Sci-Tech Today

Google Upgrades Search with Knowledge Graph

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:19:42 -0500

On the heels of major revisions to Microsoft's Bing search engine, Google is revamping its own. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced the launch of its Knowledge Graph, which is intended to help users quickly and easily discover new information.

In a posting on the Google Official Blog, Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal wrote that, instead of primarily focusing on matching keywords to queries, the enhancement enables the search engine to use an intelligent model that "understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings."

'Critical First Step'

Singhal said the Knowledge Graph "knows about" a variety of things, people, and places, such as landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art, and other subjects. The Graph's current inventory of knowledge, he said, is only the "critical first step" toward creating the next generation of search, which understands the world in ways closer to how people do.

The Graph is more than just calling up data in Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and other supplies of knowledge. It's been populated with more than 500 million knowledge objects, with more than 3.5 billion facts about the relationships between those objects.

The first step in this new kind of search, Google said, is understanding the differences in meaning for a given query. For instance, is the search for "Taj Mahal" about the monument or the musician? The Graph will give choices.

Next, the Graph provides summaries containing key facts that a user might want about a particular subject. The example given by Singhal is Marie Curie. The Graph will deliver birth and death dates, as well as information on her education and scientific discoveries. There's also knowledge about her relationship with other entities, such as her Nobel-prize-winning relatives.

'People Also Search for'

The Graph's ability to determine what is...

Samsung Tops Mobile Market In First Quarter, Gartner Says

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:51:49 -0500

Samsung is king of mobile phones, while Apple owns a not-too shabby 7.9 percent of the global phone market. And Android remains the top operating system, with more than half the market.

Those are some of the findings of a report on the global mobile market in the first quarter of the year by Gartner.

Nokia Is Slipping

South Korea-based Samsung's sales to end users amounted to 20.7 percent of the worldwide total in the quarter, up from 16.1 percent in the same quarter last year, Gartner said. That growth comes at the expense of Nokia, the Finnish company that saw its share shrink from 25.1 percent to 19.8 percent.

California-based Apple received its accustomed dose of good news with a share that doubled from 3.9 percent to 7.8 quarter over quarter. Considering that Apple makes only a single smartphone (in varying generations and storage capacity), the news is impressive.

Research In Motion dropped from 3.0 percent to 2.4 percent. The Canadian BlackBerry maker lags behind China's ZTE, South Korea's LG and China's Huawei to take up seventh place.

Gartner's report follows one by Strategy Analytics based on vendor surveys that put Samsung at the top of the market with a 31 percent share, toppling Nokia's 14-year reign at the top spot.

Google's Android OS saw substantial growth year over year, from 36.4 percent to 56.1 percent, while Apple's iOS also grew from 16.9 percent to 22.9 percent, according to Gartner. Nokia's fading Symbian platform dropped significantly as the company switches to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, dropping from 27.7 percent to just 8.6 percent. Research In Motion's platforms fell from 13.0 percent to 6.9 percent.

Windows Phone also dropped, from 2.6 percent to 1.9 percent.

Overall, mobile phone sales reached 419.1 million units in the quarter, a decline of 2 percent, Gartner said, marking the first decline in sales...

Soaring Mobile App Adoption No Cakewalk for Developers

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:17:03 -0500

With more than 50 percent of U.S. mobile phone users now equipped with smartphones, demand for mobile apps continues to soar. The average number of mobile apps per smartphone jumped from 32 apps to 41 apps during 2011 � a 28 percent rise in comparison with 2010, according to a new report from Nielsen.

However, U.S. smartphone owners spent about the same amount of time using mobile apps each day in 2011 as they had during the previous year -- 39 minutes per day versus 37 minutes per day, Nielsen said.

Nielsen researchers said 70 percent of the survey's respondents expressed "concern over personal data collection" and 55 percent were "wary of sharing information about their location via smartphone apps." So we asked Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC, what developers need to do to address privacy concerns as well as prod U.S. smartphone users to spend more time using their apps.

Hilwa said he expected to see the development of new app types as well as the further expansion of apps into other areas of life.

"And developers will continue to chase ever narrower opportunities" while hoping to "hit areas that have not transitioned fully from Web to mobile, or aspects of life not digitized fully yet," Hilwa said Wednesday. "But at some point this pace of growth will slow down."

Claiming More Minutes

Privacy and security considerations definitely stop some people from using apps.

"And that may be another area where the industry can move to claim more minutes of app usage by increasing the confidence in apps," Hilwa said.

Clearly, users ramp up the most toward app usage in their first few months of smartphone usage.

"After that, a steady state ensues, and it is a challenge for the app ecosystem to keep existing users engaged," Hilwa said....

New Xeon Chips Latest of Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:14:58 -0500

Intel just rolled out three new Xeon processor families with a range of target uses: the E5-4600 for boosted performance and flexibility, the E5-2400 for small- to mid-sized businesses, and the E3-1200 v2 with improved performance per watt, data security and graphics capabilities for entry workstation customers. Altogether, Intel introduced 28 processors.

As part of the announcement, Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Infrastructure Group at Intel, said companies are increasingly dependent on IT to deliver innovative products and services to customers. Intel hopes to be the one to make IT look good.

But will Intel's move to drive Xeon innovations for small business and emerging scale workloads be met with enthusiasm among server makers? If OEM adoption is any signal, Intel could see new profits as both IBM and Dell deliver Xeon-based systems to market targeting these niche audiences.

The Ivy Bridge Disruption

We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his take on the latest news in the x86 data center revolution. He told us the overarching story has been a tale of industry standard upward mobility, pressing and pressuring traditional systems from below.

At the same time, he continued, displacement has been a constant theme in that narrative. Enter Intel's latest fab technology, widely known as Ivy Bridge. King said Ivy Bridge may look to some like just another chapter in an ongoing story but it could actually signal an entirely new era of industry-standard computing.

That, King said, is because not only did Intel's revolutionary new 3D Tri-Gate fabrication technology allow the company to become the first CPU vendor to deliver commercial 22-nanometer based products, the company also executed the process in good time, speeding its traditional "tick-tock" upgrade schedule and establishing a viable, believable roadmap for future tinier transistors.

Intel's...

Flesh-Eating Bacteria Risk Rare Despite New Case

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:33:52 -0500

Aimee Copeland, the Georgia graduate student battling a life-threatening, flesh-eating bacterial infection, was still on a respirator Tuesday in a hospital in Augusta, Ga., but she is improving, her father says.

Andy Copeland told the Associated Press that doctors still believe they will have to amputate his daughter's fingers, though they think they can save her palms and right foot. She has lost most of her left leg.

Aimee, 24, still faces months of recovery to treat the infection that developed after she cut her leg when a zip line snapped over a river in Georgia May 1. The gash in her left calf is believed to be the entry point of the infection, necrotizing fasciitis.

It is caused by some of the same Group A strep bacteria that also cause common strep throat and impetigo. Only about 750 cases of flesh-eating bacteria occur each year, usually caused by a type of strep germ, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. About one in five cases prove fatal. But Copeland's infection was caused by another bacteria, Aeromonas hydrophila, the AP reported. Those cases are even rarer.

William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, discusses how this atypical infection could occur and how it can be treated.

Q: What is necrotizing fasciitis?

A: It is a very deep soft-tissue infection. Fasciitis refers to the connective tissue covering the muscle. One of the things that characterizes these infections is that because they are deep, they are removed from oxygen. It's not like an infection on the surface. So you need bacteria or a combination of bacteria that can function in a largely oxygen-free environment. And there are a number of different ones, including Aeromonas hydrophila, that can do that.

Q: This bug is common in outdoor swimming holes?

A: It lives in warm freshwater,...

Higher Education Linked to Longer Life

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:34:37 -0500

Education may not only improve a person's finances, it is also linked to better health habits and a longer life.

For instance, people who have a bachelor's degree or higher live about nine years longer than those who don't graduate from high school, according to an annual report, out today, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. Some of the health data reached back a decade or more.

Gina Lundberg, a preventive cardiologist in Atlanta, says a shorter life expectancy among less-educated people has been consistent for the last few decades.

The study found that in 2010, 31 percent of adults ages 25 to 64 with a high school diploma or less were currently smoking, compared with 24 percent of those who had some college and 9 percent with a bachelor's degree.

"Highly educated people tend to have healthier behaviors, avoid unhealthy ones and have more access to medical care when they need it," says the report's lead author, Amy Bernstein, a health services researcher for the National Center for Health Statistics. "All of these factors are associated with better health."

The report also found that in 2010 24 percent of boys and 22 percent of girls were obese in households where the heads of the family had less than a high school education; the figures are 11 percent of boys and 7 percent of girls where the head of the household had a bachelor's degree or higher.

Poor people sometimes live in less healthy communities with less access to healthy foods and places to be physically active, Bernstein says. "It's all interconnected."

Anthropologists Discover Earliest Wall Art:

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:31:03 -0500

Anthropologists working in southern France have determined that a 1.5-metric-ton block of engraved limestone constitutes the earliest evidence of wall art.

The finding was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. It shows the piece to be approximately 37,000 years old, and offers rich evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans.

The research team, comprised of more than a dozen scientists from American and European universities and research institutions, has been excavating at the site of the discovery -- Abri Castanet -- - for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard have long been recognized as being among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism.

Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered there, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.

"Early Aurignacian humans functioned, more or less, like humans today," explained New York University anthropology professor Randall White, one of the study's coauthors. "They had relatively complex social identities communicated through personal ornamentation, and they practiced sculpture and graphic arts."

The Aurignacian culture existed until approximately 28,000 years ago.

In 2007, the team discovered an engraved block of limestone in what had been a rock shelter occupied by a group of Aurignacian reindeer hunters. Subsequent geological analysis revealed the ceiling had been about two meters above the floor on which the Aurignacians lived -- within arms' reach.

Using carbon dating, the researchers determined that both the engraved ceiling, which includes depictions of animals and geometric forms, and the other artifacts found on the living surface below were approximately 37,000 years old.

"This art appears to be slightly older than the famous paintings from the Grotte Chauvet in southeastern France,"...

Houston Lawyer on Quest To Find Missing Moon Rocks

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:33:59 -0500

The dark suit and tie that Joe Gutheinz wore set him apart from other customers inside a Texas eatery where the usual attire is jeans and cowboy hats.

An appetite for down-home cooking wasn't what brought the former NASA investigator to the Pitt Grill recently. He was on a quest to identify and maybe recover some of the rarest treasure brought to Earth and then lost: moon rocks.

"We're educating the states and countries of the world about how much they're worth on the black market and we need to increase the security in museums and need to put them back on display," Gutheinz said.

The rock samples were collected by the dozen American astronauts who walked on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. U.S. states, territories, the United Nations and foreign governments received them as gifts. The samples, which also were loaned to museums and given to scientists for research, range from dust particles to tiny pebbles.

"A lot of them are in storage. And we need to put them in an inventory control system. And that's what's really lacking," said Gutheinz, a Houston lawyer who also teaches college classes in investigative techniques.

At the Pitt Grill in Buffalo, Texas, Gutheinz was meeting a former toy manufacturer from Colombia who contends his piece of the moon is from the more than 48 pounds (22 kilograms) of material collected in 1969 by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the first manned lunar landing mission.

Rafael Navarro's asking price on eBay for dust scraped from his rock is $300,000. The dust weighs 0.03 grams, roughly the same as a grain of rice.

"Bottom line is, from a common sense perspective, this is a train wreck waiting to happen for him and he's inviting it," Gutheinz said. "He's opening the jail cell door and walking...

Evacuations and Drills Pared Near Nuke Plants

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:33:44 -0500

Without fanfare, the nation's nuclear power regulators have overhauled community emergency planning for the first time in more than three decades, requiring fewer exercises for major accidents and recommending that fewer people be evacuated right away.

The revamp, the first since the program began after Three Mile Island in 1979, also eliminates a requirement that local responders always practice for a release of radiation.

At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan.

Under the new rules, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which run the program together, have added one new exercise: More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state and community police will now take part in exercises that prepare for a possible assault on their local plant.

Still, some emergency officials say this new exercise doesn't go far enough.

And some view as downright bizarre the idea that communities will now periodically run emergency scenarios without practicing for any significant release of radiation.

These changes, while documented in obscure federal publications, went into effect in December with hardly any notice by the general public.

An Associated Press investigative series in June exposed weaknesses in the U.S. emergency planning program. The stories detailed how many nuclear reactors are now operating beyond their design life under rules that have been relaxed to account for deteriorating safety margins. The series also documented considerable population growth around nuclear power plants and limitations in the scope of exercises. For example, local authorities assemble at command centers where they test communications, but they do not deploy around the community, reroute traffic or evacuate anyone as in a real emergency.

The latest changes, especially relaxed exercise plans for 50-mile emergency zones, are being flayed by some local planners and activists who say...

Google's Grand Plan for New Android Devices

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:38:33 -0500

Google is revising the way it rolls out new Android versions and devices, according to a new report. The move is intended to give the tech giant greater control over features and apps, and to reduce the influence of wireless carriers.

According to a story in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Google will now give new versions of Android to as many as five manufacturers at a time, and devices using the new version will be sold directly to consumers. Previously, Google's practice was to produce "lead devices" for a new version with a single manufacturer and then roll out to other makers, with devices being sold through carriers or retail stores.

Nexus-Branded Products

Under the new scheme -- which has not yet been confirmed by Google -- Google would sell the Nexus-brand products from the manufacturers through its Web site and possibly through some retailers. Google has tried direct sales to consumers on a limited basis previously, with limited success.

The amount of involvement that wireless carriers would have in marketing and selling this wave of products is not yet clear. One might assume that phones or tablets sold directly to consumers by Google would not be subsidized by carriers, so, unless Google is ready to pick up that slack, the prices are expected to be considerably higher than what buyers have come to expect.

It would be expected the phones would be sold unlocked, so that they would work on a variety of networks. Unless a contract is packaged with the sale -- something that would seem to counter Google's strategy -- the buyer then would have to find a carrier. But, potentially, a device buyer could purchase a prepaid wireless plan, making the total ownership cost less than currently and not obligating the buyer to a contract.

The new Google strategy, according to the...