3 Mart 2011 Perşembe

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Google-Backed WeatherBill Protects Farmers From Extreme Weather

Google-Backed WeatherBill Protects Farmers From Extreme Weather

BY Ariel SchwartzWed Mar 2, 2011

WeatherBill
Anyone who relies on consistent weather patterns for work is going to be hit hard by climate change-induced wacky weather. WeatherBill, a startup founded in 2006 by two ex-Google employees, aims to help one vulnerable population--farmers--cope with these changes. And now the startup has $42 million from Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others to do it.
WeatherBill, which collected the cash in a Series B funding round, has a simple goal: to protect the $3 trillion global agriculture industry from bad weather through insurance products that pay out based on measured weather conditions, no claims processing required.
"WeatherBill is applying the use of our technology platform to become the first company to provide every farmer--from the developing world to the technologically sophisticated--with a simple and effective solution for removing weather-related risk from their financial profile, in order to support and ensure the sustainability of the global food supply," said David Friedberg, CEO and co-founder of WeatherBill, in a statement.
WeatherBill's insurance system (already available on the startup's site) works with help from local weather modeling and monitoring systems that hunt down adverse weather conditions on farmer's lands--and then pays out cash. Factors that influence the cost of insurance packages include historical observations, short-range forecasts, climate outlook models, and long-term trends. Then, if there is unexpected rain, drought, snow, heat, or cold, WeatherBill will pay out automatically.
If climate change continues to induce extreme weather patterns, WeatherBill's business will only continue to grow. And this company won't be the last of its kind--rest assured, well-funded startups that benefit from climate change will pop up in increasing numbers. Because there is a profit to be made from every crisis, right?

MIT Scientist Captures Son's First 90,000 Hours and First Words on Video, Graphs It

MIT Scientist Captures Son's First 90,000 Hours and First Words on Video, Graphs It

BY Anya KamenetzWed Mar 2, 2011


In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family's every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear.


A combination of new software and human transcription called Blitzscribe allowed them to parse 200 terabytes of data to capture the emergence and refinement of specific words in Roy’s son’s vocabulary. (Luckily, the boy was an early talker.) In one 40-second clip, you can hear how “gaga” turned into “water” over the course of six months. In a video clip, below, you can hear and watch the evolution of "ball."


Unreal 3-D visualizations allowed his team to zoom through the house like a dollhouse and map the utterance of each word in its context.
In a landscape-like image with peaks and valleys, you can see that the word “water” was uttered most often in the kitchen, while “bye” took place at the door.
The video was processed to show "time worms," below, charting the family's movement from room to room.



Most moving of all was the precise mapping of tight feedback loops between the child and his caregivers—father, mother, nanny. For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word--like “water”--was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.
“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.
Roy is now taking the amazing research capability and team he’s developed and applying it to commerce. He’s on leave from MIT and has founded a VC-backed company called Bluefin Labs that applies these same high-powered analytics to relate, not the speech of a child to that of a father, but events broadcast on TV to conversations taking place in social media, the better to chart “engagement” with the State of the Union Address or Jersey Shore or a car commercial.
"After 15+ years of academia, I want to take some of my ideas out of the lab and into the world," Roy told Fast Company. "I also feel that the changes in the world of mass and social media provide a perfect environment for these ideas to have real impact (not just commercial, but also social), a opportunity that I feel compelled to seize."
The methods he's developed are still being applied to babies; some of his senior graduate students at MIT  continue to analyze the data, and he's designed PlayLamp, a less intrusive recording device currently being used in pilot studies of children at-risk of autism.

China Threatens Death Penalty for Food Safety Violations

China Threatens Death Penalty for Food Safety Violations

BY Jenara NerenbergToday


China is beefing up its food safety laws in light of melamine-tainted milk and other scandals, and the country is now considering the death penalty for such offenders.
The move isn't strictly about protecting public health--it's also about forcing domestic food producers to become more competitive against foreign imports. Over half of China's dairy products are now brought in from abroad, putting a dent in the local dairy industry. That’s up 10% in only the last three years--a trend the Chinese government would rather not see spread to other agricultural areas like meat or produce. As the middle class and its purchasing power continue to grow, there's less stopping the locals from spending a bit more for foreign imports they may perceive as safer.
"We will not only strengthen the work of different regulatory departments, but also eliminate loopholes in the regulations to improve supervision," said Zhang Yong, head of China's State Council Food Safety Commission.
The threat of capital punishment might do the trick of snapping local players back onto the scene, but reestablishing trust with the buying public may also require a rebranding of Chinese dairy products.

A Facebook for Patients: IBM's Medical Social Network Gets an Upgrade

A Facebook for Patients: IBM's Medical Social Network Gets an Upgrade

BY Jenara NerenbergToday
An expanded portal lets patients connect better with the right information--and with one another.
IBM Patient Empowerment System
IBM has a long-standing commitment to health care and global health. This week the company revamped its "patient portal." Dubbed the IBM Patient Empowerment System, it now acts like a social network for participating patients.
Especially intriguing here is the interactive nature of the Patient Empowerment System--if a person has an urgent question about the interaction of two drugs, the system will cross check his or her medical records and background and warn yes or no to taking a particular medicine. It also allows patients to log in, update their profiles with prescription information, symptom complaints, blood pressure readings, and to find other patients struggling with similar illnesses or diseases. A patient can send a message to other patients and ask questions about certain medications or offer advice from personal experience.
"Most patients do not have the same access to information available to physicians, such as treatment updates or new warnings from the FDA," said Joseph Jasinski, IBM Research. "And physicians are not always privy to ongoing patient updates, such as eating habits or long-term monitoring of vital signs. These partial pictures limit the level of care that physicians can provide, as well as the care patients can provide for themselves. The IBM Patient Empowerment System merges these realms, bringing important data to both parties."
IBM Patient Empowerment System
Other medical-focused social networks already exist; PatientsLikeMe is an independent online social network that connects patients based on disease affliction and the focus is on sharing the experience of what it's like to go through the particular illness--like a social support network.
The IBM system is different for its focus on institutional affiliations--hospitals sign up and integrate the portal into their office procedures.
"Today, patients want to be more involved in managing their clinical data, and are eager to discover relevant and useful medical information for their benefit," noted Dr. DongKyun Park from Gacheon University Gil Hospital in Korea, the pilot center of the new Patient Empowerment System.
If cities can do it, why not hospitals?
Follow Fast Company on Twitter.

Deep Inside the Frustrating World of Second-Tier Tablets: Flaws, Fights, Fails

Deep Inside the Frustrating World of Second-Tier Tablets: Flaws, Fights, Fails

BY Kit EatonWed Mar 2, 2011

iPad shadow
As Apple reveals its next-gen iPad 2 (with the first edition still acting as the Moses of Tabletland) the high-profile makers of competing devices are squabbling, mis-stepping, or generally not delivering.
HP Says RIM is cloning its efforts
After its acquisition of ailing smartphone-maker Palm, the expectations were high that HP--with its long history of delivering quality computing products--could manipulate Palm's expertise into some sort of wondrous tablet. It's since revealed plans for the TouchPad which, though it's yet to arrive, has indeed stirred a deal of excitement. It does have its flaws--it's essentially a clone of Apple's iPad 1, up-specced to slightly beat Apple's initial tablet offering, with just one camera and what's rumored to be poorer battery life.
Now HP's in the news again, this time accusing RIM of outright copying in its own PlayBook tablet PC--which is also yet to arrive on sale. HP's Jon Oakes noted "uncanny similarities" between RIM's QNX-inspired UI for its tablet and HP's own updated webOS UI, before noting HP will energize itself and move on in a "fast innovation cycle" leaving RIM following "by about a year." Stern words, and all the more surprising for their public nature. RIM's rebuttal seems limited to mentioning parallel evolution and convergence of design--"cars over time end up looking a lot alike" because you optimize their shape for current tech and wind resistance.
RIM picks terrible date to launch the PlayBook
A leaked bit of info to website BGR.com suggests RIM will be taking its updated tablet OS to gold master status on March 31st, and that the Playbook will actually hit retailers shelves on April 10th. Quite apart from the fact that the first thing buyers may have to do is update their OS the moment they turn the Playbook on (to accommodate tweaks RIM makes in the interim 10 days) the timing is shocking. The iPad 2 was revealed yesterday, and will hit stores imminently--March 11th in the US and in 26 nations on March 25th. We can expect millions to sell almost instantly, and the device will vacuum-up all the limelight that RIM was going to shine on its tablet.
Motorola prices the Xoom into the stratosphere, LG follows
The Wall Street Journal was moved to comment on several articles about the suspected build cost of the Motorola Xoom tablet, which rocks in at over $30 more expensive than a similarly-specced Apple iPad 1. That 30 bucks is a trivial figure, you may think, but multiplied out over millions of units of sales it represents significant profit margin erosion. Motorola seems to be recovering the loss by pricing the Xoom pretty high--it's $600 on contract, $800 off in the U.S., leaked info puts the UK's 3G version at £600 ($980, though this does include tax) and suggestions from Germany hint at a €700 bracket ($970). Remember the iPad goes from $499 without 3G to $829 with 64GB of RAM and 3G.
Some of the "extra" cost in the Xoom comes from the inclusion of cameras ($14) and a screen that may cost $5 more than Apple's unit does. But this didn't deter Apple from including similar facilities in its iPad 2, and pricing the units at the same levels as the iPad 1's. Apple is probably taking a small hit on profits here, hoping to recover them with margins on accessories like the sleek new magnetic iPad 2 case.
But if that's the case, couldn't Motorola have pulled off a similar trick with the Xoom in order to establish some solid sales and stamp a good footprint into the tablet market? After all, the Xoom itself has earned a lot of buzz and compliments from the tech media, and technologically speaking, it looks to be one of the strongest challengers to the iPad. Meanwhile LG's much-vaunted Optimus Pad, an 8.9-inch Android Honeycomb unit with dual rear cams for 3G seems due to arrive in Europe for prices well over an equivalent of $1,000--LG is suffering the same issues as Motorola.
Samsung Galaxy Tab not meeting sales expectations
Samsung's Galaxy Tab, a 7-inch Android tablet was the first serious challenger to the iPad, arriving much later in 2010, but at first gathering some (seemingly) impressive sales.
Earlier this year Samsung was hit with claims the Galaxy Tab had a 16% return rate (up from pre-holiday figures of 13% in 2010), compared to a 2% return rate for the iPad--as quoted by Verizon, selling the Wi-Fi only version at the time. Samsung has since announced these figures aren't correct, quoting its return rate is also around 2%. But the firm also backtracked on earlier claims it had sold around 2 million units and admitted its sales to consumers had been "quite small," which suggested the Tab hadn't captured consumer imagination as much as the hype suggested it had.
Meanwhile Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 was revealed a few weeks back, and it's a 10.1-inch screen Android Honeycomb-sporting unit with front-facing webcam and rear-facing 8-megapixel imaging unit. Samsung's kept mum on the price thus far, but with such high specs and large screen, the worry is that Samsung's actually overstepped the iPad, building something too large (especially now the iPad 2 is so much sleeker), and may have to price the Tab 2 10-inch in a very high bracket.
The upshot?
Apple may sail serenely through this mess for many months more, as its competitors seem to struggle to compete with the iPad's design, customer appeal, and pricing. We thought the most revolutionary thing about iPad 1 was its low price, and it seems we were pretty much dead on.... it's just that almost everything else about the iPad seems to have been revolutionary too.

Union bill whizzing through Ohio Legislature

COLUMBUS, Ohio – While much of the nation's attention remains focused on a stalled proposal in Wisconsin to restrict collective bargaining rights for public workers, an Ohio measure that in some ways is tougher and broader is speeding toward reality.
A Senate panel and then the full chamber approved the Ohio measure Wednesday amid jeers from onlookers. The bill would restrict the collective bargaining rights of roughly 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees, while Wisconsin's would affect about 175,000 workers and exempt police and firefighters.
[Related: Largest labor unions in the U.S.]
"For as far-reaching this thing is and how many lives it will affect, I can't believe how fast it moved," said Columbus Police Sgt. Shaun Laird, who wanted lawmakers to spend more time debating the changes.
Wisconsin's bill remains in limbo after Democrats hightailed it for the Illinois border on the day the Senate was to adopt the bill. Their absence left the chamber one member short of the quorum needed for a vote.
[Related: What is a labor union?]
In contrast, the Ohio bill could go as early as next week to House committee hearings. Republicans hold a 59-40 majority in the House, where the measure is likely to receive strong support.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican like his Wisconsin counterpart, Scott Walker, praised the development. Both have pushed the collective bargaining bills as part of budget-balancing measures.
"This is a major step forward in correcting the imbalance between taxpayers and the government unions that work for them," Kasich said.
The differences and similarities between the two proposals are many and nuanced, especially because lawmakers continue to debate and insert or subtract individual proposals. But to critics, at least one thing is clear: Both bills are meant to weaken the role of the unions.
"From the perspective of unions, both bills are punitive and would severely restrict what they have traditionally bargained over and what they have done as organizations," said Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkley who specializes in labor issues.
[Related: What is a right-to-work law?]
The Ohio bill would ban strikes by public workers and establish penalties for those who do participate in walkouts. State workers in Wisconsin are already prohibited from striking.
Unionized workers in Ohio could negotiate wages, hours and certain work conditions — but not health care, sick time or pension benefits. The measure would do away with automatic pay raises, and base future wage increases on merit.
Wisconsin's measure would forbid most government workers from collectively bargaining except over wage increases that aren't beyond the rate of inflation. Police and firefighters would be exempt.
Both states' capitols have been mobbed by protesters, Ohio's not as intensively as the two-week-long siege in Wisconsin. Protesters in Ohio were fewer Wednesday during the marquee vote in the Senate than they were the day before, when 8,500 demonstrators gathered inside and out.
"Shame!" firefighters and teachers shouted in the Senate chamber as the measure squeaked through on a 17-16 vote.
Standing in the rotunda afterward, Columbus firefighter Terry Marsh said he understood the Legislature's need to look for ways to save on costs and examine collective bargaining.
"But to ram something through within a few weeks is irresponsible, and to blame the budget woes of the state on the workers is a downright travesty," he said.
Ohio's legislation would also set up a new process to settle worker disputes, giving elected officials the final say in contract disagreements. Binding arbitration, which police officers and firefighters use to resolve contract disputes as an alternative to strikes, would be eliminated.
Republican Sens. Tim Grendell of Chesterland and Bill Seitz of Cincinnati spoke out against the new proposed way to resolve disputes. Grendell said the process would turn workers into beggars before city councils and other officials who oversee them.
"No one can be a judge and advocate in their own cause," Seitz said. "That's called 'heads I win, tails you lose.'"
Seitz had expressed disappointment in the bill and was removed from the panel by its leaders, a move that secured the votes needed to get the legislation before the full Senate.
Anthony Caldwell, spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, District 1199, said the union's focus will now turn to the House. Members there serve shorter terms and may be more vulnerable to repercussions at the ballot box than senators, he said.
"We hope that the members of the House will understand the valuable role working families play in their districts," he said. "The House is a two-year body. Whatever happens, people are going to remember that. This isn't just about union issues, this is about working people."