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We’ve all got refrigerators to keep our leftovers not-rotten, but compared to National Institute of Standards and Technology’s latest creation, our hulking cooling boxes hardly compare. This tiny quantum prototype, no bigger than a few inches, packs as much power as a window air conditioner the size of the Lincoln Memorial. More » 
from Gizmodo
Almost every major storm is now accompanied by a climate change discussion. Everybody wants to ask whether human impacts on the climate system “caused†the storm. Unless framed carefully, it’s kind of a lousy question. We can’t say for sure that an individual storm wouldn’t have occurred if we hadn’t warmed the planet by roughly 1°C—climate is, by definition, statistical. So we use analogies like the climate loading the dice (or juicing its hits like a steroid-assisted major leaguer). What we do know is that every storm now takes place in a world that’s notably warmer than it was a century ago.
Perhaps no type of storm draws as much attention in the US as hurricanes, but the science of these storms has been dissatisfyingly uncertain. Some studies have projected more hurricanes in the future, but others have projected fewer. The best information available today points to decreasing frequency but increasing strength, but it comes with significant uncertainties.
One challenge is that global climate models used to make projections for the future have a hard time effectively simulating the fine-scale processes within hurricanes, which has contributed to the present uncertainty. Modern hurricane observations are also much better than they were in the past, so it’s difficult to identify historical trends in any of these details.
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from Ars Technica
THX Ltd., the audio technology company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, has filed a lawsuit saying that Apple’s iPhones, iMacs, and iPads all infringe a patent it owns that covers “narrow-profile speakers.”
The three-page lawsuit [PDF], filed in San Jose federal court, is slim on details. It simply says that most Apple products “incorporate narrow-profile speaker units that output sound through a duct or aperture having a narrow dimension.” The patent at issue was granted in 2008.
Like most tech companies, Apple gets sued for patent infringement quite regularly. Most of those suits come from “patent trolls” that just sue over patents, while others are a result of the corporate smartphone patent wars that Apple had a hand in starting a few years ago.
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from Ars Technica
Verizon wants to disrupt the television industry with a simple idea: smaller networks and media outlets shouldn’t be paid as much as big networks that offer channels on cable and satellite providers.
Verizon pays a per-subscriber fee for the right to air various channels via FiOS TV (it’s the sixth-largest provider in the US). But that fee is a flat amount based on how many potential viewers those channels could have, not the actual number of viewers.
“We are paying for a customer who never goes to the channel,” Terry Denson, the phone company’s chief programming negotiator, told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
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from Ars Technica
Google’s big announcement that Reader’s days are numbered prompted a mass exodus from the Internet’s most popular RSS reader. People scrambled to back up their precious subscription lists and jumped ship to one or another of a handful of Google Reader alternatives. Sadly, the vast majority of alternatives failed to cope with the strain – thus far Netvibes has barely skipped a beat.
I have used a bunch of different readers in the past, but around a year ago I got onto Netvibes and was rather impressed. While its widget view is a bit of a miss if you have a large number of feeds, the reader view is pure hit. It is basically a cleaner version of Google’s Reader, with a few key differences.
When I made the jump to Netvibes, I did so primarily because of its speed. I have used a few different news readers over the years and was interested to try The Old Reader and Newsblur, but both sites were really suffering due to the influx of traffic. At the time of writing, Newsblur is running at a snail’s pace and has suspended free account sign up and The Old Reader has taken over three hours to upload my feeds. Netvibes had my feeds loaded in mere seconds – in fact, I was able to do it twice in a matter of minutes. After messing up the first time, by inadvertently created a huge number of duplicated subscriptions, I deleted my account and started again. In contrast, taking into account the 8,500+ users in the line ahead of me to import their feeds, it will probably take me a week to get the same job done at The Old Reader. Infrastructure is hugely important.
While I love almost everything about Netvibes, there are a couple of sticking points that are a persistent reminder of the smoothly running ship that Google has scuttled. The lack of a mass edit feature means that it is nigh on impossible to make significant changes to a subscription list from the program. There don’t seem to be any workarounds for that either. You can import feed lists but you cannot kill off the list that is already there – which rules out modifying the list offline. The only practical method that I found was to create a whole new account – hardly an ideal situation, but better than manually deleting feed after feed. This brings me to the second issue that I have with Netvibes, unsubscribing is too complicated.
In spite of its foibles, Netvibes sits atop a pretty good pile. There is a lot to like about it, and as for the stuff that we don’t like – as more people start to jump on board, those things will probably start to change.
Score: Five out of five
from The UberReview
Research by eBay suggests paying to advertise on Google only works in limited circumstances and even then the effect isn’t massive. It also suggests that for established brands at least, slashing the ad spend causes little damage.
The company intentionally suspended its advertising for a trial period, save for in several regions used as a control. It then asked three in-house economists to analyze the results.
They found that ditching paid ads for brand names (either simply “eBay†or combinations such as “ebay shoesâ€) made no significant difference whatsoever. It believes that’s because in almost every situation somebody searching for those terms simply found a link to the relevant eBay page through Google’s “natural†(non-paid) search results, as indicated in the graph above.
It also noted that numerous other brand owners were paying to be atop the sponsored search results list, even though they were also number one in the main search results, effectively wasting their case.
Turning to non-branded keywords, eBay found that although removing the advertising may have dropped the number of visitors, it had only a “statistically insignificant effect†on sales. That’s because eBay has a customer base where the most frequent buyers make up “most†of the sales. Those customers who are attracted by advertising for non-branded keywords are much more likely to buy only one or two items a year.
Overall, eBay found the only real difference paid advertising on Google makes is attracting first time visitors or persuading infrequent users to check out the site, for example when there’s a special deal on. In other words, eBay believes Google advertising only really works as an informative rather than persuasive tool.
Clearly the results won’t hold true for all companies: the limitations eBay points to are mainly relevant to those with well-established brands with an existing core customer base. Still, this is a significant group: eBay cites a report showing that the 10 highest spending companies alone pay a combined $2.36 billion.
Google responded by noting its own research shows a clear link between ads and increased visits to a website, though didn’t specifically address the issue of whether these visits boost business. It did note that results vary widely and highlighted the way its ad services make it much easier for companies to experiment with different tactics than they can with more traditional advertising media.
eBay hasn’t yet announced what, if any, changes it will make to its Google advertising in the long run as a result of the study.
Last year we covered the case of Linda Eagle, whose former employer, Edcomm, kept control of her LinkedIn account after firing her. In his October ruling, Judge Ronald Buckwalter of the District Court in Eastern Pennsylvania rejected the theory that taking control of a former employee’s LinkedIn account violated the anti-hacking provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But in a Tuesday ruling, Judge Ronald Buckwalter found that seizing an employee’s LinkedIn account can constitute unauthorized use of the employee’s name and likeness under Pennsylvania law.
Edcomm’s takeover of Eagle’s LinkedIn account was an awkward affair. Eagle had shared her password with another Edcomm employee so that the employee could help her manage it. When she was terminated, the other employee was instructed to change the password, freezing her out of the account. Edcomm then replaced the name, picture, and most of the information in her account with information about Eagle’s replacement as Edcomm’s CEO.
But the account still had the URL “http://www.linkedin.com/in/lindaeagle,” and it was still linked to about 4000 of Eagle’s professional contacts. Eagle, a recognized figure in her field, charged that Edcomm was effectively using her name to drum up business without her consent. Someone who Googled Eagle’s name hoping to do business with her would be likely to find himself on the LinkedIn page of Eagle’s successor at Edcomm.
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from Ars Technica