Wednesday, April 24, 2013

CA-BUSINESS Summary

TSX extends gains as financials offset gold dip

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index rose for the fourth straight session on Tuesday as strength in the financial sector helped offset weakness in shares of gold producers. The gains were kept in check by weak economic data from Germany and China.

Bank of Canada's Macklem confirms interest in governor role

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Tiff Macklem, currently second in command at the Bank of Canada and widely seen as the lead contender to succeed Governor Mark Carney, confirmed on Tuesday that he would be interested in running the central bank. "Yes if asked I will serve, but there is a process that is ongoing and I don't think it would be appropriate to start asking interview questions here when there is a separate process," Macklem told a House of Commons committee, when asked if he would take the job.

Manufacturing data stokes fears of global spring swoon

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Major economies in North America, Europe and Asia lost some momentum this month, a clutch of business surveys showed on Tuesday, raising concerns about the strength of the global recovery. China and Germany, the world's biggest exporters, both lost a step in April. Growth in Chinese factories slowed to a crawl as export demand dwindled, while the euro zone's largest economy saw business activity decline for the first time in five months.

Corzine sued by MF Global trustee over firm's collapse

(Reuters) - Jon Corzine was sued by the bankruptcy trustee liquidating MF Global Holdings Ltd , who accused the former chief executive of negligently pursuing a high-risk business strategy that culminated in the commodities brokerage's destruction. The trustee, Louis Freeh, said in the lawsuit that Corzine and two top deputies overhauled MF Global's business without addressing "systemic weaknesses" in oversight and monitoring.

Factory data flags slowing economic growth

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Factory activity expanded at its slowest pace in six months in April, the latest sign economic growth continued to lose momentum early in the second quarter. Another report on Tuesday showed the housing market recovery pushing ahead, with sales in March the second-highest in three years.

Bank of Japan QE needed, but structural reforms also important

TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan should stick with its expanded quantitative easing to achieve its inflation target, but this may not be enough to foster sustainable economic growth unless it is coupled with structural reforms, the OECD said on Tuesday. Japan's government should stay with its plan to double the sales tax to 10 percent, compile a detailed plan to return to primary budget surplus in 2020 and boost revenue from other taxes, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

NTSB seeks larger lesson in Boeing 787 battery fire

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The top U.S. transportation safety agency is looking beyond what caused a Boeing Co Dreamliner battery to fail in January at larger lessons that can be applied to the airplane certification process and new technologies. A two-day hearing at the National Transportation Safety Board headquarters in Washington that began on Tuesday delved into what Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration knew about volatile lithium-ion batteries when they proposed them for use on the Dreamliner, and how they addressed the risks.

Dewey ex-chairman agrees to proposed settlement to resolve claims

(Reuters) - The former chairman of Dewey & LeBoeuf has agreed to pay more than half a million dollars in a proposed settlement with Dewey's trustee and insurer to resolve claims that bad management led to the law firm's demise, according to papers filed in federal bankruptcy court. Former Dewey chairman Steve Davis has agreed to pay $511,145 to settle claims that he mismanaged Dewey & LeBoeuf, which became the largest law firm in U.S. history to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May. XL Specialty Insurance Company, Dewey's management liability insurance policy holder, has agreed to pay $19 million in the proposed settlement, according to court documents.

Bank of Canada repeats language on higher interest rates

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Outgoing Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney on Tuesday repeated the central bank's warning that it expects its next move to be an interest rate increase, even after recently cutting growth forecasts. "The considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will likely remain appropriate for a period of time, after which some modest withdrawal will likely be required, consistent with achieving the 2 per cent inflation target," he told a Canadian parliamentary committee.

Encana operating profit falls on hedging losses

(Reuters) - EnCana Corp , Canada's No.1 natural gas producer, reported a 25 percent fall in first-quarter operating profit due to hedging losses. Encana's net operating income, which excludes most one-time items, fell to $179 million, or 24 cents per share, in the first quarter, from $240 million, or 33 cents per share, a year earlier.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ca-business-summary-114755430.html

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Monday, April 22, 2013

Former Google CEO shares vision in tech treatise

The New Digital Age book cover is photographed in San Francisco, Friday, April 19, 2013. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday. (AP Photo)

The New Digital Age book cover is photographed in San Francisco, Friday, April 19, 2013. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday. (AP Photo)

In this Friday, March 22, 2013, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt gestures during an interactive session with group of students at a technical university in Yangon, Myanmar Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday, April 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)

(AP) ? Some illuminating books already have been written about Google's catalytic role in a technological upheaval that is redefining the way people work, play, learn, shop and communicate.

Until now, though, there hasn't been a book providing an unfiltered look from inside Google's brain trust.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company's CEO, shares his visions of digitally driven change and of a radically different future in "The New Digital Age," a book that goes on sale Tuesday.

It's a technology treatise that Schmidt wrote with another ruminator, Jared Cohen, a former State Department adviser who now runs Google Ideas, the Internet company's version of a think tank.

The book is an exercise in "brainstorming the future," as Schmidt put it in a recent post on Twitter ? just one example of a cultural phenomenon that didn't exist a decade ago.

The ability for anyone with an Internet-connected device to broadcast revelatory information and video is one of the reasons why Schmidt and Cohen wrote the book. The two met in Baghdad in 2009 and were both struck by how Iraqis were finding resourceful ways to use Internet services to improve their lives, despite war-zone conditions.

They decided it was time to delve into how the Internet and mobile devices are empowering people, roiling autocratic governments and forcing long-established companies to make dramatic changes.

The three years they spent researching the book took them around the world, including North Korea in January over the objections of the U.S. State Department. They interviewed an eclectic group that included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the former prime ministers of Mongolia and Pakistan. They also drew on the insights of a long list of Google employees, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The resulting book is an exploration into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead as the lines blur between the physical world around us and the virtual realm of the Internet. Schmidt and Cohen also examine the loss of personal privacy as prominent companies such as Google and lesser-known data warehouses such as Acxiom compile digital dossiers about our electronic interactions on computers, smartphones and at check-out stands.

"This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record," Schmidt and Cohen predict.

To minimize the chances of youthful indiscretions stamping children with "digital scarlet letters" that they carry for years, online privacy education will become just as important ? if not more so ? than sex education, according to Schmidt and Cohen. They argue parents should consider having a "privacy talk" with their kids well before they become curious about sex.

Not surprisingly, the book doesn't dwell on Google's own practices, including privacy lapses that have gotten the company in trouble with regulators around the world.

Among other things, Google has exposed the contact lists of its email users while trying to build a now-defunct social network called Buzz. It scooped up people's passwords and other sensitive information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Last year, Google was caught circumventing privacy controls on Safari Web browsers, resulting in a record $22.5 million fine by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. European regulators have a broad investigation open.

Google apologized for those incidents without acknowledging wrongdoing. Schmidt and Cohen suggest that is an inevitable part of digital life.

"The possibility that one's personal content will be published and become known one day ? either by mistake or through criminal interference ? will always exist," they write.

The book doesn't offer any concrete solutions for protecting personal privacy, though the authors suspect that calls for tougher penalties and more stringent regulations will increase as more people realize how much of their lives are now in a state of "near-permanent storage."

"The option to 'delete' data is largely an illusion," Schmidt and Cohen write.

People can choose not to put any of their information online, but those that eschew the Internet risk become irrelevant as online identities become increasingly important, the book asserts. Schmidt and Cohen foresee an option that will allow all of a person's online accounts ? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix and various other subscriptions ? to be merged together into a "constellation" that will serve as a one-stop profile.

If this book is right, there is no turning back from the revolution that is making Internet access as vital as oxygen and mobile devices as important as our lungs.

As much disruption as there already has been since Google's inception in 1998, Schmidt and Cohen contend that the most jarring changes are still to come as reductions in the cost of technology bring online another 5 billion people, mostly in less developed countries. At the same time, the combination of more powerful microprocessors, much-faster Internet connections and entrepreneurial ingenuity will turn the stuff of science fiction into reality.

Schmidt and Cohen are convinced that holograms will enable people to make virtual getaways to exotic beaches whenever they feel need. Nasal implants will alert us to the first signs of a cold. Virtual assistants ? the kind Google is developing with Google Now and Apple with Siri ? will become constant companions that influence when we shop and what we buy. Those assistants will generally steer us in directions drawn from an analyses of our personal preferences vacuumed off the Internet and stored in vast databases.

These aren't far-out concepts to the tech cognoscenti, or even younger generations who can barely remember what it was like to surf the Web on a dial-up modem, let alone use a typewriter.

The ideas will be more unnerving to older generations still trying to figure out all the things that their smartphone can do.

Schmidt, who will turn 58 on Saturday, can remember the days before there were personal computers. But he has been studying tech trends for decades, long before he became Google's CEO in 2001 and became a mentor and confidant to company co-founders Page and Brin. That collaboration established him as one of the world's best-known executives and minted him as a multibillionaire. Before joining Google, he was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and CEO of software maker Novell Inc.

Many of the book's themes expand upon topics that Schmidt regularly mused about in speeches and interviews that he gave as Google's CEO. Some of his past remarks, particularly about the loss of privacy, rankled critics who believe Google had become too aggressive in trying to learn more about people's individual interests so it could sell more ads, its chief source of revenue.

Schmidt also won plenty of admirers in powerful places, including President Barack Obama, who called upon Schmidt's advice during his 2008 campaign. Political pundits once considered Schmidt to be a leading candidate to join Obama's cabinet, though Schmidt has said he never had any interest in a government job.

Schmidt relinquished the CEO job to Page two years ago, freeing him to devote more time traveling to meet government leaders around the world.

Cohen, 31, is regarded as a rising star in tech circles, though he isn't as well-known as his co-author. Time magazine just named Cohen as one of the world's 100 most influential people in its annual list. Cohen worked on State Department policy planning and counter-terrorism in both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Schmidt and Cohen emerged from their research convinced that most governments don't fully understand the implications of ubiquitous Internet access and mobile computing. They expect repressive regimes to do everything in their power control the flow of information and to abuse databases to spy on citizens. They also foresee smaller countries waging computer-based attacks on countries they would never target with troops and weapons.

Even as they address the dark sides of technology, Schmidt and Cohen hypothesize that the world ultimately will be better off as more people spend more time connected to each other on the Internet. Societies will be more democratic, governments will become less corrupt as their transgressions are exposed and people will become smarter and better informed.

"Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips," Schmidt and Cohen assert.

___

"The New Digital Age" is being published by Alfred A. Knopf with a suggested retail price of $26.95.

___

Online:

http://newdigitalage.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-04-21-Google-Tech%20Visions/id-8ecb7ccc46944df6af6ea0f91900909f

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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries the most powerful yet

Apr. 16, 2013 ? Though they be but little, they are fierce. The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery -- and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye.?

Developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

Led by William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering, the researchers published their results in the April 16 issue of Nature Communications.

"This is a whole new way to think about batteries," King said. "A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it."

With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly.

"There's a sacrifice," said James Pikul, a graduate student and first author of the paper. "If you want high energy you can't get high power; if you want high power it's very difficult to get high energy. But for very interesting applications, especially modern applications, you really need both. That's what our batteries are starting to do. We're really pushing into an area in the energy storage design space that is not currently available with technologies today."

The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale.

The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun's group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance.

With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies -- imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery -- until now," King said. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny."

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

"Now we can think outside of the box," Pikul said. "It's a new enabling technology. It's not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It's allowing us to do different, new things."

The National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported this work. King also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory; the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory; and the department of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. James H. Pikul, Hui Gang Zhang, Jiung Cho, Paul V. Braun, William P. King. High-power lithium ion microbatteries from interdigitated three-dimensional bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes. Nature Communications, 2013; 4: 1732 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2747

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/technology/~3/vR8b031rWT0/130416151929.htm

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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Dead At 87

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Dead At 87

Margaret Thatcher diedMargaret Thatcher, who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”, passed away on Monday at age 87 after suffering a stroke. A spokesman for the family confirmed the news of her death from Thatcher’s children, saying in a statement, “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother ...

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Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/04/former-british-prime-minister-margaret-thatcher-dead-at-87/

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US Court Rules That Checking Maps on Your Phone While Driving Is a Bad Thing

So, we all know that we shouldn't text while driving. But in case you thought that checking Google Maps was acceptable, a Californian judge has made it clear that isn't the case. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/yuG6nYyJ72o/us-court-rules-that-checking-maps-on-your-phone-while-driving-is-a-bad-thing

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