Sony to launch online service with PlayStation 3 Yahoo! NEWS
Sony Corp.'s top video game studio executive said on Wednesday that a new online service debuting with its PlayStation 3 console in early November will open up a world of new content for gamers as well as new revenue opportunities for the company. The service, which lets users buy games and communicate and compete with other players via the Web, again puts the company in head-to-head competition with Microsoft Corp. Sony, one of the world's leading technology manufacturers and entertainment companies, aims to retain dominance over the roughly $30 billion global video game market with the PS3. Rival Microsoft introduced its next-generation Xbox 360 game console in November of last year. The company's Xbox Live subscription service, which offers game downloads and online play, has been a hit on the new machine and Sony had been widely expected to offer a similar service. The basic level of Sony's online service, known internally as PlayStation Network Platform, will be free, Phil Harrison, president of worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, said at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Users will pay for subscriptions to game services and premium content, he told Reuters in an interview. When asked if Sony would tap its music and film libraries, he said: "Obviously, the strategy is for more than just games."

INSPIRED BY WEB PHENOMS
Built in collaboration with Sony Online Entertainment, which already offers PC game downloads and a marketplace for trading virtual assets, the service was inspired by such successful businesses as Web bazaar eBay Inc. and online retailer Amazon.com -- where communities of users contribute ratings and recommendations. It also steals a page from social networking sites like Myspace.com, which has attracted tens of millions of users. "We have to fall into step with consumer expectations," said Harrison, who said the social aspects of the network promise to get people more involved in gaming. Among other things, the network aims to make gaming a more central part of people's lives. "I believe that games can have the same social currency of a great television program," he said, invoking an image of people gathering around the water cooler to talk about a game they played the night before. With broadband adoption on the rise and television viewership dropping, advertisers are exploring the possibility of buying ad space in games much like they now do on the Web. "This can provide a tremendous revenue stream for our industry," Harrison said. Video game makers, who have seen sales fall as gamers wait and save for new consoles, have been under pressure to find new ways to offset rising game development costs. Microsoft said on Tuesday that Xbox Live has logged more than 10 million downloads, which it said was "faster than iTunes did when it launched" -- a reference to Apple Computer Inc.'s popular music download service. More than 85 percent of Xbox 360 consoles that are connected to the Internet have downloaded games, trailers and videos from the subscription service, Microsoft said. Downloads appeal to many game makers, who can cut costs by selling direct to consumers. Online distribution also gives them a way to head off piracy and used game sales by providing a way to check that the player of a game is also its owner. NPD analyst Anita Frazier said most publishers are "treading lightly" into the space since they don't want to alienate retailers, but added that such services would likely open the market for more games. "If this allows more niche games to get out ... it's going to help grow the industry," Frazier said. Harrison said he expects retail to remain the main outlet for purchasing games for the foreseeable future. "It's not going to shift overnight," he said.
By Lisa Baertlein

Scientist Alleging Bush Censorship Helped Gore, Kerry Crosswalk.com
The scientist touted by CBS News' "60 Minutes" as arguably the "world's leading researcher on global warming" and spotlighted as a victim of the Bush administration's censorship on the issue, publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president and received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by Kerry's wife. Scientist James Hansen has also admitted that he contributed to two recent Democratic presidential campaigns. Furthermore, he acted as a consultant in February to former Vice President Al Gore's slide show presentations on "global warming," which Gore presented around the country. But Scott Pelley, the "60 Minutes" reporter who profiled Hansen and detailed his accusations of censorship on the March 19, edition of the newsmagazine, made no mention of Hansen's links to Kerry and Gore and none to the fact that Kerry's wife -- Teresa Heinz Kerry -- had been one of Hansen's benefactors. Pelley's "Rewriting the Science" segment focused on Hansen's allegations that the Bush administration was preventing his views from becoming publicized because it did not like his conclusions. Hansen's complaints were first publicized in January. "In my more than three decades in the government, I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," Hansen told Pelley. But Hansen had made similar claims of another Republican White House allegedly censoring his views. In 1989, Hansen claimed that President Bush's father - then-President George H. W. Bush - was censoring his climate research. Kerry and about a dozen other senators eventually co-signed a letter written by Gore, who was also a senator at the time, demanding an explanation for the alleged censorship.

'Apocalyptic predictions' and political alliances
Hansen has previously acknowledged that he supported the "emphasis on extreme scenarios" regarding climate change models in order to drive the public's attention to the issue, but Pelley's "60 Minutes" report made no mention of that admission. "Not only are [Hansen's] apocalyptic predictions not coming true, but more and more countries are beginning to realize that they will destroy their economies just under Kyoto 1, to prevent about 0.1 degrees of warming," Paul Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death, told Cybercast News Service. "Hansen's rants might still garner headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times, and raves from CBS - especially if you believe every beetle infestation, forest fire, cold snap, hot flash, dry spell, flood, frog death and malaria outbreak is due to global warming - but they're complete hogwash," Driessen said. In endorsing Kerry's presidential bid late in the 2004 campaign, Hansen conceded that it could harm his reputation. "Dr. Hansen, 63, acknowledged that he imperiled his credibility and perhaps his job by criticizing Mr. Bush's policies in the final days of a tight presidential campaign." according to the Oct. 26, 2004, edition of the New York Times. Hansen said in his October 26, 2004 speech, "John Kerry has a far better grasp than President Bush on the important issues that we face." Three years earlier, Hansen had accepted the $250,000 Heinz Award granted by the foundation run by Kerry's wife Teresa. But a day after Hansen publicly endorsed Sen. John Kerry's presidential candidacy in 2004, the New York Times quoted Hansen as saying that the grant from the Heinz Foundation had had "no impact on my evaluation of the climate problem or on my political leanings." But George C. Deutsch, who served as a spokesman for NASA until resigning in February, said he quickly learned that "Dr. Hansen and his supporters have a very partisan agenda and ties reaching to the top of the Democratic Party." Deutsch resigned his post earlier this year following a controversy surrounding a false resume claim that he graduated from Texas AM University. Deutsch also denied that the Bush administration was clamping down on scientific views that did not support its preferred conclusions. "There is no pressure or mandate from the Bush administration or elsewhere, to alter or water down scientific data at NASA, period," Deutsch said, according to a Feb. 11, article in the Washington Post. Instead, he said, there existed a "culture war" at the federal agency. "Anyone perceived to be a Republican, a Bush supporter or a Christian is singled out and labeled a threat to their views. I encourage anyone interested in this story to consider the other side, to consider Dr. Hansen' s true motivations and to consider the dangerous implications of only hearing out one side of the global warming debate," Deutsch added. Hansen fired back at Deutsch's assertions in an online statement published in February, calling Deutsch's claims "nonsense." "I can be accurately described as moderately conservative," Hansen wrote, while acknowledging that he had endorsed Kerry for president in 2004 "because he recognized global warming problem." Hansen stated that he had great respect for former Vice President Al Gore, noting that he met with Gore in January 2006 and ended up consulting Gore on his climate change slide show presentations. "I have great respect for Vice President Gore and his dedication to communicating the importance of global warming. He has a better understanding of the science of global warming than any politician I have met, and I urge citizens to pay attention to his presentation, which I understand will come out in the form of a movie," Hansen wrote. Hansen wrote that his only two political contributions were to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and to either the 2000 Al Gore presidential run or the Kerry 2004 campaign. "I don't remember which," Hansen stated. Hansen, described by Pelley in the "60 Minutes" report as an "independent," also reportedly refused to go along the Clinton administration on the issue of "global warming." The Clinton administration "wanted to hear that warming was worse than it was," Pelley reported.

Justifying climate alarmism
In the March 2004 issue of Scientific American, Hansen appeared to be justifying the past use of climate models to scare the public into believing the "global warming" problem was urgent. "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue," Hansen wrote in 2004. "Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate-forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions." Patrick J. Michaels, the author of several books on climate change, including the recently published "Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming," declared that Hansen has "advocated the use of exaggeration and propaganda as political tools in the debate over global warming." Michaels, who leveled his charges in a Feb. 21 commentary entitled "Hansen's Hot Hype," wrote that "Hansen thought the public should be subjected to nightmare scenarios regardless of the scientific likelihood of catastrophe, simply in order to gain people's attention. Michaels, who believes claims of catastrophic, human-caused "global warming" are scientifically unfounded, is a climatologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Michaels has previously credited Hansen with taking a more moderate stance toward climate change. "The irony is that, in recent years, Hansen's positions on global warming have come increasingly in line with those of the administration he claims is censoring him," Michaels said. Several attempts to contact Hansen for comment were not returned. Telephone calls to Bill Owens and Catherine Herrick, the two CBS News employees who produced Pelley's "60 Minutes" segment, were referred to the network media affairs office. "60 Minutes" spokesman Kevin Tedesco defended the segment, telling Cybercast News Service that "it was a fair and accurate report." A call to reporter Scott Pelley was not returned by press time.

See Related Articles:
'The Heat Is On' Fox News for 'Global Warming' Special (Nov. 15, 2005)
Kyoto Protocol Declared 'Dead' at UN Climate Conference (Dec. 6, 2005)
Warm Homes Causing Arctic Ice Melt, Eskimo Charges (Dec. 9, 2005)
Marc Morano

PayPal to offer paying by text messageYahoo! NEWS
Online payment company PayPal said on Wednesday it was preparing to offer a service for consumers to make purchases or money transfers using simple text messaging via mobile phones. The move by PayPal, a unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc., marks a big step in bridging the worlds of e-commerce and the physical world of brick and mortar stores by giving consumers a pay as you go option via phones, analysts said. The service, known as PayPal Mobile, will be launched in the next couple of weeks in the United States, Canada and Britain. Other markets worldwide will follow for the world's biggest online payments service. "PayPal is going to be launching a mobile payments product," PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt told Reuters. Word of the service had leaked out earlier on Wednesday when bloggers found links to test pages on PayPal's Web site describing it. Details can be found at: (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/mobile/MobileSend-outside). Over time, the company may look to extend the service to the more than 55 countries and regions where PayPal is registered to transfer funds online, Bettencourt said. However, she stressed that PayPal has no specific plans to do so yet. While designed to make online payments more convenient for the nearly 100 million existing PayPal users, the move to offer a mobile payment service holds out the prospect of reaching vast markets in the developing world where phones, rather than computers, are the main way to connect to the Internet. PayPal Mobile will offer customers two options for transferring funds, be it for gifts or purchases, by phone to nearly anyone they choose, whether individuals or retailers. Payments can be sent over a phone via text message or by calling an automated customer service system and using voice commands to transmit funds, according to PayPal's site. "This is very important because it is going to create an awareness that your mobile phone is much more than just a device for talk," said Dan Schatt, an analyst with financial consulting firm Celent. "It allows you to make transactions." In effect, the phone has become an electronic wallet. In the United States, start-up TextPayMe now offers a PayPal-like service that allows consumers to send send payments via text messages. Obopay is set to launch mobile payments with a companion debit card for purchases or cash withdrawls. Operators of mobile phone systems in Britain, Europe, Australia, Japan and many other parts of Asia are well ahead in investing in mobile payment services. But PayPal's stringent verification system gives it a leg up on independent services as it appeals to a huge base of existing users, Schatt said.

PAY AS YOU GO
One feature, called Text to Buy, would allow magazine readers, for example, to buy advertised items such as clothes, concert tickets or music or movie-video discs using their mobile phones, by sending product codes located in the ads. A merchant receiving such a payment would then ship the product to the address stored in the PayPal user's account. "It's basically just another way to access PayPal," Bettencourt said. "It's just like in the online world when you send a payment," she said. "All you are doing is sending a payment using your phone instead of your computer." When introduced, mobile phone users will be able to send a text message to 729725 (the spelling of PayPal on a numeric handset keypad) with the amount of money the sender wishes to transfer and the recipient's phone number. On the PayPal Web site, the company uses the example: "Send 5 to 4150001234." A PayPal computer then calls back the text message sender on the phone and asks the user to enter a secret PIN to confirm the transaction. PayPal immediately notifies the recipient and tells it how to claim the payment online. The Web site shows a second option where the customer calls 1-800-4PAYPAL, enters a secret PIN, the amount of the transfer and the phone number where the payment is to be sent.
By Eric Auchard

- Greenland's Glacial Earthquakes Increasing In Frequency
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Greenlan..._Frequency.html

Ithaca NY (SPX) Mar 24, 2006 - Rise of seismic activity linked to the movement of glaciers may be a response to global warming Seismologists at Columbia University and Harvard University have found a new indicator that the Earth is warming: "glacial earthquakes" caused when the rivers of ice lurch unexpectedly and produce temblors as strong as magnitude 5.1 on the moment-magnitude scale.

What Makes a Lefty: Myths and Mysteries Persist Yahoo! NEWS
Can openers, scissors and spiral-bound notebooks discriminate against lefties. Despite such challenges, 10 to 12 percent of the human population has historically preferred the left hand. Why doesn't the number ever waiver? Nobody knows for sure, but new research supports a body of evidence that suggests genetics have a hand in it all. In the meantime, the myth remains that lefties are more artistic. And the idea that left-handed fighters have an advantage persists on scant evidence, supported by Scottish lore and Rocky Balboa's heroics in the ring.

Look, Mom: Both hands!
Like many traits, handedness is probably determined by a complex interaction between genes and the environment, experts figure. Left-handers are more likely to have a left-handed relative. But researchers have yet to find the gene or set of genes that pick one hand over the other. Most scientists agree that handedness exists on a continuum. The idea helps explain why some people bowl with their left but hold a spoon in their right. Truly ambidextrous people, who have indifferent preference for either hand, are extremely rare. In a new study, researchers measured the width of elbows in living people and in skeletons from a medieval British farming community. The researchers assumed the 9-to-1 ratio of handedness would match the ratio of bigger right to left elbows. The prediction held true in the modern-day group, but not for the medieval bones. Most of the ancient farmers' left and right elbows were the same size. "It's obvious that they were using both hands equally," said anthropologist Amanda Blackburn from the University of Manitoba. "It's not fair to say they were ambidextrous in the true sense of the word, but they may have had a tendency to use both hands equally. It's a behavior they may have learned rather than just being born like that." The findings will be published in the April issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

Oppressing the left
Lefties have long suffered. In India and Indonesia, eating with the left hand is considered impolite. Chinese characters prove extremely difficult to write with the left hand. Not so long ago, teachers slapped the wrists of left-handed American elementary students. Humans have shown the ability to learn to use their non-preferred hand after injuries, when required to perform manual labor, or in the face of cultural pressure. Yet preference for handedness appears to take root in the womb, or even earlier. One genetic model, called the right shift theory and developed by psychologist Marian Annett at the University of Leicester, suggests that a single gene increases the likelihood of being right-handed. "The essence of my right shift theory is that there is a gene that helps to develop speech in the left hemisphere of the brain and increases the probability of right-handedness," Annett told LiveScience. Whatever evolutionary jog made humans left-brain dominant for speech also made us right-side dominant, Annett argues. Since our closest relatives—chimpanzees—can't talk, the gene must have arisen in recent evolutionary history. One study found most chimps prefer to fish for termites with their left hand. But other recent research shows most chimpanzees favor their right hand when throwing overhand. "The prevailing genetic model seems to be pretty strong. There are only a few weak points that are yet to be addressed. Not only can they not pinpoint a gene, there's conflicting data out there too," said David Wolman, author of "A Left Hand Turn Around the World" (Da Capo Press, 2005). In a twist on the genetic model, the gene for hand preference might also be the gene for hair whorl direction, the way a person's hair turns on the top of their head. Half of people with counterclockwise whorls prefer their left hand, according to research by Amar Klar at the National Cancer Institute. The same system that patterns hair and handedness could also play a role in the asymmetrical organization of the brain. "It is clear that the same genetics control both traits, along with the side of the brain where language is processed," said Klar.

The artistic myth
The answer to left-handedness is likely in the brain, and probably has to do with that organ's asymmetry, scientists generally believe. Somewhere in our lopsided brains is something, probably a gene or two that determines which hand prefers to throw a ball and which hand likes to write. Unfortunately, scientists can't open up someone's brain and see a sign for hand preference Wolman said. For anyone to move their left hand, or anything on their left side, instructions come from the right side of the brain. Motor centers of the brain control the hands; lefties have more dominant motor centers on the right side of their brain. But just because the directions come from the side of the brain associated with artistic function, doesn't mean a lefty's more likely to compose a Shakespearean sonnet. "The big myth is that the right side of the brain is somehow a creativity bull's-eye. That's not the case, and doesn't have anything to do with handedness. You need resources from both sides of your brain to be creative. All people use both sides of the brain," Wolman told LiveScience.

Fighting advantage
Lefties have had the upper hand in hand-to-hand combat since the Bronze Age, and even today, in the boxing ring. Left-handedness could be beneficial in times of violence, and genetically passed from one generation of fighters to the next, as shown by Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond of the University of Montpellier II in France. While a righty fought with a sword in his right hand and a shield in his left, a left-handed swordsman could make strong surprise attack on the opponent's unprotected right side. Recall Rocky Balboa's last-minute switch to his southpaw. The Kerr family of Scotland, known for sinister swordsmanship, went so far as to build Ferniehirst Castle with an unusual staircase that spiraled counterclockwise. The architecture provided left-handed fighters more freedom to swing their sword. Today, the common Scottish terms Kerr-handed, kerry-fisted and corry-fisted mean left-handed. The concept of lefties advantageously killing off all the righties doesn't hold strong, however. The 9-to-1 ratio of right- to left-handedness existed long before the advent of sword and shield warfare and continues to this day. Some researchers suggest prenatal levels of testosterone determine hand preference. Brain damage from trauma in the delivery room is another explanation. "Proud lefties cringe at the thought of it," said the left-handed Wolman. "The genetic model has wider support among the laterality community than brain damage at birth or levels of hormones in the womb," Wolman said. "At the end of the day, everyone seems to go back to the gene."

• Why You Can't Tickle Yourself
• Peace or War? How Early Humans Behaved
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• The Biggest Popular Myths

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Corey Binns, Special to LiveScience, LiveScience.com

Blossom Forecasting Is Crucial in Japan Yahoo! NEWS
One would think Eishin Murakata has a pleasant, relaxing job. In springtime, he strolls every day to the same cherry tree in central Tokyo and gazes up at the boughs. When he spots a full bud on the verge of blossoming, he carefully snaps a photograph. But Murakata is on edge. As an employee of Japan's Meteorological Agency, his annual quest is to determine the official opening of Tokyo's hallowed cherry blossom season — and this year the competition is closing in. "I have to look very carefully so I won't miss anything," he said one recent afternoon as he examined the agency's main benchmark tree at a Tokyo shrine. "Our mission is so important I don't have time to enjoy the flowers when we spot them." The cherry blossom is the ultimate emblem of Japanese culture. Delicate, elegant and ephemeral, the pink flowers have inspired poets, philosophers and even soldiers for centuries — and served as an aesthetic pretext for all-out parties under the trees. So it's easy to imagine the outrage among the super-punctual Japanese last year when the Meteorological Agency predicted the blossoms would open four days earlier than they actually did — triggering a wave of angry calls for greater accuracy. The foul-up by the agency — the long established standard-bearer for forecasts of the cherry blossom "front" as it moves up the archipelago — has brought upstart weather services to the fore in a heated competition for the most accurate predictions. "Who will get the right answer?" nationwide newspaper Yomiuri asked last week in a front-page article, comparing two conflicting forecasts. "Soon we'll find out." Weathernews Inc. is a typical rival. It puts blossom forecasts and cherry blossom maps on its Web site, and provides weather information to 1.5 million individuals and 3,000 corporate subscribers, including 30 retailers. The company's Web site also gives real-time cherry blossom condition reports, so visitors can click on an area and find out if it's time to pack a picnic basket — a service the Meteorological Agency does not provide. "We just want to help people to enjoy the flowers," said Weathernews spokesman Masaki Ito. "Nothing is more disappointing than cherry festivals without flowers." The competition goes far beyond aesthetics: Japan's cherry blossom party season means big bucks. Millions of people crowd the country's parks and spend freely on picnic tarps, food and drink. Stores and cities depend on forecasts to plan the revelry. "We monitor the blossoms very closely, using both the Meteorological Agency and private forecasts," said Mayumi Ito, a spokeswoman for Seven & I Holdings Co., owner of 7-Eleven convenience stores. "Staffers also visit nearby parks to check the blossoms." In anticipation of the flowers, the convenience chain doubles stocks of snacks, paper plates and cups, plastic tarps — and beer. The day before the season starts, it orders boxed lunch shipments. Sales at outlets near main cherry blossom parks tripled during last year's season, Ito said. In response to last year's outcry, the Meteorological Agency left nothing to chance this time. It installed an upgraded supercomputer and revised its forecasting model, using temperature data from the last 30 years — rather than the last 50 years — for more up-to-date readings. "We believe the accuracy of our forecast has improved ... though we still have margin of error and the forecast can be off by about one to two days," said Takashi Nakamura of the agency's information and technology department. "We're dealing with nature, which doesn't always agree with our math." The precautions apparently worked. The agency initially pegged Tokyo's blossom date at March 25, but then moved it up to March 22 — just one day later than the actual blossom date, which fell on Tuesday this week. Weathernews' initial forecast for Tokyo, meanwhile, predicted the flowers would blossom March 29, a prediction they later changed to the 25th — a few days late. Despite the talk of competition, most Japanese are keeping things in perspective. Daisuke Saito, 24, said the flowers were about having a good time as he gathered with friends under mostly bare branches at Ueno Park on Tuesday. "It's only this time of the year we can enjoy friendship, rice wine and flowers at the same time," Saito said. "We'll come back here during the peak of the season, then before the end — imagine sitting under a tree with petals falling all over you."
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer

Study: Left-Handed Snails Have Advantage Yahoo! NEWS
Left-handed snails are better than righties at defending against predators, according to a new study that suggests lefties have the same competitive advantage in nature that they enjoy on the baseball diamond or in the boxing ring. The study, published in this month's Royal Society Biology Letters, suggests that snails whose shells coil toward the left were more likely to survive crab attacks than those whose shells coil toward the right. "It's just a frequency issue," said Yale geologist Gregory P. Dietl, one of the study's authors. "As long as you're rare, you're going to have an advantage." The researchers studied about 1,800 snail fossils, looking for scarring evidence of a predator attack. Scarring was found more frequently on right-handed snails, the study said. Researchers offered two explanations for the advantage. Because most crabs are right-handed, they said, cracking into a shell that opens on the opposite side might be more difficult. Alternatively, researchers said crabs might simply not be used to attacking lefties, just as baseball pitchers face fewer left-handed batters. "It's the same thing here in nature," Dietl said. "These snails that are left-handed, they have an advantage. It doesn't become an advantage if lefties are just as common as righties."

Fans put satellite radio on cellphones, draws fire Yahoo! NEWS
Fans of U.S. satellite radio have been waiting eagerly for nearly a year to get XM or Sirius on to their cell phones. But as the two satellite radio providers carefully ponder their mobile strategies and chew over business plans, a small group of technically savvy devotees are taking matters into their own hands. Grassroots software and Web developers have found ways to tap into XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s Web sites to stream music channels on to Windows-powered smartphones and other devices. Most have given their work away for free to other fans since late last year -- running into conflict with the wireless business strategies of the satellite radio providers. "I'm not always near a PC, but I already have a cell phone," said David Bressler, who wrote a piece of software to listen to Sirius in his office, which blocks satellite radio signals. "I like Sirius, I promote Sirius to everyone I talk to," he said in a phone interview, adding it took him about an hour last December to write the software, SiriusWM5. XM, the top U.S. satellite radio service provider with about 6 million subscribers, and Sirius, which serves about 4 million, have both said that going mobile was an important part of their business expansion. But so far, only a few of Sirius' channels are available on one wireless provider's network, Sprint Nextel. Meanwhile, XM has threatened to take legal action. In early February, a law firm representing the company sent a cease and desist letter to a developer, citing infringement of its trademark. A spokesman for Sirius said its lawyers are also pursuing the issue. "Our lawyers are diligently pursuing this," a Sirius spokesman said. "We've indicated time and again, we expect our service and technology to be widely available in portable products and we continue to explore opportunities to do that," said XM spokesman Chance Patterson. "These incidents don't have any impact on those plans.

GRASSROOTS COMPETITION
To be sure, the addressable market is tiny. Users have to own relatively new Microsoft Windows Mobile-powered smartphones or PocketPC handheld devices and troll online message boards to locate the software or Web site links. As a service to paying subscribers, XM and Sirius offer only a limited selection of their music channels on the Web. Sirius' hugely popular shows by ribald radio host Howard Stern, for example, are not available on its Web site. Nonetheless, marginal competitive distractions, have a way of haunting technology companies. Consider how the dorm room and garage passions of Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, dropouts from Harvard University and Reed College, respectively, took on IBM and now own the personal computer market. "We don't want to get into any trouble," said Wayne, the developer of PocketXM Radio, who declined to give his full name for fear of retribution. He said his software, subsequently renamed Pocket Satellite Radio, is no longer for sale. It had been sold at www.eBooksoftwarehouse.com, which is registered to Wayne Jiang, based in Texas. The potential legal quagmire such workarounds represent has not shaken the resolve of new developers, some of whom would rather continue to quietly tinker without disturbance. "I have not been contacted. I do not wish to be contacted by XM," said Younes Oughla, who created the Web site MiniXM.com over four weekends in his home office in West New York, New Jersey. "I make sure that people know I'm not affiliated with XM to avoid confusion," Oughla said, pointing to a disclaimer on his site, www.minixm.com. Another developer, whose programing allows Windows Mobile phone users to easily link to XM radio Web casts, said he wrote the software to cut down on clutter. His programing was widely distributed off his blog. "I prefer to carry one device," Nick Krewson, one of the earliest developers of software that connected to XM, said. On Internet message boards, such as HowardForums.com, where tech and phone geeks converge, Bressler has turned down offers to accept fees for his software. "If Sirius wants the application and wants to develop it further, it's all theirs," he said.
By Kenneth Li

Orchestras seek classical revival with downloads Yahoo! NEWS
Universal Music on Friday unveiled new concerts for sale that aim to return live orchestral performances to the wide audiences they once enjoyed and usher classical music further into the digital age. Two labels, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca Music, will initially release an average of four downloadable concert recordings a year each from the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with plans to add major European orchestras shortly. Concert attendance in the United States and CD sales have been declining, but classical music is disproportionately represented at online stores because its older fan base is more apt to buy downloads than younger music fans who often swap pop hits without paying for them. Orchestras around the world, however, have been slow to capitalize on their most popular asset -- live performances -- in the modern age of digital music, with few offering Internet streaming of concerts, because of musician demands to be paid for them and unresolved concerns about sound quality. Most orchestras once enjoyed large radio audiences for their concerts around the world, but those have diminished considerably over the years. "Downloading is the relevant channel for music distribution in the 21st century," said Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "It provides a very important opportunity for classical music listeners to discover, experience and appreciate new music through the latest technology," Salonen added in a statement.

MOZART, REICH AT ITUNES
The first concerts released in the series will be the New York Philharmonic's February performances of Mozart's Symphonies 39, 40 and 41 conducted by Lorin Maazel, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's March 24-26 performances of works by minimalists Part, Andriessen and Reich at Walt Disney Concert Hall. They will be available at the end of March, priced at around $8 to $10 on Apple Computer's iTunes music store, with launches expected soon on services from RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody and Napster Inc.. Consumers will have the option of downloading a movement, a symphony or the entire concert, said Jonathan Gruber, Universal's vice president of new media for classics and jazz. "We have developed the expertise to give these performances the kind of attention they deserve in the digital arena," he said. Universal Music, a unit of media and telecoms group Vivendi, is the largest music company in the world. The concert series, which will also include one CD per year, is considered an experiment for the orchestras, which are still trying to find their feet in the digital world. Though Universal will share revenue with the musicians, some critics argue that such live concerts ought to be given away free as marketing tools to entice listeners to concert halls and perhaps even to find younger audiences. Britain's BBC Philharmonic in partnership with Radio 3 attracted about 1.5 million free downloads of performances of Beethoven's nine symphonies over two weeks last summer. "I am thrilled that Radio 3 has shown how wide the interest is in quality classical music and demonstrated how innovation and the use of new technology can find new audiences," the station's controller, Roger Wright, said at the time. Classical music accounts for about 2 percent of all music sales in the United States, 10 percent in Korea, 8 percent in Germany, 5 percent in France and 3 percent in Britain, according to the latest data available from music companies. While U.S. classical CD sales declined 15 percent last year, download sales nearly doubled. Some classical artists derive as much as one-quarter of their sales online. Industry executives also said that more than 10 percent of the music sold online is classical.
By Jeffrey Goldfarb

Next Big Quake? Maybe East of Bay Area Yahoo! NEWS
New cracks appear in Elke DeMuynck's ceiling every few weeks, zigzagging across her living room, creeping toward the fireplace, veering down the wall. Month after month, year after year, she patches, paints and waits. "It definitely lets you know your house is constantly shifting," DeMuynck said. So do the gate outside that swings uselessly 2 1/2 inches from its latch, the strange bulges in the street and the geology students who make pilgrimages to her cul-de-sac. DeMuynck could throw her paint brush from her front stoop and hit the Hayward Fault, which geologists consider the most dangerous in the San Francisco Bay Area, if not the nation. Like others who live here, she gets by on a blend of denial, hope and humor. It's the geologists, emergency planners and historians who seem to do most of the worrying, even in this year of heightened earthquake awareness for the 100th anniversary of San Francisco's Great Quake of April 18, 1906. Several faults lurk beneath this region, including the San Andreas Fault on the west side of the Bay area, but geologists say the parallel Hayward on the Bay's east side is the most likely to snap next. "It is locked and loaded and ready to fire at any time," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Tom Brocher. The Hayward Fault runs through one of the country's most densely populated areas; experts say 2 million people live close enough to be strongly shaken by a big quake. It slices the earth's crust along a 50-mile swath of suburbia east of San Francisco, from exclusive hilltop manors overlooking the bay to Hayward's humble flatlands. It snakes beneath highway bridges, strip malls, nursing facilities and retirement centers, and it splits the uprights of the football stadium at the University of California, Berkeley. "A lot of these structures are going to come down," said David P. Schwartz, chief of the USGS's Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project. He spoke with one foot on either side of the fault, marked by a crack that snaked through a parking lot in Hayward's business district. Before San Francisco's Great Quake of 1906, on the San Andreas fault, there was the Great Quake of 1868 on the Hayward, a magnitude 6.9 rumbler that killed five people. Severe quakes have happened on the Hayward Fault every 151 years, give or take 23 years, meaning it is now into the danger zone. Experts forecast the next big one will be in the potentially lethal 6.7 to 7.0 range. The Association of Bay Area Governments estimates it would wipe out some 155,000 housing units, 37,000 in San Francisco alone. The ground on each side of the fault could shift 3 feet, meaning two objects on opposite sides could be abruptly carried a total of 6 feet apart, Schwartz said. The Hayward Fault runs directly beneath Eden Jewelry and Loan, but the men working in the pawn shop shrugged when asked if they fear a quake. "Honestly, it's a non-issue," said Saul Gevertz, 64. The building was renovated about five years ago and now is essentially an enormous steel cage, designed to flex in an earthquake without breaking, said one of the building's co-owners, Darrell Davidson. "I'm not worried-worried. I've thought about it," said Davidson, 47. "I think we're in good shape. I hope to God we are." Nickey Avila acknowledged some alarm when informed that the fractures in the pavement outside his house were caused by the fault. "I'm thinking one day it's going to move, but if I survive it, I'll be able to say I survived one of the biggest quakes of all time," said Avila, 23. The quake could come at any moment. "If it moved while we were walking, it wouldn't surprise me," Schwartz said during a tour of Hayward's misaligned street curbs, warped concrete gutters and abandoned buildings. They include the former Hayward City Hall, deemed too dangerous to occupy because it's right on the fault. The City Hall was built in 1930, during an unusually quake-free period after the Great Quake of 1906 released stress on all faults in the region. A "virtual tour" developed by the USGS shows the Hayward Fault slashing through identifiable structures, like DeMuynck's house, but she is resolved not to worry. "There's dangers all around us, all the time, so if we thought about those dangers all the time, we wouldn't have anything else to think about," said DeMuynck, 62. "We just come home and say, 'The house is still here.' We're OK for another day."
On the Net:
USGS Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/cencal/
Northern California Quake Hazards: http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/
Great Quake Centennial: http://www.1906centennial.org
Shaking Hazard Maps: http://www.abag.ca.gov/bayarea/eqmaps/pickcity.html
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer

Close encounters Prospect
How can we in Britain learn to live together more successfully? We should cultivate an "encounter culture," in which it becomes easier to interact with others. This may require compulsory community service for young people
The debate over identity and Britishness has been raging in Britain over the last few years, and with particular urgency since last year's London bombings. These issues of identity extend to a common social challenge. Over the next generation in Britain we must re-learn how to live together successfully. The solution I advocate is not to pretend that everybody can feel the same affinity with all identities outside their own, but to build an “encounter culture” in which it becomes easier and more rewarding to interact with and respect others. This is not just about government and public policy; it is personal, cultural, civic. The starting point is the recognition that it affects everybody. As a black MP representing one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the UK, people often assume that when I address these issues, I am talking primarily about race. But look beyond race, at the hundreds of thousands who have joined Countryside Alliance marches in recent years, for example, driven in part by the perception that the urban majority do not understand their culture and values. Or look at inter-generational conflict. We know that every generation laments the declining moral standards of the one that comes after it. But the intensity of public feeling aroused by anti-social behaviour, and the widely held perception that legal sanctions like Asbos are necessary, seems to represent an unusually sharp divide. Look forward a generation to the potential conflict of resources over pensions, social care, the costs of climate change and so on, and you may wonder which loyalties will be most influential in determining people’s attitudes to the distribution of those resources. One of the defining characteristics of contemporary British society is its social diversity. Identities—whether based on occupation, class, faith, or territory—that once perpetuated themselves by being passed automatically from one generation to the next have become more fragmented and conditional, and in some cases disappeared altogether. In a globalised, consumerist society, identity seems much less something we inherit and increasingly something we can choose, shape or discard. We go on six times more foreign holidays that we did in 1971. We travel seven miles further each week to visit friends than we did in the 1980s. We spend eight times longer online per week than we did in the late 1990s. This is the paradox Manuel Castells identified when he wrote about “the net and the self.” On the one hand, we have an urge to affirm our own individuality and differentiate ourselves from some of the more suffocating aspects of our traditional identities. On the other, this is offset by a continuing human need to belong, to remain anchored in something collective. If ties to party, class, faith and nation can no longer be relied upon to generate the foundations of a cohesive society, it is also not clear that the flexible, consumerist approach to identity is an adequate replacement. Gordon Brown has been quick to identify the challenge this presents for politicians. He has argued that a "thicker" conception of shared national citizenship is needed as a basis on which other, more particular identities can be overlaid. At the other end of the scale, David Blunkett in his time at the home office helped focus attention on the ingredients for community cohesion at the local level. Partly in response to the 2001 riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, he articulated the need for a balance of responsibilities between government, which can nurture civic unity but cannot prescribe it, and individuals, who may respond to support and encouragement in participating actively as citizens. Whether the focus is national or local, the challenge remains the same: how can we build a civic space in which people engage with people who look, sound and live differently from themselves, who are from different backgrounds, age brackets or areas, and with whom they share a common destiny as residents of the same street, users of the same service or voters for the same council? This uniquely valuable part of our civic fabric is what I would call our “encounter culture.” We already know a great deal about why our encounter culture is so valuable. The American sociologist Mark Granovetter captured it well when he spoke of “the strength of weak ties.” Granovetter’s argument was that the strong ties of close friends, family and neighbours are very important in helping us to cope with the stresses of everyday life—babysitting someone’s kids at short notice, giving them a lift somewhere, running an errand for them. But strong ties by themselves aren’t enough. When you are looking for a job, for example, you are not going to be helped if your friends all live nearby and are also unemployed, because the chances are they won’t know any more about potential vacancies than you do. By contrast, an acquaintance who lives and works 50 miles away is likely to be much more helpful in spotting opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise hear about. Having the right mix of strong and weak ties is an essential component of people’s quality of life, no matter where they lie on the income scale. Middle-class professionals in Kensington may seek comfort in gated communities filled with other middle-class professionals, but we know it does nothing to alleviate their fear of crime once they step outside those gates. Granovetter’s work has greatly influenced subsequent research on social capital—the social ties, bonds, values and loyalties that we hold in common and which help knit our society together. Robert Putnam, the American political scientist, drew a distinction between "bonding" and "bridging" social capital. Again, the point is not that one is better than the other, but that you need a balance. Research has shown, for example, that a critical factor in determining whether neighbourhoods can lift themselves out of poverty is whether they have the social networks to access resources from outside the neighbourhood, like information, investment or political leverage; they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but it’s much easier if they can call on someone to give them a hand. Further evidence of the value of encounter culture comes from social psychology. Fifty years since it was first expounded by Gordon Allport, the so-called "contact hypothesis" has shown that under the right conditions, increasing the level of contact between different groups is enough to generate more favourable relationships between them. According to Miles Hewstone, it can promote more positive, or at least less negative, perceptions. It can nuance perceptions, making people less likely to make sweeping generalisations. And it can also promote forgiveness for past deeds, a critical issue, not least as we approach the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 2007. Is this any of government’s business? To some commentators, any suggestion that government should concern itself with the social networks people form smacks of social engineering. And while politics is a contest about the ends to which public power should be directed, some antagonism between different social groups—between the miners and the middle classes in the 1980s, for instance—is inevitable. I would argue that democratic governance must ensure social conflict is peaceful, and that some of its costs are reduced. As was the case with comprehensive schools, or indeed the legislation banning race discrimination in housing and workplaces in the 1960s and 1970s, where there are barriers to greater social interaction and understanding amongst people of different backgrounds, and where those barriers stand in the way of a fairer, more equal and more cohesive society, we should be prepared to look at all the ways to break them down. So how might we begin to invest more systematically in encounter culture, building on Britain’s existing success stories? First, while the notion of “water-cooler” moments may be clichéd, it captures something important about the way that random encounters are sometimes the most powerful ways to generate new linkages. The public realm is replete with places in which civilised encounters between strangers can and do take place. Some spring easily to mind: public parks, for example, or libraries. But what about some of the more unusual ones: A&E waiting rooms, at the school gate, in the GP's surgery, at antenatal classes. The next big challenge for our public services, and something the more innovative among them already do well, is not just to develop a more responsive relationship between the individual user and provider but to nurture stronger connections between groups of users—whether they are parents, library users or victims of the same mental health condition. Second, we need to focus on youth, broadening the attachments that young people can form through exposure to a more diverse range of experiences and encounters. This is partly about education, but there are also many opportunities beyond the school gates. For example, we should seize the emerging cross-party consensus to create a national service scheme for young people, building a new institution to provide fulfilling, customised experiences for every young person. I think the principles that should underpin such an institution are reasonably clear. It should be national, with an emphasis placed on giving people a taste of people and places very different from their own. It should be a service, to inculcate the habits of active citizenship, and encourage people to recognise the contribution of citizens of other backgrounds in making Britain a better place. As far as possible, the emphasis should be on encouraging young people themselves to design their own experiences, with projects of a sufficient duration to be meaningful. There is already a vast amount of experience in the youth sector we can draw upon here. In an age when creativity and problem-solving are highly prized skills, the last thing we want to do is pressure young people into undertaking worthy but mundane activities from which they will learn little. A powerful mechanism for harnessing upward mobility for young people from poorer economic backgrounds might be for top firms to tend toward the selection of national service graduates in their recruitment process. Subject to affordability, we should be prepared to examine some form of compulsion, offset by rewards or rebates on education and training, to send the clear signal that this is about taking the duties of British citizenship more seriously. Finally, to promote flexibility, young people should be entitled to opt to fulfil their obligation at any point between the ages of 16 and 24, with different kinds of projects available depending on age and experience. We need to recognise the vast swathes of potential encounter culture that exists within the arts, sport and culture. From The Archers to Goodness Gracious Me, the BBC, for example, is a tremendously powerful vehicle for reflecting and articulating the diverse communities that make up modern Britain. But perhaps more interesting for the future is the emerging capacity for local, community-based media, and for so-called "citizens’ media, in which people act as both creators and consumers of media content, underpinned by digital media. Through ICan and community programming, there is a real opportunity to make local digital media a focus for generating the same shared understanding at the local level that the BBC has been so effective at creating at the national level. Sport is another important part of encounter culture, with social classes A or B twice as likely to participate than D or E. We must use the Olympics as a focal point for developing a sports infrastructure that promotes participation amongst the widest and most diverse group of people possible. There’s merit to the idea of combining widespread civic participation and fun sporting activities through the Street Olympics that IPPR and Demos have put forward. Their proposal is to encourage streets, parks, pubs, neighbourhoods and community organisations to host their own version of the games as a way to promote neighbourliness and community spirit. Government cannot legislate or direct the formation of attachments and attitudes, but their formation is not an entirely random or predetermined process. Over the next generation, the challenge of enabling collective action beyond the direct scope of the state will be crucial to whether we learn to live together successfully. When David Hume wrote about “the conversable world,” he warned that it would not happen by accident, and that left to their own devices people might remain in their ivory towers. There are no quick fixes, but I am confident that the British can find slow-burning methods which increase people’s propensity not just to cope with difference, but to understand how it can enrich their lives. You can’t legislate for encounter culture, but you can help to nurture it.
By David Lammy

March 27, 2006
Windows Is So Slow, but Why?
By STEVE LOHR and JOHN MARKOFF
Back in 1998, the federal government declared that its landmark antitrust suit against the Microsoft Corporation was not merely a matter of law enforcement, but a defense of innovation. The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation.

Eight years later, long after Microsoft lost and then settled the antitrust case, it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation — at Microsoft.

The company's marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers — and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.

In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and "widgets," an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.

So what's wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft's past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.

Windows runs on 330 million personal computers worldwide. Three hundred PC manufacturers around the world install Windows on their machines; thousands of devices like printers, scanners and music players plug into Windows computers; and tens of thousands of third-party software applications run on Windows. And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one — compatibility, in computing terms.

As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

Microsoft certainly understands the problem, the need to change and the potential long-term threat to its business from rivals like Apple, the free Linux operating system, and from companies like Google that distribute software as a service over the Internet.

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Last Monday afternoon, James Allchin, the longtime engineering executive who leads the Vista team, held a meeting with 75 Windows managers and senior engineers to discuss the status of Vista. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Allchin met with a handful of his lieutenants and told them of the decision to push back the consumer introduction, a move that was announced publicly later that day, after the close of the stock market.

Brad Goldberg, a general manager of Windows program management, who attended the Tuesday morning meeting, said he was not surprised, because he had been involved in the decision. "But it's a different place than Microsoft a few years ago would have wound up," he said.

Like other Microsoft executives, Mr. Goldberg bristles at the notion that little innovative work has come out of the Windows group since XP. In the last five years, he said, Microsoft has released two versions of the Windows Tablet PC software intended for pen-based notebook computers, and four versions of Windows Media Center. To combat viruses plaguing Windows, much of the engineering team focused for 18 months on fixing security flaws for a downloadable "service pack" in 2004.

"The perception that nothing new has come out of the Windows group since XP is just so far from the truth," Mr. Goldberg said.

But last Thursday, Microsoft reorganized the management of its Windows division. Steven Sinofsky, 40, a senior vice president, was placed in charge of product planning and engineering for Windows and Windows Live, a new Web service that lets consumers manage their e-mail accounts, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site.

Mr. Sinofsky, a former technical assistant to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, was one of the early people in the company to recognize the importance of the Internet in the 1990's. He comes to the Windows job from heading Microsoft's big Office division, where he was known for bringing out new versions of the Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other offerings — on schedule every two or three years.

The move is seen as an effort to bring greater discipline to the Windows group. "But this doesn't seem to do anything to address the core Windows problem; Windows is too big and too complex," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Vista delay, Microsoft executives said, was only a matter of a few more weeks to improve quality further, not attributable to any single flaw and done to make sure all its industry partners were ready when the product was introduced. Vista will be ready for large corporate customers in November, while the consumer rollout is being pushed back to January 2007.

Mr. Allchin conceded in an interview that the decision was "a bit painful," but he insisted it was the "right thing." Mr. Allchin, 54, will continue to work on Vista until it ships and then retire, as he said he would last year.

Microsoft will not say so, but antitrust considerations may have played a role in the decision that Mr. Allchin called the right thing to do. As part of its antitrust settlement, Microsoft vowed to treat PC makers even-handedly, after evidence in the trial that Microsoft had rewarded some PC makers with better pricing or more marketing help in exchange for giving Microsoft products an edge over competing software.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft met with major PC makers and retailers to discuss Vista. Hewlett-Packard, the second-largest PC maker after Dell, is a leader in the consumer market. Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers, whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.

Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified because he was told the information confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.

Vista was also held up because the project was restarted in the summer of 2004. By then, it became clear to Mr. Allchin and others inside Microsoft that the way they were trying to build the new version of Windows, then called Longhorn, would not work. Two years' worth of work was scrapped, and some planned features were dropped, like an intelligent data storage system called WinFS.

The new work, Microsoft decided, would take a new approach. Vista was built more in small modules that then fit together like Lego blocks, making development and testing easier to manage.

"They did the right thing in deciding that the Longhorn code was a tangled, hopeless mess, and starting over," said Mr. Cusumano of M.I.T. "But Vista is still an enormous, complex structure."

Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple.

Remember that Steven P. Jobs came back to Apple because the company's effort to develop an ambitious new operating system, codenamed Copland, had failed. Mr. Jobs convinced Apple to buy his company Next Inc. for $400 million in December 1996 for its operating system.

It took Mr. Jobs and his team years to retool and tailor the Next operating system into what became Macintosh OS X. When it arrived in 2001, the new system essentially walked away from Apple's previous operating system, OS 9. Software applications written for OS 9 would run on an OS X machine, but only by firing up the old operating system separately.

The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows.

"Microsoft feels it can't get away with breaking compatibility," said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. "All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that's a very painful thing."

It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft's Windows.

And Apple, which makes operating systems that run only on its own computers, does not have to work with the massive business ecosystem of Microsoft, with its hundreds of PC makers and thousands of third-party software companies.

That ballast is also Microsoft's great strength, and a reason industry partners and computer users stick with Windows, even if its size and strategy slow innovation. Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.



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Online music makes up for CD sales losses: survey Yahoo! NEWS
Online music sales will grow rapidly over the next five years, although traditional music sales will still make up almost two thirds of revenues in 2011, a survey by market researcher Forrester said on Monday. The study forecast a 30 percent decline in European sales of traditional music formats like CDs and DVDs, but music downloads on the web from shops like iTunes Music Store from Apple will fill the gap. Online sales are seen growing more than tenfold to 3.9 billion euros ($4.70 billion) in 2011 from 279 million euros in 2006. The total music sales market will grow to nearly 11 billion euros by 2011, up from less than 9.5 billion euros now, as the new sales channels will boost demand. The survey coincides with the launch of new services aimed at boosting the take-up of online music sales. Mobile technology and services companies mBlox and NewVisions on Monday introduced a mobile phone delivery system which includes the network charges for mobile phone download of music. Until now, these network fees were often several times the price of the 2 euro ($2.41) song itself. "They just pay one, one-off price, of around 1.50 pounds ($2.62)," said U.S. transaction firm mBlox which negotiated wholesale tariffs with carriers like Vodafone. Music publishers Ministry of Sound and V2 will sell the songs straight from their sites for mobile phones, without going through the portal of a mobile carrier. This will be another catalyst that will boost digital music sales, said technology consultant Jolyon Barker at Deloitte. "Digital music sells best when sold in the most appropriate format for the end devices, as shown by the market for ring-tones which are designed specifically for mobile phones and mobile phone networks," Barker said. The shift to online music will mean more sales of single tracks rather than whole albums, Forrester said. British mobile carrier 3 said on Monday it had reached average sales of over 200,000 single music tracks per month. The French parliament passed a law last week that will force online music stores to sell their songs in a copy-protection format which can be used on multiple devices, potentially opening the digital songs market to more competition.

Jajah gets funding from Sequoia, starts in US Yahoo! NEWS
A European start-up company that promises to make Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls simpler said on Monday it has won funding from Sequoia Capital and will launch services in the United States. The company, Jajah, headquartered in Luxembourg just like its rival Skype, which was taken over for $4.1 billion by eBay, has pledged to make cheap Internet calls as simple as using a search engine. Jajah asks its users to go its Web site and type in the telephone numbers they want to connect. Jajah will call both parties and will route most of the call over the Internet. Only the last mile of the call will be made over the existing phone infrastructure, either mobile or fixed line, and for this the company asks a fee related to charges made for local calls by telecommunications operators. The company will further simplify calls by integrating its service with applications that already have contact information such as e-mail systems, online search engines and contacts databases such as LinkedIn and Plaxo. The first integrations, some of which will be automatic without downloads, will be live within a week. "We will collect customers where the telephone numbers are," said co-founder Roman Scharf. A further improvement of the service will take place in two months time when customers can initiate VoIP calls from their mobile phones. "In May we will bring Jajah to the mobile phone. Consumers will be able to use Jajah from any mobile phone to any destination. We'll solve it by sending a little bit of software to the phone," said co-founder Roman Scharf. Charges vary per call. Jajah says it will charge 0.18 euros (21 U.S. cents) per minute for a mobile to mobile call between the Netherlands and the United States, which will cost a minimum of 0.50 euros for a subscriber on the Dutch Vodafone network. Jajah will charge 0.02 euros for a call between two fixed line phones between the two countries, which is half the price of some of the lowest call rates from existing operators like Tele2 and slightly more expensive than a Skype call from a computer to a normal phone. "We're not the cheapest. Our aim is to get to the normal Internet user. Market research group found that only three out of every 100 Internet users make VoIP calls from their computer. But 95 out of 100 are able to use a search engine. These people may know about VoIP, but it needs to be easier," Scharf said. Jajah is offering its services to consumers in 60 countries. Calls from those 60 countries can be made to any destination in the world. Sequoia is a known for investments in high profile companies such as Google, Cisco Apple Oracle and Yahoo. Scharf declined to say how much Sequoia had invested.

Israeli couple jailed over computer virus Yahoo! NEWS
An Israeli couple convicted of inventing a computer virus that set off a major industrial espionage investigation were sentenced to jail on Monday, court documents showed. Following a plea bargain with prosecutors, Ruth Haephrati was sentenced to four years in prison, the documents said. Her husband, Michael, was jailed for two years as her accomplice. The couple, who were arrested in their London home last year and extradited to Israel, were also ordered to pay their victims two million shekels ($427,000) in compensation. The couple were charged with developing a "Trojan horse" programme they sold to private investigators who helped top Israeli corporations spy on each other's computers. "Trojans" refer to malicious software often presented as an innocuous Web link or e-mail attachment that can infect a computer when opened. Police probed some of Israel's leading telecommunications companies in connection with the case. Several private investigators have been indicted on related charges. Israeli media reports have said Michael Haephrati originally developed the Trojan horse as a prank targeting his ex-wife's family. The Haephratis tried to market the virus to Israel's defense agencies before Ruth decided to sell it to private investigators representing corporations. ($1 = 4.68 shekels)

Social Networking Connects For Businesses InformationWeek
But the value provided by personal connection sites is murky, as is their potential for becoming profitable.
Since 2002, social networking companies have been generating buzz, but not much income. Or if they do, they don't want to talk about it. Despite 24 million members and 9 million unique visitors a month, Friendster's answer to the question "Are you profitable?" is "We're privately held and don't share any financial info." Orkut, Google's social networking service, was launched in January 2002, but has yet to take off. Or if it has, Google doesn't want to talk about it. "We don't disclose the exact number of users, but it's safe to say there are millions of users worldwide," Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv writes in an E-mail. "To date we have been focused on improving the service and user experience and have not monetized the product." The value provided by social networking sites can be vague--helping members stay connected with friends or participate in an online community--or specific--helping members conduct investment research or find a job or a sales lead. Despite their evident ability to find friends, social networking companies have had a hard time connecting with cash. Google, like Yahoo and its Yahoo 360 service, can afford to build its user base before making it pay off, but cash-strapped startups need a real business model. A few appear to have found one. After three years, LinkedIn, a social networking site that caters to business people with both free and fee-based options, has 5 million subscribers. Konstantin Guericke, VP of marketing for the company, believes that number will reach 8 to 10 million by the end of the year. "We're expecting to reach profitability this month," says Guericke. "We already have had some days where we've taken in more money than we spent." That may not sound like much, but Guericke says it's a welcome validation for Web companies that advertising support isn't the only viable business model. "The question is, do people pay for subscription-based services on the Internet?" he says. "Especially in the business arena, if you provide enough value, the answer is yes." Reached via LinkedIn for this article, Karl Jacob, former CEO of anti-spam company Cloudmark, says he loves LinkedIn and finds the ability to share contact networks within an organization particularly useful. For his current company, a startup he describes as being in stealth mode, Jacob hired three people through LinkedIn. "We found people who weren't looking for a job, but were interested in hearing about new opportunities," he explains via E-mail. "Even better, they are the kind of people who might not have returned a call from a recruiter, but when they see an intro from a management-level person who I usually have in my network, they respond." Adrian Scott, CEO and founder of business social networking site Ryze.com, claims his site, with its six employees and 400,000 users, has been profitable for several years. He says Ryze helps people build business relationships that "can lead to significant business." It's harder to say that about social networking sites that peddle personal rather than commercial connections. Scott remains skeptical about the prospects of MySpace despite its supposed 50 million users. "I don’t think it's really clear that MySpace has shown a business model that works," he says. Even so, MySpace, the fifth most popular site on the Internet at the moment after Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and eBay, appears to be in a good position following News Corporation's purchase of its parent company last year for $580 million. A company spokesperson wasn't immediately available for comment. While some may doubt whether millions of users necessarily translate into income, Jeff Roberto, public relations marketing manager for Friendster, believes consumer-oriented social networking is thriving. "We're doing very well," he says. "We're growing." He insists that social networking is still an area of growth and investor interest, but he also observes that companies like Friendster have to develop services that go beyond connecting friends and cater to interests like media sharing and community-relevant applications. Friendster is doing just that, having recently introduced a personalized radio service and personal media sharing. But the fact that these services are built on technology from other Internet startups--Pandora and Grouper, respectively--suggests that, in the consumer space at least, a viable online business requires more than just connecting. Efforts to provide enterprise business value have been paying off for LinkedIn in part because users are no longer thinking about it as a social networking site; they see it as a search engine. "More and more people are going to LinkedIn to be found," Guericke says. Social networking company Visible Path, which calls itself a "relationship capital management company," is also improving its search capabilities. Earlier in March, it announced a deal with business information broker Hoover's to help salespeople using Visible Path's software find and contact executives listed in the Hoover's database. Contrast the $60 to $2,000 fee LinkedIn users pay to be found with the sense of violation that often accompanies being googled. That's a sentiment presumably evident in Google's short-lived decision to cease communicating with online news organization CNET last year when one of the site's reporters googled Google CEO Eric Schmidt and wrote about her findings. The difference is that users opt in to social networking sites, whereas search engines index online information until site owners opt out. And commercial data brokers collect information regardless of whether those in their databases object. Later this month, LinkedIn plans to extend the ability to search its site to nonusers, furthering its ambitions as a search engine for business people. Beyond recruiting and sales lead generation, Guericke says LinkedIn has become a powerful research tool. He explains, "A typical thing that someone in a hedge fund might do is work their network for people who recently left that company to see what they can glean from that."
By Thomas Claburn

Google gains search share, widens lead on Yahoo Yahoo! NEWS
Web search leader Google Inc. gained an additional 6 percentage points of the U.S. search market based on total queries, widening its lead last month against Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, according to data released on Tuesday. Google's share of the search market rose to 42.3 percent in February from 36.3 percent a year earlier, according to data provided by tracking firm ComScore. Searches on Yahoo Internet sites represented 27.6 percent of the market, down from 31.1 percent a year earlier, while queries on MSN fell to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent. IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com was the only other search engine to gain share, to 6 percent of the market from 5.3 percent a year earlier. Industry analysts picked up on the data, citing it as a strong sign for Google in its rivalry for advertising revenue. An overall 11 percent increase in total search queries for the month also bodes well for the sector, they said. "We expect Google's increased market share in search queries, and better monetization of queries to lead to increased share of ad dollars relative to its competitors" in the first half of 2006, Merrill Lynch analysts Justin Post and Lauren Rich Fine wrote in a research note on Tuesday. Merrill Lynch said Google also stood to gain in the coming months as its main competitors "struggle" to improve the technology and experience surrounding their search engines. Google could eventually capture a 70 percent market share, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan. "The question really comes down to how long it could take," Rohan wrote in a research report. He rates both Google and Yahoo shares at "outperform." At the same time, Rohan noted that market share data does not always correlate with the ability of companies like Google to generate revenue from Web searches. For example, Rohan noted that Google revenue rose 20 percent for the third quarter, even though the volume of searches on its site were down during the period. Google shares traded 1.4 percent higher on Tuesday at $374.77, Yahoo rose 1.5 percent to $31.93.

Pacific isles get wildlife drive BBC NEWS
A major initiative has been launched to conserve the fragile wildlife of the islands of the Pacific. It includes a commitment to protect nearly a third of coastal waters and a fifth of the land area of Micronesia. The announcement was made on the fringes of a UN conference on the protection of the world's biodiversity. Scientists have warned that the variety of life on Earth is declining at a rate unprecedented since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In a separate move, one of the world's largest marine parks will be created in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati to protect an extraordinary untouched coral ecosystem.

Island extinctions
Islands contain a disproportionate number of the world's species, as their isolation over millions of years has resulted in separate evolutionary pathways. For example, the exotic white-crested Kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus) is the sole member of an entire bird family, and lives only on the island of New Caledonia. Some 16% of the world's known plant species have evolved on islands and their coastal waters contain half of the planet's variety of marine life. This isolation makes the wildlife uniquely vulnerable to extinction as environmental changes in just a small area can easily wipe out entire species. Half of all known extinctions have involved island species, including the notorious case of the dodo on Mauritius. Current threats include deforestation, over-fishing and the degradation of coral reefs, 30% of which are already severely damaged.

Future of fishing
The initiative to increase protection of Pacific islands was launched by the president of the tiny nation of Palau, an island group with a human population of barely 20,000. Its aim is to provide effective protection by 2020 of 30% of the inshore marine life of the ocean region of Micronesia, and of 20% of land ecosystems. At the launch of the programme in the Brazilian city of Curitiba, a total of $18m was pledged towards conservation in Micronesia, coming from a combination of government funds, conservation organisations and international finance institutions. The new marine protected area in Kiribati will cover an area twice the size of Portugal, and will heavily restrict human activities in the Phoenix Islands, a group of eight coral atolls between Hawaii and Fiji. They are nearly uninhabited, and have stunned conservation scientists with an extraordinary variety of unique wildlife including 120 species of coral and more than 500 fish, some new to science. In addition, it is an important stopping point for migrating birds and sea turtles. While the Phoenix Islands are still in a remarkably pristine condition, the creation of the new protected area is designed to prevent future damage from over-fishing and to offset the impact of climate change. This will involve setting up an endowment fund to compensate the government of Kiribati for revenue it could have got from the issuing of commercial fishing licences, and also to finance professional management of the wildlife. It is hoped that by protecting coral ecosystems, the long-term future for small-scale fishing can be secured for people in the region, as the reefs provide important spawning grounds.

'Major milestone'
The island initiative is being contrasted with the slow pace of global efforts to address the crisis of biodiversity loss, with the government negotiations at this UN convention getting bogged down in arguments over finance and the rules for sharing profits from products such as drugs obtained through traditional knowledge of plants. There has been concern from conservation organisations that while a growing proportion of land-based ecosystems are at least officially protected, the process of designating ocean areas for conservation has barely begun. Russ Mittermeier, of the group Conservation International, which is helping to sponsor the Phoenix Islands protection scheme, said: "This is a major milestone for marine conservation efforts in the Pacific and for island biodiversity." "The Republic of Kiribati has shown unprecedented vision for long-term conservation of its precious marine biodiversity."
By Tim Hirsch - BBC News Environment Correspondent in Curitiba, Brazil

Apple offers way to limit iPod volume Yahoo! NEWS
Apple Computer Inc. said on Wednesday it introduced a software update for its market-leading iPod that lets parents set maximum volume limits on the device, as concerns grow that loud music played through earphones might risk hearing loss. The software update, which is available as a free download for the iPod nano and fifth generation iPod, gives users the ability to set volume caps on the iPod and lock it with a combination code, Apple said. The move follows a class action lawsuit that was filed against Apple in a federal court in California in January, which claimed that iPods could cause hearing loss because they have the capacity to produce sounds in excess of 104 decibels and up to 115 decibels. The National Institute of Health said earlier in March that more research is needed to determine whether portable music players like the iPod increase the risk of hearing loss, in response to a lawmaker's request for a review of the issue. The company said iPod users can get the software upgrade as a free download from http://www.apple.com/ipod/download. It said the new volume limit feature works with any headphone or accessory plugged into the iPod headphone jack, as well as the iPod Radio Remote. Apple has sold more than 42 million iPods and over 1 billion songs on its iTunes Music Store since they were introduced. Apple's shares rose $3.62, or 6.2 percent, to close at $62.33 on Nasdaq. The stock rose after rival Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday faced fresh antitrust pressure from the European Commission. Analysts also cited optimism that the delay of Microsoft's forthcoming Vista operating system could boost sales of Apple's Macintosh computers in the holiday-sales-fueled fourth quarter. Shares of Apple tripled in 2004 and doubled in 2005, but have sold off some 28 percent since hitting a record high in mid-January.

Patchy Internet access a worry for Irish business Yahoo! NEWS
A huddle of fishing boats buffeted by the Atlantic wind, with the rolling peaks of the Irish mainland beyond, are all you can see from Diarmuid Ring's kitchen window. Known as the last parish before America, tiny Valentia Island seems an unlikely setting for a 140-year-old communications revolution, particularly in light of 21st-century Ireland's poor transport links and patchy Internet access. It was from here on July 13, 1866, that Isambard Kingdom Brunel's mighty SS Great Eastern set sail for Canada on a voyage that helped shape the modern world. Two weeks and 2,000 miles of cable later, the ship -- one of the Industrial Revolution's leviathans -- paddle-steamed into Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, completing the first viable telegraph link between Europe and the Americas. "Joining the two continents together was something similar to putting a man on the moon from a technological point of view," says Ring, an islander and amateur local historian who worked for Western Union for 30 years. Or, as London's Science Museum put it in a brief history published in 1950, until then "each part of the world was isolated in time, as well as in space, from the rest, and world affairs in consequence moved at an altogether slower pace." Reuters, which had rocked London's financial markets a year earlier with news of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination -- 12 days after the event -- was able to report the new telegraphic link within hours of the Great Eastern's arrival in Canada: "Messages of congratulation passing rapidly between Ireland and Newfoundland. Insulation and continuity perfect. Speed much increased since surplus cable has been cut off." Today, as the world undergoes another communications revolution thanks to the Internet, Valentia is one place where speed and continuity are in short supply.

FRUSTRATING AND EXPENSIVE
While owners of holiday homes mushrooming in this rugged, south-west corner of Ireland may relish its splendid isolation, economists warn such deficits pose a threat to productivity. For Cathal Guiney, a chartered surveyor who tends Valentia's Web site, the lack of fast Internet links -- even at his office on the mainland -- is frustrating, inefficient and expensive. "I'm not logged on all day because it costs too much but then customers get annoyed because I don't reply to e-mails quickly enough," he says. Guiney's monthly phone bill is about 150 euros ($180), compared with the 30 euros he would pay for a broadband package providing unlimited Internet access at 15 times the speed. Such disparity has become a hot topic in Ireland after recent data showed one of Europe's strongest economies also has one of the region's lowest levels of high-speed Internet use. By late 2005, only 5.3 percent of the population had broadband compared with more than 20 percent in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands and a European Union average of 11.5 percent. Eircom commercial director David McRedmond rejects charges by smaller rivals, who depend on the former state monopoly's network, that it favors investors over long-term investment. "Our level of investment in our network is well ahead of other European countries and has been for five years," he says of the period since Eircom was bought, and later re-floated, by billionaire Tony O'Reilly's aptly named Valentia Consortium. Eircom is adding 2,600 new broadband customers a week while the government also offers assistance in rural areas. One beneficiary has been the town of Kenmare whose hotels serve some of the million or so visitors to County Kerry each year. Set amid mountains sculpted by the last ice age and a two-hour drive from Valentia, it now has broadband after 12 months of lobbying by local business and politicians. "There's a very cosmopolitan population here, a huge cross-section of nationalities, some of them running businesses, and that lends itself to high internet usage," says Donald Lynch, president of Kenmare's Chamber of Commerce and Tourism. "The next step is to expand it to the surrounding area," he adds, stressing the added social importance in remote areas.

MERCHANTS, BROKERS, TRADESMEN
Critics say competition from Asia and Eastern Europe means Ireland must do more to improve its infrastructure if it is to remain an attractive destination for investment by multinationals such as technology giants Intel and Google. "If Ireland wants to produce high-paid, high-productivity jobs in the future we need state of the art IT infrastructure," says Jim Power, chief economist of financial services group Friends First. The European Commission, which is urging more high-speed Internet use across the region, believes communities with faster communications enjoy more rapid employment and business growth. Even in 1845, the men behind the first submarine cable between Britain and France wrote to British Prime Minister Robert Peel highlighting its potential to transmit "messages of business etc, from merchants, brokers, tradesmen." On Valentia, 79-year-old Ring has little interest in the Internet but one thing he's clear on is that enterprising 19th-century engineers got things done faster. "They built 30 miles of railway through mountain country in less than three years and the only thing they had the ancient Egyptians didn't was dynamite," he says, pointing out of his kitchen window to the nearby mainland and its disused railway. He compares that to the recent straightening of one km of road: "You should have seen the machines they had and still it took two and a half years. You wonder what goes on." Friends First's Power says such slow progress betrays a lack of political will: "If I hear another politician describe us as a 'knowledge economy' I'm going to throw a brick through the television because we're not and we need to be."
By Paul Hoskins

Government sites fail web tests BBC NEWS
More than half of government and council websites contain errors and cause problems for disabled people, research shows. Some 60% of UK government websites contain HTML errors, according to a study by the University of Southampton. A similar proportion do not comply with guidelines created to improve web access, it found. In response, a government spokesman said the UK had been actively promoting better accessibility of sites.

Web standards
The Southampton University report found that 61% of these websites did not fully comply with guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium, the organisation which creates web standards and guidelines. Researchers said not complying with these guidelines could prevent some individuals from being able to access the websites. Contrast between background and text, site navigation and use of colours all have an effect on how effectively disabled people can use particular websites. Adam Field, from the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science, conducted the survey. He explained that even if a website looked fine and was error-free, it did not mean that it would work with all browsers and for all users and may not always be accessible for visually impaired people. The aim is for websites to function with any browser and any size screen, which can happen if site developers follow the proper guidelines. Mr Field said: "There is a big push within government to improve web accessibility. Although 61% of sites do not comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guide, the 39% which do is encouraging." However, he expressed surprise at the number of websites found with HTML errors.

Flagship website
Mr Field said: "It is a very unfortunate statistic. It should be better. It is not something that is difficult to improve upon. "The accessibility issues are a lot more difficult to sort out." Mr Field also pointed out disabled people were likely to require government services and, therefore, had even more reason to want to use government websites. Organisers of a leading conference, WWW2006, have called on webmasters from UK local authority and central government to increase their understanding of the latest web standards. A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said there were excellent examples of eAccessibility in the public sector. He drew attention to the flagship Directgov website, which lists all public services in one place, and which meets the high demands of the AA standard. He told the BBC News website: "The Cabinet Office has been active in promoting better accessibility of government websites. "It has published detailed guidelines for UK government departments and it has raised the visibility of the issue across the EU by sponsoring a detailed study on eAccessibility of EU government websites carried out by RNIB and others. "One difficulty is that many authoring tools do not generate compliant HTML and make it difficult to edit the coding. "This is an issue that the IT industry must address and we are working with them on that," said the spokesman.

Unexpected warming in Antarctica BBC NEWS
Winter air temperatures over Antarctica have risen by more than 2C in the last 30 years, a new study shows. Research published in the US journal Science says the warming is seen across the whole of the continent and much of the Southern Ocean. The study questions the reliability of current climate models that fail to simulate the temperature rise. In addition, the scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) say the cause of the warming is not clear. It could be linked to increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or natural variations in Antarctica's climate system. Scientists are keen to understand the change in temperatures over the continent as the region holds enough water in its ice to raise sea levels by 60 metres.

Temperature rise
Temperature rises on parts of the surface of Antarctica have been seen for some time. The western side of the Antarctic Peninsula is known to have the largest annual warming seen anywhere in the world with increases of over 2.5C in the last 50 years. Until now very little was known about air temperatures above the vast continent. The new work uses meteorological data collected from weather balloons launched in the Antarctic winters between 1971 and 2003. The scientists collected information from nine international research stations, mostly in the east of the continent.

It's the largest regional warming on Earth at this levelDr John Turner
The researchers were particularly interested in measurements taken in the middle troposphere, the layer of air at a height of about 5km (3 miles) where most heat exchange between the Earth and the atmosphere takes place. Their analysis shows that temperatures in the layer have risen by between 0.5 and 0.75C for each of the last three decades. "It's the largest regional warming on Earth at this level," said Dr John Turner of Bas, one of the authors of the paper. However a question remains over what is causing the change. "There are arguments for and against this temperature rise being caused by greenhouse gases," Dr Turner told the BBC News website. "The problem is trying to differentiate between what is happening naturally and what is happening because of man's activities".

Climate models
To try to resolve the conundrum, the Bas team compared the data with twenty simulations of the climate over the last century. The models simulate rising levels of greenhouse gases and are used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to replicate past climates and make predictions for the future. The team found that in all cases, the models failed to simulate the rise.

The models do not match the data
Dr Turner believes this could mean the temperature rise is a result of a natural fluctuation in Antarctica's climate or that current models are inadequate. Dr Jeff Ridley, a climate scientist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the UK, agrees. He believes it is likely that current climate models are unable to sufficiently recreate conditions on the continent. "I've looked at all these models and seen that Antarctica is not very well modelled at all," he said. "So we shouldn't put too much confidence in what they tell us is going to happen there". For example, observations show that in Antarctica winds flow from the South Pole out to the coast in winter. As they move they lose energy, causing heating and mixing the air above. But in the climate models, simulating these air flows and the mixing it causes is too complex. Instead the model is simplified with a cold layer at the surface that does not mix with the rest of the atmosphere. One reason for this is the scant data that has been collected across the continent. Another is that the climate models are still not very good at simulating relatively small-scale regional processes. Dr Ridley is trying to work out how to overcome problems like this in climate models, and believes the new data will help understanding of processes in Antarctica. But he says we should not lose faith in the ability of current models to predict worldwide climate change. "On a global scale the processes we have in the models work well. We are confident we are able to predict the past, and globally we can predict climate change".
By Jonathan Fildes, BBC News science reporter

Crew arrive at space station Yahoo! NEWS
A Soyuz spacecraft delivered Brazil's first astronaut and a Russian-U.S. crew to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, two days after blasting off from earth. "The docking was smooth and the crew are now preparing to open the hatches to enter the ISS," a spokesman for mission control, situated outside Moscow, said. Marcos Pontes, a 43-year-old Brazilian Air Force pilot, had spent the journey hunched inside the capsule with Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams, both off whom are starting a six-month rotation in space. Dozens of Brazilian, Russian and U.S. space officials at Mission Control watched on a big screen as the outgoing team -- American Bill McArthur and Russian Valery Tokarev -- welcomed the newcomers aboard. "Is Marcos alright?" was the first question asked by Tokarev when the hatch was opened. Within seconds, a joyful Pontes could be seen floating in, waving the Brazilian flag. Pontes, who also packed a Brazilian soccer team shirt, will return to earth in just over a week with the outgoing crew. Russian spacecraft have been responsible for shipping crew and supplies to the station since NASA grounded its shuttle fleet after failing to fix a technical problem that killed seven astronauts in 2003. Soyuz rockets have proved safer than the shuttle despite their 1960s heritage. The departure of the 13th expedition to the ISS on Thursday has been marred by a brief communication glitch soon after the Soyuz blasted off from Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia leases from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. Russian space officials have said that the glitch did not threaten the mission. But the head of Energia corporation, which builds the Soyuz spacecrafts, said that overloaded communication network created in 1970s will be upgraded using the latest generation of satellites to fully meet the demands of busy traffic to the ISS. "We are planning to set up the system of receiving information from Yamal satellites in the next three months," Energia general director Nikolai Sevastyanov told a news briefing after the docking. "The council of chief designers has already made such decision," he added.

BBC used to entice cyber victims BBC NEWS
People are being warned about spam e-mails containing BBC News stories designed to trick them into visiting malicious websites. Cyber criminals are using the messages to exploit a recently discovered flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. If users click on the link, they are taken to a fake website that installs a piece of software that can monitor online financial activity. People who receive the e-mails are advised to not follow the link. The alert, from security firm Websense, comes less than a week after security firms found three flaws in the popular browser.

Spoof sites
The new threat takes advantage of one of these vulnerabilities. The fake e-mails entice readers with excerpts from current BBC news stories and include a link to "Read More". When the user clicks on the link they are directed to a spoofed BBC news website that installs a piece of software known as a keylogger. "The keylogger monitors activity on various financial websites and uploads captured information back to the attacker," said the Websense alert. Other websites known to exploit the bug can install spyware and Trojan horses on unprotected computers. Using global brands like the BBC to lure people to malicious websites is common practice according to Mark Murtagh, technical director of Websense. "We saw a similar approach last year after Hurricane Katrina with e-mails sending requests for help purportedly from the Red Cross," he told the BBC News website. "We are also already seeing the World Cup brand being used in the same way".

Taking down sites
This is not the first time the BBC's name has been used by malicious hackers. "We have had people creating spoof pages of our site before," said Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website. "But using them in this way to attack people's online security is particularly troubling to us and a cause for serious concern." Security firms say hundreds of web links are trying to catch people out using the loophole. On Microsoft's security blog, the company said it had been very active in working with the law enforcement to take down malicious websites. Microsoft said it would produce patches for the vulnerabilities in its next security update due on 11 April. However these could be released earlier if the threat grows significantly. For now, two firms, eEye Digital Security and Determina, have separately produced software patches that close this loophole.

Light shed on mysterious particle BBC NEWS
Physicists have confirmed that neutrinos, which are thought to have played a key role during the creation of the Universe, have mass. This is the first major finding of the US-based Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (Minos) experiment. The findings suggest that the Standard Model, which describes how the building blocks of the Universe behave and interact, needs a revision. Neutrinos are believed to be vital to our understanding of the Universe. But scientists know frustratingly little about these fundamental particles. The findings build on work carried out by Japanese physicists. Click here to see the Standard Model

Different 'flavours'
Neutrinos are sometimes described as "ghost particles" because they can pass through space, the Earth's atmosphere and the Earth itself with almost no interaction with normal matter. This makes studying them very difficult. There are three kinds - or "flavours" - of neutrinos: muon, tau and electron. To examine their properties, scientists created muon neutrinos in a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, US. A high intensity beam of these particles was fired through a particle detector at Fermilab, and then to another particle detector 724km (450 miles) away in a disused mine in Soudan, US.

Fewer neutrinos arrived at the detector in Soudan than expected
"Because they so rarely interact with matter we can shoot them straight through the Earth, and most will travel through without doing anything," explained Dr Lisa Falk Harris, a particle physicist at the University of Sussex, and a member of the Minos team. "Of course, most of them travel right through our detectors as well, but once in a blue moon one of them will interact - about one or so per day." The scientists' set up established that fewer particles were being detected at the Soudan site than had been sent. They had effectively "disappeared". "What they have done is to convert into another type of neutrino," Dr Falk Harris told the BBC News website. Physicists call the process of transforming from one type of neutrino into another flavour oscillation. And to be able to perform this transformation, particle physics theory states that the particles need mass. "The fact that we see them 'disappear' and they do this little transmutation, means that they must have mass," said Dr Falk Harris.

'Missing mass' mystery
These are the first results from the Minos experiment, which has involved scientists from 32 institutions in six countries. It confirms the earlier observations of neutrino "disappearance" found in 2002 by the Japanese K2K experiment, where scientists fired muon neutrinos at a detector situated 240km (150 miles) away. The corroboration that the neutrino has mass has profound implications for particle physics. "In particle physics there is the Standard Model which describes how the fundamental building blocks of matter behave and interact with each other," explained Dr Falk Harris. "And this model tells us that neutrinos should have no mass. So the fact that we have now got independent measurements of neutrinos saying that they must have mass, means that this Standard Model is going to have be revised or superseded by something else." In the longer term, the findings may also help us to better understand the mystery of "missing mass" in the Universe. "Various observations show there appears to be much more mass in the Universe than is visible," said Professor Jenny Thomas, a particle physicist at University College London, and a member of the Minos team. "We are surrounded by neutrinos, so in every cubic centimetre there are hundreds at any instant. "To put it simply, if they are heavy, it means that there is a lot more mass in the Universe than we thought there was." Neutrinos are also thought to have played an important role in the formation of the Universe. The Minos findings and future ones may help to shed light on how matter formed, and why so much of the Universe's antimatter has disappeared.

The Standard Model is a theory devised to explain how sub-atomic particles interact with each other
By Rebecca Morelle, BBC News science reporter

Baby breathing aid study cleared BBC NEWS
A way to help premature babies breathe does not cause long-term harm as previously feared, a study has shown. Nottingham researchers, unconnected to the original trial in the early 1990s, assessed CNEP therapy - continuous negative-extrathoracic pressure. It was pioneered by controversial Stoke-based paediatrician Professor David Southall. The study appears in the Lancet, where child health experts say Professor Southall's work has been vindicated.

Concerns
The Nottingham researchers followed up 133 of the 205 children still alive - now aged between nine and 15 - who were involved in the original CNEP study. Half had the CNEP treatment - where pressure is applied to a child's chest to aid breathing. The rest were given the standard treatment of a breathing tube being inserted through the larynx - part of the windpipe. After the study was published, some parents of the children given CNEP became concerned after suggestions it was linked to a small increase in deaths and in infants with abnormal brain scans. This follow-up study found any differences between the two groups of children could be explained by chance. In addition, no evidence was seen of a higher risk of long-term disabilities for children given CNEP. Professor Neil Marlow, of Queen's Medical Centre, who led the study, said: "Our long-term study of the original trial participants suggests no evidence of disadvantage, in terms of long-term disability or psychological outcomes, from the use of CNEP."

Protection
Concerns over the CNEP treatment led one couple whose daughter died after the trial to take action against the doctors who treated her. Carl and Debbie Henshall, of Clayton in Staffordshire, recently won an Appeal Court hearing which said the GMC should review its decision to reject their complaints that doctors did not give properly informed consent to medics for their girls to take part. The CNEP trial has also been investigated by the hospital twice and been the subject of police inquiries. The government also ordered a public inquiry into the trial. But the author of that 2000 report - which was critical of the study - said it would have been less negative if he had had access to fuller information. None of the investigations has supported parents' claims they were misled and consent forms forged. In a commentary piece in this week's Lancet, Professor Southall and Dr Martin Samuels, who also led the original CNEP study, welcomed the latest findings.

Progress fears
They added: "We fear that over the last six years many infants with bronchiolitis [a potentially fatal chest infection] presenting to our children's unit have received unnecessarily intensive care." Professor Sir Alan Craft, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Dr Neil McIntosh from the University of Edinburgh Department of Child Life and Health supported Professor Southall's work. They said CNEP should probably be retained for older children with bronchiolitis bec