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Sunday, February 1, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Portfolio Mobile - First Bytes: AT&T, Obama, Filttr, Skype
First Bytes: AT&T, Obama, Filttr, Skype
AT&T's profit fell in the fourth quarter on high subsidies to support the iPhone. [Reuters]
Jeffrey Sachs believes Obama can turn the crushing economic crisis into the launch of a new age of sustainable development. [Guardian]
If there's just too much information on Twitter, Filttr is here to advise you on what's worth reading, and what's a
waste by automatically filtering content from your followers. [Techcrunch]
Om Malik thinks that it's time for eBay to let suitors like Yahoo and Microsoft court Skype. [Gigaom]
by Joan R. Magee
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Reuters - RIM's Storm costlier to make than iPhone: report
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RIM's Storm costlier to make than iPhone: report
Thursday, Jan 29, 2009 11:21PM UTC
TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion's touchscreen BlackBerry Storm costs almost $30 more to produce than rival Apple Inc's iPhone 3G, according to an analysis by technology research firm iSuppli Corp.
In its report, iSuppli said the Storm, which RIM launched late last year to compete with the popular iPhone, has a materials and manufacturing cost of $202.89.
That compares with $174.33 for the initial production costs of an 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, iSuppli said.
It said the Storm's total component count stands at 1,177, while the iPhone's is 1,116.
RIM has pushed aggressively into the broader consumer market to diversify its subscriber base beyond the executives, politicians and other professionals who have been its mainstay.
Models like the Storm, as well as the earlier BlackBerry Pearl and a flip version of the smartphone, are all laden with multimedia features to attract non-business users.
On Wednesday, Verizon Wireless said it had sold 1 million units of the Storm in the United States since its November launch.
(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; editing by Rob Wilson)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
NYTimes.com: YouTube Said to Be Near Hollywood Deal
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Distant planet has extreme global warming
In just six hours, this planet four times the size of Jupiter heats up by more than 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"It's the first observation of changing weather" on a planet outside our solar system, said study author Gregory Laughlin, an astronomy professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study the planet.
Change is a mild way to put it for the lifeless world, called HD80606b, where the word "mild" would never enter a weather forecast.
Normally, the planet is a toasty 980 degrees or so. But in the few hours it whips around its sun the planet gets zapped with mega-heat, pushing the thermometer closer to 2,240 degrees.
During its brief pass close to its sun, the planet is 10 times nearer its star than Mercury is to our sun. When it comes closest to its star, it becomes one giant "brewing storm" complete with shock waves, Laughlin said. The radiation bombarding the planet is 800 times stronger than when it is farthest away.
Then just as quickly, the planet slingshots away and radiates the heat to the cool vacuum of space. It glows cherry red and the temperature plummets, Laughlin said.
"Utterly bizarre," he said. "It is thoroughly completely uninhabitable. In a galaxy of uninhabitable planets, this one stands out as being completely inhospitable to life."
The planet circles its star the larger of two stars in a binary system in a comet-like orbit in just 111 days.
The star is visible from Earth near the Big Dipper. On Feb. 14, HD80606b will travel between the Earth and its star. There's a 15% chance that amateur astronomers using small telescopes could see it swing by, obscuring a tiny part of the star, Laughlin said.
"This is indeed an oddball planet, where the temperature range of the season changes from hellish to super-hellish," said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss. "This place makes Venus look like a nice place to live, and that is saying something."
Reuters - Nokia unveils three new phone models
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Nokia unveils three new phone models
Thursday, Jan 29, 2009 8:37AM UTC
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia unveiled on Thursday three new cellphone models, including the successor to its slim hit model Nokia 6300, as the world's top handset vendor pushes to win a larger share of a shrinking market.
Cellphone sales will dive this year, hit by consumers' reluctance to spend on new gadgets in the midst of the economic recession and large inventories built up by phone sellers at the end of last year.
Nokia's 6700 classic -- the follow-up to the Nokia 6300, which was among Nokia's top sellers for many quarters -- will sell for 235 euros ($307.4) starting in the second quarter, when excluding subsidies and taxes.
The model will have a 5-megapixel camera and GPS navigation with Nokia Maps.
"Our new arrival shares the same 'DNA' as its predecessor and we believe that it will be one of our best selling devices in 2009," Soren Petersen, Senior Vice President at Nokia, said in a statement.
Nokia also unveiled the 6303 and 2700 models, which are expected to sell for 135 euros and 65 euros respectively, excluding subsidies and taxes. (Reporting by Tarmo Virki)
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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IBM quietly cuts thousands of jobs
The Armonk, N.Y.-based company has cut thousands of jobs over the past week, including positions in sales and the software and hardware divisions. IBM says the cuts are simply part of its ongoing efforts to watch costs, and the company won't release specific numbers, even as reports of firings stream in from IBM facilities across the country.
Workers have reported layoffs in Tucson; San Jose, Calif.; Rochester, Minn.; Research Triangle Park, N.C.; East Fishkill, N.Y.; Austin, Texas; and Burlington, Vt.
Meanwhile, other tech companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Sprint Nextel and Google have all publicly revealed job cuts as part of their strategies for riding out the economic crisis. More than 20,000 jobs will be lost from those companies alone.
One of IBM's biggest rivals Hewlett-Packard is also laying people off. HP is shedding 24,600 jobs, nearly 8% of its 320,000-employee work force, as it digests the acquisition of Electronic Data Systems.
IBM says it doesn't have to reveal the number of jobs it is cutting, since the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to disclose only "material" events. And IBM considers its job cuts a regular part of the company's business model, since thousands of jobs are cut every year but are usually added back in other places.
Because of that, IBM contends it doesn't have to break out its layoffs in regulatory filings unless it suddenly changes course and makes substantially more or fewer job cuts.
That's why while IBM's head count keeps growing, topping 400,000 at the end of 2008, laid-off IBM workers have flooded online job boards with complaints about the company's stealth cuts.
One estimate of IBM's recent cuts put the number at more than 4,000 jobs lost since IBM's fourth-quarter earnings announcement last week. Those earnings contained an unexpected surprise: IBM forecast at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009. IBM shares are up more than 10% since then.
To get the cost savings that will help spur the higher profits, IBM appears to have acted quickly. The estimate of at least 4,000 jobs cut comes from AllianceAtIBM, a union that is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and represents a small number of IBM workers.
The Associated Press reviewed one document sent to laid-off workers that identified some of the positions that were cut. Employees weren't identified by name, but positions and the workers' ages were listed. The document listed nearly 3,000 jobs.
In Vermont, IBM remained tightlipped about layoffs at its Essex Junction facility, but state Labor Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden said the total number would be less than 500.
IBM recently employed 5,300 workers at the Essex Junction plant, down from 8,500 in 2001.
Jim Gallo, 48, who said he worked in IBM software support for 27 years, was among those let go from that facility. Gallo, drinking a Grey Goose and ginger ale at nearby Lincoln Inn on Tuesday, said he hadn't told his four children yet.
He said he has until Feb. 26 to find another job in IBM, but he put his chances at "slim to none." Gallo said he gets six months' pay as part of a severance package.
"It's too bad they're not doing what they were doing before. They offered some sweet packages for people to jump out," he said.
IBM's ongoing labor adjustments have led the company to add bodies in cheaper and higher-growth parts of the world, like India.
In 2007, the last full year for which detailed employment numbers are available, 121,000 of IBM's 387,000 workers were in the U.S., down slightly from the year before. Meanwhile, staffing in India has jumped from just 9,000 workers in 2003 to 74,000 workers in 2007.
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Associated Press writer Dave Gram contributed to this story from Essex Junction, Vt.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
CNN - Dead athletes' brains show damage from concussions
Sent from bombastic4000@yahoo.com's mobile device from http://www.cnn.com.
Dead athletes' brains show damage from concussions
For years after his NFL career ended, Ted Johnson could barely muster the energy to leave his house.
"I'd [leave to] go see my kids for maybe 15 minutes," said Johnson. "Then I would go back home and close the curtains, turn the lights off and I'd stay in bed. That was my routine for two years.
"Those were bad days."
These days, the former linebacker is less likely to recount the hundreds of tackles, scores of quarterback sacks or the three Super Bowl rings he earned as a linebacker for the New England Patriots. He is more likely to talk about suffering more than 100 concussions.
"I can definitely point to 2002 when I got back-to-back concussions. That's where the problems started," said Johnson, who retired after those two concussions. "The depression, the sleep disorders and the mental fatigue."
Until recently, the best medical definition for concussion was a jarring blow to the head that temporarily stunned the senses, occasionally leading to unconsciousness. It has been considered an invisible injury, impossible to test -- no MRI, no CT scan can detect it.
But today, using tissue from retired NFL athletes culled posthumously, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) is shedding light on what concussions look like in the brain. The findings are stunning. Far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. That damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
CTE has thus far been found in the brains of five out of five former NFL players. On Tuesday afternoon, researchers at the CSTE will release study results from the sixth NFL player exhibiting the same kind of damage.
"What's been surprising is that it's so extensive," said Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, and co-director of the CSTE. "It's throughout the brain, not just on the superficial aspects of the brain, but it's deep inside."
CSTE studies reveal brown tangles flecked throughout the brain tissue of former NFL players who died young -- some as early as their 30s or 40s.
McKee, who also studies Alzheimer's disease, says the tangles closely resemble what might be found in the brain of an 80-year-old with dementia.
"I knew what traumatic brain disease looked like in the very end stages, in the most severe cases," said McKee. "To see the kind of changes we're seeing in 45-year-olds is basically unheard of."
The damage affects the parts of the brain that control emotion, rage, hypersexuality, even breathing, and recent studies find that CTE is a progressive disease that eventually kills brain cells.
Chris Nowinski knows well the impact of concussions. He was a football star at Harvard before wrestling professionally with World Wrestling Entertainment.
In one moment, his dreams of a long career wrestling were dashed by a kick to his chin. That kick, which caused Nowinski to black out and effectively ended his career, capped a career riddled with concussions.
"My world changed," said Nowinski. "I had depression. I had memory problems. My head hurt for five years."
Nowinski began searching for studies, and what he found startled him.
"I realized when I was visiting a lot of doctors, they weren't giving me very good answers about what was wrong with my head," said Nowinski. "I read [every study I could find] and I realized there was a ton of evidence showing concussions lead to depression, and multiple concussion can lead to Alzheimer's."
Nowinski decided further study was needed, so he founded the Sports Legacy Institute along with Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and co-director of the Neurologic Sports Injury Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The project solicits for study the brains of ex-athletes who suffered multiple concussions.
Once a family agrees to donate the brain, it is delivered to scientists at the CSTE to look for signs of damage.
So far, the evidence of CTE is compelling.
The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, along with other research institutions, identified traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of late NFL football players John Grimsley, Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Justin Strzelczyk and Terry Long.
Grimsley died of an accidental gunshot wound to the chest. Webster, Long and Strzelczyk all died after long bouts of depression, while Waters committed suicide in 2006 at age 44.
"Guys were dying," said Nowinski. "The fact of the matter was guys were dying because they played sports 10 or 20 years before."
So far, around 100 athletes have consented to have their brains studied after they die.
Ted Johnson was one of the first to sign up. He said he believes that concussions he suffered while playing football explain the anger, depression and throbbing headaches that occasionally still plague him.
Johnson said he played through concussions because he, like many other NFL athletes, did not understand the consequences. He has publicly criticized the NFL for not protecting players like him.
"They don't want you to know," said Johnson. "It's not like when you get into the NFL there's a handout that says 'These are the effects of multiple concussions so beware.' "
In a statement, the NFL indicated that their staffs take a cautious, conservative approach to managing concussions.
While they support research into the impact of concussions, they maintain that, "Hundreds of thousands of people have played football and other sports without experiencing any problem of this type and there continues to be considerable debate within the medical community on the precise long-term effects of concussions and how they relate to other risk factors."
The NFL is planning its own independent medical study of retired NFL players on the long-term effects of concussion.
"Really my main reason even for talking about this is to help the guys who are already retired," said Johnson. "[They] are getting divorced, going bankrupt, can't work, are depressed, and don't know what's wrong with them. [It is] to give them a name for it so they can go get help."
"The idea that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine is gone," said Nowinski. "We know we can't do that anymore. This causes long-term damage."
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