These guys have gathered the largest historical data set on smoking ever compiled and study how its prevalence is correlated with the types of societies involved.
And yet the Swedes had access to the same data about the dangers of smoking at more or less the same time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hofstede surveyed more than 100,000 IBM employees to measure how these dimensions varied in different countries around the world.
The puzzle is that the data on smoking shows exactly the reverse. Sweden was much slower to adopt smoking and much slower to stop.
And that an idea that could influence everything from drugs policy to social network studies to the marketing of beef burgers r
#Flexible, Printed Batteries for Wearable devices A California startup is developing flexible, rechargeable batteries that can be printed cheaply on commonly used industrial screen printers.
Imprint Energy, of Alameda, California, has been testing its ultrathin zinc-polymer batteries in wrist-worn devices
the batteries can deliver enough current for low-power wireless communications sensors, distinguishing them from other types of thin batteries.
as well as AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, to further develop its proprietary chemistry and finance the batteriescommercial launch.
where she collaborated with a researcher in Japan to produce microscopic zinc batteries using a 3-D printer.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
and one is displays, says Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel.
Despite demand for flexible batteries, Ho says no standard has been developed for measuring their flexibility, frustrating customers who want to compare chemistries.
#Amazon s Zocalo Cloud Service Casts a Shadow over Startups In the 1990s Microsoft became identified with the Death Star partly by enticing developers to build applications (such as Wordperfect
and Lotus 1-2-3) on its platform and then releasing copycat versions that ran more smoothly thanks to proprietary access to the underlying code.
and Schneider Electric but it faces blistering competition from EMC Syncplicity and Citrix Sharefile as well as Microsoft Onedrive Google Drive and a host of others.
The stock market chose the same moment to pound cloud-software companies giving rise to reports that Box would postpone its public offering.
The price of hard disk capacity per megabyte plummeted from $700 in 1981 to two-tenths of a cent in 2010.
50 gigabytes at Mega one terabyte at Flickr. This week in fact Box announced that it would offer unlimited storage to customers of its business product.
That pressure has spurred Microsoft Google and now Amazon to evolve from providing generic file storage to specialized services aimed at large organizations that have real problems
It has sparked also a price war that so far has seen Google drop prices and Microsoft boost per-customer storage allotments.
Box for its part can t afford to be drawn into a race to the bottom.
It offers a programming interface for integrating custom and third-party code metadata tagging to keep document archives organized and high-fidelity file previews to make specific documents easy to identify without having to open them.
For legal and financial clients it integrates with electronic signature services. The company has built server farms in Europe Asia
and South america to deal with local regulations and provide a responsive experience to international customers and deal with local regulations.
Given that Amazon web services has become the go-to source of computing power for new-breed online businesses the company may well threaten Google Microsoft
Ali Shakouri, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, says that tetrahedrite has promise
According to data released by Alphabet Energy tetrahedrite costs about $4 per kilogram, whereas other thermoelectric materials cost between $24 and $146 per kilogram.
the project expects to be able to compare DNA data with detailed centralized health records (see hy the U k. Wants a Genomic National Health service.
while letting it capture big national jobs like the one in the U k. According to users of the new Illumina system,
Each one focuses light onto 29 megapixel chip. The dome is designed so that the fields of view of each of the small telescopes overlap to cover around 10,000 square degrees of sky simultaneously
That will produce 700 megapixel images every two minutes at a data rate of 5 MB per second.
This will be stored on a 20 TB storage unit that should help to handle three months of data,
And because Law and co intend to store all the data produced by the Evryscope, it should also be handy for after-the-fact study of any event in the night sky.
and objects on minute-by-minute timescales in archival data, say Law and co. And they should do at the relatively low cost in the near future. e expect to deploy a prototype of the Evryscope system in early 2015,
Users who participate in transaction confirmations are rewarded with Bitcoins, a process that is called mining. As the value of a Bitcoin has increased,
you need powerful computers but those computers don necessarily have to be yours. Some of the largest botnets run by online criminals today are monetized by mining.
So an infected home computer of a grandmother in Barcelona for example, may be mining Bitcoins worth tens of thousands of dollars a day for a Russian cybercrime gang.
Cyber-spies Companies and governments spend money on espionage. Cyber-spies use rojansand ack doorsto access data on their targetscomputer networks,
remotely monitor them, and perform actions on them, such as keylogging to collect passwords or eavesdropping through the infected computer microphone.
The most effective method to protect data against cyber-spying is to process confidential information on dedicated computers that are connected not to the Internet.
Critical infrastructure should be isolated from public networks. Exploits Cyber attacks rely on exploitation of ulnerabilitiesbugs in the source code of commonly used software to infect target computers.
When professional criminals and governments got into the cyber attack game demand for new xploitsgreatly increased,
Some U s.-based defense contractors are openly advertising positions for people with Top Secret/SCI clearance to create offensive exploits targeting iphones, ipads, and Android devices.
Government surveillance The two most important inventions of our time, the Internet and the mobile phone, changed the world
monitors people known to be innocent and builds dossiers on everyone based on their Internet activity.
Because the U s. is home to the most ubiquitous Internet services, search engines, webmail sites, browsers,
and mobile operating systems, it can basically spy on the whole world at a level no other country can.
However, the same advancements in computing power and data storage that have made wholesale surveillance possible have made also leaking possible.
#How to Clean the Gas and Oil industries Most Contaminated water In a nondescript site in Midland, Texas, an inexpensive new process is cleaning up some of the most contaminated water aroundhe extremely salty stuff that comes up with oil at wells. By the end
#How An Intelligent Thimble Could Replace the Mouse In 3d Virtual reality Worlds The way in
which humans interact with computers has been dominated by the mouse since it was invented in the 1960s by Doug Engelbert.
A mouse uses a flat two-dimensional surface as a proxy for a computer screen. Any movements of the mouse over the surface are translated then into movements on the screen.
These days a mouse also has a number of buttons and often scroll wheel that allow interaction with on-screen objects.
The mouse is a hugely useful device but it is also a two-dimensional one. But what of the three-dimensional world and the longstanding but growing promise of virtual reality.
What kind of device will take the place of the mouse when we begin to interact in three-dimensions?
Today we get to see one idea developed at the University of Wyoming in Laramie by Anh Nguyen and Amy Banic.
These guys have created an intelligent thimble that can sense its position accurately in three-dimensions
and respond to a set of preprogrammed gestures that allow the user to interact with objects in a virtual three-dimensional world.
It s been possible to buy a computer mouse for some time that senses its position in three dimensions.
Anybody who has a modern computer game console such as an Xbox Kinect or a Nintendo Wii will be aware of the way these devices capture three-dimensional movements
and translate them onto 2-D screen. The problem here is that these devices are locked to a particular technology
and cannot be transferred to a PC or Mac for example. Then there is the Leapmotion which measures the movement of an entire hand in three-dimensional space.
instead to create a cheap device that works as a universal input for more or less any computing device.
That allows the data from each sensor to be compared and combined to produce a far more precise estimate of orientation than a single measurement alone.
In addition the 3dtouch has an optical flow sensor that measures the movement of the device against a two-dimensional surface exactly like that inside an ordinary mouse.
which combines the data from all the sensors. The fused data is streamed then to a conventional laptop.
However Nguyen and Banic recognised the bulkiness of this set up. This wired connection later could be replaced by a wireless solution using a pair of XBEE modules they say.
Nguyen and Banic have built also in a number of mouselike gestures that allow a user to interact with 3-D objects by selecting
Nguyen and Banic say it will work with existing devices such as a desktop PC or a Cave Autonomous Virtual Environment.
But in recent months a number of practical virtual reality devices have begun to emerge such as the Oculus Rift and Google cardboard.
A Wearable 3d Input device With An Optical Sensor And A 9-DOF Inertial Measurement Uni U
Ice can take whole wind farms offline and wreak havoc on the grid in places such as Colorado,
#Facebook s Emotional Manipulation Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users With emotion-triggering effort, Facebook pushes beyond data-driven studies on voting, sharing,
Facebook controversial study exploring whether it could manipulate people moods by tweaking their news feeds to favor negative
but it is far from the social network first effort to control user behavior. With huge amounts of data flooding in from more than a billion users, the company has a unique position to study their every move
and to perform experiments by measuring how behavior changes under different conditions (see hat Facebook Knows.
This helps Facebook persuade users to spend more time on the site. But in the past three years it has also been probing everything from voting to the effect of encouraging people to make organ donations.
The company has a data science team dedicated to running experiments, both to advance its business aims
and to do social-science research on the side, often with collaborators in academia. Other academics perform research on Facebook without collaborating with the companyither by simply observing users
or creating apps that ask them to take part in a project. The recent study, done in January 2012
because it had a negative effect on some users, but also because the affected users were asked not for permission to participate (agreeing to Facebook terms
and conditions was taken as consent). hat different about this study is did that participants not explicitly consent to being part of an experimental manipulation for the study,
says Lorrie Cranor a computer scientist at Carnegie mellon University, where she directs the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.
Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users to see if it could manipulate their emotions by varying the selection of posts in their news feeds.
Past Facebook studies have shown that relatively minor restructuring of its pages and prompts can have significant social effects.
when Facebook posted reminders to vote, that action prompted 340,000 more people to vote than otherwise would have (see ow Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls.
And in 2012 Facebook showed it might have the power to get people to donate their organs.
The company put a clickable box on Timeline pages to let people indicate that they were registered donorshe campaign was associated with a huge boost to donor enrollments.
though, extensive media coverage of Facebook effort complicated the analysis of whether Facebook effort directly caused the increased enrollments.)
In some ways, Facebook published research is just part of a vast ongoing effort at Web-based manipulation. hat far more concerning is the lack of transparency about Facebook practices overall,
says Zeynep Tufeki, an assistant professor at the University of North carolina, Chapel hill, and a former fellow at the Center for Information technology Policy at Princeton university. concerned about these practicesesting and manipulating the user experience every day.
What else does Facebook do every day? We have no idea. Mining personal data is a billion-dollar business (see he Data Made
Me Do it designed to elicit purchases, garner eyeballs, and shape behavior. dvertising and the media work to manipulate our emotions all the time,
so I don find this study to be particularly problematic, Cranor says. e are all laboratory rats without being aware of it.
Facebook data use policy is far more vague, saying that it might use your data for nternal operations,
including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, and service improvement. This lack of consent is concerning to Antonio Damasio,
a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who has made key findings in the understanding of the brain processes underlying emotion. agree that emotion manipulation is quite common,
not only on the Web but in daily life, he says. hat is what advertising in general
On Monday Facebook said it had nothing to add beyond the apology its researcher, Adam Kramer, posted on the matter e
#Google Makes Its Search engine a Remote control for Some Mobile Apps Getting stuff done using a smartphone often involves swiping through a jumble of icons looking for just the right app then navigating within it to find what you want.
Google aims to change that by creating search results that take you somewhere specific within an app or trigger a function like playing music by a specific artist.
If successful the move could change the way people interact with smartphones and tablets. So far aimed only at devices running Google s mobile operating system Android the new system also expands the company s vision for mobile voice-operated functionality that competes with Apple s Siri and Microsoft
s Cortana. It could help extend Google s lucrative search ads business in an increasingly mobile app-defined world.
Google began experimenting with search results that point inside apps late last year together with a few partner companies such as Pinterest Tumblr and IMBD.
On Thursday at the Google I/O conference for software developers in San francisco the company announced that its search engine will now index any
and all apps that allow it to do so. Lawrence Chang a product manager at Google said the change would make mobile devices easier to use
and likened it to the arrival of Google search on the Web. It makes a seamless experience he said.
For the first time we re treating apps you ve installed on your device on the same level as websites.
Chang showed how Google s mobile search app can list results from the Web and from inside apps running on the same device.
Searching for a phrase related to a recent news story returned a direct link to an article inside the Huffington Post app.
Now if you search for the name of a musical artist Google s search app responds by offering icons for the music apps installed on a device
Supported apps include Spotify Youtube and Tunein. I have instant access to my music apps whenever
I search for music artists on Google said Jason Douglas a product manager for Google search.
and that it was powered by Google s database of facts and relationships known as Knowledge Graph (see How a Database of the World s Knowledge Shapes Google s Future).
We will be expanding over time he said. Chang said the company was interested in eventually rolling out the new features to devices based on Apple s ios operating system
but didn t give details of how that would work. We re focused naturally right now on Android he said
but Google users are on all different platforms and that s really important to us.
The key to searching inside apps is modified a version of the Googlebot software that constantly trawls the Web.
This version uses a new variety of URL known as deep links which point to places inside mobile apps
Google is not the only company encouraging use of deep links. Facebook for example has launched a program called App Links designed to help spread the practice on both Android
and ios devices and a well-funded startup recently announced its own plans for a search engine focused on searching inside apps (see A Search engine for the App Era
#Aereo Ruling Means Uncertainty for Cloud Streaming Services In the U s. Supreme court smackdown of Internet TV upstart Aereo today, some legal watchers see a threat to other cloud storage and content-streaming models,
even though the court tried to tailor its decision as narrowly as possible to the broadcasting context.
capture free over-the-air TV broadcasts on tiny antennas in data centersne antenna per customernd send that content over the Internet to individual subscribers,
except that cable TV companies pay broadcasters fees and Aereo does not. The court also found that Aereo was in effect enabling a public rebroadcast of copyrighted works.
At multiple points in the ruling, the court tried to make clear that it was only talking about television broadcasting, not other cloud streaming models.
when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works,
is skeptical of worries that copyright holders could say a storage service like Google, Dropbox,
when a user accesses his or her own content. think the Supreme court did the best job they could at making this as narrow an opinion as they could,
A computer algorithm then creates a stack of thin layers that a radiologist can read, much like the pages of a book.
and senior author of the JAMA study. think the data supports implementing tomosynthesis for screening,
a researcher at Intel Labs who developed the technology while a Phd student at Dartmouth. f
my phone would be unlocked without a PIN code, or I could log into my PC
or provide a means of access control, he said. Given the boom in fitness monitors and other wearable gadgets tethered wirelessly to smartphones,
the technology could also allow confirmation that data streaming from the device is coming from the right person,
says Carl Gunter, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois, who was not involved with the project.
In a trial, the device worked with 98 percent accuracyood enough to sort out signals in a cluttered environment.
#With Fire Phone, Amazon Could Popularize Visual Search Amazon is evidently on a quest to make it as fast as possible to buy whatever you want,
and the smartphone that the online retailer unveiled yesterday is its newest tool for making that happen.
however, it may also be creating a powerful new mobile search engine that could evolve into a simpler way to find all sorts of information on the fly.
During yesterday event in Seattle, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Fire Phone black handset that runs a modified version of Google android system and looks pretty similar
The phone, which will be available on July 25, is initially available only through AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract.
A few features do set the Fire apart, most notably a scanning technology called Firefly, which lets you not only shoot pictures of QR codes
what the phone camera sees with information from its database of products. And, interestingly, it allowing developers to use Firefly in their own apps.
That could mean anything from multimedia scavenger hunts to faster access to nutritional data. Bezos used the example of an app called Myfitnesspal
which could use Firefly to recognize something like a bag of Cheetos and show its nutrition data.
Bezos also indicated that developers could use Firefly with their own image-recognition technology and databases of known objects.
The high-end smartphone market is crowded already, but given the rise of mobile e-commerce, it a plunge worth taking (see hy Amazon Needs Its Own Phone.
It also clear that Amazon intends for Firefly to help it sell more stuff: 70 million of the more than 100 million things Firefly can currently recognize are products like books and video games,
and the rest are songs, which youl be able to order on Amazon com or add to your Amazon wish list.
But beyond perhaps changing how we shop, the feature could change how we search, encouraging us to use images to find out more about the world around usather than typing words into a search box. think it will be a very addictive capability,
says Ramneek Bhasin, general manager of mobile and vice president of product for shopping search engine Thefind. Bhasin is interested in using Firefly to expand the Thefind search capabilities.
In museums it could pull up Wikipedia articles when focused on a piece of art (Amazon says that it will add image-recognition for artwork to Firefly later in the year).
when their products appear on social networks, thinks that having a physical button to access Firefly on the Fire Phone will help popularize visual search simply by making it easier to access.
To use anything similar, users currently have to load a third-party app. don really know quite yet what the long-term use case is going to be here,
but I think we now assume everyone phone can recognize a song you hear on the radio
or a song you hear at the bar, and I think wel grow to expect the same thing from visual search as well,
While a smartphone may be able to recognize somewhat flat items like books, it still very difficult to discern objects like a purse or a stuffed animal.
so that it can be matched up against known objects in a database. And it can get trickiernd slowero determine a match with authority as the database gets larger. here still a gap between science and fiction there;
what we like to do and what the state-of-the-art allows, Shiftan says t
#Elon musk Needs a Very Big Factory for His New Solar technology The Tesla founder and private space entrepreneur Elon musk announced yesterday that Solar City,
which often exceed the cost of the panels themselves, because fewer panels are needed to generate a given amount of power.
Silevo isn the only company to produce high-efficiency solar cells. A version made by Panasonic is just as efficient,
But Silevo claims it could make its panels as cheaply as conventional ones if it can scale up from its current production capacity of 32 megawatts to the factory Musk has planned,
Microsoft s Quantum Search for The next Transistor Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer,
the basis of all computing today. his is our attempt to find the analogous device to the transistor,
In an interview, he told MIT Technology Review that Microsoft had kept previously its quantum effort relatively quiet
Microsoft has dedicated a quantum computing research lab, known as Station Q, on the campus of University of California,
Microsoft is not currently attempting to build a quantum computer. Rather, its research effort is aimed at developing a reliable version of the qubit, the key building block of a quantum computer.
Just like a transistor in a conventional computer, a qubit can switch between states that represent either a 1 or 0 of digital data.
That would allow a quantum computer to process data many times faster than any conventional computer.
making them impractical for anyone hoping to build a computer of any size. e believe that current approaches will said never scale
Microsoft research focuses on a type of qubit known as a topological qubit that theory suggests would encode data in a much more robust way.
around four years ago, Microsoft researchers led work to pose a series of key tests that could show
Microsoft funded several labs around the world to work on those questions, says Lee. wo years ago the results started to come in positive.
Microsoft has developed specialized tools for quantum experiments and given them to the academic community. Those tools range from cloud simulation platforms for theoretical work to new types of electronics for use in the super-cooled temperatures of quantum hardware experiments.
Meanwhile Microsoft is already looking ahead to explore what could be done with a system of topological qubits once they are built. upposing that one day we have a quantum machine:
would it be good for anything? says Lee. oday we have clear ideas in classical computing about problems we can solve
but it very hard to conceive what possible with one of these theoretical machines. e
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