Sniffing out schizophrenia

Apr. 29, 2013 ? A debilitating mental illness, schizophrenia can be difficult to diagnose. Because physiological evidence confirming the disease can only be gathered from the brain during an autopsy, mental health professionals have had to rely on a battery of psychological evaluations to diagnose their patients.

Now, Dr. Noam Shomron and Prof. Ruth Navon of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, together with PhD student Eyal Mor from Dr. Shomron's lab and Prof. Akira Sawa of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, have discovered a method for physical diagnosis -- by collecting tissue from the nose through a simple biopsy. Surprisingly, collecting and sequencing neurons from the nose may lead to "more sure-fire" diagnostic capabilities than ever before, Dr. Shomron says.

This finding, which was reported in the journal Neurobiology of Disease, could not only lead to a more accurate diagnosis, it may also permit the crucial, early detection of the disease, giving rise to vastly improved treatment overall.

From the nose to diagnosis

Until now, biomarkers for schizophrenia had only been found in the neuron cells of the brain, which can't be collected before death. By that point it's obviously too late to do the patient any good, says Dr. Shomron. Instead, psychiatrists depend on psychological evaluations for diagnosis, including interviews with the patient and reports by family and friends.

For a solution to this diagnostic dilemma, the researchers turned to the olfactory system, which includes neurons located on the upper part of the inner nose. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University collected samples of olfactory neurons from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and a control group of non-affected individuals, then sent them to Dr. Shomron's TAU lab.

Dr. Shomron and his fellow researchers applied a high-throughput technology to these samples, studying the microRNA of the olfactory neurons. Within these molecules, which help to regulate our genetic code, they were able to identify a microRNA which is highly elevated in those with schizophrenia, compared to individuals who do not have the disease.

"We were able to narrow down the microRNA to a differentially expressed set, and from there down to a specific microRNA which is elevated in individuals with the disease compared to healthy individuals," explains Dr. Shomron. Further research revealed that this particular microRNA controls genes associated with the generation of neurons.

In practice, material for biopsy could be collected through a quick and easy outpatient procedure, using a local anesthetic, says Dr. Shomron. And with microRNA profiling results ready in a matter of hours, this method could evolve into a relatively simple and accurate test to diagnose a very complicated illness.

Early detection, early intervention

Though there is much more to investigate, Dr. Shomron has high hopes for this diagnostic method. It's important to determine whether this alteration in microRNA expression begins before schizophrenic symptoms begin to exhibit themselves, or only after the disease fully develops, he says. If this change comes near the beginning of the timeline, it could be invaluable for early diagnostics. This would mean early intervention, better treatment, and possibly even the postponement of symptoms.

If, for example, a person has a family history of schizophrenia, this test could reveal whether they too suffer from the disease. And while such advanced warning doesn't mean a cure is on the horizon, it will help both patient and doctor identify and prepare for the challenges ahead.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Friends of Tel Aviv University.

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Journal Reference:

1. Eyal Mor, Shin-Ichi Kano, Carlo Colantuoni, Akira Sawa, Ruth Navon, Noam Shomron. MicroRNA-382 expression is elevated in the olfactory neuroepithelium of schizophrenia patients. Neurobiology of Disease, 2013; 55: 1 DOI: 10.1016/j.nbd.2013.03.011

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/mind_brain/mental_health/~3/zHXUhnxaa7s/130429130548.htm

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Dinosaur predecessors gain ground in wake of world's biggest biodiversity crisis

Apr. 29, 2013 ? Many scientists have thought that dinosaur predecessors missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during Earth's largest mass extinction, approximately 252 million years ago. The thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia.

It turns out that scientists may have been looking for the starting line in the wrong places.

Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs taking hold in Tanzania and Zambia in the mid-Triassic period, many millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.

"The fossil record from the Karoo of South Africa remains a good representation of four-legged land animals across southern Pangea before the extinction event. But after the event animals weren't as uniformly and widely distributed as before. We had to go looking in some fairly unorthodox places," said Christian Sidor, University of Washington professor of biology. He's lead author of a paper appearing the week of April 29 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new insights come from seven fossil-hunting expeditions since 2003 in Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica, funded by the National Geographic Society and National Science Foundation, along with work combing through existing fossil collections. The researchers created two "snapshots" of four legged-animals about 5 million years before and again about 10 million years after the extinction event at the end of the Permian period.

Prior to the extinction event, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon -- said to resemble a fat lizard with a short tail and turtle's head -- was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea. Pangea is the name given to the landmass when all the world's continents were joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India. After the mass extinction at the end of the Permian, Dicynodon disappeared and other related species were so greatly decreased that newly emerging herbivores could suddenly compete with them.

"Groups that did well before the extinction didn't necessarily do well afterward," Sidor said. "What we call evolutionary incumbency was fundamentally reset."

The snapshot 10 million years after the extinction event reveals, among other things, that archosaurs were in Tanzanian and Zambian basins, but not distributed across all of southern Pangea as had been the pattern for four-legged animals prior to the extinction. Archosaurs are the group of reptiles that includes crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds and a variety of extinct forms. They are of interest because it is thought they led to animals like Asilisaurus, a dinosaur-like animal, and Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a dog-sized creature with a five-foot tail that scientists in December 2012 announced could be the earliest dinosaur, or else the closest relative found so far.

"Early archosaurs being found mainly in Tanzania is an example of how fragmented communities became after the extinction event," Sidor said. And the co-authors write: "These findings suggest that . . . archosaur diversification was more intimately related to recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction than previously suspected."

A new framework for analyzing biogeographic patterns from species distributions, developed by co-author Daril Vilhena, a UW biology graduate student, provided a way to discern the complex recovery, Sidor said.

It revealed that before the extinction event 35 percent of four-legged species were found in two or more of the five areas studied, with some species having ranges that stretched 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers), encompassing the Tanzanian and South African basins. Ten million years after the extinction event, the authors say there was clear geographic clustering and just 7 percent of species were found in two or more regions.

The techniques -- new ways to statistically consider how connected or isolated species are from each other -- could be useful for other paleontologists and modern day biogeographers, Sidor said.

In the early 2000s Sidor and some of his co-authors started putting together expeditions to collect fossils from sites in Tanzania that hadn't been visited since the 1960s and in Zambia where there'd been little work since the '80s. Two expeditions to Antarctica provided additional materials, as did long-term efforts to examine museum-held fossils that had not been fully documented or named.

Other co-authors from the UW are graduate students Adam Huttenlocker and Brandon Peecook, post-doctoral researcher Sterling Nesbitt and research associate Linda Tsuji; Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Roger Smith, of the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town; and S?bastien Steyer from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Funding was also received from the Evolving Earth Foundation, the Grainger Foundation, the Field Museum/IDP Inc. African Partners Program and the National Research Council of South Africa.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Washington. The original article was written by Sandra Hines.

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Journal Reference:

1. Christian A. Sidor, Daril A. Vilhena, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Adam K. Huttenlocker, Sterling J. Nesbitt, Brandon R. Peecook, J. S?bastien Steyer, Roger M. H. Smith, and Linda A. Tsuji. Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction. PNAS, April 29, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1302323110

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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/t4B8Gs8a5mE/130429154059.htm

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Black Voters Are Key to a Colbert Busch Win in South Carolina

SUMMERVILLE, S.C. ? South Carolina?s 1st Congressional District is known for the churning Port of Charleston, growing suburbs to the north, and stately homes with wrap-around porches from Beaufort to Mount Pleasant. The white, well-heeled voters who dominate the district favored Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points.

This coastal strip is also home to a more blue-collar, solidly Democratic population; about one out of five of the district?s residents are African-American. Their turnout in the May 7 special congressional election is key to an upset by the Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Colbert Busch.

Inside her campaign office here, having come straight from church in their Sunday best, Dot Brown and Ethel Campbell are planning an afternoon of phone banking and door knocking. Local television stations aren?t carrying the only debate pitting Colbert Busch against her Republican opponent, former Gov. Mark Sanford, on Monday night.

?Most people we come across tend not to understand the importance of a special election, so you have got to get out and let them know,? said Brown, 67 years old, dressed in a marigold suit and bright pink scarf.

Campbell, 62, who immediately kicked off her pumps once she sat down, said she tries to explain to voters that electing another Democrat to Congress will help President Obama. ?I say, ?You had his back in 2012. Do you have his back in 2013?? "

But Colbert Busch has flaunted her independence from a president who is unpopular in most of the district, assailing his budget plan for raising taxes, not cutting enough spending, and meddling with Social Security. ?Not only does President Obama?s plan fail to put our finances back in order, it would cut benefits for our seniors, which is wrong,? she said in a statement. Colbert Busch also declined to say whether she would have supported Obama's economic stimulus plan in his first term. ?She?s trying to be all things to all people,?? said Sanford campaign spokesman Joel Sawyer.

Interviews with black voters on Sunday found few knew much about the businesswoman and political novice -- beyond the fact that she?s the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert. If they vote, disgust with Sanford is more likely to be the driving force. The governor left office in 2011, over a year?after admitting he disappeared from public view for several days to visit his girlfriend in Argentina.

?We don?t need people like him who set a bad example,? said 78-year-old Virginia Rosemond, her wide-brimmed, red hat shielding her from a drizzly rain as left the Baum Temple AME Zion Church. Will she vote for Colbert Busch? ??If I get a ride,? she responded.

Fellow churchgoer Charles Logan, 67, said he ?might? vote for Colbert Busch. ?I?m not messing with him,? he said of Sanford. ?He left his wife. He left his office. What makes you think he won?t go to Washington and do the same thing??

Colbert Busch?s campaign did not respond to e-mails and phone calls about its outreach to African-American voters. Appealing to moderate Republicans and independents is also crucial to her success, so there is a political risk in appearing eager to court black Democrats. When she campaigned at historically black Burke High School in Charleston last week, the event was billed as a rally for women voters.

But the campaign?s radio ad linking Sanford to allegations of voter suppression makes her intentions clear. With Isaac Hayes? soundtrack from Shaft, the 1971 movie about a black private detective, as backdrop, the ad assails a new South Carolina law that requires voters to show photo identification. A federal court blocked the law from going into effect until after the 2012 election. ?Somebody doesn?t want African Americans to vote, and it doesn?t take Shaft to figure out who,? a narrator says in the radio spot. ?Tuesday, May 7th,?is your chance to show them they can?t get away with it.?

The spot doesn?t mention that the ID law was signed after Sanford left office by Gov. Nikki Haley. Sawyer released a written statement when the ad first aired earlier this month that called it a ?negative radio ad with some very unfortunate overtones.?

Jaime Harrison, vice chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, defended the spot.

?Voter ID has been a very hot-button issue in the African-American community,? said Harrison, who if elected chairman next month would be the first African American to lead the party in South Carolina. ?Many folks who grew up in the civil-rights movement have called it modern-day Jim Crow. The ad will help to pique the awareness of African-Americans in that district.?

Sanford is not opposed to the law, Sawyer said, but he did not recall the ex-governor ever speaking publicly about it. Sawyer also noted that Sanford appointed a record number of African-Americans to his Cabinet and joined the state Supreme Court?s chief justice in 2006 in calling for more diverse appointments to the bench. In 2003, Sanford offered an official apology for the ?Orangeburg Massacre,? the 1968 shootings by South Carolina highway patrol officers that killed three black students protesting a segregated bowling alley.

The uncertainty of black turnout in the special election comes on the heels of an Associated Press analysis that found African Americans nationwide voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and largely surpassed white turnout for the first time. If black turnout had matched 2004, Romney would have won in 2012.

In one of Colbert Busch?s only campaign events aimed at African Americans, she spoke at a black history celebration in February at Summerville High school. ?I give her credit for that,? said Ava Graham, a 44-year-old child care worker whose daughter sang with her church choir at the event. Colbert Bush spoke about the impact of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy on her life. ?I hope the black community comes out,? Graham said, ?because the Republicans want this seat and are going to do what they have to do.??

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story contained incorrect information about the end of Mark Sanford's tenure as governor. Sanford left office after his second term ended in January 2011; he did not resign from office after the scandal hit.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/black-voters-key-colbert-busch-win-south-carolina-072536368.html

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Yep, I Totally Agree (talking-points-memo)

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Engaging online crowds in the classroom could be important tool for teaching innovation

Apr. 29, 2013 ? Online crowds can be an important tool for teaching the ins and outs of innovation, educators at Carnegie Mellon University and Northwestern University say, even when the quality of the feedback provided by online sources doesn't always match the quantity.

In a pilot study that invited the crowd into their classrooms, Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern instructors found that input from social media and other crowdsourcing sites helped the students identify human needs for products or services, generate large quantities of ideas, and ease some aspects of testing those ideas.

Finding ways to incorporate online crowds into coursework is critical for teaching the process of innovation, said Steven Dow, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He and his co-investigator, Elizabeth Gerber, the Breed Junior Professor of Design at Northwestern University, will present their findings April 29 at CHI 2013, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Paris.

"Educating students about innovation practices can be difficult in the classroom, where students typically lack authentic interaction with the real world," Dow explained. "Social networks and other online crowds can provide input that students can't get otherwise. Even in project courses, feedback is limited to a handful of individuals, at most."

At the same time, tapping the power of online communities has itself become part of the innovation process, Gerber said, with many entrepreneurs turning to sites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to get initial support.

"The Internet affords access to online communities to which we might not ever have access," she said. "Future innovators need to know how to find and respectively engage with these communities to get the resources they need."

Dow and Gerber have received a National Science Foundation grant to study the use of crowd technologies in the classroom. They have created a website, http://crowddriveninnovation.com/, to share ideas and resources regarding the use of crowd-based resources in innovation education.

In the pilot study, they explored the use of crowds with 50 students enrolled in three innovation classes offered by Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern. Students worked in groups of 3-4 on projects.

Students found online forums, such as Reddit, were very helpful in discovering unmet needs. A group working on public transit, for instance, found lots of people talk about transit on social media, Dow said. "It also helps them figure out what questions to ask users in more traditional interviews," he added.

An attempt to generate ideas through Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pays workers small fees for performing micro-tasks, produced little of use. "Understanding context is critical for ideation and this is difficult to do in a micro-task work environment," Gerber said. What did work effectively, she said, was asking people from the user research site Mindswarms to reflect on students' storyboard concepts.

In the final class assignment, to help students learn how to pitch ideas, the teams created a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. But that made many students uncomfortable.

"The main problem with the crowdfunding piece of the class was that few students, as far as I could tell, actually wanted to raise the money," one student explained. "Most students in the class have other plans and weren't planning to continue working on their idea."

"In a strange way, this discomfort validated our hypothesis that engaging external crowds would bring the reality of innovation practices into the classroom," Dow said. "It was almost too real."

One solution, Dow and Gerber said, may be to have students prepare a crowdfunding campaign, but not launch it.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/N2RtpZnvZVw/130429130520.htm

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Acer Aspire S7-191-6640

The Acer Aspire S7-191-6640 ($1,199.99) is a road warrior's ultrabook. It has high-end features like a 128GB SSD, 1080p ten-point touch screen, and weighs less than 2.25 pounds without accessories. The ultrabook comes highly recommended as a commuter or jet traveler who must have a full Windows 8 PC with her at all times. Only a few stumbles?like limited ports and anemic standard battery life?keep the system from our highest honors.

Design and Features
The S7-191-6640 looks every bit the little brother of the 13.3-inch Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 ($1,649.99), with a slim, compact profile, measuring only 11.25 by 7.75 by 0.48 inches (HWD). The S7-191-6640 has an aluminum lid with a diagonal brushed pattern, Gorilla Glass 2 covering the 11.6-inch touch screen, and a silver-colored keyboard and keyboard deck. The full sized keyboard is backlit, and is comfortable to use despite a very shallow key travel. Like its big brother, the S7-191-6640 eschews the row of function keys, rather incorporating those keys into the number keys on the top of the keyboard. Other keys do double duty as well: Fn-U increases the keyboard backlit brightness, for example.

The S7-191-6640 weighs a scant 2.24 pounds alone, and a still svelte 2.63 pounds with the included extended battery installed. This makes the system just as portable as systems like the Apple MacBook Air 11-inch (Mid 2012) ($999) and HP EliteBook 2170p ($1,099). These are road warrior systems, where you give up a little (processor power, number of I/O ports, etc.) in return for a system that fits easily in your commute bag and can travel with you everywhere.

The S7-191-6640 comes with a 11.6-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-resolution touch screen, which significantly more packed with pixels than the 1,366 by 768 resolution screen usually seen on smaller displays. This means that you can view all the video in a 1080p HD online video, as well as several full pages of data when viewing a spreadsheet or Word document. You'll find a larger work surface on the S7-191-6640 than on systems like the HP Envy X2 (11-g012nr) ($849), which has an 11.6-inch 1,366 by 768 screen. But 1080p in such a small screen can also mean that text at 100% zoom will be quite small, so you may have to fiddle with the zoom settings a bit if you're eyesight isn't 20/20. Also, some games may not look quite right until you find the right combination of settings. That said, we think many users will welcome the HD video capabilities of the S7-191-6640.

The screen uses IPS technology, so it's visible from many angles. Speaking of angles, the system's screen hinge has a dual friction setup, so it's harder to push the screen past 90 degrees. Acer did this to help curb screen bounce when you use the built-in touch screen. The touch screen is responsive, correctly interpreting our taps with a single finger. This is an improvement over the Acer Iconia W700-6465 tablet ($999.99), which had some trouble by registering a tap on the maximize button when we meant to tap the close button on windows in Desktop mode.

Speaking of video, the S7-191-6640 comes with a micro-HDMI port on the back, which requires an adapter, which isn't included. It's the same for other formats like VGA or DVI. The S7-191-6640 comes with a Bluetooth mouse for precise pointing. The system only has two USB 3.0 ports, so connecting your smartphone and an external hard drive would fill up the ports.

There are a couple of indents built into the chassis to hook up the included extended battery. The system doesn't have a traditional removable battery or a docking port, so the extended battery uses the laptop's charging port to pass power through. This simplistic workaround has a drawback: The extended battery doesn't show up in Windows, so you'll have to interpret the five-lights in the LED indicator on the side of the extended battery to figure out how much charge you've got. Thumbwheel screws hold the battery in place, making the whole exercise feel like a laptop battery setup from the mid 1990s. It's effective, but nevertheless feels like a kludge on what is otherwise an elegant looking system.

Thanks to Microsoft Signature setup, the S7-191-6640 comes with no extra software pre-loaded aside from Microsoft products like Office Trial, Skype, and Windows Defender. This is a vast improvement over systems like the HP Envy X2, which has quite a few programs pre-installed. The S7-191-6640 comes with a 128GB SSD, with about 75GB free when you take it out of the box. The system has a one-year warranty.

Performance
The Intel Core i5-3317U and four GB of memory are pretty standard specs for systems in this price range, The Acer Iconia W700-6465, HP EliteBook 2170p, and the Editor's Choice for high-end ultrabooks, the Asus Zenbook Prime Touch UX31A-BHI5T ($1199), all come with this setup. Therefore, it's no surprise that these systems all have similar CineBench, Handbrake, and Photoshop CS6 results. The HP lags behind the others in PCMark7, due to its spinning hard drive, but all are closely matched on the 3D tests, since they all have Intel HD Graphics 4000.

The performance stat that really matters is the system's battery rundown score, and on that note the S7-191-6640 is mixed. The sealed internal battery is only good for a short 3 hours 42 minutes. This is far less than the Asus UX31A-BHI5T (6:38) or the MacBook Air (5:19). However, when you add the extended battery, the S7-191-6640 achieves an excellent 6:58. It's like Acer had to follow a mandate to make this system one of the thinnest and lightest, then said wait a minute, we can't ship a laptop that lasts less than four hours. The extended battery feels like an afterthought, one that it easily lost and less sturdy than if they had simply added a couple of millimeters to the system's thickness.

And there's the rub: If the Acer Aspire S7-191-6640 had been a few millimeters thicker with a larger capacity battery and the same 2.63 pound weight, it might have given serious competition to the Editors' Choice Asus Zenbook Prime Touch UX31A-BHI5T. The Asus UX31A-BHI5T has a larger screen and includes a mini-VGA-to-VGA adapter, so it's better suited to corridor dwellers than road warriors, but otherwise the systems are similar in specs, capabilities, and pricing. The S7-191-6640 is just a touch better for the road warrior, but it's not enough for a clear-cut victory.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Acer Aspire S7-191-6640 with several other laptops side by side.

More laptop reviews:
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??? Acer Aspire S7-191-6640
??? HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook
??? Gigabyte P2742G-CF1
??? Acer Aspire V5-571PG-9814
?? more

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Samsung Galaxy Mega hits FCC (again), this time with LTE

Better start working on those powerball exercises. At least if Samsung's Galaxy Mega was the thing you thought your life was missing, as it's just landed at the FCC. Yeah, we know this isn't the first time, but on second time around it's the LTE-sporting GT-i9205 model. The usual lab tests show little that we didn't know already -- unless you didn't know it had LTE Band 5, dual band WiFi, NFC or GSM 850 / 1900. As the 5.8-inch isn't 4G-enabled, this means we're looking at the bigger 6.3-inch version, but still no word on if, when or how a version might land on US shores. Still no harm in limbering up though, is there?

Update: Upon further inspection, this variant only uses LTE band 5 (850mhz), which no us carrier currently uses. It's very unlikely this I9205 will hit the US.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung

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Source: FCC

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/28/samsung-galaxy-mega-lte-fcc/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Multi-modal Messaging Will Dominate Mobile Communications

As wired telephony becomes subsumed by IP-based, mobile unified communications (UC), we are seeing a big increase in messaging communications. That includes person-to-person contacts, automated notifications from business applications, and community-based posting of ?social messaging.? What is most important, however, is that all modes of messaging contact are becoming ?unified? and must support both sender and recipient functional needs.

This change will be particularly welcomed in business communications, where the limitations of PSTN telephony and voicemail did not allow end users the functional capabilities they needed. In particular, external users were required to place a phone call just to leave a voice message in an organization?s employee voice mailbox. As a way of consolidating message management for recipients, ?unified messaging? (UM) provided shared message storage, notifications, and conversion of voice messages-to-text options for message retrieval. UM capabilities were therefore always considered a major communication application component of UC.

Mobility is a big driver for multi-modal messaging

Now that consumers are quickly adopting multi-modal mobile smartphones and tablets and can handle other forms of messaging (email, SMS, social posts), it?s time for voicemail to join the ?Mobile UC? club. However, we shouldn?t still call that move by its old name, ?unified messaging? (UM), which only provided limited benefits to message recipients and nothing for message senders.

The old UM has always been focused on simply making it easier for a message recipient to be notified about and easily retrieve all types of business messages, including email and voicemail, in the recipient?s choice of media. With rapid consumer adoption of mobile, multi-modal smartphones and tablets, along with video messaging and new forms of social networking, it really is time to expand the functional role of UM in the context of such flexibility to support a message originator?s options as well. (I blogged about this over five years ago!)

This will not only benefit end users who want to communicate more flexibly with different media, but will also have a strong impact on automated business applications for initiating notification contacts with individual end users and customers. Although the industry has been moving quickly in developing the different pieces of UC, the market is still confused because we are still using old terminology. This is particularly evident as organizations try to migrate from legacy technologies to the future of cloud-based, UC-enabled business communications and think of UM as being just about email and voice mail consolidation for storage and retrieval.

Since telephony and associated voice messaging technologies are changing, both from an infrastructure perspective (IP connectivity, ?cloud? applications), as well as user functionally and UI flexibility, the old perception of UM must change as well. That would mean being able to send messages in any mode desired by the sender, as well as retrieval and response in any mode by the recipients. Because mobility implies constraints on which medium of messaging functionality can be used, UM must provide dynamic flexibility for both the sender and recipient interfaces, including the mode of ?message waiting? notifications (MWI).

So, What Do We Have To Change?

First of all, separate the needs of a contact initiator from that of the contact recipient/response. With UC flexibility, asynchronous messaging modes can be done independently in text, voice or video for input or output.
Second, include messaging contacts from automated business process applications, not just from people. That has been going on for years primarily with email, and has quickly moved into social networking. Authorized access management and screening will be required as email and social posts are displacing snail mail and TV for advertising.
Third, allow individual recipients to easily control all forms of call and message notification (MWI), so that their multi-modal smartphones or tablets won?t overload them unnecessarily when they are busy. That would require both call/message-screening options, based on various factors, including caller/sender ID, subject of contact, urgency indicator, etc. (I call that ?Unified Notification Management,? which is a recipient function.)
Fourth, enable direct message creation media options, including voice and video. We don?t have to have a real-time connection to initiate and send a voice or video message. This has already started to happen, but just needs to be consolidated under the ?UM? umbrella. It is not necessary to involve ?presence? management for sending asynchronous messages.
Fifth, (maybe this should be first?), provide for ?universal addressing? for all modes of messaging, so that the sender simply has to identify the individual recipient, not any particular mailbox or phone number for each medium. To separate personal from business messages, there will obviously also have to be a ?dual persona? identification and authentication requirement for addressing.
Finally, all forms of messaging must be ?UC-enabled? in order to dynamically escalate from an asynchronous message to a real-time connection that will, indeed, be based upon presence status and availability information. However, unlike legacy telephone answering voice messaging that started with a failed call attempt, I see multi-modal messaging and chat becoming increasingly more common, easy starting points for contacting people, with the option to escalate easily and efficiently to real-time voice and video conferencing connections.
There are quite a few important interoperability and integration details that will need attention in order to support the basic capabilities I describe. One of the implications of bridging the gap between a message sender and recipient, is that messages may be needed to be screened and converted from one form to another (including languages?) before they are delivered/retrieved by a recipient. For inbound customer contact interactions, message screening will also include routing to appropriate agents or experts; for outbound notification messages to mobile users, the ?Unified Notification Management? facility should be available from the recipient?s service provider.
Where and how that can all best be implemented in the new world of mobility and cloud services, will be an evolving challenge. VARs, SIs, and Consultants will play a key role in helping organizations transition to integrated Multi-modal Messaging as part of the BYOD revolution.

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Source: http://blog.ucstrategies.com/2013/04/27/multi-modal-messaging-will-dominate-mobile-communications/

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US Judge Rules That Motorola's Patents Aren't Worth $4 Billion, But ...

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Earlier this year we reported that Motorola?s complaint against Microsoft for alleged patent infringement could see Motorola demanding up to $4 billion in royalties from Microsoft which we can all agree upon is no small amount. Unfortunately for Motorola, it looks like even if they were to win the legal battle against Microsoft, they might not be able to get $4 billion as the judge presiding over the legal battle has determined that the value of Motorola?s patents were extremely overvalued and that they are in reality worth about $1.8 million in royalties every year.

Of course when it comes to settlements, negotiations are to be expected, although in this case Motorola?s $4 billion did seem somewhat outrageous, compared to Microsoft?s estimation of $1.2 million, which admittedly was closer to what the judge had valued Motorola?s potential royalties to be worth on an annual basis. We expect that Motorola can?t be too happy about this, and unsurprisingly Microsoft seems to be and in a statement released by Microsoft?s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, David Howard, ?This decision is good for consumers because it ensures patented technology committed to standards remains affordable for everyone.?

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Speedy fix for FAA sequester woes

By Doug Palmer and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives is expected to act quickly on Friday to finalize a Senate plan to ease nationwide air-traffic delays caused by last month's automatic federal spending cuts.

The Senate plan, passed unanimously late Thursday, will give the Department of Transportation flexibility to use unspent funds to cover the costs of air traffic controllers and other essential employees at the Federal Aviation Administration who had been furloughed.

Lawmakers were eager to act quickly since many would be scrambling to catch flights home and to other destinations at the start of a weeklong recess.

They also sought to avoid the growing wrath of the traveling public, which had dealt with significant take-off and landing delays since the furloughs started on Sunday.

The legislative action marks a surprising bipartisan effort, especially after many Republicans had blamed the Obama administration for manipulating funds to maximize the impact of the budget cuts, in a perceived bid to damage Republicans.

It does come with the risk, though, of unleashing furious lobbying campaigns to ease other program cuts triggered by the controversial "sequestration" that took effect on March 1, requiring across-the-board spending cuts among most federal agencies.

The White House on Friday welcomed Congress' move, but said it falls short of broader action needed to address sequestration.

"It will be good news for America's traveling public if Congress spares them these unnecessary delays," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement.

Carney said lawmakers need to take additional steps to alleviate the impact felt beyond the airline industry from the cuts, such as among poorer elderly people, defense industry workers and others brought on by sequestration.

"Ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless across-the-board cuts," he said.

Transportation officials have made other cuts to their budget but furloughs of air traffic controllers began this week, prompting traveler backlash at major hubs like those in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

On Friday morning, departing flights at Newark Liberty International Airport were delayed more than an hour and 15 minutes, and Boston's Logan Airport had departure delays of more than 30 minutes, both due to staffing, the FAA said. Teterboro airport in New Jersey, which handles many corporate jets, also was experiencing delays of more than 90 minutes due to staffing.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Doug Palmer, Susan Heavey and Alwyn Scott; Writing by Karey Van Hall; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-calls-effort-end-airport-delays-good-140534158.html

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Senate bill ends air traffic controller furloughs

WASHINGTON (AP) ? With flight delays mounting, the Senate approved hurry-up legislation Thursday night to end air traffic controller furloughs blamed for inconveniencing large numbers of travelers.

A House vote on the measure was expected as early as Friday, with lawmakers eager to embark on a weeklong vacation.

Under the legislation, which the Senate passed without even a roll call vote, the Federal Aviation Administration would gain authority to transfer up to $253 million from accounts that are flush into other programs, to "prevent reduced operations and staffing" through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year.

In addition to restoring full staffing by controllers, Senate officials said the available funds should be ample enough to prevent the closure of small airport towers around the country. The FAA has said it will shut the facilities as it makes its share of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts ? known as the sequester ? that took effect last month at numerous government agencies.

The Senate acted as the FAA said there had been at least 863 flights delayed on Wednesday "attributable to staffing reductions resulting from the furlough."

Administration officials participated in the negotiations that led to the deal and evidently registered no objections.

After the vote, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, "It will be good news for America's traveling public if Congress spares them these unnecessary delays. But ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless, across-the-board cuts."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a key participant in the talks, said the legislation would "prevent what otherwise would have been intolerable delays in the air travel system, inconveniencing travelers and hurting the economy."

Senate approval followed several hours of pressure-filled, closed-door negotiations, and came after most senators had departed the Capitol on the assumption that the talks had fallen short.

Officials said a small group of senators insisted on a last-ditch effort at an agreement before Congress adjourned for a vacation that could have become politically problematic if the flight delays continued.

"I want to do it right now. There are other senators you'd have to ask what the hang-up is," Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said at a point when it appeared no compromise would emerge.

For the White House and Senate Democrats, the discussions on legislation relating to one relatively small slice of the $85 billion in spending cuts marked a shift in position in a long-running struggle with Republicans over budget issues. Similarly, the turn of events marked at least modest vindication of a decision by the House GOP last winter to finesse some budget struggles in order to focus public attention on the across-the-board cuts in hopes they would gain leverage over President Barack Obama.

The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union that represents FAA employees, reported a number of incidents it said were due to the furloughs.

In one case, it said several flights headed for Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York were diverted on Wednesday when a piece of equipment failed. "While the policy for this equipment is immediate restoral, due to sequestration and furloughs it was changed to next-day restoral," the union said.

It added it was "learning of additional impacts nationwide, including open watches, increased restoration times, delays resulting from insufficient funding for parts and equipment, modernization delays, missed or deferred preventative maintenance, and reduced redundancy."

The airlines, too, were pressing Congress to restore the FAA to full staffing.

In an interview Wednesday, Robert Isom, chief operations officer of US Airways, likened the furloughs to a "wildcat regulatory action."

He added, "In the airline business, you try to eliminate uncertainty. Some factors you can't control, like weather. It (the FAA issue) is worse than the weather."

In a shift, first the White House and then senior Democratic lawmakers have signaled a willingness in the past two days to support legislation that alleviates the budget crunch at the FAA, while leaving the balance of the $85 billion to remain in effect.

Obama favors a comprehensive agreement that replaces the entire $85 billion in across-the-board cuts as part of a broader deficit-reduction deal that includes higher taxes and spending cuts.

One Senate Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, noted that without the type of comprehensive deficit deal that Obama favors, a bill that eases the spending crunch at the FAA would inevitably be followed by other single-issue measures. She listed funding at the National Institutes of Health as one example, and cuts that cause furloughs of civilians who work at military hospitals as a second.

At the same time, Democratic aides said resolve had crumbled under the weight of widespread delays for the traveling public and pressure from the airlines.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., involved in the discussions, said the issue was big enough so "most people want to find a solution as long as it doesn't spend any more money."

Officials estimate it would cost slightly more than $200 million to restore air traffic controllers to full staffing, and another $50 million to keep open smaller air traffic towers around the country that the FAA has proposed closing.

Across the Capitol, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., said, "We're willing to look at what the Senate's going to propose."

He said he believes the FAA has the authority it needs under existing law to shift funds and end the furloughs of air traffic controllers, and any legislation should be "very, very limited" and direct the agency to use the flexibility it already has.

In a reflection of the political undercurrents, another House Republican, Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma, said FAA employees "are being used as pawns by this (Obama) administration to be able to implement the maximum amount of pain on the American people when it does not have to be this way."

The White House and congressional Democrats vociferously dispute such claims.

___

Associated Press writers Joan Lowy, Henry C. Jackson and Alan Fram in Washington and David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senate-passes-bill-ease-faa-furloughs-005441034--politics.html

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Long-term care in aging US: Not for me, poll says

WASHINGTON (AP) ? We're in denial: Americans underestimate their chances of needing long-term care as they get older ? and are taking few steps to get ready.

A new poll examined how people 40 and over are preparing for this difficult and often pricey reality of aging and found two-thirds say they've done little to no planning.

In fact, 3 in 10 would rather not think about getting older at all. Only a quarter predict it's very likely that they'll personally need help getting around or caring for themselves during their senior years, according to the poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

That's a surprise considering the poll found more than half of the 40-plus crowd already have been caregivers for an impaired relative or friend ? seeing from the other side the kind of assistance they, too, are likely to need later on.

"I didn't think I was old. I still don't think I'm old," explained retired schoolteacher Malinda Bowman, 60, of Laura, Ohio.

Bowman has been a caregiver twice, first for her grandmother. Then after her father died in 2006, Bowman moved in with her mother, caring for her until her death in January. Yet Bowman has made few plans for herself.

"I guess I was focused on caring for my grandmother and mom and dad, so I didn't really think about myself," she said. "Everything we had was devoted to taking care of them."

The poll found most people expect family to step up if they need long-term care ? even though 6 in 10 haven't talked with loved ones about the possibility and how they'd like it to work.

Bowman said she's healthy now but expects to need help someday from her two grown sons. Last month, prompted by a brother's fall and blood clot, she began the conversation by telling her youngest son about her living will and life insurance policy.

"I need to plan eventually," she acknowledged.

Those family conversations are crucial: Even if they want to help, do your relatives have the time, money and knowhow? What starts as driving Dad to the doctor or picking up his groceries gradually can turn into feeding and bathing him, maybe even doing tasks once left to nurses such as giving injections or cleaning open wounds. If loved ones can't do all that, can they afford to hire help? What if you no longer can live alone?

"The expectation that your family is going to be there when you need them often doesn't mean they understand the full extent of what the job of caregiving will be," Susan Reinhard, a nurse who directs AARP's Public Policy Institute, said. "Your survey is pointing out a problem for not just people approaching the need for long-term care, but for family members who will be expected to take on the huge responsibility of providing care."

Most people who have been caregivers called the work both worthwhile and stressful. And on the other end, those who have received care are less apt to say they can rely on their families in times of need, the poll found.

With a rapidly aging population, more families will be facing those responsibilities. Government figures show nearly 7 in 10 Americans will need long-term care at some point after they reach age 65, whether it's from a relative, a home health aide, assisted living or a nursing home. On average, they'll need that care for three years.

Despite the "it won't happen to me" reaction, the AP-NORC Center poll found half of those surveyed think just about everyone will need some assistance at some point. There are widespread misperceptions about how much care costs and who will pay for it. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed underestimated the cost of a nursing home, which averages more than $6,700 a month.

Medicare doesn't pay for the most common types of long-term care. Yet 37 percent of those surveyed mistakenly think it will pay for a nursing home and even more expect it to cover a home health aide when that's only approved under certain conditions.

The harsh reality: Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor, is the main payer of long-term care in the U.S., and to qualify seniors must have spent most of their savings and assets. But fewer than half of those polled think they'll ever need Medicaid ? even though only a third are setting aside money for later care, and just 27 percent are confident they'll have the financial resources they'll need.

In Cottage Grove, Ore., Police Chief Mike Grover, 64, says his retirement plan means he could afford a nursing home. And like 47 percent of those polled, he's created an advance directive, a legal document outlining what medical care he'd want if he couldn't communicate.

Otherwise, Grover said he hasn't thought much about his future care needs. He knows caregiving is difficult, as he and his brother are caring for their 85-year-old mother.

Still, "until I cross that bridge, I don't know what I would do. I hope that my kids and wife will pick the right thing," he said. "It depends on my physical condition, because I do not want to be a burden to my children."

The AP-NORC Center poll found widespread support for tax breaks to encourage saving for long-term care, and about half favor the government establishing a voluntary long-term care insurance program. An Obama administration attempt to create such a program ended in 2011 because it was too costly.

The older they get, the more preparations people take. Just 8 percent of 40- to 54-year-olds have done much planning for long-term care, compared with 30 percent of those 65 or older, the poll found.

Mary Pastrano, 74, of Port Orchard, Wash., has planned extensively for her future health care. She has lupus, heart problems and other conditions, and now uses a wheelchair. She also remembers her family's financial struggles after her own father died when she was a child.

"I don't want people to stand around and wring their hands and wonder, 'What would Mom think was the best?'" said Pastrano, who has discussed her insurance policies, living will and care preferences with her husband and children.

Still, Pastrano wishes she and her husband had started saving earlier, during their working years.

"You never know how soon you're going to be down," she said. "That's what older people have a problem understanding: You can be in your 60s and then next flat on your back. You think you're invincible, until you can't walk."

The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey was conducted Feb. 21 through March 27, with funding from the SCAN Foundation. The SCAN Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization that supports research and other initiatives on aging and health care. The nationally representative poll involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,019 Americans age 40 or older. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

___

Associated Press writer Stacy A. Anderson and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Government long-term care primer: http://longtermcare.gov

AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research: http://www.apnorc.org

Aging America is a joint AP-APME project examining the aging of the baby boomers and the effect that this so-called silver tsunami is having on the communities in which they live.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/long-term-care-aging-us-not-poll-says-174856514--politics.html

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How a phony tweet and computer trades sank stocks

NEW YORK (AP) ? For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble.

No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks ? eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Except most of the investors weren't human. They were computers, selling on autopilot beyond the control of humans, like a scene from a sci-fi horror film.

"Before you could blink, it was over," said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and an outspoken critic of high-speed computerized trading. "With people, you wouldn't have this type of reaction."

For decades, computers have been sorting through data and news to help investment funds decide whether to buy or sell. But that's old school. Now "algorithmic" trading programs sift through data, news, even tweets, and execute trades by themselves in fractions of a second, without slowpoke humans getting in the way. More than half of stock trading every day is done this way.

Markets quickly recovered after Tuesday's plunge. But the incident rattled traders and highlighted the danger of handing control to the machines.

"It's easy to plant a false rumor with machines in their current state," said Irene Aldridge, a consultant to hedge funds on algorithmic programs who teaches computer trading at New York University. She said most trading programs that read news just count the number of positive and negative words, without any filter.

Regulators have complained that these trading programs make it difficult for them to ensure markets don't misfire.

Just how exactly the trading unfolded Tuesday is still a bit of mystery.

Some experts say the computers took their cue from humans, picking up on a pause in buying as traders read the phony tweet. In Wall Street's insanely fast trading world, humans holding back for even a second could have signaled to computers that buyers were drying up and that prices could fall, and so the computers should sell fast.

Others, like Saluzzi, think computers may have sold on the tweet itself. That's possible because computer trading programs are increasingly written to read, and react to, news from social media outlets like Twitter.

Experts say the fake tweet seemed designed to catch a computer's attention.

Ron Brown, head of Elektron Analytics, a Thomson-Reuters unit that sells news feeds that computers can read, said that the words "explosions" or "Obama" alone wouldn't have triggered selling. But add "White House," and it's a combination even the slowest computer couldn't miss.

Brown said his service doesn't include Twitter in its feeds because there's too much useless "noise" in the deluge of tweets and, given the 140-character limit to tweets, often too little context.

Before the fake tweet appeared on Tuesday, it looked like any other good day on Wall Street. Unexpectedly strong earnings reports from Netflix and DuPont sent the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index up 1 percent at 1,578 with three hours to go in the trading day.

Then, at 1:08 p.m. EDT, a tweet appeared on the hacked AP Twitter account stating that two explosions at the White House had injured President Barack Obama. Stocks immediately started falling, and kept doing so for two minutes. AP quickly announced that its account had been hijacked and the report was false. Prices began to climb again.

A group called the Syrian Electronic Army said it was responsible for the hack. But the claim has not been corroborated. The FBI has opened an investigation into the incident, spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said.

Whoever was responsible, the damage was big. The Dow lost 143 points, or 1 percent, in two minutes. In the frenzied selling, oil prices dropped, gold rose, the dollar rallied and the price of Treasurys, seen by many investors as a hiding spot, shot higher, briefly knocking yields to their lowest level of the year.

Some Wall Street pros were surprised that a single tweet could move markets so much.

Julian Brigden, managing partner of Macro Intelligence 2 Partners, an investment consultancy, said the drop suggested an "unstable" trading environment dominated by investors too quick to buy or sell without any thought.

"To me, it's indicative of a very dangerous market," he said.

Though stocks eventually recovered for the day, investors have been on edge recently.

Both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average lost 2 percent last week, their biggest weekly drops in five months. Investors were reacting to slowing Chinese economic growth, plunging commodity prices and mixed earnings reports from big U.S. companies. A measure of likely future swings in stocks ? what's known as the "fear" index, or VIX ? jumped 40 percent at one point last week.

The Boston Marathon bombing added to the jitters.

"People are looking for a reason to sell, and (Tuesday) it was a fake Tweet," said Adam Sussman, head of research at Tabb Group, a research firm. "Of course, once they realized it was fake, they bought back in, or they stopped selling."

But he thinks humans played only a minor role in stock plunge. He said most professional investors are too savvy to sell on a tweet.

"They'd get a tweet from AP and then say, 'Oh, was there a corroborating tweet from Bloomberg? A corroborating tweet from Thomson Reuters?' and so forth," he said. "So I don't believe that anyone selling substantial money saw that tweet and just began selling off billions of dollars."

Joe Fox, founder of online brokerage Ditto Trade, said the selling was too fast for humans to have pulled off, and computers were to blame.

"Whoever this jerk (who wrote the tweet) is probably cost some people millions of dollars in a matter of minutes," he said.

Computer programs have come to dominate stock-market trading over the past 20 years. The goal is speed, and it's led to an arms race as companies develop ever-faster programs. High-frequency trading came under public scrutiny following the "flash crash" of May 6, 2010, when a glitch erased 600 points from the Dow Jones industrial average in five minutes.

One of the latest weapons in the arms race is machine-readable news. The Thomson Reuters service, one of the more popular offerings, scans 50,000 news sources and 4 million social media sites for stories.

Brown of Thomson Reuters says his programs take news articles and announcements and automatically flag answers to the essential questions ? who, what, where, when and why. The answers are translated into a code that an investment firm's trading program can understand and then sent to clients. All of that takes less than one-thousandth of a second.

It's up to the investment fund to place a value on each word and rank established news outlets over other sources like blogs or social media websites, Brown said.

Tapping into the stream of comments on Twitter has become increasingly popular. Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission cleared companies to release key announcements on Twitter, Facebook and other social-media venues. Bloomberg also added Twitter to its terminal, a fixture on every big bank's trading floor.

Johan Bollen, an associate professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University, said Twitter is more useful for getting a sense of public opinion. A study he co-authored in 2010 tied the overall mood of tweets to the direction of the Dow Jones industrial average and made a splash among managers of hedge funds.

But Bollen warned that mood is one thing, news is another.

"If you want to trade on the news from Twitter, you run the risk of trading on false data, even deliberately false data."

Regulators have been studying the problems posed by automatic computer trading for years. Last month, the SEC proposed tighter oversight of automatic trading. Stock exchanges would be required to test their trading systems routinely, and report to the SEC about problems that could damage trading, like hacking.

Aldridge, the computer trading consultant, said regulators should beef up their monitoring of Twitter, but that glitches and plunges may be inevitable in the brave new digital age. "You can't ban Twitter," she said.

Bart Chilton, a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, another regulator overseeing markets, said government investigators will find that high-speed trading programs "will have been all over this trading time period."

The CFTC has been examining high-speed programs to gauge their importance in the markets and consider possible new rules for them.

"The exchanges love speed," Chilton said. "I'm not so sure that fast is always better."

___

Associated Press writers Christina Rexrode in New York and Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/phony-tweet-computer-trades-sank-stocks-201916964--finance.html

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Kindle app for Android gains carousel browsing, expanded side panel

Amazon is rectifying the long wait for a Kindle for Android update today with a version 4.0 refresh that carries with it a major UI redesign. The library view looks very different: instead of a basic grid, recently read items are presented in a rotating carousel at the top of the home screen, while the navigation panel has been expanded to provide quicker access to books, documents and periodicals. The actual reading pane remains untouched, so whether you're using a smartphone or a tablet, your e-copy of War and Peace should still look the same. To have a peek at Kindle's new look, Android users can go ahead and download it from the source.

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Evernote's John McGeachie on business expansion, the shift to mobile and an update on two-factor authentication

Evernote Business has only been around since last summer, but it's already having an impact on how teams far and wide keep track of what's on the collective mind. The division's vice president John McGeachie sat down with us for a bit at The Next Web Conference this week in Amsterdam, giving us an inside look at how the company has evolved, what it has learned and where it hopes to go. Specifically for Evernote Business, McGeachie affirmed that there's a greater need for educating users as compared to individuals just testing the waters on its free service. "It sort of takes a while for people to figure out how to best fit Evernote into their workflow," he said, "but once that starts happening, people see that it adds an amazing amount of value to all of these different areas." He added: "That's basically how our whole marketing strategy works. We're really just listening to how people use Evernote, and then put that back out there [as use case scenarios]."

In that sense, Evernote's quite unusual. Many startups have to maintain a focused product just to convince a new audience to try something foreign. Evernote, on the other hand, is deliberately open-ended, and it's the company itself that's now learning how to evolve based on direct feedback. "Our best source of new users that stay and really use the product is from understanding how someone they know or someone they can identify with uses it," said McGeachie. He did, however, acknowledge that the huge amount of flexibility does mean that the learning curve is steeper. "We see a lot of people download the app and use it once, and they aren't sure what to do next, so they go away. But a lot of them come back and reengage because they read something or run into someone they know who uses it, and it clicks."

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