London Mar 2 (ANI): Scientists have developed a computer program that allows laptops to shout for help if they have been stolen.
The program, called Retriever, has been developed by a software company called Front Door Software Corporation, reports the Telegraph.
Retriever enables users to display alerts on the missing computer's screen and even to set a spoken message such as a shout or a warning.
Tracking software for stolen laptops has been on the market for some time, but this is understood to be the first that allows owners to activate recorded messages, according to The Times.
Owners must report their laptop missing by logging on to a website, which sends a message to the computer, triggering on-screen messages of warning to the thief and voice alerts.
The 21-pound software, designed by the Colorado-based firm, also collects information if the stolen laptop is being used to access the Internet so that the police can be alerted to its location. (ANI)
http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090302/862/ttc-now-software-that-allows-laptops-to.html
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
UAE is building network of driverless electric taxis
United Arab Emirates, land awash in petroleum, why are you so ahead of us with your gasoline-free Masdar City (near Abu Dhabi)? Well, the Emirates are awash in another key ingredient — petrodollars. But look at what they’ve done with all that cash: PRT (personal rapid transit), driverless electric taxis that take to the streets later this year. When the system’s fully built, planners say the podcars will be able to deliver riders within 100 meters of any location in the city. The whole network of tracks for the cars will be two stories beneath street level.
The cost? Its creators say the system will pay for itself by charging riders the same price they’d pay for an equivalent taxi ride. Similar podcars are in use at Heathrow Airport near London, but never have they been deployed on such a city-wide scale.
http://www.gadgetted.com/msn/?p=3998
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
NASA, Google launch Mars exploration
WASHINGTON: NASA and Google announced the release of a new Mars mode in Google Earth that brings to everyone's desktop a high-resolution, three-dimensional view of the red planet. Besides providing a rich, immersive three dimensional view of Mars that will aid public understanding of Mars science, the new mode, Google Mars 3D, also gives researchers a platform for sharing data similar to what Google Earth provides for Earth scientists. The mode enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars that are much larger than any found on Earth. Users also can explore the planet through the eyes of the Mars rovers and other Mars missions, providing a unique perspective of the entire planet. Users can see some of the latest satellite imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other probes orbiting the planet. Viewers can learn about new discoveries and explore indexes of available Mars imagery. The new Mars mode also allows users to add their own 3D content to the Mars map to share with the world. The announcement is the latest benefit from a Space Act Agreement that NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, signed with Google in November 2006. Under its terms, NASA and Google agreed to collaborate to make NASA's data sets available to the world.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Health__Science/Science/NASA_Google_launch_Mars_exploration_/articleshow/4068689.cms
Pregnant fossil shows how early whales evolved
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fossils from two early whales -- a male and a rare pregnant female -- shed light on how these ancestors to modern whales made the leap from walking on land to ruling the sea.
The fetal remains, found with the 47.5 million-year-old pregnant female, were positioned head down, suggesting these creatures gave birth on land, while spending much of the rest of their time in the water.
Initially, the tiny fetal teeth stumped University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, whose team discovered the fossils in Pakistan in 2000 and 2004.
"When I first saw the small teeth in the field, I thought we were dealing with a small adult whale, but then we continued to expose the specimen and found ribs that seemed too large to go with those teeth," Gingerich, whose study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
The fetal skeleton is the first specimen of the extinct whale group known as Archaeoceti, and the find represents a new species named Maiacetus inuus, a hybrid of the words for "mother whale" and Inuus, the name of a Roman fertility god.
The fetus was positioned head down like other land animals, allowing it to begin breathing right away. This suggests the group had not yet made the leap to giving birth in the water like modern whales, which are born tail first to allow them to start swimming right after birth.
The 8.5-foot (2.59-meter) male, which was collected in the same fossil beds as the female, is about 12 percent bigger and had fangs that were 20 percent larger than those of the female. Gingerich said these well developed choppers suggest the creatures spent a large portion of their time catching and eating fish.
Both fossils had four flipper-like legs that could have supported their weight on land, but only for short distances, suggesting these whales likely came on shore to mate, rest and give birth, Gingerich said.
"They clearly were tied to shore," Gingerich said. "They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."
He said the Maiacetus fossils appear to represent an intermediate whale form, showing the evolution from land-dwelling to aquatic creatures.
The fetal remains, found with the 47.5 million-year-old pregnant female, were positioned head down, suggesting these creatures gave birth on land, while spending much of the rest of their time in the water.
Initially, the tiny fetal teeth stumped University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, whose team discovered the fossils in Pakistan in 2000 and 2004.
"When I first saw the small teeth in the field, I thought we were dealing with a small adult whale, but then we continued to expose the specimen and found ribs that seemed too large to go with those teeth," Gingerich, whose study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
The fetal skeleton is the first specimen of the extinct whale group known as Archaeoceti, and the find represents a new species named Maiacetus inuus, a hybrid of the words for "mother whale" and Inuus, the name of a Roman fertility god.
The fetus was positioned head down like other land animals, allowing it to begin breathing right away. This suggests the group had not yet made the leap to giving birth in the water like modern whales, which are born tail first to allow them to start swimming right after birth.
The 8.5-foot (2.59-meter) male, which was collected in the same fossil beds as the female, is about 12 percent bigger and had fangs that were 20 percent larger than those of the female. Gingerich said these well developed choppers suggest the creatures spent a large portion of their time catching and eating fish.
Both fossils had four flipper-like legs that could have supported their weight on land, but only for short distances, suggesting these whales likely came on shore to mate, rest and give birth, Gingerich said.
"They clearly were tied to shore," Gingerich said. "They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."
He said the Maiacetus fossils appear to represent an intermediate whale form, showing the evolution from land-dwelling to aquatic creatures.
Microsoft Launches Windows 7 in Hindi
Microsoft, as a part of its efforts to overcome the language barrier to computing, has showcased a variety of custom made products directed specifically at the vernacular language market - a market that has been largely left untapped till now.The new initiatives include Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages - Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu - for MS Office and Windows. The company has also announced a total of 45 additional virtual keyboards for these languages. Even Windows Live has not been spared the treatment with it being made available in as many as seven Indian languages. These languages are Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.There's more in store for developers as well. Directed at vernacular language developers, it has launched the Captions Language Interface Pack (or CLIP) in Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, and Tamil. CLIP uses a tool tip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008 making it the first ever instance of Microsoft releasing a tool specifically to help students and beginner developers in India use the product in their own language. The most talked about part of the sneak peek was a rather cool beta version of Windows 7 in Hindi, one of the eight global languages the Operating System (Beta) was released in recently. We would love to have a go at this one!
10p pencil as good as 100 pounds Nintendo brain-trainer
London, January 26 (ANI): A survey of 10-year-old children suggests that a 10p pencil is as good as a much expensive Nintendo brain-trainer at stimulating the memory.
The study's finding dismisses the claim in Nintendo's advertising campaign, featuring Nicole Kidman, that users can test and rejuvenate their grey cells.
"The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it's fine. But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test," Times Online quoted Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes, Brittany, who conducted the survey, as saying.
Nintendo claims to have developed certain "edutainment" programmes-like Big Brain Academy and Brain Training-which improve "practical intelligence by improving blood flow to the brain.
The company claims that its programmes can make users "two to three times better in tests of memory." It even claims to assess capacity by measuring "brain age", and insists that older people can keep their minds young by using the console.
"The more you use the brain in a challenging way, the better it can work. We know that the mental processes of our brain start to weaken if we only use it in our routine daily life," the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, who developed Brain Training, says on the Nintendo website.
Professor Lieury said that helping children with their homework, reading, playing Scrabble or Su Doku or watching documentaries, rather than soap operas, matched or beat the console.
The researchers conducted an study on 67 ten-year-olds with a view to testing whether Nintendo's claims were true.
"That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement. If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults," Professor Lieury said.
The researchers divided the children into four groups-the first two did a seven-week memory course on a Nintendo DS, the third did puzzles with pencils and paper, and the fourth just went to school as normal.
Before and after the programmes, the children undertook a variety of tasks-logic tests, memorising words on a map, doing sums and interpreting symbols.
The researchers said that the children who used the Nintendo DS system failed to show any significant improvement in memory tests.
They agreed that the children using the Nintendo DS did do 19 per cent better in mathematics, but so did the pencil-and-paper group, while the fourth group did 18 per cent better.
The researchers also observed that the pencil-and-paper group recorded a 33 per cent improvement in memorising, while the Nintendo children were 17 per cent worse.
In logic tests the Nintendo children registered a 10 per cent improvement, as did the pencil-and-paper group.
According to the researchers, the children who had no specific training improved 20 per cent.
In a book titled Stimulate Your Neurones, due out this month, Professor Lieury says: "There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants." (ANI)
http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090126/393/ttc-10p-pencil-as-good-as-100-pounds-nin.html
The study's finding dismisses the claim in Nintendo's advertising campaign, featuring Nicole Kidman, that users can test and rejuvenate their grey cells.
"The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it's fine. But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test," Times Online quoted Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes, Brittany, who conducted the survey, as saying.
Nintendo claims to have developed certain "edutainment" programmes-like Big Brain Academy and Brain Training-which improve "practical intelligence by improving blood flow to the brain.
The company claims that its programmes can make users "two to three times better in tests of memory." It even claims to assess capacity by measuring "brain age", and insists that older people can keep their minds young by using the console.
"The more you use the brain in a challenging way, the better it can work. We know that the mental processes of our brain start to weaken if we only use it in our routine daily life," the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, who developed Brain Training, says on the Nintendo website.
Professor Lieury said that helping children with their homework, reading, playing Scrabble or Su Doku or watching documentaries, rather than soap operas, matched or beat the console.
The researchers conducted an study on 67 ten-year-olds with a view to testing whether Nintendo's claims were true.
"That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement. If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults," Professor Lieury said.
The researchers divided the children into four groups-the first two did a seven-week memory course on a Nintendo DS, the third did puzzles with pencils and paper, and the fourth just went to school as normal.
Before and after the programmes, the children undertook a variety of tasks-logic tests, memorising words on a map, doing sums and interpreting symbols.
The researchers said that the children who used the Nintendo DS system failed to show any significant improvement in memory tests.
They agreed that the children using the Nintendo DS did do 19 per cent better in mathematics, but so did the pencil-and-paper group, while the fourth group did 18 per cent better.
The researchers also observed that the pencil-and-paper group recorded a 33 per cent improvement in memorising, while the Nintendo children were 17 per cent worse.
In logic tests the Nintendo children registered a 10 per cent improvement, as did the pencil-and-paper group.
According to the researchers, the children who had no specific training improved 20 per cent.
In a book titled Stimulate Your Neurones, due out this month, Professor Lieury says: "There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants." (ANI)
http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090126/393/ttc-10p-pencil-as-good-as-100-pounds-nin.html
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