Contra Costa Times: It's Wednesday night, and the hottest teen hangout around is packed and throbbing with what seems an unholy beat.
A disc jockey spins dance tunes upstairs, sending boys in sagging pants into contortions. Downstairs, girls surf the Internet from rows of iMacs flanking a glassed-in basketball court. Hundreds of new arrivals flow under a neon sign reading, "Oneighty," slowed only by a weapons check at the door.
Church night Bible study, it's not. But the music is Christian, the surfing monitored and "the funnest part," a 12-year-old Oneighty regular attests over a video game, "is learning about God."
With a worship style that is both hugely popular and way over the top -- this night's service features live motocross stunts -- the youth ministry of Tulsa's Church on the Move has been copied nationwide.
More than 100 unrelated youth groups have franchised the concept and the trademarked Oneighty name, despite critics who find its approach big on show and short on spirituality.
It's Wednesday night, and the hottest teen hangout around is packed and throbbing with what seems an unholy beat.
The scents of herbs and spices waft out of a Vietnamese medicine store, down a hall and past a restaurant where diners sip tea and eat bowls of pho. Pulsing Vietnamese music plays in the background.It's a scene out of Hanoi -- but it's really a suburban Washington strip mall that has become a hub for the burgeoning Vietnamese community and an example of what's happening elsewhere in the country.
Asians are projected to be the fastest-growing major population category over the next half-century, outpacing blacks, whites and Hispanics. Recent Census Bureau projections show the Asian population could grow by a third, to 14 million, by 2010 and more than triple to 33 million in 2050.
The Web is threatening to force down the prices charged by traditional players, squeeze their margins, and even put some out of business. New technology, new ways of doing business, and new approaches to cutting out the middleman mean the old pricing power is collapsing in a series of industries -- and existing leaders will be forced to find new ways to make money. The pressing question is: How many more industries will be transformed by the Net? "How high is the sky?" answers Barry Diller, CEO of InterActiveCorp (IACI ) , which owns Expedia and other Net properties.In the first wave of disruption, Amazon, Expedia, and others rewrote the rules for books, music, and air travel. Now the Web is poised to remake at least six more major industries: jewelry, bill payments, telecom, hotels, real estate, and software. In the jewelry business, online players are set to wreak havoc on traditional players. Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos, who jumped into the business on Apr. 22, says he can buy a diamond wholesale for $500 and resell it for $575. Never mind that Tiffany (TIF ), Zale (ZLC ), and neighborhood stores are used to getting $1,000 for the same stone. Five-year-old Blue Nile Inc. has proved that this strategy can be very profitable.
Saint Louis University researchers believe they've won a major skirmish in the battle of the bulge, and their findings are published in the May issue of Diabetes."We figured out how obesity occurs," says William A. Banks, M.D., professor of geriatrics in the department of internal medicine and professor of pharmacological and physiological science at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. "The next step is coming up with the solution."
"High triglycerides are blocking the leptin from getting into the brain. If leptin can't get into the brain, it can't tell you to stop eating," says Banks, who is principal investigator and a staff physician at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis.
"This is a big deal. We now know what is keeping leptin from getting to where it needs to do its work."
The Rugged Elegance Inspiration Network:
Google has filed to go public via a $2.7 billion auction-based IPO. The company will go public in the late summer or early fall.
One of the most interesting aspects of Google's SEC filing is that it leads off with a letter from the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The letter begins by saying, "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."
Consistent with that philosophy, Google has chosen an unconventional means to go public: an auction-based IPO. Here's what Page and Brin had to say about the auction:
Informed investors willing to pay the IPO price should be able to buy as many shares as they want, within reason, in the IPO, as on the stock market. It is important to us to have a fair process for our IPO that is inclusive of both small and large investors. It is also crucial that we achieve a good outcome for Google and its current shareholders. This has led us to pursue an auction-based IPO for our entire offering. Our goal is to have a share price that reflects a fair market valuation of Google and that moves rationally based on changes in our business and the stock market. (The auction process is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this prospectus.)...
An auction is an unusual process for an IPO in the United States. Our experience with auction-based advertising systems has been surprisingly helpful in the auction design process for the IPO. As in the stock market, if people try to buy more stock than is available, the price will go up. And of course, the price will go down if there aren't enough buyers. This is a simplification, but it captures the basic issues. Our goal is to have an efficient market price -- a rational price set by informed buyers and sellers -- for our shares at the IPO and afterward. Our goal is to achieve a relatively stable price in the days following the IPO and that buyers and sellers receive a fair price at the IPO.
We are working to create a sufficient supply of shares to meet investor demand at IPO time and after. We are encouraging current shareholders to consider selling some of their shares as part of the offering. These shares will supplement the shares the company sells to provide more supply for investors and hopefully provide a more stable fair price. Sergey and I, among others, are currently planning to sell a fraction of our shares in the IPO. The more shares current shareholders sell, the more likely it is that they believe the price is not unfairly low. The supply of shares available will likely have an effect on the clearing price of the auction. Since the number of shares being sold is likely to be larger at a high price and smaller at a lower price, investors will likely want to consider the scope of current shareholder participation in the IPO. We may communicate from time to time that we would be sellers rather than buyers.
We would like you to invest for the long term, and to do so only at or below what you determine to be a fair price. We encourage investors not to invest in Google at IPO or for some time after, if they believe the price is not sustainable over the long term.
We intend to take steps to help ensure shareholders are well informed. We encourage you to read this prospectus. We think that short term speculation without paying attention to price is likely to lose you money, especially with our auction structure.
Herds of robotic traffic cones could soon be swarming onto a highway, closing down lanes and slowing the traffic.The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.
The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.The markers are delivered to the roadside by a specially equipped truck, from which an operator controls their deployment using a laptop computer. Each fleet of robots is made up of a lead robot or "shepherd", which is equipped with a Global Positioning System satellite navigation receiver, plus a number of less expensive "dumb" units.
The laptop screen displays an image of the road, captured by a camera mounted on top of the truck. Using software developed by Farritor's team, the operator marks on the screen where the barrels should be placed.
Scientists have come a step closer to creating a minuscule DNA computer that may one day be able to spot diseases like cancer from inside the body and release a drug to treat it.Professor Ehud Shapiro and researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute constructed the world's smallest biomolecular computer a few years ago.
Now they have programmed it to analyze biological information to detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments.
"We've taken our earlier molecular computer and augmented it with an input and output module. Together the computer can diagnose a disease and in response produce a drug for the disease in a test tube," Shapiro told Reuters.
The microscopic computer is so minuscule a trillion could fit in a drop of water. Its input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information about living organisms.
"Our work represents the first actual proof of concept and the first actual demonstration of a possible real-life application for this kind of computer," Shapiro added.
In the mid-1990's, a new management program called Compstat shook up the New York Police Department. Detectives stopped working 9-to-5 and started working at the hours when most crimes occur. Crime statistics, once compiled every few months, were updated and mapped weekly. Commanders who displayed a feeble grasp of their precincts' problems were summarily replaced. Crime rates raced downward, outpacing a national decline. Since then, the gospel of New York-style policing specialized units, statistics-driven deployment, and a startling degree of hands-on leadership has been spreading throughout the country. So have the people who personify those tactics, a diaspora of zealous former New York Police Department officers who have gone on to lead other departments.Some of the dozen or more in this wave of New York exports are well known, like John F. Timoney in Miami and William J. Bratton in Los Angeles. But further from the public eye, New Yorkers have been remolding departments one by one, from crime-plagued midsize cities like Baltimore down to Newton, Mass., a bedroom community near Boston whose police force numbers about one-half of 1 percent of New York's 37,000 officers. "It's culture shock," said Capt. Jeff Fluck.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that the threat of climate change was the most pressing long term issue facing the world and reaffirmed Britain's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming."We have to act and we have to act now," said Blair, at the launch of a new organization that aims to speed up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
The prime minister said it was important the issue of global warming was discussed at the forthcoming G8 summit in the United States.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol sets the target of bringing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases worldwide eight percent below the 1990 level by 2010.
Washington has drawn fire from other countries for rejecting the protocol as based on flimsy evidence and harmful to the economy.
Blair was speaking at the launch of the Climate Change Group, which brings together leading corporations, financial institutions, civil organizations and state, city and national governments to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reductions.
"I think that there is a fair recognition around the world that something is happening to our climate," he said.
For the first time in 30 years, Harvard University has reviewed its undergraduate curriculum, concluding that students need more room for broad exploration, a greater familiarity with the world that can only be gained from study abroad, and a deeper, hands-on understanding of science.After 15 months of study, a committee of administrators, professors and students has recommended that the university give students more time to choose their majors and limit the requirements for those majors, encourage students to spend time abroad and increase the number of required science courses.
The committee's underlying conclusion, that students in a fast-changing world need a wider range of knowledge, is likely to have an impact on universities across the nation, many of which are also trying to modernize their curriculums. In making its recommendations, the committee was asked to address what it would "mean to be an educated man or woman in the first quarter of the 21st century."
Manalapan, Florida -- One of the nation's wealthiest towns will soon have cameras and computers running background checks on every car and driver that passes through.Police Chief Clay Walker said cameras will take infrared photos recording a car's tag number, then software will automatically run the numbers through law enforcement databases. A 911 dispatcher is alerted if the car is stolen or is the subject of a "be on the lookout" warning.
Next to the tag number, police will have a picture of the driver, taken with another set of cameras upgraded versions of the standard surveillance cameras already in place.
If there is a robbery, police will be able to comb records to determine who drove through town on a given afternoon or evening.
"Courts have ruled that in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy," said Walker, one of 11 sworn officers who protects Manalapan's 321 residents. Still, Walker says Manalapan's data will be destroyed every three months.
Manalapan's town council authorized $60,000 in security upgrades last week after three burglaries this winter robbed residents of $400,000 in jewelry. The town averages two or three burglaries per year and residents demanded swift response, Town Manager Gregory Dunham said.
Diabetes rates will double worldwide by 2030, to 366 million people with the disease, even if the obesity rate remains stable, an international team of researchers reported on Monday.But the rate will go up even higher if, as expected, more and more people become overweight, eat a so-called Western diet and stop exercising, the researchers said.
"The total number of people with diabetes is projected to rise from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030," the researchers wrote in the latest issue of Diabetes Care, published by the American Diabetes Association.
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Sarah Wild of the University of Edinburgh in Britain and colleagues in Australia, Denmark and Switzerland, looked at type-2 diabetes figures from around the world, using United Nations data to project future diabetes rates based on current trends.
"Assuming that age-specific prevalence remains constant, the number of people with diabetes in the world is expected to approximately double between 2000 and 2030 based solely upon demographic changes," Wild and her colleagues said.
"The greatest relative increases will occur in the Middle Eastern Crescent, sub-Saharan Africa, and India."
IBM has teamed with Stanford University for research and creation of new high-performance, low-power electronics dubbed "spintronics."To formalize the effort, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Stanford today announced the formation of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, or SpinAps.
"SpinAps researchers will work to create breakthroughs that could revolutionize the electronics industry, just as the transistor did 50 years ago," said Robert Morris, IBM VP and director of the Almaden Research Center, in a statement.
As IBM explains it, electron spin is a quantum property that has two possible states, either "up" or "down." Aligning spins in a material creates magnetism, and magnetic fields affect the passage of "up" and "down" electrons differently, Big Blue said.
IBM's Almaden lab came out with the first mass-produced spintronic device in 1997, the giant magnetoresistive head. Another multilayered spintronic structure is at the heart of the high-speed, nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM), currently being developed by a handful of companies, according to IBM.
For nearly 150 years, people who lived past 100 could claim this accomplishment: They had outlived the point at which the life insurance industry technically predicted they would die.Now the industry is raising the bar, and not just a little. New mortality actuarial tables are being adopted that top off at 120.
The tables predict the likelihood people at different ages will die within a year. It is the first time the tables have been revised since 1980, and just the fourth time since 1858.
This might seem like nothing more than a bookkeeping change, albeit a big one and probably long overdue, but it could lower premiums for people who buy life insurance and help those who live past 100 avoid that other virtual certainty in life...taxes. Life insurance beneficiaries do not owe taxes on the payouts if policyholders die.
But policies that invest part of the premiums, such as "whole life" ones, also have a cash value and when policyholders live to the point where the mortality tables end, insurance companies are required to cash out the policies and return the investment proceeds. Under a 1983 federal law those payouts are taxed.
Stroll the corridors and the atriums on Apple Computer's corporate campus these days and you will notice that something is missing. Gone are the posters and graphics accenting the company's sleek personal computers. In their place, in the main lobby, is a striking, three-story-high billboard celebrating Steven P. Jobs's brand-new billion-dollar consumer electronics business - the iPod digital MP3 music player.In just two and a half years, Mr. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has managed to take a well-designed hand-held gadget, add software connecting it to Macintoshes and Windows-based personal computers and convince the recording industry that he has found an elegant solution for ending its nightmare of digital piracy. In doing so, he has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous - hip, even lovable computers - to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life.
Just ahead of Mother's Day, scientists have found a way to cut dads out of the picture, at least among rodents: They have produced mice with two genetic moms -- and no father. It is the first time the feat has been accomplished in mammals.Scientists said the technique cannot be used on people, for reasons both technical and ethical. In fact, one of the mouse mothers was a mutant newborn, whose DNA had been altered to make it act like a male's contribution to an embryo.
But the new work sheds light on why people, mice and other mammals normally need a male's DNA for reproduction, and some experts say it also has implications for the idea of using stem cells to treat disease.
The feat is reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by Tomohiro Kono of the Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan, with colleagues there and in Korea.
Just ahead of Mother's Day, scientists have found a way to cut dads out of the picture, at least among rodents: They have produced mice with two genetic moms" and no father. It is the first time the feat has been accomplished in mammals.Scientists said the technique cannot be used on people, for reasons both technical and ethical. In fact, one of the mouse mothers was a mutant newborn, whose DNA had been altered to make it act like a male's contribution to an embryo.
But the new work sheds light on why people, mice and other mammals normally need a male's DNA for reproduction, and some experts say it also has implications for the idea of using stem cells to treat disease.
The feat is reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by Tomohiro Kono of the Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan, with colleagues there and in Korea.
They say they produced two mice, one of which grew to maturity and gave birth. Kono said this mouse, named Kaguya after a Japanese fairy tale character, appears healthy.
Growing U.S. interest in embryonic stem cell research has produced some 100 bills in 33 states, USA Today reported Wednesday.In California, for example, there is a voter initiative in November that could pump nearly $3 billion over 10 years into such research.
There is a tremendous amount of legislation flying around on one area of medical research. It is remarkable and unprecedented, says Dan Perry of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a collaboration of 83 patient groups, universities and medical organizations that support the research.
The activity, which includes at least 100 bills in 33 states, comes despite President Bush's decision three years ago to limit federal spending on stem cell research.
Not since the advent of the videocassette in the mid-1980's has the movie industry enjoyed such a windfall from a new product. And just as video caused a seismic shift two decades ago, the success of the DVD is altering priorities and the balance of power in the making of popular culture. And industry players, starting with the Writers Guild, are lining up to claim their share.There's good cause. Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion -- more than $3 billion more -- to buy and rent DVD's and videocassettes.
Little wonder then that studio executives now calibrate the release dates of DVD's with the same care used for opening weekends, as seen by Miramax's strategic release of "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" a few days before the theatrical release of "Kill Bill: Vol. 2." (The DVD made $40 million its first day out.)
Studios now spend comparable amounts of money on DVD and theatrical marketing campaigns. Disney spent an estimated $50 million marketing the "Finding Nemo" DVD last year, said officials at Pixar, which made the film. It was money well spent. The DVD took in $431 million domestically, about $100 million more than the domestic box office. DVD has resuscitated canceled or nearly canceled television series like "The Family Guy" and "24," and has helped small art movies like "Donnie Darko" win rerelease in theaters. It is also beginning to affect the kinds of movies being made, as DVD revenues figure heavily in green-light decisions and are used as a perk to woo craft-conscious movie directors.
"There's not a sector of the entertainment industry to which DVD is not a significant, if not the dominant, contributor of revenue," said Scott Hettrick, editor in chief of DVD Exclusive, a trade paper, pointing to the movie and television libraries being released on DVD. Even in the ailing music industry, he noted, music DVD's are an area of growth.
The DVD stands out as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies ever, but in the electronics industry it's akin to an aging king in Shakespearean drama -- rivals are lurking, knives drawn.Just as consumers are beginning to get comfortable with their DVD players, electronics manufacturers are set to introduce next-generation discs that store more -- and would be harder to copy.
A dozen companies, headed by Sony Corp, are pushing a disc called the Blu-ray.
The other main contender, the High Definition DVD, is promoted only by Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp. But it has an important endorsement from an industry group and is also expected to get Microsoft Corp.'s support as the software giant seeks a toehold for its multimedia format in the consumer electronics arena.
Movie studios generally aren't commenting on the new formats. And the rival industry groups aren't saying exactly when they expect to have players on the market. Both, however, consider the DVD ripe for replacement next year.
For consumers, the benefit of a new format would be better image quality. Sales of high-definition TV sets have finally started to take off, but current DVDs don't have the resolution to get the most out of HDTV sets.
The growing popularity of the Linux operating system has drawn attention to a style of software development in which volunteers, collaborating over the Internet, can create programs that are cheaper, even arguably better, than those that emerge from paid staffers working at high-tech firms.Now a new book argues that the style of development dubbed open source -- so-called because the working innards, or source code, are published freely -- has the potential to revolutionize not just the software and high-tech industries, but biotechnology, publishing and other fields.
"Open source is not just for hackers. It's a new way of organizing people to create complex products in a knowledge-based economy,'' said Steven Weber, author of "The Success of Open Source,'' from Harvard University Press.
Americans are in grave danger of undoing the greatest achievement of medical science - the doubling of the human life span from four decades just a century ago to nearly 80 years today.The culprits are the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, with some doctors predicting children could lose as much as 20 years off their lives.
Nowhere is this more likely to happen than in Southern Arizona, where an evolutionary collision has left those native to this land overwhelmed by these twin epidemics, which are maiming and killing them at the highest rates in the world.
Among Southern Arizona's largest Indian tribe, the Tohono O'odham, 50 percent of adults are battling diabetes, a figure that soars to 85 percent in older adults. They are facing a diabetes risk 10 times that of the rest of the country. Mexican-Americans in this region who share Indian blood suffer diabetes at twice the rate of the population as a whole.
The blame lies squarely on a toxic modern diet and lifestyle - cheap, high-fat, sugar-packed, processed, supersized foods, requiring no more energy to get than extending a hand out the car window.
Because this region sits at the center of the problem, experts here have developed new and aggressive ways to attack it, successfully bringing diabetes under control in those most severely sick - and even starting to prevent it in those most at risk.
But poverty is a barrier, here and elsewhere, between many Americans and a healthy life.
"Eating healthy costs a lot."
Put a bag of carrots in one hand and a Happy Meal in the other, and the cost of each is pretty much the same. But in one hand you have a whole meal, and the other you have only the start of one.
Today, a growing hacker culture is not only reclaiming the original meaning of the term but also applying its can-do ethic far beyond computer code to embrace everything from home electronics to home improvements.Just as the first hackers looked at behemothcomputers and rudimentary programs and insisted, ''We can make them better," so are modern-day hackers looking at a wide variety of products, services, and materials and saying, ''We can make these better, too."
Take Tony Northrup of Woburn, for example. Dissatisfied with a pet sitter who showed up only sporadically to care for his cat, he didn't merely fire the sitter and find another one. Instead, at the cost of about $250, he built a system of wireless cameras, motion detectors, and an old personal computer to snap pictures of the cat at strategic places -- like the food bowl -- and load them on a website, allowing him and his wife, Erica Edson, to check on the cat from almost anywhere.
This pet-sitting ''hack" -- a hack being the term of art for a ''creative solution to an interesting problem" -- is just one of more than a dozen similar home remedies to be included in the soon-to-be published book, ''Home Hacking Projects for Geeks," coauthored by Northrup and Eric Faulkner of Lowell.
Almost a century after Albert Einstein began writing about relativity, NASA is poised to launch a mission 45 years in the making to put a little known tenet of his general relativity theory to its first test.The Gravity Probe B satellite is the bland name given to one of the most precise scientific instruments ever built. But the project's $700 million price-tag adds glamour, as does its long history, surviving the Congressional budget ax seven times.
Lift-off of the Boeing Co. Delta 2 rocket carrying the probe is scheduled for Monday at 1:01 p.m. EDT from the rocket range at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
With four near-perfect spheres -- the roundest objects ever made, according to NASA -- the probe will try to show whether the Earth, which is known to warp both time and space with its mass, also twists them like tornado winds as it rotates.
Twenty-first-century problems, like genetic mapping, an aging population and globalization, are combining with old problems like skyrocketing costs and skyrocketing numbers of uninsured, to overwhelm the 20th-century system we have inherited.The way we finance care is so seriously flawed that if we fail to fix it, we face a fiscal disaster that will not only deny quality health care to the uninsured and underinsured but also undermine the capacity of the system to care for even the well insured. For example, if a hospital's trauma center is closed or so crowded that it cannot take any more patients, your insurance card won't help much if you're the one in the freeway accident.
Let's face it -- if we were to start from scratch, none of us, from dyed-in-the-wool liberals to rock-solid conservatives, would fashion the kind of health care system America has inherited. So why should we carry the problems of this system into the future?
Sales of praise and worship albums have doubled since 2000, to about 12 million in 2003. While music sales over all slumped last year, including Christian music in general, worship music was up 5 percent. A series of CD's marketed on television by Time-Life, "Songs 4 Worship," has drawn a million subscribers and sold about 8 million CD's since 2000.Several Christian pop stars, including Michael W. Smith, Newsboys and Third Day, have recently recorded worship albums, often to the biggest successes of their careers.
"What's selling now is compilations and praise and worship," said John W. Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association in Nashville. For this music, he added, "Church is the new radio. It's where people learn about songs, and how songwriters get compensated.
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Her enthusiasm mirrors national trends among college students, according to surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Last fall, 13.4 percent of freshmen identified themselves as evangelical Christians, up from 4.5 percent in 1990.
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"It was underground, but now it's just exploded," he said. "The Internet connects all these smaller subcultural units. For us, a small band in Waco, it disseminated our songs all over the world."
Anyone who doubts the gravity of global warming should ask Alaska's Eskimo, Indian and Aleut elders about the dramatic changes to their land and the animals on which they depend.Native leaders say that salmon are increasingly susceptible to warm-water parasites and suffer from lesions and strange behavior. Salmon and moose meat have developed odd tastes and the marrow in moose bones is weirdly runny, they say.
Arctic pack ice is disappearing, making food scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for the Natives who hunt them. It is feared that polar bears, to name one species, may disappear from the Northern hemisphere by mid-century.
It's just one example of how the unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum is turning into a hothouse of technological innovation.For years, these radio frequencies were neglected, the lonely domain of cordless phones and microwave ovens. In the past few years, however, engineers at institutions from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Dutch giant Royal Philips Electronics have been hard at work on a grander vision for the unlicensed radio frontier. That tinkering is what sparked the creation of Wi-Fi, the wildly popular wireless Net technology that took off last year with the support of chip giant Intel Corp.
Wi-Fi is just the first step, though. Hard on its heels are four equally innovative technologies -- WiMax, Mobile-Fi, ZigBee, and Ultrawideband -- that will push wireless networking into every facet of life, from cars and homes to office buildings and factories.
These technologies have attracted $4.5 billion in venture investments over the past five years, according to estimates from San Francisco-based investment bank Rutberg & Co. Products based on them will start hitting the market this year and become widely available in 2005. As they do, they will expand the reach of the Internet for miles and create a mesh of Web technologies that will provide connections anywhere ...
The number of secret surveillance warrants sought by the FBI has increased 85 percent in the past three years, a pace that has outstripped the Justice Department's ability to process them quickly.Even after warrants are approved, the FBI often doesn't have enough agents or other personnel with the expertise to conduct the surveillance. And the agency still is trying to build a cadre of translators who can understand conversations intercepted in such languages as Arabic, Pashto and Farsi.
These are among the findings of investigators for the commission probing the September 11 attacks, which has criticized the intelligence-gathering efforts of the CIA and FBI.
FBI and Justice Department officials said yesterday that they are working to address all three issues, which limit the government's ability to gather the kind of intelligence needed to head off terrorist attacks.
Looking deep inside the genes of malignant cells, two teams of leukemia researchers have uncovered new ways to help identify the severity of a patient's cancer, the best treatments and how long a patient might live.While this type of detailed gene analysis isn't being used on leukemia patients yet, doctors say it probably will play an important role in treating the most common form of adult leukemia.
More broadly, the studies, carried out at Stanford University and in Europe, are the latest to shed light on the basic wiring of cancer, probing whether some cancer cells are more lethal from the start. The research was published in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
A US geophysicist has set the scientific world ablaze by claiming to have cracked a holy grail: accurate earthquake prediction, and warning that a big one will soon hit southern California.Russian-born University of California at Los Angeles professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok says he can foresee major quakes by tracking minor temblors and historical patterns in seismic hotspots that could indicate more violent shaking is on the way.
And he has made a chilling prediction that a quake measuring at least 6.4 magnitude on the Richter scale will hit a 31,200-square-kilometer (12,000-square-mile) area of southern California by September 5.
The team at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics accurately predicted a 6.5-magnitude quake in central California last December as well as an 8.1-magnitude temblor that struck the Japanese island of Hokkaido in September.
"Earthquake prediction is called the Holy Grail of earthquake science, and has been considered impossible by many scientists," said Keilis-Borok, 82. "It is not impossible.
"We have made a major breakthrough, discovering the possibility of making predictions months ahead of time, instead of years, as in previously known methods."
[Project] Avalanche is a legally constituted intellectual-property cooperative. Companies pay $30,000 a year to become members. They can then donate any in-house software they choose to the Avalanche library, with the project becoming the legal owner of the code. Project members get to use, free of charge, any of the other programs in the library....
Because large corporations like those in Avalanche are the biggest customers of software companies, any shift like this would have enormous repercussions. The last thing any company wants is to have its customers banding together.
As residents of Minnesota, Mr. Black and Mr. Lien know their snow, and they say the name of their project was carefully chosen. An avalanche isn't only unstoppable, it also either buries everything in its path or carries everything along. Software companies may soon be needing to choose their fate.
Pornographic "spam" e-mail will have to contain a warning on the subject line so Internet users can easily filter it out, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday.Starting May 19, sexually explicit e-mail will have to bear a label reading "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" and the messages themselves will not be allowed to contain graphic material, the FTC said.
Outrage over unsolicited pornography and other forms of junk e-mail spurred Congress to pass the first nationwide anti-spam law last year, which required the FTC to develop labels for smut.
An FTC study released last spring found that 17 percent of pornographic offers contained images of nudity that appeared whether a recipient wanted to see them or not.
China's application to join the 40-nation NSG and its discussion on entry into the MTCR reflect a sea change in thinking in Beijing about where its national interests lie with regards to proliferation, foreign policy experts said.For years, China saw the two groups as supplier cartels, dominated by the US, which were used to restrict technology to developing countries.
Beijing has a long history of missile and missile-related sales overseas, and in the 1980s provided Pakistan with enriched uranium and a working bomb design, which was later sold to Libya and possibly North Korea and Iran.
But China has changed its thinking because of its need to harness all potential sources of energy, including nuclear power, and its desire for good relations with the US, Japan and Europe to maintain economic growth.
China's diplomatic co-operation with the US and Japan on the North Korean nuclear threat has been driven by similar concerns.
"China recognises that its interests in non-proliferation are increasingly aligned with those of the major powers," says Evan Medeiros, of the Rand Corporation, a think-tank.
China is unlikely to face any barriers to joining the NSG at its annual May meeting in Sweden but it might be more difficult to join the MTCR.
Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam have discovered a common link between cancer cells and stem cells.Together with colleagues from the University of Zurich, Merel Lingbeek and NWO pioneer Prof. Maarten van Lohuizen published their findings on 18 March 2004 in Nature.
Because cancer cells and stem cells can both reproduce themselves in unlimited numbers, it was suspected that they have something in common. That suspicion proved to be correct. Together with their Swiss colleagues, researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute discovered an important common link: the BMI1 gene.
Stem cells, the 'original cells', develop into specialised body cells by first of all making many copies of themselves. Once this copying process has been completed, they stop dividing and start differentiating into specialised cells, for example, a brain cell. But sometimes this process goes wrong. Instead of differentiating, the stem cells retain the expression pattern of a stem cell and keep on copying themselves. This is how medulloblastomas, the most frequently occurring form of brain cancer in children, can develop.
A new operating system war is brewing on desktop PCs, and it's not Windows vs. Mac, or even Windows vs. Linux. This time, it's Linux vs. Linux.Red Hat and Novell - already foes in the market for Linux server software - are taking their fight to the personal computer. The Linux firms hope to sell businesses a single, companywide software platform for both servers and desktops.
The stepped-up Linux rivalry is another sign that the once-renegade operating system is becoming a mainstream alternative to Microsoft Windows. It also marks a new battleground as Linux jumps from servers to PCs used by non-techies.
Novell got big-name backing from longtime Red Hat partner Hewlett-Packard, which will sell and support SuSE-brand Linux on its business PCs in the second half of the year. HP already sells SuSE Linux for business servers, along with a similar Linux product from Red Hat.
Enormous intelligence and law enforcement gaps that contributed to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are being filled, but it will take years more for America to build the needed systems to effectively combat terrorists, the heads of the FBI and CIA said Wednesday.CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller went before the commission investigating the 2001 hijackings after the panel's staff released statements harshly criticizing the CIA for failing to fully appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaida prior to Sept. 11 and questioning the FBI's reorganization efforts.
"It was a damning report of a system that's broken, that doesn't function," said commission member John Lehman, a former navy secretary, referring to flaws found in the intelligence system.
Tenet, making his second appearance before the commission in three weeks, said that in the 1990s the CIA lost 25 per cent of its personnel, was not hiring new analysts and faced disarray in its training of clandestine officers who work overseas to penetrate terror cells and recruit secret informants.
Although strides have been made since the attacks, Tenet said it would take five more years to "have the kind of clandestine service our country needs." The National Security Agency, which handles electronic surveillance, and U.S. mapping and analytic intelligence agencies also need time and sustained funding to improve, he said.
The Bay Area has an opportunity to shape California's physical and economic landscape for decades to come. A report published this month by Jon D. Haveman and David Hummels called "California's Global Gateways: Trends and Issues'' outlines this opportunity. Haveman and Hummels are with the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California which was co-founded in 1994 by the late William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co. The Institute is dedicated to improving public policy in California through independent, objective, non-partisan research on major economic, social, and political issues.The Institute's study emphasizes California's need to leverage the current service we offer which subsidizes economic activity in other states. Haveman and Hummels clearly express our need to decrease the congestion on rail lines that link the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with America's interior and jammed Bay Area highways which slow down truckers near the Port of Oakland. If we do, shippers will not have to look for other U.S. gateways.
San Francisco Chronicle's, David Armstrong writes, "California's international trade could soar to three times its current level by 2020, but only if the state's congested seaports, airports, highways and railroad lines are significantly expanded and upgraded."
Vinod Khosla, one of the Bay Area's premier venture capitalists, said Monday that onerous securities regulations had pushed him to step down as a board member of Juniper Networks.He said a host of recent regulations -- introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nasdaq and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 -- are important but have combined to create burdens on board members, with unintended consequences.
Khosla's move raises the question of whether Silicon Valley will see a wave of other venture capitalists making similar moves.
Reactions by other venture capitalists to increased regulations are mixed. Some, such as Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners, believe Khosla's move is being joined by others.
"It's so damned time-consuming,'' Haque said of the new regulations. "All of us have been reducing our board positions in some form.''
While Linux advocates look to desktop software to challenge Microsoft's desktop championship, a new top-ranked contender is coming from a direction that's both unexpected and obvious: Google.But first, Google needs to overcome privacy concerns, as proposed terms of service for its upcoming Gmail service leave users with very little legal protections for the privacy and security of their e-mail.
While the common wisdom is that Google's core business is search, in fact, even search is secondary for Google, argue several bloggers and journalists.
...
[Jason] Kottke writes:
[Google has] this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.Kottke envisions Google selling cheap PCs running Gnome and Linux, tailored to take advantage of the Google service, practically giving the PCs away at $10 each. The PCs would run their own office suite, with built-in Internet collaboration.
Related Posts:
Topix.net -- The Secret Source of Google's Power
Kottke.org -- GooOS, the Google Operating System
Big Brother isn't just watching the bad guys in Chicago. By late summer, he'll be listening as well -- for the sound of gunshots.Gunshot detection technology -- capable of "triangulating within 20 feet" of the location of a shooting -- is being added to 30 surveillance cameras already in place on high-crime corners and to 50 new cameras expected to be installed by late summer at undisclosed locations.
The gunshot detection devices to be installed in Chicago's crime-watching cameras employ a technology similar to a seismograph that measures earthquakes.
Circuit boards installed in four corners of each camera identify gunshots by measuring the decibel level of the unique sound made by a bullet traveling through the air at high speed. The sensors are then able to "triangulate within 20 feet" the location of the shooting.
Assistant Deputy Supt. Ron Huberman said the system has been tested with a variety of sounds -- ranging from giant firecrackers and dynamite sticks to breaking glass -- to make certain nothing but a gunshot will trigger the system.
An Indian steel tycoon paid $128 million for a mansion in the British capital, breaking the world record for the most expensive house purchase, according to a report.The Sunday Times said Lakshmi Mittal, named by Forbes magazine as one of the richest people in the world, bought the 12-bedroom house in London's Kensington district from Formula One car racing boss Bernie Ecclestone.
Mittal's spokesperson was unavailable for comment Monday and a call to Ecclestone's Formula One Management company went unanswered.
The Sunday Times reported that three real estate agencies were involved in the sale. The offices of all three companies were closed for Easter Monday.Guinness Publishing also could not be contacted for comment on the report. The Sunday Times said the sale of the property near Kensington Palace, the former home of Princess Diana, broke the record for the world's most expensive house sale. It said the previous record was set in Hong Kong in 1997 when a property sold for $101.6 million.
Under heightened security that included airport-style metal detectors at the gates of the Vatican, Pope John Paul II used his Easter message on Sunday to plead for the world to unite to overcome terrorism and "the logic of death."The pope, speaking to tens of thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter's Square, prayed for leaders who are trying to resolve conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, including the Iraq war and Israeli-Palestinian violence. He called for what he described as the children of Abraham -- Christians, Jews and Muslims -- to rediscover their shared bonds.
The world, he said, needs to "find the strength to face the inhuman, and unfortunately growing, phenomenon of terrorism, which rejects life and brings anguish and uncertainty to the daily lives of so many hard-working and peaceful people."
The pope, who is 83, visibly frail and suffering from Parkinson's disease, has traditionally offered a message at Easter Mass that reflects upon world affairs. But this year, his comments came as Italy and the rest of Europe have grown increasingly anxious about the prospect of another terrorist attack.
On Sunday, hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police officers patrolled St. Peter's Square, as well as nearby roofs.
"I'm a little vain," Mr. Miller conceded. Though the new procedure, which uses radio waves to correct near-vision problems, had not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for his problem, he had it done last winter."It was a no-brainer," said Mr. Miller, who no longer needs reading glasses. "I can't imagine why anyone who could afford it would not do it."
Biology and vanity are collaborating to make vision correction techniques a boom market, as some 78 million aging Americans seem intent on seeing well but looking good. Granny glasses? Grandpa's bifocals? Not for them. Offer them the option of paying $1,500 for a three-minute remedy and the eyeglasses are gone.
"The baby boomers are kind of a picky bunch," said David Harmon, president of MarketScope, an eye care market research company in Baldwin, Mo., near St. Louis. "They want to be fixed."
Last month, the F.D.A. approved the latest surgical procedure, called conductive keratoplasty, to correct a common near-vision problem for people whose eyesight is otherwise excellent, in a minimally invasive way.
To some scientists, robots are the answer to caring for aging societies in Japan and other nations where the young are destined to be overwhelmed by a surging elderly population.In one of a budding series of robot-therapy sessions at Japanese hospitals and senior citizens' homes, the elderly patients suffer from severe dementia, but their faces light up when they see the dog-shaped robot, swaddled in soft clothing, waddle around the hospital floor. Some clap; others break into feeble smiles. Urged by nurses, a few cautiously reach out and touch it.
"It's cute," one female patient cries out.Advocates see robots serving not just as helpers -- carrying out simple chores and reminding patients to take their medication - but also as companions, even if the machines can carry on only a semblance of a real dialogue.
The ideal results: huge savings in medical costs, reduced burdens on family and caretakers, and old and sick people kept in better health.
"This technology is really needed for the global community," said Russell Bodoff, executive director at the Center for Aging Services Technologies in Washington, D.C. "If you look 30 years out, we have what I would call a global crisis in front of us: that we will have many more aging people than we could ever deal with."
The French pharma Sanofi is getting positive results so far with a drug that suppresses appetite. And it may have cardiac benefits, tooAt the American College of Cardiology annual meeting last month, Paris-based Sanofi-Synthelabo caused a stir when it unveiled data on a promising experimental drug for obesity. The drug, rimonabant, seems to stem cravings in humans, thus reducing obese patients' appetites. If it proves safe and effective, rimonabant could see peak annual sales of $3.6 billion, says Jean-Francois Dehecq, the pharmaceutical company's CEO.
Few treatments for obesity have garnered as much excitement in recent years. The existing prescription drugs got attention when they were introduced several years ago, but that has faded amid some less than favorable publicity. The two approved for use in the U.S. -- Roche's Xenical and Abbott Labs' Meridia -- both offer modest weight loss and unpleasant side effects. A drug that produced significant weight loss, Wyeth's Redux, was removed from the U.S. market in 1997 after being linked to a deadly heart condition in some patients.
The Royal Dutch/Shell Group's oil production in Oman has been declining for years, belying the company's optimistic reports and raising doubts about a vital question in the Middle East: whether new technology can extend the life of huge but mature oil fields.Internal company documents and technical papers show that the Yibal field, Oman's largest, began to decline rapidly in 1997. Yet Sir Philip Watts, Shell's former chairman, said in an upbeat public report in 2000 that "major advances in drilling" were enabling the company "to extract more from such mature fields." The internal Shell documents suggest that the figure for proven oil reserves in Oman was mistakenly increased in 2000, resulting in a 40 percent overstatement.
See related story: Saudi Arabia Struggling To Meet Oil Demand
Jimmy Chu sent a mass e-mail to his Bible study group asking for help setting up for Easter services. He posts the group's prayer requests on his Weblog, downloads hymns from his church's Web site and listens to Sunday sermons online.Chu, 23, who lives in Mountain View, is one of the almost 82 million Americans who use the Internet for religious or spiritual purposes.
That's 64 percent of the 128 million Internet users in the United States, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies the social impact of the Internet."The I