Pat Cummins: Teenager in contention for must-win Test

Australia are considering a baptism of fire for 18-year-old fast bowler Pat Cummins in the second Test against South Africa, starting on Thursday in Johannesburg.

Cummins, who can bowl at over 90mph and has already made five limited-overs appearances for Australia, will become his country's second youngest Test cricketer after Ian Craig if he is selected in a match the tourists must win to claim a share of the two-game series.

Australia were bowled out for 47 in their second innings en route to an eight-wicket defeat in the series opener at Newlands and are certain to make at least one change to their starting XI as top-order batsman Shaun Marsh is ruled out by a back injury.

Usman Khawaja will be recalled in Marsh's place at number three, while there is also a case for David Warner, who joined the squad this week, to make his debut at opener Phil Hughes' expense.

For several of Australia's senior players this match is probably their final chance to turn around a run of poor form, most notably this applies to former captain Ricky Ponting, wicketkeeper Brad Haddin and left-arm paceman Mitchell Johnson.

"There's one definite change and the possibility of a couple of others. We have no choice, we have to pick a team to take 20 wickets and also to be positive and confident with the bat as well... we've got to take the game forward," said Australia skipper Michael Clarke.

"There are also some guys who have not trained yet this week. Ryan Harris is a bit stiff and sore, so we're waiting to see how he goes and how he pulls up in the morning. But nobody's got any great concerns and we'll probably be able to pick our best XI."
Scars

On events at Newlands, Clarke added: "We got rid of the scars once we left Cape Town, we had a good session in the changing room and made a pact that we would leave what happened there and look only to this one. We need to have a red-hot crack at this one."

Clarke's opposite number Graeme Smith expects Australia to have moved on quickly from their Cape Town humiliation.

"Australia have got enough players of experience who would have dealt with what happened in Cape Town before and they'll know it's a fresh start," said the South Africa captain.

"If we can get them under pressure early, then maybe the memories of that 47 all out will come back. But we have to start well and earn the right to put them under pressure; we must have a good first day."

South Africa are set to name an unchanged team.

South Africa squad: Graeme Smith (capt), Hashim Amla, Mark Boucher (wkt), AB de Villiers, Jean-Paul Duminy, Paul Harris, Imran Tahir, Jacques Kallis, Morne Morkel, Vernon Philander, Ashwell Prince, Jacques Rudolph, Dale Steyn, Lonwabo Tsotsobe

Australia squad: Michael Clarke (capt), Shane Watson, Michael Beer, Trent Copeland, Pat Cummins, Brad Haddin (wkt), Ryan Harris, Phil Hughes, Michael Hussey, Mitchell Johnson, Usman Khawaja, Nathan Lyon, Ricky Ponting, Peter Siddle, David Warner, Shane Watson

Source: http://www1.skysports.com/cricket/news/12341/7311757/Australia-mull-Cummins-debut

These May Be The Droids Farmers Are Looking For

When it comes to farm robots, fruit gets all the attention. But it looks like trees and shrubs could win the prize for first significant agricultural market for small mobile robots.

Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market.

The multi-billion-dollar industry that supplies ornamental plants to building contractors, big-box retailers and landscaping firms — $11.7 billion according to the most recent USDA figures — has been eagerly awaiting automation for decades. The down economy and harsh state laws targeting undocumented workers have turned up the pressure.

The horticulture industry has caught the attention of several robotics industry veterans, including Joe Jones, a co-inventor of iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaning robot. What they see is an opportunity to develop a small, relatively inexpensive, mobile material handling robot. Their venture-backed company has been field testing the robots at 11 nurseries around the country, and plans to release its first product at the end of the first quarter or beginning of the second quarter next year.

Harvest Automation bootstrapped the development of prototype robots and received its seed funding from its customers, said CEO Charles Grinnell. The company landed $5 million in venture capital funding from Life Sciences Partners, the Midpoint Food & Ag Fund, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation.

In today’s human-tended nurseries, immature potted trees and shrubs arrive at nurseries by truck and are offloaded onto the ground. Teams of migrant workers — undocumented for the most part — spread the plants out one by one following markers outlining a grid. When the plants are ready to be shipped out later in the season, workers reverse the process to group the plants for loading onto trucks. “We’ve recognized the need for robotics in the nursery industry for moving pots because it’s one of our highest concentrations of labor use,” said Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries, Inc. in Avon, Ohio.

Ten years ago the Horticulture Research Institute took a crack at automating nurseries, said Demaline. “The whole concept there was building a bigger machine to do the process, but it just never worked that well,” he said. When Harvest Automation showed Demaline it’s small mobile robots, the lightbulb went on, he said. “It was stark simplicity,” he said. “The robots were more adaptable to a wider range of growing areas.”

Small mobile robots that tend crops are just emerging, and most of the action is in produce. Row crops provide a semi-structured environment, and several companies are marketing four-wheeled robots with computer vision systems that monitor and in some cases tend to crops. The most advanced are medium-sized strawberry-picking robots, notably a machine from Spanish firm AgroBot. One player in the nursery automation market is British firm CMW Horticulture Ltd., which sells a medium-sized pesticide-spraying robot for greenhouses and nurseries.

Farmer’s little friend

The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/mobile-farm-robots/

Mobile Apps to Keep Your Mind on Your Money

Managing personal finances once involved lots of paper. Then computer programs came along that helped simplify the process. Now a multitude of mobile apps are available to help people attend to money matters on the go.

"It's very convenient to have it in your pocket on your phone," Garth Scrivner, senior investment counselor with StanCorp Investment Advisers, told TechNewsWorld. "It's just a convenience factor."

Company-Specific Apps

Many personal finance apps are provided by banks and investment firms to help their customers manage their accounts. Vanguard, for instance, has an app that lets its customers view balances and holdings, move money between banks and Vanguard accounts, buy and sell exchange-traded funds, look at transaction histories, research performance and prices, and view market news.

"Vanguard is a virtual service company," Julie MacArthur, senior manager in retail services, told TechNewsWorld. "We need to be where our investors are."

Vanguard launched its first mobile website back in 2007, before apps were all the rage. In 2009, it launched its first iPhone app, and in 2011, it launched apps for Android devices and the iPad.

Increasingly, customers expect their financial institutions to have apps that let them access and manage their money, MacArthur said. "Consumers have gotten comfortable interacting with banks through mobile devices. Investment management is a natural extension of that."

Vanguard's phone app focuses on numbers and text, but the iPad has opened up a whole new dimension for the app.

"The iPad app has more interactive content and charting, taking advantage of the larger screen," said MacArthur.

Aggregating Apps

Apps that collect financial information from a variety of institutions are also becoming increasingly popular. One of the most well-known of these comes from Mint.com. Mint, which is owned by Intuit, sees the role of its website and mobile app as helping people better manage their money by seeing it all in one place.

"One of its key advantages is that it aggregates all your information," Ken Sun, a group product manager with Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) Personal Finance Group, told TechNewsWorld. "It provides additional features, such as budgets and goals."

Users can sync the app with various accounts so they can see real-time balances. They can also set up budgets, track spending, get bill reminders, and generate reports to analyze the health of their finances.

The app also lets users enter cash transactions. An interaction between the mobile device's GPS and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Places allows the app to suggest the specific location for the transaction, which the customer can confirm.

Users can see their balances, but they can't actually move any money around.

They can sign up for the service either through Mint's website or through the app itself, which is available for iPhones, Android devices, and the iPad. Because it's a cloud-based app, any information entered on a mobile device is instantly available through the user's account on the Mint.com website, and vice versa.

"People just really want to keep on top of their finances," said Sun. "The Internet generation likes to use technology to do that. You can think of Mint as a real-time dashboard into your personal finances."

Mint monetizes its service by analyzing its users' data and spending habits and suggesting certain strategies, including financial products and services, that might be appealing or useful.

For instance, if a customer spends a lot on groceries using a credit card, the app might suggest a specific card that offers cash back on grocery purchases. If the user follows through and signs up for that card, then Mint receives a referral bonus for the transaction.

Only the most pertinent, customer-specific advice is given, Sun emphasized. "We like to make the advice really targeted and relevant to the user."

Mint's smartphone app, like Vanguard's, has relatively simple lists of numbers, data and information. The iPad, however, has given Mint's app a platform to replicate the colorful spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts of its website, with the added capabilities of the touchscreen.

Promoting Financial Literacy

Mint's app has many loyal users, including Scrivner, who has been using the iPhone app for several years to manage all of his own personal finances and recently got the iPad app.

"It's really nice because I can look at all of my apps in one spot," said Scrivner. "It's a great app for budgeting."

Mint's commitment to providing users with information, and even a kind of financial education, are particularly appealing, he said.

"They do a great job of sending alerts," noted Scrivner. "They give you tips and notices. They try to do some educating along the way."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/73637.html

Droid RAZR vs Galaxy S2 – Motorola exceeds expectations on every front

The Samsung Galaxy S2 was released just a few months ago and has instantly become the flagship Android smartphone, even though its main competitor, the HTC Sensation had almost the same specs and a better build quality. But time doesn’t stay in one place, and we already have several potential competitors ready to take the flag from the S2. One is the Galaxy Nexus, of course – a phone that everyone was expecting, but the other one, which is actually even better, is the Motorola Droid RAZR.

The Droid RAZR came to be pretty unexpectedly, and it is interesting to see what it can do compared to the previous generation flagship, The Galaxy S2, which is no slouch and can easily compete with anything that will be released in the next several months. So, can the new RAZR outdo the current leader?


Source: http://gadgetmania.com/2011/11/droid-razr-vs-galaxy-s2-motorola-exceeds-expectations-on-every-front/