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Wednesday, July 18, 2012
RIM gets patent for logic-based text prediction, BlackBerry 10 keyboard now preserved for the ages
For those of us who aren't fans of swipe gestures, the highlight of BlackBerry 10 is undoubtedly a unique keyboard that's often a step ahead of its user. It's a good thing for this last camp that RIM was just granted the final version of a related patent for logic-based text prediction. Instead of simply hunting for typos, the patented keyboard guesses the next word based either on the context of the words around it or on other criteria, like common expressions. About the only time the technique doesn't predict words is for passwords -- RIM would rather not be that clever. While there looks to be a few differences in the practical implementation of the patent as we've seen it in a pre-release BlackBerry 10, theory and reality are close enough that RIM won't be worried about anyone else poaching its seemingly mind-reading technology anytime soon.
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Video: Barbecuing shrimp in America?s Dream Kitchen
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/48209632#48209632
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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Threatwatch: Florida's TB epidemic is bad news for all
Threatwatch is your early warning system for global dangers, from nuclear peril to deadly viral outbreaks. Debora MacKenzie highlights the threats to civilisation ? and suggests solutions
How bad is it when 99 people in the US ? most of them homeless, drug addicts or mentally ill ? get tuberculosis? It doesn't sound like much. But it rings alarm bells here at Threatwatch.
An investigative journalist in Palm Beach, Florida, has reported that in April in Jacksonville, Florida, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated what it called the biggest outbreak of TB in the US since the early 1990s. Yet even as the CDC was writing its report, Florida's legislature voted to slash jobs and funding in public health, and to close its only TB hospital. It shut on 2 July.
The subsequent ruckus has focused on an alleged cover-up of the outbreak. The more important message, though, is how easily TB can get out of control even in the richest country, and how, unless we are very careful, economic recession could make that much worse.
In June, the CDC reported how this outbreak started: a schizophrenic man visited psychiatric clinics around Jacksonville over five months in 2008, complaining of a cough. On the fourth visit he was finally diagnosed with TB. But he refused to stay on his TB drugs, which you need to take for months before you are no longer contagious. So he was locked up in the state TB hospital.
By then, however, he had already spread the infection. In 2009 CDC found TB infections in an "extraordinary" 88 per cent of his contacts in the mental health facility he attended. The normal transmission rate is between 20 and 30 per cent.
Hard to trace
The CDC could not track all the cases and treat them, so the spread continued, and last February, Jacksonville called them in again. The CDC has now traced 99 cases since 2004, mainly in homeless shelters.
Of 3222 recent contacts of these cases, the CDC traced only 253. If only the usual third or so of contacts were infected, that means around 1000 people are still spreading the strain. The outbreak, CDC concluded, "has yet to show signs of abating".
So why is Florida cutting public health spending and closing the TB hospital? It is partly due to small-government ideology and partly to budget worries. But it is also true that overall TB cases in Florida have been declining ? down nearly two-thirds from a peak in 1994.
However, beneath the overall decline, this outbreak of TB bacteria and its human network of contagion is booming: there were 10 cases in 2010, 38 in 2011, and six in the first two months of 2012. The CDC fears this will result in the kind of TB explosion seen in homeless communities elsewhere.
"As overall incidence declines, micro-epidemics become more important," as do delays in diagnosis by doctors who rarely see TB, says Giovanni Migliori, head of the World Health Organization's TB centre in Tradate, Italy.
Beneath the radar
This tells us two important things. Firstly, a lot of TB could be spreading under the radar elsewhere in the US health care system. Florida actually analyses more TB DNA than most states. Despite efforts to fix US healthcare, the sluggish economy means 40,000 jobs in US local health departments like the one in Jacksonville have been lost since 2008, and nearly half expect more cuts. Similar cuts seem likely outside the US too, as economic woes deepen.
Secondly, TB anywhere is TB everywhere. Florida officials say they didn't alert the public to the outbreak as they didn't want to subject homeless people to further stigma. Fair enough, but this outbreak may not be limited to the homeless: the CDC found no history of homelessness, jail or drug use in 21 of the 99 cases it found. In 29 cases, the CDC could not trace the source of infection to the homeless community.
Meanwhile, TB among the homeless does not remain there. Such outbreaks, as in New York in the 1990s, breed drug-resistant TB as it is hard to ensure marginalised people stay on their medication for months. Every new resistant case makes the global epidemic harder to fight.
It sounds callous and immoral to imply that we should care about an outbreak among the impoverished because it eventually affects the non-impoverished ? but in New York, says Migliori, there was little action until it became clear that the more affluent were affected. So let's be clear: this will happen unless we pay attention now and avoid making public health cuts that will cost dearly later.
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Clinton discusses Egypt, Iran on brief Israel visit
Israel and the United States must think and act together to face the changes sweeping the Middle East, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday after meeting President Shimon Peres.
Clinton, who arrived late on Sunday after two days of talks with the new leadership in Egypt, hailed a "moment of great change and transformation in the region."
"It is a time of uncertainty but also of opportunity. It is a chance to advance our shared goals of security, stability, peace and democracy," she said after talks with Peres focusing on Egypt, Syria, Iran's nuclear programme and peace efforts with the Palestinians.
"It is in moments like these that friends like us have to think together, act together," she said.
On the last leg of a 13-day, nine-nation tour, Clinton held talks with her Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman as well as with Peres and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.
She updated each of them on her discussions with Egypt's newly elected President Mohamed Morsi and military leader Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi.
And she was expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before heading back to Washington.
"Your visit comes at an extremely interesting time, the whole Middle East is going through a major transition," Barak told her at the outset of their talks at the David's Citadel hotel in Jerusalem.
In response, Clinton reiterated the need for Israel and Washington to work together.
"We are at a time of such historic change, really unprecedented, and we have to work together to face challenges and to hopefully seize some of the opportunities," she told him in brief remarks to the press.
During the meeting with Peres, Clinton updated him on "the latest developments and the approaches of the new Egyptian leadership, and stressed the importance of strengthening the relations between Israel and Egypt and maintaining the peace between the countries," the president's office said.
"We appreciate very much that immediately after Egypt, you came to us with your latest impressions because for us, as well as for the United States, Egypt is a key country in the Middle East and much depends on Egypt and a little bit on us as well, to continue the great march of peace," Peres said in remarks to the press.
During her visit, Clinton was to reassure the Israelis that Egypt's new leadership had reaffirmed support for the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries -- which she has repeatedly referred to as "the cornerstone" of regional security.
There has been some concern in Israel that Morsi, who emerged out of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, might seek to renegotiate the treaty.
Clinton and Peres also discussed Iran's nuclear programme which Israel, Washington and much of the West believes is a cover for a weapons drive. Tehran flatly denies the charge.
Israel says a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state and has refused to rule out a military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Clinton said the Obama administration was "committed to building and maintaining a wide coalition to deny Iran the ability to acquire nuclear weapons," and pledged that the tough economic sanctions imposed on Tehran "will continue to become harsher," Peres's office said.
Peres, who is known to favour diplomacy over the idea of a military strike, expressed confidence in Washington's tough stance, saying that sanctions "are beginning to have their impact and they are the right start."
"We appreciate very much your position. We trust its depth and dedication and determination and we feel partners of this coalition," he told her.
The two also discussed diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed in Syria and the deadlock in efforts to restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Also participating in Monday's talks were Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, who represents Washington at the talks between world powers and Iran, and US Middle East envoy David Hale.
Clinton also met Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, but there was no immediate comment from either side on the meeting. She had met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in Paris on July 6, at the start of her trip.
Devising ways to restart the moribund peace process was also high on the agenda, following nearly two years of stalemate sparked by an intractable dispute over Jewish settlement building on land the Palestinians want for a future state.
"Obviously, every day that goes by where there is not a peace agreement is a day, that leaves us unsatisfied," a State Department official told reporters late on Sunday ahead of the talks.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/clinton-meets-israeli-leaders-amid-regional-upheavals-074955249.html
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Video: Coursera CEO Daphne Koller on New Platform
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Global warming harms lakes
Monday, July 16, 2012
Global warming also affects lakes. Based on the example of Lake Zurich, researchers from the University of Zurich demonstrate that there is insufficient water turnover in the lake during the winter and harmful Burgundy blood algae are increasingly thriving. The warmer temperatures are thus compromising the successful lake clean-ups of recent decades.
Many large lakes in Central Europe became heavily overfertilized in the twentieth century through sewage. As a result, algal blooms developed and cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria) especially began to appear en masse. Some of these organisms form toxins that can compromise the use of the lake water. Dying algal blooms consume a lot of oxygen, thereby reducing the oxygen content in the lake with negative consequences for the fish stocks.
The problem with overfertilization was not merely the absolute amount of oxygen and phosphorus, the two most important nutrients for algae. Mankind has also changed the ratio between the two nutrients: The phosphorus load in lakes has been reduced vastly in recent decades, yet pollution with nitrogen compounds has not decreased on the same scale. The current ratio between the nutrients can thus trigger a mass appearance of certain cyanobacteria, even in lakes that have been deemed "restored".
Burgundy blood algae grow more rapidly
"The problem today is that mankind is changing two sensitive lake properties at the same time, namely the nutrient ratios and, with global warming, water temperature," explains Thomas Posch, a limnologist from the University of Zurich. In collaboration with Zurich Water Supply, he analyzed 40 years' worth of data in a study that has just been published in Nature Climate Change.
The evaluation of this historical data on Lake Zurich reveals that the cyanobacteria Planktothrix rubescens, more commonly known as Burgundy blood algae, has developed increasingly denser blooms in the last 40 years. Like many other cyanobacteria, Planktothrix contains toxins to protect itself from being eaten by small crabs. Burgundy blood algae were first described in Lake Zurich in 1899 and are a well-known phenomenon for Zurich Water Supply. Consequently, the lake water is painstakingly treated for the drinking-water supply to remove the organism and toxins completely from the raw water.
Warmer lakes have insufficient water turnover
But why does Planktothrix increasingly thrive? The most important natural control of the cyanobacteria blooms occurs in the spring, once the entire lake has cooled down vastly during the winter. Intensive winds trigger the turnover of the surface and deep water. If the turnover is complete, many cyanobacteria die off in the deep waters of Lake Zurich as they cannot withstand the high pressure, which is still 13 bars at depths of 130 meters. Another positive effect of this turnover is the transportation of fresh oxygen to the deep. However, the situation in Lake Zurich has also changed drastically in the last four decades. Global warming causes rising temperatures at the water surface. The current values are between 0.6 and 1.2 degrees Celsius above the 40-year average. The winters were increasingly too warm and the lake water was not able to turn over fully as the temperature difference between the surface and depths posed a physical barrier. The consequences are larger oxygen deficits for a longer period in the lake's deep water and an insufficient reduction of the Burgundy blood algae blooms.
Hope for cold, windy winters
"Unfortunately, we are currently experiencing a paradox. Even though we thought we had partly solved the nutrient problem, in some lakes global warming works against the clean-up measures. Therefore, we primarily need cold winters with strong winds again," says Posch. As far as the researchers are concerned, the winter of 2011/12 was just what the doctor ordered: The low temperatures and heavy storms allowed the lake to turn over completely and ultimately resulted in a reduction in Planktothrix.
###
University of Zurich: http://www.uzh.ch
Thanks to University of Zurich for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/121748/Global_warming_harms_lakes
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