Microsoft Brand In Sharp Decline

Posted by kdawson on Friday March 28, @12:28PM
from the no-surprise-to-anyone-here dept.

Amy Bennett writes "A recent poll of about 12,000 US business decision-makers by market researcher CoreBrand found that Microsoft's brand power has taken a dive over the past four years. According to the study, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful US company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries. The CEO of CoreBrand said: 'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.' To add some historical context, IBM suffered a much faster and more severe decline in brand power in the early 1990s and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation."

[+] business, microsoft, haha (tagging beta)

Is Parallelism the New New Thing?

Posted by kdawson on Friday March 28, @10:23AM
from the still-working-on-the-old-new-thing dept.

astwon sends us to a blog post by parallel computing pioneer Bill McColl speculating that, with the cooling of Web 2.0, parallelism may be a hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors. (Take with requisite salt grains as he is the founder of a Silicon Valley company in this area.) McColl suggests a few other upcoming "new things," such as Saas as an appliance and massive memory systems. Worth a read.

2007: Americans cut back on driving

by Josh Loposer
Mar 27th 2008 @ 2:30PM

Filed under: Cars and Transportation, News, Travel and Vacation, Green by the Numbers

The 20+ year streak is over! 2007 marked the first year in over two decades where Americans drove less in terms of overall mileage than the year before. According to the Federal Highway Administration, America's total mileage dropped 0.4% in 2007, clocking in at 3 trillion miles -- down from 3.01 trillion in 2006.

It looks like we finally have an answer to what kind of all-powerful force it will take to actually put the brakes on America's driving habit: high gas prices. While I'd like to claim that the underlying reason was a widespread conservation mindset and biking movement, I think that Americans are simply cutting down on unnecessary trips, joyrides, etc. because it's no longer economical.

Thus far in 2008, gas prices are hitting new highs, so I'm sure that Americans' driving habits will probably taper off again this year -- I know mine have. I mean, we though that $3 a gallon was expensive last year, but we're already nearing $3.50 this year. Domestic vehicles are getting to be more fuel efficient, and that's great. But if gas was still $1.50, I think that better gas mileage just encourages taking longer and more frequent trips. Who wants to pile in for a country drive?

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Glycine Could Be Key To REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, Study Shows

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Evolution Of New Species Slows Down As Number Of Competitors Increases

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Brief, High Doses Of Folate -- B Vitamin -- Blunt Damage From Heart Attack

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2008) — Long known for its role in preventing anemia in expectant mothers and spinal birth defects in newborns, the B vitamin folate, found in leafy green vegetables, beans and nuts has now been shown to blunt the damaging effects of heart attack when given in short-term, high doses to test animals.

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Designing Environmentally Friendly Communities

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2008) — The University of Illinois at Chicago's City Design Center has produced a 96-page electronic publication illustrating ideas for green development in East Garfield Park as a case study for use by Chicago neighborhoods and individuals.

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Designing Environmentally Friendly Communities

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2008) — The University of Illinois at Chicago's City Design Center has produced a 96-page electronic publication illustrating ideas for green development in East Garfield Park as a case study for use by Chicago neighborhoods and individuals.

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Brain Scientist Shedding Light On Learning, Memory

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2008) — Neurons spoke to Dr. Joe Z. Tsien when he was a sophomore college student searching for some meaningful extracurricular activity.

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Daihatsu and Provision building HLXX 3D holographic dashboard, the future

Posted Mar 28th 2008 4:35AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Displays, Transportation

If those darn kids would get out of the way, what you'd see before you is a fancy new dashboard that Daihatsu teamed with Provision Interactive Technologies to build for its latest concept car. They're calling it HLXX, and it's pretty straightforward: there's a traditional flat screen 2D dashboard that is used for all the usual driving infos, with a 3D holographic screen in front that overlays warnings or alerts so they're more easily seen by the driver. Daihatsu hopes to have HLXX in production vehicles by 2012, but until then we suppose we'll just have to pretend these gauges and dials on our dashboards are 3D. Oh wait.

Tags: daihatsu, hlxx, holographic, provision interactive technologies, ProvisionInteractiveTechnologies

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Army tests of Land Warrior high-tech uniform successful, soldiers request more

Posted Mar 28th 2008 2:29AM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We knew the Army's supposedly-dead Land Warrior high-tech uniform program still had some life in it, but now it appears that good marks from tests in the field might mean it's going to make a full recovery. The Army sent the 4/9 Infantry (aka the "Manchus") off to war loaded down with the 16-pound Land Warrior kit, and after some on-the-fly adjustments that made the gear lighter and more functional, the soldiers had talked Land Warrior up to the point where the 2nd Infantry Division's 5th Combat Brigade Team has now officially requested 1,000 more Land Warrior rigs. The main change is the removal of six pounds of inessential gear, but the crew in the 4/9 also requested and added in a "digital chem light," which allows buildings and waypoints to be marked in green on an electronic map, and restricted Land Warrior deployment to team leaders and above. There's still some tricky funding problems to solve -- some $102M needs to be set aside for the request -- but the Land Warrior project managers say it's looking promising. Now if we could only get some of that HUD monocle action on the civilian side, our morning coffee run would be a lot more interesting.

Tags: army, land warrior, LandWarrior, military, us army, UsArmy

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Countering An Approaching Water Crisis

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In Poker, Psychologists Place Bets On Skill

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Chemists Find New Important Contributor To Urban Smog

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2008) — Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that a chemical reaction in the atmosphere above major cities long assumed to be unimportant in urban air pollution is in fact a significant contributor to urban ozone -- the main component of smog.

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Ants Are Experienced Fungus Farmers

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2008) — It turns out ants, like humans, are true farmers. The difference is that ants are farming fungus.

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Entomologists Ted Schultz and Seán Brady at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have been providing new insight into the agricultural abilities of ants and how these abilities have evolved throughout time. Using DNA sequencing, the scientists were able to construct an "evolutionary tree" of fungus-growing ants, which revealed a single pioneering ancestor that discovered agriculture approximately 50 million years ago.

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Does It Suck To Be An Engineering Student?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday March 24, @12:41PM
from the what-doesn't-suck dept.

Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."

[+] education, whining (tagging beta)

Sun aims to speed up data by swapping wires for frickin' laser beams

Posted Mar 24th 2008 11:26AM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Desktops, Misc. Gadgets, Laptops

It's far from the first time we've seen lasers touted as a means of boosting data speeds exponentially, but Sun seems to think it has a better chance than most of making it a reality, thanks in no small part to $44 million in funding from DARPA. As The New York Times reports, that cash haul will be put to use to "explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams," which would not only allow for computers to be smaller, but as much as a thousand times faster as well. Needless to say, however, there's quite a few significant hurdles to overcome before that happens, and even Sun itself admits that there's a "50 percent chance of failure." They also say, of course, that the potential benefits are worth the risks, with them even going so far as to boast that the technology would be a way of "breaking Moore's Law."

NASA scientists puzzled as data show oceans actually cooling

by Patrick Metzger
Mar 24th 2008 @ 8:01AM

Filed under: Climate Change

This climate change thing sure is complicated. Researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory studying temperature changes in the world's oceans are finding they don't seem to have heated up all in the last 5 years or so.

Scientists at the lab have been working on a program called Argo that looks at ocean temperatures using robotic buoys which dive down to three thousand feet to collect data. Since the study began in 2003, measurements have not only failed to find evidence of warming, but in fact have picked up a slight cooling trend.

The results of the study are especially significant since 80-90% of global warming involves the oceans, which retain far more heat than land.

The findings are difficult to reconcile with surface readings, which show consistently rising temperatures. JPL scientist Josh Willis recently said in an interview with NPR that the phenomenon may have something to do with heat flowing from the water into the air (the phenomenon known as El Nino), or it may reflect a a brief hiatus in an overall warming trend. Other possibilities are that researchers aren't interpreting the data properly, or that the heat is going deep into the ocean where it isn't being measured by the Argo buoys.

As if the figurative waters weren't muddy enough, static sea temperatures should imply stable sea levels, since water expands when heated. However, sea levels have risen by about half an inch in the last four years - a significant change.

So is it time to take a long drive in the Hummer and hack down a little rain forest to celebrate the end of global warming? Probably not; climate is incredibly complex, and there are clearly a few things going on here that aren't fully understood just yet. However, it may be time to fire up the old supercomputer and reexamine the climate change models.

Therapeutic Cloning Treats Parkinson's Disease In Mice

ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2008) — Research led by investigators at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has shown that therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), can be used to treat Parkinson's disease in mice.

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Eating Causes Stress, But Antioxidants Can Help

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We Help Friends Due To Empathy; Relatives Due To Expectation Of Reciprocity

ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2008) — Empathy is an emotional reaction to the plight of others. Empathy can lead to altruistic behaviour, i.e. helping someone with the sole intention of enhancing that person’s wellbeing. If we see people in difficulty, for example, we feel the same emotions, and this may prompt us to help them. Yet the relationship between empathy and altruism is still far from clear. Psychologist Lidewij Niezink has researched this subject. She concluded that when we help friends in need, we are prompted by feelings of empathy, and that when we help relatives we do so because we have expectations of reciprocity.

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Black Carbon Pollution Emerges As Major Player In Global Warming

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Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 24, @04:09AM
from the paging-dr.-schrodinger-line-4-please dept.

Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"