January 2012
One Per Cent: FBI releases plans to monitor social... →
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Jerry Yang resigns from Yahoo | Technology | The... →
The end of an internet era has come with the resignation of Jerry Yang, the 43-year-old co-founder of Yahoo, from his position on the company’s board after 16 years.
Yang’s reign as chief executive, between June 2007 and January 2009, included the disastrous decision – from Yahoo shareholders’ point of view – to reject a $44.6bn (£29.1bn) takeover offer from Microsoft in...
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New Process Makes Heat-Harvesting Materials... →
High-efficiency thermoelectric materials could lead to new types of cooling systems, and new ways to scavenge waste heat for electricity. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have now developed an easy, inexpensive process to make such materials. The materials made by the RPI team already perform as well as those on the market, and the new process, which involves...
Is Too Much Plus a Minus for Google? | Epicenter |... →
On Tuesday, Google announced something called Search, plus Your World (SPYW). It marked a startling transformation of the company’s flagship product, Google Search, into an amplifier of social content. Google’s critics — as well as some folks generally well-intentioned towards Google — have complained that the social content it amplifies is primarily Google’s own product, Google+.
Google: Sorry, Twitter, We Don't Index the @... →
If you haven’t noticed that Google+ pages are increasingly becoming a part of Google search results, you may have noticed Google and Twitter’s increasingly public spat about it. Twitter argues that by promoting Google+ in search results, Google isn’t providing the most relevant social results….
Magnetic Memory Miniaturized to Just 12 Atoms -... →
Dwave systems publishes a paper showing 84 qubit... →
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BBC News - Google persuades Spanish bank BBVA to... →
Spanish banking giant BBVA is switching its 110,000 staff to use Google’s range of enterprise software. The deal is the biggest that the search giant has signed with one company for its cloud-computing services, where software is offered as a service via the internet. The bank told the BBC it will use Google’s tools only for internal communication
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Samsung Reveals the Future of Smart TV at CES 2012... →
Today, at the 2012 International CES, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, proclaimed a new era of entertainment by placing TV at the center of the home ecosystem and breaking down boundaries between connected devices. Samsung Electronics President Boo-Keun Yoon unveiled the future of Smart TV on the CES press conference stage,...
BBC News - CES 2012: New technologies unleashed at... →
The first technologies have been unveiled at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Waterproof smartphone coatings, diet-aiding armbands and a social network that warns drivers of the latest police speed-traps were all on show. Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer will present his company’s last keynote at the three-day event. The firm’s pullout has led...
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Thomas Hills: Why human intelligence isn't... →
Psychologist Thomas Hills explains the evolutionary trade-offs in increasing intelligence
Why Bootstrapping Is Just As Over-Rated As Raising... →
This Week in Review: Lessons from Murdoch on... →
shaneguiter:
Nielsen released its list of the most-visited sites and most-used devices of the year, with familiar names — Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube — at the top. And Pew tallied the most-talked-about subjects on social media: Osama bin Laden on Facebook and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak on Twitter topped the lists, and Pew noted that many of the top topics were oriented around specific people...
BBC News - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes... →
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has resolved to take an online computer coding course. The mayor is joining more than 180,000 people currently taking part in Code Year, a campaign to encourage more people to program. “My New Year’s resolution is to learn to code with Codeacademy in 2012!” he wrote on Twitter. Participants in the course receive an interactive lesson each week,...
Dynamic face substitution →
Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro play around with a face tracker and color interpolation to replace their own faces, in real-time, with celebrities such as that of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton. Awesome. And creepy.
See Castro’s video of him doing the same thing, but with a different blending algorithm. His looks more like a maleable mask rather than a face substitution.
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The Daddy Complex: An Announcement To The... →
Isn’t that the truth!
No such thing as a good parent…just a parent doing the best they possibly can.
thedaddycomplex:
I’d like to make an announcement to the parenting blogging/Tumbling community:
I have no idea what I’m doing.
I’m Forrest Gumping my way through this fatherhood thing and I’ve set the bar pretty low simply to avoid panic and depression. Seriously, the day counts...
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Top 10 TED Talks of 2011 To Inspire Tech Startups →
Startup folks, looking for inspiration for 2012? TED talks are an awesome source of inspiration. Here are ten from Mark Soper’s Blog.
Great work Mark!
English Pronunciation
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
http: //www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/
A virus for cyberdefense? Japan has something... →
infoneer-pulse:
For several years, Japan has been developing a computer virus that can track, identify, and disable cyberthreats, according to a story in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

Fujitsu reportedly is working on the cyberweapon for Japan’s Defense Ministry under a 178.5 million yen ($2.32 million) project initiated in fiscal 2008 by the ministry’s Technical Research and Development...
BBC News - Google adds IBM patents as it looks to... →
Google has gained hundreds of patents from IBM as it continues its intellectual property spending spree. It has acquired 187 patents and 36 applications, adding to the 1,000 it purchased from IBM last summer. The latest patents include a system for “using semantic networks to develop a social network”. Google has spent billions building its technology rights portfolio, including a...
TalkTalk ad campaign for 'UK's safest broadband'... →
TalkTalk has been told it cannot claim that its new internet security system HomeSafe is the “UK’s safest broadband”, after rival BT won a ruling from the advertising watchdog determining that it offers only “basic security”. The internet service provider has been heavily promoting the online security service, which aims to block children from accessing adult content,...
Microsoft accuses Comet of making and selling... →
chaoticplanet:
Uh oh Comet, not only do you have horrendous customer service, but you have also been ripping off OS disks! Bad Comet.
Infoposters Are Not Infographics: A Comparison →
Cisco's Alternative To Skype Has Quietly Been... →
Cisco has quietly pulled the plug on its ill-fated consumer home videoconferencing system, Umi. This could be the final blow to the company’s once-grand consumer plans.
Umi was introduced a little over a year ago, in October, 2010. And it always seemed like the brainchild of a wealthy Cisco executive with no concept of what people are willing to pay for home video conferencing.
Read...
Google caught violating its own rules →
digital-diva:
Whoops!
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that...”
– M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All - Forbes (via mediafuturist)
Tech predictions for 2012 - Telegraph →
not a bad selection…well not if you’re RIM!
Book Review – In a Persian Kitchen: favourite... →
See my latest food blog on Don’t burn it right now.
For my first post of 2012 (Happy New year by the way) I thought I would do a wee bit of a book review. My Christmas presents this year…actually I mean last year, revolved around the kitchen. I got a cool timer; a fantastic set of measuring cups that double as Russian dolls and this book on Persian cookery.
I’m not entirely sure why I...
The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful... →
In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures. It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common. Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.
The Joy of Quiet - NYTimes.com →
ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of...
Rumor: An Apple iTV in 2012? - Technology Review →
Rumors of an Apple-branded television set — as opposed to the set-top box the company already makes — are no stranger to this blog. But the rumors have taken on a fever pitch of late, with the Wall Street Journal and Digitimes adding details to the mix. The latter claims that we might even see 32-inch and 37-inch iTVs as soon as this summer. Before Steve Jobs died, he told his...
BBC News - China launches first 3D TV channel →
China has launched its first three-dimensional television channel (3D TV) on a trial basis.
The channel, operated by China Central Television (CCTV) and five local stations, aims to be launched formally over the upcoming Chinese New Year.
People who have 3D TV sets and high definition digital TV set-top boxes can watch the new service.
Countries like Japan, South Korea and India have already...
5 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012 →
2012 promises to be a very busy year in all things digital, but, as with any annum, there will be just a handful of big, memorable trends. Here, I’ve collected five such movements that are likely to make a big impact in our technologically-enhanced lives. Augmented Reality It’s now in …
December 2011
BBC News - British teenage designer of Summly app... →
Most teenagers will find any reason under the sun not to do their homework.
But 16-year-old South Londoner Nick D’Aloisio’s excuse is better than most - he has been busy developing an app which has made international headlines and attracted a big investment from a Hong Kong-based billionaire.
Summly is an iPhone app which summarises and simplifies the content of web pages and search...
BBC News - Deep-sea creatures at volcanic vent →
Remarkable images of life from one of the most inhospitable spots in the ocean have been captured by scientists.
Researchers have been surveying volcanic underwater vents - sometimes called black smokers - in the South West Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean.
The UK team found an array of creatures living in the super-heated waters, including yeti crabs, scaly-foot snails and sea cucumbers.
They...
BBC News - Experts propose free access online to... →
Patients should be able to access their medical records and request prescriptions and appointments online, a government-backed group recommends. The NHS Future Forum, which advises the government on its health reforms, says it would like to see the proposals implemented in England by 2015. Prof Steve Field, who leads the forum, said the “vision” was that patients should feel they own...
