Verzeichnis
Sci-Tech TodayTech News by Sci-Tech Today (http://www.sci-tech-today.com).
At the same time, the news gets worse for one-time champion Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry devices' share slipped to single digits at 6.4 percent, less than half its market share in the first quarter of 2011.
More than eight of every 10 smartphones shipped in the quarter were powered by Google's Android operating system, which is available on a range of devices on multiple carriers from many manufacturers, said International Data Corp., based on its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
The company said Android's method of making the smartphone experience "intuitive and seamless" was the key to its success as competitors have struggled to challenge them. That means ensuring a steady supply of apps and content.
"In order for operating system challengers to gain share, their creators and hardware partners need to secure developer loyalty," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker program, in a statement releasing the study. "This is true because developer intentions or enthusiasm for a particular operating system is typically a leading indicator of hardware sales success."
Apple's iOS, however, continued to show solid growth, with a boost from 18 percent to 23 percent year-over-year, coming in at an impressive second place given that Apple only makes one device.
Last week Gartner gave it a 56 percent global share.
The news is less encouraging not only for BlackBerry but for Microsoft, whose Windows Mobile and newer Windows Phone 7 devices combined barely showed a pulse with a 2.2 percent share of the market, more or less the same as its 2.6 percent share in the first quarter of last year, despite Microsoft's partnership with Nokia and its Mango update. ...
IBM announced new software, dubbed IBM Commerce on Cloud, designed to improve data sharing and automate complex marketing and supply chain processes in the cloud. The idea is to help marketers improve customer service, increase marketing effectiveness and reduce operational costs.
IBM is in a unique position to provide value as it manages massive amounts of data and client transactions in cloud environments, including more than $100 billion in commerce transactions a year and 4.5 million daily client transactions. But is the story too complex to sell to its target audience?
IBM Commerce on Cloud promises the benefits of cloud economies, such as low upfront capital investment, pay-for-use models, and instant and ongoing scalability. While purchase motivations are different for B2B and B2C companies, IBM noted, their sales and marketing programs are becoming virtually identical.
IBM also improved several of its on-cloud collaboration networks in a move to accelerate collaboration and digital information sharing across demand and supply processes to offset the unpredictable nature of commerce. Big Blue also announced new pricing and trade promotion collaboration capabilities for DemandTec.
Finally, IBM is offering a new certified Digital Data Exchange Partner program that works to allow marketers to manage their marketing, promotions and customer behavioral analytics. The exchange also includes a "gold tag" approach designed to assure enterprises that analytics and marketing partners are all operating off the same, relevant data.
We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT who attended the Smarter Commerce Summit, to get his thoughts on the event...
Experts and everyday Facebook users says holiday posts are a contagious phenomenon, encouraging users to mark every celebratory moment online. "Likes" for Facebook's own flag-emblazoned Memorial Day page passed 102,000 by this week.
"The pressure is on to show you remember the birthday or national holiday," says Sara Linton, 28, of Oakland.
Linton says she'll post an image of one of her most precious possessions, a letter from her grandfather, Ted Linton, to his wife, her grandmother Thora, on VJ Day in 1945.
"I'm proud we get to honor people and remember what they did," Linton says. "Posting something unique and real makes Facebook less superficial."
Holiday posts are about the urge to be known, like getting a tattoo or putting a bumper sticker on the car says Sam Gosling, a psychology professor at University of Texas.
Ed Reiman presents his Facebook and Twitter identity as a husband, a grandfather and a retired businessman in Portland, Ore., and -- perhaps, most telling of all -- as a Vietnam War veteran.
Reiman, 65, tweeted at #USWarstories this week: "Was in Vietnam in the Army '67/'68 thru "Tet" survived think about it and friends I lost there everyday, but have lived well, raised a family have 'grands' and am now retired. I am blessed."
He has mixed feelings about the outpouring of Memorial Day posts.
"I think most folks are sincere, but I also think some people are trying to get rid of their own guilt for not speaking up sooner against the Vietnam War or for turning a cold shoulder to those veterans for 20 or 30 years," Reiman says.
Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.
And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.
"There were a whole lot of people upset by this study," lead researcher Roberta Estes said. "They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American."
Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border. But it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry.
In recent decades, interest in the origin of the Melungeons has risen dramatically with advances both in DNA research and in the advent of Internet resources that allow individuals to trace their ancestry without digging through dusty archives.
G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who's spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn't part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn't a new phenomenon.
"All of us are multiracial," he said. "It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history."
Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black...
It succeeded in making the first commercial delivery into the cosmos.
U.S. astronaut Donald Pettit used the space station's 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon after a few hours of extra checks and maneuvers. The two vessels came together while sailing above Australia.
"Looks like we've got us a dragon by the tail," Pettit announced from 250 miles up once he locked onto Dragon's docking mechanism.
"You've made a lot of folks happy down here over in Hawthorne and right here in Houston," radioed NASA's Mission Control. "Great job guys."
NASA controllers clapped as their counterparts at SpaceX's control center in Hawthorne, Calif. -- including SpaceX's billionaire maestro, Elon Musk, of PayPal fame -- lifted their arms in triumph and jumped out of their seats to exchange high fives.
This is the first time a private company has attempted to send a vessel to the space station, an achievement previously reserved for a small, elite group of government agencies. And it's the first U.S. craft to visit the station since the final shuttle flight last July.
The astronauts wasted no time getting the Dragon capsule into position for actual docking to the space station. The unmanned capsule is carrying 1,000 pounds of supplies on this unprecedented test flight.
On Thursday, the capsule came within 1 1/2 miles of the space station in a practice fly-by. It returned to the neighborhood early Friday so Pettit, along with Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers could capture it with a robot arm. First, the capsule went through a series of stop-and-go demonstrations to prove it was under good operating control.
NASA ordered extra checks of the Dragon's imaging systems as the capsule drew ever closer to the...
The revelations come via Google's Transparency Report, which shows when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. This year, Google expanded the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, Google is disclosing the number of requests it get from copyright owners -- and the organizations that represent them -- to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content.
"We're starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason," Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post. "So we're providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which Web sites."
The Transparency Report shows a rapid increase in the number of requests from copyright holders. Von Lohmann said it's not unusual for Google to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked Google to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, Google has received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 Web sites.
"Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don't want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we've always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," von Lohmann said. "At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and...
An app to help you land a parking spot? San Francisco-based KurbKarma says it connects people leaving desirable parking spots with people clamoring for them, rewarding both sides for the exchange. The app's goal is to help you find and reserve the right parking spot in cities such as New York and San Francisco, and find it with built-in navigation. The person who gives up the spot to you is "rewarded" with a KarmaKredit of $1. The free iPhone app is now available in the Apple App Store, and you get 10 KarmaKredits for signing up.
But will someone actually wait for a KurbKarma member to show up before they pull out of a space? The company says it designed the app to publish your spot to the community in less than 5 seconds. If no one reserves your space, no harm done. And the app reminds you what color and model vehicle you are trying to spot. But is a $1 KarmaKredit enough of an incentive to make this parking social network work? Only good parking karma will tell.
For all the many places these days that let you tap into the Internet, a wireless connection to cyberspace still isn't ubiquitous. San Francisco start-up Open Garden promises to connect all nearby smartphones, tablets and computers in an encrypted "peer-to-peer mesh" network that would let anyone with the Open Garden app access the Internet for free. In effect, the network is pooling the Internet for everyone to use, with all capable devices -- those that have downloaded the app --...
The new findings address a long-standing debate about whether great apes possess human-like personalities or if such perceived behavior is an anthropomorphic projection of human observers, they said.
Using a statistical method to remove any biases in human observers of apes' behavior, researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland said their study suggests humans and apes really do share "personality dimensions," the BBC reported Wednesday.
"[Chimpanzees] have the same social problems that we do. They want to make friends and find mates and sort of gain position within their society," said Mark Adams, who conducted the research while studying for his doctorate at Edinburgh.
Alexander Weiss, a senior lecturer at the university who also worked on the study, agrees that chimpanzee personality is "highly similar" to that of humans.
Researchers categorize human personality into five "dimensions," he said. "Those dimensions are neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness."
The shared personality dimensions between chimps and humans are likely due to genetic similarities, Weiss said.
"Humans and chimps share a common ancestor about 4 [million] to 6 million years ago."
The research "vindicates both the view that chimpanzees have personalities and perhaps the more controversial statement that their personalities are quite similar to those of humans," Weiss said.
A beautiful but venomous jellyfish, a night-blooming orchid and an ancient walking cactus creature are also on the list released Wednesday by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.
"The top 10 is intended to bring attention to the biodiversity crisis and the unsung species explorers and museums who continue a 250-year tradition of discovering and describing the millions of kinds of plants, animals and microbes with whom we share this planet," Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist who directs the institute, said in an ASU release.
An international committee made their selection from more than 200 nominations of "species that capture our attention because they are unusual or because they have traits that are bizarre," said Mary Liz Jameson of Wichita State University, who headed the committee.
"Some of the new species have interesting names; some highlight what little we really know about our planet," she said.
A new fungus species looking more like a sponge than a typical mushroom has been named Spongiforma squarepantsii, after the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.
A monkey found in the high mountains of Myanmar, Rhinopithecus stryker, is distinctive for its mostly black fur and white beard and for sneezing when it rains.
A strikingly beautiful yet venomous jellyfish has been named Tamoya ohboya, a name selected by a teacher as part of a citizen science project who assumed that people who are stung exclaim "Oh boy!"
The study of about 24,000 people ages 35 to 64 found those who regularly took calcium supplements were 86% more likely to have a heart attack than those who didn't. Those who took only calcium supplements were twice as likely to have a heart attack as those who didn't take any vitamin supplements. Calcium supplements have been linked to kidney stones and bloating in other studies, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"Calcium supplements have been widely embraced by doctors and the public, on the grounds that they are a natural and therefore safe way of preventing osteoporatic fractures," the authors write. "We should return to seeing calcium as an important component of a balanced diet."
The study, aimed at seeing if calcium supplements affect cardiovascular risk, found no direct link between the supplements and heart attacks, nor did they identify brands of supplements. Participants answered questions about supplement use and diet in an 11-year health study.
The study did not look at what caused the heart attacks, but "supplements cause calcium levels to soar above the normal range, and it is this flooding effect which might ultimately be harmful," the authors write.
"Doctors who work with the elderly and people who are postmenopausal routinely tell them to take a calcium supplement," says Linda Russell, a rheumatologist and osteoporosis specialist at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. "It's really time to re-examine that philosophy. Other studies about calcium have been suggesting this in recent years, but maybe this study really should get doctors to rethink this approach."
Strategies for preventing bone thinning in postmenopausal women have recently come under review; the Food and Drug Administration warned in...
