Category: News

The 48th Academy of Country Music Awards were held this weekend in Las Vegas. While co-host of the ceremonies Luke Bryan walked away with the Entertainer of the Year award, singer Miranda Lambert won four different awards Sunday night, shutting out Taylor Swift, who was nominated for five awards.

Lambert, who is famously married to ACM Awards co-host Blake Shelton, won awards for both writing and performing the song “Over You.” The song also won the Single of the Year Award. Lambert also won the award for Female Vocalist of the Year, an award she has won for four years running. Reba McEntire and Loretta Lynn are the only other artists to have won the Female Vocalist of the Year award four or more times.

Lambert was also nominated for Entertainer of the Year, the award that Bryan won.

“I can’t comprehend anything that’s happening right now,” said Lambert shortly after the awards ceremony. “I actually voted for, I was rooting for Carrie [Underwood], because I’m such a fan of hers and I’m so jealous of her voice and her legs and everything else she has.”

 

Move over iPad Mini, Nexus 7 and Galaxy Note 8.0— Acer is bringing a new player to the mini tablet arena. A mysterious Acer Iconia A1-810 has been revealed to the general public and looks to have the standard goodies including a 1.2GHz MediaTek dual-core chip, 7.9-inch IPS display with a 1,024 x 768 resolution + 1GB of RAM, a 5MP rear camera + a VGA front-facer, a 3,250 mAh battery and 16GB of on-board memory. Sure the competition may have some better specs inside, but at least the device will ship with Android 4.2 out of the gates.

As of now, it appears that French retailer Rue Du Commerce is the only place that is officially listing the device available for order at this point, though we’ll see if other countries and markets will get the device as well. It is expected the Iconia A1-810 will cost about €199 (about $259) and ship sometime in June.

source: Android Authority

Come comment on this article: Acer Iconia A1-810 tablet gets outed, flaunts its 7.9-inch display to the general public

As more and more of my friends get their hands on a BlackBerry Z10, I find myself referring to an earlier Inside BlackBerry Blog post – “There’s No Button like Home”- about the device’s lack of a home button. Users migrating from a BlackBerry device or competitive devices needed more information on how using BlackBerry 10 Flow keeps you moving, and BlackBerry users in particular wondered how and why they would navigate apps without the much-adored “Back” or “U-Turn” button.

Without belaboring the “how” part of using BlackBerry 10 Flow (explained in this video), I’d like to focus on why the U-turn button is no longer needed with BlackBerry 10. We frequently note that this function is due to the goal to “keep you moving forward” but what does that really mean?

• It means that the user experience of your mobile operating system should adapt to you and not the other way around.
• It means taking the human desire to reach higher and be more and packing it into a smartphone.
• It means a smartphone that says “I agree with you, star-reacher. Let’s go and be more.”
• It means knowing where you’ve been and how it impacts you, then using it to propel you beyond your expectations.
• It means plunging fearlessly into apps and being able to peek into the correspondence that mean the most at any time, day or night.
• It means BlackBerry 10 is more than a slogan or ad – it’s a movement, and a movement forward.

I hope this clears things up. If you have any questions about how BlackBerry 10 keeps you moving forward, shout them out in the comments.

Hewlett-Packard said its first “Generation 2″ Project Moonshot server, based on Intel’s( intc) Atom Series 1200 chip is available as of Monday with other versions running chips from Calxeda, AMD, Applied Microand Texas Instruments to come.

The goal of Project Moonshot, as initially stated last year, is to offer a super energy-efficient and compact servers capable of running the world’s biggest webscale (and biggest enterprises)  at a fraction of the cost. HP said it shipped a number of early versions for customer proofs of concept last year but today’s news represents broad availability of what HP execs called a  ”software-defined server designed for the data center.”

The new server puts 4,500 Proliant servers in one HP 1500 enclosure. Compared to traditional Proliant servers, this iteration uses 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and is 97 percent less complex than the former state of the art at 77 percent less cost.

It’s understandable given HP’s huge server installed base in enterprises why it lays out that comparison, but companies might be more interested in how Moonshot boxes compare with webscale servers from what used to be no-name rivals like Quanta, Inventec, Quanta. The notion of BYO servers is also spreading.  In January, Rackspace the big hosting and cloud provider, for exmaple, said it would start building its own servers.

That trend puts traditional server vendors  like HP,  Dell and IBM in a tough spot.  It’s good to see HP willing to cannibalize its installed base., the question is whether those big web-scale workloads have already set sail on no-name servers.

I will update this story as needed throughout rest of today’s HP web conference.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Winners and Losers of 2009
• Power in the data center: Can it drive disruption?

This week, President Obama’s nominee to succeed energy secretary Steven Chu will face questions before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in which senators are expected to pose a number of questions to Dr. Ernest Moniz about his …

Every April, we recognize Sexual Assault Awareness Month. This year, with rape in the headlines nearly every day, we speak out with even greater urgency to honor survivors and prevent sexual violence.

We know the devastating the statistics: 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men have been raped in their lifetimes. That’s 18 million women in this country who have been raped, and more than 1 million rapes that occur every year. The vast majority of these assaults occur when the victims are under the age of 25, and those under the age of 18 are at the greatest risk. These numbers are real, but they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t tell of the broken trust when the attacker is a friend, a trusted colleague, or a family member.  They don’t tell of the suicidal feelings, the depression, or of the PTSD. And, they don’t tell of the courage survivors demonstrate when they work every day to put their lives back together.

Across the federal government, we are working to support survivors and to prevent sexual violence. Last year, the Department of Justice modernized the definition of rape used to collect our nation’s crime statistics. This year, the Department of Justice is working with law enforcement agencies to implement this change and develop new guidelines for investigating sexual assault cases. The Office on Violence Against Women is funding training that will help communities address their backlogs of rape kits and improve prosecution of sexual assault crimes. The Office of Victims of Crime is supporting the development of a telemedicine center that will help bring sexual assault forensic exams to victims in rural and isolated communities.

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There’s one area of solar that is going gangbusters in 2013, and that’s companies that are financing and installing solar panels on rooftops. On Monday morning solar financing startup Clean Power Finance announced that it has raised a round of $37 million in growth equity from investors including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Claremont Creek Venture.

Odds are, it’s a pretty safe bet, even for the venture capitalists that have been scared off by the lack of consistent returns in cleantech investing. Last year there were a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S., making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically, according to Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research.

The reason that solar panels exploded last year was due to a few factors: the price of solar panels dropped dramatically, companies have been offering financing deals that cover the upfront costs of the systems (like Clean Power Finance), and some states have been offering strong incentives to get panels installed. It’s not a coincidence that states like California with the best subsidies for solar panels had the most installations last year.

Clean Power Finance is a solar software and financing company, and it can put money into a variety of solar installers across the country. It originally grew its business on providing Software-as-a-Service tools to solar installers to start the sales, rebate, and lead-gen processes, but more recently started providing financing agreements like power purchase agreements (PPAs) for rooftop solar for home owners. A PPA is a contract over a time to buy the solar power as a service, and commonly avoid having to pay the upfront installation fee.

Solar installer SolarCity, which has a similar business model to Clean Power Finance, went public last December and its stock is trading around $18.50 Monday morning — $10 above its debut price. Sungevity, another solar financing and installation company, was able to raise a large round of $125 million of equity and project finance earlier this year.

Clean Power Finance previously raised funds from Clean Pacific Ventures, Sand Hill Angels and founder Gary Kremen, who is a long time entrepreneur and investor, and who previously founded of Match.com. Clean Power Finance raised another $25 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Claremont Creek Ventures back in 2011.

Solar financing and installation is one of the few bright spots in cleantech investing. It’s a business model innovation, which is based around solar panels becoming a low cost commodity, and banks or corporations becoming comfortable putting up the upfront funds for the installation. In contrast solar manufacturing innovation has proved to be far tougher as an investment category (Solyndra, Miasole, etc.). The solar module manufacturing industry is also seeing mass bankruptcies this year, precisely because the cost of solar modules has gotten so low.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

 

Sure Facebook Home is going to be one heck of a game-changer for Android devices, but not only do we still need to wait a while for it to come out— Facebook Home is only going to be available for a handful of devices, at least for the initial launch. Fortunately, some enterprising folks went ahead and brought the awesome launcher to the masses. Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo’s details that using any Android device with a maximum resolution of 1,200 x 768, users will have the ability to use a pre-release version of the ROM by installing 3 special files.

Of course using the special build of the app doesn’t come without a few catches. The first is that since this is a pre-release version of Facebook Home, meaning the ROM is not exactly stable, is missing a feature or two and is a little bit on the slower side. The second catch is users will need to ensure that Facebook is completely uninstalled from their device prior to installing the ROM since the leaked files are re-signed and can’t just be installed over the top of an existing installation. This means that those of you with a device that has Facebook pre-installed will probably need to have Root access and remove the Facebook from your phone just to be on the safe side.

Ok— so now that you’ve gotten the disclaimer, we’re sure that you’re itching to try it out for yourself, right? Head on down to the source link to grab the full deets and instructions for yourself.

source: MoDaCo

Come comment on this article: Facebook Home pre-release gets leaked, gives Android users a half-baked taste of sweet glory

Margaret Thatcher is dead. For most Britons of my generation she was the dominant political figure. People either loved her or hated her and she seemed, if anything, to thrive on that conflict. Her consensus-minded opposite numbers in Europe (mostly male) certainly regarded her with disapproval. She was too strident, an iron lady, not for turning, all the stereotypes applied to strong-minded women in power.

Part of her crime, perhaps, was to be a conservative. It would have been far more convenient for most women’s rights and civil rights activists to be able to point to a socialist as a female role model. Thatcher was towards the hard right of the conservative party, someone who wanted to reverse the socialist experiment of Britain’s post-war years. But the socially progressive were very much wedded to that model. For these people, Shirley Williams of Britain’s Labour Party was a far more agreeable role model for women.

So why was Britain’s first woman Prime minister a true-blue Tory? After all, Labour politicians were, on the face of it, much more supportive of women in politics.

Part of the answer, perhaps, was plain old cynical politics. Conservatives got to look progressive because they had a woman as leader, and a reasonable number of non-conservatives might vote also for her party because she was a woman. In a first past the post system, that would be good electoral math.

Having a woman front the economic policies of the conservatives might also perhaps have made their platform seem a little more palatable. Conservatives were generally seen as representing the interests of the privileged establishment. Conservative politicians were often the product of Britain’s elite public schools and they mostly sounded as if they had a silver spoon in their mouths. You would not say that about a grocer’s daughter from Grantham (even if she did affect a “posh accent” and had been to Oxford).

Branding and packaging considerations aside, it’s clear that Thatcher was driven, highly motivated, and astute. She could play hardball politics with the best of them, an ability that many men found hard to resist, if you are to believe the riotously popular diaries of Alan Clark (a maverick conservative and notorious womanizer who formed part of Thatcher’s coterie).

Psychologists might make something also of the fact that she was very much encouraged in her ambitions by the men in her life. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a stalwart of local politics in Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham, a local alderman and sometime mayor, and encouraged her to aim high. Her rather older than she husband Denis (whose apocryphal letters in Private Eye caused merriment to a generation of readers) provided the financial security that allowed her to pursue a career in politics.

Any and perhaps all of the above could be advanced to explain Thatcher’s success. But at the end of the day, perhaps none of those reflections matter as much as the fact that Thatcher represented a set of ideas whose time had come.

By the 1970s, Labour had arguably run out of steam. After decades of leading a progressive social agenda it had created an economy in which organized labor held a disproportionate share of power. Britain was over-regulated, overtaxed, and under-productive. With an economic model severely challenged by the oil-price shocks of the 1970s and with the massive oil reserves in the North Sea yet to come on line, British voters were receptive to Thatcher’s idea that Britain needed to get back to work the old-fashioned way.

Her formula reshaped Britain’s economic orthodoxy and became for two decades and more the dominant logic of politics. And if the financial crisis caused some to question that logic, it remains largely intact. Arguably, it was her very success in realizing her ideas that undid her. As long as she represented a work in progress, much could be forgiven. But once she had achieved her big goals, the sound and fury sounded increasingly shrill. It was a pity, perhaps, that she was so brutally cast aside (in, essentially, a palace coup), but it may have been inevitable.

Fighters like Thatcher are almost doomed not to recognize when their time is up; it’s what makes them so good at achieving their goals.

Facebook (FB) unveiled Home last week, an Android software suite that transforms a handset’s home screen into a real-time graphical representation of users’ Facebook timelines. The new software has seen mixed early responses from pundits and bloggers, many of whom have expressed concerns over how Home might impact users’ privacy. Privacy concerns surrounding Facebook products are nothing new — concerns are justified, of course— and Facebook had a response to users’ worries ready to go. In a nutshell, Facebook says Home “doesn’t change anything related to your privacy settings on Facebook, and your privacy controls work the same with Home as they do everywhere else on Facebook.” Facebook’s full privacy Q&A can be found by following the source link below.

Google has reportedly cracked down on payday loan services using AdWords, which are in violation of its policies and government regulations.

TheDrum.com reports (via Search Engine Land) that Google has pulled all Moneysupermarket ads as part of the crackdown, which is the result of increasing government pressure on Google.

The publication shares a statement from a Google spokeswoman, who said, “We have a set of policies which govern what ads we do and do not allow on Google. We have strict policies for those advertising short term loans, and make it very clear that advertisers need to comply with local regulations and be transparent about their fees, implications of non-payment and collection practices. If we discover sites that are breaking this policy we will take appropriate action.”

Here’s what Google says about short-term loans in its AdWords policies:

Short-term loans are defined as secured or non-secured loans with a duration of 60 days or less. Google doesn’t allow websites for short-term loans that don’t include all of the information below (includes lenders, lead generators, and aggregators of short-term loans):

• Legitimate contact information or physical address (P.O. box addresses are not acceptable)
• Compliance with other state or local regulations related to short-term loans
• Prominent disclosure of the following on the landing page, meaning that it’s shown in the same font type, size, and color as the base text on the landing page and presented in a way that is clear and conspicuous to users:
  • APR
  • Implications of non-payment, including the following:
    • Financial implications (whether fees are charged and/or interest rates are raised)
    • Collection practices
    • Potential impact to users’ credit score
    • Renewal policy information, including if the renewal is automatic and if there are fees associated with the renewal

    Aggregators/lead generators may provide sample implications from their network to satisfy the above requirements. Implications of non-payment should be grouped together in one location on the landing page.

Google has different policies for Japan, Singapore, the UK and the US. These can all be found here.

Advertisers who have had their accounts suspended are advised to review the guidelines, remove all unacceptable content from ad text and their websites, provide users with accurate info about business, products and services, ensure that their sites contain all info required by state and local lawas, and be transparent about the products or services being promoted.

Some of the most engaged employees in your organization are your worst performers. And some of the least engaged are your highest performers.

This conclusion comes from new research by the consulting firm, Leadership IQ. The study “matched engagement survey and performance appraisal data for 207 organizations.” According to CEO Mark Murphy (who I interviewed via email), “We had long suspected that high performers might not be as engaged as has traditionally been assumed. But seeing that, in 42% of cases, high performers were even less engaged than low performers was a bit of a shock.”

This conclusion runs contrary to conventional wisdom as well as many studies (including this one from Gallup) that show high engagement — that is, how much employees are committed to their work — correlates with better bottom line results, including productivity and profitability.

You could think of these low performers as hamsters on a wheel, spinning fast but actually going nowhere. Conversely, high performers may be coasting like swans on a pond, just gliding by. You don’t see their effort because it’s below the water. As Murphy says, “in our study, high performers gave very low marks when asked if employees all live up to the same standards.”

While low performers may be more engaged, their efforts may not be as productive, especially since it’s the higher performers — disengaged though they may be — who are doing all the work. The underperformance of the former undermines the effort of the latter. This is especially true, according to the study, when low performers are not held accountable for poor performance. These employees may not even know they are doing a poor job.

Naturally when poor performers are allowed to slide by, it erodes the morale of high performers who feel, again according to the study, “helpless about the trajectory of their careers.”

“We had seen plenty of cases where managers avoid dealing with low performers (because they believe the conversation will be difficult), and instead assign work to the employees they enjoy — i.e. high performers.,” says Murphy. “And as a result, they end up ‘burning out’ those same high performers they enjoy so much.”

While I find Leadership IQ’s findings linking high engagement to poor performers to be contrarian, it is not usual for good performers to feel lost in the system. This is a comment I hear not infrequently in my coaching work.

So what to do about it? Murphy offers two suggestions. “First, leaders need to set very explicit, and behaviorally-specific, expectations for performance. These expectations need to define and delineate good, great, and even poor performance so employees and managers can clearly define and differentiate best practices, teach those practices to others, and then hold people accountable accordingly.”

Doing this, according to Murphy, “gives high performers confidence that their manager understands the meaning of ‘high performer’ and it holds the manager accountable to actually differentiate employees on the basis of their performance.”

Second, Murphy suggests regularly monthly meetings (perhaps lasting no more than 20 minutes) that ask managers about what’s going on in the workplace and how motivated they feel. As Murphy says, “If a company CEO were told that their best customers were unhappy, it’s a safe bet that CEO would be on a plane within hours. If we truly believe that people are our most important asset, shouldn’t we pay a bit more attention to the engagement of the best of those people?”

Senior management needs to communicate more clearly, hold people at every level accountable for results, and actively invest time and resources in the talents of high performers.

All too often companies do not know their employees are unhappy until they leave. Exit interviews reveal that they leave because they did not believe anyone cared. Research has confirmed the old saw that people leave bosses, not companies. That makes holding bosses accountable for employee engagement critical.

Senior leaders need to do a better job of teaching managers how to be better managers. And they also need to apply such standards to themselves.

Reuters is reporting that seven people have died in a brewery accident in Mexico City. Beer company Grupo Modelo stated that seven workers were killed in an accident involving a tank that was being cleaned and receiving maintenance. The details of the accident have not been released.

According to the report, a Grupo Modelo spokesperson stated that, “Modelo is deeply sorry for this accident and will support the affected families permanently.”

Grupo Modelo is the maker of beer that included Modelo, Pacífico, and Corona. Corona is the best-selling beer from Mexico, and the top imported beer in the U.S. Last summer, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) announced that it would fully acquire Modelo for just over $20 billion. ABI is the maker of the best-selling U.S. beer, Bud Light.

In January 2013, the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to block the merger. The Justice Department claims that the U.S. beer market is highly concentrated, with 39% of beer sales in 2012 going to ABI, and another 7% going to Modelo. There is worry that ABI, which is a price leader for the U.S. beer industry, is seeking to eliminate competition from Modelo, which “aggressively” prices its imports.

Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, passed away today after suffering from a stroke. The longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, Thatcher also holds the distinction of being the only woman to hold the post. She has died at 87-years-old.

Below, some TED Talks that examine Thatcher’s legacy — in politics, social policy, even science funding.

David Cameron: The next age of governmentDavid Cameron: The next age of government “We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton,” current Prime Minister David Cameron said of Thatcher today, upon returning to the UK from a European tour to pay tribute to the so-called “Iron Lady.” In this talk given at TED2010, Cameron shares his thoughts on how governments will need to adapt as global power dynamics shift toward individuals.

Lemn Sissay: A child of the stateLemn Sissay: A child of the state In this talk from TEDxHousesofParliament, British poet and playwright Lemn Sissay talks about growing up as a “ward of the state,” without parents to care for him. As he says, “Margaret Thatcher was my mother.” A moving talk about why so many people who grew up this way feel the need to hide their pasts.

Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get rationalElizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV – let’s get rational At TED2010, public health expert Elizabeth Pisani shares a counter-intuitive policy that Margaret Thatcher was the first to put into practice – the creation of a national needle exchange program for intravenous drug users to prevent the transmission of HIV.

Gordon Brown on global ethic vs. national interestGordon Brown on global ethic vs. national interest Gordon Brown, Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, has revealed himself to be a great admirer of Thatcher because she was a “conviction politician.” In this Q&A that followed Brown’s talk on wiring the web for global good at TEDGlobal 209, TED Curator Chris Anderson asks Brown how he balances the needs of his own citizens with the needs of the world.

Brian Cox: CERN's supercolliderBrian Cox: CERN’s supercollider At TED2008, physicist Brian Cox shares a funny anecdote about getting funding for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN from Margaret Thatcher. Apparently, Thatcher said to him, “ If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand … what this Higgs particle does … you can have the money.”

Taiwan’s forecast-beating export data today came as a pleasant surprise amid the general emerging markets economic gloom.  In a raft of developing countries, from South Korea to Brazil, from Malaysia to the Czech Republic, export data has disappointed. HSBC’s monthly PMI index showed this month that recovery remains subdued.

With Europe still in the doldrums, this is not totally unsurprising. But economists are growing increasingly concerned because the lack of export growth coindides with a nascent U.S. recovery. Clearly EM is failing to ride the US coattails.

Does all this confirm the gloomy prediction made last month by Morgan Stanley’s chief emerging markets economist, Manoj Pradhan. Pradhan reckons that a U.S. economy in recovery would be a competitor rather than a client for emerging markets, as  the world’s biggest economy tries to reinvent itself as a manufacturing power and shifts away from consumption-led growth. It is the latter that helped underwrite the export-led emerging market boom of the past decade.

It’s early days yet. Yet the impact of the U.S. rebound this time does appear different from the past.

Typically, a recovery in the United States leads to a rise in demand for all sorts of products – chemicals,  home furnishing, clothing, footwear, light manufacturing,  electrical appliances, machinery and equipment, transport – and this leads to a broad-based rebound in imports, analysts at UBS say. That has not happened in this cycle, and imports from  EM in particular have lagged. The answer, according to UBS, lies in the kind of things the United States has been importing. Look at their chart below  – most in demand are heavy machinery and transport equipment because the rebound is centred on construction, autos and infrastructure. UBS says:

The US does not need EM to supply into these sectors – these are the sectors that it can supply to itself, or potentially import from other ‘industrialised’ economies such as Germany…. Our initial analysis suggests that EM may not be able to fully participate in the cyclical upturn in the United States.

The competitive advantages of emerging markets kick in with consumer sectors such as household appliances, phone handsets and clothing. But U.S. demand for these is stagnant, possibly because of deleveraging by households and also due to the relatively weak pace of job creation.

 

The U.S. recovery could yet broaden out to other sectors as it gathers pace.  But until this happens, the economic recovery in  emerging markets will be subdued.

There is another hope though — China. Taiwan is a case in point. Its 3.3 percent export improvement last month was down to China.  Taiwanese exports to China rose 5.2 percent on the month after a 21 percent jump in February.  Taiwanese exports to the U.S., on the other hand, fell 1.9 percent, adding to a 12 percent slump in the previous month.

 

Just a few days after his death at the age of 70, the Chicago Sun Times has posted legendary film critic Roger Ebert’s final review. It’s now online and available at rogerebert.com.

Ebert’s final review turns of to be To the Wonder, the latest feature from director Terrence Malick. To the Wonder stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, and Javier Bardem, and is slated for an April 12th release.

Ebert enjoyed the film, giving it a positive review and 3 and 1/2 stars.

Here’s a snippet of the review, which is classic Ebert through and through:

A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these characters and made their motivations more clear. Malick, who is surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers, appears almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the depth of his vision.

“Well,” I asked myself, “why not?” Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren’t many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren’t many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn’t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?

There will be many who find “To the Wonder” elusive and too effervescent. They’ll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.

Ebert has been kind to Malick’s films in the past. He loved his last film, The Tree of Life, awarding it four stars. He also enjoyed 2005′s The New World and 1999′s The Thin Red Line, giving those films four and three stars, respectively.

For another great Ebert review, check out his “Great Movies” essay on Malick’s 1978 classic Days of Heaven.

Over on rogerebert.com, you can also find some select remembrances of Ebert, along with a statement from his wife Chaz. Plus, an archive of all of his reviews – most of which (especially the Great Movies essays) are essential reading for anyone who’s serious about the movies.

Final Book Now Available

When, in late 2011, it became public knowledge that two research groups had submitted for publication manuscripts that reported on their work on mammalian transmissibility of a lethal H5N1 avian influenza strain, the information caused an international debate about the appropriateness and communication of the researchers’ work, the risks associated with the work, partial or complete censorship of scientific publications, and dual-use research of concern in general.

Recognizing that the H5N1 research is only the most recent scientific activity subject to widespread attention due to safety and security concerns, on May 1, 2012, the National Research Council’s Committee on Science, Technology and Law, in conjunction with the Board on Life Sciences and the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Microbial Threats, convened a one-day public workshop for the purposes of 1) discussing the H5N1 controversy; 2) considering responses by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which had funded this research, the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), scientific publishers, and members of the international research community; and 3) providing a forum wherein the concerns and interests of the broader community of stakeholders, including policy makers, biosafety and biosecurity experts, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and the general public might be articulated.

Perspectives on Research with H5N1 Avian Influenza: Scientific Enquiry, Communication, Controversy summarizes the proceedings of the workshop.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

There’s a new podcast directory in town and this one has a twist: it integrates with your cloud storage accounts so you can upload and stream audio or video shows on any device with a browser. Called Podcast Gallery, the online directory uses responsive design, making it usable on smartphones, tablets and traditional computers.

I hit up the Podcast Gallery website earlier today and took it for a spin. In short: I’ll be using this for both my audio and video podcast needs going forward on all of my devices. It doesn’t hurt that I have a fair amount of storage available to me in both Dropbox and Google Drive of course. Here’s Podcast Gallery’s creator, Amit Agarwal, explaining how Podcast Gallery works:

About the only feature I see missing — and I’ve already pitched it to Agarwal — is the ability to subscribe to a show and have it automatically upload new episodes to my cloud storage.

Yes, podcast subscription is a primary feature in any podcatcher, but I still see value in Podcast Gallery. The ability to watch or hear a podcast through a browser on nearly any device is a big plus. I’ve already streamed several audio and video episodes on an iPhone 5. And the Google Drive integration is perfect for Chromebook users; you can even set the media files to be available offline so they sync to your Chrome OS device.

One potential holdup for some: to save favorite podcasts to your collection requires you to sign in via Facebook or Twitter. Some folks won’t use a service that is connected to a social network. Surprisingly, you can’t sign in with a Google account, which would actually make sense, given the Google Drive integration. Regardless, Podcast Gallery is a handy and refreshing take on podcatchers that smartly bridges mobile, desktop and the cloud.

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• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• The 2013 task management tools market
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

In exactly 365 days Microsoft will stop offering support for its still widely used but venerable operating system. XP has certainly had a good run. Microsoft will have supported the OS for 12 years, which shows how incredibly popular it was (its success also perhaps speaks volumes about how much better than its successors it was perceived to be, I’m looking at you in particular Vista).

But now Microsoft is dropping extended support for XP, so what does that actually mean for consumers and businesses who are still using the OS?

Windows XP, like all new versions of Windows and Office products, received a minimum of ten years of support — five years Mainstream Support and five years Extended. Mainstream — or full — support, includes incident support, hotfixes, security updates and so on. For XP this ended in April 2009. Extended support is only available to commercial customers and consists purely of security updates.

On 8 April 2014, Microsoft will stop providing any form of support to any customers and more importantly, it will stop issuing any security patches for XP.

For consumers this likely won’t have too much of an impact — after 12 years of bug and security fixes, you’d hope Microsoft would have found and eliminated any major problems by now. For businesses it’s more of a concern, and in the case of larger organizations it’s already very late in the day to migrate to Windows 7 or 8. Microsoft says average enterprises can take 18 to 32 months to reach full deployment.

Microsoft understandably wants firms to switch from Windows XP Professional to Windows 8 Pro (rather than Windows 7) and so is offering a 15 percent discount now through June 30 as part of its Get2Modern offer.

I’m intrigued though — are you or your workplace still using XP, and if so do you have any plans to migrate to a newer operating system any time soon, and if so, which one?