In fact, it’s really just in the last decade that our technology for exploring the cosmos has improved to the point where astronomers could see that vast galaxies actually clump together and form larger structures. Our universe is a vast tangled web of interconnected galaxy clusters linked by wispy filaments surrounding areas that can only be described as voids. And that’s what scientists have taken to calling it: the Cosmic Web.

It’s incredibly difficult to model this vast web of galaxies, however, since all the components that make it up vary greatly by orders of magnitude. “Powers of 10″ made good use of zooming out and zooming in for its limited cinematic purposes, but when it comes to computer simulations, that approach doesn’t work so well. KFC of the arXiv blog explains:

“As the small scale structures become too small to resolve, most computer models apply some sort of statistical smoothing process to make the large scale calculations easier. But if you zoom back in again, there is no way to retrieve the information that is lost by the smoothing process other than to rebuild the picture again from the original data. …

“[I]t’s a problem if you want to simulate how the large scale structures form from smaller structures and how, in turn, the shape of the large structures influences the way smaller structures evolve. This kind of feedback process is impossible to model when the smoothing process between different scales essentially destroys any meaningful links between them.”
A pair of scientists at the University of Gronengen in the Netherlands think they might have the answer: the Delauney Tessellation Field Estimator. “Delauney tesselation” sounds like something vaguely unpleasant from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, but it’s actually an approach to computer simulation in which galaxies are treated as points in 3D space. The space between them is filled in with tetrahedra governed by very strict rules about how they combine as scales get larger.

Ingredients

One cassette player – any kind will do, from an old Walkman to a cassette deck
One computer with a sound card and input jack
One male-to-male 1/8-inch mini-jack cord (or an RCA-to-mini-jack cord)
One digital audio recording program

Software

There are a variety of audio recording and editing programs you could use – some free, some not – but for the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume you’re using Audacity, one of the most popular freeware recording programs available on the web.
Audacity is an open-source audio recording and editing program that works on both Macs and PCs, and creates raw WAV files that you can edit and mix to your heart’s delight. You can also use it for burning CDs and creating podcasts or soundtracks. If you want to convert your WAV files to MP3s, you’ll need the LAME MP3 encoder, a separate plug-in that works with Audacity.
Recording Steps

Regardless of which audio recording software you’re using, these steps should work pretty well (there are minor differences in menus and terminology from program to program):
Hook your tape player up to the computer using a mini-jack cord. There should be a headphone or line-out jack on the cassette deck, and a line-in input on your computer’s sound card.
Go into the Control Panel and make sure the Line In Source is checked. In Windows, the menu path is Control Panel/Multimedia/Multimedia Properties/Devices. You should also check the input panel in your audio software. In Audacity, it’s the I/O tab in the Preferences dialog box. Also make sure the output is set to go through your sound card.
Check the recording settings in your software program. If you are recording music, check the Record in Stereo box (for voice recordings, that’s not necessary). Under the Quality tab you need to set the sample rate – the higher, the better. For CD quality, use 44,100 Hz.
Now that your settings are dialed in, press play on your cassette deck, and press the record button in your software program. Audio should be coming from your PC speakers, if you have them connected. Now click the input level meter and enable Start Monitoring to see a recording meter. Adjust the volume to your liking, and then restart the recording.
When you stop the recording, go to the file menu and save the file to your hard drive. From here you can edit and convert the file to MP3.

WAV to MP3

In order to turn a WAV file to MP3, you need MP3 encoder software, such as LAME. Before doing that, however, you may want to split up the tracks in your recording. In your audio editing software, there will be instructions on how to do this – basically, you look for the flatline (silence) in the sound waves between tracks and manually split it there. Select the flat areas with the mouse, and select “Cut” from the “Edit” menu to remove them.
Once you have MP3 files saved, you can use a MP3 tagger program to apply tags that will be read by whatever MP3 player you play the tracks on.
In the Future

The court injunction is set to go into effect Jan. 11. Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ) has said such a bar would prohibit the sale of all currently available versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office.

Microsoft had appealed a Texas jury verdict in favor of i4i Inc., a Toronto company. The jury found recent versions of Microsoft Word infringed on a software patent.

href=”http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Virtue-Clinton-Starr/dp/0307409449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261431235&sr=8-1″>The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, set to be published in February, recounts an incident during Clinton’s visit to the Philippine capital, Manila, in 1996 for an APEC conference. According to blogger Jamie Malanowski at True/Slant, moments before the president’s convoy was to start down a route that would take it over a bridge in downtown Manila, the Secret Service was warned that an attack might have been planned on the bridge.

Malanowski reports:

During the 1996 visit, Clinton was scheduled to visit a Filipino politician. The route he was to take required him to cross a bridge in downtown Manila. As the motorcade was about to depart, Merletti received “a crackly message in one earpiece” informing him that intelligence operatives had picked up a transmission that used the words ‘bridge’ and ‘wedding’ in the same sentence. Since ‘wedding’ was known to be a code word for assassination, Merletti ordered that the motorcade be re-routed. An intelligence team then discovered that a bomb had been planted under the bridge. No estimate is given in the passage for how soon the motorcade would have crossed the bridge, but the implication is that the bridge was not far away.

Malanowski quotes Gormley directly implicating bin Laden in the purported attack:

The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public. … It remained top secret except to select members of the U.S. intelligence community. The American government’s subsequent investigation of this plot to kill Clinton, however, revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan — a man named Osama bin Laden.

Malanowski notes that the New York Times reported at the time that security services found two bombs around Manila during the president’s visit, and neither of those bombs appeared to be the one found under the bridge, suggesting that as many as three bombs may have been planted around the city.

Malanowski asks if the revelations in the book, if true, should change the public’s perspective on the Bush administration’s actions, or lack thereof, in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks.

“The Bush administration has been largely been given a pass for its failure to thwart the attacks, for after all, no one could have predicted that terrorists would hijack planes and fly them into buildings,” he writes. “But now we see al Qaeda, in addition to the embassy bombings, the attack on the Cole, and the thwarted airport plot in 2000, had actually attempted to assassinate an American president. ‘Chatter,’ we’ve been told, was high throughout the month of August [2001]; shouldn’t security apparatus been placed on a higher level of alert?”

The book by Gormley, a Duquesne University Law School Professor, focuses primarily on the Whitewater scandal, the Ken Starr investigation and the sex scandals that haunted Clinton’s presidency.

Last week, after obtaining a copy of the book, Politico reported that Monica Lewinsky, the intern at the center of the sex scandal that began an unsuccessful effort to impeach Clinton, said in the book that Clinton lied under oath during the investigation into his affair with Lewinsky. According to Politico, the book also alleges that Clinton had an affair with Susan MacDougal, who was convicted and sentenced to 22 months in prison in the Whitewater affair.

The book also alleges that prosecutors were prepared to indict both Bill and Hillary Clinton in their roles in the Whitewater and Lewinsky affairs. But prosecutors evidently determined that getting an indictment against the first lady would have been very difficult, and dropped that strategy, the Associated Press reported.

Has picking a year’s greediest “top ten” ever been easier? We don’t think so. We could, this year, fill an entire top ten just with bankers from Goldman Sachs — or JPMorgan Chase or any of a number of other Wall Street giants. All sport executive suites packed with power suits who fanned the flames that melted down the global economy, then helped themselves, after gobbling down billions in bailouts, to paydays worth mega millions — at a time when, in over half our states, over a quarter of America’s kids are living off food stamps.

Now that’s greed. But that’s also not the whole picture. The Great Recession’s greedy don’t just sit on Wall Street. They occupy perches of power throughout the reeling U.S. economy. So we’ve tried, in this our latest annual ranking of avarice, to survey that bigger picture.

Where does all this greed come from? We humans have always, of course, had greed among us. But levels of greed vary enormously from one historical epoch to another — and from one society to another.

What determines which societies see the most greed and grasping? In a word: inequality. The more wealth concentrates, the more greed grows. The United States remains the most unequal nation in the developed world. Next year, we suspect, will bring us still another bumper crop of greedy.

10: Richard Anderson

America’s airlines have been flying, for the most part, under the media radar ever since the nation’s banks went into meltdown mode, and that suits Delta CEO Richard Anderson just fine.

Delta, now the world’s biggest airline, has been richly rewarding Anderson ever since he became the airline’s top exec in September 2007. If folks were paying attention, they might wonder why. Delta, after all, lost $8.9 billion in 2008. In 2009, Delta and other U.S. carriers, says the International Air Transport Association, will likely lose a combined $1 billion.

Passengers are certainly feeling this red ink. Delta and other carriers have been trimming seating capacity, a move, notes the Orlando Sentinel, designed to “enable them to raise ticket prices more often.” Delta is also squeezing passengers with airport bag fees. In August, the airline’s bag charges bounded to $20 for the first bag and $30 for the second.

Anderson and his family, meanwhile, don’t just fly free on Delta. The airline also pays the taxes due on Anderson’s free tickets — and lots more, too.

For agreeing to become Delta’s chief, 28 months ago, Anderson picked up $8.5 million in stock awards. Seven months later, another $3.4 million. Six months after that, to celebrate the Delta-Northwest merger, more options to buy Delta stock, worth $7.3 million, and more actual shares, worth $6.1 million.

With all those rewards, Anderson must be devoting every waking hour to making Delta soar, right? Well, almost every waking hour. Anderson has been spending some of his precious hours serving on the corporate board of Medtronic, a medical tech firm. In 2009, from the good people at Medtronic, he’ll pocket $188,000 for his directorship services.

9: George David/Marie Douglas-David

This power couple hit the headlines last March, with a nasty divorce trial. We tried to pick the most greedy of the pair. We failed. Here’s why.

The 67-year-old George David, the former CEO of defense contracting powerhouse United Technologies, comes with impeccable greed credentials. In the four years after the 9/11 attacks, David hauled home bigger paydays than any other defense executive, over $200 million in all, including $88.3 million in 2004, a sum that made him that year’s top-paid CEO.

Taxpayers, noted the Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess CEO pay report in 2006, provide a third of United Technologies annual operating income.

But George has found his match in avarice. Marie Douglas-David, a Wall Street investment banker before she married George in 2002, signed a pre-nup before her wedding day that entitled her to $20,000 a week should the marriage break up, a not unreasonable possibility given the 30-year age gap between the two.

The couple did separate last year and this past spring went to court after Marie sued to overturn the pre-nup. She demanded $53,000 a week. Marie needed extra cash, said her lawyers, to cover her basic expenses. Among those basics: “$4,500 a week for clothes, $8,000 for travel, and $1,500 for eating out.”

8: Steve Wynn

Last February, Las Vegas gaming industry kingpin Steve Wynn announced an across-the-board wage and hour cutback for all employees at his resort empire. The total savings for Wynn Resorts: between $75 and $100 million.

In November Wynn Resorts announced a special $4-per-share dividend. Total cost of the dividend payout to Wynn Resorts: $492 million. Total dividend check that will go to Steve Wynn: $88.6 million.

Wynn currently rates 141st on the annual Forbes list of America’s 400 richest. But his fortune has faded some $900 million, to just $2.3 billion now, since last year. A typical American family, according to Census Bureau figures, would have to work nearly 18,000 years to make $900 million.

Wynn, ever the trooper, isn’t crying in his cocktails over his near-billion-dollar misfortune. He “rang in” the 2009 new year skimming the Caribbean on a 183-foot mega yacht, then went on to spend lovely winter days dodging gossip columnists on the Riviera and in the Alps.

7: Robert Rubin

Back in 1997, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin won huzzahs the world over for his efforts to fix the Asian financial crisis. One crisis “solved,” Rubin proceeded to help create another — by brokering the 1999 deal that repealed the New Deal’s most important financial industry reform legislation.

That reform, the Glass-Steagall Act, essentially prevented investment banks from speculating with the cash commercial banks and insurance companies were collecting from depositors and policy holders. Glass-Steagall would be weakened over the years, but still had enough oomph, at century’s end, to prevent Citicorp from finalizing a merger with Travelers Group insurance.

Citi, America’s biggest bank, and Travelers needed Glass-Steagall eliminated. Rubin obliged. His contacts and credibility, notes Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, helped speed repeal through Congress — and paved the way for the wild Wall Street run that crashed the U.S. economy.

Rubin, a Goldman Sachs alum before his stint at Treasury, would go on to join the newly merged Citigroup as a senior strategist. Citi, betting heavily on subprimes, would go on to lose over $65 billion during Rubin’s stint, and, this past January, Rubin formally resigned his Citi duties.

Overall, Rubin pocketed $126 million in cash and stock for his Citi labors. But he seems to regard his years at the bank as something akin to public service. Declared Rubin in one exit interview: “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more.”

6: Andrew Hall

If you happen to be Andrew Hall, the world’s most celebrated commodity trader, you don’t care what other people think. Hall waged a four-year battle — against his neighbors in the posh Connecticut town of Southport — to keep a 80-foot-long concrete sculpture on his lawn.

The neighbors won, and Hall had to remove the concrete eyesore. He promptly replaced it with two garishly painted “cartoonlike” sculptures of cars.

Hall can afford plenty of sculptures. He took home $100 million betting on oil futures and other commodities in 2008 — after picking up a quarter-billion over the previous five years — and stood to receive another $100 million this year.

But his employer, Citigroup, balked. Citi, by that time, was sitting on $45 billion in taxpayer bailout dollars, and handing $100 million to Hall, the honcho of Citi’s commodity-trading subsidiary, would have created a PR disaster for the bank — and the Obama administration as well.

Hall didn’t care. He demanded his trading fee. Citi ended up having to sell off Hall’s subsidiary, at a bargain basement price, to end the Hall headache.

Our story, to be sure, does have a happy ending — for Hall, Citi, and federal pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. Hall will get his $100 million, but not until next year. That deferral let Citi claim a zero pay expense for Hall in 2009, and Citi’s pay outlays for the year now show up about $100 million less than last year.

This accounting razzmatazz helped skew the 2009 executive pay totals for the seven biggest bailout basket cases and enabled pay czar Feinberg to claim that pressure from his office had, “on average,” reduced executive cash comp at the seven by an impressive — and thoroughly misleading — 90 percent.

5: John Chambers

Earlier this year, with lawmakers mulling over legislation to limit CEO pay, a high-powered New York business group convened a “Task Force on Executive Compensation” to show that corporations could clean up their own act.

The final report from this task force, issued this fall, asked companies to commit themselves to executive pay that’s “fair” and “clearly aligned with actual performance.” Among the first half-dozen companies to make that commitment: Cisco, the Internet networking giant.

Just days later, a federal filing revealed that Cisco was awarding “discretionary bonuses” to its five top executives for the fiscal year that ended this past July. Why “discretionary?” The company couldn’t give the execs regular bonuses since all five missed their “performance” targets.

Cisco says the five execs delivered “solid financial performance” while facing “tough economic challenges.” Not that solid. Cisco has laid off over 1,500 workers since the economy turned challenging. Cisco CEO John Chambers, for his part, has pocketed $232.7 million over the last five years.

Back in 2000, Cisco reigned briefly as the world’s biggest company, as measured by total share value. Then the dot.com bubble burst. But Chambers unloaded a ton of shares before the bubble popped — and cleared a $156 million windfall.

The janitor who cleaned Cisco’s executive suites that year, observed the San Jose Mercury News at the time, would have to work 8,653 years to earn what Chambers made in one.

4: Rupert Murdoch

Billionaires never rest. They don’t let their assets rest either. Take media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for instance. Three years ago, Murdoch shelled out an estimated $30 million for a 183-foot yacht he calls the Rosehearty. He’s apparently enjoying his investment. Billionaire-watchers have sighted him holidaying offshore with actor Mel Gibson and crooner Billy Joel.

But what do billionaires do when they can’t find an aging celebrity to join them aboard? They rent their boats out, says Superyacht World — discreetly, of course, through charter agencies that never reveal the boat’s actual owner.

But sometimes that identity does slip out. Murdoch’s Rosehearty, an enterprising reporter has disclosed, charters for just under $300,000 per week. Murdoch’s “exceptionally solicitous staff” comes included in the fee.

Speaking of fees, Murdoch has launched a crusade to force Web surfers to pay for the newspaper articles they read online. One reason: His take-home last year from the News Corp. — the base of his media empire — dropped 14 percent to $27.5 million.

3: Mark Hurd

Computer printer ink, a high-tech financial analyst pointed out a few years ago, “costs more per drop than expensive perfume.” Mark Hurd, the CEO at Hewlett-Packard since 2005, wouldn’t have it any other way.

HP, under Hurd, has been busy squeezing every bit of revenue possible out of the printer ink cash cow. Last year, HP upped ink prices up at double the inflation rate. The typical $30 ink cartridge, SmartMoney reported this past June, costs $3 to make.

Hurd apparently enjoys cutting wages and jobs as much as raising prices. In May, he axed 6,000 workers off the HP payroll and cut paychecks for the survivors from 5 to 15 percent.

Hurd did take a 20 percent salary cut himself for 2009. But “salary” in 2008 only accounted for $1.45 million of Hurd’s $26.04 million in cash compensation. He took in another $7.9 million in new stock awards — and cleared still another $10.1 million cashing out previously awarded stock options.

Hurd’s CEO stint at HP has so far seen about 40,000 employees lose their jobs.

2: Richard Scott

Mike Snow, a regional health care executive, earlier this month recalled that evening a dozen years ago when his then-boss, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. CEO Richard Scott, revealed to Snow and the rest of the company’s top management that the FBI had just raided the firm’s El Paso office.

Scott defiantly declared the government had no case. Mike Snow and his fellow execs lustily applauded. Remembers Snow: “Like so many others that night, I drank the Kool-Aid.”

The federal government went on to indict key Columbia/HCA personnel for “bilking Medicare while simultaneously handing over kickbacks and perks to physicians who steered patients to its hospitals.” The company ended up pleading guilty to 14 felonies and paying $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines.

The board of Columbia/HCA, then the nation’s biggest for-profit hospital chain, would go on to ease Scott out the door, but ever so gently. He left with a $10 severance package and stock worth $300 million.

This past spring, Richard Scott burst back into the news, pouring more Kool-Aid as the moving force behind the year’s first media blitz designed to demonize the Obama administration’s drive for health care reform.

If President Obama ever gets his way, Scott warned in one ad that his multimillion campaign ran, bureaucrats will “decide the treatments you receive, the drugs you take, even the doctors you see.”

Scott’s ads would set the “Tea Party” tone for the year’s health care debate — and help leave tens of millions of Americans without affordable health care, a state of affairs that has never bothered Scott, originally a corporate attorney specializing in buyout deals.

As Scott used to rail back in his CEO days: “Do we have an obligation to provide health care for everybody? Where do we draw the line? Is any fast-food restaurant obligated to feed everyone who shows up?”

1: Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison appeared on our “greediest” list last year. He may appear every year. No one may better personify, personally and professionally, the self-absorption, arrogance, and insensitivity that separates the merely greedy from the greediest.

In 2008, Ellison, the CEO of Oracle business software, contested the $166.3 million tax appraisal on his Northern California estate. The assessment appeals panel gave him a $3 million tax refund in a ruling that will cost the local school system an annual $250,000, the cost of hiring and supplying three teachers.

Ellison, the holder of a $27 billion fortune, spent a good bit of 2009 sparing no expense to build a yacht speedy enough to win next year’s America’s Cup, the world’s top sailing race. His new racing yacht has a $10-million mast “18-stories tall and sails large enough to cover a baseball infield.” Some 30 designers and scientists spent 130,000 hours putting the vessel together.

For more casual water fun, Ellison takes to the seas on his 453-foot mega yacht, the Rising Sun, a boat he co-owns with Hollywood mogul David Geffen. This five-story little ship boasts 82 rooms and a basketball court that doubles as a helicopter pad. The construction cost in 2004: $200 million.

On the business side, Ellison did his best in 2009 to top the $557 million he took home as Oracle’s CEO in 2008. His magic formula: Ellison’s a serial merger. He buys companies, takes their customers, and fires their workers. His top 2009 gobble-up: Silicon Valley’s Sun Microsystems.

The Sun merger, analysts believe, will almost certainly end up eliminating more jobs than the 5,000 positions lost when Oracle bought out rival PeopleSoft.

And did we mention the dividends? Oracle this past spring announced plans to pay out its first dividend. The announcement, CNBC estimated, meant a $57.5 million quarterly check for Ellison in May and another $230 million in dividend checks over the next 12 months.

Bowler of the year: Was there one? Top of the Test match tables is
Mitchell Johnson, who has taken 57 wickets at 28.8 each so far.
Worryingly, only one of the top twenty wicket-takers in Test matches
managed to taken them at average of under 25 each, and that was Nuwan
Kulasekara, who took exactly 20, enough only to place him 20th on the
list. The biggest single problem facing cricket is the imbalance
between bat and ball, a bias brought about through bigger bats,
flatter pitches and the seeming impossibility of staying fit as a
fast bowler in the modern game. Looking back on the year, I just
don’t feel that I have seen enough great quick bowling, and with
Muttiah Muralitharan on the wane, there is no shoo-in contender for
this prize any more. In the absence of any outstanding candidate, I’d
plump for Swann, who bowled more deliveries in Test cricket than
anyone except Johnson, and took 64 wickets at 29 each in all forms of
the game. Not bad for a man who, two years ago, was seen by many, The
Spin included, as just another county journeyman.

XI of the year, picked for performances in all
formats of the game and with a strong degree of personal prejudice:
TM Dilshan, V Sehwag, MJ Clarke, AB de Villiers, AJ Strauss, MS
Dhoni, SR Watson, DL Vettori, GP Swann, MJ Johnson, DW Steyn.

Match of the year: Ideally, the game should be watched from a seat at
the ground. Failing that, a sofa in front of the television will do.
But my favourite day’s play of this year though was followed over the
radio. There is something especially magical about Test Match
Special. It seems to make a tense game seem tighter still. On the
fifth day at Cardiff, as Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar were
playing out those fraught final 40 minutes, I was in the pub, sat
around a small personal radio plugged into a tinny pair of portable
speakers, listening, along with a group of complete strangers, to Jon
Agnew’s crackling description of the denouement. It was one of those
moments when the country seems to stop. Walking the dog, washing the
car, cooking the roast, all that could wait. The only thing anyone
was interested in, whether they loved cricket or not, was whether
England could bat out the match.

Shot of the year: Something about playing Australia seems to bring out
the best in Chris Gayle. Maligned and mocked through early part of
the English season after his offhand comments about the future of
Test cricket, Gayle set the World Twenty20 alight with his innings of
88 from 50 balls against Australia at the Oval. All Englishmen love
seeing Australia lose, especially in an Ashes summer, and to see them
humiliated is a greater pleasure still. Brett Lee followed a bouncer,
which Gayle had hit out of the ground for six, with a cunning slower
ball. Gayle moved his front foot aside and hit through the line over
long-on, sending the ball high into the air. If this shot was heard
around the world, it was only because of the almighty clatter it made
when it landed. Sky measured it at 105m. “It’s the first time I’ve
hit it so far,” Gayle reckoned afterwards.

”It’s not a not a surprise that we’re seeing Indians rise in corporate ranks,” says Richard Herman, coauthor of a book on migrants to the U.S., Immigrant, Inc. ”Of all the immigrant groups coming in today, Indians are head-and-shoulders above others, and this is partly because of their English language skills and also the advanced education that many of them are bringing to the U.S.”

Nooyi, says Herman, is part of a growing trend where U.S. companies are being created, or led, by foreign-born individuals who bring in something special. Herman cites new research from Brigham Young University showing American workers innovate and solve problems faster when working with a ‘’socially distinct newcomer,” meaning, a person from another culture.

Vikram Pandit, the embattled CEO of Citigroup ( C – news – people ), is the other prominent native Indian in the corner office. Prior to joining the ailing bank he was president of Morgan Stanley ( MS – news – people )’s investment banking, fixed income and capital markets businesses and cofounded and was the chairman of a hedge fund, Old Lane Partners.

Technology is a field particularly receptive to the foreign born. Kenya-born Francisco D’Souza heads Cognizant Technology Solutions ( CTSH – news – people ), which outsources IT services for its Western world clients. D’Souza, 40, whose grandparents hailed from Goa in India, joined the company in 1994 when it was founded and within three years had gone up the ranks to become director of North American operations. Shantanu Narayen, 46, is at the helm at Adobe Systems ( ADBE – news – people ). The diversified software company’s flagship Internet video tool is Flash.

At least one top boss of Indian descent is plotting a growth strategy. Quest Diagnostics ( DGX – news – people )’ head Surya Mohapatra has raised $750 million from the capital markets for acquisitions. Apart from diagnostic services through its network of clinics, the company also conducts gene-based tests and clinical trials.

The article omits any mention of Sara Mathew, who will be CEO of D&B (Dun and Bradstreet) with effect from July 1, 2010. The announcement was made back in November itself. D&B though smaller than

Despite these personal success stories the number of immigrants who are leading corporate America, Indian or otherwise, is still a tiny fraction. But, says Herman, ”look at where the data was ten years ago and maybe it was zero or one [Indian then].”

For the driver looking for speed at a less-racy price, a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro or Jaguar XF will still roar (the Camaro’s V8 SS gets to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds, the Jaguar’s supercharged V8 in 4.7) but won’t break the bank in the process.

Those performance cars join the Toyota ( TM – news – people )Avalon, Lincoln MKS and Nissan Maxima on our list of the most affordable vehicles in their segment. They may not have the lowest manufacturer suggested retail prices on the lot, but over years of ownership, their value becomes readily apparent.

Behind the Numbers
To identify 2010’s most affordable vehicles for their segment, we used Vincentric data to determine the total cost of ownership for a vehicle, including five-year totals for fuel costs, maintenance, repairs, average national insurance rates, depreciation, interest, opportunity costs and taxes. (Vincentric is an auto consulting firm based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.)

The data assumes an annual rate of 15,000 miles driven per vehicle and a price of $2.60 for regular fuel, $2.86 for premium, and $2.75 for diesel. It also applies an inflation rate for fuel prices, since the calculations predict costs over five years. We evaluated affordability based on the percentage of each vehicle’s total five-year costs compared with its total costs, including base price and one-time fees. MSRPs are adjusted for fees and destination charges, in accordance with Vincentric data.

Toyota and Chevrolet each did well on our list, with entries like the $27,670 Toyota Prius, $27,075 Toyota Tacoma, $65,588 Chevy Silverado, and $68,280 Chevrolet Corvette all leading their segments.

Sales last month for each of those automakers reflect their appeal: Toyota posted gains of 1% over November 2008; Chevrolet gained 4.8% year-over-year. Overall, the industry broke even in sales year-over-year. Asian brands gained 6.8% total; domestics lost 6.8%.

From our list of affordable cars, the Prius sold 9,617 units last month, up 11.1% over November 2008. While Prius owners can expect to pay $4,296 on fuel for five years, and $915 on repairs, owners of vehicles in the same segment can pay as much as $12,300 and $1,240, respectively.

Education Pays
Experts say cars like the Prius and BMW’s X6 (up a respectable 7.8% last month) appeal to consumers because they offer a whole package of value, not just a cheap sticker price. Prospective buyers are smarter than ever about determining which vehicles are affordable.

Two things automakers are doing to improve the affordability of their cars–besides lowering the price, of course–are improve reliability and efficiency. (The combustion engine alone could improve its efficiency by as much as 20%, according to engineers at Bentley). Maintenance, repairs and fuel comprise a large chunk of expenses over five-years’ time. The less often a car has to be at the gas station or in the shop, the more money it saves.

Consumers are catching on. Auto sales are projected to hit 11 million by year end (down from 13.2 million in 2008)–but Internet traffic related to buying is way up, says Chip Perry, CEO of Autotrader.com. The Atlanta-based automotive marketing company lists local dealer inventories, buying and selling tips, comparison tools, reviews and pricing and incentive information for prospective buyers. It has gained a 35% year-over-year increase in on-site traffic for the past 10 years. Perry doesn’t expect it to let up anytime soon.

“Our average monthly total audience was 15.3 million [unique visitors] through September,” he says. “You would expect that our numbers are going down, but we’re up 8% over 2008. We expect to grow next year.”

Seventy-five percent of car-buyers shop online, according to AutoTrader data, with the average buyer spending 55 minutes a month researching vehicles on the site. Chevrolet is the No. 1 shopped-for car brand on AutoTrader.com. Toyota is No. 3. (Ford is No. 2).

David Wurster, who leads product development and industry analysis for Vincentric, says the exponential growth in online research is no surprise. Self-education is the key to finding something affordable.

“Just intuitively, you know that in a down economy that is what consumers need to be doing,” he says. “This is how you really determine how much it costs to operate the car, as opposed to just the payment.”

Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt.

The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained “functional” pain.

“Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain,” explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.

“Consequently,” he told Reuters Health in an email, “there is considerable effort to uncover other ways in which the pain might be generated.”

Derbyshire said he now wants to study whether the brains of patients with functional pain respond to images of injury in the same way that the current study participants’ did.

For the study, Derbyshire and colleague Jody Osborn first had 108 college students view several images of painful situations — including athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection. Close to one-third of the students said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.

Derbyshire and Osborn then took functional MRI scans of 10 of these “responders,” along with 10 “non-responders” who reported no pain while viewing the images.

Functional MRI charts changes in brain blood flow, allowing researchers to see which brain areas become more active in response to a particular stimulus. Here, the researchers scanned participants’ brains as they viewed either images of people in pain, images that were emotional but not painful, or neutral images.

The investigators found that while viewing the painful images, both responders and non-responders showed activity in the emotional centers of the brain. But responders showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with non-responders, and as compared with their own brain responses to the emotional images.

“We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain,” Derbyshire said.

He noted that the responders also tended to say that they avoided horror movies and disturbing images on the news “so as to avoid being in pain” — which, the researcher said, is more than just an empathetic response.

This could help unravel the brain activity underlying the process of “joint attention”, thought to be key to complex, human social interactions. It could also offer insights into why social interactions can break down for people with autism.

Joint attention – the ability and motivation to both guide and follow someone else’s gaze – develops early in infants. It is considered necessary for complex social interactions, the learning of language and co-operation. For example, an eye signal from one person to another can indicate a potential meal, mate or menace.

In people with autism, joint attention seems to be abnormal, which may underpin some of the social difficulties they experience. Previously researchers have studied brain activity in people watching a video designed to engender a feeling of joint attention in the viewer. The new study is the first to separate out the processes of following and initiating joint attention.

Watch me watch her

Psychiatrist Leonhard Schilbach at the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues developed an avatar that can hold someone’s gaze and an infrared camera that tracks the eye movement of someone watching the avatar. The system was set up inside an MRI scanner.

Then the team asked 21 healthy volunteers to use their eyes to guide the avatar’s gaze towards a grey box projected on a computer screen, or to follow the avatar’s gaze, while inside the scanner. The camera allows the researchers to determine when the volunteers are following the avatar’s gaze and when the avatar is following theirs.

The real-time fMRI scans revealed that when the volunteers successfully got the avatar to follow their gaze, brain areas involved in reward and motivation were activated. When they followed the avatar’s gaze, a different area of the brain, known to be involved in imagining what other people are thinking, was active. “It’s kind of surprising that sharing something as basic as a grey square is something we enjoy,” says Schilbach.

Get engaged

The finding is novel, says autism researcher Peter Mundy at the University of California, Davis, because previous studies of joint attention have not distinguished between initiating and responding.

It points to the possibility that differences in motivation to initiate joint attention “may be involved in the early social impairments of autism”, he says.

Mundy adds that interactive avatars will be helpful in other areas of social psychology by allowing us to simulate social interactions and observe the neural systems they involve. “Our method is progress in the direction of studying things which stem from being engaged with another person,” agrees Schilbach.

His team now plans to study the brains of people with autism as they interact with the avatar.