Overnight Newspapers Online 12-17-2013 | Sci

Boston Dynamics, which contracts for the US military, is the eighth robotics company snapped up by Google this year.

Both the price and size of the project, which is led by former Android boss Andy Rubin, are being kept under wraps.

However, analysts say the purchases signal a rising interest in robotics use by consumer internet companies.

Online shopping portal Amazon, for example, recently announced plans to deploy a fleet of delivery drones. In a statement posted on the Google Plus service, Chief Executive Larry Page said:

"I am excited about Andy Rubin's next project. His last big bet, Android, started off as a crazy idea that ended up putting a supercomputer in hundreds of millions of pockets. It is still very early days for this, but I can't wait to see the progress."

Robot Machines Boston Dynamics, which does not sell robots commercially, was founded in 1992 by a former professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It consulted for Japanese electronics giant Sony on consumer applications such as Aibo, a robot dog.

But it mostly develops mobile and off-road robotics technology, funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.

Google has said it would honour the existing military contracts with Darpa. Boston Dynamics' videos of its walking robots have garnered millions of views online.

One of them, called BigDog, is remarkably agile for a machine and is able to move over rough terrain such as snow and ice.

The apps are proving popular because they claim to reward phone owners for every text message they relay.

But, say security firms, the apps can relay huge numbers of texts via a phone and lead to its number being blocked.

Mobile operators say the apps violate their terms and conditions and could lead to a service being suspended.

Daily rate The apps aim to profit via the unlimited texting that many people get with their mobile contract.

Routing text messages through a phone can be a cheap way to ensure an SMS reaches its destination, said Cahal McDaid from mobile security firm Adaptive Mobile.

"There's a huge market in sending text messages as cheaply as possible around the world," he said.

The fees for transporting text messages vary from country to country which has led to a "grey market" for routing messages via the cheapest route.

Routing the message via a phone already in the country that someone wants to reach could cut costs even more, he added.

However, said Mr McDaid, the sheer number of texts that some of the apps sent through a participating phone could cause problems.

Adaptive had seen thousands of messages passing through phones that had downloaded one of the apps.

In addition, he said, operators were likely to take a dim view of customers who use their phone as a text message relay.

"You cannot resell your message plan," he said. "Operators have terms and conditions for a reason."

A spokesperson for Bazuc, one of the message-relaying Android apps, said it told participants to ensure that the daily limit of messages they send is not set too high.

"We are fully aware that mobile operators are not going to be a big fan of this app," said the spokesperson. "We're simply trying to help people out there make some extra money."

The spokesperson claimed that some users of its app had five phones dedicated to using the app so they can cash in. Bazuc said it paid participants $0.001 cents for every message they relayed.

All the UK's large mobile operators contacted by the BBC said any customer using text-message-relaying apps would be breaching the terms of their contract. This could lead to their number being blocked or their service being suspended.

Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at mobile security firm Lookout, said getting caught using such apps could make the whole experience very expensive.

"If your operator decides to bill you their 'out of bundle' or overage rate for violating their terms you could be billed hundreds of pounds for those messages," he said.

The 2-1/2-hour meetings, which mainly focus on vehicle quality issues, were started by Mark Fields after he was appointed chief operating officer a year ago - a clear sign that a changing of the guard is under way at the No. 2 U.S. automaker.

Mulally, 68, is a top contender to lead Microsoft Corp, according to sources familiar with the software company. But regardless of whether he gets that job, he is unlikely to stay at Ford through 2014, two people close to the automaker said.

The view from inside Ford, and of people close to the company, is that the management team Mulally groomed is now ready for his exit. Fields, 52, is widely expected to take over as CEO.

"Collectively we have helped change the culture - it's not just relegated to one particular individual," Fields told reporters in September. "It's really about all of us looking to build on the things over the years that have made our culture so strong."

After more than seven years at Ford's helm, Mulally is closely identified with the company's ability to avoid the 2009 federal bailouts needed to save General Motors Co and Chrysler, now controlled by Fiat Spa.

The Kansas native's "One Ford" strategy connected Ford's once-disparate business units to achieve economies of scale and boost profit. He also overhauled Ford's once-toxic culture to create one based on collaboration and disclosure.

Yet the challenges ahead for Ford are still significant, analysts said. The company's premium brand, Lincoln, is struggling. Quality problems in North America have knocked the Ford brand to near the bottom of reliability surveys from Consumer Reports and J.D. Power & Associates. Ford also is still catching up to rivals in Asia.

The overriding question is how Ford will fare without the architect of its turnaround. A key concern is preventing Ford's old culture from resurfacing after Mulally is gone.

"When the alpha goes away, does the new alpha step up?" Guggenheim Securities analyst Matthew Stover asked. "We won't know until that happens."

Ford has repeatedly said Mulally plans to stay as CEO through the end of 2014. This timetable was announced late last year as were several executive changes, including Fields' promotion to COO and the appointment of Joe Hinrichs to head the Americas.

FORD 'LIFERS' POISED TO LEAD

The UbiSlate 7Ci, made by UK-based company Datawind, is the commercial version of the Aakash 2 tablet, which was originally launched in India.

There, the tablet is mainly used by students and was designed to provide cheap internet access to help improve education.

Analysts say UK customers buying this tablet and comparing it with others on the market may be disappointed.

The 7in (18cm) Android tablet has wi-fi connectivity, 512MB of RAM, a microUSB connection and 4GB of storage.

It has a three hour battery life and allows users to watch online tutorials and videos, browse the internet and play games.

When the Aakash was launched in India in 2011 it was dubbed the "world's cheapest touch-screen tablet" and was aimed at schools and colleges. The first version was not well received by critics, but an upgraded version, the Aakash 2, fared better.

Speaking at the Wired 2013 conference in October, Suneet Singh Tuli, who founded Datawind, said getting online was all about affordability.

"It's not just about creating low-cost devices, for us it's about delivering the internet," he said.

Cost offset

A partnership with the Indian government helped the Aakash 2 became one of the country's best-selling tablets.

"At the start of this year we became the largest supplier of tablet computers in India, ahead of both Apple and Samsung," said Mr Tuli.

Samsung has since taken the lead.

The company said it could afford to sell the product at such a low price as the cost of the hardware was offset with revenue from content and advertising.

"The reality is that with any consumer electronics device you get what you pay for," said Ben Wood, an analyst at research company CCS Insight.

"Any consumer buying this tablet with the expectation it will deliver a comparable experience to more expensive, yet affordable, Android tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Tesco's Hudl will be sorely disappointed."

The company, which was named as the UK's most innovative mobile company in a government competition in 2012, also has two other tablets with higher specifications advertised on its UK website.

In a report which included an assessment of payments of 25 million pounds made to 150 departing BBC staff from 2009 to 2012, parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said many of them "far exceeded" contractual entitlements, that some of the justifications put forward were "extraordinary", and that the BBC's governance model was "broken".

"There was a failure at the most senior levels of the BBC to challenge the actual payments and prevailing culture, in which cronyism was a factor that allowed for the liberal use of other people's money," the PAC said in a statement.

The scale of some of the severance payments, many of them made as austerity cuts swept Britain, angered politicians and members of the public, who fund the broadcaster through a compulsory license fee.

Thompson, who quit the British broadcaster last year to become chief executive of the New York Times, robustly defended the severance payments in September in front of the same committee, saying they had ultimately helped the BBC cut costs.

In a statement cited by the Guardian newspaper on Monday and released before the embargo on the PAC report was lifted, Thompson was quoted as saying:

"The members of the PAC are entitled to criticize the result, but the decision to make the settlement was made in an entirely proper and transparent way.

Despite some inflammatory language in the PAC report, there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone at the BBC in relation to these severance payments."

A handful of U.S. media commentators have questioned Thompson's handling of the episode, saying they want to know more about the cases. The New York Times said it has full confidence in him.

REPUTATION 'AT RISK'

Margaret Hodge, the PAC's chairwoman and a senior lawmaker, said the payments had put the BBC's reputation at risk and that the influential committee remained concerned about the veracity of some of the oral evidence it had heard.

"Some of the justifications for this put forward by the BBC were extraordinary," she said in a statement.

"We are asked to believe that the former Director General Mark Thompson had to pay his former deputy and long-time colleague Mark Byford a substantial extra sum to keep him 'fully focused' on his job instead of 'taking calls from headhunters'".

EU foreign ministers arriving for talks on the EU's relations with Ukraine and Russia said the door remained open for Ukraine to seal a far-reaching trade and political agreement with Brussels despite Kiev's last-minute decision in November to pull back from signing the deal.

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans sharply criticized EU enlargement chief Stefan Fuele, the official in charge of negotiations with Ukraine, who announced on Twitter on Sunday that talks with Ukraine were on hold because Kiev had failed to give a clear commitment to sign the trade deal.

"I think making policy on the basis of a Twitter notice by Mr Fuele is perhaps not the best way of approaching this issue," he told reporters. "There was no reason from a Dutch point of view to suspend talks."

"I believe the best signal we can give Ukraine is simply that the door is still open," he said.

Fuele's decision reflected growing frustration among EU officials at what they see as the inconsistent position taken by President Viktor Yanukovich, who sometimes appears to be veering towards Brussels and at others towards Moscow.

Yanukovich's decision to abandon the EU deal last month in favor of closer ties with Russia sparked weeks of mass protests in Kiev.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt accused Yanukovich of "double speak".

"Sometimes he says ... he wants to sign it in the near future. The other day he said he was going to fire those who negotiated the agreement," he said. "If there's a clear message from Kiev, we are ready to sign tomorrow."

STRAINED EU-RUSSIAN RELATIONS

Ukraine sent first deputy prime minister Serhiy Arbuzov to Brussels for talks last week on reviving the pact following reports that Ukraine had asked the EU for 20 billion euros ($27 billion) in aid to offset the cost of signing the deal.

The EU held out the prospect of increased EU aid and help with negotiating an International Monetary Fund loan if Ukraine gave a firm commitment to sign the EU accord, but Ukraine has not replied, Fuele said on Sunday.

A Kremlin aide made clear on Monday that Russia was ready to extend a credit to Ukraine to help Kiev cope with its economic problems and keep the country in Moscow's orbit.

Modern pills being launched in western markets could cure the liver-destroying infection in tens of millions of people from China to Congo, or even eradicate the disease entirely. But that will only happen if the cost falls dramatically.

Drugmakers like Gilead Sciences, whose product Sovaldi won U.S. approval this month with a $1,000 a day price tag, are under mounting pressure to strike deals to avoid a rerun of the disputes that stalled early access to HIV therapy.

"Affordability is an urgent and pressing issue," World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Margaret Chan told Reuters during a visit to London.

"These drugs are very expensive. How can we address this? I hope we can learn from the lesson of HIV and find solutions without confrontations."

In the 1990s, HIV/AIDS drugs costing more than $10,000 per patient a year were simply out of reach for millions of people in the developing world. Today, thanks to cheap generics from India, the cost for the poor has been slashed to around $100.

Like HIV, hepatitis C (HCV) can be spread through blood, often via contaminated needles. The WHO estimates that 150 million people worldwide are chronically infected, putting them at risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer.

But whereas the burden of HIV is largely in sub-Saharan Africa, most cases of HCV are in middle-income countries like China, India and Russia, where drug companies are more reluctant to accept rock-bottom prices.

ENSURING ACCESS

Chan said options for maximizing use of the drugs could include granting licenses to low-cost generic drug manufacturers in India and other countries, as has happened with HIV drugs and also Roche's flu pill Tamiflu.

Gregg Alton, Gilead's head of corporate and medical affairs, said his company was working on plans to help ensure access to Sovaldi in resource-limited countries and aimed to set out details early in 2014.

Other companies developing all-oral treatment regimens for HCV - such as Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck & Co - also recognize they need to tackle the issue.

"We are going to be responsible players to make sure that people get access," said Paul Stoffels, head of pharmaceuticals at J&J. "There is a lot of pressure on us to make this available."

Whereas in the West lowering clouds portend trouble, in traditional South African culture they are seen as a blessing, the bearers of rain and good fortune, especially at a funeral, where they signify an elder passing peacefully into the bosom of his ancestors.

This is not to say South Africa's future is cloudless.

As a medium-sized emerging economy, it is still being buffeted by the after-effects of the global financial crisis and growth is struggling to recover from a 2009 recession, the first since the end of apartheid in 1994.

It also continues to labor under the peculiar problems left by three centuries of white domination - crime, high unemployment, poor public education and yawning income inequality between whites and blacks.

But the distance traveled in the two decades since Mandela's inauguration as its first black leader and his death aged 95 on December 5 - in essence the end point of South Africa's first post-apartheid generation - is immense and irreversible.

The economy has more than trebled in size, 85 percent of homes have electricity from just over half at the end of apartheid, and the tax base has grown from just 1.7 million whites to 13.7 million from across the racial spectrum.

Furthermore, Mandela, who deliberately served only one term in office, left behind a host of strong institutions, from a free media to an independent judiciary, all underpinned by a progressive and respected constitution.

Like a carefree young man who suddenly loses a father, his death is likely to reinforce the sense that the nation of 53 million must grow up and look to itself for answers rather than turning instinctively to a now-absent figurehead with his reassuring smile, or blaming an apartheid bogeyman.

"We should no longer say it's apartheid's fault," former finance minister Trevor Manuel said in April, unusually frank comments from a big-hitter in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that caused a major stir at the time.

"We should get up every morning and recognize we have responsibility. There is no longer the Botha regime looking over our shoulder. We are responsible ourselves."

VILLAINS, HEROES ARE GONE

The search giant will tell the high court on Monday that it should throw out claims that it secretly tracked the browsing habits of millions of iPhone users.

In the first group claim brought against Google in the UK, the internet firm has insisted that the lawsuit must be brought in California, where it is based, instead of a British courtroom.

Hundreds of internet users are preparing to sue Google if the test case gets the green light.

Google is accused by the claimants of secretly monitoring their behaviour by circumventing security settings on the iPhone, iPad and desktop versions of the Safari web browser.

Judith Vidal-Hall, one of the claimants suing Google, said: "Google is very much here in the UK. It has a UK specific site. It has staff here. It sells adverts here. It makes money here. It is ludicrous for it to claim that, despite all of this very commercial activity, it won't answer to our courts.

"If consumers are based in the UK and English laws are abused, the perpetrator must be held to account here, not in a jurisdiction that might suit them better. Google's approach that British consumers should travel all the way to California to seek redress for its wrongdoings is arrogant, immoral and a disgrace."

Google will argue on Monday that the case does not meet the standard required to be heard at the high court in London. Lawyers for the search firm are expected to tell the judge that a similar privacy claim was recently struck out in the US and that no European regulators are currently investigating this issue.

But lawyers for the claimants will argue that Google should answer to the British legal system for allegedly breaching the privacy of internet users on UK soil.

"British users have a right to privacy protected by English and European laws," said Dan Tench, a solicitor from the law firm Olswang, which represents the claimants.

"Google may weave complex legal arguments about why the case should not be heard here, but they have a legal and moral duty to users on this side of the Atlantic not to abuse their wishes. Google must be held to account here, even though it would prefer to ignore England."

The robotic vehicle rolled down a ramp lowered by the lander and on to the volcanic plain known as Sinus Iridum.

Earlier on Saturday, the landing module containing the rover fired its thrusters to perform the first soft landing on the Moon since 1976.

The touchdown in the Moon's northern hemisphere marks the latest step in China's ambitious space programme.

The lander will operate there for a year, while the rover is expected to work for some three months.

The Chang'e-3 mission landed some 12 days after being launched atop a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket from Xichang in the country's south. The official Xinhua news service reported that the craft began its descent just after 1300 GMT (2100 Beijing time), touching down in Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 11 minutes later.

"I was lucky enough to see a prototype rover in Shanghai a few years ago - it's a wonderful technological achievement to have landed," Prof Andrew Coates, from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News.

Chang'e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1,900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210.

But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour.

Its name - chosen in an online poll of 3.4 million voters - derives from an ancient Chinese myth about a rabbit living on the moon as the pet of the lunar goddess Chang'e.

The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night.

Reports suggest the lander and rover will photograph each other at some point on Sunday.

According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined.

"China's lunar programme is an important component of mankind's activities to explore [the] peaceful use of space," Sun Huixian, a space engineer with the Chinese lunar programme, told Xinhua.

"Take anything I tell you with a grain of salt," he told me recently at his office near Geneva, Switzerland, paraphrasing the presentation. "I know nothing about the future." It's a bold statement coming from someone who has spent decades collaborating on new technologies and inventive ways of solving problems. To explore the universe's past, Incandela has been thinking at the edge of the future.

Incandela leads the team for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two towering wonders of modern engineering that detected an important particle called the Higgs boson. Known to the general public as "the God particle," the Higgs boson helps explain why matter has mass, and therefore why we're here at all.

Physicist Leon Lederman's book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" gave it that nickname, which scientists actually hate. Lederman wrote that while "Goddamn Particle" might have been a more appropriate title, the publisher wouldn't allow it.

The experiments that found it -- ATLAS and CMS -- lie at opposite ends of the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. CERN's $10 billion Large Hadron Collider sits in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border, and will smash protons at energies of 13 trillion electron volts in 2015, after upgrades. The machine was designed to recreate conditions around the time of the birth of the universe, to look for evidence of our origins, including the Higgs boson.

Francois Englert and Peter Higgs received a Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for coming up with theories about the all-important particle. Incandela sported a tux for the banquet and snapped a photo with Higgs.

Attending the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm was one of many thrills of Incandela's tenure as CMS spokesperson, a position akin to CEO of the experiment. He steps down at the end of this month, and will leave Switzerland in August to return to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of physics.

Overseeing the CMS experiment has kept Incandela, 57, too busy to notice the view of the Alps out his office window. Just this week, he's flown between Stockholm, Geneva and New York. No wonder he's waiting to settle back in the U.S. before getting a dog (he's picked the name Petabyte).

In Chile's first presidential showdown between two women, voters are expected to give overwhelming backing to Bachelet, who led the country from 2006 to 2010, impressed by her easy charm and plans to tackle deep income inequality.

Her right-wing rival, the sharp-tongued Evelyn Matthei, has been weakened by her family's ties to the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and by her post in the unpopular government of outgoing President Sebastian Pinera.

In the first round of voting on November 17, Bachelet, a 62-year-old pediatrician by training, won nearly twice as many votes as Matthei, a 60-year-old economist and former labor minister. But Bachelet fell just short of the 50 percent needed to win outright, pushing the vote into a runoff.

The two women were playmates during their childhood on an air force base, though the bloody 1973 military coup later divided their families.

"This is not about choosing between 'two women', as the press likes to put it," Bachelet said in a closing campaign speech to hundreds of cheering supporters on Thursday.

"There are deep differences here. I think Chile is ready to face the transformations that will allow it to be the country we all want. We can turn Chile into a truly developed country."

Robust, copper-led economic growth has turned Chile into a Wall Street favorite, but many Chileans feel they have yet to see the fruits of the mining boom as wealth and power remain largely concentrated in the hands of a small elite.

Bachelet wants to hike corporate taxes to pay for a wide-ranging education reform, shred the dictatorship-era constitution, and legalize abortion under certain circumstances.

"I voted for Bachelet. I want changes for the people, for young students, more opportunities for those of us who are lower-middle class," said Maximiliano Valdes, a 25-year-old electrician. "The changes she's promised can be done."

There have been no major polls ahead of the run-off, mainly because Bachelet's victory has been taken for granted.