KDDI says to let mobile users use Google search Yahoo! News
KDDI Corp., Japan's No.2 telecom firm, said on Thursday it had agreed a deal with Google Inc. enabling users of its Internet services via "au" mobile phones to use Google's Web search engine. The first adoption of the world's most popular search service in Japan, starting in July, will make Internet searches easier while enabling direct access to information sought by users, the company said. Users will also be able to view content aimed not only at mobile phones but also at PCs through the new search service, the first of its kind in Japan, and also text advertisements which meet the needs of users based on search terms, KDDI said. The announcement comes at a time when Japan's $78 billion mobile phone market is preparing for a possible increase in competition as a new government rule this autumn will make it easier for customers to switch services by letting them keep their existing phone numbers. The industry also faces a challenge from Softbank Corp., which recently bought Vodafone Group Plc's Japan operations, allowing the aggressive high-speed Internet provider to offer a combination of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services. Softbank unveiled a new strategic move on Thursday as it said it would set up a mobile phone handset and content joint venture with Vodafone to buy phones at lower costs and offer innovative services to users. But KDDI sees little direct impact from the new service on its earnings, a company spokesman said. "Our main target from this is to improve usefulness of services to our existing users," he said. KDDI declined to comment on further details, including the value or period of the contract. Last month KDDI forecast its group operating profit to rise 7 percent in the year to March, 2007, slightly above market expectations. But KDDI said operating profit at its mobile phone business, which contributes 82 percent of total sales, would be flat this year as it sees the unit's average revenue per user drop and the percentage of customers leaving the service rise. au is KDDI's main mobile phone brand with over 20 million subscribers, tracking behind that of NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's No. 1 mobile phone operator. It has enjoyed strong demand in recent years thanks to aggressive pricing plans, attractive phones and innovative services such as music downloads. The news, announced on Thursday afternoon, helped KDDI shares rise 4 percent to 731,000 yen, compared with a 0.14 percent fall in the information and telecommunications sector subindex.

'Big brother' informs baby talk BBC News
Every movement, gurgle and chuckle made by a baby in the first three years of its life is being recorded by a scientist in the US. Professor Deb Roy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is recording his son's development to shed light on how babies acquire language. The Human Speechome Project, as it is known, uses cameras and microphones installed in the scientist's home. The project will eventually gather 400,000 hours of material. "As every proud parent knows, there's no such thing as too many images and videos you can take of your newborn," Professor Roy told a press conference. "I think we're taking this to a whole new level."

Language difficulty
There is still a considerable amount of debate about how infants acquire language. Although listening to the cooing of parents is thought to play an important part, most scientists believe it cannot be solely responsible for the rapid progress seen in most children.

"There are numerous spin-off opportunities beyond the Speechome"
Professor Deb Roy
Instead, language-specific genes and environmental factors have both been put forward as additional factors that help children to learn to speak. Until now, the environmental influences on development have been very difficult to test because scientists have been unable to observe a baby for long enough in its home environment. The Speechome Project will change that by generating and analysing vast tracts of recorded material. For example, to understand how Professor Roy's son learnt his first words, the scientists will be able to mine their records to see who used those words around the child, where they were and what the child was doing at the time. Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab, believes the project has close parallels to the Human Genome Project. "Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," he said.

Big brother
The project started recording nine months ago when Professor Roy's newborn son left hospital. Since then a "big brother" network of 14 microphones and 11 omni-directional cameras has been recording his son's waking hours.

Interaction with parents is thought to affect language development
The surveillance system is turned on at eight o'clock in the morning until 10 o'clock at night, producing nearly 350GB of compressed data every day. It will be switched on for the next three years, by which time Professor Roy's son should be using complex language and spending more time outside, making recordings more difficult. In case Professor Roy's family requires some privacy, every room is fitted with a PDA that can turn the microphones or cameras off. An "oops" button allows people to erase the last few minutes of footage. "You can type in how many minutes back in time you want to scrub permanently from the house's memory," said Professor Roy.

Personal video
After the data has been collected, it is temporarily stored at the house before being sent to a massive petabyte (one million gigabyte) disk storage system at the Media Lab at MIT. There, both humans and computers are crunching the data to look for patterns. However, Professor Roy is keen to stress that most images will never be seen by human eyes.

The project could produce the ultimate family album
Instead, software will process the "immense flow of data" so that common actions such as doing the dishes or changing a nappy can easily be recognised by the researchers. Other tools analyse speech patterns or show how people move through the different rooms in the house. Together, the different systems will build a complete picture of all the stimuli that the infant experiences, allowing the model to "step into the shoes" of Professor Roy's son. The team then hopes to build computers that can learn words and grammar, from hearing and seeing precisely the same images and sounds as the child, to understand the learning process in humans. As well as these insights into language development, Professor Roy and his team believe the technology that has been developed for the project may also have applications in other fields such as personal video or analysing images from security cameras. "There are numerous spin-off opportunities beyond the Speechome," he said. At least one of these is the ultimate family album for his son when he grows up. But Professor Roy says that sitting through hours of baby photographs won't be a laugh a minute. "Most of the recordings are pretty boring."

Space shuttle moved to launch pad BBC News
Space shuttle Discovery has been moved onto its launch pad at Nasa's Cape Canaveral, in Florida, as part of preparations for a July lift off. The slow procession from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad took almost eight hours. The orbiter is scheduled to take off some time between 1 and 19 July. It will be only the second shuttle flight since the space shuttle Colombia disintegrated on re-entry three years ago, killing all seven astronauts. Pointing skywards, the shuttle, already attached to its orange rocket fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters, inched along its four mile (6.5km) journey atop a giant transport vehicle. Shuttle programme manager Wayne Hale has expressed confidence that Discovery will launch in July as planned and that the US space agency will be able to launch a further two shuttle flights before the end of the year. A final decision on whether to launch will be made in mid-June. Discovery had originally been expected to blast off this month, but the schedule was changed when a faulty fuel tank sensor was discovered.

Politicians Brave the Internet - With Help Ask News
LOL:) Look who's podcasting! No, it's not your teenager. It's your senator. Veteran politicians more familiar with turntables and typewriters are enlisting twentysomething computer whiz kids to help them brave the digital world of blogs, podcasts and the Web as they look to connect directly with voters. The 2004 presidential campaign ushered in Internet fundraising and the lightning speed effectiveness of Web logs. The next campaign promises a significant increase in Web-based activities; politicians are responding to the reality. Few are treating it with a LOL - laugh out loud - attitude. This is serious business. Consider Ari Rabin-Havt, 27, who blogs for a living as a staffer to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., 66. Rabin-Havt's duties include watching the blogosphere for what's being said about his boss and others, and helping manage the blog and other Web-based activities for Reid. Rabin-Havt said the way politicians and their staffs view blogs and other Internet tools is dramatically different from just two years ago when he was helping Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of Massachusetts with his Internet strategy. "There was a communications staffer who once said to me - in the summer of 2004 - I wouldn't know a blog if it slapped me in the face," Rabin-Havt recalled. "I don't think that attitude exists anymore." Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., responds on a weekly basis to questions on his blog. He also is among several politicians who have recorded podcasts, self-made audio or video broadcasts that can be downloaded from the Internet to a computer or portable gadget. The former heart surgeon who is considering a 2008 presidential bid said he saw the power of podcasts when one in which he discussed avian flu was featured on a conservative blog and downloaded a million times. Frist, 54, said the technology allows him to "break through the gaggle of reporters" and "touch people who are sitting in Smyrna, Tennessee." John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee and a White House hopeful in 2008, recently showed off a newly designed Web site that features a reality television show that tracks Edwards, up close and personal, as he goes around the country. The former North Carolina senator has favored video blogs, in which individuals submit questions to his site via video and he responds in the same format. "Where in history has that ever happened?" asked Ryan Montoya, 32, technology adviser to Edwards, 52. "He sees the people, and he is able to respond to their questions directly. That's democracy." Strategists in both parties say the drive to use new media is simple: It's cheap, easy and more and more people are connected. According to a survey after the last presidential election, reliance on the Internet for political news during the 2004 contest grew sixfold when compared with 1996. At the same time, the Pew Research Center poll showed that 40 percent of Internet users found the Web important in helping them decide for whom to vote. In the 2003-04 election cycle, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean used the Internet to raise tens of millions of dollars and stun his primary rivals early in the campaign. He easily surpassed Republican Sen. John McCain, who had relied in part on the Internet for his fundraising in 2000. In this election year, Republican gubernatorial candidate and pro football Hall of Famer Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania found his contributions increased when he added a personal touch to his Web site. When visitors click on a "donate" button on the site, a video pops up of Swann telling voters why they should elect him. "Campaigns are won and lost on a lot more than a simple Web site, but a campaign Web site is step one in determining the voters' ability to understand who you are and what you're about," said Leonardo Alcivar, Swann's communications director. Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat who is considering a presidential run, recently added a professional blogger to his staff. Warner likes to use video podcasts. "Things that you can see and hear make a much greater impact than just reading," says Ellen Qualls, Warner's communications director. "Video of the governor is a much more powerful tool than simply an e-mail or blog post from him." That sentiment should make YouTube attractive to campaigns. The new company lets people share videos through the Web. Each day, 6 million people watch more than 40 million videos on YouTube or through e-mail or posts to other sites, says Julie Supan, marketing director for YouTube. "You'll never see people enthusiastically sending around an e-mail message from a candidate. But those videos move across the Internet like wildfire," said Carol Darr, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, which focuses on technology and politics, said Youtube can spark conversations between users, helping to build an online community. He said that is how Dean's candidacy got its strong start in the last election. Zack Exley, 36, who directed the Kerry campaign's online activities, said e-mail actually sounds old-fashioned to techies, but remains vital. He says politicians should personalize e-mail messages to keep people reading. For example, he said 2008 candidates could empower supporters, and reward their efforts, by giving them first word in an e-mail of the candidate's pick for a running mate.
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD and BROOKE DONALD

AOL, Startups Emerge to Challenge MySpace
It's only natural for companies large and small to want to capture some of the social-networking magic of MySpace.com, a Web site that has risen out of nowhere to become the Internet's second busiest by successfully figuring out what teens and young adults want. AOL joined the pack this month with its own take on social networking, a loose term for services that help users expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone. The rapid growth of MySpace and last year's purchase of its parent company by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NWS) (NWSA) for $580 million "definitely accelerated something," said Greg Sterling, an industry analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif. "MySpace went from being this curiosity to a cultural phenomenon," Sterling said. "People started to think this is a really, really big opportunity." MySpace offers a mix of features - message boards, games, Web journals - designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages. The site has successfully built communities around music, becoming the go-to place for emerging bands, and it wants to replicate that success in film and comedy. Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace grew astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's user base more than quadrupled to nearly 80 million over the past year, with as many as 270,000 joining every day. Yahoo even announced a home page redesign this week in part to fend off the rising threat, adding recommendations and insights about cultural trends culled from its community of 402 million users worldwide. Others, mostly startups, are hoping to become the next-generation MySpace, offering more-robust, easier-to-use tools or specialized features for niches. CollectiveX Inc. launched this month as a network for professionals and other pre-organized groups. Famoodle started in April as a MySpace for families. Relative newcomers Tagged Inc. and Varsity Media Group Inc.'s Varsity World are billing themselves as safe havens for teens. Even the British Broadcasting Corp., seeing rival News Corp.'s successes, is revamping its Web site to incorporate more user-generated features. The most notable of the newcomers is AOL's AIM Pages, which is building upon its already substantial instant-messaging base of 49 million active users worldwide. Still, MySpace's number is higher - the active subset of registered users who logged on in March was 56 million, according to comScore. "MySpace is doing phenomenally well," said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products. Nonetheless, Bankoff denied AOL was positioning AIM Pages as "a MySpace killer." Rather, he said, the entrance by Time Warner Inc. (TWX) (TWX)'s Internet unit "points to the trend of consumers wanting to express themselves in a more powerful way." AIM users get a page customizable with any number of drag-and-drop modules for maps, Web journals and other features, including those from rivals like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. By contrast, MySpace users must deal with HTML programming code to customize. The offering, available in a beta test mode, underscores AOL's history of playing down innovation in favor of waiting until the masses are ready. It wants to be easy, not necessarily first. MySpace wasn't first, either. But it surpassed Friendster Inc. in monthly visitors just a half-year after formally launching.

Analysts note that if Friendster can fall, so can MySpace.
"It's like the one hot bar or restaurant everybody descends upon," Sterling said. "Then it gets cold and people leave it." MySpace, whose press representatives said executives were unavailable for interviews, has been continually adding features, including just recently a test version of an instant-messaging program and the hit TV show "24" as free and for-pay downloads. Potential rivals insist they are doing more. TagWorld Inc. and Freewebs Corp. let users build entire Web sites, not just single profile pages. Both see themselves as people's hubs for music, photos and video, while many MySpace users embed in their profile pages digital items stored elsewhere. A Microsoft Corp. spinoff company, though mum on specifics, plans to launch Wallop later this year with promises of helping people better interact more like they would in the real world.

That's also the thinking behind CollectiveX.
"CollectiveX doesn't expand or create communities," founder Clarence Wooten said. "It empowers existing communities." So members of pre-existing groups, such as a homeowners association, could use CollectiveX to communicate and meet one another - but only if someone they already know introduces them. Groups are visible only to their members, and even within groups, a person's friends and colleagues are described only by title, not by name. By contrast, MySpace makes most profiles publicly viewable and users easily reachable. Meanwhile, some startups see MySpace as the new mass media - too big to appeal to any one demographic group well. Adir Levy figures that once people get married, they're no longer keen on meeting new faces on MySpace, where about a quarter of the users are minors. So he developed Famoodle as a site for families to connect and expand existing relations. "We definitely don't see us as becoming as big as MySpace, but we see ourselves as being the MySpace for the more mature crowd," said Levy, 25, who's getting married this year. Others are targeting teens, the group that has turned MySpace into a lightning rod for warnings about the dangers posed by sexual predators on the Internet. At Varsity World, moderators screen most writings, photos and other materials before posting. Tagged has features - among them, a weekly celebrity lookalike contest - likely to be seen as immature by even college students, said its founder, Greg Tseng. "MySpace and the industry as a whole is really in the first inning," Tseng said. MySpace's 80 million users is but a fraction of the estimated global online population of 1 billion. Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said users also can have multiple profiles at multiple sites - the way they may belong to separate school, work, neighborhood and church networks in the offline world. But not everyone will have time to keep up. In fact, only about 60 percent of MySpace's U.S. registered users visited the site in April, according to calculations of data from MySpace and Nielsen/NetRatings. "You may have four or five e-mail addresses, but you use two of them," Sterling said. "You're going to go to one or two places. You're not going to go to four."
By ANICK JESDANUN

Breaking up is easy to do — for a comet ZDNet
Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann just missed us by 10 million kilometers last week. But this comet, which visits our Solar system every 5 years, is just a shadow of itself. Because of the powerful forces of the Sun, the comet broke into 3 parts in 1995. This year, it has almost completely exploded into 40 to 60 fragments depending on the observations. For its part, the European Space Agency (ESA) has used a superconducting camera to watch the fractured comet. This camera, known as SCAM, can count "almost every single photon of light that falls into it," allowing scientists to see into the interior of the comet — maybe for the last time. But read more…

Here is what the ESA says about this SCAM camera.

The superconducting camera, SCAM, is an ultra fast photon counting camera, developed by ESA. It is cooled to just 300 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. This enables its sensitive electronic detectors, known as superconducting tunnel detectors, to register almost every single photon of light that falls into it. As such, it is the perfect instrument with which to detect fast and faint changes in the fragments of the comet.

Below are images of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann taken on May 7, 2006 by SCAM. "It shows three of the new fragments produced by the splitting of the Fragment B — one of the five original fragments into which the comet split in 1996. The spatial resolution of the images is about 70 km. (Credit: ESA)

[To take these images,] SCAM was attached to the one-metre ESA Optical Ground Station telescope on 7 May 2006, when the disintegrating comet was observed . Every few microseconds, the camera reads out the number of photons that have touched it and their colour. Using the unprecedented accuracy of the camera, ESA scientists charted the evolution of the dust and gas envelopes associated with each fragment for two hours.

Strangely, there are few details about this superconducting camera. One of the best sources about it is an ESA news release from January 2002. Below is a picture of the SCAM camera at this time, when it still was under development. (Credit: ESA)

The arrival of this comet in our neighborhood was widely covered by the media, so I have to choose between lots of pictures to illustrate this post. First, here is a beautiful X-ray picture of comet Schwassmann-Wachmann as it bypassed the Ring Nebula taken by NASA (Credit: NASA, via this article from Universe Today on May 16, 2006).
Posted by Roland Piquepaille

Leveraging Web 2.0 for business growth ZDNet
I was in San Francisco last week at JavaOne at the same time that Gartner's IT/Symposium was taking place, though I was unable to attend Gartner's event. I was however on a JavaOne panel that discussed Ajax, SOA, and Web 2.0, the convergence of the latter two in particular which is a topic of special interest to me. The packed room of 1,200 people that came to hear the panel, overlaid with Gartner's pronouncement a few days ago that Web 2.0 offers enterprises many opportunities for growth, underscored an important point for me. Namely that IT management and IT workers seem to have a major opportunity to align together. To be sure, many folks at the panel came to hear about Ajax and not Web 2.0, yet a clear majority of the audience also raised their hands about both Web 2.0 and SOA when asked why they came. And most of these folks were programmers that for the most part were not tracking Web 2.0 last year. Call it Enterprise 2.0 or what have you, there now seems to be a lot of shared, common attention to these ideas right now across the ranks of IT. But other than the buzzword factor, what does Web 2.0 bring to the table as far as real business value? It's this question in particular we're continuing to circle as we continue looking at Web 2.0 strategies in the enterprise.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 of our exploration of Web 2.0 strategies in the enterprise.
I covered BPM strategies for Web 2.0 in my last post and pointed to a few companies that best exhibited the advantages that lightweight, Web-based, self-service BPM can provide. You may recall that one of the key concepts of Web 2.0 (diagram) is The Long Tail, which describes the mass servicing of micromarkets, which is only possible (or at least, cost-effective) in a self-service world. Thus, giving employees the tools to create and continuously tweak automated business processes themselves has enormous potential because of what it enables: the emergent reduction of routine, low-value transactional work and an increase in tacit interactions.

Read about the Sandhill Report on the software outlook for 2006 and its emphasis on leveraging Web 2.0 and tacit interactions.
And it's here that it gets interesting. That's because the latest round of low-barrier, easily-changed, mashup-style BPM tools let users focus on developing solutions that assist users in automating and managing either transactional or tacit interactions. In this way, automating tedious and manual transactions can increase the time spent on tacit interactions. Some experts claim this is approach can provide access to the last bastion of work productivity productivity. But spending that same time focusing on building solutions that support and enable tacit interactions might have even more return on investment. Tacit interactions, however, are generally harder to automate because of their variability and open-endedness. In general, they are largely guided by skilled workers, and it's this part that Web 2.0 techniques might be able to help address most by getting excessive central control out of their way. I find mashup tools fascinating for just this reason; because they point to a near-term future where most skilled end-users can find or build/tweak just the right solution, just when they need it. This is a sort of Hypercard effect, so that when an existing mashup is almost right, the user can "clone" it and add the last couple of features or data sources needed to make it serviceable for a new task.

Posted by Dion HinchcliffeAs I've written about in the past, companies such as Intalio have been developing this vision, which they call BPM 2.0, and the idea at least shows the potential for what Gartner and McKinsey have been talking about: Leveraging network effects, self-service IT, and the [url=http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1733]recombinant Web[/b] to harness new growth and productivity gains in the enterprise. Note: I've recently taken Intalio's BPM 2.0 tools for a spin and have been impressed so far, hopefully I'll do a tour of this in a future post. Given this, here is a rough take on using Web 2.0 for BPM and self-service business process automation:

Applying Web 2.0 Concepts to BPM

• Low-barrier, available anywhere, Web-based business process mashups (Ajax and RIAs with granular URL structures)
• Allow business users to structure business information and content (folksonomies over taxonomies)
• Continuous, bottom-up management and maintenance of business processes by the end-users that use them
• Business processes exposed as Web services, turning the business process into a reusable platform
• Easy inclusion of external Web-friendly data sources and services into business processes
• Based on portable, recognized standards as much as possible (OpenAjax, RSS, REST, SOAP, BPEL, etc.)
• Web 2.0-style collaboration (wiki-style editing, blog-style publishing, social networking, etc.)

And lest we forget, the advantage of applying the successful techniques we observe out on the Web is due to the strong Darwinian forces at work on such a large stage. The organizations that can effectively add enterprise context to this and make it work successfully for them will be able to develop a sustainable competitive advantage. In fact, notwithstanding the continued reports of people like Nick Carr, McKinsey and Company's latest article on tacit interactions highlights an important comparison of similar organizations that shows a surprisingly wide interaction variability between them. This indicates that "there is considerable competitive headroom for improving productivity." This could mean that IT still matters, if it can demonstrate that it still matters, that is.
What do you think? Will BPM get a second life with techniques that make it responsive and user-controlled enough to tap real growth potential and productivity gains?

Radio-Frequency Chips Coming to Cattle Ask News
After growing up on a cattle ranch, John Hassell became an electrical engineer specializing in wireless technology. So he feels doubly qualified to offer this warning about the system taking shape to track cattle across America: It won't work. To be sure, he doesn't quibble with the logic of the system. It stems from the Bush administration's plan to give agriculture inspectors the ability to pinpoint the origins of mad cow and other diseases within 48 hours. Livestock facilities and individual animals will get identifying numbers, which owners will use to document the beasts' movements in industry databases. The system isn't expected to be fully online until 2009, but already it's clear that in the sprawling U.S. beef and dairy industries - home to 100 million cattle - many producers will automate data gathering with radio-frequency chips attached to cattle ears. And that's what has Hassell worried. He contends most of the radio-frequency chips making their way onto cattle ears are a terrible fit.


Those chips - based on the same radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology being integrated for inventory control by large retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. - are known as "passive" tags that broadcast identifying numbers for only a short range, generally just a few feet. While cattle may be considered docile creatures, they are a lot more mobile and skittish than cases and pallets in Wal-Mart warehouses. Hassell believes only "active" tags, which broadcast identification data for up to 300 feet, will consistently work for the multiple owners and many environments that cattle pass through, from pastures to stockyards, feed lots and slaughterhouses. Hassell is so convinced that he's launched his own company, ZigBeef Inc., to sell long-range tags. The name is a play on the "ZigBee" wireless standard employed by his tags. "I really don't think ... on a mass scale that short-range, passive devices are going to be practical," he said. "The Betamax of the industry is the short-range tags." That makes Hassell sound like many other startup technologists - pooh-poohing a rival standard at the expense of his own. But something makes this situation a bit unusual: Even beef producers who are using the passive flavor of RFID don't seem thrilled with it either. The Joplin Regional Stockyards in Carthage, Mo., began using passive RFID to identify some cattle in 2001. But co-owner Steve Owens believes the technology "hinders the speed of commerce." That's because the thousands of cattle that go through his facility wouldn't always naturally line up and orderly proceed past devices that can read electronic ID tags at short range. Most often, cattle quickly move through his yard in groups. And if a cow has lost a tag or comes to him without one, "you've got to catch that animal in a head chute and hold it still so you can put the tag in an ear," he said. That can take 30 seconds each - which adds up when you've got thousands of mooing creatures to deal with. These factors are big because human contact and other stresses can hurt a cow's ability to gain or maintain weight. That's costly because beef is, after all, sold by the pound - and generally with slim profit margins. "I'm sure hoping and open to other technologies that might be able to solve some of our problems," Owens said. Even so, he and other people in the industry figure that passive tags will carry the day. For one thing, passive tags are cheaper, about $2 each versus roughly $10. Passive tags don't require batteries, because they get their power by induction from the electromagnetic energy sent by the reader. And perhaps most importantly, most of the estimated 5 percent of cattle owners who are using RFID have passive tags. Changing that would be hard, since it's important for all players along the complex chain of cattle ownership to be on the same technical page. "Despite its warts, I think (passive tagging) is the technology that's going to be brought to play initially," said Dale Blasi, a Kansas State University professor researching the challenges of RFID in cattle. "We're innovative, we'll learn how to work around these issues." Still, Hassell holds out hope for ZigBeef. While he's not the first to suggest active tags for livestock, he's encouraged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has funded the company with an $80,000 grant. Soon he will be eligible for a $300,000-plus extension. That makes this a crucial year. He has to attract potential customers while still fine-tuning his system. Part of his pitch is that while active tags cost more, their readers can run as low as $50, instead of hundreds or even thousands of dollars for passive RFID. The active readers' range could be dialed up or down to register multiple cows or just one at a time. Hassell says his tags' batteries can last five to seven years, well beyond the 15-month life of typical beef cattle. And he asserts that most of the cost of the tags comes from their plastic housing, not their circuitry - so ZigBeef tags could easily include both passive and active chips, soothing producers' fears about choosing the wrong technology. There are still other methods for recording that an animal crossed a certain link in the food chain, including retinal scans for identifying cattle. And there are a spate of old-school record-keeping practices, which often rely on brands, veterinary papers or visually spotting numbers on plastic ear tags and writing them down. Many producers would love to stay that course, fearing the added cost of more detailed tracking. Some also fear that new databases would reveal private business information to rivals, regulators or animal-rights activists. Meanwhile, pork and poultry producers tend not to have such worries. Pigs are unlikely to need RFID because the nation's 60 million hogs generally remain in large, easily identifiable lots, said Bobby Acord, a former USDA administrator who chairs the Swine Identification Implementation Task Force. Chickens follow a similar pattern - and are too numerous to tally individually, anyway, with 9 billion in the U.S. alone. Early adopters of RFID in cattle have done so largely to better track sick animals and to document organic, grass-fed or other high-value beef and dairy. But holdouts note that premiums for RFID-equipped cattle would likely vanish as more cows get the tags. Because of such hesitation, the cattle industry widely expects that the database system - which is technically voluntary for now - will become mandatory to ensure widespread participation. Once that happens, old methods simply could become too difficult, said Allen Bright, animal ID coordinator for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. For example, he notes that people are prone to error as they write down ear-tag numbers. It's not exactly easy in auctions teeming with 10,000 head of cattle. "Just from a practicality standpoint, you need to automate those tags," said Bright, who owns a feed lot in Nebraska. Kevin McGrath, chief executive of Digital Angel Corp., which has sold 6 million passive RFID tags for livestock in North America, contends that the U.S. beef industry has lost more than $3 billion because Japan and other Asian markets have been closed since the nation's first mad cow scare in 2003. If an automated ID system can persuade officials in those markets to resume accepting American beef, the technology would more than pay for itself, he argues. Even so, McGrath says he understands the skepticism. Consequently, Digital Angel plans to test other tag frequencies in hopes of making the chips easier to read on moving animals. "I think we still have to convince the industry that this is the right solution," McGrath said. When it was suggested to him that cattle RFID seems an experiment in progress, he agreed. "And it will be for a long period of time."
On the Net: USDA page on ID system: http://www.usda.gov/nais
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN

Microsoft reveals Vista checklist BBC News
Microsoft has revealed how powerful computers must be to run Vista - the new version of its Windows operating system. It has given advice on the basic specifications to run the software as well as the higher capabilities needed to get the most out of it. Also available is a downloadable tool that lets people know if the PC they own now will run the system. Microsoft has said that Vista will go on widespread release in January 2007.

Spec check
Vista, formerly known as Longhorn, is Microsoft's long awaited update to the Windows family of operating systems and makes some big changes to the way that the software works. Typically every release of Windows kicks off a round of PC buying as companies and consumers buy machines that can make the most of the novel features included in the new version. Microsoft has released "minimum" and "recommended" specifications for Vista. The minimum means that the operating system will run but some new features will be disabled. Recommended means that this is what is needed to get the most basic configuration of the whole package working. For instance one of the big changes in Vista is the graphical look of the interface itself - dubbed Aero. In Vista the familiar boxes, windows and icons on the desktop are modelled as 3D objects - just like in many computer games. Only those machines with a graphics card that has a significant amount of memory will be able to use this 3D display. Other big changes in Vista include the way it handles sound and networking with other machines. Microsoft has also prepared a Vista "Get Ready" website that can help people work out if their PC can run Vista unaltered, if they need to upgrade their main memory or graphics card, or if they need a whole new computer. Also available is a software download called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor that can check a PC and advise about the action needed to run the new version of Windows. The situation is also complicated by the fact that Microsoft is set to release Vista in six separate versions. Three will be aimed at home users, two at companies and one for emerging markets. Many PC makers are already selling machines that they label as "Vista ready". There is no information yet about the abilities of Intel-based Apple Mac computers and whether they will be able to run Vista.
VISTA HARDWARE CHECKLIST
_________________Minimum__________Recommended
Processor_________800MHz___________1GHz 32 or 64 bit
System Memory____512MB____________1GB
Graphics card______DirectX 9 capable__ Runs Windows Aero
Graphics Memory___- -_______________128MB
Free space on Hard
Drive_____________15GB_____________15GB
Source: Microsoft

Google reinvents TV ads with pay-per-click video
Google Inc. said on Monday the company is ready to help Web sites run video advertisements, putting the Web search leader into competition with television for the biggest chunk of ad spending. Google is seeking to take the pay-per-click model it refined for text ads and apply the approach to video, cleaning up a nascent market where irritating splash ads distract users and limit advertisers' desire to spend money on the medium. Google video ads first appear on Web pages as static screenshots in small television-screen like boxes. Only when a consumer clicks on the screen does the ad begin running inside the box -- instead of jumping off the page as many video ads do -- giving users control over how much or how little they view. "We are offering a very, very non-intrusive ad product," said Gokul Rajaram, product manager for Google AdSense, which runs advertising campaigns across affiliated Web sites. "Only users who click on the ad see the video." Google's AdSense network generates nearly half of Google's revenue, with most of the rest coming from Google's own sites. The new "click to play" video ads complement Google's existing line-up of text, static image, banner and flash animation ads that run on the edges of Web pages of sites that use Google to deliver advertising for them. Google aims to make video advertising as simple to buy as these existing formats. Video ads will be introduced this week, Rajaram said. To make it easy for advertisers to use the format, Google will host video advertisements on its own computer servers instead of forcing customers to contract out with a third-party supplier as many video advertisers must now do. Click to play video ads differ from the scattershot approach of broadcast TV advertising in that Google promises to measure the duration of how long customers, on average, watch any particular ad on a site before moving on to another page. "It is very good for advertisers because they now know the user is engaged," Rajaram said in a phone interview. "The targeting is more powerful than traditional broadcast TV," said Greg Sterling, an industry analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in Berkeley, California. For example, Sterling said one way Google plans to promote the service as a way for advertisers to test-market TV ads on the Web to determine the best ad for broadcast TV campaigns. The Internet ad market grew 30 percent in 2005 to $12.5 billion. But that represents only 5 percent of the budget that U.S. marketers spend on all media, including newspapers, radio and TV, according to Internet Advertising Bureau data. U.S. ad spending on cable TV alone totaled $18.9 billion last year. But analyst Safa Rashtchy of broker Piper Jaffray estimates that major advertisers in categories such as autos, finance, entertainment and consumer goods are shifting a growing amount of their spending -- 10 to 20 percent so far -- online. Such brand name advertisers favor using richer graphical or video based elements in their advertising. This part of the market is where rival Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) has long dominated. "Brand marketers will take notice. This is going to cause others like Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL to develop some of the same targeting," Sterling said. "We will see an acceleration of video advertising from here," he predicted.
By Eric Auchard

Microsoft battles Word PC virus BBC News
Microsoft could release early a patch for a loophole in its Word program that virus writers are already exploiting. If users get infected by the virus, attackers could open up a backdoor on the PC and take over the machine to use it for their own ends. A fix is due for release in mid-June but Microsoft said it would bring it forward if the action was "warranted". Microsoft told users to turn off some Word features in order to protect themselves.

Safe mode
Security firm Symantec said the virus, called Backdoor.Ginwui, that exploits the bug in the word processing software had been found in e-mails bearing a Japanese Word document. The document summarises a recent summit meeting between the US and Asia. So far only people at one company are known to have been caught out. Those opening the booby-trapped Word document will fall victim to the virus which opens up a backdoor on the PC. It then reports back to a website in Asia, telling it the computer has been compromised. Microsoft is planning to release a fix for the flaw on its next monthly patch date which falls on 13 June. But it said on its security advisory blog that the patch may be released sooner "if needed". To help people protect themselves, Microsoft urged users not to open or save Word files they receive from unknown sources or even those that are from trusted sources but are unexpected. For extra protection, it said users should change an option in the popular Outlook e-mail program that uses Word as the editor for mail messages. Other advice included not opening Word files that are inside other programs such as Excel or PowerPoint. It also said users should avoid downloading Word documents from websites. Users should also run Word in so-called "safe" mode which shuts down some features of the word-processing program and stops the exploit code gaining hold of a machine. The bug affects Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003 for Windows.

Yahoo and eBay seal online deal BBC News
Internet search engine Yahoo and auctioneer eBay have teamed up in an exclusive online alliance. Under the deal, Yahoo, the largest internet media firm, will be the exclusive provider of branded advertising on eBay's site. In exchange, Yahoo will use eBay's payment system PayPal, to permit its customers to pay for Yahoo services. The deal comes as both firms face stiff competition from rival Google, and are seeking new ways to gain market share. "It's a very positive for both, since eBay gets to monetize its traffic with advertising," said Marianne Wolk, an analyst with Susquehanna. Monetization denotes a way to create revenue from a property or an asset, in this case by increasing advertising on an internet page. "Clearly Google and Microsoft, I assume, would have liked this business, but Yahoo has more assets to leverage in a partnership with e eBay," said Mark May, an analyst with Needham & Co. The joint initiative will start later this year.

Spotty mice flout genetics laws BBC News
Scientists say they have demonstrated that animals can defy the laws of genetic inheritance. Researchers found that mice can pass on traits to their offspring even if the gene behind those traits is absent. The scientists suggest RNA, a chemical cousin of DNA, passes on the characteristic - in this experiment, a spotty tail - to later generations. But more work may be needed to confirm the conclusions of the study, which appears in the journal Nature. The research focuses on a gene called Kit, which comes in two varieties: "normal" and "mutant". The mice inherit two Kit genes, one from each parent; a mutant version gives them a spotty tail. According to Mendel's laws of genetic inheritance, the combination of normal and mutant Kit genes inherited by the mice should alone determine whether the mouse has a spotted or unspotted tail.

Breaking the law
The scientists, based at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, used mice which carry one normal version of Kit and one mutant version, giving them spotted tails. They bred these mice together, producing offspring with a range of Kit gene combinations:

• two mutant genes (these are shown to die shortly after birth)
• one mutant and one normal gene (these should be "spotty" like their parents)
• two normal genes (these should not be spotty).

However, the researchers found that mice born with two normal versions of Kit also had a spotted appendage. "We were very surprised to see this," said Professor Minoo Rassoulzadegan, a geneticist at the University of Nice and lead author on the paper. After further investigation, the scientists suggested the transfer of RNA molecules as the cause. RNA is a polynucleotide, like DNA, and plays an important role in protein synthesis and in other chemical activity in the body. They found the mutant Kit gene produces large amounts of messenger RNA molecules (a type of RNA which acts as a template for the creation of proteins) which accumulate in the sperm of these mice. The scientists believe the RNA molecules pass from the sperm into the egg, and they "silence" the Kit gene activity in the offspring - even those who do not inherit a copy of the mutant gene. Silencing the activity in this gene leads to a spotted tail. "We then looked to see what would happen if a preparation of RNA from the sperm [of a mutant mouse] was injected into a fertilised mouse egg," explained Professor Rassoulzadegan. "It was clear when we saw the mice born after this injection that RNA could be responsible for the inheritance of the white tail phenotype."

Imprinted memories
The phenomenon whereby the characteristic of a gene is "remembered" and seen in later generations, even if that particular version of the gene is no longer present, is called paramutation.


It has previously been identified in plants, but this is the first time it has been shown in animals together with a proposed mechanism - if the explanation is confirmed in future experiments. "As the authors suggest, more experiments need to be done," commented Dr Andrew Hamilton, a molecular biologist from the UK's Glasgow University. "RNA-directed paramutation, which this study suggests, sounds very exciting, but I think major questions surrounding the gene specificity still remain," he told the BBC News website. In recent years researchers have amassed much circumstantial evidence to show that transmission of genes made of nuclear DNA is not the sole factor affecting inheritance. Could transfer of RNA in sperm explain other so-called epigenetic phenomena as well? That it could is hinted at in a commentary on the new research, also published in Nature, by Professor Paul Soloway from Cornell University in the US. "A particularly intriguing possibility," he writes, "is that such RNAs regulate other non-genetic modes of inheritance, such as metabolism or behavioural imprinting." The Nice-based team now plans to look for other characteristics in mice which can be transferred through RNA. But the eventual scope of research in this field may widen to include other organisms, including humans. "This brings valuable information about modification of our genome," said Minoo Rassoulzadegan, "and perhaps this research may eventually help us to understand why we are all so different from each other."
By Rebecca Morelle, BBC News science reporter

Nintendo sets price limit on Wii BBC News
Japanese games giant Nintendo has confirmed that the price of its new Wii console will be much lower than its rivals. The Wii will cost 25,000 yen or lower in Japan and $250 (£133) or less in the US, said Nintendo as it revealed its financial results. The company added it aims to sell six million machines by March 2007. The Wii is due out towards the end of the year, competing with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The three companies are battling for a share of a video games industry worth some $30bn (£16bn).

Cheaper machine
Nintendo unveiled its Wii console at the E3 games expo in Los Angeles earlier this year. At the time, it did not reveal the cost of the machine, but analysts had expected it to be lower than its competitors. At a news conference in Osaka, Nintendo senior managing director Yoshihiro Mori confirmed what many wanted to hear. The price range set by Nintendo contrasts with the cost of Sony's new PlayStation 3, which is due to hit the shops in November. A basic version of the console will cost $499 (£266), while a premium model will sell for $599 (£320). The exact price in the UK has not been announced. Prices for Microsoft's Xbox 360, which went on sale last November, start at $299 (£209 in the UK).

Wii hopes
The Wii console is key to Nintendo's future success. The company has just posted a 19% drop in annual profits, warning that results for its current financial year will be weaker than previously expected. It is looking to the launch of the Wii to help its bottom line. Nintendo plans to ship six million consoles by March next year and aims to sell 17 million games for it. The console has a one-handed controller that looks like a TV remote control. It uses motion-detection sensors that allow players to control the game by moving the controller in the air.

Earthlink to build New Orleans Wi-Fi network Yahoo! News
Earthlink Inc., the Internet service provider, said on Friday it has won approval from the New Orleans City Council to build a wireless high-speed Internet network in the city. The company said the wireless network will provide Internet access for residents, businesses and visitors in New Orleans. It will offer a free service for a limited time during the city's rebuilding efforts and a faster paid-for tier service.

Amnesty to target net repression BBC News
Internet users are being urged to stand up for online freedoms by backing a new campaign launched by human rights group Amnesty International. Amnesty is celebrating 45 years of activism by highlighting governments using the net to suppress dissent. The campaign will highlight abuses of rights the net is used for, and push for the release of those jailed for speaking out online. It will also name hi-tech firms aiding governments that limit online protests.

Pledge bank
Called Irrepressible.info, the campaign will revolve around a website with the same name. While the human rights group has run separate campaigns about web repression and the jailing of net dissidents before now, Irrepressible.info will bring them all together. It aims to throw light on the many different ways that the freedom to use the net is limited by governments. For instance, said a spokesman for Amnesty, around the globe net cafes are being closed down, home PCs are being confiscated, chat in discussion forums is being watched and blogs are being censored or removed. "The internet has become a new frontier in the struggle for human rights," said Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International. "Its potential to empower and educate, to allow people to share and mobilise opinion has led to government crackdowns." Ms Allen added that there were growing numbers of cases in which those who have turned to the net to discuss change or protest about government policies have been jailed for what they said. For instance, she said, Chinese journalist Shi Tao is serving a 10-year jail sentence for sending an e-mail overseas which detailed the restrictions the Chinese government wanted to impose on papers writing about the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Hi-tech firm Yahoo helped identify the journalist via his e-mail account. Amnesty is calling for the jailed journalist to be released immediately. However Mary Osako, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, said the case was "distressing" to the firm. "We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognised as free expression, whether that punishment takes place in China or anywhere else in the world," she said. She added the company had received "a valid and legal demand" for information and responded to it as required by the law. She went on: "The choice in China or other countries is not whether to comply with law enforcement demands for information. Rather, the choice is whether or not to remain in a country. "We balance the requirement to comply with laws that are not necessarily consistent with our own values against our strong belief that active involvement in China contributes to the continued modernization of the country - as well as a benefit to Chinese citizens - through the advancement of communications, commerce and access to information."

Profit and principles
The Amnesty campaign will seek to get net users to sign a pledge that opposes repressive use of the net. The pledges will be collated and presented to a meeting of the UN's Internet Governance Forum that is due to meet in Athens in November 2006. Amnesty wants to get people using an icon in e-mail signatures or on websites that contains text from censored sites. The group also wants to run an e-mail campaign to target companies to stop putting "profit before principles" and respect human rights everywhere they operate. Reports will be prepared on those countries that place restrictions on what can be said online or use it to keep an eye on those expressing discontent. "Irrepressible.info will harness the power of the internet and of individuals to oppose repression and stand up for free speech," said Ms Allen.

Collaborative Innovation and The Humble Corporation Alwayson
Just about every study on innovation identifies the power of collaboration and communities as one of the major forces driving innovation in today's environment. But this is much easier said than done, especially in a society as focused on "winning" as is ours in the US. For example, in our own such studies in IBM, a major conclusion of the 2004 Global Innovation Outlook (GIO1.0) was that innovation is increasingly collaborative and open, as more and more, it results from people working together in new and integrated ways. Specifically, the report noted that ". . . close cooperation across an ecosystem will stimulate new business designs, as companies redefine what they do and what they rely on others to do." The GIO 2.0 report which came out earlier this year identified the power of networks, i.e., communities, as one of its top findings, as individuals told us that increasingly "their power comes largely from their ability to tap into and sometimes transform a larger network of people and ideas." Similarly, in the 2006 CEO study that was released this past March one of the key themes that emerged from the CEO interviews was that external collaboration is indispensable for innovation, with customers and business partners cited as top sources of innovative ideas. In today's fast-moving and highly competitive world, more and more businesses recognize that there exist a lot more capabilities for innovation in the marketplace than they could try to create on their own, no matter how big and powerful the company. While CEO's told us that collaboration is absolutely critical, they also told us that partnering, whether crossing internal or external boundaries is easy in principle but very difficult in practice. This is not at all surprising. Working with different groups to achieve common objectives usually requires a change in the culture of most organizations - and cultural transformations are arguably the hardest of all. Deep down, to truly embrace a culture of collaboration requires a certain degree of humility in an individual, group or company, that is, an acceptance of limitations in ones ability to get things done without help, which then makes it emotionally easier to reach out and work effectively with others. We like to use sports metaphors when discussing competition in the marketplace, and our business vocabulary is infused with all kinds of sports and martial terms, starting with our notions of "winners" and "losers." We use such terms even as we know that the world of business is much more complex than the artificial world in which sports teams compete, and that the time frame in which a business has to prove its excellence is much longer that the typical sports season. Collaboration and humility are particularly important for those companies that like IBM are addressing problems in business, government, health care, technology and science that are very sophisticated in nature and are pushing the envelope in what is possible. You cannot work on such problems - say information based medicine, integrated supply chains or advanced engineering design - unless you have established a very close relationship with your clients, business partners, and even other vendors that might very well be competitors. In such an environment, to boast about being "the best" would frankly be considered crass, a sign of corporate insecurity rather than the strength of a confident leader. Instead, you want to be known as a company that helps all the various members of the team succeed in whatever problems are being addressed. Rather than claiming that you are the most innovative of companies, you want to be known as a company that helps those that you work with become more innovative themselves. In the end, a company can only be as innovative as the collective capacity of the people in the organization, and clearly, that requires attracting top talent. In today's highly competitive business environment, a company cannot attract and retain the top talent it needs unless such people feel that they are respected as individuals and professionals, which increasingly means that in addition to their work in the business, they are involved in activities as part of communities. GIO 2.0 participants observed that "innovation in business and society is fueled by the unifying notion of 'the endeavor' - activities driven by a common set of interests, goals or values." We see that for example with the rise of open communities, social networks, online discussions or "jams", as well as the collaboration that is such an integral part of the world of research, whether your discipline is physics, medicine, history or law. In such an environment, a business needs to not only attract top talent, but it needs to trust them and encourage them to collaborate and innovate with colleagues within and outside the business, driven as much by pride of contribution as by loyalty to the company. For companies used to hierarchic organizations and strategies driven down from the top, this management style is not easy at all. It requires that the company and its top managers accept the fact that they don't have all the answers, and that in today's fast changing and complex world such answers are best found with their own people, their business partners, their customers, researchers in universities and government labs and so on. Often, the way people get inspired and come up with new ideas will be through their interactions with colleagues within and outside the business, and consequently, the humble - and wise - corporation does everything possible to encourage such community interactions. For collaborative innovation to become part of the DNA of a company, its culture must embrace a set of seeming paradoxes. It must be both aggressive and self-conscious, both prideful and humble, both confident and second-guessing. Without abandoning its competitive spirit -- indeed, while enhancing it -- the company must truly accept the notion that the way to make progress and solve problems is to work as a team and tap into the collective knowledge of the team. In fact, such a culture of collaboration often enables the company to better compete in the marketplace in those areas in which it chooses to do so. The wise corporation recognizes that a major element of business strategy in the 21st century is to achieve the proper balance of proprietary and collaborative innovation. This is really difficult, but doable, as IBM's own experience attests. For example, we have simultaneously accelerated our creation of intellectual property -- evident in 13 years-and-counting as the top U.S. patent earner -- while deeply embracing the open source movement and the spread of open standards. In other words, we're holding in our heads at the same time notions of profiting-from-ownership and profiting-from-collaboration. I'm convinced that those companies that make a similar transition will increasingly attract the most talented people, the best partners, and in the end - the most loyal customers.
By Irving Wladawsky-Berger - IBM

Extortion virus code gets cracked BBC News
Do not panic if your data is hidden by virus writers demanding a ransom. Poor programming has allowed anti-virus companies to discover the password to retrieve the hijacked data inside a virus that has claimed at least one UK victim. The Archiveus virus caught out British nurse Helen Barrow and swapped her data with a password-protected file. The virus is the latest example of so-called "ransomware" that tries to extort cash from victims.

Code breaker
Analysis of Archiveus has revealed that the password to unlock the file containing all the hijacked files is contained within the code of the virus itself. This virus swaps files found in the "My Documents" folder on Windows with a single file protected by a 30-digit password. Victims are only told the password if they buy drugs from one of three online pharmacies. The 30-digit password locking the files is "mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw". Using the password should restore all the hijacked files. "Now the password has been uncovered, there should be no reason for anyone hit by this ransomware attack to have to make any payments to the criminals behind it," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos. Archiveus was discovered on 6 May but it took the rest of the month for the first victim, Rochdale nurse Helen Barrow, to emerge. Ms Barrow is thought to have fallen victim when she responded to an on-screen message warning her that her computer had contracted another unnamed virus. The virus asks those it infects to buy drugs on one of three websites to get their files back. "When I realised what had happened, I just felt sick to the core," said Ms Barrow about the incident. The Archiveus virus is only the latest in a series of malicious programs used by extortionists to extract cash from victims. Archiveus seems to use some parts of another ransoming virus called Cryzip that was circulating in March 2006.

Ancient fig clue to first farmingBBC News
Ancient figs found in an archaeological site in the Jordan Valley may represent one of the earliest forms of agriculture, scientists report. The carbonised fruits date between 11,200 and 11,400 years old. The US and Israeli scientists say the figs are a variety that could have only been grown with human intervention. The team, writing in the journal Science, says the find marks the point when humans turned from hunting and gathering to food cultivation.

Random mutations
Nine small figs, measuring just 18mm (0.7in) across, along with 313 smaller fig fragments were discovered in a house in an early Neolithic village, called Gilgal I, in the Jordan Valley. The researchers from Harvard University in the US and Bar-Ilan University in Israel believe the figs are an early domestic crop rather than a wild breed. After examining the figs, they determined that it was a self-pollinating, or parthenocarpic, variety, like the kind we eat today.


In nature, parthenocarpic fig trees appear now and again by a chance genetic mutation. But because they do not produce seeds they cannot reproduce alone - they require a shoot to be removed and replanted. Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist from Harvard University and an author on the paper, said: "Once the parthenocarpic mutation occurred, humans must have recognised that the resulting fruits do not produce new trees, and fig tree cultivation became a common practice. "In this intentional act of planting a specific variant of fig tree, we can see the beginnings of agriculture. This edible fig would not have survived if not for human intervention."

Neolithic revolution
The figs were well preserved and found together with wild barley, wild oats and acorns. The team says this indicates these early Neolithic people mixed food cultivation with hunting and gathering. "This sort of find helps us to learn about human behaviour at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution," said Professor Bar-Yosef. "Before this you had about 2.5 million years of hunters and gathers in various locations around the world. "But the Neolithic revolution was all about changing the relationship between humans and nature. Instead of just being consumers of whatever was growing in the wild, we started to plant and cultivate and corral animals and so on." The researchers say the carbonised figs pre-date the cultivation of other domesticated staples such as wheat, barley and legumes. They believe the fruit may mark the first known example of agriculture. But other carbonised finds, such as domesticated rice found in Korea thought to date from about 15,000 years ago has made defining the exact origins of agriculture complicated.
By Rebecca Morelle, Science reporter, BBC News

Deserts 'need better management' BBC News
Climate change, high water demand and even tourism are putting unprecedented pressures on the world's desert ecosystems, according to a report. The Global Deserts Outlook, produced by the UN's Environment Programme, is described as the most authoritative assessment to date of desert regions. Its authors say too much water is being frittered away on water-intensive agricultural crops. But, they add, deserts have huge economic benefits if managed sensibly. Far from being barren wastelands, deserts are biologically, economically and culturally dynamic, the report says. Desertification is the theme of World Environment Day on Monday when ecologists plan to plant trees to slow erosion, or deliver talks in schools. Among the WED events:

• A group in Mauritius plans to plant vegetation on dunes to protect beaches from erosion
• Activists in Churchill, Australia, are collecting computer parts for recycling
• A group in Zambia holds a "Miss Environment" beauty pageant.
• Activists in Vadodara, India, encourage local schools both to plant trees and build sandcastles to "get a closer connection to the topic of deserts and desertification"

"Across the planet, poverty, unsustainable land management and climate change are turning drylands into deserts, and desertification in turn exacerbates and leads to poverty," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a statement.

Solar energy source
According to the report, while many changes are likely to occur in the next 50 years, some are surprisingly positive. There are new economic opportunities such as shrimp and fish farms in Arizona and in the Negev Desert in Israel offering environmentally friendly livelihoods for local people. Similarly, desert plants and animals are being seen as positive sources of new drugs and crops. Even the problems of global warming could be tackled by better use of deserts: some experts say that an area of the Sahara 800km by 800km could capture enough solar energy to meet the entire world's electricity needs.

Urban demands
However, most of the 12 desert regions whose climate has been modelled are facing a drier future. There are also problems caused by the melting of the glaciers whose waters sustain deserts in South America. The impact of humans continues to cause difficulties. In the United States and in the United Arab Emirates more and more people are choosing to live in desert cities creating further pressures on scarce water resources. Mountainous areas in deserts face particular threats to their wildlife and ecosystems - all of which could be lost in 50 years without urgent action.

Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting PC World
Google Spreadsheets is, indeed live--but not yet, alas, open to all comers. Try to get in for the first time, and it'll let you get in a first-come-first-served queue; I did, and got in, and found that this service, which is a "Google Labs" experiment is very simple (don't shred your copy of Excel quite yet!) and has gaping holes in terms of even basic functionality...but it's nifty for what it is. As I mentioned in my last post, I've tried a bunch of AJAX-y spreadsheets and hadn't found one that had all the basics of Excel-like user-interface behavior down pat. Google Spreadsheets does--use the mouse, arrow keys, and other means of input, and they almost always do what you'd expect. The service is a tad sluggish at times--especially when opening, closing, importing, and exporting spreadsheets--but for the most part, it's acceptably snappy. (Deleting a worksheet from a file, however, has been agonizingly slow in my informal experiments.) In terms of mimicking standard spreadsheet features...well, it does many of the the things you'd expect, with a good library of formulas, multiple worksheet support, and reasonably rich formatting features (I was happy to see that you can merge cells). I've only imported a couple of Excel spreadsheets so far, but they came in more or less intact. (However, the one with fairly fancy filtering in Excel came in minus its filtering drop-downs.) What Google Spreadsheets does, it does quite well, but there are far more Excel-type features that it doesn't even attempt to emulate than ones that it does. (Zoho Sheet, just to pick one competitor, does a lot more at the moment.) There's no printing feature beyond what you can get from your browser. Sorting is bare-bones. You can freeze rows but not (as far as I can tell) columns, and there's no charting whatsoever. And any Excel feature that's even a tiny bit advanced simply isn't here. One other complaint, as long as I'm squawking: Depending on your screen resolution, you may find that the amount of screen space in Google Spreadsheets that's actually devoted to the spreadsheet is kind of skimpy--it seems like the UI could be more space-efficient:

Then again, Google's spreadsheet does some things that Microsoft's doesn't. Like Writely and many of the other best browser-based apps, it includes painless built-in collaboration--in theory, you can quickly share sheets with anyone who has a Google Account (aka a Gmail account; I've had a little trouble so far getting this to work with every coworker who has one, however). You can choose to let folks either just view the spreadsheet or have editing rights, and in the latter instance you'll see changes as they make them, and vice versa. Google Spreadsheets' most unexpected feature is a built-in chat feature: If you and one or more people you've shared a sheet with are in it st the same time, you can use a chat window to communicate. This won't change number-crunching forever--you can do something similar today with any IM client--but it's nicely implemented, and could certainly come in handy if you need to work on a spreadsheet with someone who's not in the same room at the same time. Here's what the chat window looks like:

I'd hoped in my previous post that Google Spreadsheets would have some sort of real integration with Google's Writely word processor (which sadly still isn't signing up new users right now). It doesn't--it's a completely stand-alone product, with a distinctly different UI. Spiritually, though, they're fraternal twins, at least. They're both lean, mean, and fun to use. In other words, they're Google-esque. At least Google Spreadsheets is Google-esque if you can be Google-esque without having any sort of search feature--there's no way to search within a spreadsheet, or to search all your spreadsheets... As with almost all things Google, Google Spreadsheets does leave you wondering what the company is up to. Very roughly speaking, it and Writely offer what Excel 1.0 and Word 1.0 offered many, many years ago. Does Google want to build them out into deep, feature-rich applications? How long will its attention span last when it comes to this stuff? Even if its ambitions are expansive, there are still a ton of features which are may simply impossible to implement in a browser-based app right now. (Side note: Google has launched so many services without a clear revenue strategy that I've forgotten to ask "How does it plan to make a profit at this?" For the record, Google Spreadsheets is a free, ad-free service...and it's hard to imagine how you could target ads based on the numbers in a particular spreadsheet.) Google has talked up Google Spreadsheets as being perfect for managing stuff like soccer-team scores. Even a soccer coach might want some capabilities it lacks in its current form, such as real printing tools. (The good news is that nobody needs to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on Excel for basic tasks: If Google Spreadsheets isn't up to a task, the equally free OpenOffice.org probably is.) One nice thing about soccer coaches, from Google's perspective: They're probably not very secretive about their files. Google Spreadsheets doesn't encrypt your data, which will make it a non-starter for many of the sensitive subjects that end up in spreadsheets. Me, I imagine I'll continue to spend time in Excel or OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet for most of my number-crunching tasks. But I'm in a happy groove of using Writely for some of my basic word processing--especially when I want a file to be easily gotten at from any computer--and I like the idea of at least trying to use Google Spreadsheets in a similar way. Especially if it fills in some of the holes I've mentioned. When Google focuses on a product, it can evolve and improve with dizzying speed (Google Desktop!). But other projects seem to fester (Google Groups, in beta, and, seemingly, limbo, for half a decade!). Anyone want to hazard a guess as to which kind of product Google Spreadsheets will turn out to be? It doesn't need to evolve into Excel to be great--in fact, its straightforwardness and lack of bloat is, potentially, a killer feature itself. But the service does need to evolve a bit further to reach its potential.
By Harry McCracken
Google bent upon invading Microsoft Hindustan Times
Google Reveals Launch Of Limited Test Of Spreadsheets On Google Labs Trading Markets
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Microsoft Seen Beating Google In Spreadsheet Battle Forbes
Google's new Spreadsheet application doesn't pose an immediate threat to Microsoft, according to RBC Capital Markets. The research firm maintained an "outperform" rating and $32 price target on Microsoft shares after Google announced yesterday that it had launched a beta version of its Spreadsheet service. Spreadsheet is Google's second application aimed at Microsoft's Office suite: in March, the company bought Writely.com, a free on-line word processor that has a small subset of capabilities similar to Microsoft Word. "For now, we don't believe Google Spreadsheet to be a credible replacement for Excel, and we believe it to be very unlikely for any enterprise to run their core spreadsheet requirements on a web-based offering," wrote analyst Robert Breza in a report. "We believe it is more likely to spur Microsoft in developing a similar offering." If Microsoft chooses to counter Google's move with a light-weight suite of productivity tools, their likely platform will be Office Live, which is also currently in beta, said the analyst. Breza expects enterprise users to continue to demand off-line access, security, and extensive functionality, including the business intelligence functions and "add-in" capabilities, which will be expanded in Microsoft's Office 2007. For now, he says on-line tools like Spreadsheet or thinkfree.com's suite of products will have to become more durable to meet the "ruggedness" enterprise users are accustomed to under Microsoft's Office applications. "In the short-term, these on-line tools will provide a cheap/free alternative, though a similar trade-off in functionality will be made and is likely to continue as Microsoft continues to invest heavily in their core products," said the analyst. Microsoft expects to ship its next version Office 2007 suite, currently in its second beta release, in January of 2007.
By Maya Roney

Mini-dinosaurs emerge from quarry BBC News
A new species of mini-dinosaur has been unearthed in northern Germany. The creature was of the sauropod type - that group of long-necked, four-footed herbivores that were the largest of all the dinosaurs. But at just a few metres in length, this animal was considerably smaller than its huge cousins, scientists report in the journal Nature. The team thinks the Jurassic species evolved its small form in response to limited food resources on an island. Martin Sander, from the University of Bonn, and colleagues studied the remains of over 11 sauropods found in a quarry at Oker, near Goslar, Lower Saxony. With total body lengths ranging from 1.7 to 6.2m (5.5-20ft), the team originally thought the dinosaurs were juveniles. But when the scientists examined the fossils closely, they realised they were dealing with dwarf creatures.


The species has been given the formal classification Europasaurus holgeri, or "Holger's reptile from Europe". The name honours Holger Luedtke, a self-taught palaeontologist who found the first bones in 1998. In height terms, an adult E. holgeri would have been about the size of a horse at the shoulder. Compare this with other sauropods, which were bigger than buses, tens of metres in length and could weigh 100 tonnes or more. The fossils were found in Late Jurassic carbonate rock (about 150 million years old). At this period in Earth's history, much of what is now central Europe was under water. Dr Sander and colleagues suggest the dinosaurs could have lived on one of the large islands around the Lower Saxony basin. "Such islands would not have been able to support large-bodied sauropods," they write in Nature. "The ancestor of the Europasaurus would have dwarfed rapidly on immigrating to the island, or as a response to shrinking land masses caused by rising sea levels."

Yahoo! Photos Gets Flickred Up Forbes
When Yahoo! snapped up photo-sharing startup Flickr in March 2005, many asked why, when millions of people per month were already uploading images to Yahoo!’s homegrown service. But Yahoo!’s acquisition strategy became clearer Wednesday as the company unveiled a renovation of Yahoo! Photos that incorporates some but not all of the quirky social features that make tiny Flickr the fifth most trafficked photo site on the Web, according to Nielsen NetRatings. Yahoo! Photo users will now be introduced to Flickr-ish concepts like sharing descriptive tags and comments with friends, but closer integration between the two products, such as sharing photos between Flickr and Yahoo Photos accounts and the ability to publish photos to the public Web, isn’t in the current plan, says Yahoo! Photos director of product management Will Aldrich. That’s because users of the two products are very different, and hardly overlap at all, says Aldrich. “Flickr isn’t the best fit for the mass market user,” he says. “Moms want to share photos of their kids, but they want to control it.” Flickr users generally post photos that are viewable by anyone. With cell phones and digital cameras in more than 50% of American households, nearly 22 billion digital images will be captured in 2006, according to the Photo Marketing Association. Yahoo! wants to store as many of them as possible on its servers, and with this beta-stage update now offers users unlimited storage space, and a clean, drag-and-drop interface that looks a little bit like Apple’s iPhoto application. Like most of its other web properties, Yahoo! turns traffic on its photo service’s pages into dollars with banners and sponsored text ads. But revenue also comes from printing paper photos, as well as printing photos on coffee mugs and calendars through an online store. Yahoo! also inked a deal with Target to let Yahoo! Photos users pick up prints from a local store within an hour after placing an order. Yahoo! Photos already ranks as the first or second most-trafficked photo site (according to April 2006 data from Nielsen NetRatings and ComScore Media Metrix), but Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Photobucket is neck-and-neck. Photobucket, with more than $13 million in venture funding under its belt, says its business of hosting photos and linking them to other sites is profitable. The two companies both plan to take advantage of traffic stemming from user generated content, though they have opposite plans of attack. While Yahoo! integrated its photo service with other properties in the Yahoo! network, such as mail, messenger, mobile and 360, in order to keep users at Yahoo and bring guests to the site to view photos, Photobucket brings its services to social networking sites. Photobucket users travel frequently between the photo uploading site and News Corp.’s MySpace, Google’s Blogger, EBay and Facebook.
By Rachel Rosmarin

Robot device mimics human touch BBC News
A device which may pave the way for robotic hands that can replicate the human sense of touch has been unveiled. US scientists have created a sensor that can "feel" the texture of objects to the same degree of sensitivity as a human fingertip. The team says the tactile sensor could, in the future, aid minimally invasive surgical techniques by giving surgeons a "touch-sensation". The research is reported in the journal Science. "If you look at the current status of these tactile sensors, the frustration has been that the resolution of all these devices is in the range of millimetres," explained Professor Ravi Saraf, an engineer from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, US, and a co-author of the paper. "Whereas the resolution of a human fingertip is about 40 microns, about half the diameter of a human hair, and this has affected the performance of these devices."

Nano-device
But Professor Saraf and colleague Dr Vivek Maheshwari, also from the University of Nebraska, were able to attain this high level of sensitivity by creating a very thin film made up of layers of metal and semiconducting nanoparticles flanked at the top and bottom by electrodes. When the film touches a surface any pressure or stress squeezes the layers of particles together. This causes the current in the film to change and light is emitted from the particles, an effect known as "electroluminescence". The visible light is then detected by a camera. "The beautiful thing is that we have managed to make the device in such a way that the amount of current change, or light, that you get out is exactly proportional to the stress that you apply," added Professor Saraf. To demonstrate the high sensitivity of the device, the scientists pressed a US one cent coin against it. The sensor revealed the wrinkles in President Lincoln's clothing and the letters TY in liberty.

Detecting cancers
Professor Saraf said the film, as well as matching the sensitivity of a human fingertip, was also flexible and robust enough to be used repeatedly. He also said the device could have medical applications. "The hope is that if you have the resolution close to a human finger in applications like minimal invasive surgery, where the surgeon could actually "touch" while he or she doing the procedure and tell if the tissue is cancerous or abnormal etc, that would increase the success of these surgeries." Dr Richard Crowder, a robotics expert from Southampton University, commented in an accompanying article in the journal: "The development of tactile sensors is one of the key technical challenges in advanced robotics and minimal access surgery. "The unique sensor developed by Maheshwari and Saraf could prove to be a key advance in technology, for reasons including relatively simple construction, apparent robustness, and high resolution." Professor Saraf added that now he would like to see if he could create a device that can detect temperature changes as well as texture, enabling it to closer mimic the sensations humans can feel.
By Rebecca Morelle, Science reporter, BBC News

Webbys 2.0 Forbes
Win a Grammy and you might see CD sales increase. An Oscar might boost DVD sales. But winning a Webby can shut down your company. After the Montreal-based Web-design company Dream Studio Design won a Webby award for "Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics" last month, curious Web surfers flooded the company's site, crashing five of its servers. A Webby can provide a more benign boost, as well: Paint company Sherwin-Williams (nyse: SHW - news - people ) says it has seen a (manageable) traffic spike to its "color visualizer" feature since winning their award in May. The fact that the ten-year-old Webby, which will honor this year's winners on Monday in New York City, has any clout at all is a testament to the renewed vitality of the industry it honors. Throughout the past decade, the size and tone of the Webby awards has closely mirrored that of the dot-com sector. In 1997, the first year a Webby awards show was held, 700 people showed up at Bimbo's night club in San Francisco to celebrate sites like bezerk.com and suck.com--both now defunct--and IMDB.com and Salon, both which survive as popular destinations today. By 2000, the peak of the dot-com bubble, the Webby awards show at San Francisco's Nob Hill Masonic Center drew 3,000 netizens, who watched as representatives from relatively nascent search portal Google.com retrieved awards for technical achievement by roller-skating victoriously across the stage. Awards were presented by celebs like Alan Cummings and Sandra Bernhardt. As the bubble began to burst, Webbys founder Tiffany Shlain says the award show's organizers were in denial. "We had our biggest show ever in 2001, because we wanted to make a statement that we didn't believe this industry was really going away." A preshow hosted by Emporio Armani and an awards ceremony featuring drag queens and a gospel choir ensured the mood was as upbeat as 1999. But by 2003, there was no money left for a lavish awards ceremony. Awards were still chosen but were announced online that year, as they were in 2004. In 2005, as the tech industry recovered, the Webby Awards were sold to IDG, a technology media and events company, and the show was back on--this time in New York. The Webby awards now employ a new strategy of scale, inviting only 500 attendees to an exclusive dinner show and securing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart comedian Rob Corddry as emcee. To keep the evening short, winners in 65 categories are allowed to make acceptance speeches no longer than five words. Today, digital content is thoroughly mainstream--so much so that the long-standing television-awards show, the Emmys, has begun to recognize programming designed for consumption via computer, iPod and cell phone. The first new-media Emmy was granted in April at the Daytime Emmy Awards to Time Warner's AOL for its Internet broadcast coverage of "Live 8," an international concert and poverty fundraiser. While the Emmy may not have changed AOL's fortunes as a digital-content provider--after all, its brand is already one of the most well known of the Internet-era--a nomination in this new category could mean everything to a startup. The "new media" Emmy is so new that it is too soon to tell whether the tech industry or consumers will give the category clout comparable to an "Outstanding Comedy Series" Emmy nod. But Chris Tyler, chief executive of Riddle Productions, says his company's nomination in that category for interactive Web-based episodes of Stranger Adventures' Helen Beaumont has resulted in enormous recognition, including phone calls from movie studios, networks and cable channels interested in giving his firm work. Some even offered to buy him out.
Special Report: The World's Best Companies
By Rachel Rosmarin

New shark discovered in US waters BBC News
A new type of hammerhead shark has been discovered in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, marine scientists say. The shark resembles a common species called the scalloped hammerhead but has not yet been classified or named. US researchers say the animal appears to be rare, breeding only in waters off the South Carolina coast. They believe the shark is at risk of extinction and conservation efforts are needed to protect females when they are raising their pups. The shark was discovered by a biology professor at the University of South Carolina. Dr Joe Quattro became curious about a common coastal shark called the scalloped hammerhead shark while studying coastal fish. Genetic studies revealed that there was a second "cryptic" species - that is, "genetically distinct" from the scalloped hammerhead.

Nursery grounds
The shark appears to breed only in waters off South Carolina, although adults swim into waters off Florida and North Carolina."If South Carolina's waters are the primary nursery grounds for the cryptic species and females gather here to reproduce, these areas should be conservation priorities," said Dr Quattro. "Management plans are needed to ensure that these sharks are not adversely impacted so that we can learn more." Scientists plan to tag the shark so they can understand more about its range. Ali Hood, director of conservation at the Shark Trust in the UK, said with only 454 recorded species of shark in the wild, it was exciting to discover another one. "It shows how small areas of coastline are significant to certain species and it is so important to consider shark conservation on an area by area basis," she said.

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites NewScientist.com news service
"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream. New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals. Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.


Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation. By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay. "You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas. Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag. "RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag. The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites. On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May. That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA. What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month. The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members (see Graph). The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together. So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers. Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before." The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth. The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act. Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns. But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says. Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.
By Paul Marks

Scoble To Exit Microsoft CRN
The blogs were humming this weekend about the decision of Microsoft uber-blogger Robert Scoble to leave the fold. (The Microsoft fold, not the blogging fold, that is.) Scoble—on his blog of course—says it's true. He's going to Podtech and is relocating from the Seattle area to the Valley. For the record and contrary to what other bloggers have written, Scoble says he remains a Microsoft fan and his move should not be taken as an anti-Microsoft ding. He also said Microsoft brought no pressure to bear on him for any negative things he may have said. And never fear he writes, some 3,000 other Microsofties are still blogging away. Oh joy. Still, a move is a move. And coming it as it does just as Tech Ed 2006 kicks off, it's bound to have tongues wagging. Just weeks ago Microsoft's Channel 9, another Scoble venue, touted him as "the star of Tech Ed Europe."
By Barbara Darrow, CRN

Mars chip to test for life signs BBC News
It is set to become one of the key experiments on ExoMars, Europe's next mission to the Red Planet in 2011. The Life Marker Chip (LMC) will test soil samples drilled from below Mars' surface for specific molecules that can be associated with life. The results might not be a definitive proof of the existence of microbes, but they could still provide tantalising evidence for their possible presence. A UK-led international consortium is developing the technology. On Monday, it was awarded £0.5m (0.7m euros) to advance the system's design and demonstrate such an instrument can be made small enough and light enough to be flown half a billion kilometres to Mars. "As ever on missions like ExoMars, the mass constraints are very tight - we're trying to get the whole package down to about 800g," said Dr Mark Sims, from Leicester University. "Essentially, you're looking at something that's the weight of a mobile phone in a lunchbox," he told BBC News.

Prototype proof
The £0.5m is part of a £1.7m (2.5m euros) package of R&D investment announced by the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PParc) to enable UK scientists and engineers to develop key instrumentation and technologies for the ExoMars mission. The £410m (600m euros) European Space Agency project (Esa) was approved by ministers last December. The current vision is for a 400kg (880lbs) rover that would study Mars' environment and geology. It would also carry a range of instrumentation capable of investigating the planet's life potential - past and present. The LMC would be a key component of ExoMars' "Pasteur Laboratory". Dr Sims' team is now engaged in a 20-month study that expects to turn the chip instrument from an exciting concept into a working prototype. The Life Marker Chip will look for the presence of molecules such as amino acids; DNA; and adenosine triphosphate, the critical molecule involved in energy transfer in cells.

Martian 'pregnancy'
To make a detection, the ExoMars rover would drill down into the Martian soil with a mole and pull a sample into the Pasteur housing. There, the sample would be ground up and treated with solvents to pull out any organic (carbon-rich) material. The fluid would then be passed through a test channel in the LMC. The technology exploits the fact that molecules will only bind with other molecules of a particular shape - essentially a "lock and key" approach. If one of the target molecules is present in the fluid, it will bind to a prepared receptor in the test channel. It is a process that is very similar to pharmacy testing kits that detect the presence of a hormone associated with the early stages of pregnancy. "The pregnancy testing kit is a good analogy," said Dr Sims. "The fluid flows across a molecular receptor array; but instead of getting a 'blue line', we see dots where the compounds are bound to the surface; and they will actually fluoresce." He added: "If [Martian life] has a chemistry similar to life on Earth, we will see it."

'Winning' position
Britain has promised more than £70m (100m euros) to Esa's Aurora Solar System exploration programme, of which the ExoMars project is the major focus. The UK is the biggest "subscriber" after Italy and can expect a sizeable number of contracts to come its way when Esa invites final tenders to build the mission's components. The commitment already of UK industry to the mission can be seen in "Bridget", a testbest rover chassis developed by EADS-Astrium and featured by BBC News last month. Bridget has been trialling the locomotive aspects of the ExoMars design on the slopes of the El Teide volcano in Tenerife. So far, Bridget has been constructed with Astrium's own money. The PParc funds will now help develop an autonomous navigation system that would enable the rover to guide itself over a rocky landscape without the need for human intervention. "The new PParc money allows us to do the early development work that will pre-position the UK to win the ExoMars contracts w