Category: News

In today’s Remainders: AT&T users log in to Facebook only to find unfamiliar faces; iPhone 4G rumors abound while AMOLED Apple Tablet rumors get shot down; and Northwestern’s StatsMonkey robot takes hard stats and churns out baseball narratives.

Unfamiliar Faces
Over the weekend, some AT&T customers logged into Facebook only to find that they faces they were looking at were not their own. A network hiccup redirected some of the carrier’s customers to other people’s pages upon logging in on mobile phones. AT&T has acknowledged the issue but maintained that it only affected a “limited number” of users. Still, you’d think they wouldn’t just brush this off. As more and more people are putting more and more of their lives on Facebook, shouldn’t the security of these accounts be paramount? With all of the bad publicity in recent months—starting with the privacy settings fiasco and continuing through the revelation of a Facebook master password—this latest snafu doesn’t do anything to restoring our confidence in the social network. [Geek.com]

4G Orgy Writhes On
Apple Tablet rumor-mongering must be getting boring, because these last few weeks have seen a conspicuous uptick in speculation on the next generation of Apple’s smartphone. With the January 27 event just made official, a Tablet reveal is almost a certainty. But could we be getting some news on the new iPhone as well? Nowhereelese.fr put together this handy visual guide to all the rumors swirling around the iPhone 4G, but we’re not sure how much stock we put in them: the render they’re using is one we’ve all seen before, and some of their probabilities are downright batty. [Nowhereelse.fr]

AMOLED, Am I Right?
No, you’re not. Today, Ars Technica argued the case against the 10″ AMOLED Apple Tablet. This quote from Barry Young, Managing Director of the OLED Association, gets to the heart of the matter: “there’s no real production of 10.1-inch panels.” Right. Thing is, we already knew that. It’s good to hear more official confirmation, though, and now we’re thoroughly convinced that Apple isn’t going AMOLED on January 27th. [Ars Technica]

Robowriting
StatsMonkey, a creation of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, is a robot that takes raw statistics of baseball games and fleshes them out into full narratives of the contest. It does so pretty well. Here’s an example of a StatsMonkey screed:

UNIVERSITY PARK – An outstanding effort by Willie Argo carried the Illini to an 11-5 victory over the Nittany Lions on Saturday at Medlar Field.

Argo blasted two home runs for Illinois. He went 3-4 in the game with five RBIs and two runs scored.

Illini starter Will Strack struggled, allowing five runs in six innings, but the bullpen allowed only no runs and the offense banged out 17 hits to pick up the slack and secure the victory for the Illini.

Not bad, eh? Robowriting isn’t necessarily a new idea, but this is the first time that I’ve seen an example that made me actually get a little nervous. At least there’s no gadget-blogging robots. Yet. [NPR]

Filed under: CES, Technology

Continue reading Visteon shows us its next-gen tech, a dash that can tell if you’re sleeping, and an in-car Tegra 2 [w/video]

Visteon shows us its next-gen tech, a dash that can tell if you’re sleeping, and an in-car Tegra 2 [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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»  Forget 2011. Now you can expect Windows Mobile 7 at the end of this year, and a preview of it at next month’s MWC. [Gizmodo.]

»   Steve Wozniak clarifies his opinion about the Nexus One – it’s not his favorite, but a new gadget he considers to be “good.” [Geek.com]

»  Weird AT&T (NYSE: T) glitch gave m.facebook.com users access to other users’ accounts. [AP]

»   Motorola (NYSE: MOT) has several likely Android-based phones coming out this year. [Engadget]

»   Verizon rolls out FiOS bundles with connections of 35Mbsp. [Release]

Cramer’s prediction about a huge stock market rally if Scott Brown wins got us thinking: what do we predict will actually happen to healthcare stocks if the insurgent GOP candidate wins and torpedoes healthcare reform.

Casual observers would guess that healthcare stocks will rally, but that ignores the fact that healthcare stocks rallied even as it looked like reform was a sure thing.

One reason for this — and it’s the same reason that many industry lobbyists went to bat for Coakley — is that reform would likely be good for the industry (more people on insurance, more people buying drugs, no government competition.

Of course, the fact that healthcare stocks rallied at the end of last year doesn’t mean much, since the whole market drifted upward, so who knows what was due to reform and what wasn’t.

Anyway, here’s what will happen if Brown wins: Healthcare stocks will initially rally in the first half of Wednesday, before settling down, if not ending in the red outright, as the smart money dumps their shares.

If Coakley wins, we’ll get the opposite.

Anyone disagree?

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Scott Brown Peaked Two Days Too Early
• Martha Coakley Falls To 40% On InTrade
• Healthcare Stocks EXPLODE Higher After Big Vote On Reform

ReCellular, the world’s leading recycler of cellphones, has launched Phones For Haiti—a relief effort that donates 100% of the value of your recycled phone to quake victims via the American Red Cross. [Phones for Haiti via Inhabitat]

International law firm Vinson & Elkins sees untapped billable hours in renewable energy and is therefore opening a new office in Palo Alto, Calif., to capture  a slice of this growing market.

The office is opening with three partners and will be managed by Boyd Carano who has moved to Northern California from the firm’s Houston office. Kyle Fox and Margaret Sampson of Austin have also joined Carano in Palo Alto. Fox has extensive experience advising early-stage companies and Sampson is a partner with Vinson & Elkins’s intellectual property practice.

Carano tells us that the firm could add a partner and three or four associates by the end  of the year.

Law firms have been staffing up with environmental/greentech lawyers, (see here and here), although a lot of the hiring has been in Washington, which these days is the epicenter of cleantech funding, with the Department of Energy overseeing nearly $40 billion in dedicated funds.

click on the image for a larger version

The most recent satellite reported to be joining China’s constellation of Beidou navigation satellites is shown in yellow. An example of a geostationary Beidou satellite is shown in white and China’s one and only navigation satellite in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) is shown in green.

The launch of what is reported to be a seventh Chinese navigation satellite (on 16 January 2010) provides an opportunity to review what we know about this system of satellites. First, it is clear that the satellite, which has yet not been officially designated a Beidou satellite on the NASA space-track website (at least as of 12 noon, 18 January 2010), is intended to be a geostationary satellite. It, and the third stage of the CZ-3 launch vehicle, are in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as the image above shows. Within a few days of launch, the satellite’s apogee motor will fire, positioning the satellite in to its final orbital.

If the case of Beidou 1D is any indication, we will not know which satellite it is replacing until China moves it into position. China, as a responsible spacefaring nation, moved Beidou 1D into a supersync orbit just days after the launch of its replacement satellite, Beidou G-2. Beidou 1D as only about two years old when China replaced it with what is reported to be a second generation Beidou satellite. That is somewhat surprising since Beidou 1 was over six years old at the time and one might have expected it to be replaced before the much younger 1D. If China decided to replace 1D because it was failing, they must have had plenty of warning since they were still in control of that satellite.

click on the image for a larger version

Current Beidou Constellation is shown (at the top) with the ground tracks for three orbits for each satellite projected onto the Earth’s surface; (lower left) an equatorial view of the satellites; (lower right) a polar view of the constellation. Note the Beidou 1D’s ground track shows both a large longitudinal displacement over three days and a large inclination—the up and down motion of the ground track. Dates indicated are the launch date of each satellite.

China’s first generation of navigational satellites did not have an onboard atomic clock. That, of course, complicated their operation and limited the number of users. Instead of broadcasting their own timing, as GPS satellites do, the satellite operated as a “bend in a pipe” with the time standard generated on Earth and, in fact, the “user” position determined by a central location after a round trip of radio signals from the center to the satellite to the user and back. It would be very interesting to know if the second generation satellites had their own space qualified atomic clocks.

With this latest satellite, we are also starting to see a pattern in Beidou launches. About every three years (2000, 2003, 2007, 2009*, 2010) a new wave of satellites is plugged into the constellation. (The asterisk for 2009 indicates that this launch might well have been accelerated to replace a dying satellite.) That might indicate the length of time it takes to design and/or build a new satellite. If it includes design time, I would expect evolutionary changes; something we might expect from China in any case given their known history of systematic development.

The holidays and possibly some intense weight work may have Quinton Jackson, Georges St. Pierre and Diego Sanchez considering a jump to a new weight class. Jackson was seen last night in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock’s new club Vanity. St. Pierre is pictured with heavyweight Brendan Schaub and middleweight Nate Marquardt. GSP looks like the thickest guy of the bunch.

GSP and Sanchez (not pictured) have actually given hints about a move up. St. Pierre told the media throng before UFC 108 that he was considering the jump to 185 pounds. Sanchez posted on his Facebook page that he may go back to welterweight where he was 8-2 in the UFC. Sanchez has little shot at the title at 170, he’s simply too small to compete with guy’s who walk around between 185-195 pounds. But he can get back in the mix at 155 with possible fights against Gray Maynard, Tyson Griffin, Takanori Gomi and Kenny Florian. MMA for Real says Sanchez is in no man’s land. We say he’s fine at lightweight, B.J. Penn won’t be around forever.

UPDATE – Sanchez confirms move via Twitter:

Meanwhile, Rampage to heavyweight is purely speculation. But by the looks of his new Mr. T persona, there won’t be a "jump" necessary. What is that 230 pounds? The Hard Rock did confirm that the photo is indeed Jackson not Brett Rogers. 

Jackson photo by Cody Boor/Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Rogers line via Twitter @EAJames. 

In this Google-sponsored video by Patrick Boivin, stop-motion ninjas show us only the second unboxing that I can describe as “action-packed.” They easily defeated the Nexus One packaging, but their arch-rival Blister Pack won’t go down so easy. [Engadget]

As Mobile World Congress—and presumably Window Mobile 7—careens closer and closer, we’re going to hear a lot more of this. Today’s batch? Business and consumer versions of the OS, a sexxxy new name, and possible first hardware.

WMExperts’ post is essentially a digest of everything they think they know from a variety of sources, including this very site. Even as a summary, though, it’s pretty huge, and the rumors sprawl from totally ridiculous to fairly credible, so here are the meaty bits:

&bull Windows Mobile 7 won’t be marketed as Windows Mobile 7. We sort of knew this already, since Microsoft has been marketing Windows Mobile and “Windows Phone” since the announcement of 6.5. But it’s not even going to be that, apparently. The new name? “Seven.”

&bull There will be two versions of the OS: one for OEMs and businesses, a stripped-down that’s being referred to in development as Business Edition; and one media-oriented version for consumers, tentatiely called Media Edition. Business edition will be focused on enterprise tools, like collaborative document editing, while the media edition will be focused on, well, media.

&bull If we see Seven at MWC, it won’t be a full product—we’ll see HD video playback, a Zune-like media interface, and some of the rest of the UI, but not all of it. This sounds odd! But the rumor consensus is that the OS won’t hit phones until late 2010, so it’s plausible that they’re just not done yet,

There’s nothing earth-shattering here, and most of these rumors just prompt more questions. Perhaps the juiciest part of this whole mess, though, is the rumored hardware from LG and HTC. What’s so great about the LG Apollo and HTC Obsession, assuming they actually exist? Well, seeing as they’re supposed to be Seven launch devices, they represent the new baseline for Windows Mobile phones. And this baseline is high: WMExperts reports both have 1GHz+ Snapdragon processors, 3.7-inch AMOLED screens, and 512MB to 1GB of RAM. In other words, Windows Mobile 7’s dumpiest handsets will be gutsier than anything you can buy today—something that will get less and less impressive the longer Microsoft waits to release this thing.

Anyway, if you’re still feeling a little lost as to what on earth WinMo 7 may or may not be, WMExperts’ breakdown is worth a read. [WMExperts]

The historical situation in Haiti has long been dire, and we need to understand its history if we are to understand how human values, and which ones, come into play. Haiti, once France’s most lucrative colony and born of greed and slavery, became an independent republic 200 years ago. Haitians should have much to celebrate. The country is the birthplace of many values that we celebrate as modern, as it was the first nation in the world to outlaw slavery, the source of vast European profits. A slave revolt, unprecedented and unequaled since, transformed the colony of Saint-Domingue into Latin America’s first sovereign nation.

Haiti’s second constitution, promulgated in 1805, declared that all citizens, regardless of skin color, were to be known as nègres, prohibited foreign ownership of land and reclaimed as the country’s name the term used by the island’s indigenous people. Haiti meant “high country” to the original inhabitants, millions of Arawak who had almost all died out a century after Columbus landed in 1492.

Haiti in 1804 had few friends. The small country, in cinders after a decade of war waged successfully against Europe’s greatest powers, was surrounded by the slave economies of Jamaica, Cuba and the southern United States. Its leaders tried to make some friends by helping Simón Bolívar and others cast off colonial rule in the New World. One of the conditions of this assistance was that slavery be abolished in the nascent republics of South America. And Haitian troops, former slaves, marched east to abolish slavery in what is now the Dominican Republic, the nation with which it shares its small island.

Haiti’s first century as an independent nation was a difficult one. Bolívar did not keep his promise, and he tried to block Haiti’s formal participation in international affairs. The Dominican Republic remains a country in which racism—and dislike of all things Haitian—is tolerated or condoned. Throughout the 19th century, Haiti remained isolated by trade embargoes and the world’s refusal to recognize a country born of a slave revolt. The 20th century was no easier: Gunboat diplomacy was followed, in 1915, by U.S. military occupation. Franklin Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934, but decades of military and paramilitary dictatorships ensued. Haiti’s first democratic elections were not held until 1990.

What transpired over the next 14 years is much disputed, but Haiti’s brief experience with democracy is readily documented. We do know this: In spite of a spectacular coup attempt (by Duvaliériste and paramilitary forces) between the elections and the installation of the president-elect, the inauguration of the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide took place on February 7, 1991.

Father Aristide’s government policies reflected liberation theology and the corporal works of mercy: Ambitious programs to promote adult literacy, public health and primary education were quickly launched, as were campaigns to raise the minimum wage (opposed vigorously by Haitian and U.S. factory owners) and to promote land reform (opposed by those with large and often fallow land holdings). Tensions were high, and in September the Aristide government was overthrown by yet another military coup, this one anything but bloodless.

Thus the modern Haitian military, a creation of the U.S. occupying force in the 1930s, once again took power. (Some will note a certain symmetry here with the recent history of Rwanda. In the case of Haiti, as elsewhere in Latin America, it was the U.S. government and not France that gave assistance and training to the army.) The degree to which the first Bush administration secretly abetted the 1991 coup is much debated and may not be known for years. But there is no doubt that a CIA asset in Haiti formed and led the vicious paramilitary group named FRAPH, credited with many of the murders committed during the years following the coup.

1992 Haiti was like a burning building from which the only exit was over the Dominican Republic border or across the sea. Tens of thousands of refugees embarked for the United States. The United Nations soon condemned the U.S. policy of forcibly returning Haitian refugees and declared post-coup Haiti “a human-rights nightmare.” Hundreds of thousands of “internal refugees” fled the pro-Aristide urban slums—which were targeted by the military and paramilitary forces—for rural hiding places or the neighboring Dominican Republic, famously hostile to Haitians.

A change in U.S. policy

During endless negotiations orchestrated by the United Nations and the Organization of American States the military dictators refused to budge. Then Bill Clinton, who had promised during his U.S. presidential campaign to grant sanctuary to Haitian asylum seekers and to restore constitutional rule to Haiti, took office. But the flood of unwelcome refugees to Florida forced his administration into another strategy—to stanch the flow by stopping military and paramilitary terror in Haiti.

Instrumental in shaping the policy that eventually led to the re-establishment of constitutional rule in Haiti was John Shattuck, former vice chairman of Amnesty International. He joined the Clinton administration in June 1993 as assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Within 18 months after Clinton took office, Shattuck recalls, “disaster had struck in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia and China. Human-rights conflicts were erupting or escalating in virtually every part of the world.”

Since Haiti is a close neighbor with strong ties to the United States, the crisis in “our backyard,” just then generating huge numbers of refugees, loomed larger than the catastrophe evolving in Rwanda. Clinton, says Shattuck, favored using military force, if necessary, to restore democracy in Haiti. “The strategy had many opponents inside the Beltway, but the president knew it was time to reach over their heads and take it to the public.”

How did Clinton come to feel so strongly about this matter when Washington’s power elite saw little reason to waste time and energy, or to jeopardize American lives, on account of Haiti? On September 14, 1994, the day before Clinton was to present his proposal to the U.S. public, Shattuck brought him photographs of the atrocities taking place there.

“I spread my photos of the disfigured faces and bodies of Haitians who had recently been attacked by the FRAPH on a coffee table in the Oval Office,” Shattuck says. “Examining them closely one at a time, the president swore quietly, ‘Those bastards,’ and vowed that Haiti’s reign of terror would be brought to an end. The statistics I summarized for the president spoke for themselves. . . . As I talked, the president stared at the hacked and mutilated bodies of men, women and children trapped on an island ruled by thugs.”

And so the U.S. military deed was done. Constitutional rule was restored to Haiti in 1994. Not a single American life was lost to hostile fire during the course of the operation.

But there are many ways to undermine a popular democracy. What followed was a decade of “structural adjustment” programs forced on Haiti by the same international community which had declared that Haitian democracy should be restored. Aristide served out what little was left of his term and became the first Haitian president to hand over power to another elected president.

Aristide was re-elected by a landslide in 2000. But he pulled little economic weight, since the bulk of his support came from the poor rather than Haiti’s wealthy elite, notoriously reluctant to pay taxes. The “new” U.S. policy gurus on Haiti, who came into the White House with the next Bush administration, were precisely those who’d disparaged the left-leaning Haitian populist during the first Bush administration. A virtual embargo on aid or credits to the cash-poor Aristide government ensued.

Haiti in 2004 was the most impoverished nation in the hemisphere; the aid embargo was strangling the country. Shortly after its bicentennial celebration, Haiti endured its 33rd coup d’état and lost tens of thousands to violence, floods and epidemic disease.

Questions and ironies abound. Haiti was the first state in the Western Hemisphere to put into practice the modern notion of rights: the first to proclaim universal equality among the races, the first to offer a sanctuary to oppressed refugees. Then why is Haiti the hemisphere’s most HIV-affected nation? Why does Haiti, the source of much of 18th-century France’s wealth, now stand as one of the poorest and most volatile countries on the face of the earth? Why is political stability so elusive, and why are violence and rights violations so endemic? Why is it so difficult, even when the tools of the trade are made available, to practice good medicine and public health in the Western Hemisphere’s neediest nation?

We might seek to answer these questions by asking “what went wrong” in Haitian politics and culture. But such narrowly focused investigations give less truthful answers than an attempt to understand Haiti’s history and its place in the modern world economy—the webs of power that link us all. Simply put, Haiti’s poor majority is by no means to blame for the mess it finds itself in, today or at any point in the last 200 years.

Not all the news from Haiti is bad. I know from my own experience that it is possible to deliver high-quality health care in rural central Haiti, where there are neither paved roads nor electricity. Haiti also can claim to have led the charge against AIDS in the poor world, having launched some of the first integrated prevention-and-care programs. A new funding mechanism, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, allowed Haiti to ramp up long-standing efforts to prevent new infections and to improve care for the sick.

Even as some poor nations seemed ready to concede defeat in the struggle against what had become the world’s leading infectious cause of adult death, Haiti could point to real victories. The corporal works of mercy, at least many of them, helped to promote these victories. But is mercy enough?

This article was part of the longer piece published in Autumn 2006, If We Fail to Act.

Paul Farmer is the founding director of Partners in Health, an international charity organization.

I’d like to give a tiny Golden Globe to all the fine people who put together these incredibly detailed Avatar Lego dioramas. That’s my kind of 3D.

Many of these are repurposed from older Lego sets, such as Halo and (gasp!) Toy Story, which in a way is an apt metaphor for Avatar itself, no? Either way, another win for the hobbyists! [Flickr via The Brothers Brick]

ASUS’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) showed off some new gaming notebooks at CES, with specs available including Intel i7 processor, Direct X 11 and 3D graphics, high definition audio and HDD support for up to 1Tb of storage. Gizmag took the opportunity to have a closer look…

Tags: 3D,
Asus,
Blu-ray,
CES 2010,
Core i7,
DDR3,
Gaming,
GeForce,
HD,
High Definition,
Intel,
LED backlit,
Notebook,
NVIDIA,
SATA,
Stealth

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