Want To Become A Detective? Look No Further Than Facebook -Facebook Users Turn Into Detectives

Previously in ferbaruary,a central Maine police department credited the social networking Web site Facebook for helping solve a vandalism case.Auburn police said that three teenagers broke into the spa at a Hilton Garden Inn. Police posted images from the hotel's surveillance video on the department's Facebook page, which they had set up Jan. 29.Detectives then received several anonymous tips from Facebook users who recognized the boys.

This is not an isolated incident,where Facebook had given a helping hand in solving crime.Most recently,When Mary Chapman learned that two of her husband's work trucks had been burgled, her first reaction wasn't to call the police. It was to sign on to Facebook.She cracked open her laptop, logged on to the popular social networking site and sent off a quick message to a friend down the street.

A few minutes later, her friend forwarded that message to another friend in the neighborhood who, surprisingly, had noticed something strange in the middle of the day.The women put two and two together and, within a matter of hours, they'd singled out the suspect, confronted him and amicably settled the entire affair. The police had yet to come up with a name.

"I really don't think at this point they would have figured out who committed this crime," Chapman said. "If it was not for Facebook we would not have our items or our vehicles repaired."

The suspect was an 18-year-old from the neighborhood who, she said, impulsively looted her husband's trucks after a disagreement with his mother. The Chapmans ultimately downgraded the charge after the teen apologized and agreed to make amends.

Chapman said the police were a great help, but she still credits Facebook for recovering about $1,000 worth of equipment (a radar detector, GPS device and XM radio) and other damages.

Recognizing Facebook's potential to quickly sift through and reach out to others, crime victims and good Samaritans from all over the world have started to use the site to play digital detective, often with great success.

In Another case, Carla Pillo Mote a resourceful advertising executive in Philadelphia recently put her social networks to work to track down a man who drunkenly pilfered her laptop, taxes and wallet. According to the media blog MediaBistro.com, Mote was having drinks with a friend in March, when a visibly intoxicated man sat down beside her. After the bartender refused to serve him any more drinks, he took off.

The man's behavior seemed a little bizarre to her all night, so when Mote got ready to leave and realized her laptop bag was missing, it didn't take her long to identify a main suspect.She asked the bartender for the man's name (he'd paid with a credit card) and then headed for Facebook.

Explaining that she'd been robbed, she put out a "Facebook APB," asking for information on the mystery man who she thought stole her laptop.

She filed a report with the police as well. But to make a long story short, Mote's Facebook sleuthing (bolstered by some digging by her friends) led her to the front door of the drunken thief and, eventually, her computer.

Laptop in hand, Mote called off the police and, according to MediaBistro, updated her profile with: "the perp and i are now friends on facebook."

Facebook Joins Law Enforcement

For victims of crime, Facebook provides a way to supplement a police department's investigation. But that's not to say that police officers themselves aren't also using the tool. In Auburn, Maine, police set up a Facebook page in January, after a group of vandals broke into a local hotel and caused about a thousand dollars worth of damage.

On camera, the mischief-makers were caught ripping tiles off the walls of the hotel spa and throwing them in the water and down the hall.Soon after the police launched the Facebook page featuring photos of the criminals, they started receiving anonymous tips."Within 48 hours, we had them ID'd and charged with criminal mischief," said Deputy Chief Jason Moen, adding that the vandals were three boys, ages 15 and 16.

In their town of about 23,000 people, he said the Facebook page is "more than catching criminals. It's another way to communicate with our folks."

From Catching a rapist,to finding lost stuff online,Facebook is helping those people in need of immediate help.

Demigod Hits PC This Week-Demigod Hands on Review and Developer Walkthrough

Enter Demigod, a genre-bending title where you play as an incarnation of a deity, waging war against human armies and their respective godly leaders. I recently went hands-on with the game and got a taste of what it's like to wield the power of a god.

Demigod isn't what you might expect. The latest game from Gas Powered Games doesn't follow the classic real-time strategy formula like Supreme Commander did. And while Demigod is a real-time strategy game, it's also more of an arena-based combat game. In it, players control giant, powerful figures called demigods in the quest to destroy the opposing team's fortress while at the same time defending their own. It's a game of momentum, where you press the attack to its limits and then fall back at the right moment to recover. As such, Demigod has an ebb-and-flow to it, not unlike a battle for field position in a football game.

while godly avatars play a big role, they only make up a small portion of the on-field forces. Enemy and friendly soldiers are almost constantly flowing out of portals on the map, creating skirmishes all over the battlefield. During my hands-on time, I'd often follow my forces into battle, either helping them -- or perhaps using them as a diversion -- when we finally clashed with the enemy. Such are the decisions a god must make.

Even the length of a Demigod match alludes to the almost sports-like nature of it, as Gas Powered Games head Chris Taylor told us that it takes about 35 or 40 minutes to play a match. He then proceeded to show us just that, launching into a multiplayer game where the other players were controlled by the computer. So what he showed off was basically a bot match, but there is a single-player campaign that sounds like something like Unreal Tournament. The plot is that there's an opening in the pantheon of the gods, and the head god is having the many demigods (half human, half god beings) battle it out in matches to see who gets the big promotion.

Not all demigods are created equal. From what I've seen so far, none of them are, actually. That's not to say they aren't balanced, but they all certainly look and play differently. One diminutive demigod, the Torchbearer, acts primarily as a caster, wielding a combination of fire and ice spells -- seemingly best used in an assisting role to your army's A.I.-controlled forces rather than as a shock trooper. The other, the Rook -- the towering behemoth who's ostensibly become the poster child for the game -- is suited for aggressive players who like to wade into the thick of battle and just crush things under their heel. And while these demigods differ in their playstyles, both left me feeling disappointed, as they can't control their minions. Then again, both are classified as Assassin demigods -- meaning they play like typical action-RPG characters. In other words, you control a singular main character and use a variety of special abilities in combat to best an army of foes. Another demigod type, the General, can direct troops on the battlefield, but I didn't get a chance to check them out in my hands-on time. To me, though, Assassins feel a little shallow; their fates are too tied to the whims of A.I.-controlled soldiers.

The gameplay revolves on you controlling your demigod and going forth to attack the enemy forces and defenses in the goal of destroying the enemy fortress. To assist you, there are portals that spew out a stream of minions known as creeps. You can't directly control the creeps, but they surge forward and attack enemy forces and fortifications on sight. The enemy has its own creeps, too, so the battlefield is crawling with creatures and demigods.

As your demigod kills creeps, inflicts damage on enemy defensive towers, and attacks opposing demigods, it generates gold and experience. This is critical, because the entire point of a match is that demigods become more powerful the longer the battle rages. It basically escalates into an epic brawl, and even the creeps will evolve to become larger and tougher.

The challenge will be to know how far to press an attack. You must surge forward, inflict damage, then fall back to heal back at your fortress. Falling back also gives you the benefit of using that hard-won gold to purchase items and upgrades that make your demigod more formidable; healing potions will let you stay up front longer, armor can make your demigod more durable, and so on. You can also level up and acquire new powers and abilities for your demigod, like attack spells. When you're rested and ready, it's time to press forward and attack. If you die, you're penalized a number of ways; you can drop valuable items that the enemy can pick up and use, but more importantly, you have to wait to respawn. The designers are still balancing things, but let's say the battle is at a critical moment and you're killed and have to wait 20 seconds to get back into the fray. Those 20 seconds could spell the difference.

Get The Game's Look And Feel By Watching These Review and Gameplay Videos

GODFATHER 2 HITS PC,PS3 AND XBOX 360 THIS WEEK -EXCLUSIVE GAMEPLAY VIDEOS AND REVIEW

The Godfather II is an intensely violent experience that routinely surprised us with the level of potential for sadistic combat. At its core, the game is a straightforward third-person action game with a few guns and melee weapons to go along with a lock-on targeting and cover system. But when you wear down your enemies' health, you can execute them in some truly horrific ways. The most gruesome is probably the baseball-bat execution, followed closely by the Tommy gun--both of which involve shoving these weapons into someone's mouth and your inevitable wince in response.
The Godfather II is a tale of two games, a blend of sandbox action and strategic resource management. The low-level mobster in you will want to parade around 1950s-era depictions of New York, Miami, and Havana causing as much wanton destruction as you possibly can, but you'll need to get in touch with your inner Mafia boss if you want to successfully progress through the story. Taking over and managing various rackets and crime rings is key, but so is keeping an eye on your own family and those of other organizations. We've had only a taste of what sort of strategic depth The Godfather II might offer in previous looks at the game, but we've recently been spending some time with a nearly complete version of this EA Redwood Shores-developed game to see how far we could dive into the Don lifestyle.

Each potential associate has a unique background and specialty, which determines his personality and class-based abilities. To give you an idea of a few specialties that exist out there, you can hire a medic who will revive you whenever you get taken out during combat, an arsonist who excels in making impromptu doorways in the sides of buildings, a safecracker who can get you some extra cash whenever you break into a business, and a bruiser who will reduce your odds of having the police called on you for random acts of violence on the street. You'll eventually be able to recruit more associates, and subsequently promote existing ones up the ranks from associate to capo to underboss. If you really want to get into the spirit of things, you can even customize each family member's clothing to give your group a signature look, like our collection of thugs clad in periwinkle leisure shirts.

Once you get your first associate, you'll need to take over your first racket, which are critical because they let you launder dirty money through a legitimate business. This usually entails finding a business controlled by another family, taking care of all of their guards, and then shaking down the owner. The last bit is especially fun because you need to rough them up to the point where they'll give in, but not quite fight back or die. Once you control a racket, you can seek out others like it for a crime-ring bonus. For example, if you control all of the prostitution rackets in New York, you'll get brass knuckles for all of your family members, and if you control all of the drug-smuggling rackets in Miami, you'll double your daily income. Each racket you own needs to be guarded against takeovers, but guards cost money that you might otherwise spend on upgrading the abilities of you and your crew, so there's a lot to consider.

Of course, you're not the only one managing the operations of a family filled with thugs and criminals; there are plenty of rival organizations out there looking to cause you trouble. Early in the game, your primary source of conflict is the Rosato family, the crew that operates the bulk of rackets in the modest-sized chunk of New York City that makes up the game's first act. You begin by taking over their businesses, but as the story progresses and the possibility of a truce becomes less and less likely, it's revealed that you need to do more than cripple their income; you need to take them out entirely.

To do this, you'll need to stage contract hits on the various family members. But it's not enough to kill them however you see fit; you need to know the right kill condition to send the appropriate message. This requires you to do a favor for people of interest, and if you fulfill your obligation (usually an act of violence on an enemy of theirs), you'll learn the kill condition. Some rivals need to be thrown from a building, some choked, and others run over with a car, to name a few.

Later in the game you'll move your operations to Florida, and eventually Cuba. The core mechanics of the game remain the same, but the scenery changes from Brooklyn townhouses to pastel-colored art deco buildings and Spanish architecture. The number of rival families you need to deal with also grows as the story expands into a web of shady alliances, corrupt government officials, backstabbing friends, and so on. Although you don't have much control of the story proper, you at least feel pretty invested in all of this crime and corruption due to your ability to strike deals with a number of government officials and keep favors from them until you find the right time to call them in. We'd like to give you an idea of how the story plays out, but with so many turns and twists, almost anything would be a spoiler.

At the heart of all of this is something called the Don's View. This is a screen that lays out the entire city in a fully movable 3D map, detailing all of the businesses, people of interest, and missions available to you. You can manage the number of guards stationed at your rackets, call in strikes on rival businesses, send your made men to defend a racket that's come under attack, and keep tabs of how close you are to controlling an entire crime ring. You can also examine the makeup of rival family trees, examining them before calling in a contract hit. Giving you a lot of ability to stretch your strategic muscles definitely seems to have been a big goal for the developer.

Altogether, The Godfather II should offer a few interesting twists on the open-world action genre that has become so common these days.

Watch The Review of Godfather 2 by Playboy Model Jo Garcia

ERASE FEARFUL MEMORIES WITHOUT DRUGS

The concept of Memory Erasing has fuelled our imagiantion ever since MIB came out.But it would have been really easy if it were like a flashing device which instantly erases memory as seen in movies.
Up till now, the most widely used therapy for erasing memory is extinction therapy,which works up to a point, but fearful memories often reappear,according to researchers. Marie Monfils, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas in Austin and her colleagues performed intense research in this subject.For instance,Her team first taught rats to associate a musical tone with a slight electric shock. Playing the tone with no shock generally causes rats to freeze in fear. When her team played the tone over and over again, 19 times, the rats displayed less and less fear. This is standard extinction therapy. However, a month later their fear of the tone returned, strong as ever.They also wondered if performing extinction during the reconsolidation window might lead to a permanent effect.

A new drug-free therapy wipes away fearful memories in rats and humans. The simple treatment might eventually help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, say researchers.
The new procedure relies on a quirky property of memories called reconsolidation. The process of jogging a memory – with an emotional or sensory jolt, for instance – seems to make it malleable for a few hours.

Potent drugs that block brain cells from making new proteins can erase fearful memories during this window. But these chemical are toxic, and wholesale memory erasure could do more harm than good, says Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who performed some of the drug studies.

But What Happens when nightmares reappear?

Schiller and Elizabeth Phelps, neuroscientists at New York University, tested whether they could block human volunteers from recalling a fearful memory. In this case they paired an electric shock with a blue square on a computer screen.Schiller and Phelps measured tiny, imperceptible changes in sweat – a well-documented fear response – in roughly 80 volunteers.

As with the rats, repeated exposure to the blue dot during the reconsolidation window seemed to block the fearful memory from returning.

Parallel Memories?

Monfils theorises that extinction therapy alone creates two parallel memories linked to the tone or blue square, one fearful, one not. Waiting for reconsolidation to kick in overwrites the original memory instead of making a parallel memory, she says.

Despite proof of principle experiments in rats and humans, Monfils says researchers should proceed with caution in applying the new findings to treating PTSD or other anxiety disorders. Some people's reconsolidation windows may be longer than others, and people respond differently to stressful situations.

"I'm a simple rat researcher. I'm in no way going to suggest that I'm going to step in and tell clinicians how they should treat their patients," she says.