The Lucky Kitten survives

A kitten caught in the hood of a car miraculously survives.

Canada declares bisphenol A as hazardous, thus limiting its further use in baby bottles

Following its announcement of April 18th 2008, Canadian government has declared Bisphenol A (BPA) a hazardous chemical two days back, thus preventing its further use as a plastic bottle container of baby foods halting any further imports of the chemical.

Canada's Health Minister Mr Tony Clement, earlier this year announced Canada was considering banning the chemical BPA from use in baby bottles.

The Health Canada's report should have been published in the Canada Gazette publication.

Bisphenol A is also found in hard plastic sports bottles and in the food can linings, how the authorities are going to limit the use is still not clear yet.

Earlier the Journal of American Medical Association research reported finding
" significant relationship " that mimics estrogen with many diseases including fatal heart and liver disease and also the National Toxicology Program of the US found the chemical to carry some strain.
Related Posts :
Plastics suspected in Brain Disorders
Melamine contaminated food products
Printed T-Shirts causing cancer

Charity Dinner of the Presidential candidates turns into a Joking Spree

The Presidential Campaign takes a lighter turn as the Presidential candidates joke around at a charity Dinner.

McCain, Obama Get Tough, Personal in Last Debate

In one of the last debates of the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the candidates John McCain for the Republican Party and Barack Obama for the Democrats sparred against each other for one last time at the New York's Hofstra University before going for the ballots.

Helicopter Crash Kills Four Outside of Chicago

In a freak accident four die in an accident involving a chopper outside of Chicago area it was reported.

Worlds first Social Networking Enabled Bike

Yahoo has invented a new bike with Social Networking abilities, it snaps up pictures every minute, tags it with the Geographic Location and uploads it to Flickr, its photo sharing website and other websites all with the aid of a GPS camera fitted onto the bike.

Theft reported at Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace has reported theft on its premises and investigations are on to determine the details of the theft.

2008 Nobel Prize for Economics is awarded to Paul Krugman

In a latest press release it has been declared the Nobel Prize for Economics is awarded to Mr Paul Krugman " for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity ".

Mr Paul Krugman is a Professor at Princeton University, New Jersey.

Nobel Prize for Economics was first launched in the year 1968 and was first awarded to Ragnar Frisch in the year 1969.

The award is sponsored by Sveriges Riksbank ( Swedish Bank )

Press Release at Nobel.org

Video of the Prize Announcement

NY times Column where Mr Paul Krugman himself is a Columnist

Most Asian Markets Open higher on Monday

Most Asian stock markets recovered Monday after last week's historic sell-off as governments in Europe and beyond intensified efforts to stabilize the world's troubled financial system.

Nations Want Financial Fix, but How?

Finance leaders from around the world meeting in Washington agree on principles to help solve a growing financial crisis gripping the globe, but the AP's Lee Powell says markets may demand something extraordinary.



Democratic campaign for the Presidential elections 2008 received a boost from Clintons attending the Vice-Presidential Campaign Joe Biden rally at his town in North Eastern Pennsylvania.

Are Computer based complex models responsible for the Financial Crisis ?

How best the complex computer models are used to predict the financial forecasts at the Wall-Street is going to have a whole new re-look at, but people are now questioning How best the climate models are going to prove themselves in the future. Since these too are based on complex computer system models.

In fact these are the same complex system based models that scientists use to predict the Global Warming related measurements analyzing the carbon emissions and their impact on the earth's environment, that financial analysts use to predict the forecasts in the industry by tweaking the required options and derivatives to suit their needs.

But the important thing to note here is, these derivatives and options are not physical in nature in the Financial Industry where these models are employed, and hence the accuracy in predicting a financial forecast can never be guaranteed, it can go wrong as in the present financial situation where these complex system based models are partially blamed.

But the question is are Climate Models too are not dependable models where the underlying parameters are infact physical and can be predicted on a given time scale. Though there can be acceptable variations in the accuracy of the models.

It is in fact due to the claim that the scientific community holds like this one " The claim is sometimes made that if computer models were any good, people would be using them to predict stock market, Well they are " writes the author of a New Scientist article giving a nod for the accuracy of the present climate models.

There is this argument that these financial models if not whole, were partially responsible for the present situation in the Stock Markets. But how far the Climate models too are not dependable is debatable.

In fact some new avenues have opened up "The credit crisis can be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for global green economic growth," de Boer, who heads the Bonn-based UN Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference. by UN Climate Chief

Raw Video: Fiery Balloon Gondola Crash

A hot air balloon has been involved in a fiery accident crashing into the power lines and burst into flames Friday. The accident killed one of two men thrown out from the basket and critically injuring the other during Albuquerque's annual balloon fiesta.

2008 Nobel Peace Prize, Dow's wild weekend

The 2008 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to the the former President of Finland Mr Martti ahtisaari of Finland for his peace efforts spanning three decades.



Dow ended the week with wild session mixed after a 8 day slide.

Health Map: A Project website to track health alerts

By the time a major disease outbreak is reported and the news would have reached the Internet and by the time it reaches the general public it would have already affected a sizable portion of the population under its influence. Thanks to the information explosion these days, it is simply hard to find what's actually and very important like matters on health. Now in the days of financial crisis we get to see bail-outs, wall-street, recession, debts, mortgage in most of the headlines in the world today.

To overcome this problem researchers have been working on a project since 2006 on a project website called HealthMap, which extracts all the buried information from the web places like Google News, World Health Organization and all the other online discussion groups. The extracted data is then reprocessed and presented to the researchers and the public in a way to track an outbreak of a disease or virus or any other relevant info region by region.
The site also has other features like color coding to distinguish between the severity of an outbreak and other parameters including prevalent weather. This was disclosed by the researchers in the latest edition of PLoS (Public Library of Science) journals on preventive health studies.

The site is sponsored by the Google's Prevent and Predict initiative and could be of much use in the developing world, where the researchers mostly predict most of the outbreaks to the prevalent climatic conditions and other geography related factors.


Related Articles:

1. Printed T-shirts causing Cancers
2. Plastics Involved in brain disorders
3. Snoring dangerous to health

Raw Video: Gaffe at Biden Rally

The man in the clip introduces Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden as John McCain the Republican Presidential nominee mistakenly at a rally in Tampa, Fla.,

Planet mammals face mass extinction

Mans actions is costing dear to the Wild life, the latest report by the International Union of Conservation IUCN has warned that many of the species living in the wild are directly threatened to extinction if no further efforts are made by the authorities that would be concerned.

Nobel for Excellence

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish Scholar and Inventor, had a vision and so in his will articulated the need for creation of Nobel Prize, to be founded out of his fortune.
In the honour of “ those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”.

And so got instituted the Nobel Prizes in the late memory of the noted scholar and inventor of dynamite in 1895. The Nobel Prizes are categorized into five categories according the Alfred Nobel’s will.

Annually the awards are bestowed up on the achieving the excellence leading to important discoveries benefiting mankind in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Medicine and Peace prizes for efforts that abolish the existing war and strife among the nations and people.

And the first Nobel awards were distributed in the year 1901.

This years Awards in the field of Physics have been presented two Japanese researchers and an American colleague for advanced particle physics.

The names are
1. Yoichiro Nambu (USA) for “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"
2. Makoto kobayashi (Japan)
3. Toshihide Masakawi ( Japan ) "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

Mr Yoichiro Nambu shares half the Prize money while Mr Makoto and Toshilde share the other half, quarter each of the total Prize money according to the Nobel Committee.

The Nobel Prize for medicine has been conferred on.
1.Harald zur Hausen, ( Germany ) for the discovery of virus causing Cervical Cancer.
2.Francoise Barré-Sinoussi ( France )
3.Luc Montagnier. ( France ) for the discovery of Virus HIV.

Harald zur Hausen shares half of the Prize money in the award for medicine and the other half by the French Researchers, quarter each of the total Prize money according to the Nobel Committtee.

NobelPrize.org
Alfred Nobel's Last will and Testament

Officer nearly hit by a flying Telephone pole

In what appears to be an incident out of nowhere an officer attending an accident site miraculously escaped unhurt after a telephone came flying around him much to the surprise of all those present at the site.

Raw video: Woman dangles from the ride

A mother was forced to drop her child from 30 feet above the ground after they were left stranded during their ride, the fairgoers caught the child below, the accident happened at a central Florida carnival.

Five New Twitter tools to tweet

The five tools about twitter that you should know post comprises of tools that you can use to make very best out of the Twitter.

The tools are

1.Tweet Wheel
2.who should I follow
3.twerpscan
4.Summize
5.twitturly

These are the tools which can be used to prefer which way you want to connect users on twitter.

Complete details of how these tools work can be found at Five New Twitter tools that you should know

Disabled friendly public transport systems

ICT Results

In an ideal world, all buses would be wheelchair friendly and train timetables would be available as audio recordings for the visually impaired. Reality has yet to catch up with that vision, so instead European researchers have developed a personal navigation aid to help disabled people make use of public transport.

By letting disabled people know in advance which bus routes, subway lines or rail links are disabled friendly, people with disabilities can plan journeys that they may otherwise be unable to make unassisted. Once on the move, location-based services accessed via a smart phone or handheld computer can highlight points of interest, warn them of potential obstacles and let them change their itinerary as needs be.

“Until you meet with disabled people and talk to them about their needs it is hard to imagine just how difficult using public transport is,” notes Gary Randall, a researcher at BMT in the United Kingdom. “They are scared of finding themselves isolated, of being abandoned in the world.”

Someone confined to a wheelchair, for example, may end up stuck at a bus stop many kilometres from home if a bus with wheelchair access never arrives, or a blind person could easily become lost trying to make a train connection if there is no one to assist him or her. For that reason, few disabled people use public transport alone in what constitutes a severe restriction of their freedom and autonomy.

To address that problem, researchers working in the EU-funded MAPPED project developed personal navigation software designed specifically to meet the needs of people with disabilities. The system extends technology used in now commonplace GPS navigation aids. It incorporates information about public transport timetables and routes as well as so-called points of interest to disabled people in what the researchers describe as the first application of its kind.
Accessability info in advance

“A point of interest for someone with a disability is often very different from what [it] would be for you or me,” says Randall who coordinated the initiative.

He notes, for example, that someone with limited mobility would want to know if a building has an elevator or if you have to go up steps to enter a restaurant, while a blind person would find it useful to know in advance if a certain supermarket has someone available to help with their shopping. That information is obtained wirelessly from a preloaded database. The data is then presented to the user in a variety of formats tailored to their individual needs, including visual maps and audio instructions.

“Curiously, despite the wide variety of disabilities, we found that the needs of different groups of test users were very similar regardless of whether they were in a wheelchair, visually impaired or had hearing disabilities,” Randall says. “They all want the reassurance that having a personal navigation aid can provide.”

In trials in Dublin and in Winchester in the United Kingdom, people with different types of disabilities tested different versions of the system. Their reactions were generally positive, with 84 percent saying they would find a route planner such as that developed in MAPPED useful in their daily lives.

Nonetheless, the trials identified several challenges that must be overcome before such a system goes into commercial use.

Users tended to find the off-the-shelf PDA on which the software was installed difficult to use because of its small buttons and screen, while the accuracy and reliability of the GPS information needs to be improved to make micro-level route planning effective. New mobile devices with better user interfaces and incorporating digital compasses, coupled with the roll-out of Europe’s more accurate Galileo positioning system should solve those problems over the coming years.

“Usability and reliability are obviously crucial,” Randall says.

An even bigger problem, however, may be gathering the information about public transport routes, timetables and, especially, the accessibility features of museums, restaurants, shops and other points of interest.

“For the trials, we had to go around and visit restaurants and cinemas individually to see what their accesses were like – that is evidently not a practical solution,” Randall notes.

Instead, the researchers have considered allowing users to add their own content or working with business directories to obtain the information.

In light of the challenges, Randall believes public-sector support will be essential if a navigation aid such as that developed in MAPPED, which was funded under the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme, is to be widely used.

In that vein, he foresees the system or elements of it being deployed in different European cities where local governments have the political will to make location-based services for disabled people, tourists and other users available.

The Reference Article :

Cordis Europa

Peer-to-peer networking takes internet out of the equation

ICT Results


When people working on a project get together with their laptops and PDAs, they share information via the internet and a client server. But new software developed by European researchers allows independent, ad hoc, secure networking anywhere.

The power and reach of the internet in today’s world is such that people have, in a short space of time, become over-reliant on it for many tasks both in business and personal life.

If a group of people are gathered together with their laptops in a conference room and are working together on a project, they need to use the web as a communications medium and a central server to store the data they are working on.

If the internet connection is unavailable, congested or even just unaffordable, it has a serious impact on the productivity of the group.

To overcome this, we need to move away from the centralised, rigid client-server paradigm and fixed communications infrastructure. This is just what researchers on the EU-funded POPEYE project have been doing.
Power in unity

The researchers realised that when a group of people gather for a business meeting, be it on the sidelines of a conference, or in airports or hotels, they all carry laptops or PDAs which have vast processing power. They also have the built-in ability to wirelessly network, although this is usually used to connect to the internet.

“We decided you could use the combined computing power of whatever portable devices are present to conduct meetings in a productive manner,” says project coordinator Nicolas Berthet.

Apart from the advantages of being able to collaborate in any environment without the need for the usual fixed infrastructure, using just the portable personal devices of the people present has other advantages.

“Even if you do have access to the internet, that can often be a distraction if a group are gathered together to work on a project. While one person is doing his presentation, or providing his input, others could be checking their email or performing other tasks while waiting their turn, instead of concentrating on the task at hand,” he says. “But using peer-to-peer networking allows everybody to focus,” he says.
Standards don’t matter

The researchers have taken advantage of the technology embedded into today’s portable computing devices by developing new software which is able to cope with different hardware standards. A variety of devices can seamlessly slot into a spontaneously created network.

“It doesn’t matter if there are different brands of Wi-Fi cards or laptops, if they have a small amount of storage space and small screens, or plenty of memory and a big screen, the POPEYE system can bring them all together,” he says.

The software creates a shared repository which everybody in the network can tap into, moving documents and other files to and from their individual hard drives. Because the resources of all the devices are being shared to create the repository, somebody with a small PDA will get exactly the same access to the material as somebody with a powerful laptop.

“Using peer-to-peer in this way means there is no particular node or site where everything is stored for reference,” Berthet says. “You don’t get to download files as such, but to open any file or access any data in the shared space and use it.

There is a common repository that only exists because the community exists, and it ceases to exist when the community ceases to exist.”
No centralised control

Even though there is no centralised control or storage point, people can opt in and out of the network without any adverse effect, as it automatically readapts. This even applies to the person who created the network in the first place or the network manager, if there is one.

How does it work in practical terms? First, you would have to install POPEYE via online download, CD, memory stick, or at the conference itself, via an infrared port or bluetooth.

The researchers have included many of the applications available with standard online collaborative systems in POPEYE, including polling, instant messaging, notice boards, file sharing, screen sharing, collaborative maps and even an anagram game.

Everything is open source, so anybody can develop their own applications to run on POPEYE. According to Berthet, more bandwidth-hungry functions, such as video streaming, may be the subject of future research.

While the initial focus of the project was to allow people to work on collaborative projects using personal IT devices independent of the internet, the applications of POPEYE go beyond business meetings and the need for corporate infrastructural support.

“In a disaster situation, it can take days or weeks to get power and communications restored, and POPEYE could help emergency services and relief workers to share information,” Berthet offers as an example.

“In the EU, where the ultimate aim is a laptop for every child, the potential for small interest groups and neighbourhood groups to network is enormous.”

POPEYE was funded by the ICT theme of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for research.

The Reference URL :

Cordis Europa

A spate of incidents on the Interstate Highway

A driver of a truck is supposed to be a suspect according to the investigations into a spate of accidents, collisions, injuries, including that of a trooper on the Interstate highway.

Spotlight: Digg

An interview with the founder of Digg Kevin Rose digs deeper into the issues related with how the user driven site such as Digg operates itself.

Houses perched up in the Trees

A Japanese artist known for his site-specific sculptural innovations has provided a park in NYC with tree houses perched high up in the trees.

More 31 products found tainted with Chemical Melamine

Tainted Milk products has taken a magnanimous proportions in China after another 31 products are found to be tainted with Melamine. This is something like mixing poison with food products and this has happened for quite a long time, with so many widespread cases reported across the mainland China, so far according to a CNN report

1.4 children died,
2.Kidney ailments among 54000 children reported
3.13,000 children hospitalized.
4. So far 27 arrests has been made.

This brings to total number of tainted products list to a full 100.

Read the Full story here

Further Reading:

1.NYTS Report on the Scandal
2.Australia Recalls Cookies
3.Melamine