iPhone girl scared by attention

Mystery girl befuddled by worldwide fame

Written by Iain Thomson in San Francisco

A Chinese factory worker who became an internet sensation after a photo of her flashing a peace sign was left on an iPhone has been identified.

The photo was left on an iPhone delivered to a British customer who posted it up on an Apple message board. Since then the photo has gone around the world and people have tried to identify the mystery worker.

Foxconn, which makes the iPhone for Apple, has now confirmed the girl has been identified but says her job is not at risk and has called the incident a “beautiful mistake”.

However the girl herself is more than a little perturbed by the reaction to the picture.

“"She's just a young girl who has come to the city from her remote hometown. She's never been in such a situation,” a Foxconn representative told the South China Morning Post.

“She's really scared by the media. She told me she wanted to quit her job and go back home to get away from this. We let her off work today so she could rest. "

Via www.vnunet.com


Millions of young Chinese addicted to 'unhealthy' Internet games: report

A young man is seen playing games at an Internet cafe in Shanghai. Around four million Chinese youngsters are addicted to the Internet, mainly attracted by "unhealthy" online games, state media reported Friday, citing a top legislator.(AFP/File/Liu Jin)BEIJING (AFP) - Around four million Chinese youngsters are addicted to the Internet, mainly attracted by "unhealthy" online games, state media reported Friday, citing a top legislator.

"Internet-addicted teenagers" account for around 10 percent of China's Web users under the age of 18, the Beijing Times said, quoting Li Jianguo, a vice chairman of the standing committee of the National People's Congress, or parliament.

The committee has called for stricter monitoring of Internet games that have illegal or inappropriate content, the report said.

It has also said games should include technology that automatically logs players off once they exceed a set number of hours of continuous play.

"Unhealthy" games by Chinese government standards could refer to those featuring violence and pornography as well as "unpatriotic games" that make Chinese soldiers or agents the enemy.

The government has tried various measures to regulate the booming online gaming market and curb teenagers' use of Internet games.

In 2006, it ordered all Chinese Internet game manufacturers to install technology in their games that demands players reveal their real name and identification number.

Source: Yahoo News

Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet.

Skip to next paragraph
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

From left, three views of a fragment of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: a plain digital image, a color scan and an infrared scan.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Simon Tanner is leading a team at Israel's museum who are digitalizing the Dead sea scrolls.

Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted Shrine of the Book. Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them.

The scrolls’ contemporary history has been something of a tortured one because they are among the most important sources of information on Jewish and early Christian life. After their initial discovery they were tightly held by a small circle of scholars. In the last 20 years access has improved significantly, and in 2001 they were published in their entirety. But debate over them seems only to grow.

Scholars continually ask the Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls, for access to them, and museums around the world seek to display them. Next month, the Jewish Museum of New York will begin an exhibition of six of the scrolls.

The keepers of the scrolls, people like Pnina Shor, head of the conservation department of the antiquities authority, are delighted by the intense interest but say that each time a scroll is exposed to light, humidity and heat, it deteriorates. She says even without such exposure there is deterioration because of the ink used on some of the scrolls as well as the residue from the Scotch tape used by the 1950s scholars in piecing together fragments.

The entire collection was photographed only once before — in the 1950s using infrared — and those photographs are stored in a climate-controlled room because they show things already lost from some of the scrolls. The old infrared pictures will also be scanned in the new digital effort.

“The project began as a conservation necessity,” Ms. Shor explained. “We wanted to monitor the deterioration of the scrolls and realized we needed to take precise photographs to watch the process. That’s when we decided to do a comprehensive set of photos, both in color and infrared, to monitor selectively what is happening. We realized then that we could make the entire set of pictures available online to everyone, meaning that anyone will be able to see the scrolls in the kind of detail that no one has until now.”

The process will probably take one to two years — more before it is available online — and is being led by Greg Bearman, who retired from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Data collection is directed by Simon Tanner of Kings College London.

Jonathan Ben-Dov, a professor of biblical studies at the University of Haifa, is taking part in the digitalization project. Watching the technicians gingerly move a fragment into place for a photograph, he said that it had long been very difficult for senior scholars to get access.

Once this project is completed, he said with wonder, “every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look at them from numerous angles.”

Source: NYTimes

Strengthening Gustav threatens Jamaica

A contract worker for United States Corps of Engineers packs sand in a Hesco basket near a flood wall in New Orleans, Louisiana August 28, 2008. (Lee Celano/Reuters) KINGSTON (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Gustav hit Jamaica with near hurricane-force winds and torrential rain on Thursday on a path toward western Cuba that could take it to the Gulf of Mexico oil fields as a strong hurricane next week.

As Gustav churned through the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Hanna formed in the Atlantic Ocean with 40 mph (65 kph) winds and on a track that could take it toward the Bahamas and Florida next week, the National Hurricane Center said.

Energy companies prepared for Gustav to deliver potentially the hardest hit on the heart of the U.S. Gulf oilpatch since the devastating 2005 hurricane season. Crude futures rose more than $2 to $120.50 a barrel before falling back as Gustav aimed deep into the heavy concentration of oil and natural gas platforms off Louisiana and Texas.

The area, which provides the United States with a quarter of its crude oil and 15 percent of its natural gas, was battered in 2005 by two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita.

The seventh storm of a busy Atlantic hurricane season was 40 miles east of Kingston, Jamaica, by 2 p.m. EDT, the hurricane center said.

Its top sustained winds were 70 mph (110 kph), just short of the 74 mph (119 kph) hurricane threshold. Forecasters said it could become a hurricane at any moment.

New Orleans, the southern U.S. city devastated by Katrina three years ago, remained near the middle of the range of possible landfall locations on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal put New Orleans residents on alert for possible evacuations from Friday, the third anniversary of Katrina's strike, and issued a precautionary disaster declaration.

In Jamaica, reservoirs filled with rainwater, shops, post offices and schools shut their doors and authorities ordered nonessential workers to stay home as Gustav neared.

Natasha Morris, heading home from her restaurant job to batten down, said she would take this one seriously.

"I never took Hurricane Dean seriously the last time and it blew my house down," she said, referring to the powerful storm that slammed Jamaica's south coast last year as a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale of intensity.

"I'm going home now to secure my stuff."

Emergency officials on the lush, mountainous island urged residents to avoid gullies and flooded waterways. Forecasters said the storm might dump up to 25 inches of rain in isolated areas, triggering flash floods and mudslides.

REGAINING STRENGTH

Gustav barged ashore as a hurricane in Haiti on Tuesday and its torrential rains killed at least 23 people there and in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Gustav is the first serious Atlantic storm since the devastating 2005 hurricane season to threaten New Orleans and the 4,000 U.S. energy platforms in the Gulf.

Katrina and Rita destroyed 124 platforms and severed pipelines when they swept through as Category 5 storms. Katrina came ashore near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane and flooded the city. It killed 1,500 people along the Gulf Coast and caused $80 billion in damage.

Energy companies shut down production and pulled workers from offshore rigs on Thursday. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the nation's only deepwater oil port which normally offloads about 1 million barrels of foreign crude per day, expected to stop working over the weekend.

The U.S. Energy Department said it was prepared to open its emergency oil supply and the International Energy Agency said member nations were ready to release strategic oil stocks.

The White House, criticized for a slow response to Katrina, said it was closely monitoring Gustav. The storm could hit the coast as Republicans are gathered for their convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul to nominate John McCain for president.

On its current path Gustav will threaten the wealthy Cayman Islands offshore financial center and western Cuba before entering the Gulf between Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Energy traders also warily watched newborn Hanna, 305 miles

northeast of the northern Leeward Islands. The storm was moving to the west-northwest at 12 mph (19 kph) and was expected to become a hurricane by Sunday.

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston; Writing by Jim Loney; Editing by Michael Christie)

Source: Yahoo News

Sony to launch world's thinnest LCD TVs

A model from Japan's Sony Corporation poses with a new Bravia 40-inch LCD televison (ZX1 series) at their headquarters in Tokyo. Sony Corp. has said it will launch the new ZX1 model, the world's thinnest and lightest 40-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) television, seeking to trump its rivals ahead of the key year-end shopping season.(AFP/Kazuhiro Nogi) TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp said on Thursday it would launch the world's thinnest liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs this year, broadening its product line-up ahead of the critical year-end shopping season.

The new 40-inch model, which is 9.9 mm thick, is estimated to sell for 490,000 yen ($4,478) in Japan, Sony said.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also offer the world's first LCD TVs that display 240 frames per second, compared with 120 frames for Sony's existing models.

More frames in a given time make fast-moving images in sports programs and action movies look seamless.

Sony, the world's second-largest LCD TV maker behind Samsung Electronics Co Ltd expects a 46-inch model with the 240 frame function to sell for around 400,000 yen.

Both models will go on sale in Japan on November 10, closely followed by overseas launches.

Sony said a slowing economy has had little effect on its LCD TV sales, and that the maker of Bravia brand flat TVs is on track to hit its target to sell 17 million LCD TVs in the year to March 2009.

Sony shares were down 0.7 percent at 4,140 yen, outperforming the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC. which fell 1.1 percent.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka)

Source: Yahoo News

Futuristic fridges invade Berlin consumer electronics show

A "decomposed" washing machine at the stand of German household appliances giant Miele at the IFA (Internationale Funkaustellung) Consumer Electronics Trade Fair, at Berlin's fair ground August 27. The IFA, one of the largest consumer electronics trade fairs in the world, takes place from 29 August to 03 September.(AFP/John Macdougall)BERLIN (AFP) - The Ifa, Europe's top consumer electronics show, is normally all about gadgets that make life more entertaining with the latest flat screen televisions, stereo equipment and the like.

But this year the Internationale Funkausstellung, opening in Berlin on Friday, will for the first time see usually more down-to-earth appliances like fridges and washing machines fighting for attention.

According to organisers of the six-day show, which hopes to attract more than 200,000 visitors, the inclusion of white goods reflects what they call a "worldwide trend for more comfort in the home and for healthier eating."

And in these days of soaring energy bills and growing environmental consciousness about global warming and water resources, they also offer greater efficiency.

In an effort to boost flagging sales, makers of these normally commonplace home appliances have given them an image revamp, with even the humble vacuum cleaner made to look futuristic and exciting at the Ifa.

But it is not all superficial. There have also been changes under the hoods of many of these products, with mechanical controls ripped out to be replaced by high-tech electronics.

There are "intelligent" washing machines on display from Bosch for example that adapt the amount of water used to the weight of what is being washed, while dishwashers make more efficient use of every last drop.

Fridges just keep things cool, you might think. But no, fridges at the Ifa have in-built LCD televisions and send you a shopping list of what you need -- by email.

Reinhard Zinkann, head of the family-owned household appliance maker Miele, says the industry is banking on the message of improved efficiency to get Germans to replace their energy-guzzling older machines.

But Zinkann and the industry association he heads have their work cut out in attempting to persuade consumers in a slowing economy to part with their money for appliances they may feel they don't need.

At present Germans only get new appliances every 15 years on average, and rising prices and weaker economic conditions mean that many households have an ever-dwindling amount of euros available to spend each month.

As Zinkann, who is also head of the German household appliances industry association, admits, "the environment is difficult".

Germany's ZVEI industry federation has forecast that growth in the second half of 2008 is likely to be "considerably slower" than the first six months of the year, when the sector was hardly booming either.

Makers of vacuum cleaners and fridges are not the only ones hoping for renewed interest in their products. Organisers of Ifa are also hoping to give a shot in the arm to their show, now more than 80 years old.

Only two years ago, Ifa organisers decided to make it an annual event -- it was every two years before.

Ifa, with 1,245 exhibitors from 63 countries -- up from 1,212 from 32 nations last year -- runs until September 3.

Source: Yahoo News

Carbon clues to when Greenland was a green land

This picture taken in May 2008 shows fishermen in Ilulissat Icefjord, western Greenland, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Climatologists poring over Greenland's ancient past say global cooling, unleashed by a fall in atmospheric greenhouse gases, caused the vast island to ice over around three million years ago.(AFP/File/Slim Allagui)PARIS (AFP) - Climatologists poring over Greenland's ancient past say global cooling, unleashed by a fall in atmospheric greenhouse gases, caused the vast island to ice over around three million years ago.

In a study released Wednesday, the British research team say that for aeons, Greenland was mostly ice-free and may have hosted grasslands and forests before it became smothered in a thick, glacial crust in a relatively short time.

The ice sheet can only be explained by a decrease in naturally-occurring, heat-trapping carbon gases in the atmosphere, they say.

Over a period of around 300,000 years, concentrations of greenhouses gases fell by more than a third, to around the same level as before the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, they calculate.

Their conclusions are based on a powerful computer model that crunched data about the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean and recreated the growth of the Greenland icesheet, starting from a small white spot on the eastern highlands to a deep slab covering virtually all of the island.

The scientists, who published their findings in the London-based science journal Nature, looked at three other competing theories for explaining the coming of the ice.

These include a change in ocean circulation that blocked the supply of warm sea currents to Greenland; the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains, which deflected the cold jetstream of air over Greenland; and changes in Earth's orbit, which influenced the amount of solar heat reaching our planet.

Such factors did affect the amount of ice cover, but not enough to contribute to the massive, long-term growth of an ice sheet, the researchers contend.

Lead author Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol in western England, said a reverse greenhouse effect clearly played the major role in Greenland's glaciation, but how it happened remained unclear.

Among the ideas being kicked around is geological weathering, in which certain kinds of rock, undergoing chemical change, absorb more carbon dioxide (CO2), he told AFP.

Understanding why would be a vital insight into the mechanisms of climate change, he said.

"There is a huge amount of uncertainty as to why there are big, natural swings in CO2 levels," he said.

Lunt said there were also implications for today's problems of man-made global warming, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels.

He noted that greenhouse-gas levels before the Industrial Revolution were 280 parts per million (ppm), and now stand at around 385 ppm -- just shy of the 400 ppm that prevailed in Greenland's pre-ice era.

"It's clear from our work that the Greenland ice sheet is very sensitive to carbon dioxide levels, but it's wrong to draw inferences about what will happen," he said.

"You can't say that if you get to the level of 400 ppm, the ice sheet will melt in the next hundred years, because we don't know enough about the process. It might be easier to create an icesheet than to melt. If you reverse what you did before, you don't necessarily get the same answer back."

Next to Antarctica, Greenland is the biggest source of land ice in the world.

On August 21, US researchers, adding to concern about the state of Greenland's ice cover in the face of higher temperatures, said the island's two largest glaciers had lost at least 40 square kilometers (14 square miles) of ice since the last melt season.

Source: Yahoo News

Technology's low powered future

Next month is the 50th anniversary of the invention of the microchip. Dan Simmons travels to Texas, the home of the chip, to look back at its past and forward to its future.

Jack Kilby standing next to the world's first microchip at at the 1985 Science Exposition in Tsukuba, Japan
Jack Kilby received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000
The microchip was created in Dallas in 1958 by Jack Kilby soon after he joined chip giant Texas Instruments (TI).

The insight that led Mr Kilby to this breakthrough was his realisation that if all the bits of an electric circuit were made from the same material then the whole thing could be printed on a single chip. It would be small and easy to mass produce.

Half a century on from that momentous insight and the ubiquity of the chip is well proven. But Texas Instruments, currently the world's third largest chip maker, wants to take it further and to do so it is busy trying to break another electronic frontier.

Miniature technology

Mobile phone with a built in projector
Devices with low power consumption allows greater functionality
Researchers at Texas Instruments are not just creating more powerful processors, they want them to use very little power. If they achieve their goal all manner of possibilities open up.

Click was shown one such example with a demonstration model of a projector housed inside the shell of a mobile phone.

Hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors inside the handset flip with tiny amounts of energy, reflecting the right colours to make up the picture.

Power parsimony makes this possible. If it needed as much power as a standard projector, the show would be over in minutes.

"In designing this pico-projector, with the use of LED illumination and the chip, along with other components, we've engineered it to last longer," said Michael Guillory, head of marketing for Texas Instruments' digital light processing products.

"You want to use the cell phone, so you don't want it to take up all its power using the projector," he said. "So by designing it to last at least an hour and a half it allows our customers to manufacture a very useable device."

TI hopes the first products using this miniature technology will go on sale in 2009.

Low power

It also demonstrated how grapes can be used to power a clock.

A clock powered by grapes
Some chips can be powered by alternative sources of energy
Adrian Valenzuela, low-powered processing engineer at TI, explained that this experiment was important because it showed that electricity can be generated from alternative sources.

"We [Texas Instruments] have created systems that are so low-powered they can sample sensors and transmit information wireless without the need of a battery and they will last forever," he said.

Wouldn't it be great to have a smoke alarm where you never change the batteries, and it wasn't plugged into the mains?
Texas Instruments' engineering manager David Freeman

As an example of this TI wants to use vibrations generated when traffic passes over a bridge to power sensors so they can monitor themselves and relay the data back to inspectors.

Vibration power

The buzz phrase for this is "energy scavenging". This means not just using solar power, but capturing energy from any light source, any sound, any vibration, any heat.

An office, home or a car engine might produce three milliwatts of energy and that is now enough to run diagnostics, monitor and control other things.

"Wouldn't it be great to have a smoke alarm where you never change the batteries, and it wasn't plugged into the mains?" said David Freeman, engineering manager at TI.

"It would be wherever you wanted to put it and if you scavenge energy correctly that smoke alarm can actually talk to other alarms," he said. "So when one goes off and your bedroom door's closed, the one in your bedroom can also go off

"This just from the energy that can be scavenged from a normal household environment - from the light, vibrations, temperature and such," Mr Freeman added.

Perpetual devices

In a separate project Mr Freeman has adapted a mobile phone to run on solar power.

At the moment the panels would need to be six times larger than the one currently used in order to power the call on its own, but the benefits of low power chips are clear.

"There's this whole new regime of technology that nobody knows about because we've never been able to do the perpetual device," said Gene Frantz, TI principal fellow.

"The perpetual device is a device that needs no power to do its function. It just does it. And you have to step back a minute and think 'why would I want such a thing?' Or, better yet, 'what could I do differently?'"

If scavenging energy from the world around us is to work, then devices that we use will also have to work with a lot less energy.

Half a century after the first chip was born, these Texans not only think small is beautiful, but less is more.

Source: BBC

Beer-based biofuel, trash brigade help turn convention green

Democratic US presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama speaks at Molly's Gas Station, in March, in Pennsylvania. The Democratic Party is using beer-based biofuel and a recycling brigade guarding trash cans to help ease the environmental impact of its convention in Denver this week. The aim is to have the most environmentally-sustainable convention in modern US history.(AFP/Getty Images/File/Alex Wong)DENVER, Colorado (AFP) - The Democratic Party is using beer-based biofuel and a recycling brigade guarding trash cans to help ease the environmental impact of its convention in Denver this week.

The aim is to have the most environmentally-sustainable convention in modern US history. And the goals are ambitious.

"We've been committed to taking the practical steps to sustainability," said Damon Jones, a spokesman for the Democratic National Convention Committee.

"There are a number of things you can do that are not outrageous but are responsible and use good common sense."

The plan is to divert 85 percent of the waste produced by the 50,000 people coming to the convention into recycling or composting facilities.

Some 900 volunteers were enlisted to help delegates sort their garbage so it ends up at a recycling plant or composting facility.

Caterers and other vendors are also being instructed in waste diversion.

And the company hired to build the stage where Barack Obama will accept his party's nomination has been asked to use recycled materials and make sure they get reused when the stage is torn down.

Then there's transportation: General Motors will be providing a fleet of hybrid and flex-fuel vehicles, Coors is donating ethanol made with thousands of gallons of its beer waste and bus idling will be kept to a minimum.

Pollution is also being controlled through the use of wind and solar energy and efficient lighting, computers and appliances.

To top it all off, the party's "Director of Greening" hired an outside firm to calculate the convention's carbon footprint so it can be offset with carbon credits.

"We're really proud of the steps we've taken and if you compare another event that's taking place the next week we feel really good about our track record," Jones told AFP.

The Republican National Convention has also pledged to hold its "greenest" convention ever, but its plans are more modest.

"Having someone stand next to a trash can? I don't think so," said RNC spokeswoman Yohana de La Torre.

The Republicans are also using hybrid and ethanol-powered vehicles and have been cutting down on the use of paper products while asking vendors to use recycled materials for everything from the carpets to the signs filling the arena, de la Torre said.

Their offices were filled with reused furniture and recycling bins and the bulk of staffers found apartments within walking distance so they could avoid driving.

"We are trying to be stewards of the environment and are trying to encourage others to be," she said in a telephone interview.

"The Republican Party is home to Theodore Roosevelt who was the first American president to consider the long-term needs for efficient conservation of natural resources."

These greening efforts, while important, have become pretty standard for large events, said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace.

"This is all good manners at this point," he told AFP. "It's more important what they talk about inside the convention. ... The campaign platforms have to match the behavior."

Source: Yahoo News

See also:

Engineering Silicon Solar Cells to Make Photovoltaic Power Affordable

PHEV And The Hybrid Plug-in Grid

Fuel Cell Efficiency May Be Improved With Material With 'Colossal Ionic Conductivity'

A $130 phone headset helpfully talks back

A Bluetooth earpiece by BlueAnt is photographed in New York, Monday Aug. 25, 2008. Tuesday marked the launch of the first headset that speaks our language, literally. The $130 V1 from BlueAnt Wireless recognizes spoken English commands, and responds, also in English. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)NEW YORK - Bluetooth wireless headsets for mobile phones are puzzling: We're supposed to control them with couple of unmarked buttons and get feedback from a single indicator light.

What is the headset trying to say when the LED is blinking that particular way? How do I connect it to a new phone? Do I press the big button or the small button, or both at once? The user interface is as cryptic as an alien artifact.

On Tuesday, BlueAnt Wireless launched the first headset that, by comparison, is clearly from Planet Earth. The $130 V1 headset recognizes spoken English commands, and responds, also in English.

It's eerily like having an automated call center in your ear. It can't do everything that a standard headset combined with a voice-recognizing phone can do, but it's a useful advance for an industry that's been focused on everything except ease of use.

Headsets are marketed based on how much ambient noise they suppress, how small they are and how long their batteries last. Yet Shawn Score, president of Best Buy Mobile, says 20 percent of the Bluetooth headsets it sells are returned. When the Best Buy employees "pair," or connect, a new headset to the customer's phone in the store, the return rate drops to a few percent. Clearly, a lot of people find these things hard to set up, and I don't blame them.

If you haven't memorized the procedure for entering pair mode with a regular headset and don't have the manual handy, good luck. Burning incense or tossing some salt over your shoulder might help.

With the BlueAnt V1, this is what you do: Press the big button once. A male voice says "Say a command." You say "Pair mode." Then the voice walks you through what to do on the phone to get it connected.

If you've forgotten the magic words, you press the button and ask "What can I say?" The V1 will patiently go through the commands it accepts. You can ask it whether the headset is connected to the phone, and how much battery charge is left.

When you get a call, the headset reads out the number, then asks whether you want to answer or ignore it. You don't need to touch the headset, as you do with competing models. Don't worry — people around you will get used to you blurting out "Answer!" Remember, years ago people who talked loudly to unseen friends while walking down the sidewalk were considered crazy.

So far so good. But the headset is quite limited in the number of terms it can recognize, and you can't train it to recognize or say new phrases. This means that when you receive a call, it will read out the number, digit by digit. It can't tell you "It's your wife calling again."

Another big limitation is that you can't dial calls from the V1 by saying the name of someone in your phone's contacts list.

You can, however, program seven numbers that it can call for you. Some phones allow you to program a speed dial for each number, from 1 to 9, and the V1 can use those — but it reserves 1 for voicemail and 5 for Google Inc.'s 411 service. So you can tell it "Call speed dial six" and it will do so.

Not all phones allow these sorts of speed dials. Apple Inc.'s iPhone 3G is an example. In those cases, you have to get a call from a number before you can store it in the headset's own speed dial list. Then you have to press the "Volume Down" button on the headset to store it. This isn't exactly a usability advance over standard headsets.

If you have a phone that takes voice commands, those will work with the V1 as well. Since the headset can do things the phone can't, and vice versa, this is a good combination. When I tested this with a BlackBerry Pearl, pressing the phone's voice command button elicited a female voice in my ear, asking me what I wanted to do. When I pressed the V1's button, I got the male voice. It was almost like being 2 years old again and having my parents at my beck and call.

In other ways, the V1 behaved like a good, standard headset. It was comfortable to wear. Apart from the big "command me" button, there are two volume buttons. The rated talk time is five hours.

In loud environments, the V1 did nearly as well as the latest Jawbone headset from Aliph (also $130), which prides itself on military-grade noise suppression. Both are good enough that your main problem is likely to be the sound of the wind whistling over the microphone rather than ambient noise.

The V1 costs twice as much as an older BlueAnt headset without voice recognition, but my guess is you'll find it a good value, particularly if your phone lacks voice recognition.

The voice-recognition feature won't be unique to BlueAnt — it's provided by a third party, and it will probably show up headsets from a few manufacturers within a year. Beefing up the voice recognition to make it more versatile likely will take a few more years, but it won't be long before we can tell a headset to "Call my office and tell them I'll be in at 10, then book me a massage for 9, m'kay?"

Source: Yahoo News

See also:

Daimler denies planning second Smart car plant

New Zealand's colossal squid defies legends: scientists

Some eBay sellers frustrated with rule changes

Nokia unveils new multimedia phones

Nokia's new N79 (L) and N85 handsets are seen in an undated combination image. (Nokia/Handout/Reuters)HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia (NOK1V.HE) unveiled two new high-end phone models, the N79 and the N85, as the world's top cellphone maker battles against increasing competition from the likes of Apple (AAPL.O) and Samsung (005930.KS).

Both new phones, upgrades to Nokia's older models, will have 5 megapixel cameras and pre-loaded games.

Both new models will go on sale in October. The N85 will retail for 450 euros ($662), excluding operator subsidies and taxes, and the N79 will go on sale for 350 euros.

Shares in Nokia were 1.8 percent higher at 17.63 euros by 0852 GMT, outperforming a firmer DJ Stoxx European technology shares index (.SX8P).

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki, editing by Will Waterman)

Source: yahoo news








Internet socializing keeps time with the music scene

Event goers check their laptop displays during San Francisco's first Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival held on August 22. Software giants Microsoft and Federated Media have teamed up with concert organizers to debut the new online festival experience called "CrowdFire"(AFP/File/Kara Andrade)SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - As music lovers mobbed an outdoor stage, vying for views of Radiohead, Beck and other rockers, Keith McPhail enjoyed a prime view of the show from a couch in an Internet "living room."

McPhail, 34, was ensconced in a red-and-white striped, circus-style tent where the worlds of online social networking and real-world rock-and-roll merged in what some predict is a computer-age concert trend.

Microsoft and Federated Media teamed with concert organizer SuperFly Productions to debut a "CrowdFire" experience at the three-day Outside Lands music festival that ended Sunday in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

"Sitting in that Microsoft living room was better than being at the show," McPhail told AFP.

"It was perfect; no one was blocking my view. The last 25 minutes of the (Tom) Petty set I sat on that couch, as comfortable as I could be."

The high-tech big top pitched within easy earshot of the Outlands stage was marked only with a wooden sign bearing the word "CrowdFire" and a picture of a flaming mobile telephone.

Inside, dozens of concert-goers queued to check emails and Facebook accounts at a bank of laptop computers while others competed for wannabe guitar star glory on "Rock Band" music videogames.

Beer-drinking visitors in an "experience room" peered at a colossal flat-panel monitor watching their photos while listening to live music streamed in from outside.

Some people waited patiently for personalized posters featuring photographs digitally manipulated to make it seem they are standing with their favorite bands.

An estimated 100,000 Outlands attendees were given a place to upload digital photos, videos, audio and text from mobile telephones for sharing at a www.crowdfire.net website.

Uploaded content was streamed in a continuous montage online, in the CrowdFire tent, and on screens dotting the festival grounds.

Microsoft digital innovation manager Laura User headed the project, the inspiration for which sprang from the US software giant's "emerging media trials" program earlier this year.

"We wanted to do it around an event that people are excited about which is music," User told AFP during the event.

"It is smaller-scale pilot programs like this that provide a great learning environment where the company can try out new ideas and implement them right away."

Federated chief executive John Battelle takes the majority of the "blame" for the idea of smashing together online social networking and live concert going.

"It's basically just harvesting what everyone is already doing and creating a platform to allow them to do more with it," Battelle said.

The CrowdFire name came from the idea of creating a "digital campfire" in the middle of the event that was built by the crowd.

"This tent idea is new to me, but I like it and I think it would take off in Spain and other countries in Europe," said Teresa Gispert of Spain, who attended Outlands while vacationing.

She contended that using computers during live shows is very social because it lets her and friends share experiences while apart.

Before dashing off to upload video of musician Steve Winwood, Battelle predicted the CrowdFire concept will spread like wildfire worldwide.

Federate Media and partners plan to create "virtual living rooms" at music festivals in Europe and Asia.

Not far from Battelle, Mercedes Gendron looked about frantically for help in a reminder that the worlds of live performance and technology have something else in common; there can be unexpected glitches.

"Can you please help me? I was trying to upload, but it's not taking pictures from my phone," the 26-year-old Canadian woman pleaded.

"I think computers are bizarre as it is."

Source: yahoo news

Daimler denies planning second Smart car plant

Journalists test drive a Smart Car ForTwo during a 50-city roadshow to promote the U.S. launch of the car next year in downtown Detroit, July 10, 2007. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)STUTTGART, Germany (Reuters) - German car maker Daimler AG (DAIGn.DE) does not intend to build another factory for its Smart brand minicars, the company said on Monday, denying a German magazine report.

"We have no plans for a second Smart plant," said a spokesman for the Mercedes-Benz division, which includes Smart.

He was responding to a report in Auto Motor und Sport that a second plant was under consideration given surging demand for the small cars, which was about to strain capacity at its plant in Hambach, France.

The spokesman said capacity utilization at Hambach was "very satisfactory" but he declined to discuss future production plans. He also said Smart had no plans for the foreseeable future to expand its product range beyond the two-seat version.

Auto Motor und Sport had quoted management sources as saying the company was sounding out the option of building another site, with Asia or the United States under discussion as possible locations.

Total Smart brand sales rose nearly 57 percent in the first seven months of the year to 81,300 units and were up by just over a quarter in July alone to 12,400 cars.

U.S. sales for the Smart two-seater hit 2,559 in July, bringing total U.S. deliveries to around 14,000 units since its launch there at the start of the year.

(Reporting by Hendrik Sackmann; editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

Source: Yahoo News

See also:

Some eBay sellers frustrated with rule changes

Astronomers Find Unusual New Denizen Of The Solar System

Chemists Make Beds With Soft Landings: Researchers Create Stable, Highly Pure Helical Peptide Arrays

Vocal joystick gives computer control to those with disabled hands

SEATTLE--For many Iraq war veterans who have returned home with debilitating injuries that, for example, make it impossible to use their hands, doing anything on a computer is an impossible task.

But a research project being worked on in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of Washington could be the latest tool at such veterans' disposal, as well as anyone who suffers from the lack of full use of their hands.

The project, known as the Vocal Joystick, which, according to University of Washington graduate student Jon Malkin, is an extension of speech recognition technology, is designed to allow someone to control a computer cursor using nothing more than their voice.

Malkin gave a talk on the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday.

It works by having a user train the Vocal Joystick software with his or her voice, mainly using the mouth and lips.

"We can do a lot with that," Malkin said. "Speech is a very complex signal."

Indeed, he explained that the software allows a user "four degrees of freedom" meaning that the cursor can be moved up, down, left and right, all with different vowel sounds.

For example, to move left, the user would sound out the "ee" tone in "feet." To go right, it would be the "aw" sound in "law." Hitting the equivalent of the mouse button would be the "u" sound in "but."

It might be tempting to think that only the most basic tasks are possible with this kind of software, but Malkin said that one artist who has used the Vocal Joystick had employed it to paint a picture of Mount Fuji that he then showed the audience.

The picture was very good, something many people with full use of their hands would never have been able to make.

He said the artist had made the picture in just three hours.

Malkin also demonstrated the software in real-time, showing how it is used in conjunction with a simple game where a player controls a fish swimming around trying to catch other fish.

He proceeded to sound out vowel after vowel, and sure enough, on-screen, his fish moved around dexterously, chomping up snack after snack. The Gnomedex crowd went wild.

Source: Yahoo News

See also:

New Theory on DEET: Mosquito Just Dislikes It

Aboriginal Kids Can Count Without Numbers

New Zealand's colossal squid defies legends: scientists

Microsoft site makes digital photos into panoramas

In this screen shot provided by Microsoft, Photosynth, Microsoft's new online tool for presenting a collection of related digital photos, is shown.  Users can upload their pictures and sit back while the software matches pixels and arranges the image.Viewers can 'walk' around the collection in an experience that melds online photo gallery and video player. (AP Photo/Microsoft)SEATTLE - Digital cameras have liberated awe-struck travelers and proud parents from worrying about the price of film processing. But showing off those megapixels of memories is still reminiscent of tedious living room slideshows — and perhaps now worse, because instead of one blurry photo of the Eiffel Tower or the high school musical, there might be 50.

Most digital photo-sharing sites require viewers to click from an album to a bite-sized thumbnail of a picture, and then again to a large image, then sit through a slideshow of snapshots one by one. Microsoft Corp.'s newest Web tool, Photosynth, is designed to give viewers a much zippier way to take in the sights of Paris or an act of "HMS Pinafore."

Here's how it works: After a quick software download, the photographer selects a collection of related images from her hard drive. The software crunches the files using the local computer's processing power, looking for pixels that are the same in each photo. Then, Photosynth stitches together the images into a panoramic scene.

There is an old-school analog to this: taped-together photo prints. But online the result is part photo gallery, part movie. One photo is shown clearly at a time; adjacent images appear faded, and others less closely related to the photo in focus are indicated with a ghostly scatter of pixels. Viewers can zoom in and out, and pan left and right, through the scene created by overlapping many different views of the same place or object.

The software, which works only on Windows PCs, latches on to similarities and ignores differences, so photos taken in the same room but at different times of day with different inhabitants can still match up.

Microsoft first opened Photosynth to employees and partners including the National Geographic Society, so the site already has many "synths" on file. (Those "synths" are all given numeric "synthy" scores, indicating how many of the photos overlapped in a way the program could detect.)

One synth, from a National Geographic photographer, combines hundreds of images of Stonehenge; another, submitted by a Microsoft employee, lets the viewer follow a climber on a harrowing ascent of a rock face.

Synths can be embedded like videos into other sites, including blogs and eBay auction listings.

Photosynth, which was due to launch late Wednesday, doesn't yet allow more than one person to add photos to a "synth," which means strangers can't easily pool photos of a certain place or event, as is commonly done using tags on sites like Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr.

But Microsoft's David Gedye, manager for the Live Labs group that cooked up Photosynth, said eventually the program should allow not only small-scale collaborations but also global photo contributions. Those could be fed into Microsoft's mapping technology to fill in gaps where satellite images aren't available.

Source: Yahoo News

See also:

New Zealand's colossal squid defies legends: scientists

Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward

Security, Security, More Security

Some eBay sellers frustrated with rule changes

In this Oct 12, 2006 file photo, eBay signs illuminate the company's booth at the DigitalLife expo in New York. EBay plans to move nearly all transactions to electronic payment methods. Beginning in the U.S. in mid-October, 2008, users will have to pay by credit card, PayPal or the credit card processing service ProPay. No more cash, checks or money orders — which account for less than 10 percent of eBay transactions these days — unless sellers and buyers meet in person.  (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)Get a $1,000 eBay gift card!

Some people who sell things on eBay are fed up with new rules the company has been imposing in hopes of making the auction site more attractive to online shoppers. Now even more changes are coming in the next few weeks, but this time eBay Inc. hopes it can cool tempers.

Already this year, eBay has tinkered with its fee structure, search results and feedback system. These efforts might be meeting eBay's aims of improving the experience for buyers, but several sellers say their relationship with eBay is worse than ever, and some have left the site entirely.

Jonathan Garriss, executive director of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance and head of Gotham City Online, which sells shoes on eBay, said his group's members are seeing fewer of their listed items sell, and lower average prices for things that do sell.

EBay has been rejigging its vast Internet marketplace in hopes of turning around a troubling trend: Its number of active users is barely rising. In the most recent quarter, the figure rose 1.4 percent to 84.5 million.

One big change came in January, when eBay altered its complex fee structure and said it was trying to encourage sellers to offer more items for sale, which in turn could attract more buyers.

Generally, eBay cut the fees it charges for listing an item, but raised its commissions on completed sales of products auctioned for less than $1,000 or sold at fixed prices lower than $100. Meanwhile, the company began taking a lesser bite out of higher-end fixed-price sales — as much as 4 percent instead of a previous maximum of 5 percent.

At the time, eBay said more than 60 percent of its sellers would save money under the new rules. But plenty of complaints poured in. EBay responded by cutting listing fees by as much as half for items in its "media" category — such as books and DVDs — that sell for under $25.

Still, many sellers were still unhappy that unlike in the past — when eBay consistently talked of a level playing field for brand-name companies and weekend attic-raiders alike — a new top tier of vendors seems to have an easier time flooding the marketplace.

Under a new "Diamond PowerSeller" plan, the highest-volume merchants may be eligible for reduced fees. One Diamond PowerSeller, Buy.com Inc., is offering so many goods on eBay that many sellers suspect Buy.com is listing items practically for free. EBay won't comment on Buy.com's arrangement.

Buy.com's listings also emphasize eBay's move toward sales with set prices rather than its traditional auction format. EBay says auctions are not going away, but fixed-price sales are the fastest-growing part of the company's marketplace, increasing 60 percent a year.

And more changes are afoot. EBay announced Wednesday that starting Sept. 16, it will let U.S. sellers pay 35 cents to list an unlimited number of identical items at a set price, for a month at a time. Previously, fixed-price listing fees could run as high as $4 per item, and the listings were good for a week.

EBay's president of marketplace operations, Lorrie Norrington, acknowledged there has been "a lot of change" this year. But she said the company carefully considered the moves and believes they are improving buyers' experience because "the best values from trusted sellers become better and better."

For some sellers, like Michael Knight, who dismantles motorcycles and sells the parts on eBay from Garland, Texas, the sheer volume of recent adjustments has been frustrating.

"I have no control. I have to comply with anything they choose to do and I have no voice in the matter," he said.

Knight would like to move off eBay, but says it's difficult to transfer his listings to another site. Other sites will not easily accept the photos embedded in his item descriptions, and modifying every one of his almost 4,000 listings "is just not practical."

"I'd be giving up a month's income to get that done. That's the only thing that's keeping me on eBay — the inconvenience of leaving," he said.

Bruce Hershenson of West Plains, Miss., had spent 10 years selling vintage movie posters on eBay. Instead he now does that twice a week on his own site, eMoviePoster.com, using technology offered by AuctionAnything.com Inc.

"I talk to other people who have done what I did and they're happy with their decision. They've been able to get their business to the eBay business levels or beyond," Hershenson said.

His poster auctions on eBay had started at 99 cents each, so under the fee structure eBay imposed in January, he would have paid 15 cents to list each poster, down from 20 cents. But his average poster sold for $50, and eBay's take on that sale price would rise to about $3.07, from about $2.12 previously.

Even with a discount he could get by keeping his customer-feedback ratings high, he expected to pay eBay almost $20,000 more per year.

Sellers have also bristled at changes in eBay's feedback policy, one of the site's traditional hallmarks. In the spring, the company removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, though buyers can still offer negative assessments of sellers. EBay also adjusted its search engine so that items being hawked by people with poorer feedback ratings come up lower in search results.

Some sellers complain that this put them at the mercy of unscrupulous buyers who try to take advantage of the rating system.

"Many times you feel like they're really pushing it to see if you'll give them some kind of a refund," said Bill Cartmel, who sells records on eBay from Lewiston, Maine. "They'll float the suggestion that 'This isn't exactly what I expected.'"

EBay's Norrington said that sellers can report such abuse, and that the company hasn't seen it much.

Even with the rancor, some sellers clearly have benefited from eBay's changes. Steven Holt and his wife, Crystal, who sell DVDs from Denison, Iowa, say they've seen record sales since the spring, when eBay search results began favoring vendors who, like them, have high feedback ratings.

Yet Holt understands why some sellers may be upset. He notes that the uncertain effect of fee changes, combined with an iffy economy, "is naturally going to be a concern."

"When eBay makes these dramatic changes, it can make you very nervous," he said. "But again, eBay is doing what eBay believes it has to do to protect its marketplace."



Source: Yahoo News

Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward

Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.

This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.

The work involves materials that have a property known as negative refraction, which means that they essentially bend light backward. Once thought to be pure fantasies, these substances, called metamaterials, have been constructed in recent years, and scientists have shown they can bend long-wavelength microwaves.

Negative refractive materials can in principle lead to fantastical illusions; someone looking down at a fish in a pool of negative refractive liquid would see the fish swimming in the air above.

Two separate advances are described in two scientific papers being published this week, one demonstrating negative refraction at infrared and visible wavelengths. The second article will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Both papers come out of the research laboratory of Xiang Zhang, a professor at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Berkeley.

When a ray of light crosses the boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by a property known as the index of refraction. Transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher for visible light, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends toward an imaginary line perpendicular to the surface.

With the engineered metamaterials, scientists can create refractive indices less than 1 or even negative. Light entering a material with a negative index of refraction would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off the imaginary perpendicular line.

In the Nature paper, the Berkeley researchers created a fishnet structure with 21 layers, alternating between a metal and magnesium fluoride, resulting in a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for infrared light. The researchers said by making the fishnet structure even smaller, they should be able to do the same with visible light.

In the Science paper, a different group of scientists in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory used a different approach, building an array of minuscule upright wires, which changed the electric fields of passing light waves. That structure was able to bend visible red light.

Dr. Zhang said both approaches had advantages and disadvantages. “There are many roads to Rome,” he said. “At this point, honestly speaking, we don’t know which road will be the best.”

One application of negative index materials could be a “superlens.” Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”

The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplifies the evanescent waves, preserving detail lost in conventional optics, and the hope is to eventually build an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.

Source link: NYTimes.com

See also:

Astronauts handle explosives on daring spacewalk

Capturing DNA Molecules In A Nanochannel

Delta 2 Rockets to Remain Competitive Until 2015

Sky-high system to aid soldiers

Reflection in soldier's glasses, AFP
The imaging system could find uses on the battlefield

Hardware used to spot gamma ray bursts could soon be helping direct troops on a battlefield.

Defence firm Qinetiq has brought the technology down to Earth to make a monitoring system that may be able to track thousands of targets.

The futuristic system manages the feat without using lenses to gather light from the scene it is watching.

Instead it employs a sensor array, a special "mask" and image processing software to picture a scene.

High guard

Astronomers had been attracted to such devices because they coped much better with harsh conditions when a spacecraft is launched and in space, said Dr Chris Slinger, Qinetiq's principal investigator on the system.

"It's hard using lenses and mirrors up there," he said.

Instead of lenses the imaging system uses an array of microscopic sensors in front of which is a specially made "mask" randomly punctured with holes in a particular pattern.

Light from the scene over which the detector is passing hits the mask and casts a distinctive shadow on the array behind it.

"If you design your coding pattern well it's possible to take this mishmash pattern and use digital signal processing to decode the pattern to pull out an image of the scene," said Dr Slinger.

Swift aperture, Nasa
This coded aperture helps Swift spot gamma ray bursts

Nasa used such an approach, called coded aperture imaging, for the Swift satellite that was sent aloft to spot gamma ray sources.

By doing away with lenses and mirrors to focus light it is possible to produce an imaging system that is very sensitive but also light and durable.

Because the image the device is picking up is spread across many thousands of sensors, damage to one in the array does not significantly degrade the entire image.

Shifting the systems focus of interest was much easier than with bulky lens-based equipment because it was so light, said Dr Slinger.

The system should also have a "super resolution" mode that can dial into a scene to produce very detailed pictures of one location in its field of view.

Qinetiq is developing the imaging system for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) as part of a project known as Lacoste - Large Area Coverage Optical Search While Track and Engage.

The Lacoste project aims to produce an imaging system that will fly on a drone or airship to keep an eye on a battlefield or a huge swathe of a city.

Dr Slinger said Darpa wanted the system to be able to keep track of thousands of vehicles for months at a time.

Hardware with these abilities would be helpful for peace-keeping forces who want to wind images back from an incident, such as a car bomb exploding, to gather useful intelligence about where the vehicle began its journey.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

See also:

9 Questions About Robots in Space For NASA Innovator Brian Wilcox

R2-D2 to the Rescue?

A Car That Drives You (to Save Gas)

Security, Security, More Security

Security news dominated this week, and that will undoubtedly be the case next week as well, with the Black Hat and Defcon conferences under way in Las Vegas. In other news, Yahoo shareholders met Friday for their annual meeting, with fewer fireworks than expected.

1. DNS patches cause problems, developers admit: Patches for the DNS (Domain Name System) vulnerability that has generated so much buzz have led to performance problems for servers running BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) software. BIND is the most popular DNS software. Administrators shouldn't roll back the patch released July 8, said Paul Vixie, head of the Internet Systems Consortium, which oversees BIND. "The vulnerability is of more concern than a slow server," he said. An updated patch is in the offing. Meanwhile, hackers are actively exploiting the DNS vulnerability, and...

2. Apple finally patches dangerous DNS flaw and Opinion: Apple's unforgivable DNS delay: Apple issued a patch-- finally-- for its implementation of the BIND server software in various Mac OS releases. The delay in the patch release has caused considerable consternation among Mac fans.

3. A photo that can steal your online credentials and Black Hat/Defcon: Welcome to the funhouse: Among other things, researchers at Black Hat next week will demonstrate software they've developed that can circumvent security and take over accounts on popular sites such as Facebook, Google and eBay. The malicious software looks like image files to Web servers. The researchers will leave out details of how the attack works so that it won't be immediately used. We expect a lot of news out of Black Hat and Defcon, both in Las Vegas next week.

4. After facing shareholders, Yang must fulfill promises and Yahoo on defensive at shareholder meeting: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has made a lot of promises about how he's going to get Yahoo back in its financial and technology grooves. Shareholders at Friday's annual meeting served up some criticism, and one even suggested that Chairman Roy Bostock "do the honorable thing" and quit, but the get-together overall wasn't as heated as had been expected. Even so, with Microsoft's attempts to buy all or part of Yahoo now presumably behind the company, and having made peace with investor Carl Icahn, Yang and other company leaders will be expected to deliver.

5. FBI warns of new Storm worm attacks: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned that spam e-mails making the rounds on the Internet are spreading the dreaded Storm worm. Watch out for e-mail containing the phrase "F.B.I. vs. Facebook" and don't click on links in unsolicited e-mail, especially when you don't know the sender.

6. FCC rules against Comcast P-to-P throttling: Comcast must stop interfering with peer-to-peer traffic on its broadband network, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission ordered. The FCC decided in a 3-2 vote that Comcast has to stop slowing down P-to-P traffic by the end of the year and develop a new network management plan or face an injunction and possible other penalties.

7. Cuil stumbles out of the gate and What's in a name? Better not ask Cuil: The Cuil (pronounced "cool") search engine launched with promises to take a whack at Google. But an inauspicious start led to a flurry of criticisms about search results returned by the engine. It didn't help that Cuil's servers were overwhelmed on launch day. Started by a former Google employee and her husband, Cuil was said to be named after the Irish word for "knowledge." But it didn't take much searching on the Internet to discover that isn't actually what "cuil" means.

8. Sun releases preview of JavaFX SDK: Sun got into the hot rich Internet application market, releasing a preview software developer kit for JavaFX. Support for some features is missing from the preview SDK, but will be rolled out in later releases.

9. IBM invests big in two new cloud-computing centers and Update: Yahoo, Intel and HP form cloud-computing labs: IBM is investing US$360 million in a cloud-computing data center that it says will be the most sophisticated ever. The center will be housed in an existing building IBM will renovate in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The company also plans a new center in Tokyo where customers will be able to develop their own cloud infrastructures and applications. In other cloud-computing news this week, Yahoo, Intel and Hewlett-Packard announced they will work together on research and education in that area.

10. IOC caves to China Internet censorship: The International Olympic Committee cut a deal with the Chinese government to allow censorship of Internet sites during the Olympics. The censorship was noticed by journalists working in the Olympics newsroom, who immediately cried foul.

Source link: Yahoo news

See also:

R2-D2 to the Rescue?

A Car That Drives You (to Save Gas)

Memory, Depression, Insomnia -- And Worms?

Mars Lander Gets Another Sample In Oven

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully dumped another sample of surface dirt into its ovens for analysis, mission scientists reported this weekend.

Phoenix's robotic arm delivered dirt Thursday from a trench informally named "Rosy Red" through a narrow opening to a screen above the No. 5 oven on the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). TEGA heats up the samples in its oven and then analyzes the vapors given off to help determine the composition of the Martian dirt.

The $420 million Phoenix mission is designed to analyze the surface dirt and underlying ice in the arctic regions of Mars to assess whether or not the area might have been habitable at some point in the past.

A few particles of the sample passed through the screen on Thursday, but not enough to fill the oven and allow analysis of the sample to begin. The Phoenix team sent commands for TEGA to vibrate the screen again on Friday, and more material reached the oven, though still not enough to proceed with analysis.

"There appear to be clumps blocking the opening," said Phoenix science lead Doug Ming of NASA Johnson Space Center, in Houston, on Friday.

Vibration of the screen on Saturday finally succeeded in getting enough dirt into the oven to begin analysis. The team sent instructions to begin analysis of the sample on Sunday.

Phoenix scientists will be looking for signs of perchlorate, a highly oxidizing substance that was detected in dirt samples by the lander's wet chemistry laboratory. The last sample analyzed by TEGA found no indications of any chlorine present

On Friday, the spacecraft also extended the width of an exploratory trench informally named "Neverland," which runs between two rocks on the surface of the ground.

Phoenix also took overnight measurements of the conductivity of the Martian regolith that were completed on Wednesday. A fork-like probe inserted into the dirt checks how well heat and electricity move through the dirt from one prong to another.

Phoenix's mission, originally slated to end at the end of August, has been extended to Sept. 30.

Source link: Yahoo news

See also:

The Latest Technology May Not Have Transformed Your Health, But It Has Changed Science

Mapping The Human Mind

A Better Solar Collector

Ocean Glints Could Reveal Alien Planets

The phenomenon that causes a diamond to sparkle could be used to find large bodies of water on rocky, Earth-like planets, says Darren M. Williams, lead author of a paper in Icarus that describes the process.

The trick, he says, is to look for planets when they are in crescent phase, ideally in orbits that lie at an edge-on angle to Earth. In that position, the glare bouncing off the water would make the planet seem unusually bright.

"Crescent phase is where the starlight would be glancing off the edge of the planet toward our telescopes," says Williams, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State Erie. "That would be when the light is coming at the surface at a very steep angle, and the specular reflection would be the strongest and most intense."

Williams ran simulations of idealized, cloud-free planets with three types of surfaces: unfrozen land, snow and ice, and water. His goal was to see to what extent the presence of water would contribute to the light coming from a planet in another solar system.

He found that for slightly tilted systems the reflection from water would be the most powerful signal, particularly if the planet were observed in crescent phase. When a star appears directly over a body of water, almost all the light is absorbed. But from a glancing angle, most of the light is reflected. The shape of the light curve would help distinguish Earth-like planets with water from those without.

More than meets the eye

At the University of Florida, Dr. Eric Ford has also been learning about how light can reveal the presence of ice, sand, vegetation and water. Asymmetry in a planet's light curve over time could indicate major seasonal transformations or weather patterns caused by the ebb and flow of clouds.

Warmer, ice-free planets, for example, might experience a large blooming event of plants or oceanic algae, changing the way the planet reflected light. Scientists could detect those changes by looking for certain signatures in the planet's colors and measuring their intensities. While fluctuations would signal some type of surface feature, scientists would need a lot more follow-up before they could say for sure what was causing it.

"It could be water and land, it could be some other liquids, particularly where it's further out where you might have methane, like on Titan," says Ford. But, he explains, scientists could rule out many alternatives using other methods.

"If we have an idea of how far away the planet is from the star, and how bright the star is, then maybe we could say methane would not be liquid at those temperatures," for example. Scientists could narrow the possibilities by comparing their findings and might conclude the only logical explanation is the presence of water, "particularly if there was spectroscopic evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere," says Ford.

Experiments from Interplanetary Space

Looking at Earth-sized planets beyond our own solar system will require advanced new telescopes using modern technology to its full potential. Two proposed efforts, NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Darwin mission, will both have instruments capable of picking up the sparkle of an ocean.

The way those instruments are designed and built will be based, in part, on the results of what Williams sees of Earth from Mars and Venus.

Williams is using observing time on ESA's Venus Express and Mars Express orbiters, to look at Earth from interplanetary space. From Mars, all of Earth's phases can be seen, but from Venus, only Earth's gibbous (more than half-full) and full phases are visible. Regardless, Williams can use the results to test his predictions.

"That's the most exciting application from my standpoint," he says, "the observation of extreme glint off the Earth's oceans as seen from Mars Express."

Looking at terrestrial planets while they are in crescent phase, when only a small fraction of their disk is illuminated, will be extremely difficult, perhaps taking two or even three weeks of observing time. But, as Williams points out, of all the extremely difficult measurements astronomers plan to do, it might be one of the easiest.

Source: YN

See also:

Stranded in space? Japan's space lab too roomy

NASA Jumps at Patent for Plasma-Powered UFO Technology

Space probes show solar system dented, not round