5:19 PM
Scientists confirmed that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July, only the 5th time in history that scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The fireball was spotted in the sky 6 months ago, but the rocks weren't discovered on the ground until the end of December. The biggest rock weighs over 2 pounds and all of the rocks are more valuable than gold. Since the last time a Martian meteorite fell and was found fresh was *50* years ago, a meteorite dealer said he is charging $11k to $22.5k an ounce and has sold most of his supply already--getting about 10x the price of gold:
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/01/General-Science-Space-Geology-Scientists-confirm-rocks-fell-from-Mars/
The Navy's newest ship that is supposed their minehunter of the future has been found by the Pentagon's testing organization to not be able to find and withstand mines. The Littoral Combat ship is the Navy's expensive next-generation ship and has also been found to have serious problems with corrosion and hasn't participated in any of the latest naval wartime missions. The Navy has 3 of the 55 Littoral Combat Ships it planned to buy, but the entire ship may be cut out of the budget:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/mines-littoral-combat-ship/
MIT research group is presenting a breakthrough algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform, in some cases this new algorithm is 10x faster! They take advantage of how most signals are sparse, and the sparser it is the greater the improvement achieved over the FFT. The algorithm divides signals into narrower slices of bandwidth, sized so that a slice will generally have only 1 frequency with a heavy weight. Their unpublished paper then describes how by sampling the slice of bandwidth at different times they are able to determine where the dominant frequency is in its oscillatory cycle:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/faster-fourier-transforms-0118.html
After 10 years of talks, governments will now vote this week on whether or not the leap second should be abolished. Leap seconds are added at irregular intervals to make up for the irregular wobble in the Earth's rotation to prevent atomic clocks from speeding ahead of solar time. The US, France, and others are pushing to eliminate the leap second while China, Canada, the UK and others warn about the consequences of having atomic clocks no longer synced to the solar day. There are big benefits for machines if the leap second use is eliminated, but eventually the clock would say that it is noon when the sun wouldn't have risen yet...
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/01/Information-Tech-Computing-Countries-consider-time-out-on-the-leap-second/
Oracle is looking to increase the value of its patent infringement lawsuit against Google and provides interesting information on the economic value Android represents to Google. Oracle said that more than 700,000 Android-based devices are activated every year (Google announced this themselves), resulting in every day's worth of Android activations adding $10 mil in annual mobile advertising revenue to Google. It appears that Oracle is using the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user that has been published elsewhere:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/oracle-says-each-days-worth-of-android.html
Google is offering users in India free WiFi to increase usage of Google+ and YouTube. O-Zone Networks will allow unlimited usage of Google+ and 10 minutes of free access to YouTube per week, but any other websites can only be accessed by paying for minutes. This sure seems like a smart way to get a huge emerging market to use Google+:
http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/google-free-wi-fi-india.html
More than 7,000 websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are blacked out today--this is apparently the biggest blackout of Internet sites in US history and is a big sacrifice for many of the participants:
http://sopastrike.com/
One of many good links to learn more about why so many sites are objecting to SOPA. The initial goal of SOPA was to stop foreign websites from hosting and distributing pirated works, but as the bill went through Congress and through the lobbying process, it appears to have morphed into something that has many other effects. Website owners and their visitors will have serious punishments if they are at all involved in distributing copyrighted material--under SOPA's definiation, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be in violation so all of their users could be subject to serious punishment:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-dangerous-opinion/
Google and Twitter are conducting a public argument over Google's search results increasingly showing Google+ pages and missing a number of Twitter pages. Twitter says that by promoting Google+ in search results, Google isn't providing the most relevant social results. Google says that Twitter would show up higher in searchers if Google had permission to promote Twitter pages. Twitter users create 200 million Tweets every day and Twitter includes "nofollow" links on its pages that stop Google's crawlers from understanding where links in tweets point to--Twitter stopped giving Google access to their Tweet firehose in July, which hurts their complaint of incomplete search results. Google results also do not index the "@" symbol (that sure seems like a simple flaw to fix!), so a search for "@WWE" would show Google+ results first since it would just be a search for "WWE", but a search for "WWE Twitter" shows the Twitter results first:
http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/ShowPR~PUBCODE~055~ACCT~0000100~ISSUE~1201~RELTYPE~IN~PRODCODE~000000~PRODLETT~JY.html?et_cid=2430654&et_rid=60838639
LightSquared publicly criticized the test results from a federal GPS advisory board that found that they interfere with GPS systems, saying that those tests were rigged to be biased against LightSquared. They are asking for federal agencies to conduct other tests--they kind of need to take this position because their network is dead without further testing and the Federal Agencies said that they would not do any further testing due to the failure of the recent tests:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/lightsquared-blasts-us-gps-interference-tests-says-sprint-loop/2012-01-18
China Mobile is spending about $633 mil to build a 700,000 square meter call center that will have 20,000 call center representatives and twice as many other staff in the building...60,000 people working in one HUGE call center!
http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=48375&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10
Nielsen found that Apple's iPhone 4S launch in the Fall had a huge impact on the US smartphone market--44.5% of US consumers who got a smartphone in December got an iPhone, compared to just 25.1% of consumers in October, with 57% of new iPhone owners in December getting an iPhone 4S. Android leads in the smartphone market place with 46.3% of US smartphone owners. 60% of US consumers that got a new phone within the last 3 months of 2011 chose a smartphone over a feature phone. Android and Apple simply dominated the Christmas sales season--91.4% of US smartphones sales were for Android or Apple smartphones, leaving tiny slivers of sales for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and other platforms:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/more-us-consumers-choosing-smartphones-as-apple-closes-the-gap-on-android/
Samsung backtracked from reports that they are merging their Bada operating system with Intel's open-source Tizen platform. Now Samsung says that they are considering the move but have not yet made an official decision:
http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/samsung-backpedals-badatizen-os-merger-plans/2012-01-18
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/01/General-Science-Space-Geology-Scientists-confirm-rocks-fell-from-Mars/
The Navy's newest ship that is supposed their minehunter of the future has been found by the Pentagon's testing organization to not be able to find and withstand mines. The Littoral Combat ship is the Navy's expensive next-generation ship and has also been found to have serious problems with corrosion and hasn't participated in any of the latest naval wartime missions. The Navy has 3 of the 55 Littoral Combat Ships it planned to buy, but the entire ship may be cut out of the budget:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/mines-littoral-combat-ship/
MIT research group is presenting a breakthrough algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform, in some cases this new algorithm is 10x faster! They take advantage of how most signals are sparse, and the sparser it is the greater the improvement achieved over the FFT. The algorithm divides signals into narrower slices of bandwidth, sized so that a slice will generally have only 1 frequency with a heavy weight. Their unpublished paper then describes how by sampling the slice of bandwidth at different times they are able to determine where the dominant frequency is in its oscillatory cycle:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/faster-fourier-transforms-0118.html
After 10 years of talks, governments will now vote this week on whether or not the leap second should be abolished. Leap seconds are added at irregular intervals to make up for the irregular wobble in the Earth's rotation to prevent atomic clocks from speeding ahead of solar time. The US, France, and others are pushing to eliminate the leap second while China, Canada, the UK and others warn about the consequences of having atomic clocks no longer synced to the solar day. There are big benefits for machines if the leap second use is eliminated, but eventually the clock would say that it is noon when the sun wouldn't have risen yet...
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/01/Information-Tech-Computing-Countries-consider-time-out-on-the-leap-second/
Oracle is looking to increase the value of its patent infringement lawsuit against Google and provides interesting information on the economic value Android represents to Google. Oracle said that more than 700,000 Android-based devices are activated every year (Google announced this themselves), resulting in every day's worth of Android activations adding $10 mil in annual mobile advertising revenue to Google. It appears that Oracle is using the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user that has been published elsewhere:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/oracle-says-each-days-worth-of-android.html
Google is offering users in India free WiFi to increase usage of Google+ and YouTube. O-Zone Networks will allow unlimited usage of Google+ and 10 minutes of free access to YouTube per week, but any other websites can only be accessed by paying for minutes. This sure seems like a smart way to get a huge emerging market to use Google+:
http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/google-free-wi-fi-india.html
More than 7,000 websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are blacked out today--this is apparently the biggest blackout of Internet sites in US history and is a big sacrifice for many of the participants:
http://sopastrike.com/
One of many good links to learn more about why so many sites are objecting to SOPA. The initial goal of SOPA was to stop foreign websites from hosting and distributing pirated works, but as the bill went through Congress and through the lobbying process, it appears to have morphed into something that has many other effects. Website owners and their visitors will have serious punishments if they are at all involved in distributing copyrighted material--under SOPA's definiation, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be in violation so all of their users could be subject to serious punishment:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-dangerous-opinion/
Google and Twitter are conducting a public argument over Google's search results increasingly showing Google+ pages and missing a number of Twitter pages. Twitter says that by promoting Google+ in search results, Google isn't providing the most relevant social results. Google says that Twitter would show up higher in searchers if Google had permission to promote Twitter pages. Twitter users create 200 million Tweets every day and Twitter includes "nofollow" links on its pages that stop Google's crawlers from understanding where links in tweets point to--Twitter stopped giving Google access to their Tweet firehose in July, which hurts their complaint of incomplete search results. Google results also do not index the "@" symbol (that sure seems like a simple flaw to fix!), so a search for "@WWE" would show Google+ results first since it would just be a search for "WWE", but a search for "WWE Twitter" shows the Twitter results first:
http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/ShowPR~PUBCODE~055~ACCT~0000100~ISSUE~1201~RELTYPE~IN~PRODCODE~000000~PRODLETT~JY.html?et_cid=2430654&et_rid=60838639
LightSquared publicly criticized the test results from a federal GPS advisory board that found that they interfere with GPS systems, saying that those tests were rigged to be biased against LightSquared. They are asking for federal agencies to conduct other tests--they kind of need to take this position because their network is dead without further testing and the Federal Agencies said that they would not do any further testing due to the failure of the recent tests:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/lightsquared-blasts-us-gps-interference-tests-says-sprint-loop/2012-01-18
China Mobile is spending about $633 mil to build a 700,000 square meter call center that will have 20,000 call center representatives and twice as many other staff in the building...60,000 people working in one HUGE call center!
http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=48375&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10
Nielsen found that Apple's iPhone 4S launch in the Fall had a huge impact on the US smartphone market--44.5% of US consumers who got a smartphone in December got an iPhone, compared to just 25.1% of consumers in October, with 57% of new iPhone owners in December getting an iPhone 4S. Android leads in the smartphone market place with 46.3% of US smartphone owners. 60% of US consumers that got a new phone within the last 3 months of 2011 chose a smartphone over a feature phone. Android and Apple simply dominated the Christmas sales season--91.4% of US smartphones sales were for Android or Apple smartphones, leaving tiny slivers of sales for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and other platforms:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/more-us-consumers-choosing-smartphones-as-apple-closes-the-gap-on-android/
Samsung backtracked from reports that they are merging their Bada operating system with Intel's open-source Tizen platform. Now Samsung says that they are considering the move but have not yet made an official decision:
http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/samsung-backpedals-badatizen-os-merger-plans/2012-01-18