Category: News

According to a BBC News report, forty mentally ill patients have broken out of a mental hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. The patients reportedly escaped by overpowering guards at the facility after a protest about their medications. Kenyan police have told the BBC that some of the patients could be violent.

The breakout happened at the Mathari Mental Hospital, the largest mental hospital in Kenya. The hospital was built as a smallpox isolation facility and later converted into a mental hospital. Before the breakout it housed around 75 patients.

Kenyan police have launched a manhunt for the patients, who they say will be easy to identify.

Mathari Mental Hospital has been criticized in the past for its conditions and treatment of patients. In 2011, CNN reporters were locked in the facility for hours after uncovering a recently deceased patient:

Cyber security has emerged as something that almost all power grid companies worry about and invest in, and entrepreneurs and startups are innovating to deliver new types of security solutions for the power grid. For example, an under the radar company called GridCOM Technologies tells us it’s developing a new tool based on quantum physics that could protect the grid from such digital security attacks.

Founded only last year, GridCOM’s technology uses something called quantum cryptography to generate codes using photons (tiny packets of light) that shield communications among a network of electronic equipment from the computers that control power transmission to smart meters. Quantum cryptography uses physics (instead of math like conventional encryption does) to secure cyber communications.

GridCOM’s approach is quite different from the conventional mathematically-based encryption methods traditional used to protect communications over the Internet, said Duncan Earl, co-founder and CTO of GridCOM and a former researcher in the Cyberspace Sciences and Information Intelligence Research group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These conventional methods have worked fairly well and have been around long enough to be affordable, but they also don’t offer the speed and potency that some owners of sensitive energy data might want, Earl said.

The startup, based in Carlsbad near San Diego, recently raised a round of seed money from Ellis Energy Investment. Earl declined to disclose the amount but said Ellis is “committed to funding us for the next two years.”

Smart grid cyber threats

GridCOM is counting on a growing concern by utility executives over the security of their networks. Up until now, cybersecurity attacks on utility grids have been pretty rare. The grid hasn’t been vulnerable mainly because the computers and other equipment historically used by utilities have been mostly analog, not digital, and they have been designed with proprietary, customized technologies for each utility’s closed-off network.

The push to deploy smart grid technologies, however, is transforming the grid to include more digital devices with common technical standards and communication protocols. In addition, the reliance of the Internet for some of the network creates a vulnerability that didn’t exist before.

While utility executives are thinking more about cybersecurity these days, they don’t necessarily want to spend much money to enhance it, as this report by the U.S. Department of Energy pointed out. The report said evolving regulations on cybersecurity, which is a fairly new problem, also makes it difficult for utilities to draft and deploy good plans.

The secret security sauce

GridCOM’s core technology lies in the quantum server that will generate lots of “keys,” each of which is a string of 200 random bits of 0′s and 1′s that can encrypt a message very quickly. The startup’s customers will be able to download as many of those keys as necessary. The keys can work within 4 milliseconds, which is the amount of time that a utility’s machines will need to communicate with one another should there be an emergency on the grid, Earl said. Conventional encryption methods take longer and allow for a hacker to eavesdrop and disrupt the communications.

The source of the keys comes from what’s called “quantum entangled photons.” Say what? Well, when a light source goes through a crystal, it generates a pair of photons that are twins with polar opposite characteristics. Those photons share a bond called entanglement, which makes it difficult to distinguish them and figure out what message they have encrypted. To break that encryption, the hacker will have to figure out which photon has which characteristic. And the act of measuring a photon will in fact alert the quantum server of the intrusion.

Sounds hard to crack? The encryption and detection system is “nearly unbreakable,” says Earl. Each GridCom system is consisted of a quantum server, eight receivers and fiber optic lines. The startup plans to make money by charging a subscription fee, which in the near term would be $50 per device per month.

GridCOM still has to prove that its technology could do wonders in real life, though. Quantum cryptography has long been a subject of academic research, but it hasn’t been widely adopted. Using it for the typical email and Internet or even cellular communications is too expensive.

Those communications involve so many devices and high levels of data traffic that each network will need quite a few of quantum servers to generate tons and tons of keys, Earl said. Communications between machines in a power grid, on the other hand, happen less frequently. There are a handful of quantum cryptography companies out there, such as ID Quantique in Switzerland, Earl noted.

GridCOM is only in the early stages of developing its technology. It is now engineering the quantum servers and assembling them itself. The company aims to deploy a test network of 20-mile radius in the San Diego area by the end of this year. It would like to do a larger demonstration project with a first subscriber in 2014, Earl said. The company also plans to target the oil and gas industry.

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If you are sitting in a job interview and hear the words “dotted line reporting,” you have just encountered the world of matrix management. In these organizational structures, you typically have two bosses: a “straight-line” direct boss, who is the person who prepares your performance review and decides on your raise; and a “dotted-line” boss, who may also assign you work but has less control over your review. It is easy to see how difficult a job could be if your two bosses aren’t in agreement about your work or your abilities.

Since they came about in the 1960s and 1970s, matrix organizations have had a bad rap. They are often accused of stifling freedom and initiative, and being overly bureaucratic. In their HBR article, Problems of Matrix Organizations, Stanley M. Davis and Paul R. Lawrence say they cause all kinds of “pathologies” including: “tendencies toward anarchy, “power struggles,” “navel gazing, and decision strangulation.”

But as Ruth Malloy of the Hay Group said in a recent HBR blog post, more and more “global organizations like IBM and GE are embracing the matrix organizational model,” so there’s a good chance you’ll encounter them as you look for jobs. And there are good reasons why they are so common. Matrix organizations keep their people customer-focused, whether the customer is internal or external. For example, a divisional controller may report directly to the CFO and on a dotted line to the VP of the division; which ensures that the controller knows what the “internal customer” (the VP) needs as well as what the direct boss (the CFO) wants. Matrices also prevent some parts of the organization from going off on strategic tangents, which may result in a product no one will buy or an internal policy that won’t be accepted. Matrix reporting systems are designed to keep people working together and not at cross purposes.

Jobs with matrix reporting relationships are not generally entry-level professional positions. These relationships occur frequently in jobs with internal customers, like human resources generalists, facility managers, or business systems analysts in information technology. But positions that require a strong relationship with outside customers, like account managers for major corporate clients, may also require client approval and input when you are hired and when your performance is reviewed.

If you are able to balance more than one manager, it is a big career plus to work for a matrix organization. How else would you get the opportunity to get to know two managers who are senior to you, to develop a network of colleagues in two different areas of your company, and to have the chance to learn and grow in two different areas at the same time? It certainly worked for me. I was a senior human resources generalist reporting to the VP of Human Resources, and my dotted-line boss was the EVP in charge of most of the rest of the bank. He really liked me. So, with my assent, he managed to arrange for me to work directly for him with a big raise and fancy title. Of course, then I had to work with my previous boss on a dotted-line basis, but that’s a story for another time.

To successfully manage your own career in a matrix organization, it’s important to make sure your managers are aligned and can work with you without competing with each other. Getting caught in the middle might cost you your job. Make sure it doesn’t by asking some essential questions up-front, even in the interview process.

Are your managers aligned? During the interview with both managers, ask something like, “In my first 30 days in this job, what are the most important things for me to accomplish?” If they have different priorities, that is a problem to solve with your direct boss before you accept the position. They won’t always agree, but if they have similar goals, you should be able to manage your relationship with both of them.

What are their perceptions of each other? Another clue to your future success is the attitude one department has about the other. Try asking each potential manager: “What are the people like who work there?” or “How have you worked best with them in the past? Can you give me an example?” In this case, the information you want is not so much in the content of the answer, but in the attitude and language of the boss you are talking to. If you get any whiff of “us vs. them,” that’s a bad sign.

What’s the general attitude towards collaboration? Both managers have to be collaborative for you to be successful on the job. Listen to how each talks, not just what each says. Do they talk about themselves all the time? Are they always saying “I” and never “we?” Never mind if they talk about “teamwork” or “customer service.” Do they actually act as if they do it?

It is a commonplace among recruiters that the employment relationship starts with the interviews, for good or for ill. This is particularly true in matrix organizations. If you get along great with one manager in the interview, but find the other hard to relate to, that may be a problem that will persist. As a job candidate, it’s up to you to assess in the initial stages of the interview process whether or not you will be successful working in this organization and, more especially, for these two people.

Facebook’s bid to buy social navigation company Waze has seemingly hit a serious snag that has stalled the deal for the time being. Calcalist, the Israeli newspaper that first broke news of Facebook’s plans to acquire Waze, has followed up its original report with news that the two companies are having problems coming to terms in a few key areas.

Continue reading…

First, some good news – eastern European banks are relatively profitable. Austrian bank Raiffeisen, which is heavily involved in the region, published a report at the weekend which showed:

In terms of growth and profit, the banking sectors in the CEE (central and eastern Europe) region continue to outperform their Western European counterparts.

Real loan growth in the region’s banks, which includes Russia and Ukraine, was 21.8 percent between 2010 and 2012, Raiffeisen says, while euro zone banks’ real loan growth was negative over the same period.

The IMF said something similar this month, pointing out that for the five largest banking groups in the region, their businesses in eastern Europe were substantially more profitable than those in the West.

That might go some way to explaining why banking stocks in emerging Europe have outperformed broader indices, in contrast to the euro zone where they have been underperforming.

But here’s the bad news – not everyone is repaying their loans. Both the IMF and Raiffeisen point to high levels of non-performing loans,  particularly in southeastern Europe. The NPL ratio in that region rose to 17.3 per cent in 2012, from 14.5 per cent in 2011, Raiffeisen says:

The high NPL ratios in Hungary and Slovenia still have a significant negative impact on the entire CE-region, overshadowing the stable or declining NPL ratios in the Czech and Slovak banking sector.

Erik Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which last week slashed its emerging Europe and North Africa growth forecasts, was also concerned. At the bank’s annual meeting this weekend in Istanbul, he said:

“We are watching some countries in southeastern Europe, Slovenia is also a part of this story and Ukraine and Moldova – there is not much reason for optimism.”

 

 

 

24 is coming back to Fox, for at least one more season (though it will only be twelve episodes, as opposed to the custom twenty-four).

In a rather surprising bit of news, the network announced that the show will return in May, complete with Kiefer Sutherland returning as the iconic Jack Bauer.

JACK IS BACK! FOX has ordered 24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY to restart the clock on the groundbreaking drama starring @realkiefer. @twentyfouronfox

— FOX (@FOXTV) May 13, 2013

From USA Today:

The new season, one of two “limited series” Fox plans for 2014, will be compressed into 12 weeks and premiere next May, says Fox entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly. “We’ll go in chronological order with the hours of the day, but we’ll skip some hours,” he says.

Fans shouldn’t get too attached, as there are no plans to extend the show beyond the twelve episodes, at this point, but who knows what will happen. There was talk of a 24 movie, but the would-be director recently said the project is dead.

24 has been off the air since 2010, after running for eight seasons.

It can be hard to accurately express feelings on Mother’s Day, and who better to take up the task than a poet?

Maya Angelou has just released her seventh autobiography, titled Mom & Me & Mom. The book chronicles the author‘s memories of her mother and grandmother, who each helped to raise her at different points in her childhood.

Angelou appeared this Sunday (Mother’s Day) on Face the Nation to speak about her mother, saying, “She and my father fell in love, or maybe in lust with each other. They were both really beautiful human beings and it was after World War I and my father was pompous and pretentious and had learned some French in France. And my mother was very beautiful and he was very handsome, and they fell in something together.”

Angelou’s recollections, which can be heard in the video below, go on to become darker before she turns to the story of how she got her first job:

(Image courtesy Adria Richards/Wikimedia Commons)

I would never want to be a Stormtrooper. They seem to die far too much for my liking. Now, I wouldn’t mind having my face put onto a custom Stormtrooper figurine. If you feel the same way, you might want to hit up Disney’s Hollywood Studios this summer.

Disney announced that it’s bringing back its popular attraction from last year that scans a person’s face to put onto a custom Star Wars themed mini-figurine. Visitors will be able to have their face put onto either a Stormtrooper or a person frozen in carbonite this year.

Those who visit Disney Hollywood Studios can hit up the Darth Mall (get it?) and have their face scanned by the world’s highest-resolution, single-shot 3D face scanner. The process takes about 10 minutes, and then Disney ships the image off to its 3D printing facility to have a custom figurine created. The figurine is shipped to your home, and should arrive in seven to eight weeks.

Here’s a video showing the process used last year to create custom carbonite figurines. A similar process will be used for this year’s Stormtrooper figurines:

It costs $99.95 to have your face scanned onto a Stormtrooper or frozen carbonite victim. The opportunity to have your face scanned will only be offered during Star Wars Weekends starting on May 17 and taking place on every weekend after until June 9. As such, demand will be great and you will have to make an appointment.

Still, it’s a small price to pay to have yourself immortalized as one the galaxy’s most incompetent soldiers.

[h/t: VentureBeat]

The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.

Continue reading…

Bloomberg LLC, which supplies news and data to the world’s financial elite, has been embroiled in a growing uproar over its reporters’ use of the company’s technology to report on client activity — leading the New York Times to proclaim that Bloomberg admitted to “snooping” on clients.

In case you missed it, the controversy began on Friday, when the New York Post reported that merchant bank Goldman Sachs was annoyed that Bloomberg reporters were tracking employees’ log-on activities. The matter soon gained steam when BuzzFeed reported that Bloomberg brass had long known about the practice, and with the news that the Fed and Treasury were investigating the situation.

The company stonewalled at first but on Sunday, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, addressed the situation in detail:

“Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable,” wrote Winkler in a blog post. The rest of the post, however, amounted to a pushback; Winkler explained that the practice was nothing new, and that reporters only tracked “mundane” information.

As bad as voicemail hacking?

So what to make of all this? Did Bloomberg engage in sinister “snooping” (one NYU journalism prof has already compared the incident to the infamous phone hacking conducted by News Corp in Britain)? Or is just this a tempest in a teapot egged on by Bloomberg’s competitors in the news media?

The answer is somewhere in between. On one hand, Bloomberg reporters didn’t do anything approaching the UK scandal — monitoring bankers’ log-in activities is nothing like breaking into a dead girl’s voicemail. Moreover, the Bloomberg “tracking” appears to have done little more than confirm if someone still worked at a certain company. As a source told BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria, “LinkedIn Pro is more useful and has better information for finding sources and helping to break news.”

All this suggests that some of the the fuss is not about what Bloomberg reporters actually did, but instead from the secretive nature of the company itself. This is reflected in a Quartz report that characterizes Bloomberg as “a black box” and portrays a data-obsessed, almost cult-like corporate culture.

News and power of the platform

On the other hand, the Bloomberg episode does raise ethical concerns over how proprietary platforms — including not just Bloomberg but also LinkedIn or Facebook — should handle customer data for news purposes.

The issue isn’t just academic. More and more, platforms are relying on news (think of “LinkedIn Today”) to keep users on their sites. And, as Bloomberg journalists know, customers’ activities on those platforms can be a source of news — and better yet, a source of exclusive news.

The question is where this all this should stop. Would you like reporters to know when you suspend newspaper to go on vacation? Probably not. Would you like your cell phone carrier to use the location of your calls as a source of news? Definitely not. The Bloomberg episode, therefore, appears to be less of a snooping scandal than it is a cautionary tale about what can happen when the line between a company’s news and data gathering operations get blurred.

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If you’ve spent any time at all on Twitter, you know that it can be a great place for a variety of things – real-time news, celeb-watching, comedy, and the list goes on and on. But you also know that Twitter is full of the kind of homophobic and racist language that can make you physically recoil. Now, a group of researchers have developed an interactive map of all the hate speech that Americans are pumping out on a daily basis.

The map was created by geography students at California’s Humboldt State University, the same group of people who brought us the post-election Twitter racism map back in November. Back then, they looked at racist tweets the focused on President Obama’s reelection and found that Mississippi and Alabama were the two hotbeds for such activity.

“Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs,” say the researchers.

For instance, here’s the map of generally “homophobic” tweets, which are determined by the use of words like “dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” and “queer.”

And here’s the map of racist tweets – those containing the words “nigger,” “chink,” “wetback,” “gook,” or “spick”:

Of course, analysis like this is never going to be 100% accurate. Keyword analysis has inherent issues. For instance, the word “queer” is not always used in a derogatory, hate-filled manner. People could be tweeting out the word “fag” in another context, such as bemoaning its usage.

On the other hand, it’s hard to justify many used of words like “wetback” on Twitter. Sure, it’s not completely solid analysis, but it’s pretty close. You have to to imagine that the majority of people tweeting about fags, dykes, niggers, and chinks are doing so in a hateful manner.

But to completely cut out this sort of uncertainty, the researchers manually read and coded each tweets to judge the sentiment, “in order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama.” This way, they could know, for sure, whether a tweet that contained the word “queer” was actually posted in a hateful context.

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

You can check out the full interactive map here, where you can zoom in to see specific concentrations of twitter hate speech.

[Floating Sheep via MIT Technology Review]

Here is a leadership lesson: Be selfish. Be very selfish.

For this message to be an effective leadership tip, we need to understand what selfishness is. Selfishness is typically defined as “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself.” If someone hears that the CEO is being selfish, the thought that is likely to come to mind is, “The leader is maximizing personal financial rewards even at the cost of the company’s interests.” If that is the case, it is unfortunate and unacceptable. But there is a fundamentally different way to view selfishness. If leaders selfishly take care of their feelings, it will benefit not only them, but also everyone around them, including the companies they lead.

In order to achieve this, leaders must stop harming themselves and, instead, start benefiting themselves. Consider these questions: What are the mental aspects of selfishness that will help us as leaders? What are the mental states that cause us harm that we should reduce or eliminate, and the mental states that will give us benefits that we should acquire or increase?

The first step in becoming a selfish leader is to remove the harmful emotions and negativities that distract us from clear and effective decision making. Take anger, for example. Anger releases neurotransmitter chemicals known as catecholamines that give us a burst of energy. Our heart rate accelerates, our blood pressure rises, and our rate of breathing increases. Our attention narrows and becomes locked onto the target of our anger, and we can’t pay attention to anything else. We are now ready to fight or flee. In the jungle, all this would have been very helpful, but in the modern world where it gets bottled up behind a desk, it has nowhere to go and thus gets tangled within — or worse, spent outwardly toward our employees. The adrenaline-caused arousal that occurs during anger lasts many hours, sometimes days, and lowers our anger threshold, making it easier for us to get angry again later on. In other words, we can easily get trapped in the vicious circle of anger. Just ask yourself a simple question: “As a leader, have I ever made a good decision when I was angry and out of control?”

All negative states of the mind have similar effects. They create a tendency to suck us into a vicious circle. This list of negative states includes hatred, ill will, revenge, fear, ego, entitlement, jealousy, restlessness, anxiety, and depression. The chemicals that cause these feelings can build up over time, and the result is a whole host of psychosomatic diseases. By realizing that we are harming ourselves through these feelings and attempting to stop them for our own good, we are in effect helping ourselves and helping others at the same time. After all, we distribute what we have, magnified many times over. What you feed grows. If you feed anger, it grows. So when we have these negative states, we spread those negativities to others around us. This saps morale and reduces productivity. In other words, the most selfish thing we can do — for ourselves and for others — is to reduce or eliminate negative states.

The second step is to selfishly benefit oneself, and the biggest benefits we can give ourselves are positive states of mind: empathy, kindness, compassion, goodwill, pardon, egolessness, and gratitude. These positive states of mind release serotonin, oxytocin, and other related chemicals that reduce stress, improve our immune system, and drastically reduce our tendencies for psychosomatic diseases. As leaders, when we have positive states of mind, we start distributing those to others around us. We distribute what we have, magnified many times over. This creates a more congenial atmosphere, and improves morale and boosts productivity.

Equally important for leaders and decision makers is the fact that these chemicals improve the clarity of the mind (PDF) significantly, and help us to connect the dots and be creative, understand problems from multiple perspectives, get to the depth of problems quicker, and make quick decisions that are good for us and good for others. Who would have thought that focusing on yourself first can do so much?

There are many ways we can master this level of selfishness. One such approach is a meditation technique called vipassana, which means to see things as they really are (and not as they appear to be, as we want them to be, or as we imagine them to be). Business judgment of leaders is all about getting to quickly decipher what is not so evident at the surface level. When a leader is selfish, there is nothing clouding his or her understanding of the current reality as it is — not as he or she would like it to be, as it appears to be, or as the media describes it to be.

A word of caution: This is easy to understand, yet difficult to practice. But it’s incredibly worthwhile. Awareness of the fact that negative states harm us — whether or not they harm the person the negativity was targeted at — opens the doors to change.

We spread what we have within. When we are angry, we don’t limit that anger to ourselves. We magnify it and throw it on others. Similarly, when we have compassion, we spread that compassion. So as leaders, it is particularly important for us to be selfish — to care for our own state of being over anything else — so that we can then spread the selfishness far and wide.

With most of the mobile operators today relying on 3G underpinnings, and few actually using 4G backbones, the concept of yet another generation of cellular networks is unfathomable. After all, most of us still struggle to watch 1080p videos on YouTube without buffering and we know that developing, testing, approving and rolling out a new cellular technology doesn’t happen overnight. If 4G is of any indication, it might not happen even years after vetting it.

But, on Monday, Samsung announced that it has developed “the world’s first adaptive array transceiver technology operating in the millimeter-wave Ka bands”, that is designed for cellular communications. That’s a mouthful, but it is actually a device which paves the way for the fifth-generation networks. And if the speed part is true, count me in, whenever it arrives.

Samsung says that 5G networks will deliver “data transmission up to several hundred times faster than current 4G networks”, while providing “speeds up to several tens of Gbps” for each base station.

The company’s adaptive array transceiver technology transmits data, at up to two kilometers, with maximum speeds of 1.056 Gbps. It all sounds a bit surreal, but this could  dramatically change the way we use mobile devices and make room for a new breed of cloud services.

We could fully use cloud storage to actually store and access our data from the cloud without having to grab a cup of coffee while it arrives on our smartphones or tablets. The majority of large downloads can happen within minutes or even seconds, at least theoretically. The bottleneck would shift from data speeds onto carrier data caps and cloud service providers.

As the company says: “Samsung’s new technology will allow users to transmit massive data files including high quality digital movies practically without limitation. As a result, subscribers will be able to enjoy a wide range of services such as 3D movies and games, real-time streaming of ultra high-definition (UHD) content, and remote medical services”.

But there is something you should know. As I previously mentioned, vetting a new cellular technology can take time and, therefore, Samsung does not expect to offer the necessary devices anytime soon. The company says that it plans to commercialize 5G equipment by 2020, a tad under seven years down the road.

Photo Credit: Sashkin/Shutterstock

Google announced the launch of content recommendations for mobile sites via the Google+ Platform. By adding a line of code, webmasters can encourage users to look at more of their articles when they’re browsing mobile sites, by delivering recommended (by Google) content based on a variety of factors.

“When you help someone find a great article on your site, you’re not only making them happier, you’re inspiring deeper engagement and loyalty,” says Google+ product manager Mario Anima. “That’s why today, we’re bringing together elements of Google+ and Google Search to suggest the right content from your mobile website, at just the right time.”

Anima explains, “For example: Forbes visitors can now more easily discover other Forbes articles based on Search Authorship, signals and other articles with lots of Google+ activity (including +1′s and shares). In all cases, recommended content is based on the specific page the visitor is viewing, to boost the relevance of recommendations. And they only appear when people tap for more, so as not to interrupt their browsing experience.”

Recommendations will show up regardless of whether users are signed into Google+. When they’re signed in, they’ll just be more personalized, based on content that was shared or +1′d by people in their circles – not unlike Google’s personalized search results.

Documentation for implementation can be found here.

Prepublication Now Available

The Committee to Assess the Current Status and Future Direction of High Magnetic Field Science in the United States was convened by the National Research Council in response to a request by the National Science Foundation. This report answers three questions: (1) What is the current state of high-field magnet science, engineering, and technology in the United States, and are there any conspicuous needs to be addressed? (2) What are the current science drivers and which scientific opportunities and challenges can be anticipated over the next ten years? (3) What are the principal existing and planned high magnetic field facilities outside of the United States, what roles have U.S. high field magnet development efforts played in developing those facilities, and what potentials exist for further international collaboration in this area?

A magnetic field is produced by an electrical current in a metal coil. This current exerts an expansive force on the coil, and a magnetic field is “high” if it challenges the strength and current-carrying capacity of the materials that create the field. Although lower magnetic fields can be achieved using commercially available magnets, research in the highest achievable fields has been, and will continue to be, most often performed in large research centers that possess the materials and systems know-how for forefront research. Only a few high field centers exist around the world; in the United States, the principal center is the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL).

High Magnetic Field Science and Its Application in the United States considers continued support for a centralized high-field facility such as NHFML to be the highest priority. This report contains a recommendation for the funding and siting of several new high field nuclear magnetic resonance magnets at user facilities in different regions of the United States. Continued advancement in high-magnetic field science requires substantial investments in magnets with enhanced capabilities. High Magnetic Field Science and Its Application in the United States contains recommendations for the further development of all-superconducting, hybrid, and higher field pulsed magnets that meet ambitious but achievable goals.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Math, Chemistry and Physics

We could be saving the world, y’all. But instead researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab in Cambridge have worked with the Cola-Cola Co. and Bacradi companies to deliver a smartphone-controlled mixologist that can make an infinite number of drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) with the touch of a few buttons. Which admittedly, is cool.

A device like this is both a mechanical poster-child showing what’s possible for the future of automation as well as an attempt to work out kinks on our way to personal robots that will help reduce drudgery and improve our lives. And yet, despite my love of cocktails and robots, this particular partnership rubs me the wrong way.

It’s called the Makr Shakr and the robot and smartphone app will be unveiled Wednesday at Google’s I/O conference. The apparatus has three robot arms, whose movements were modeled after those of an Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle, and access up to 100 different types of flavors (alcohols, fruit juice, syrups, etc.) You download the app and then use the app to create the mix of your choice.

MIT is making a big deal of being able to see what recipes people make and how the robot allows others to crowdsource winning combinations. For example, the release includes the following quote, which is presented without irony:

“The number of drink combinations is almost limitless,” says Yaniv Turgeman, project leader from MIT Senseable City Lab. “The magic moment will be watching the formation of a bottom-up bar culture, as we close the loop between ‘co-curating’ and ‘co-producing,’ in real time.”

To which I say, Bah humbug. Yes, a robot-dispensing bartender whose “arms” are modeled after a ballet dancer and are assigned movements by a professional choreographer (it’s Italian director and choreographer Marco Pelle if you must know) is clearly theater. But this is art used to package commerce in a form designed to appeal to the frenetic, internet-hardened consumers of today. While plenty of hackers and hipsters might feel immune to a TV spot or a billboard, they will flock to tell their friends about this robot, post videos of it online and in general look without skepticism at what the creation of this robot means.

And of course, people like me, will write articles about it. Because it is cool, and these sorts of endeavors are the future, of both the service industry and commerce. And while MIT is careful to note that this won’t replace your neighborhood bartender, that’s just idiotic.

In Austin, Briggo Coffee, is a robotic coffee-dispensing robot (it’s shaped like a giant cube) that allows you to order your cup of Joe on your smartphone on the way into work and pick it up form the cube at a set time. Let’s also not forget that in the heart of SoMa at Lemnos Labs, Momentum Machines is building a robot that makes hamburgers. And in Amazon’s warehouses robot pickers abound.

Robots are cheaper at scale, and more efficient than people. For example, MIT boasts that Makr Shakr can not only mix drinks, but can also monitor alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels. So while it may not wipe down glasses while listening to your troubles, the Makr Shakr has a lot going for it should anyone decide to turn it into a production robot.

So while this is whiz-bang cool it’s worth asking the tough questions such a partnership and device bring up. Is this really what we want our MIT graduates working on? And if it is, then what kinds of adjustments do we need to be making in society to prepare for the infusions of robots into the service sector. Perhaps folks can start discussing those things after they get their Makr Shakr-made drinks.

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Chinese smartphone shipments hit a heady 82 million units in the first quarter this year. This is more than three times the smartphone shipment volume in the U.S. market during the same period of time. These Canalys numbers dovetail well with Qualcomm’s regional 3G device shipment trends. Over the past year, Qualcomm has repeatedly lowered its North American device shipment estimates while hiking its estimates sharply in China and India. Smartphones are a narrower category than 3G devices, but by both counts Asia’s portion of global sales keeps rising faster than most people expected a few years ago.

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