It wasn’t until widely respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shared the Excel files behind their influential paper on the relationship between government debt and economic growth, that a very basic and consequential spreadsheet error was discovered.
Suddenly, a conclusion that policy makers around the world had seized on for years to justify steep spending cuts was thrown in doubt.
TechCrunch
The sun celebrated May Day with a spectacular solar eruption Wednesday, unleashing a colossal wave of super-hot plasma captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft.
FOX News
Alipay has launched in a new payment system in the Beijing subway that uses sound waves to connect smartphones with ticketing machines. The sound wave payment system was introduced with the Alipay Wallet mobile app in January and uses white noise (link via Google Translate) generated by a smartphone to carry digital information to another device. Initially used for smartphone-to-smartphone transactions, the Beijing Subway launch marks the first time the system has been used with a payment kiosk for consumer transactions, according to Xinhua (link via Google Translate).
Microsoft is about to embark on a second wave of Windows 8 client hardware promotions and user education, an executive said Wednesday.
Computerworld News
A number of signs suggest that next year will see a surge in tech companies selling off assets and product lines for both financial and strategic reasons, according to a recent report by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Computerworld News
theodp writes “Rudy Giuliani had John Gotti to worry about; Mike Bloomberg has Steve Jobs. Despite all-time lows for the city in homicides and shootings, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said overall crime in New York City was up 3.3% in 2012 due to iPhone, iPad and other Apple device thefts, which have increased by 3,890 this year. ‘If you just took away the jump in Apple, we’d be down for the year,’ explained Marc La Vorgna, the mayor’s press secretary. ‘The proliferation of people carrying expensive devices around is so great,’ La Vorgna added. ‘It’s something that’s never had to be dealt with before.’ Bloomberg also took to the radio, urging New Yorkers who didn’t want to become a crime statistic to keep their iDevices in an interior, hard-to-reach pocket: ‘Put it in a pocket in sort of a more body-fitting, tighter clothes, that you can feel if it was — if somebody put their hand in your pocket, not just an outside coat pocket.’ But it seems the best way to fight the iCrime Wave might be to slash the $ 699 price of an iPhone (unactivated), which costs an estimated $ 207 to make. The U.S. phone subsidy model reportedly adds $ 400+ to the price of an iPhone. So, is offering unlocked alternatives at much more reasonable prices than an iPhone — like the $ 299 Nexus 4, for starters — the real key to taking a bite out of cellphone crime? After all, didn’t dramatic price cuts pretty much kill car stereo theft?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Startup PredictGaze thinks technology that can determine where you’re looking—and what you look like—is the interface of the future.
Ketan Banjara’s living room isn’t cluttered with remote controls. To shush the music, he simply holds a finger up to his lips. And when he gets up from the couch and leaves the room, his TV screen pauses automatically.
Earlier this morning, Samsung announced a slew of Windows 8 PCs and tablets, including the Series 5 Ultra Touch Ultrabook, a line of ATIV Smart PCs, and few Series Premium Ultrabooks. All of these devices will be released on October 26th — the day that Windows 8 is officially launching. And now, they’re available for
Gravitational waves make pulsars shimmer, a phenomenon that’s inspiring a cheap, new way of hunting for the elusive ripples in spacetime
The search for gravitational waves is one of the great scientific endeavours of modern times. Their discovery will allow astronomers to peer out into the cosmos in an entirely new way and to study exotic new phenomena for the first time, such as collisions between black holes and neutron stars.
SternisheFan writes in with this Times article about more trouble brewing between the U.S. and Iran. “American intelligence officials are increasingly convinced that Iran was the origin of a serious wave of network attacks that crippled computers across the Saudi oil industry and breached financial institutions in the United States, episodes that contributed to a warning last week from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that the United States was at risk of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.” After Mr. Panetta’s remarks on Thursday night, American officials described an emerging shadow war of attacks and counterattacks already under way between the United States and Iran in cyberspace. Among American officials, suspicion has focused on the “cybercorps” that Iran’s military created in 2011 -partly in response to American and Israeli cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz -though there is no hard evidence that the attacks were sanctioned by the Iranian government. The attacks emanating from Iran have inflicted only modest damage. Iran’s cyberwarfare capabilities are considerably weaker than those in China and Russia, which intelligence officials believe are the sources of a significant number of probes, thefts of intellectual property and attacks on American companies and government agencies.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Microsoft Surface RT isn’t the only Windows RT tablet coming this year. Four others will debut over the next few months to challenge Microsoft’s likely Windows tablet dominance. [Read more]
CNET News
Detroit might seem like an odd place to hold a tech conference, but when Steve Case, CEO of Revolution and founder of AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company), took the stage this morning at Techonomy Detroit, he said the event was not just a good idea but a great one.
For one thing, Case said it’s part of the “awesome story of Detroit fighting its way back and not giving up.” More broadly, there’s a trend that he calls “the rise of the rest” — the emergence of cities around the country that are trying to become “entrepreneurial hotbeds.”
TechCrunch
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was bringing parts of the Xbox Live experience to Windows 8 and today, the company announced the first wave of Xbox games for its new desktop operating system. There aren’t too many surprises here and the focus is clearly on casual games. Among the 40 titles in this first wave are hits like Angry Birds, Angry Birds Space, Fruit Ninja, Reckless Racing and old Microsoft standbys like Mahjong, Solitaire and Minesweeper.
TechCrunch
redletterdave writes with news of a drone that’s helping weather forecasters this hurricane season. From the article: “Hurricane prediction is not always an exact science — back in 2005, Hurricane Rita was projected to hit Houston, but missed the region entirely — but the NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) is already on the case. A few weeks ago today, the agency launched an experimental Wave Glider robot named Alex into the ocean, hoping the unmanned drone can forecast the direction of future storms. The Wave Glider, which is completely powered by the waves and the sun thanks to solar panels and a unique thrust engine, contains a GPS unit, satellite communications systems, and sensors for measuring water temperature, wind speed, and various wave characteristics. With its ability to withstand strong winds and thrashing waters — which are typically prohibitive for humans and even aerial vehicles — and its ability to theoretically drift in the ocean endlessly without refueling, a single Wave Glider could be used to monitor not just one storm, but several hurricanes occurring over an entire seasonal period. The NOAA hopes to soon use more Wave Glider robots like Alex to help determine more accurate hurricane watches and warnings.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The company’s latest incarnation of the Ultimate Ears line of audio offerings includes headphones, Bluetooth speakers, and a Wi-Fi radio. Here’s what we think.
[Read more]
CNET News
If you’re sick of the term “cloud” to refer to pretty much anything on “the internet” and consider that phrase a symptom of useless MBA, PHB, PowerPoint talking points oozing where they don’t belong, sorry — you’ll probably have to endure it for a while yet. Nerval’s Lobster writes that Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies says that “Cloud computing” (along with a few other terms, such as “Near Field Communication” and “media tablets”) is not just alive but growing.
“Gartner uses the report to monitor the rise, maturity and decline of certain terms and concepts, the better for corporate strategists and planners to predict how things will trend over the next few months or years. As part of the report, Gartner’s analysts have built a Hype Cycle which positions technologies on a graph tracing their rise, overexposure, inevitable fall, and eventual rehabilitation as quiet, productive, well-integrated, thoroughly un-buzz-worthy technologies. Right now, Gartner views hybrid cloud computing, Big Data, crowdsourcing, and the ‘Internet of Things’ as on the rise, while private cloud computing, social analytics and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon are coasting at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Prefer not to touch things in public bathrooms? A Japanese company shows off a new hands-free spin on dispensing toilet paper.
[Read more]
CNET News
diewlasing sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A fresh crop of ultrabooks sporting Intel's latest "Ivy Bridge" Core processors will start to go on sale next month, including 30 models with touchscreens, Intel said Thursday.
Computerworld News
We knew it was coming, but alas, the loss of Google Wave hits us anew now that the execution date has finally come. To say we fully grokked this platform would be untrue, but as we dug through its history to gather our thoughts, we realized what a misunderstood creature Wave really was. Released in 2009 with great fanfare and no shortage of Firefly references, the program meant well with its collaboration-friendly interface, emphasis on multimedia sharing and raft of third-party extensions such as real-time Swedish Chef translation. But while its heart was in the right place, the service sacrificed accessibility for intrigue, a distinct online identity for an early adopter sensibility. Thus, after the invite-only mystique wore off and talk of a Wave app store began to sound downright foolish, the program’s future looked anything but rosy. But even a product this short-lived can have a legacy: in Wave’s case, it could be making Google Plus seem downright approachable by comparison. And though this may be little consolation to those hardcore wavers — few and far between as they may be — the project’s spirit will live on in the equally perplexing Apache Wave. RIP, Google Wave, we really hardly knew you.
Google Wave reaches zero amplitude originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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From a slow start in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, Russia is now Europe’s biggest internet market with 53 million users (compared to number-two Germany at 51 million), and figures from GP Bullhound and comScore indicate that it is also growing the fastest, at 14 percent (other European countries are at less than six percent it says). On top of that, a growing base of middle class consumers — 15 million today, expected to double to 30 million in the next five years in an e-commerce market that is projected to be worth $ 40 billion — has translated into a veritable boom in the rise of tech companies.
But not all of that growth means big money just yet.
KupiVIP, the Russian flash-sales site, is on track to make $ 200 million in net sales this year, on revenues of $ 300 million. Oskar Hartmann (pictured), KupiVIP’s young and bullish CEO and co-founder, who I met while on a tour of Moscow’s tech scene this week, believes the company will be making $ 1 billion in sales annually within the next five years — pretty modest by the standards of Amazon, a company to which KupiVIP is compared, which had revenues of over $ 48 billion in 2011, but still making KupiVIP one to watch in the years ahead as it gears up for an IPO, possibly in the next two years.
A story that Hartmann tells gives an insight into some of the trials and tribulations of building a startup in a country like Russia:
TechCrunch
An anonymous reader writes “The oceanographers aboard RRS Discovery were expecting the winter weather on their North Atlantic research cruise to be bad, but they didn’t expect to have to negotiate the highest waves ever recorded in the open ocean. Wave heights were measured by the vessel’s Shipborne Wave Recorder, which allowed scientists from the National Oceanography Centre to produce a paper titled ‘Were extreme waves in the Rockall Trough the largest ever recorded?’ It’s that paper, in combination with the first confirmed measurement of a rogue wave (at the Draupner platform in the North Sea), that led to ‘a surge of interest in extreme and rogue waves, and a renewed emphasis on protecting ships and offshore structures from their destructive power.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Groundbreaking green architecture burst into life in Sweden this week as Inhabitat reported that Plantagon began construction on the world’s first ‘Plantscraper’ vertical farm. We also marveled at artist Yayoi Kusama’s dazzling Infinity Mirror Room, which shines with the reflections of thousands of LEDs, and we shared the bubbly modular AMPS living wall system. Meanwhile, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program announced that HWKN’s bright blue spiky sea-urchin shaped pavilion will be popping up this summer, PinkCloud.DK unveiled plans to transform oil refineries into giant energy positive communities and the UK granted planning commission for its first amphibious house.
We also showcased several amazing applications for LEGO bricks this week: a NYC apartment renovated with 20,000 plastic bricks, a gigantic LEGO-inspired church in the Netherlands and a remarkable fully articulated prosthetic LEGO arm. Speaking of next-gen prosthetics, this week Israeli scientists demoed a real-life “Star Trek” VISOR that enables the blind to see, and Nike took the wraps off a prosthetic running sole for amputee triathlete Sarah Reinertsen.
This also marked a heated week for energy news as solar power heavyweight Sunpower sued Solarcity over stolen data, and Aquamarine Power geared up to connect its new wave energy generator to the UK’s national grid. We also got ready for rough days ahead with the waterproof, armageddon-ready, solar-charged, battery-powered iPhone case, and we got things cooking with Biolite’s brilliant new camping stove, which converts waste heat into electricity for USB gadgets. Last but not least, we were wowed by several amazing new applications for discarded tech: Sean Avery’s astounding animal sculptures made from shattered CDs and Paola Mirai’s elegant jewelry fashioned out of discarded computer circuits.
Filed under: Science
Inhabitat’s Week in Green: ‘Plantscraper’ vertical farm, new wave energy and a battery-powered iPhone case originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Kinect hacks previously brought gesture and voice control to Boxee and XBMC, and now that the Kinect for Windows hardware has been released we’ve got a solution for Windows Media Center. The aptly named Kinect for Media Center brings all the normal playback controls (for WMC and add-ins like Netflix) to your fingertips and lips, at the cost of $ 6.99. While its control scheme seems to be fully featured there are unfortunately some limitations — it doesn’t work with the Xbox 360 Kinect due to Microsoft’s restrictions, and it also doesn’t work with WMC extenders. What is included are filters to keep your content from accidentally triggering the voice controls (something some of us have had problems with on the Xbox 360), and configurable settings for right or left hand dominance or sensitivity. You can check out a video demo of the beta version (compare to a demo we saw last year from the makers of the Amulet voice control remotes) embedded after the break, or head directly to the site to try it out yourself if you’re sure that finding the remote has simply become to much of a hassle.
Continue reading Kinect for Media Center released, why not wave and shout at your HTPC?
Kinect for Media Center released, why not wave and shout at your HTPC? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Wallet has been the subject of the latest round of security paranoia, but Google has come forward to say there is nothing wrong with the product and anyone who is at risk of losing sensitive Google Wallet data is someone who made a specific decision to lower their entire phone’s security, and it is [...]
SlashGear
Facebook may end up being the biggest name on the IPO calendar this year, but it's also part of a trend in which technology, and particularly Internet companies, are outpacing public offerings from businesses in other sectors.
Computerworld News
Apple’s much-rumored textbook plans came to light this week, alongside a new version of iBooks and iTunes U. More on that and the rest of this week’s news and rumors in Apple Talk Weekly.
CNET News
A close look at Google’s virtual globe reveals almost unlimited examples of the way waves behave
Google Earth provides a cornucopia of exotic images of our planet taken from above. For the most part, the focus of attention is on the land and the cities, roads and natural formations that it supports.
First time accepted submitter BabaChazz writes “Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates says he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor. During a talk at China’s Ministry of Science & Technology Wednesday, the billionaire said: ‘The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste.’ Gates backs Washington-based TerraPower, which is developing a nuclear reactor that can run on depleted uranium.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rumors of a partnership between TerraPower and China aren’t true.
The word is that TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that’s developing a new kind of nuclear power plant, is going to develop the reactor in cooperation with the Chinese government. But that word is wrong.
Samsung’s new Bada flagship has just docked into our illustrative French port. Announced back in the summer, the Wave 3 arrives on the refreshed Bada 2.0 OS, powered by a 1.4GHz processor and packing a four-inch 800 x 480 Super AMOLED display. Storage matches the watery iteration, with 3GB of memory baked-in, with expansion possible through microSD. Meanwhile, an auto-focus five megapixel shooter will do its best to fill all that space. Not content with France (where Bada-powered handsets have established a niche fanbase), the HSPA-connected smartphone is also penned to hit Germany, Russia and Italy before the end of the year.
Continue reading Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores
Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wave is often considered one of Google’s most embarrassing failures, but several startups are bringing the ideas it introduced back to life.
Two startups in San Francisco are betting that one of Google’s most ignominious failures will be their ticket to success. They’re launching software that implements key ideas from Google Wave, a complex communication tool that the company launched in 2009; at the time, Google claimed it would displace e-mail, but the project was quietly shuttered 16 months later after few people adopted it.
Bada 2.0 won’t just be riding the Wave 3, Wave M and Wave Y, but according to a tweet from Samsung, it’ll be available on all older Wave models as well. The company did warn that the OS could run “differently” between devices based on specifications like CPU and memory size, which may affect lower end models like the Wave 525 and Wave 533. However, if you are the proud owner of any of the fancier Wave phones like the S8500, expect the full OS makeover. The upgrade is due to splash across Europe some time in the fourth quarter, rolling out worldwide soon thereafter.
All Samsung Wave phones will get Bada 2.0, if they can handle the upgrade originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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