Tomorrow's Newspapers Online 08-27-2013 |

Users of Instagram, Netflix, Vine, Airbnb and several other services reported problems getting through to the services for several hours late on Sunday.

All of them rely on servers that are part of Amazon's cloud-based network.

The problems were traced to a data centre in northern Virginia that was struggling to keep up with demand.

Also caught up in the network problems were cloud software firm Heroku and web automation service IFTTT.

Instagram was the first to acknowledge that access to its services was intermittent via Twitter and other services put out warning messages soon after.

The problems for Americans began about 16:00 Eastern time (21:00 GMT) and continued for several hours. During this time access to the web services was intermittent with many people reporting that login pages were hard to reach or pages were taking a long time to update.

On the status page for its web services, Amazon said it was investigating a series of problems at the Virginia data centre. The problems hit databases, software that spreads queries across servers as well as the code controlling the core computers underlying the whole service.

After the problems were resolved, Amazon said the glitch was caused by the "partial failure of a networking device" but added no further details.

With climate scientists predicting that natural disasters will increase in both frequency and intensity in the coming decades, many designers have turned their attention to how they can help to alleviate their impact. Their work includes a broad range of devices designed to save lives by helping rescue workers or giving people caught up in the aftermath of a natural disaster a way to help themselves.

Mikal Hallstrup, chairman of the INDEX: Award jury, said he and his fellow jury members were looking for ideas that could deliver real change. "We're not a design award for designer chairs or more white teacups," he told CNN. "The world simply doesn't need more stuff, so our focus is on meaningfulness. ... No matter how well designed a solution, we're not after great design solving the wrong problems."

He said that successful nominees would address a problem and present an affordable and scalable remedy. "New takes on old problems always get the jury excited," he added. "So do simple solutions to complex problems." And they don't come much more complex or big than a natural disaster.

On the front line of climate change: Five cities battling floods, heat and storms

A personal ark

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was among the most devastating events of recent years. It led not only to increased interest and investment in early warning systems, but also to the development of personal survival devices for those in the path of an incoming tidal wave. Three of them are up for an INDEX: Award this year, including the Orange Saver, a stylish piece of furniture that unfurls into a life raft if the need arises. It's kept afloat by eight separate inflatable segments so that it will still be buoyant even if one is damaged.

The Noah miniature ark takes up a little more room than the Orange Saver but its designers intend it for the "average Japanese home". The bright yellow ball, four feet across, is made from fiber-reinforced plastic and will accommodate four adults. Once the hatch is sealed the pod is waterproof, buoyant and tough enough to fend of debris in the water. Vents in the roof allow in fresh air. The Noah is already in production and sells for about $5,500.

Ballmer's grand design - unveiled just six weeks before Friday's surprise announcement that he would retire within a year - calls for 'One Microsoft' to pull together and forge a future based on hardware and cloud-based services.

But poor sales of the new Surface tablet, on top of Microsoft's years-long failure to make money out of online search or smartphones, have cast doubt on that approach.

For years, investors have called on Microsoft to redirect cash spent on money-losing or peripheral projects to shareholders, while limiting its focus to the vastly profitable Windows, Office and server franchises.

Activist investor ValueAct Capital Management LP, whose recent lobbying of the company may have played a role in Ballmer's decision to retire earlier than he planned, is thought to favor such an approach.

In the last two years alone, Microsoft has lost almost $3 billion on its Bing search engine and other Internet projects, not counting a $6 billion write-off for its failed purchase of online advertising agency aQuantive. It took a $900 million charge for its poor-selling Surface tablet last quarter.

For now at least, Microsoft seems intent on pursuing Ballmer's vision. John Thompson, Microsoft's lead independent director who is also heading the committee to appoint a new CEO, said on Friday the board is "committed" to Ballmer's transformation plan.

The eventual choice of that committee - which has given itself a year to do its work - should provide a clue to how committed the board really is, and how open to outside advice.

"Taking an internal candidate like Satya Nadella - the guy nurturing servers - or some of the other people on the Windows team, that makes sense to keep a steady hand through this reorganization and strategic shift," said Norman Young, an analyst at Morningstar.

"But a strong case could be made that the company needs a breath of fresh air, someone who can execute on the strategy but also bring an outsider perspective," he added.

That could mean selling the Xbox and abandoning Bing, or cutting short efforts to make tablets or other computers.

SHAREHOLDERS CLAMOUR FOR MONEY, BALLMER'S HEAD

Throughout the last decade, as Microsoft's share price has remained flat, shareholders have called for bigger dividends and share buybacks to beef up their returns.

Visiting the plant crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, Toshimitsu Motegi, the trade and industry minister, said on Monday he would set up a taskforce to take charge of the clean-up, and send officials to Fukushima to oversee operations.

"I strongly feel that the government should get fully involved," he told reporters after touring the Fukushima Daiichi facility, which is 220 km (137 miles) north of Tokyo.

Motegi ordered Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, to replace storage tanks that are at risk of leaking radioactive water. Tepco acknowledged last week that hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of around 350 tanks that were assembled quickly after the 2011 nuclear meltdowns at the site. The tanks are used to store water pumped through the reactors to keep fuel in the melted cores from overheating.

Motegi said Tepco should have more frequent patrols around the tanks and better documentation of inspections. He said the utility should replace weaker bolted tanks with sturdier welded storage units. Tepco said it was setting up its own group of experts to oversee toxic water and storage tanks at the Fukushima site.

"For measures that require sophisticated technology, we will appropriately implement them as the government while collaborating with authorities on fiscal measures, including the use of a reserve fund," Motegi said.

Earlier on Monday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the situation at Fukushima was "deplorable", and signaled the government could use some of the 350 billion yen set aside in this year's budget as a reserve for natural disasters and other emergencies.

Tepco's revelation of the toxic leaks is the most serious problem in a series of recent mishaps, including power outages, contaminated workers and other leaks. Tepco also said last month - after repeated denials - that the Fukushima plant was leaking contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from trenches between the reactor buildings and the shoreline.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority said last week it feared the disaster was "in some respects" beyond Tepco's ability to cope.

"The first vehicle of the Chemical Weapons Investigation Team was deliberately shot at multiple times by unidentified snipers in the buffer zone area," the spokesman said, adding the car was no longer serviceable and a replacement vehicle was being obtained.

The spokesman added: "It has to be stressed again that all sides need to extend their cooperation so that the team can safely carry out their important work."

The team was trying to visit one of the sites of an Aug 21. attack in which, doctors and opposition activists say, suspected nerve agents killed hundreds of civilians in several outlying districts of the Syrian capital.

The U.N. investigation comes amid rising calls by Western powers for reprisals against President Bashar al-Assad's government, who they say was responsible for the attack.

Aquino came to office in 2010 on a good governance and anti-corruption platform and consistently enjoys popularity ratings of more than 70 percent, but the Philippines remains one of the most corrupt countries in East Asia.

Protesters, responding to a call to wear white, converged on Manila's largest park angry at the misuse of "pork barrel" funds under the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

The money is frequently channeled to projects solely to impress voters, though many have turned out to be non-existent.

Aquino said on Friday the government would plug leaks in the fund, an announcement appeared timed to preempt Monday's march, and a presidential spokesman said the protesters and government wanted the same thing.

"The message is clear - we are on the same side. We are against corruption," spokesman Edwin Lacierda told reporters.

But the protesters disagreed. Church and civic groups, health workers, students and entire families ignored Aquino's promise to overhaul the PDAF and called for its abolition.

"Just transfer the funds to department agencies delivering services," said Jun Bernandino, a quadriplegic who joined the march. "They are lawmakers, not service providers. Give the agencies enough budget to deliver the services the people need."

Police said around 60,000 protesters thronged Luneta Park, some wearing pig masks and headgear. Others carried banners saying "Scrap pork barrel" and "No to pork".

Organizers had hoped for a million to join the protest which is not expected to hurt Aquino's popularity.

Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, the charismatic archbishop of Manila who many thought a strong candidate to become pope during this year's Vatican conclave, joined the protest saying it was time for the government to show greatness.

About 5,000 left-wing rallyists took the protest to the nearby presidential palace while a few thousand stayed at the park waiting for a free concert organized by one of the protest groups. About 1,500 police were deployed, but no incidents were reported.

The woman had been having affairs with both men for more than four years and apparently refused to choose between them.

The agreement sets out a rota for Sylvester Mwendwa and Elijah Kimani to stay in her house and states they will both help raise any children she bears.

Lawyers said their "marriage" would be legally recognised if they could prove polyandry was part of their custom.

'Jealousy'

Mr Mwendwa and Mr Kimani drafted the agreement after realising they had both been having an affair with the woman in Mombasa County for more than four years, the local Daily Nation newspaper reports. Community policing officer Adhalah Abdulrahman persuaded the two men to marry the woman after he saw them fighting over her, it reports.

"We have agreed that from today we will not threaten or have jealous feelings because of our wife, who says she's not ready to let go of any of us," the agreement says, Kenya's NTV station reports.

"Each one will respect the day set aside for him. We agree to love each other and live peacefully. No-one has forced us to make this agreement," it adds.

Mr Mwenda said her parents had given their blessing, while he is planning to pay the bride price.

The woman, a widow with two children, did not want to be named.

Kenyan family lawyer Judy Thongori told the Daily Nation that the law does not explicitly forbid polyandry - a woman having more than one husband.

"The laws we have do not talk about it but for such a union to be recognised in Kenya, it has to be either under the statutory law or as customary marriage. The question we should ask now is whether these people come from communities that have been practising polyandry," she is quoted as saying.

Tumours in the ovaries are hard to detect in the earliest stages meaning it can be too late to treat them effectively by the time they are found.

A trial of 4,051 women, reported in the journal Cancer, showed the method could identify those needing treatment.

But a huge study taking place in the UK will give a final verdict on the test when it is completed in 2015.

There is a survival rate of up to 90% when ovarian cancer is caught early, compared with less than 30% if it is discovered in the later stages.

Unlike other cancers, the symptoms, such as pelvic and abdominal pain or persistent bloating, are often put down to other common ailments and the tumour can be missed.

There is no mass screening programme to detect the cancer either.

Testing

Scientists already know that levels of a protein in the blood, called CA125, are often higher with ovarian cancer.

However, it is too unreliable on its own. It misses some patients and tells others they have the cancer when they are actually healthy.

Researchers are now testing the idea of using the blood test to sort patients in risk groups based on levels of CA125. Instead of going straight for surgery, low-risk patients are tested again in a year, medium-risk ones after three months and high-risk patients have an ultrasound scan to hunt for tumours.

The US study, at the University of Texas, followed post-menopausal women for 11 years on average.

Ten women had surgery based on their ultrasound scan and all the cancers detected were at an early stage.

Researcher Dr Karen Lu told the BBC: "Clinical practice definitely should not change from our study, but it gives us an insight - we didn't get a lot of false positives." She said the UK study of 50,000 people would give definitive results: "There are two big questions - do we see cancers at an earlier stage and do we decrease the number of deaths."

'Possible'

Dr Sarah Blagden, from the Ovarian Cancer Action research centre, said: "Relative to the trial under way in the in the UK , this is a small study, but it does show that effective ovarian screening is possible.

"In 2015 the results of the UKCTOCs study will become available and the results are eagerly anticipated, more so now that this American study has produced such encouraging results."

Annwen Jones, the chief executive at Target Ovarian Cancer, said: "The results of this study are without doubt very positive, and we should take hope from that.

But not any more. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen. Axel Rüger, the museum's director, said: "It really is the next generation of reproductions because they go into the third dimension. If you're a layman, they are pretty indistinguishable [from the originals]. Of course, if you're a connoisseur and you look more closely, you can see the difference."

Each reproduction is priced £22,000 – somewhat more than the cost of a postcard or poster. But the museum is hoping to increase access to pictures which, if they were sold, would go for tens of millions of pounds to Russian oligarchs or American billionaires.

The 3D scanning technique has so far reproduced Almond Blossom (1890), Sunflowers (1889), The Harvest (1888), Wheatfield under Thunderclouds (1890) and Boulevard de Clichy (1887). Further ventures into Van Gogh's back catalogue are planned.

Other museums are taking a close interest in the commercial potential of 3D, given that the Van Gogh museum expects to raise substantial funds from sales. The revenue will go towards planned renovations, as well as the preservation of a collection of 200 paintings, drawings and letters. Rüger said: "It is really fascinating to start an ambitious and commercial product of this kind. For museums, the financial situation is such that we all need to think about new products, new income streams, new business ideas to secure our finances."

The replicas, called Relievos, are being created by the museum in partnership with Fujifilm, with which it has had an exclusive deal for three years. Such is the complexity of the technology, known as Reliefography, that it has taken more than seven years to develop and only three a day can be made. It combines a 3D scan of the painting with a high-resolution print. The "super-accurate" reproduction even extends to the frame and the back of the painting. Every Relievo is numbered and approved by a museum curator. There is a limited edition of 260 copies per painting.

But Ballmer wasn’t completely blameless. He does seem to have been hobbled by a limited understanding of the technological revolution that was destroying his empire. In 2010, Ballmer and Steve Jobs appeared at an All Things D conference hosted by Walt Mossberg.

At that conference, held a few months after the introduction of the iPad, Jobs told Mossberg that he expected the PC to decline as people increasingly shifted to tablets. Mossberg asked Ballmer for his reaction.

“I think people are going to be using PCs in greater and greater numbers for many years to come,” Ballmer said. “I think PCs are going to continue to shift in form factor. The real question is: What’s a PC?”

Ballmer allowed that there’s a “fundamental difference” between devices that are “small enough to be in a pocket” and those that are not. But, he said, “nothing people do on a PC today is going to get less relevant tomorrow.” He predicted that “there will exist a general purpose device that does everything you want,” because most households can’t afford to own “five devices per person.”

This was more than a semantic disagreement. Jobs thought tablets and smartphones represented a fundamentally new kind of computing platform, and he had his engineers design a new user interface from scratch optimized for small, cheap touchscreen devices. Ballmer saw the tablet as just another kind of PC, and so he built a single OS designed to work both on tablets and on desktop PCs.

Today, the results speak for themselves. Apple sold 14 million iPads in its most recent quarter. In contrast, estimates suggest that only about 2 million Windows-based tablets were sold last quarter.

Obviously, the causes of the iPad’s success and Surface’s failure are complex. But the philosophical disagreement between Jobs and Ballmer surely played a role in their products’ divergent fortunes. Ballmer tried to build a device that could be all things for all people. That philosophy was echoed in May by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who said that “a lot of [iPad] users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents. They don’t have Office there.”

They are covered in a patina of 11,268 photovoltaic cells, which look dark blue in the grey predawn. The four 10-horsepower propellers they power now start to spin silently. Bertrand Piccard, a 55-year-old explorer and psychiatrist, dons his helmet and oxygen mask and completes his final checks. The Solar Impulse quietly taxies forwards.

The plane is travelling impossibly slowly – 30km an hour – when it gently noses up and leaves the ground. With air beneath them, the rangy wings seem to gain strength; the fuselage that on the ground seemed flimsy becomes elegant, like a crane vaunting in flight. It seems not to fly, though, so much as float. Piccard spends the day wheeling the solar-powered plane around the Matterhorn and lands 12 hours later, after sunset.

But the Solar Impulse is a plane that would fly for ever.

This summer, it limited itself to crossing the US. It took off from San Francisco in May and flew past the Statue of Liberty before landing at JFK in July, traversing the country in five stages, with Piccard and the other co-founder of the project, André Borschberg, a former fighter pilot in the Swiss air force, swapping places in the cockpit. The flight was a remarkable achievement: the Solar Impulse flew further than any solar-powered aircraft before.

The plane that crossed America is a prototype, with the name HB-SIA. Its successor, the HB-SIB, currently being built, will try to circumnavigate the world in 2015, using about as much power as a scooter does. With no rival, it will have the skies to itself, but on land and on sea, too, a new generation of solar-powered vehicles is making extraordinary journeys, around the world and across continents.

Solar power can seem the least exciting of clean energy sources: it just sits there, soaking up the sun. At least wind turbines turn. Now, though, a number of projects across the globe are pushing the boundaries of technical knowledge and coupling them to daring and demanding adventure. That the technology involved might also one day save the planet is a nice bonus.

Piccard started the Solar Impulse project because he had a problem with fossil fuels, a personal one – they had nearly cost him his life. In March 1999, along with British pilot Brian Jones, he made the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon, in Breitling Orbiter 3.

The team is to begin work on Monday. Activists say Syrian forces killed more than 300 people in several suburbs east and west of the capital on Wednesday.

A US official accused Damascus earlier of an "indiscriminate use of chemical weapons". He said the delay was meant to allow evidence to degrade.

Syria has blamed "terrorists".

State media have reported that chemical agents have been found in tunnels used by rebel fighters, and also that soldiers "suffered from cases of suffocation" when rebels used poison gas "as a last resort" after government forces made "big gains" in the suburb of Jobar.

State TV is meanwhile reporting that the governor of the central district of Hama, Anas Abdul-Razzaq Naem, has been killed in a car bomb attack.

'Degradation of evidence'

The Syrian foreign ministry statement broadcast on state television said an agreement to allow UN chemical weapons experts to "investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in Damascus province" had been concluded on Sunday with the UN's disarmament chief, Angela Kane.

The agreement was "effective immediately", the statement added.

A spokesperson for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon subsequently announced that the inspectors were "preparing to conduct on-site fact-finding activities", starting on Monday. A ceasefire will be observed at the affected locations, the statement said.

Russia, a key ally of Syria, welcomed the decision to allow UN inspectors in but warned the West against pre-empting the results.

Earlier, a senior US government official said "there is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians" and the authorities were intentionally delaying the UN probe.

"Any belated decision by the regime to grant access to the UN team would be considered too late to be credible, including because the evidence available has been significantly corrupted as a result of the regime's persistent shelling and other intentional actions over the last five days," the official told reporters in Washington.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Saturday that three hospitals it supports in the Damascus area had treated about 3,600 patients with "neurotoxic symptoms" early on Wednesday morning, of whom 355 died.