'Smart' window switches to dark mode to save energy

A new type of "smart" window that switches from summer to winter mode has been made by South Korean scientists.

The window darkens when the outside air temperatures soar, and becomes transparent when it gets cold in order to capture free heat from the sun.

Similar windows already exist, but the researchers say their method allows for an almost instantaneous switch from opaque to transparent.

This may help save more energy, the team writes in the journal ACS Nano.

"This type of light control system may provide a new option for saving on heating, cooling and lighting costs through managing the light transmitted into the interior of a house," said the scientists.

"Smart windows can prevent the inside of a building from becoming overheated by reflecting away a large fraction of the incident sunlight in summer.

"Alternatively, they can help keep a room warm by absorbing the sun's heat in winter."

New approach

The existing technology uses charged particles called ions sandwiched between panes of glass.

Electric current is then applied to switch the window from opaque to clear and back.

But Ho Sun Lim from Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Jeong Ho Cho and Jooyong Kim from Soongsil University decided on a different approach.

They used a special polymer, a different sort of charged particles known as counterions and solvents such as methanol.

The report states that the result was a glass that was a lot cheaper to manufacture and much less toxic than those currently available on the market.

The window is able to switch from 100% opaque to almost completely clear in a matter of seconds, said the authors.

'Instantaneous' switch

Although "dimming" windows already exist, it is often necessary to switch them from winter to summer mode and back manually, using additional equipment such as home-automation panels.

"Until now, the numerous technologies developed not only have been chemically unstable, prohibiting their use in long-term switching applications but have been accompanied by the use of expensive special equipment and complicated harsh processing conditions," stated the report.

Dr Stephen Morris from Materials Knowledge Transfer Network that is funded by the UK's Technology Strategy Board said that if the new method allows the window to switch from opaque to transparent and back pretty much instantaneously, then it is going to be a real benefit in terms of energy savings.

"That would mean that you're allowing light in much quicker - and this can reduce the amount of heat loss out of houses or increase the cooling in summer," he said.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15076773

Twelve new frog species found in Western Ghats

The Western Ghats region in the country, a global biodiversity hotspot, has opened up more of its secrets — this time a dozen species of night frogs hitherto unknown to science.

S.D. Biju of the University of Delhi and researchers from Bombay Natural History Society, Zoological Survey of India and Vrije University in Brussels, published the new finds in the latest issue of the international journal of zoological taxonomy ‘Zootaxa’.

Their paper also announces the rediscovery of three night frogs thought to be extinct for the last several decades.

In a press release on Thursday, the University of Delhi said the rediscovered Coorg Night Frog (Nyctibatrachus sanctipalustris) had not been seen by researchers since it was reported 91 years ago. The Kempholey Night Frog (Nyctibatrachus kempholeyensis) and Forest Night Frog (Nyctibatrachus sylvaticus), the other two rediscoveries, had eluded sighting since they were reported 75 years ago.

The 12 new species were identified following a revision of the night frog genus Nyctibatrachus from specimens collected from the Western Ghats forests spread along the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra during fieldwork over the last 20 years, the press release said.

The researchers have named the new species as Nyctibatrachus acanthodermis, Nyctibatrachus danieli, Nyctibatrachus devein, Nyctibatrachus gavi, Nyctibatrachus grandis, Nyctibatrachus indraneili, Nyctibatrachus jog, Nyctibatrachus periyar, Nyctibatrachus pillaii, Nyctibatrachus poocha, Nyctibatrachus shiradi and Nyctibatrachus vrijeuni. (The name Nyctibatrachus is composed of two words — ‘nycti’ derived from the Greek ‘nux’ meaning night and ‘batrachus’ meaning frog).

These new discoveries take the number of new species described by herpetologist Dr. Biju and his colleagues over the last eight years from specimens collected from the Western Ghats during two decades of field work to 45. One of the earlier discoveries of the team led by him, a purple burrowing frog given the name Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis belonging to an entirely new family of frogs, was celebrated by the scientific world as a “once in a century find”.

Six of the 12 new species are from unprotected, highly degraded habitats. The night frogs require unique habitats — either fast flowing streams or moist forest floor for breeding and survival. They fertilise and reproduce without physical contact. The paper reporting these finds also describes the reproductive strategy and parental care habits of six of the new species.

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article2456205.ece

Five Super Foods for Keeping your Bones Healthy

A strong skeletal frame is vital not only to provide structure to the body but also protect the internal organs and anchor the muscles.

Apart from this, a healthy set of bones is crucial for good posture, balance and strength. Now the two key nutrients responsible for developing healthy strong bones are calcium and phosphorus. Smaller amounts of other nutrients like vitamins, proteins and minerals are also important for healthy bones.

The process of developing healthy bones begins at birth. However, it is important that a healthy, bone-friendly diet programme is maintained all throughout the life. This becomes particularly important after about 30 years of age.

You of course have the option of going for calcium supplements (but do consult a doctor before you do that), you can also try some calcium-rich foods to make up for the deficiency of calcium and keeping the bones healthy. Below, we discuss five super foods which can help you boost your bone density at any age:

Milk

Without a shadow of doubt, milk is the best (and readily available) source of calcium required for proper bone growth. According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), low fat or fat-free milk is the best choice as it has high calcium content without the added fat and this facilitates easy absorption of calcium by the body. And it's not just calcium. Milk is also rich in nutrients like potassium, magnesium, riboflavin, phosphorus and Vitamins D, A and B12, all of which are important for healthy bones.

Orange Juice

Oranges are packed with essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals and calcium. They are a must-have for healthy bone growth. They can be especially used by individuals who have intolerance to lactose and cannot obtain their daily calcium requirements from dairy products. So next time you help yourself with a serving of fruits, make sure you have enough oranges in that.

Dairy Products

Many experts have designated dairy products like cheese and yogurt as preferred source of calcium due to their high calcium levels. In case you are lactose intolerant, you can also opt for other dairy products that are either lactose-free or have low levels of lactose. Yogurt is contains a chemical called lactoferrin which an iron-binding protein which promotes the growth and activity of osteoblasts (the cells that build bones).

Nuts and Seeds

Besides being rich in calcium, nuts like walnuts, flaxseeds, almonds, pistachios etc are also very good sources of minerals and omega 3 fatty acids. Peanuts and calcium contain potassium which prevents loss of calcium in urine.

Greens

Dark green leafy veggies like brocolli and spinach are great sources of calcium and vitamin D and it's the latter which helps in absorption of Calcium and Phosphorus, thereby ensuring growth of healthy bones and teeth. Collards and turnip greens can also be helpful in providing you with your daily dose of calcium. The alkaline effect of eating a diet rich in these vegetables will help you to strengthen your bones and promote bone growth by preventing calcium loss. Besides, plant sterols (steroid hormones) are converted to a hormone called calciferol and that aids calcium absorption.

Source: http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com/super-foods-keeping-bones-healthy-135837228.html

Spotify revolutionizes music listening

Attention, Carnegie Mellon students: A revolutionary new service has become available to music listeners across the nation. The name of this innovation is Spotify.

Spotify is a music streaming service that allows listeners to search and play songs from an impressively large variety of record labels. This selection of music includes about 15 million tracks, which means users can find almost any song from any album, by any artist. One exciting aspect of Spotify is that users are allowed to listen nearly instantly not to just a sample of the song, but to the entire, full-length song for free. The other incredible part is that all of it is legal. According to Wired, “Those who have tried Spotify know it’s like a magical version of iTunes in which you’ve already bought every song in the world.”

Spotify is easy to navigate, and searching for and playing songs is simple. There is no waiting for songs to download; it is as easy as one click. Listeners can hear almost any song they want whenever they want, make playlists of their own music files from their hard drive or iTunes library, and share music through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Spotify’s music library is a compilation of both the user’s music and its own extensive music collection. With all music libraries collected in one place and the ability to connect to a social networking site, it is easy to share music with friends.

On the side bar of the homepage, there is a “What’s New” tab so users can be up to date on the latest music. The “Top Lists” tab shows the most popular music, and the “Feed” tab shows music shared among friends and Spotify news. There is also the music library and all playlists, including the “Starred” playlist, to which any song can be added in order to create a massive collection of every song that the user wants. It is also possible to rewind or fast forward to any part of a song, and of course to replay it as many times as the user wants. One other helpful feature is the filter tool, which allows the user to type in criteria to filter music from any playlist or search results.

Although there are many benefits of the free service, there are also some limitations that are a bit disappointing. Listeners can only listen to the same song five times per month, with a maximum of 10 hours of music per month after a certain time period. However, paid subscribers enjoy more enticing features. Users of Unlimited or Premium Service enjoy an advertisement-free version of the service, an unlimited number of playbacks, and an unlimited number of hours of music streaming. Premium users also have a mobile service, by which subscribers are able to sync all their favorite playlists from Spotify to their mobile devices. Premium users also have an offline mode, which allows them to listen to music without internet access.

This creative music service is certain to change the way we share and listen to music. The service is an accessible — and legal — alternative to pirating music. Many music listeners are willing to search through files of mediocre quality, risk downloading viruses, and wait for a long duration of time to download songs illegally as long as the music is free and accessible. Spotify presents everyone with plenty of music at their disposal instantly, with no painfully slow downloads, no viruses, and no guilty conscience.

It is an ingenious concept, and it has already received significant acclaim. Billboard.biz praised Spotify, saying, “Spotify makes music fun again, just like the iPod did nearly 10 years ago.” Recorded music has come from vinyl records to tapes, to CDs to music files, and now it has reached music streaming so that music is easier to access than ever before. Thanks to Spotify, listening to music will never be the same.

Source: http://thetartan.org/2011/9/12/pillbox/spotify

Google-powered bulbs, dishwashers

Google-powered bulbs, dishwashers

After the Internet, Google is now set to foray into the domain of household appliances -- it will produce bulbs, thermostats and dishwashers, and integrate them with wireless technology, the search engine giant has said.

According to Google, the new range of "almost anything electrical" household devices would be launched by the end of this year, and wireless technology will help these devices to communicate with tablets, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Announcing the new initiative, codenamed Project Tungsten, at a software developers' conference in San Francisco, Google said its aim was to let a range of devices "discover, connect and communicate" with each other.

In a series of demonstrations using its Android operating system 'Android@home', Google showed a tablet that could turn lights on and off and even a "near-field communications" chip that simply had to be touched on speakers to start them playing an album.

Although entering the crowded "home automation" market is brave move by Google, the US-based firm highlighted 400,000 Android devices are now being activated every day.

It said that apps integrated into the home environment, such as an alarm clock application that gradually raised the lights and turned on a user's radio, were the next logical extension.

The company already offers 200,000 different apps and they have been downloaded 4.5 billion times on 100 million different devices, mostly mobile phones.

Google also announced a service allowing users to rent movies online as well as to store music they already own on the Internet.

Read More :- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Coming-soon-Google-powered-bulbs-dishwashers/articleshow/8240894.cms

Social media: The new battleground in Singapore elections

Social media

The odds are always stacked against opposition candidates in Singapore elections and for Nicole Seah, a political novice contesting in the backyard of a popular former prime minister, they should be overwhelming.

But are they? The winsome 24-year-old is already the city-state's second-most "liked" politician on Facebook and she enjoys a higher profile than many seasoned campaigners. She has clips on YouTube and is avidly discussed in blogs.

As Singapore gears up for elections on May 7, no one is sure how social media like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will affect the outcome. What is clear is these outlets are sharply different to the pro-government local newspapers and TV.

"What used to be mere coffee shop talk can now enter the public discourse, for better or worse," says Cherian George, associate journalism professor at Nanyang Technological University.

"Whether it will have any impact and to whose benefit is anyone's guess."

The People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore with an iron grip since independence in 1965, usually wins elections by a huge margin. But at the last election in 2006, when it won 82 of 84 seats, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter either did not exist or were in their infancy and confined to the West.

According to the government's Info-communications Development Authority, 81 percent of Singapore households had access to the Internet at the end of 2009.

Top source

Facebook is particularly popular in the wealthy Southeast Asian city-state where there are an estimated 2.5 to 3 million users in a population of 5.1 million, according to industry estimates.

In a recent survey by the Straits Times newspaper, 36.3 percent of people between the ages of 21 and 34 cited the Internet as their top source of local political news compared with 35.3 percent who preferred newspapers.

According to local media, "Generation Y" citizens, or those born after 1975, make up one in four voters. And opposition parties have been quick to take note.

"There is this explosion of new media tools and we have been able to use them effectively to reach out and tell the truth about our party and what we stand for," Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), told Reuters.

But despite the Internet's growing reach, Singapore's newspapers and TV stations continue to command a much wider audience. The Straits Times, for example, has an average daily circulation of 350,000 while the Online Citizen, a popular Singapore news and commentary site, gets around 25,000 hits a day.

Singapore Press Holdings, which has a near-monopoly on newspapers in the city-state, follows a strongly pro-government line. MediaCorp, which runs the TV stations, is a unit of state investor Temasek.

Seah, who set up her Facebook page just a week ago, had already received 22,372 "likes" as at 4 pm on April 26, far more than any Singapore politician other than the country's senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew.

Still, that may not be enough for her and her alliance from the National Solidarity Party to unseat the team from the PAP led by former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in a five-seat, winner-takes-all constituency.

"Social media has been more useful in forging connections between parties and sympathizers, for example, by helping party members identify people they could engage with in party activities," said Giorgos Cheliotis, who teaches communications and new media at the National University of Singapore.

"But I do not think that it has much power in swaying public opinion."

Read More :- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Social-media-The-new-battleground-in-Singapore-elections/articleshow/8092826.cms

New format for CAT 2011!

The Common Admission Test (CAT) to be conducted on 20 testing days within the 28 day window between October 22 and November 18 will be in a yet new avatar. According to the latest news, the number of sections has been reduced to two from the erstwhile three. These are as follows: o Quantitative Ability and Data Interpretation, and o Verbal ability and Logical Reasoning. Each section will have 30 questions and 70 minutes will be given making the total test time as 140 minutes, 5 minutes more than CAT 2010. More significantly, both sections will follow a sequence with on-screen countdown timers for each. Students will not be allowed to go back to the first section once its time has elapsed. The check-in procedure this year will start one-and-a-half hours before the scheduled test time instead of two hours in CAT 2010 and the candidates will be given a 15-minute tutorial before the commencement of the main examination. Three new cities - Bhilai, Jammu and Dehradun - have been added to the existing 33 test locations. CAT brochures can now be purchased from any one of the 201 branches of Axis Bank. Further details are to be made available on the CAT site by August 8th.

Source: http://campus.yahoo.com/news/yeducareers360/new-format-cat-2011-20110801   

Honda to Recall 962,000 Cars

TOKYO—Honda Motor Co. said it would voluntarily recall 962,000 cars world-wide to repair problems with power windows and computer equipment.

The car maker said no serious injuries or fatal accidents have been reported as a result of the problems. The company estimated it would spend ¥1.29 billion ($16.8 million) in Japan for the recall. Honda declined to elaborate on the costs for overseas recalls.

The announcement came hard on the heels of another large recall and adds to Honda's headaches as it seeks to join Japanese rivals in bouncing back from production disruption in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Japan's auto makers must also cope with the yen riding near record highs against the dollar and other major currencies, making their exports more expensive and less competitive.

Honda, Japan's third-biggest car maker by volume, recalled more than 2.3 million vehicles in early August, citing problems with automatic transmissions.

Honda on Monday said it will recall 936,000 Fit compacts, CR-V and City models in Japan, China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere because of defective power-window switches.

A Honda spokeswoman said there were nine reported cases of vehicles catching on fire in Japan and China because of the power-window problem. She also said two people reported light burns after touching overheated switches.

The car maker also will recall 26,000 CR-Z hybrid models in Japan, the U.S., Canada and other markets because of defective programming of electronic-control units.

Honda shares closed 4.7% lower on Monday.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904537404576551890942734716.html

Google Docs - Finally Readying Support For Offline Mode

Google Docs

Google has already established dominance in the market for cloud-based office suites, with Google Docs, and for months the search engine behemoth has reportedly been testing offline support, but now a member of the Google Docs team confirming that it will begin to unfurl the ability to use the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software while not connected to the Net later this summer.

Offline support from Google Docs that was slated to arrive early this year, has often been an iffy proposition. Last month, Google promised offline Google Docs this summer and said it is testing the feature internally.

But according to Cnet, it is not just internal: the unofficial Google Operating System blog reported a case in which a reader noticed a black status bar at the top of the browser window with the tag line indicating “Offline Docs,” the alert “network connection lost,” and apparent links for “switch to online mode” and “switch to offline mode.”

However, it is a sometimes-on, sometimes-off thing, with Google supporting various means of using Docs offline. In addition, offline Google Docs will also have huge repercussions for Google's Chrome OS, which has been disapproved for being unusable when there is no internet network available; but if you can still edit documents while offline, it could become much more useful.

Offline Edits:

Writing in a Q&A thread on Reddit, Jeff Harris of the Google Docs team quoted as saying, “You are going to see offline start to roll out later this summer. We used to have offline with Google Gears, but it became pretty clear that plugins were not the right approach. We have been reimplementing offline using HTML5 standards like AppCache, File API, and IndexDB.”

“We are some of the first web apps that are really intorducing those standards to the test, so it has taken a while to iron out the kinks,” he added.

As such, it should also be noted that one of those offline applications, IndexedDB, is still in rather early days of the standardization process and has not necessarily won over all the browser makers. Do not be surprised therefore if only early fans such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome support offline Docs.

The Gears concept to offline Google Docs provided the feature earlier but with considerable restrictions. For example, spreadsheets could not be edited offline. Technical challenges pop-up when offline Docs go online again, particularly when multiple people are editing the same document, Harris said.

He also explained how the service will work:

Nevertheless, we will release in whatever incremental pieces make sense. But “The long term direction is if you access a Doc URL while offline, it should open the local copy of the doc and let you edit. When you go online all your edits get synced in the background. You should also be able to see a list of your docs while offline.”

“We will need to work through all the knotty problems with how to merge conflicting edits. It is fun stuff.”

Of course, this is pretty inspiring to folks interested in a free and easy-to use Office suite that you can use from just about anywhere. Now the question is when this will happen, and how Google plans to actually implement it.

Read MOre :- http://news.ebrandz.com/google/2011/4119-google-docs-finally-readying-support-for-offline-mode-this-summer.html

Google Launches “Me On The Web” Online Reputation-Management Tool

Google "Me On The Web "

With the astronomical boom in social media networking web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, managing your reputation online just got easier with Google's newly released tool, dubbed as “Me on the Web,” to help users manage their online identities.

The feature called Me on the Web is a reputation management tool accessible online now. The tool can be found on the Google Dashboard, below the Account details and offers to “help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web,” said Google.

The feature is pretty simple and can be activated for alerts through a user's Google dashboard for mentions of their e-mail addresses or other search terms they associate with their online identity such as a business or product. Alerts can be sent weekly, daily or as Google picks up the mentions.

“In recent years, it has become easier and easier to broadcast information about yourself online through powerful new platforms like social media-networking sites and photo-sharing services,” explained Andreas Tuerk, a product manager at Google.

He recognized that way to supervise your privacy on these sites is to decide who can see this information, determining whether it is visible to just a few friends, family members, or everyone on the web. But Google is taking a different approach. Me on the Web is not a privacy tool.

According to Michael Fertik, CEO of Repuation.com, concluded that he was enormously excited to find more than 100 emails in his inbox Thursday about a new Google application aiming to help people take control of their online identity.

“The biggest thing Google could do is endorse the space, which is really cool,” said Fertik, whose company sells technology for managing online reputations.

The Me on the Web component of the dashboard also offers links to Google resources on how to get content removed from searches and tips on managing your online reputation (including a pitch to create a Google profile, which gets picked up high in search results for your name.)

According to Tuerk, another significant consideration when publishing information on the web is selecting how you are identified when you post that information. That is where Google is putting its efforts.

“We have worked hard to create various identity options into Google products. For instance, while you may want to identify yourself by name when you post an answer to a question in a forum so that readers know the response is reputable, if you upload videos about a controversial cause, you may prefer to post under a pseudonym,” Tuerk said.

He further explained that your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you -- whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag, or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, Tuerk said, the results that appear are a combination of information you have posted and information published by others.

However, alerts can be organized using Me on the Web that will notify you if your name or email address gets mentioned online. It will also suggest some search terms that you might want to consider monitoring. Besides alerts, the tool offers links to resources for information on what third party information is posted about you on the web and tips like how to request content to be taken down.

But with the masses flocking to the web for more and more interaction online on social media networks and the likes with often no clue about the ins and outs of what they are letting themselves in for, especially with the minefield that is online privacy.

While Google Alerts would not detect every single mention of the terms you arrange, it is a good initiative for people concerned about their online reputation, and Me on the Web is a bit more convenient than managing several Google Alerts.

Read More :- http://news.ebrandz.com/google/2011/4108--google-launches-me-on-the-web-online-reputation-management-tool-.html

Google Debuts Voice And Image Search For Mobile And Desktop

Google

In its relentless quest to maintain its position as the de facto resource for searching information on the Internet, global search engine behemoth Google Inc. debuted an array of enhancements to its flagship search box on Tuesday, with new features for both mobile searchers, desktop searchers adding voice queries, drag-and-drop image search and background preloading of the top result page to make search faster and more interesting.

The company, on Tuesday at its Inside Search event in San Francisco, took the wraps off several new features that has bolstered its world-domineering search service once again, alongside minor updates to its mobile web search functionality.

First up, the voice search service for desktop computers, which the Web giant launched, which was earlier available on mobile platforms like iOS and Android is now available on desktop computers.

Voice Search on the desktop moves computing one step closer to the natural user interface that has been the holy grail of computing for decades. With Voice Search, people query Google by speaking aloud. A tiny mic icon appears in the search bar. When clicked, a built-in or hooked-up mic will let you bark out some search terms and Google will pop off to find results online.

Google Voice Search for the desktop (Credit: Google)

"The lust for knowledge does not ends when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device." "In the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years' worth of voice to our system," Google fellow Amit Singhal said in a blog post.

A Google employee demonstrated the power of the voice analysis with complex requests like "pictures of the yellow-bellied warbler" and "weather for Schenectady, New York". The speech recognition feature is useful for difficult-to-spell words and long phrases, according to Google.

Basically, Voice Search on desktop works by utilizing Google's Speech API and will be available to anyone using Chrome 11 in English when it is "released over the next week", Johanna Wright, Google's director of search product management, said in another blog post. The feature, which will be released for 40 languages, also requires a working internal or external microphone. And, for now, it is only available in U.S. English.

"We have endowed tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology -- for instance, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say," Singhal wrote.

In an interview, Singhal said Google's voice recognition technology is far beyond search and that the company wishes to make voice input a ubiquitous component of computing, and will eventually become a staple of services like Google Docs.

"The way we think about voice is that it is an intuitive way for human beings to interact with other human beings or even with phones and computers," he said.

"When you have a voice recognition system that is available everywhere, you just do not think about whether I can talk to this application or not, whether I should type here or talk here. With our vision behind voice, we want to make voice search ubiquitous. But not just voice search, we want to make voice input ubiquitous as well."

Another excellent new feature is the ability to search with an image. Search by Image empowers people to use a picture rather than text to submit a query. Users can drag-and-drop an image into the search box or copy and paste the image's URL into the search bar. Google will analyze your image and find some handy results related to the image.

Google images

One example Google demonstrated during its presentation on Tuesday was using the Search By Image function to determine the exact location where vacation photos were snapped. Google plans to roll the new service out to users in 40 languages immediately.

"The application behind Search by Image examines your image to determine its most distinctive points, lines and textures and creates a mathematical model. We match that model against billions of images in our index, and page analysis helps us derive a 'best guess' text description of your image," Wright said.

Google's Search by Image feature allows people to use a picture rather than text to submit a search query. Photo credit: (CNET News)

In addition, Google plans to release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will allow users to right-click any image on the web to conduct a search. Google's Search By Image application is very similar to the reverse image lookup service like TinEye, developed by Toronto's Idee Inc.

Read More :- http://news.ebrandz.com/google/2011/4106-google-debuts-voice-and-image-search-for-mobile-and-desktop-.html

25-year old dies using Chinese phone

25-year old dies using Chinese phone

If you happen to be a Chinese phone user, here's a shocking piece of news for you. In one of the most bizarre events, a 25-year old man from the Panchmahal district of Gujarat died after being electrocuted by his China-made phone.

The incident occurred when 25-year-old Dhanji Damor was trying to make a call while his phone was plugged in for charging. The victim was pronounced dead by doctors due to electrocution.

Already, the low-cost unbranded China-made handsets have seen the Indian government cracking down upon them for failing to comply on the security standards. Last year, the government was mulling to adopt various steps, including strict surveillance of grey market deals and restriction on import of devices without proper code.

The government had also banned the unbranded Chinese mobiles that do not have IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers. However, they still continue to sell across India's grey mobile markets with the IMEI numbers reportedly fudged.

Read More :- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/telecom/25-year-old-dies-using-Chinese-phone/articleshow/8888462.cms

CIA website hacked

CIA website hacked

The public website of the Central Intelligence Agency went down evening as the hacker group Lulz Security said it had launched an attack.

Lulz Security has claimed responsibility for recent attacks on the Senate, Sony Corp, News Corp and the US Public Broadcasting System television network.

The CIA site initially could not be accessed from New York to San Francisco, and Bangalore to London. Later in the evening service was sporadic.

"We are looking into these reports," a CIA spokeswoman said.

Lulz Security has defaced websites, posted personal information about customers and site administrators, and disclosed the network configurations of some sites.

Security analysts have downplayed the significance of these attacks, saying the hackers are just looking to show off and get as much attention as possible.

In the case of the CIA attack, hackers would not be able to access sensitive data by breaking into the agency's public website, said Jeffrey Carr, author of the book Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld.

"All they're doing is saying 'Look how good we are,'" Carr said. "These guys are literally in it for embarrassment, to say 'your security is crap.'"

Lulz only made claims that it attacked www.cia.gov, and there was no evidence on Wednesday evening that sensitive data in the agency's internal computer network had been compromised.

There also were no apparent links to more serious network security breaches recently at the International Monetary Fund and Lockheed Martin Corp. Lulz Security has not been linked to those incidents.

Lulz, whose members are strewn across the globe, announced the attack shortly before 6 p.m. East Coast time.

"Tango down," the group Tweeted, pointing to www.cia.gov.

Although the group, also known as Lulz Boat, fashions itself more as pranksters and activists than people with sinister intent, its members have been accused of breaking the law and are wanted by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

Lulz broke into a public website of the Senate over the weekend and released data stolen from the legislative body's computer servers.

In May, the group posted a fake story on the PBS website saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive and living in New Zealand. Shakur was murdered in 1996.

Read More : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/CIA-website-hacked/articleshow/8875574.cms

Microsoft finally loses Word patent battle

Microsoft's Office 2007

Software giant Microsoft finally lost its battle over Word patent with Toronto's i4i Inc. Thursday.

Rejecting Microsoft's appeal, the US supreme court upheld the 2009 lower court order against Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages to the Toronto firm for infringing its patent.

The Canadian company had taken the software giant to court in the US in 2007 over violations of its patent in Word applications and won the case and got $290 million in damages in December 2009.

In its lawsuit, i4i had claimed that the world's biggest software company infringed on a patent granted to it in 1998.

The patent pertained to i4i's technology that can open documents using the XML computer programming language and manipulate complex data in electronic documents. The technology allows users to sort out and manage tons of information by turning complex documents into more accessible databases.

The Toronto company claimed that Microsoft violated its patent when it created Word 2003 and Word 2007 software. Later in 2009, the US court of appeals upheld the lower court order banning Microsoft from selling its patent-infringing Word processing software from January 2010.

Though Microsoft complied with the court order by stopping selling versions of Word with the disputed technology from that date, it challenged the verdict in the US supreme court in August last year, arguing that the current system is disproportionately loaded in favour of patent holders.

i4i chairman Loudon Owen called Thursday's court decision "extremely gratifying'' for his small firm. "It has also become one of the most important business-law cases decided by the Supreme Court in decades,'' he told the local media.

Twitter introduces link-shortening feature

Microblogging site Twitter has finally fulfilled users' longtime wish. The company has introduced an automatic URL shortner. A major complaint that many users had with Twiter has been that its 140-letter cap often makes it impossible to include long URLs in tweets. This forced users to use URL shortening services such as bitly.

Announcing the new feature on its blog the company said, "Today, we're releasing something that many of you have been asking for – automatic link shortening on Twitter.com."

As to how it will work? "Just paste a link of any length into the Tweet box on Twitter.com. After you've composed your Tweet and you hit the "Tweet" button, we'll shorten the link so that it only takes up 19 characters," said the company in the blog.

As for the users who want analytics for their links? "You can continue to use your favorite third-party link shortening services," says the company.

Facebook-Google rivalry intensifies with PR fiasco

Facebook  V/S  Google

The intense rivalry between Facebook and Google just got juicier.

In a twist seemingly out of a Hollywood thriller, Facebook hired a prominent public relations firm toplant stories harshly criticizing Google’s privacy practices in leading news outlets. The efforts backfired when the firm approached a blogger who not only declined the assignment, but also went public with the offer.

The latest Silicon Valley drama has also evoked chatter of smear campaigns, secrecy and even Richard Nixon. It took the once-secret blogger known as Fake Steve Jobs to help sort it all out.

One lesson- If you’re going to write an incriminating email, don’t. Pick up the phone instead.

Here’s another- “If you are out there planting negative stories, you are feeding the conflict,” said Larry L. Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, a public relations company. “When they get in a shoving match, whoever is perceived by the public to be the bully loses in the public eye.”

Rather than getting news outlets to circulate stories about privacy problems facing Google, Facebook found itself having to answer questions about why it wanted to maintain secrecy.

Facebook said it never authorized or intended to run any smear campaign against Google. Rather, the company said it hired Burson—Marsteller to prompt investigations into how a new Google service called Social Circle collects and uses data about people. In a statement, Facebook said it should have made it clear that it was behind the efforts.

Burson—Marsteller said Facebook had requested that its identity remain secret “on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light.” The firm said that violated its own policies, “and the assignment on those terms should have been declined.” Not that it was.

Facebook’s efforts to stay anonymous — something that violates the terms of service for users of its site {hbox}” began to unravel when Burson-Marsteller contacted blogger Christopher Soghoian, an Indiana University graduate student well known in online privacy and security circles.

The firm’s John Mercurio asked Soghoian if he wanted to write an item for “a top-tier media outlet” blasting Google for what Mercurio calls a “sweeping violation of user privacy.” Soghoian asked for the identity of the firm’s client, but Mercurio wouldn’t reveal it. Soghoian then posted the email exchange online.

Burson-Marsteller, meanwhile, also pitched USA Today. Instead of running with the planted story, USA Today published an article on the “PR firm’s attack of Gmail privacy.”

It took Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons to figure out that Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client was not Apple or Microsoft, as some murmurs went, but Facebook.

Lyons, incidentally, is the writer behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a sharp—witted blog pretending to be written by Apple’s CEO. Lyons used to go by Fake Steve Jobs, but The New York Times outed him in 2007. (The blog is on hiatus out of respect for Jobs, who is on medical leave.)

“The mess, seemingly worthy of a Nixon re-election campaign, is embarrassing for Facebook, which has struggled at times to brand itself as trustworthy. But even more so for Burson-Marsteller, a huge PR firm that has represented lots of blue-chip corporate clients in its 58-year history,” Lyons wrote in the Daily Beast, a website owned by the same company as Newsweek.

And so, people got a rare glimpse inside Facebook’s thorny relationship with Google in a story that seems more befitting to behind-the-scenes Washington politics or rival pizza joints than the sparring between two seemingly friendly tech giants.

It was also a good lesson on privacy in an age in which few things stay out of the public eye.

“Odds are that if you are writing about something controversial, or doing something controversial, someone is going to leak it,” said Smith, the crisis-management expert.

Google and Facebook are Silicon Valley neighbors with similar scrappy roots as startups.

Over the past few years, however, they have grown more competitive. Google is dominant in advertising that accompanies search results, but Facebook has the potential to draw ad dollars with its extensive knowledge of people’s interests and social circles. With little success, Google has urged Facebook to make its data more accessible to its search engine.

Facebook also has successfully lured scores of Google’s engineers and executives, a key reason Google gave its staff a 10 percent raise this year.

The PR fiasco was prompted by Google’s Social Circle, which is part of the company’s efforts to supplement search results with content from your Facebook, Twitter and other online connections.

Facebook, no stranger to privacy mishaps, criticizes Google for collecting and storing Internet users’ information without their knowledge or consent.

But even the most ardent privacy advocates are dubious Google is doing anything all that bad with Social Circle.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said there are far more pressing privacy issues. They include Google’s mapping service with street-level photography and Facebook’s tendency to encourage people to share more than they think they’re sharing. EPIC also objects to the tracking of people’s location through mobile devices.

Facebook acknowledges that it could have handled the matter better.

“The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way,” the company said.

Google did not respond to messages for comment. Nor did Mercurio and Jim Goldman, the Burson-Marsteller employees behind the Facebook campaign. The blogger, Soghoian, confirmed the email exchange and said, “I don’t write things for other people.”

Lyons would not disclose how he figured out the identity of Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client. As for Facebook’s response that it didn’t intend a smear campaign, he only wrote- “I don’t think there’s any reason not to take them at their word, right? Oh wait.”

Read More :- http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article2021390.ece

Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret

Facebook

Facebook, it seems, doesn’t always practice what it preaches.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has extolled the virtue of transparency, and he built Facebook accordingly. The social network requires people to use their real identity in large part because Mr. Zuckerberg says he believes that people behave better — and society will be better — if they cannot cloak their words or actions in anonymity.

"Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," Mr. Zuckerberg has said.

Now, Facebook is being taken to task for trying to conceal its own identity as it sought to coax reporters and technology experts to write critical stories about the privacy implications of a search feature, Social Circle, from its rival, Google.

The plan backfired after The Daily Beast revealed late Wednesday that Facebook, whose own privacy practices have long been criticized, was behind the effort. It didn’t help that some of the technology experts who were encouraged to criticize Google dismissed the privacy concerns around Social Circle as misplaced.

"Doing this anonymously is an obvious contradiction of Facebook’s oft-stated values," said David Kirkpatrick, the author of "The Facebook Effect," a book about the company. "It feels hypocritical."

While Facebook issued a sort of mea culpa on Thursday saying that it never intended or authorized a smear campaign against Google, criticism continued to reverberate in Silicon Valley and beyond. TechCrunch, the influential technology blog, demanded a better explanation and called Facebook’s tactics "slimy" and "cowardly." Another well-read blog, Inside Facebook, called it "a spectacularly failed attempt at undermining the competition."

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, said, “It has the taint of a smear campaign despite what Facebook is saying.”

Facebook insiders, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the company hired the well-known public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to suggest stories about Social Circle to reporters because it did not want the issue to turn into a Facebook versus Google story. Social Circle is an optional feature of Google search that uses publicly available information from social networks to personalize search results.

In a statement issued Thursday, Facebook said: "We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."

Companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere routinely approach reporters and analysts with stories about the so-called misdeeds of their competitors. But journalism and public relations experts criticized Facebook for doing so anonymously and insisting that Burson-Marsteller not reveal its identity.

"It’s just unacceptable," said Tom Goldstein, a journalism professor and expert in ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. "Journalists should announce who they are and people who deal with journalists should announce who they are and where they are coming from."

Rosanna M. Fiske, chief executive of the Public Relations Society of America, said it was wrong for Facebook to insist on anonymity and for Burson-Marsteller to agree to it. "In the essence of the public relations code of ethics 101, that’s a no-no," she said.

The Daily Beast journalist who uncovered Facebook’s role, Dan Lyons, knows a bit about false identities. He masqueraded for years as Fake Steve Jobs, a satirical blogger who frequently savaged reporters, companies and public relations people.

Facebook’s secret campaign also underscores the long shadow that Google casts over the company. While Facebook has roundly beat its rival in social networking, its executives, many of whom hail from Google, have long feared that its rival will use its dominance over Internet search to slowly encroach into Facebook’s territory.

Social Circle appears to do just that. It allows Google users who search for a topic like "restaurant in Chicago" to see among the results items about that topic that were posted by their friends on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp. It works only for people who have chosen to link their Google accounts to their accounts on those services, and relies on information that those services make publicly available on the Internet.

"I don’t think this feature is particularly problematic," said Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University who was one of the privacy experts contacted by Burson-Marsteller. "If Facebook didn’t want the data to be public, it could stop sharing it or it could use a technical mechanism to stop Google from accessing it."

When Burson-Marsteller, which had offered to ghostwrite opinion articles and submit them to major newspapers in Mr. Soghoian’s name, declined to say who it was working for, Mr. Soghoian made public his e-mail exchange with the Burson-Marsteller representatives.

Paul Cordasco, a spokesman for Burson-Marsteller, said that the firm made a mistake. "The mistake clearly was not being transparent about the client," he said in an interview Friday. He added that employees would receive additional training to make them "fully aware of our code of responsibility that emphasizes full transparency."

Facebook is by no means the first to promote critical stories about a rival anonymously. The practice is common in political circles in Washington and beyond, and it has a long history in Silicon Valley.

In 1998, for instance, when Microsoft was under fire from antitrust regulators, it was embarrassed by revelations that it planned a campaign to plant favorable letters to the editor and opinion pieces in newspapers across the country that were to be presented as testimonials from ordinary people.

Two years later, a firm working for Oracle was reported to have paid janitors to go through the garbage cans of a Microsoft-backed industry group in hopes of finding information that would embarrass its rival.

Read More :- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/technology/14facebook.html?_r=1

Skype Deal Is Unlikely to Pay Off for Microsoft

Skype

Microsoft has only recently embraced the Internet cloud. But from the perspective of its shareholders, that’s certainly where its $8.5 billion deal to buy Skype belongs.

In theory, it has potential advantages. In practice, Microsoft’s poor track record on mergers and acquisitions and the high price it is paying for Skype mean the transaction is unlikely to pay off.

The idea is that Microsoft can integrate Skype’s voice, video and messaging tools with Office e-mail and its mobile operating system. A recent deal with Nokia could support efforts to promote Microsoft’s smartphone platform, which is an also-ran. Adding Skype, one of the few Internet names other than Google to become a verb, could help, for instance to compete with Apple’s FaceTime video calling. And gaining a Microsoft-like acceptance behind corporate firewalls might extend Skype’s reach.

That all sounds good. But in 2007, the $6 billion acquisition of the online advertising group aQuantive — the biggest by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, until the Skype deal — hasn’t borne any noticeable fruit in the battle with Google. Neither has the software giant’s search deal with Yahoo. Yet the price Mr. Ballmer has put on Skype, even without an auction, would require it to add huge value.

When Skype filed for an initial public offering late last year, a $5 billion price tag looked optimistic. Microsoft is paying almost 10 times revenue. Even Google trades at only a bit over five times. Put another way, Mr. Ballmer is paying more than 400 times last year’s operating income.

Sure, Skype is growing quickly. Monthly users increased 38 percent last year to 145 million, with the number of paying customers up 19 percent. And the total climbed to 170 million last month. To turn that operating income into a 10 percent annual return on investment, however, even on a pretax basis, it must grow fortyfold.

Microsoft can easily afford Skype. It had $50 billion of cash and short-term investments at the end of March. But it’s hard to see how the outlay, even from cash held overseas, is going to break even for the company’s shareholders. Microsoft was the biggest American loser of market capitalization on Tuesday, shedding more than $1.3 billion in value. That suggests investors in the software giant have a different verb in mind than Skype.

Munis Under Threat

Call it headline risk. Bad press, with stressed state finances, hammered the debt of local governments last year. But the $3 trillion market was never in as bad shape as the doomsayers made out. Still, an improving market — gains in 18 of the last 19 trading sessions through Monday, according to Janney Capital Markets — isn’t immune to stumbles as dysfunctional states tackle budget problems.

Meredith Whitney, a financial analyst, last year made a controversial call that “hundreds of billions of dollars” of municipal bonds would go bad. That helped drive down the market in munis. Yet nothing looks remotely on track for disaster on the scale that Ms. Whitney predicted.

There are less than $10 billion of defaulted bonds outstanding, with just $28 million of those coming from the safest instruments like bonds backed by a state, according to Municipal Market Advisors. Another $22 billion are admittedly showing signs of stress and bear watching, especially if the domestic economy sputters again.

In the meantime, prices have recovered some of their losses and yields on the average AAA-rated 10-year municipal bond have dropped about 13 percent to 2.7 percent this year. Low Treasury rates stemming from the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy have helped, but so has a dearth of supply. A surge of issuance could soften the market.

Then there’s demand. Outflows from muni bond mutual funds have slowed. They are running around $1 billion a week, according to Lipper, a firm that tracks fund flows. That’s less than half the pace earlier this year. But a few more of those bad headlines could have investors reaching for their wheelbarrows again.

Though the market seems stable for now, the finances of states like California and Illinois have an outsize influence on investors. The next fiscal year begins on July 1 for 46 of the 50 states, and budget negotiations will gather intensity in the coming weeks. Throw in concern over the federal debt ceiling, and a few jitters, deserved or not, could easily rattle munis.

Read More :- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/business/11views.html