Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the oeclimategate affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep.
The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. oewe know where you live, his detractors taunt.
073 private emails between members of his research team and published them on the Internet,
his credibility has been destroyed and so has that of an entire profession that had based much of its work on his research until now.
What began with hacked emails in the United kingdom has mushroomed into a crisis affecting an entire scientific discipline.
and yet he is largely responsible for the current tumult in their field. oethis is the computer
holding a six-year-old Acer laptop with a 40-gigabyte hard drive. oemy wife finally gave me a new one for Christmas.
The laptop marks a sharp contrast to the supercomputers at the disposal of Phil Jones and the other prophets of global warming,
whose computers fill entire floors. Instead of gigabytes, they deal in petabytes. How is possible that this Canadian was able to bring such a self-confident group of scientists to their knees?
It all began when his three children went off to college and moved out of his house,
His late return would shake the academic world to its core. One day Mcintyre came across a curve that seemed all too familiar to him.
Mcintyre programmed his computer using Manns methodology and entered completely random data into the program.
In the hacked Climategate emails he is referred to as a oebozo, a oemoron and a oeplayground bully.
But with their self-aggrandizement, the climatologists made him into a legend on the Internet. A million people a month visit his blog, climateaudit. org.
They include climate skeptics and the usual conspiracy theorists, but also, more recently, many academics who are able to do the math themselves.
He repeatedly bombarded Jones with emails in which he drew his attention to freedom of information laws.
however, Mcintyres supporters eventually included people who know how to secretly hack into computers and steal data.
Jones was like a spider in its web. Almost every internal debate among the climate popes passed through his computer, leaving behind a digital trail.
The Smoking Gun of Climatology Most of all, however, Jones controlled the oesmoking gun of climatology:
Future Farmers Network chairman James Caracoussis says he is not surprised by the latest outlook for the agricultural workforce.
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#Can Charcoal Save The Planet? Terra preta means oeblack earth. More importantly, if less literally, it means fertile soilreated 1000s of years ago out of nutrient-starved rainforest dirt by the strange alchemy of charcoal.
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#China Creates Worlds First Genetically Modified Cow Yay! Now the world has beefy abominations. Chinese scientists have created the worlds first genetically modified cow that can give milk rich in Omega-3 fatty acid,
Technicians then identify the species by comparing the DNA to a database of samples. Another tool, isotope ratio analysis, can determine subtle differences between food
and capture the tropical breezes (while cutting back on air conditioning) nd since none of the rooms have televisions or phones, youll use less energy.
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#Flowering plants May be Considerably Older Than Previously Thought A new analysis of the land plant family tree suggests that flowering plants may have lived much earlier than previously thought.
In my local paper, The Baltimore sun, the vast majority of food coupons are for cookies, cakes, sodas and various forms of packaged goo.
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#The Future of Microsofts Desktop Could Look like a Mobile phone The future of Microsofts desktop? Competition in the personal computer market is heating up,
even as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish just what we mean when we talk about a PC.
Airline flight attendants seem to be able to discern the difference between mobile phones and personal computers in their in flight announcements,
but the vendors who make and sell them increasingly cant. It is precisely this fuzziness that offers Google
and Apple a chance to get a leg up on Microsoft, but is also why Microsoft may be able to cement its lead.
Google is clear about its aims: it wants to get users into a browser as fast as possible.
Why? Because the more we use the Web, the more likely it is that well bump into Googles revenue-generating services.
While this started as a PC initiative for Google with the CHROME OS, the Chrome browser,
and other projects, Google has kicked it into hyperdrive with its increasingly popular Android mobile operating system.
Apple, for its part, is equally clear about its aims: it wants to get users into itunes or its App store.
Why? Because for all the money it makes on hardware like Macs and the iphone, Internet-scale revenues derive from such services that aggregate
and distribute digital goods. Apples strategy is bidirectional: its Macs drive adoption of iphones, and the iphone drives sales of Macs.
But mobile is what makes it hum. Microsoft, however, has been less clear about its aims, particularly with the traditional desktop.
It wants people on Windows why? Well, because Microsoft earns a license fee for every copy of Windows sold.
This has historically been a home-run strategy, but it may be a decreasingly defensible revenue model in a world conditioned by the Web
(and Google) to expect software to be free. Neither of its primary competitors charges for the OS,
which will eventually call into question Microsofts practice of doing so. Of course, Apples OS X cant be divorced easily from Apples hardware,
making it arguably a much more expensive OS than Microsoft ever dreamed of selling. But Google?
Its serious about giving away Microsofts business. is doomed Microsoft? Of course not. Any company with billions in profit each quarter can afford to spend its way into a winning strategy.
Microsoft has sold already 90 million copies of Windows 7, suggesting that its demise will be exaggerated greatly for some time to come,
especially as its market share is again on the upswing with Windows 7. Even so, I suspect the future of Microsofts oedesktop OS business is going the same direction as Apples and Googles:
mobile. Mobile gives Microsoft a fresh start with lots of room to grow. It also gives it an effective way to extend its brand into others platforms,
as its Bing search growth on Apples iphone could signal, while simultaneously letting Microsoft experiment with new business models that dont threaten its traditional licensing-based model (as cloud computing does for its server and oedesktop businesses).
Perhaps most importantly, and this is equally true for both Google and Apple for their respective environments,
mobile allows Microsoft to innovate the Windows user experience. Apple has started to extend the iphone experience with its ipad,
and I suspect well see Microsoft do the same with Windows phone 7. Microsofts consumer and enterprise customers will have little appetite for a radically changed oedesktop experience
unless they first grow accustomed to it on their phones. For each of these three major OS vendors, the nature of the OS,
and its associated business models, is changing rapidly. Mobile however, holds the key to each companys growth,
and may signal convergence on a new way of monetizing an OS: app stores, advertising, and other online services.
But all delivered on a mobile device that looks less and less like a phone and more and more like a PC without actually being one.
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#Underwear Made From Bananas Launched In Australia Australian underwear company Aussiebum has been monkeying around and the result is a range of mens underwear made with bananas.
Aussiebums Lloyd Jones said on Friday that the new eco-friendly banana range of undies incorporated 27 percent banana fibre, 64 percent cotton and nine percent lycra.
He said the banana fibre used in the underwear was made from a bark weave from the banana plant,
which made the underwear not only lightweight but also very absorbent. oenaturally you cant really add any more banana fibre than that
because it might be a bit squishy, said Jones, adding that wearers did not have to worry about real monkeys
because the underwear did not smell like a banana. Link Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati a
#Frozen Vegetables More Nutritious Than Fresh Vegetables Frozen vegies contain more nutrients that fresh Frozen vegetables can often contain more nutrients than fresh vegetables,
a report has claimed. Up to 45 per cent of important nutrients are lost in fresh vegetable by the time they are consumed.
It can take up to two weeks for fresh produce to reach the table from being picked although the survey found that 80 per cent of shoppers thought the fresh vegetables in supermarkets were less than four days old.
Produce which is frozen soon after being picked with have sealed more nutrients in scientists from the Institute of Food Research claimed.
Meanwhile after 16 days green beans have lost 45 per cent of nutrients, broccoli and cauliflower 25 per cent, garden peas up to 15 per cent and carrots 10 per cent.
The research was carried out by the Institute on behalf of Birds Eye the frozen food manufacturer. Nutritionist Dr Sarah Schenker said:
oethe nutritional content of fresh vegetables begins to deteriorate from the minute they are picked. This means that by the time they end up on our plate,
although we may think were reaping the vegetables full nutritionalb enefits, this is often not the case.
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#Terrewalks Innovative Sidewalks Made from Recycled Tires Terrewalks are made from recycled tires and waste plastics Concrete sidewalks can make a walk around the neighborhood a pleasant experience,
unless the sidewalks are cracked, broken and lifted by tree roots. Then they become dangerous to walk on.
Sidewalk repairs require intensive labor, money and sometimes the removal of trees and their invasive roots,
but with Terrewalks trees, money and labor are saved. Terrewalks sidewalks are a new and improved version of Rubbersidewalks
For more information about Terrewalks visit the Rubbersidewalks, Inc. website. Via Inventor Spot Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati h
#Pesticide Turns Male Frogs into Females The pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs into females that are able to mate
Fueling the mini-shift trend is an explosion in Web sites for freelancers, which enable skilled workers in a wide range of fields to sell their services easily in part-time chunks.
On Elance, a freelance Web site, 700,000 workers list their services, nearly triple the 2006 number of 235,000.
On another such site, odesk, where Ms. Rice works, workers have soared to 480,000. And on Fixya. com, experts offering product troubleshooting
programmer and broadcast engineer, hasnt been able to find work as a programmer, and he was laid off from his broadcast engineer job.
answering users email and instant messages in shifts ranging from two hours to all night.
which she runs three businesses computer-consulting company, a financial-systems business and a maker of a line of oewumblers toys and educational media.
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#Aphids Genome Reflects Its Reproductive, Symbiotic Lifestyle Colony of young aphids. Aphids could be considered the oemosquitoes of the plant world,
The consortium released the 464 megabyte draft genome of the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) in the current issue of PLOS Biology. oebecause this is a different kind of insect not a fruit fly, not a beetle,
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#Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services The banks
and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1. 3 trillion in debit card transactions
Iveys wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet
Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadnt hit on something:
For the most part, its powers were confined to ebay, the online auction company that purchased Paypal in 2002.
But last summer, Paypal began giving a small group of developers access to its code,
lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device no expensive card reader required.
A startup called Obopay which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.
Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,
and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies constant nickel-and-diming.
Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites.
And last March, Apple gave itunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications
making itunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the Blackberry Developer Conference in San francisco,
programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research.
It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years. But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as Paypal.
giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay.
since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services,
sending $15 million through the companys pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose Shopsavvy program lets people find an items cheapest price by scanning its barcode,
used Paypal to add a oequick pay button to its app. Liveops, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning
what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations
Paypal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet.
Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements. Facebook allows any developer to write applications for its social network
and Apple does the same with its itunes App store. Amazons Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power
and storage space they need to build applications and services. Now Paypal has brought this same spirit of innovation and experimentation to the world of payments.
Your wallet may never be the same. The banks and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1. 3 trillion in debit card
pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that,
According to a 2003 study in the Review of Network Economics, every sale by credit card costs a merchant six times what the same sale with cash would run.
Mastercard and Visa charge hundreds of different rates called interchange fees for every type of card that runs through their networks;
when computer infrastructure was expensive and proprietary. But now, with cheap bits everywhere, the actual cost to do a transaction is pennies.
Mitchell Wolfe, an ecommerce veteran who ran Compaqs Canadian Internet sales team before moving on to a series of startups,
He once helped build an ecommerce system for a Persian rug vendor and was stunned to find that the rug dealers bank required it to keep $250,
and maintain an expensive digital network between vendors and banks around the world; it operated over the Internet.
There was no need for a credit card reader, cutting point-of-sale system providers and their vigorish out of the equation.
Paypal piggybacked on a communications system that enables digital transactions like direct deposits and automatic bill payment without charging a fee.
Apples itunes and Research in motions payments program reduce transaction fees by bundling a customers purchases before sending them to a credit card company for processing.
Virtual currencies, from Microsoft Points to Linden Dollars, encourage oein-world trade, incurring credit card and banking fees only when their users buy in.
when it was purchased by ebay for $1. 5 billion. Suddenly the service, always a favored payment method on the site
became almost entirely focused on making auctions easier. Between 2005 and 2008, Paypal went from serving as the payment provider for 47 percent of ebay auctions to facilitating more than 60 percent (ebay expects it to hit around 75 percent by 2011.
That was a fine strategy as long as ebay was growing. But in CEO Meg Whitmans last years at the companys helm,
as the auction platform started to see a slowdown in revenue growth, it became clear to the Paypal team that it was time to get aggressive again.
Users dragged Paypal onto ebay in the first place. The company had resisted initially the move. Other users cobbled together Paypal-enabled oetip jars,
embraced its developers, and turned its service into a platform? What if Paypal asked its users to create the tools
you cant just let developers come in here and open accounts and move money around, he says.
whether developers would play along. So in late 2007, he started on a road trip to meet with the people who were already building on Paypals limited open code.
He met with more than 100 developers most of whom were eager to help build an easier, more flexible system.
and sellers to go through several steps to complete a transaction go to its site, fill out forms,
The developers envisioned something larger, a true digital currency that could be used on any Web site,
that enabled money to move as easily as email: Send funds with a click, from and to anywhere and anyone on the Net.
In April 2008, Bedier led a meeting at ebays North First street headquarters, where he presented his idea to CEO John Donahoe and his lieutenants.
When Bedier was finished, he was stunned to get applause. oeit was like a lightbulb clicked on,
Donahoe says. oei basically said, You have unlimited funding. This is the highest-potential business Ive ever seen in my career.
Most of the information is already available there are plenty of databases that provide real-time pricing information,
Iveys wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet
Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadnt hit on something:
For the most part, its powers were confined to ebay, the online auction company that purchased Paypal in 2002.
But last summer, Paypal began giving a small group of developers access to its code,
lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device no expensive card reader required.
A startup called Obopay which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.
Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,
and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies constant nickel-and-diming.
Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites.
And last March, Apple gave itunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications
making itunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the Blackberry Developer Conference in San francisco,
programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research.
It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years. But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as Paypal.
giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay.
since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services,
sending $15 million through the companys pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose Shopsavvy program lets people find an items cheapest price by scanning its barcode,
used Paypal to add a oequick pay button to its app. Liveops, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning
what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations
Paypal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet.
Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements. Facebook allows any developer to write applications for its social network
and Apple does the same with its itunes App store. Amazons Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power
and storage space they need to build applications and services. Now Paypal has brought this same spirit of innovation and experimentation to the world of payments.
Your wallet may never be the same. Want to catch up? Heres a look at forms of digital currency
Contactless smart cards: Smart cards use chip technology to communicate with card readers rather than direct contact between them.
Many public transit cards are contactless smart cards: a passenger can touch or wave the card over the turnstile to gain entry.
E-cash: Digital money that emulates properties of physical cash such as anonymous exchange. Public transit smart cards, such as Suica (Tokyo), Octopus (Hong kong) and Oyster (London), can be used as e-cash
when anonymity is preserved by not registering the card with a central authority. Mobile banking, m-banking, m-payments:
Mobile device-based applications for checking bank balances, making payments or transferring funds. Applications are being developed for sending,
Smart cards: The general term for any card with a specialized computer chip embedded, allowing it to process transactions more elaborately and securely than magnetic strip cards.
Stored value card: A payment card in which digital money has been encoded either directly or as a link to an account to be debited
A form of money used in an online virtual world, such as oelinden Dollars in Linden Labs Second life or oegold pieces in Blizzard Entertainments World of Warcraft.
pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that,
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#Are prepared You For Carbonated Yogurt? Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, carbonated dairy drink! Carbonated yogurt? Thats the kind of crap youd expect astronauts to eat as a last resort
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#Scientists Develop New Plastic Made From Sugar That Can Be composted At home Plastics could be made from sugar
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#Bees Can Remember What Human faces Look like If you ever get into a tense confrontation with a bee,
For more information and registration, email Fiona Hart at info@riverineplains. com. au or phone (03) 5744 1713.
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#Sundaland Clouded Leopard Newly Identified Species Filmed for First time A newly identified Sundaland clouded leopard,
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#Bees Prefer Nectar with Caffeine and Nicotine Bees are attracted to nectar which are laced with caffeine
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#Surprising New Branches on Arthropod family Tree Centipede. Any way you look at it by sheer weight, species diversity or population the hard-shelled,
or as many species, making this study about four times larger than anything done previously. more via science news Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati u
and gave scientists worldwide free access to a draft sequence of the brachypodium genome long before the work was published formally The sequencing project was carried out through the DOE-JGI Community Sequencing Program. more via science news Share Thissubscribedel
This is the first study to quantify the reactions of third-hand smoke with nitrous acid, according to the authors. more via science news Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati d
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#Initiative Proposed To Delay Californias Global Warming Law Californias global warming law calls for utilities to increase their use of renewable energy to at least 30 percent by 2020 Conservatives propose an initiative
including how much to rely on the Internet for signature gathering. Article continues below Noting the Wall street journals recent endorsement of the initiative,
says his groups Internet outreach will spawn oea new coalition. oelook at what happened in Massachusetts,
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