Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is well known for starring in such movies…
Less known are his passion and advocacy for the importance of passing on to each new generation of Americans an understanding, appreciation and love of their nation’s core values and founding ideals.
The American system requires the involvement of intelligent people in citizenship and governance, Dreyfuss said…
»Read the entire article in newsleader.com.
Google Image Swirl [googlelabs.com] is an experimental feature in Google Labs which is based on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a visual, exploratory interface.
For example, for an “apple” query, images of the fruit appears next to many products or logos of Macintosh. Users can then click on any thumbnail and a cluster of images will “swirl” into view. Other examples include keywords like car or Eiffel tower.
Via The Official Google Blog and Thnkx Andrew!
See also Google Wonder Wheel, Google Similar Images, Google Fusion, Google Timeline and Google Query Visualization Graphs.
In a recent Times article ‘The future was never going to be the C5‘ actor-comedian Ben Millar offers a familiar criticism of foresight work. Inter alia he says: “For all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark utopias, dystopias, shiny suits, flying saucers and whole meals contained in a single pill. As a child of the Seventies, I was taught that as an adult in a world run by machines my main challenge would be how to spend my endless hours of leisure time…”
Yes, Ben. I’m sure you know this has all been said before ad nauseam. But more importantly, 40 years on many lessons have been learned, and it wouldn’t run foul of quality journalism standards to reflect this.
First, let’s be clear: nobody can predict the future. Anyone who says they can is a charlatan. Also, yes, unconscionably dreadful and irresponsible predictions have been made and are continually being made. But there are three problems with the ‘no-flying-car-so-there-we-can’t-predict-the-future’ argument:
(1) The kinds of predictions Millar cites are a product of a particular moment in Western thought and therefore foresight. The 1960s and early 70s were a time of Post-War American emergence, unleashing for a while a techno-futurist predictive rapture, most of which has indeed proved to be rubbish. There are still people, very famous talking-head futurists, promoting techno-rapture for the 21st century (caveat emptor) but as a whole the foresight field has moved on to become much more circumspect about what can be predicted.
Balancing techno-fantasy
Foresight practitioners are these days more likely to balance technology wowee with economic, social, and environmental friction; see systemic (often indirect or counter-intuitive) effects where once only simple cause-and-effect was seen; and create scenarios of key alternative outcomes rather than predict one.
(2) The second thing that is missed in gleefully deriding foresight work, is how many people and institutions get it right, or right enough. It’s axiomatic that in order to be successful a person or organization must have correctly assessed both key changes and rate of change in their operating environment. To take a famous case, as quoted in Future Savvy, while Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1972 erroneously forecast super-sonic passenger air travel, Herb Kelleher, founder of SouthWest Airlines, foresaw the low-cost air travel industry. Bingo. Billionaire. Similarly, behind every success one can find future thinking that, while sometimes latent, was present and correct.
(3) The purpose of foresight work is misunderstood. We cannot predict the future and it’s pointless to try. We can only assess signals of change, trends, and potential for surprises and reversals, including challenging our all-too-easily calcified mental models, and take this into a process of understanding alternative outcomes and pre-considering best strategic actions. In other words, actively stimulating the investigation and analysis of future conditions in order to create the basis of better decision-making today.
In fact sometimes the ’strategic conversation’ that results from poor predictions is instructive to managers. As I say to clients: the goal of foresight work is better decisions not better predictions.
Back-street abortionists
The reality is that there is good and bad foresight work. Yes, some futurists are the technical and moral equivalent of back street abortionists. But the good work remains, and quality foresight is a critical advantage to decision-makers. The key thing is to be able to tell good foresight work from bad.
Simplistic trashing of foresight work en bloc ignores the weight of case evidence that people and organizations can improve their management of future uncertainty and/or create a situation where they manage the future better than competitors. Further, it encourages managers to fly blind into changing environments, often resulting in spectacularly poor decisions that deeply and widely punish their dependent stakeholders.
The web portal Marshall IDX [marshallindex.com] tracks the historical popularity of words used by several thousand media sources, from months to just down to seconds ago. It aims to go beyond counting search queries to bring more transparency and understanding of the impact of news, advertisement, trends, and terms to its users.
The so-called “Marshall Index” is expressed by a number: 1 point represents 1 million individuals that got in touch with a particular term in a 24 hours time window. For example, if one searches for the word ‘Olympics’, the service will calculate an index based on how often the word is mentioned right now in online media. Via the Marshall Index it is also possible to observe words and watch their development in the media over a particular time period, from years down to seconds. By providing charts of the Marshall Index, the tool becomes interesting for many types of comparative studies like investment, medicine, music, movies, politics, and many other fields.
Users can create your own word lists in order to measure and illustrate their relativy popularity, check them against other words or benchmarks, or just explore an understanding of how word popularity fluctuates over time. Examples include the words Facebook or Facebook versus Twitter, or Obama or Obama versus Sarah Palin, while existing lists rank the popularity of movie stars and Head of States.
Marshall IDX is different from seemingly similar and well-known concepts such as Google Trends, as what people search for online, does not necessarily match with what is really popular.
See also Text Trends.
The most anticipated sale of the year is the Wal-Mart Black Friday Deals 2009. Even with a third quarter profit of $3.24 billion, their sales on items have dramatic price reductions to get the consumers out and spending. The deals will start at 5 am and last until 11 am across the nation on November 27th. These hours will correspond to local times so the east coast will be first.
One of the hottest items is the HDTV from Sanyo. This is a 50 inch set for only $598. The Emerson 32 inch LCD HDTV will be priced at $248 and the 42 inch plasma HDTV will be at $448.The Magnavox Blu-ray player is being offered for only $78. There will be selected children’s clothing for only $3. DVD’s will be priced at $2 and there is a slow cooker in the home appliance section for only $4.
If a computer is on your shopping list then there is an Acer 17.3 inch Laptop with 4 GB Ram and 320GB of memory with a built in Webcam for $498. The eMachine eME617 with a 15.6 screen a 2GB ram and a hard drive of 160GB will be priced at $198. The HP G60 with a 15.6 inch screen, 3GB of Ram and a hard drive of 250GB are going for $298.
All Bratz Dolls are at $5 each and the Barbie Beach Party Doll and Bike are for $9. The Disney Princess Board Game will have a reduced price of $5.
To help power all the toys and games the UltraAdvanced AA/AAA 6-pack batteries from Duracell will be priced at $2.50. The Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA 2-pack of batteries will be selling for $2.50.
These are just a few of the over 100 items on sale for the Wal-Mart Black Friday Deals 2009.
The Target Black Friday Deals 2009 start at 5:00 am on November the 27th. This starting time will coincide with the opening of their biggest competitor Wal-Mart. The list is long and the savings is significant. At Target there will be a Westinghouse 32 inch LCD HDTV for only $246. For that hard to find Michael Jackson CD, “BAD”, it will be available for only $6.50.
A $25 iTunes gift card is only $20. With the purchase of an Apple 32GB iPod Touch there is a free $30 gift card and with the Apple 8GB iPod Nano there is a free $15 gift card.
The selection of movies on DVD and video are too many to name but the prices start at just $3.99 and go up to $12.99.
For the home or office there is the Chefmate 12-cup coffee maker for $3.00. Also for just $3.00 are the 2 slice sandwich maker, the 2 slice toaster and the slow cooker. The Dirt Devil Versa Power 3 in 1 vac is a low $9.00.
Sterling Silver earrings are priced at just $7.49 a pair.
A 10 pack photo frames are at $12.00 and for the memories that you want to be portable with you there is the Digital Décor Color LCD key chain that holds up to 48 pictures for only $10.00.
There is also the Lexar Media 4GB micro and standard SDHC cards that come with 50 free songs download for just $10.00.
The Polaroid V130 2 inch color LCD camcorder is priced at $39.00.
If cloths are on the shopping list then there is a selection of children’s clothes for only $3.00.
These are a few of the great offers at the Target Black Friday Deals 2009.
The rapid growth of web 2.0, or social computing, allows users to play an influential role in the way commercial and public products and services are shaped. The report "The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy", published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered.
The report shows that social computing goes beyond individual networking and entertainment, as it empowers tens of millions of Europeans to support their work, health, learning and citizenship in innovative ways. The research found that social computing is reshaping work practices, as employees join communities of interest outside their organisations to improve their knowledge and skills. Social innovation enabled by social computing contributes to improved lifelong learning processes, business competitiveness, social inclusion and integration of immigrants, among others.
Facebook has just announced that it’s launching a new photo uploader, which should greatly improve stability but also the performance of the tool. The new tool is being released for testing purposes for the time being and is available in Facebook Prototypes, the social network’s testing grounds. The “New Photo Uploader” should be faster and lighter, but the biggest change the users will mostly enjoy is the the fact that they can navigate the site while the photos are being uploaded.
“At Facebook, we’re always looking for ways to make sharing more efficient. Today we’re announcing a significant upgrade to our Photos product: a new and improved photo uploader that’s available for testing as a Facebook Prototype,” Facebook’s Chris Putnam announced.
“Since Photos launched in 2005, the photo-uploading experience on Facebook has relied on the use of a third-party ActiveX control (and its sister Java applet),” he went on explaining the reasoning behind the new tool. “Over the years we have seen a growing number of complaints with this old uploader. In a recent poll, we discovered a significant percentage of users were unable to upload photos due to technical issues. Many more found it functional, but only just.”
It’s actually surprisi… (read more)
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE announce honors
BATON ROUGE – The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE, have named LSU’s Marybeth Lima the 2009 Louisiana Professor of the Year. Lima was selected from more than 300 top professors in the United States…
»Read the entire press release in LSU News.
Microsoft and Yahoo have been engaged in a strange relationship for years now, but it is finally getting close to becoming official. The two Internet giants reached an agreement last summer, in which Yahoo practically handed over its search engine to Microsoft, but they haven’t been able to actually sign it until now. The deal was originally supposed to be finalized on October 27, but the companies said they needed more time. Now though, they’re ready and the deal will be signed by the end of the week, BoomTown reports.
Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft have confirmed this, but if everything goes according to plan, which it didn’t the last time, we should see a definitive agreement this week. The reason for the delays is simple enough, it’s a massive deal and the intricacies of getting the two search engines work together while keeping their separate identities took longer than the people at Microsoft and Yahoo had anticipated.
The two companies announced a huge but not totally unexpected deal in July. In it, Yahoo will hand over the technical side of its search engine to Microsoft and Bing will provide all of the results on any Yahoo property. Yahoo will keep its custom interface and can do what ever it wants with the actual data coming from Bing. The advertising on both search engines will be se… (read more)
Recently, AT&T sued Verizon over its “There’s A Map For That” ad, that mocked AT&T’s 3G network coverage, while playing on the Apple iPhone slogan of “there’s an app for that.” It seemed like an odd thing for AT&T to do, as it really just called more attention to the ad and the differences in 3G networks. Now, to make matters even worse, a judge has refused to issue an injunction stopping the ad. That doesn’t stop the lawsuit, though, and the ad might still get taken down if AT&T wins, but it’s unlikely Verizon’s ad campaign is going to last until the lawsuit is finally decided, anyway. So for now, all it’s done is driven a lot more attention to the ad, in which Verizon comes out favorably.
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It is quite an interesting world we live in these days when even a pen has its own app store…
LiveScribe’s Pulse Smartpen Gets Smarter with the Beta Launch of an Application Store
Of course, the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen is no ordinary pen. It can record and playback the ink you write on a paper with it as well as synchronize recorded sound with the ink. I bought my pen back in May and have been getting good use out of it.
You can find its app store beta at…
http://www.livescribe.com/store
The first page of paid apps for the Pulse Smartpen (21 apps) are mostly in the 99 cent to $2.99 range with the loan outlier being the $14.95 American Heritage Spanish Dictionary.
There are also 9 free apps in the store ranging in topics/functions from a video poker game to spanish travel phrases to guitar chords for beginners.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Ribbit Mobile is a Google Voice-like service that was acquired by British Telecom. It’s service, however, is available right here in the US of A (as they say). Unlike Google Voice, Ribbit does not offer the choice of using a unique Ribbit-provided phone number or your own cell phone number.
I was fortunate enough to get a Ribbit Mobile beta service account for testing recently and followed Ribbit’s instructions to auto-forward unanswered calls from the cell phone I use as my main voice phone to Ribbit.
The initial tests of calling my phone, letting it ring until it went to voice mail, and leaving a voice mail all worked fine. Ribbit recorded my message and sent an email notification. The problem turned up with the first actual incoming call I received after setting up the service (a call from my daughter). My cell phone rang once and then stopped. My daughter said she heard a strange sound on her end and then ended the call. Both my phone and Ribbit logged it as a “missed call”. A second test confirmed this odd behavior.
Fortunately, Ribbit provides clear instructions on how to deactivate call-forward-on-no-answer. My phone rang normally and let me pick up the call as usual after deactivating Ribbit.
My action plan is to activate Ribbit for testing once a month until it seems to work as expected and then begin longer term testing of the service. Let’s hope this happens soon.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Google Maps is great for mapping out a trip, getting directions, or finding a Chinese restaurant near you, but Google Earth manages to make maps actually fun. The latest version of Google’s 3D mapping software just shed its beta tag after getting rid of most of the lingering bugs. With Google Earth 5.1 the focus is on speed, a recurring theme at the company.
“Two months ago, we released the beta version of Google Earth 5.1. The 5.1 release focused on one of our most important features: performance. The power of Google Earth is the seamless, immersive 3D fly-throughs that give you a sense of being “there,” so we made a lot of adjustments under the hood to make flying around the globe faster and smoother. Today, after a few more tweaks and bug fixes, we’re proud to say that we’re ready to remove the beta tag,” Peter Birch, Google Earth product manager, wrote.
The latest version is just an incremental update so most users won’t notice any change. The work has been done under the hood ironing out the kinks and making sure that the plug-in is stable enough. Of course, at Google the beta tag doesn’t really mean anything, Gmail was labeled as beta for five years, but it does meant that Google Earth users get a more polished experience.
The focus in Google Earth 5.1 as a whole was on the underlyin… (read more)
In my post on RIA Services: From Vision to Architecture, a while back (right after MIX09), I mentioned that I like to think of RIA Services as RAD for RIA. At that point we had a very early preview of framework bits with little tools support. A large part of jumpstarting your development actually centers around good tooling. VS2010 brings tooling for RIA Services (now: WCF RIA Services).
Scott Hanselman demonstrated some key features used in building a Contacts application (as shown on the right) during the keynote at PDC09.
The latest version of RIA Services is now available for download. It works on .NET 4 and VS2010 as well. You can also check out a video tutorial on using RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010.
In this post, I want to highlight the range of tooling features that span from the start to getting an application up and running.
I bought my Droid on its first day of availability with the idea that I might return it afer a few months (and pay the early termination fee). But, the more I use the Droid and learn how the Android ecosystem has changed since the first few weeks of the G1 back in October 2008, the more convinced that I’m going to stick with the Droid for more than a few weeks. One of my most frequently used web services is the Evernote note-taking and web-clipping service (among other features). Evernote’s mobile friendly site…
…looks pretty good on the Droid. However, unlike the desktop/netbook environment (where I prefer to use Evernote’s web page instead of their Windows and Mac apps), I prefer to use Evernote apps on my mobile devices (iPhone & Windows Mobile so far).
After a quick search, I found Evernote’s beta release of their Android client at…
http://s.evernote.com/androidbeta
It seems to be working well on my Droid (running Android 2.0) so far.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Mention cloning to anyone and they will probably think of a little sheep called Dolly and a mad professor in a white apron. But the world of cloning has been going on a lot longer than most people realise and the crazy scientists have been really really busy. So here, after a brief introduction to cloning, is a list of some of the fake animals we know about that.
The cloning of animals you’re thinking about is normally a specific form of cloning called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). A somatic cell is any cell in the body except sperm cells or the egg cells. Each somatic cell has two sets of chromosomes. The idea is kind of simple. Take a somatic cell from an adult animal. Remove its nucleus – the brain of the cell containing the DNA which makes the animal the way it is, then take an empty nucleus-less egg cell and insert the DNA inside it. Then do a little bit of laboratory business and insert the new egg into a surrogate mother animal. After gestation a new animal is born exactly the same as the animal which donated its DNA. Weird, yes. Incredible, yes.
In April 2009 Injaz, or ‘Achievement’ in English, became the world’s first ever cloned camel. Injaz, a female one-humped camel, was born in Dubai on April 8, 2009 at the city’s Camel Reproduction Centre following investment from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum – he of international horse racing fame. Injaz’s real mother was slaughtered for camel meat in 2005, but scientists saved the DNA and injected it into an empty egg cell of Injaz’s surrogate camel mother. With camel racing big business in Dubai the implications of camel cloning are significant. And if you’re thinking you’ve heard of the Camel Reproduction Centre before it’s because it produced the world’s first ever Cama, a Camel Llama hybrid.
If you thought cloning was a relatively new phenomenon then you were wrong. Depending of course on your view of the word ‘relatively’. Because cloning was going on way back in the 60s. In China an embryologist called Tong Dizhou cloned a carp. It was the world’s first ever cloned fish and the first time such a complex organism had ever been cloned. Then ten years later he inserted the DNA of an Asian carp into a European carp mother – the world’s first ever cross carp. Although if you keep them out of water long enough…
Unfortunately for Europeans much of Dr Dizhou’s work was never translated into English meaning Western scientists had no idea such advances were being made.
Carbon Copy or Cc surprised everyone when she was born because she didn’t look or act anything like her genetic mum. For a start she had a grey stripe running down her white back whereas her mother, Rainbow, sported more of a gold and brown style. Then, when Cc started to play, she was found to be rather frisky. Rainbow on the other hand had always been shy and disinterested. Rainbow was quite a solid kitty. Cc was sleek. And so the illusion of cloning was smashed. But not for the makers of Cc. Genetic Savings and Clone claimed this was evidence of what they had stated all along, that cloned cats and dogs don’t arrive with all the old tricks. Still for a company taking a mere $1000 from deluded pet owners seeking to revive their beloved dead pets it was all a bit of a nuisance.
Cow cloning has been going strong for a number of years although just what that number is appears to be a bit of a mystery. Japan claimed to have produced the world’s first cloned cows when in July 1998 a pair of calves were born using the same technique that produced Dolly the Sheep a year before.
One very important cow was born on July 7 1999. Daisy (the calf pictured above), a Holston heifer, was cloned from a 13-year-old cow named Aspen. Scientists had often worried that cloning the DNA of an elderly animal would result in health problems for the newborn animal. But Daisy proved doubters wrong when she was able to give birth naturally two years later.
Jersey females Millie and Emma were cloned in 2001 using standard cell-culturing, a slightly different technique to the ‘Dolly The Sheep cloning’ of most animals. Emma, an acronym of Experimental Manipulation of Mastitis Abatement, was born to help scientists discover the genetic susceptibility to the bovine disease mastitis. Cow cloning is money with improved beef and milk yields sought across the world. Unfortunately Millie died. But then what hope have you got if you’re born a cow?
Dewey became the world’s first ever cloned deer when he was born on May 23 2003 at the College of Veterinary Medicine in Texas. Dewey is a white-tailed deer and became the fifth animal the college had successfully cloned, the others being a pig, cattle, goats and a cat. Dewey is a copy of a male white-tailed deer from southern Texas. He was created using fibroplast cells which were isolated from skin samples derived from the dead buck, expanded in culture then frozen and stored in nitrogen. And best of all he’s quite cute, isn’t he?
In Korea people eat dogs, so it was something of a surprise when in August 2005 scientists announced to the world they had successfully created the world’s first ever cloned canine, Snuppy. No, not Snoopy. Snuppy. It was a long and difficult process with scientists using nearly 2000 eggs to produce 1095 cloned embryos which were inserted into 123 dogs. Of these only three became pregnant and of these one miscarried, one was born but died after only 22 days, and then there was Snuppy, an apparently healthy cloned Afghan Hound born by a Golden Retriever!
The world later woke to the shock news that Korean stem cell scientist Dr Woo Suk Hwang had fabricated each of his major discoveries, all that is apart from Snuppy. Good boy.
Libby and Lilly became the first cloned ferrets in 2004 to apparently help scientists study human respiratory diseases. Yes, your respiratory system is the same as a ferret’s. Lovely.
Scientist John Gurdon claimed he cloned tadpoles way back in the 1970s. In techniques that would later be developed to clone Dolly, Gurdon successfully transplanted the nucleus of one frog into the egg cell of another. There has since been some scepticism surrounding the success of Gurdon’s attempts and it’s true that none of his tadpoles ever made it into frogs. But what he did do was show what could and would later be done. If that makes sense.
America cloned goats first in 1999. And to prove it they gave them all the same name. Mira and Mira and Mira were all born within two months of each other. The aim was medical. The three Mira’s were created to produce a substance called antithrombin III in their milk, a protein which stops human blood clotting.
Unfortunately Noah, the first endangered animal clone, died shortly after his birth. The baby bull gaur (a wild ox native to Asia) was born in January 2001 but due to complications surrounding his birth lived for only 48 hours. He died after suffering dysentery. It was a blow for scientists hoping to use cloning to save animals from extinction. But they’re still trying.
Born on May 28 2003 Prometea (the female version of Prometheus) became the world’s first cloned horse. The Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Italy created 841 embryos of which only 14 could be used and only four were implanted into surrogate mothers. Only Prometea the Halfinger foal was born. Horse racing has so far said no to cloning preferring the more traditional methods of reproduction but with millions of pounds being made on the mating rights of horses surely cloning is the nearly natural next step.
So the sheep might have gotten all the fame but it was Masha the Mouse who really paved the way for mammal cloning. Back in 1986 Russian scientists Chaylakhyan, Veprencev, Sviridova and Nikitin cloned Masha from an embryo cell.
Much later, in December 1997 in Hawaii, a mouse called Cumulina (pictured above) became the first mouse to be cloned from an adult cell. During her life she gave birth to two litters and died naturally in her sleep in 2000.
Little Idaho Gem celebrated a double when he was born in May 2003 becoming both the world’s first cloned mule and the world’s first clone related to the horse family. Financed by a wealthy mule-racing magnate, Idaho Gem, along with another cloned mule, Idaho Star, was sent to a trainer for a successful career on the track.
Pigs and humans have more in common than a bacon sandwich. In fact the animals are now extremely important as providers of organs for human transplants. On March 5, 2000 an Edinburgh-based company called PPL Therapeutics announced it had successfully cloned five piglets – Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrell and Dotcom. Since then science and technology have moved on and pigs are being specifically engineered so that their tissues are not rejected by the human body.
The star of the show Dolly The Sheep, so famous her name is referred to in capitals, became an overnight sensation when in July 1996 she became the first ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. However it wasn’t until a year later that scientists mentioned the news to an ignorant and cynical public. Television channels were full of Dolly eating grass, Dolly looking at the camera, Dolly standing in hay. She became the most famous sheep ever to walk the planet and the planet loved her and hated her in equal measure. After six years at the top Dolly succumbed to illness and died. It was a sad end but a not unfamiliar story of the new celebrity age.
ANDi (inserted DNA, in reverse) was named as the first genetically modified monkey when he was born in October 2000. He was created specifically to carry one extra gene from another species. Born in the lab ANDi helped scientists pursue further tests for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease.
In October 2005 two wolves in Korea defied the laws of natural selection when they were successfully cloned to avoid extinction. Snuwolf and Snuwolffy were born in the Korea Zoo where they still live. Well one of them does. Unfortunately Snuwolf died in August 2009 from an infection which was absolutely nothing to do with the cloning process according to the scientists.
YouTube video courtesy of fringland
The Android smartphone ecosystem has changed a lot (and for the better) between my brief T-Mobile G1 ownership period in October 2008 and today. While the Android app population is nowhere near the size of the iPhone’s, it is big enough and rich enough to keep things interesting. One big hole, though, is the lack of a decent Skype VoIP client. And, don’t get me started on that Skype Lite thing for Android. I don’t even know what to make of it.
Fortunately, even though Skype appears to be ignoring Android, fring is not…
And, fring can apparently make VoIP calls over Skype, MSN, and Google Talk. It also works over 3G or WiFi and is free. Very nice!
I downloaded and installed a copy from the Android Market and plan to give it a test (and perhaps record one my mini-podcast sound sample episodes).
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The ACTA juggernaut continues to roll ahead, despite public indignation about an agreement supposedly about counterfeiting that has turned into a regime for global Internet regulation. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has already announced that the next round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations will take place in January — with the aim of concluding the deal “as soon as possible in 2010.”
For the rest of us, with access to only leaks and whispers of what ACTA is about, there are many troubling questions. How can such a radical proposal legally be kept so secret from the millions of Net users and companies whose rights and freedoms stand to be affected? Who decides what becomes the law of the land and by what influence? Where is the public oversight for an agreement that would set the legal rules for the knowledge economy? And what can be done to fix this runaway process?
We wrestle with these questions in an essay on “The Impact of ACTA on the Knowledge Economy”(PDF here) in the Yale Journal of International Law Online. We explain how ACTA got this far, in this form, and propose four mechanisms for USTR transparency reforms, that will give the public a voice in ACTA, if U.S. citizens — and their elected officials — speak loudly and quickly enough.
In brief, the ACTA process has been deliberately more secretive than customary practices in international decision-making bodies to evade the debates about intellectual property (IP) at established multilateral institutions. The Office of the USTR has chosen to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement. Because of a loophole in democratic accountability on sole executive agreements, the Office of the USTR can sign off on an IP Enforcement agenda without any formal congressional involvement at all. But the negotiations do not have to be secret, and the sole executive agreement process does have mechanisms for oversight: they have not been used in ACTA, but can and should be.
People remember how H1N1, commonly called Swine Flu, hit around 18 countries around the globe in 2009. Hundreds of people became very sick. It especially affected those people who have existing health conditions. It was why some schools and business establishments were temporarily closed due to fear of catching the highly communicable influenza virus. Travel overseas was even temporarily banned to avoid the flu from spreading out to other countries. To avoid this from happening again, a vaccine was formulated by four leading drugmakers. Sanofi-Aventis SA, CSL Ltd, Medimmune and Novartis AG were given clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration. GlaxoSmithKline Plc is also helping develop the H1N1 vaccine. These 5 drug manufacturing companies are willing to provide more than enough supply of vaccines for millions of people.
Although the vaccine is really intended to help resolve the H1N1 issue, people just can’t help but be doubtful. They think the vaccine isn’t safe enough. These people can’t be blamed. Their life is at stake. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is strongly encouraging people to get the new H1N1 shot. A recent campaign was done in order to increase people’s level of awareness regarding the availability of the vaccine.
The vaccine comes in two forms. One is through intranasal and the other one is through injection. It is mostly aimed at those people who are within the high risk bracket. People within the high risk bracket are those with present health conditions, pregnant women, kids and elderly people. Generally, these people have a low immune system. It makes them very susceptible to the influenza virus.
One of the specific reasons why there are people against the vaccine is because of its mercury component. Exposure to mercury is believed to cause mental defects to an unborn child or an infant. But people from CDC strongly deny this misleading information which is being tossed around. First of all, it was able to pass the quality standards of the Food and Drug Administration. This rule out the possibility of the flu shot to be unsafe. Also, they firmly believe on the safety of the vaccine based from past records. Basically, it was made on the basis of how past flu vaccines were done. The expected side effects were fever and soreness/redness where the injection was done. Apart from that, these public health officials believe that all should be well.
When you look at the bright side, this vaccine indeed helps a great deal. The vaccine makes us immune to H1N1. Those people who are expected to get the disease are those who are not immune to the virus at all. But the decision to get a vaccine is still yours. You have yourself and your family to protect. In case you have questions regarding this new swine flu vaccine, it is best to address your concern directly to the local health authorities. They may be able to supply documents supporting the history of the vaccine. So that finally, you can decide whether you want this new vaccine or not.
From: H1N1 vaccine
