Tomorrow's Online News 12-04-2013 | ScienceT

In a Monday blogpost, Google outlined key features and pricing for "Compute Engine," part of a broader service that vies with Amazon's AWS in providing storage and computing power to corporate clients as in-house datacenters are gradually phased out.

It will lower prices 10 percent on most standard services, and 60 percent on high-end data storage. Google said the service was now "generally available," signaling that it meets internal standards and is ready for a wider rollout.

The prototype contains removable sensors that monitor heart and skin activity to provide an indication of mood levels.

The aim was to find out if wearable technology could help prevent stress-related over-eating.

Mood data was provided to the wearer via a smartphone app in order to highlight when "emotional eating" was likely to occur.

A team from Microsoft's visualisation and interaction research group embedded an electrocardiogram and electro-dermal activities sensors as well as a gyroscope and accelerometer in the bra.

In their paper, the researchers say using a bra "was ideal because it allowed us to collect EKG [electrocardiogram] near the heart".

Efforts to create a similar piece of underwear for men worked less well, largely because the sensors were located too far away from the heart.

The women testing the technology reported their emotions for about six hours a day over a period of four days.

"It was very tedious for participants to wear our prototyped sensing system, as the boards had to be recharged every three to four hours," Microsoft senior research designer Asta Roseway said.

Electric shock Wearable technology is increasingly being used to monitor a range of health conditions.

Last month saw the release of a Twitter-connected bra, that tweeted every time it was unhooked to encourage women to self-examine their breasts.

And last year a patent was awarded to a US firm that was working on a wearable device that analysed breast heat in order to detect cancer.

The number included the 700,000 units sold through in Europe and Australasia launching on November 29, Sony said in a statement.

Owner Gholam Dolatmardian struggled to raise the funds to keep going but finally succumbed to the inevitable, laying off his 100-strong workforce and closing the doors of the once prosperous factory.

The prospects for a revival of his business and those of thousands of others may depend on an interim nuclear accord reached between Iran and world powers last week. The deal has allowed those Iranians seeking greater foreign contact and the economic opportunities it brings to see a glimmer of hope for the first time in years.

But Iranians' enthusiasm about the accord has been tempered by its complexity and expected gradual implementation, which puts off relief from restrictions on banking, trade and international travel that ordinary Iranians seek most.

After a decade-long standoff, Iran has agreed to curb elements of its nuclear activities in exchange for limited relief from economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies, opening the way for a possible broader agreement that could end Iran's long isolation.

"I don't know whether the sanctions will be lifted soon, but of course it is my dream to reopen my factory," Dolatmardian said by phone. "It was a family business and I want my children to continue it."

He inherited the factory from his father, like his father before him. But he closed it in 2011, when sanctions prevented him from obtaining letters of credit or wiring money to European suppliers. He sold off properties to pay his employees before eventually shuttering the 35-year-old factory.

Last week's diplomatic breakthrough led him to wonder about restarting the business, but for now he faces the same obstacles of accessing the global banking system.

U.S. anti-money laundering legislation is still in place, making it difficult for banks that have any U.S. business to maintain ties with Iran. As a result, Iranian firms will continue to find it difficult to obtain letters of credit or conduct international bank transfers.

So while Iranian businessmen may sense a lucrative investment opportunity around the corner, many are still taking a wait-and-see approach.

Ahmad Hakimzadeh, who runs an import-export company in the northwestern city of Tabriz, said he has already received calls from Western companies about resuming business relations which they had broken off under pressure from sanctions.

With protesters blockading central Kiev, President Viktor Yanukovich flew to China on a three-day state visit seeking loans and investment.

He left a country in turmoil, torn once more between East and West in what his opponents hope will become a re-run of the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' that overthrew Ukraine's post-Soviet order.

Lawmakers rejected an opposition demand for a vote of no-confidence in the government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, while outside the chamber riot police faced off in freezing conditions against several thousand pro-EU protesters.

The vast majority of pro-government deputies, however, either cast votes abstaining or did not vote at all, a warning to Azarov of discontent in his ranks. At least two members of Yanukovich's Regions Party have defected.

The government's November 21 decision to reject a deal on closer trade ties and integration with the EU has laid bare once more a split in world view between Ukraine's Russian-speaking East and Ukrainian-speaking West.

Protesters see the rejection of the EU trade deal as a fundamental shift in the future outlook of their country, away from the European mainstream and back into the orbit of their former Soviet masters in Moscow.

Some 350,000 people took to the streets and squares of Kiev on Sunday in the biggest show of popular anger since the Orange Revolution, when huge demonstrations forced the annulment of a fraudulent presidential election won by Yanukovich.

Striking a conciliatory tone, Azarov apologized for the use of police force against protesters over the weekend and pleaded with opposition leaders not to repeat the revolution.

"We reach out our hand to you; push away the intriguers, the intriguers seeking power and who are trying to repeat the scenario of 2004," Azarov told parliament.

He spoke in Russian, straining to be heard over opposition chants demanding he address them in Ukrainian.

"In the name of the government," Azarov said, "I want to apologize for the actions of law enforcement agencies on (Independence) square."

The problem for three hours on Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, raised questions about the resilience of RBS's technology, which analysts and banking industry sources regard as outdated and made up of a complex patchwork of systems after dozens of acquisitions.

"For decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems," Ross McEwan, who became chief executive in October, said.

"Last night's systems failure was unacceptable ... I'm sorry for the inconvenience we caused our customers," he said, adding he would outline plans in the New Year to improve the bank and increase investment.

The latest crash could cost RBS millions of pounds in compensation and follows a more serious crash in its payments system last year that Britain's regulator is still investigating.

The regulator has been scrutinizing the resilience of all banks' technology to address concerns that outdated systems and a lack of investment could cause more crashes.

The technology glitch is another setback for the bank's efforts to recover from the financial crisis when it had to be rescued in a taxpayer-funded bailout. The government still owns 82 percent of RBS.

RBS's cash machines did not work from 1830-2130 GMT on Monday and customers trying to pay for goods with debit cards at supermarkets and petrol stations, buy goods online or use online or mobile banking were also unable to complete transactions.

The bank said the problem had been fixed and it would compensate anyone who had been left out of pocket as a result.

About 250,000 people an hour would typically use RBS's cash machines on a Monday night, and tens of thousands more customers would have used the other affected parts at its RBS, NatWest and Ulster operations. RBS has 24 million customers in the UK.

Twitter lit up with customer complaints.

"RBS a joke of a bank. Card declined last night and almost 1,000 pounds vanished from balance this morning! What is going on?" tweeted David MacLeod from Edinburgh, echoing widely-felt frustration with the bank.

They had orders to never make the dangerous journey across the narrow strait of water onto the mainland. And so, Hedges said, they never did.

Why Newman felt compelled to set foot in North Korea more than 60 years after the end of the Korean War remains a baffling question to Hedges and several other surviving members of the U.S. Army 8240th Unit.

Newman, now an 85-year-old retired business executive living in California, was detained in late October while visiting North Korea on a tourist trip. The former first lieutenant has been held ever since. The North's KCNA news agency said he was a mastermind of clandestine operations and accused him of killing civilians during the war.

"I can't believe it," Hedges said in a telephone interview from his home in Vanceburg, Kentucky. Hedges was not aware his former comrade had been detained until contacted by Reuters.

"If I know Newman, he went up there to do something good, because I know he's a good man. His philosophy was we did good up there, we shortened the war and saved lives," Hedges said on Monday.

The White House and the U.S. State Department have both called for Newman's release, although Washington and Pyongyang have no diplomatic relations. North Korea allowed Swedish diplomats to visit him on Saturday.

Hedges said he was 19 or so when he and Newman arrived in early 1953 on Cho-Do, a few miles out into the Yellow Sea off the North Korean coast. Their mission was to train and coordinate a battalion of Korean anti-communist guerrillas called the 6th Partisan Infantry Regiment, Hedges said. This was one of the main functions of the 8240th Unit, according to published histories and accounts of other former members.

Hedges, now 80 years old, said he and Newman would dispatch teams of the guerrillas by boat to try and disrupt a North Korean coastal supply line.

A U.S. Army spokeswoman said she was unable to confirm the details of personnel and missions that pre-date 1999. The State Department said their records only date back to 1970.

Official documents at the National Archives in Washington D.C., along with various historians' accounts, confirm the basics of the 8240th Unit's deployment and its missions. They do not give specific details about the roles of Newman and Hedges.

Obama planned to tout the reboot of HealthCare.gov in a speech on Tuesday as he sought to counter criticism of his reforms after the website's disastrous October 1 launch sent his job approval ratings plummeting and threatened to damage fellow Democrats in next year's congressional elections.

The website, which allows consumers to shop around for insurance policies, is a main component of Obama's reform, which aims to provide health benefits to millions of uninsured Americans.

Technical issues persist, despite some newfound optimism in the administration about the rollout of the law known as Obamacare.

Insurers are receiving enrollment forms that have errors or are duplicated. And some go missing altogether, said Daniel Durham, a vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America's Health Insurance Plans, a lobby group for health insurers.

Durham's comments raised fresh questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to sign up hundreds of thousands of Americans before a December 23 deadline for coverage starting January 1, 2014.

"So far we've been able to deal with these issues because there's been relatively low volume. It's been a heavy-duty manual process to make these fixes," Durham said at a forum organized by Georgetown University and law firm Arent Fox.

"But now that the floodgates are open at the front end ... we're going to see a lot more volume. And health plans just don't have the personnel to do all this manually," he said.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said more than 1 million new visitors checked out the website on Monday, the first day after a major overhaul of the site used to shop for health insurance required under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The administration, however, has not provided data on how many people logging into the website completed application forms and enrolled in insurance plans in November. The government is expected to provide the data later this month.

Republicans in Congress and conservative groups have attacked the law relentlessly since it was passed as an example of government overreach, criticism that has snowballed since the problems with HealthCare.gov.

The drones, called Octocopters, could deliver packages weighing up to 2.3kg to customers within 30 minutes of them placing the order, he said.

However, he added that it could take up to five years for the service to start.

The US Federal Aviation Administration is yet to approve the use of unmanned drones for civilian purposes.

"I know this looks like science fiction, but it's not," Mr Bezos told CBS television's 60 Minutes programme.

"We can do half-hour delivery... and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds (2.3kg), which covers 86% of the items that we deliver."

'Ready to enter' The service will be called Prime Air and comes as Amazon is looking to improve its efficiency to boost growth.

Amazon also posted a video on its website showing a drone picking up a package from one of its warehouses and delivering it to the doorstep of a customer's house.

However, it still has to wait for permission from US regulators.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved the use of drones for police and government agencies, issuing about 1,400 permits over the past several years.

Civilian air space is expected to be opened up to all kinds of drones in the US by 2015 and in Europe by 2016.

Existing regulations are in place to minimise the risk of injury to people on the ground, said Dr Darren Ansell, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from the University of Central Lancashire.

"The UAVs do not currently have the awareness of their environment to be able to avoid flying into people. To deliver goods to people's homes for example in residential areas, the UAVs must overfly densely populated towns and cities, something that today's regulations prevent.

"Other things to consider are security of the goods during the transit. With no one to guard them the aircraft and package could be captured and stolen," he said.

Amazon said: "from a technology point of view, we'll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place."

The FAA was "actively working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles", the company said, adding that it hoped the green light would be given as early as 2015.

"One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today."

The US company says the "limited edition" Toq is designed to showcase its new technologies rather than compete with its other products.

Qualcomm is best known for making processors that power smartphones.

However, one analyst suggested the device was too bulky to appeal beyond a niche enthusiast audience.

The $349 (£215) gadget is being made available via only Qualcomm's website to US customers, and the company said it was "unlikely" it would sell the watch elsewhere.

Wrist action

The Toq is designed to be paired with any smartphone running Android 4.0.3 or higher. It allows its owner to receive and send text messages, manage reminders and view other information - such as weather forecasts or stock prices - obtained via their handset.

There is no software store for the watch itself, but existing handset apps can be adapted to send details to its display and activate a vibrate function. In addition it can be used to accept or reject calls, and control what music is being played from the linked phone's library.

The company says that the watch's key innovation is its use of its proprietary Mirasol technology.

Rob Chandok, president of Qualcomm Interactive Platforms, described this as being similar to the e-ink displays commonly used by e-book readers and another smartwatch - the Pebble - but better.

Backlight

"In addition to the fact it offers colour, the refresh rate of Mirasol can be 30 frames a second, which allows you to build a touch interface," he told the BBC.

"That's tremendously important when you are trying to offer some of these experiences. "In an e-ink display you can't refresh the screen fast enough to follow the finger."

Mirasol is significantly less power-hungry than the OLED tech used by Samsung's Galaxy Gear watch, meaning that unlike its rival, its screen does not have to turn itself off when angled away from the user's face to extend battery life.

Sony's Smartwatch 2 does offer an always-on LCD display - however, it requires the user to switch on a backlight in dim conditions.

It sounds perfect, but something is not quite right. The scene is unnaturally idyllic, the sky slightly too blue and the horizon more curved than normal. That’s because this world is only 16 miles long, four miles wide and contained in a giant cylinder floating in space.

It’s a space colony concept, drawn up by the late Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill in the mid-1970s, but his ambitious plan is now being revived by the space think tank British Interplanetary Society (Bis). The organisation has form in championing ideas that are not necessarily as wildly eccentric as they first appear. In the 1930s it came up with a detailed plan for a multi-stage rocket and a manned lunar lander, which looks remarkably like the mission that 30 years later successfully delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon.

“Back in the 1930s, the major work of the British Interplanetary Society was explaining to the public that exploring space was not a ridiculous idea,” says Jerry Stone, leader of the Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering (see what they did there?). “And what I’m trying to do with the space colonies project is something similar, to show that building a very large space colony is technically feasible.”

O’Neill’s original space colony proposal started out as an exercise for a group of students at Princeton. “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilisation?” he asked them. After a few months, and a great many calculations, the answer came back a resounding “No”. This got him interested in alternative human habitats beyond the Earth, and he conceived giant rotating spaceships containing landscaped biospheres housing up to 10 million people.

“There are two big advantages of constructing a colony in space rather than on a planet,” explains Stone. “You have the Sun’s energy 24 hours a day, so you can concentrate that energy to melt materials or use it to generate power, and you can rotate the habitat to create whatever gravity you want.”

To compete with each other and powerhouse Amazon.com Inc, many U.S. retailers began offering some of the season's best online deals, which were traditionally reserved for the Monday after Thanksgiving, several days ago.

That helped overall online sales from Thanksgiving through Sunday rise 14.5 percent in 2013 over the same period last year, data from IBM showed. But since shoppers have a limited budget, that could mean Cyber Monday might lose some luster.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Target Corp, Toys R Us, Macy's Inc, J.C. Penney Co Inc and Best Buy Co Inc were among the brick-and-mortar chains that started their online deals early.

"The earlier offering of deals online may weigh on Cyber Monday and, interestingly, some retailers are offering a worse deal on Cyber Monday than they had over the earlier period," said Nomura analyst Simeon Siegel.

A survey by America's Research Group on Monday showed 23.5 percent of shoppers plan to shop on Cyber Monday, down from 29.2 percent, a year earlier.

U.S. shoppers spent almost 3 percent less than they did a year earlier during the Thanksgiving weekend, according to the National Retail Federation data. But online sales rose 17.3 percent on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, outpacing sales growth at brick-and-mortar stores, data from comScore Inc showed.

Shares of some brick-and-mortar chains including Wal-Mart, Target, Macy's and Penney were down on Monday. Shares of Best Buy and Gap Inc, two of the top performers of the weekend according to analysts, were up. Ebay shares also rose 3.3 percent on Monday morning.

Sales at many chains are coming at a steep cost to margins along with higher store costs as the sales spread out over a greater time, analysts said.

"Wal-Mart won the weekend with its aggressive campaign; however, even with this strength, we are not sure it will translate to much in the way of sales and earnings for the full quarter," Janney Capital Markets analyst David Strasser said.

Home applicance and electronics store h.h. gregg did well, but was hit hard in the TV and mobile categories, while Best Buy did really well with mobile phone sales, Strasser said.

"Sears continued its share losing ways," he added.

Wells Fargo's Paul Lejuez said American Eagle Outfitters, Bath and Body Works, Macy's and Urban Outfitters's chain Anthropologie were standouts, while Abercrombie did not do well over the big shopping weekend.