Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Posted on 8th Jun 2011 at 07:28 by Clive Webster with 70 comments

While it?s good news for customers that Intel is aiming to make superportable laptops that rival the MacBook Air affordable for many, via its ?ultrabook? project, it shows a slightly outdated mode of thinking. When asked what would make superportable laptops successful, Intel?s executive vice-president Sean Maloney replied that a low price would do it. Low price = more sales = more profit, the conventional wisdom goes. Or does it?

The problem with the equation above is that low price = low margin, and you therefore rely on huge sales to make significant profits. And the drive to lower prices can lead to design compromises ? plastic rather than aluminium shells, steel rather than magnesium alloy skeletons, cheap components that fail more quickly or are louder or slower. This is the PC industry for the last 30 years.

But it?s a flawed business model ? just look at UK box-shifter Mesh, which ceased trading recently. Equally, look at Acer. For years it has been trimming its costs to be ultra-efficient while also climbing the league tables in terms of units sold. All this effort was in many ways the pinnacle of the low-price philosophy of making money from computers. And it failed: Apple is more profitable.

That?s the shift that we?re seeing: so far, we?ve made do with stuff that kind of works, does a job and doesn?t cost too much. Now we want technology that?s cool, that looks like it could be from the future and that we?re not embarrassed to leave out on the coffee table. Make something desirable and it will sell, even if you whack on a decent margin. And from that decent margin you can invest in customer support (how many negative stories have you heard about Apple customer support? How many positive ones?) and into the creation of new, even more desirable kit.

Of course, the Apple success story doesn?t end at merely charging extra for desirability, there?s the fact that it takes a 30 per cent skim of any software sold for that desirable item. However, the point that it?s desirability and not cheapness that really makes money these days doesn?t crumble in light of the App Store levy caveat. Hopefully superportable laptop makers won?t forget this fact, despite Intel?s out-of-date thinking about them; certainly if preview shots from Computex 2011 are anything to go by, Asus hasn?t with its UX21. Could we see desirably light laptops without a prohibitive price? Possibly, but I?m hoping that the latter doesn?t undermine the former.

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Two New Tools for Self-Tracking

As Nadeem Kassam sauntered down the hall of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, over Memorial Day weekend, all attention was on his wrist. The museum was host to the first annual Quantified Self conference, a gathering of people who use different tools to record a variety of personal metrics with the goal of improving their health, happiness, and productivity.

Kassam was sporting the hottest new fitness monitoring gadget: a device that looks and acts like a watch, but which also measures heart rate and other physiological factors. The monitor, made by self-tracking startup called Basis (which Kassam cofounded), is unique in the number of metrics it tracks; it detects heart rate from the wrist using near infrared spectroscopy, along with both skin and ambient temperature, and galvanic skin response, a measure of sweat on the skin that is linked to both physical activity and stress or excitement. Only a few people have been selected as beta testers for the device, which is slated to come out "soon."

"We analyze five different data streams and figure out what people are doing in the context of life," says Julie Wilner, product director at Basis. "High heart rate and temperature probably means someone is exercising." Low activity, as recorded by the accelerometer, suggests the wearer is sleeping. The device also tracks quality of sleep based on movement during this phase. It combines various measures to calculate the number of calories burned during the course of a day. Accompanying software helps users track and visualize how they are progressing over time. "Are they becoming more active?" says Wilner. "Do they get better or worse sleep on certain day of the week?"

The Basis watch is one of a growing number of new tools that seeks to passively collect data on the wearer's health and behavior with the aim of helping them to change it for the better. These devices are part of the new movement in self-tracking, enabled by a new generation of wireless devices and smart phone apps to track exercise, nutrition, sleep, mood, and other variables.  "In the past, only a motivated few would keep a diary for more than a few weeks," says Wilner. "We want to bring these tools to people who wouldn't do this on their own, people who make New Year's resolutions but don't keep them."

Green Goose is another startup with technology that generated a big buzz at the conference. The company takes a different tack on self-tracking, with cheap, sensor-laden stickers for everything from your toothbrush to the dog's leash. The sensors have an embedded accelerometer, along with an ultralow power wireless transmitter to send data on the object's movement to a central base station.

The company's ultimate idea is to transform healthy behavior into a game. Users can set specific goals?walk the dog twice a day, brush after every meal?and software will award points for successful completion. Green Goose cofounder Brian Krejcarek said at the conference that the company is working on a couple of initial applications for the sensors, but it also plans to partner with others to create a variety of games and other applications. 

"Once you get low enough in price, imagination explodes in terms of what you can do with the sensors," said Krejcarek.

One of the benefits of Green Goose's approach is that because the stickers become an embedded part of everyday objects (each sticker has a year's worth of battery power), they can't be tossed in a drawer once the novelty wears off. "If you stop looking at the data, you can jump right back in again," said Krejcarek. They expect to have the stickers on the market next year.

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U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype ?Internet in a suitcase.?

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban?s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country?s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration?s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. ?We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,? Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. ?There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,? she said. ?So we?re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.?

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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Humanity Plus: How Transhumanism Could Change the Human Race

Human technology is an incredible phenomenon. It?s something that grows exponentially: for every advance we make, our next advances are more varied and easier to attain.

Our inventions are all around us, every day, making every part of life easier. Some people say that?s a terrible thing. I?m a futurist ? I think it?s incredible.

But hey, if you want to go back to shoveling your own waste into the ground, be my guest.

Here?s a concept that?s even more fascinating than human technology: human technology. That is, putting the technology into humans.

Transhumanism, as it?s known, is the process of augmenting ourselves with advanced technology; the point where the technology isn?t merely an extension of ourselves ? like your smartphone probably is ? but a part of ourselves.

In shorthand, futurists refer to transhumanism as H+, or humanity plus. In just two characters they make the claim that technology can make us better than we are.

We?re a flawed species. I?m sure there are many things that can make us better than we are, like meditation for those inclined. But this concept of transhumanism ? and the technologies that put it into practice, both conceptually and in practice right now ? is the method of species improvement that fascinates and captures the imagination beyond any other.

The Fathers of Transhumanism

Transhumanism, for a topic so firmly rooted in the most modern, cutting-edge technologies of our day, has surprisingly old roots. Philosophers say that the human impulses that drive this desire to become something more were first recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known recorded works of literature, which features a quest for immortality.

From the Bible?s Tree of Life to Stargate?s Ascension, the whole span of human literature is full of examples of our desire to become something more advanced than we are.

In the 19th century, Russian philosopher Fyodorov wrote about the potential of science to one day enable us to become immortal or raise each other from the dead, setting off a wave of discussion that was just as hopeful as fiction and legend but, for the first time, was speculatively serious (let?s discount the alchemists of various times and civilizations, whose theories were generally supported by supernatural assumptions).

In 1923, geneticist J.B.S. Haldane wrote that every advance in genetics and technology, when applied to humanity, would be called indecent, unnatural and blasphemous. So far, he?s been right. More time is spent discussing the ethics of human augmentation than on creating such technologies.

To be clear, I think it?s important that the ethics of augmentation are discussed. Just not the way the religious right hijacks the discussion and puts a blanket on rational debate.

It was Julian Huxley ? brother of the famous science fiction writer Aldous ? who first used the term transhuman, defining it as ?man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.? It was not until the next decade that the new definition (transhumanism as a transition to posthumanism, which we?ll look at momentarily) would enter the discourse in academic circles.

In later years, transhumanism is brought into the discourse of artificial intelligence and the Singularity by important figures in those fields, Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil prime among them. Kurzweil, who outside of his synthesizers is most famous for his thoughts on the Singularity, holds to the view that transhumanism is an important stepping stone toward human immortality.

The Transhuman & The Posthuman

The ideas of transhumanism and posthumanism are closely linked. The transhuman is to the posthuman as the homo heidelbergensis is to the homo sapiens, one might say.

The posthuman is the destination: the human that transcends humanity through undefined means ? technologically, spiritually, genetically. The posthuman has much in common with the Übermensch, a philosophical concept coined by Nietzsche that would come to be interpreted in many ways: racially by the Nazis, eugenically in a great deal of literature ? The Wrath of Khan must be one of the seminal works in any rigorously academic posthumanist literature list ? and through technology.

On the other hand, the transhuman is the journey. The term applies to people who are adopting the technologies and ideologies that lead to posthumanity ? thus making them transitional: in between where we will be and where the rest of us are now.

What?s hard to determine is where transhuman becomes posthuman. Is it when mind uploading becomes a reality and we no longer need the human body? But certainly that in itself is not a final destination. Technological advancement is potentially limitless, and we?ll always find ways to apply that to our posthuman selves: bigger, better, faster memory! Better processing and indexing of input! Better hardware to allow ourselves to interface with the world!

Some may even argue that as soon as we augment ourselves in any way, we become posthuman. By this definition, everyone with a cochlear implant is posthuman. This approach has no place for transhumanism in the ideological landscape.

Like the grass that?s greener, I think it?s likely that transhumanism will always be a valid concept, even when one could argue that the posthuman has arrived. The destination is a concept rather than something we can quantify and achieve.

Everyday Transhumans

It?s easy to condemn transhumanistic endeavors when detractors are quick to flood the discussion with images of Star Trek?s Borg and Shelley?s Frankenstein.

But there are people who are living as transhumans today, and their quality of life (and in some cases, their life, period) can be attributed to their transhuman features.

When you take a step back and look at the good these technologies do for people ? people you may well know ? that harsh glare fades away pretty quickly. For most people, the families of the deaf who can now hear thanks to the cochlear implant or those with heart conditions who are alive because of their pacemaker, that these devices even exist is reason for gratitude and optimism.

The cochlear implant is an incredible invention. Granted, it?s a poor substitute for real hearing, and you can hear for yourself what speech and music sound like through one of these devices. But it?s incredible because it?s an invention that, in lieu of an ear, plugs right into the nervous system to send the electrical impulses of sound to our brain. Even if it does so badly right now, it?s a leap ahead of the regular hearing aid.

The expensive implants are purchased by those who are completely deaf or reasonably close. If they want to hear, they have no other option but to enter this static-filled world. What?s amazing is that they are often able to hear and hold conversations without assistance after some adaptation time.

Imagine what such devices will look like decades down the line. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi La Forge is a blind engineer who uses a ?visor? to see. This visor doesn?t just compensate for a lack of human sight, as the cochlear does for hearing. It allows him to see spectrums of light well beyond regular human perception. When will we have cochlear devices that extend the range and spectrum of human hearing beyond what is naturally possible with even the best ears?

I wouldn?t be surprised to see that before I die.

We?ve seen a wave of transhuman development in recent years. Australian researchers this year created a technology that allows the disabled to dictate to a computer. In 2004, a quadriplegic man received a brain implant that allowed him to check email and play games using his thoughts. The more recent development in Australia means people like him could soon be writing responses to those emails as well.

After forty years of academic excitement and debate around the concept of transhumanism, we?re no longer waiting for it. We?re seeing it happen.

Haldane?s Law

There?s no such thing as Haldane?s Law. I?m making it up for convenience. Remember his assertion that every technology that?s developed to augment humans beyond their natural capabilities would be met with disgust, claims that scientists are playing God, and comparisons to Frankenstein?

There are many examples of this in history. One of those is IVF. The first IVF baby was born in 1978 and the public reaction was one of condemnation for the scientists, the parents and the child itself. Those scientists had to stop their work after the second delivery because of that reaction, but today over 100,000 IVF babies are born each year.

Today, we see IVF as a normal approach to solving fertility problems. The only people left opposing it would fit in Fred Phelps? dining room.

One of IVF?s long-time detractors, Leon Kass, once said regarding cloning that those who tolerate it have ?forgotten how to shudder and always rationalize away the abominable.?

This is a common argument by the group of people that Haldane?s Law refers to. What it does is take the responsibility of rationalism off of those who oppose things simply because they make them recoil.

But how do you define the abominable rationally? Historically, abominations are defined only by what we are not yet familiar with. In the past society has called homosexuals abominable. For the most part, at least in the Western world, we?re beyond that phase of societal retardation now, but as a species we?re certainly not past the instinct to recoil at the unknown.

It?s that instinct, as unevolved as it is, that people like Kass hope will prevail.

To me, they might as well say: ?this isn?t rational, and we can?t defend it. We?re just disgusted.?

We continuously see this cycle in motion. People are frightened by new discoveries or just the plain old unusual, cause a public kerfuffle, and hold up social advance or technological adoption for a time ? a time in which the lives of people who need such social or technological advance could have benefited.

But just for a time. As the years roll by, more and more people are willing to take risks as the public discourse and debate slowly adjusts their expectations, making people feel more at ease and familiar with such things. The early adopters ? for instance, the first IVF customers ? decide to go ahead at the expense of condescending looks from their friends and neighbours, until it becomes normal.

The Future of Transhumanism

As interesting as it is to consider that we?ve already taken the first steps into the realm of transhumanism, the real wonder ? at least for futurists ? is in what could be possible.

The cochlear implant is an amazing thing, but it?s got nothing on the speculation and predictions for the future.

According to futurist George Dvorsky, experts believe that genetic diseases can be eliminated by 2030. But that?s not all our rapid advances in genetics can help us achieve. Our intelligence and memory, our health and strength, can all be improved in the next few decades ? though the costs associated with having yourself modified will likely remain sky-high for decades.

In that vein, imagine a world where you can have your metabolism adjusted to suit your line of work, instead of doing crazy things to manipulate your body?s metabolic regulation.

In science fiction, we?ve seen plenty of examples of sensory enhancement. As is often the case, futurists are following sci-fi?s lead and working to bring those things to life. We may see implants that return vision to the blind, La Forge style. There are predictions of high resolution implants that will allow humans to see things at great distances in great detail.

Forgoing the idea of implants, there?s the possibility of changing sensory organs themselves ? for instance, adapting the human eye to take on some of the characteristics of the eagle eye, allowing us improved vision without the need for electronic devices in our skull.

As an extension of our eyes rather than an improvement, heads-up displays are a real possibility, and they?ll allow us to perform computing tasks in our head, with our eyes as the monitor. There are two methods that scientists speculate such technology would employ: retinal display, where the light is projected directly onto the retina, and synaptic interface, which doesn?t use light to create an image but rather transmits visual information directly to the brain.

This will no doubt inspire many run-of-the-mill applications such as checking your email in your head and quickly looking up words in the dictionary during a conversation so you don?t look like an idiot. But, as an atypical geek, I?m excited about the implications for gaming: synaptic interfacing would enable receipt of stimuli for other senses as well, meaning we could play completely life-like, realistic games in our head. It?s the Holodeck, without the need for a physical space.

Interestingly, the synaptic interface method has the reverse application of capturing visual data, using your eyes as a video camera. The synaptic interface method hasn?t been tested on humans, but there has been some success in capturing video signals from the optical nerves of horseshoe crabs, and even in sending video signals back into the crabs? brains.

A combination of synaptic interfacing and networking would make telepathic communication one of the more basic applications of this technology. Chances are, once the synaptic interface problem is solved, telepathy will be one of the first ways for (rich) consumers make use of it.

Humans are vain, and of course cosmetic applications haven?t been ignored. Anti-aging technology could combat free radicals and oxidation through chemical/hormonal control or nanotechnology. We could control the pigments of our hair follicles, the hormones that control male baldness, and even generate tattoos that can be painlessly created, modified, animated, and easily removed.

We could disconnect our emotions when there?s a need for rationality ? such as when that car salesman is sucking you in on an unnecessary upgrade ? or select our instinctual motivators, switching off our desires for food, entertainment and sex when we need to focus on work we?re not motivated to complete. Or, instead of switching them off, we could re-align them so that the work feeds into and satisfies those motivators.

While you?re up there screwing around with things in your head, why not adjust your pain threshold so you can take a beating without breaking a sweat well past the point CIA trained operatives would have broken?

Here?s the kicker: the things I?ve just mentioned? They?re the small biscuits, the inventions that?ll come and go in the near future before our real breakthroughs, as far as futurist scientists are concerned.

Blood too inefficient? Replace it with vasculoid! Traumatic injury? Switch on accelerated cell regrowth! Worried about your weakest failure point, the heart, even with genetic improvements to its reliability and longevity? Get a redundancy heart system.

What if you get crushed by a train? That heart system would?ve been a waste of money ? it?s not going to help you in that scenario. So how about we forget about iCloud and backup our DNA and our brain contents, ready to be restored in a new body at the drop of a.. well, train?

We can adapt our bodies to deal with extreme environments that we?re usually unable to explore without restrictive suits or remotely through robots ? for instance by using the anti-freeze proteins found in the Arctic Flounder in our own bodies. It?s a technique that has already shown success in preserving citrus plants through harsh winters.

There?s a lot of talk about being unable to ever leave our own solar system because, even with the technology to create a ship that?ll get us that far, last that long, and not run out of fuel, we?ll die because even nearby trips take tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Cryostasis is a sci-fi favorite solution for this, and nanites may help to make it work. It could be augmented with the development of a natural ability to hibernate, for shorter trips within the solar system for instance.

Transhumanism is About the Dream

Some people would read that last section and feel repulsed. Many others would feel excited. Transhumanism, for the latter group of people, isn?t so much about the technology itself as it is about the dream of becoming better: of going beyond the capabilities that we were born with.

It?s no surprise, then, that transhumanism is a popular philosophy among wealthy entrepreneurs like Raymond Kurzweil. That same idea of going beyond what?s considered possible has applied in their personal and business lives, too.

Transhumanism is a heady subject. The possibilities get the mind spinning. The ethical implications result in debates that roll on for decades. It?s something that academics dedicate huge chunks of their lives to studying and considering.

For me, I?d rather leave the ethical debates to someone else and look at the sheer possibilities. I just hope that I live long enough to see some of the more radical applications of transhuman technology become a reality.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/12/humanity-plus-how-transhumanism-could-change-the-human-race/

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Next Patch Tuesday includes 9 critical bulletins, plugs 34 holes

Microsoft announced yesterday that it's preparing to unleash a whopping 16 bulletins next week. Slated for June 14, this month's Patch Tuesday will address 34 vulnerabilities across many products. The update follows a comparatively light cycle in May, which included only two security bulletins.

Of the 16 patches, nine are labeled "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating, while the remaining seven are deemed "important." All of the critical flaws can lead to remote code execution, while the others can enable denial of service attacks, information disclosure and elevation of privilege.

Seemingly every supported version of Windows is affected, spanning from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 SP1 and their respective Server counterparts. IE6 through 9, Silverlight, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 through 2010, as well as all supported versions of Office for Windows and Mac are also listed.

IT professionals can expect a busy day, as more than half of the updates will require a reboot. In fact, June as a whole will be quite hectic. Adobe's quarterly patch is due next week and you can expect various fixes for Adobe Reader X, Acrobat X and earlier versions for both Windows and Mac systems.

Next week will also bring a new version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool. Earlier this week, Adobe released an out-of-band patch for Flash to address a vulnerability being actively exploited, and Oracle shipped a bundle of critical updates for Java SE covering various versions of JDK and JRE. 

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Chicks vs. Kittens iPhone Review

Chicks vs. Kittens iPhone Review

Posted on 7th Jun 2011 at 07:53 by David Hing with 4 comments

In Gaming Digits' Chicks vs. Kittens you?re charged with ensuring the safety of a mother bird defending her nest against a hoard of poultry-hungry kittens. This is achieved by hatching chicks and weaponising your offspring against the feline invaders. As you do.

Games for iOS live and die by their personality, though, not whether their premises make sense, and Chicks vs. Kittens has plenty of personality. Your ammunition flaps around happily while it waits to drop onto enemies, while the climbing kittens are more lovable than sneezing baby pandas, with animations that are clear and crisp even when they?re blown up to iPad size.

As far as the controls and gameplay go, Chicks vs. Kittens is a simple reaction test with a little bit of tower defence strategy thrown in to boot. The influence of the latter is manifested in the way you equip your chicks to perform different roles through the use of hats. Hats can be used to increase the strength of chicks, to upgrade your leaf-based economy or to change the way they attack kittens. Variations are constantly added throughout the game.


However, while Gaming Digits has gone to some lengths to layer a sense of strategy into the game, there?s no escaping the fact that Chicks vs. Kittens is a casual game at its root. It quickly becomes tedious if you play it for any length of time, even though it?s initially very fun. The longer you play, the more the constant introduction of new hats and ideas starts to feel like feature creep, rather than legitimate expansions to the scope of the game.

The level design is also rather minimalist. Every level is similar, with backgrounds only swapping out in every few levels, and only minor differences separating them otherwise. Some trees, for example, don?t shed the leaves you need to grow your economy, meaning you have to shake your iDevice to get them loose ? one of Game Digits? nicer ideas. Other levels vary the wind or speed at which leaves drop, which varies the pace, but does little to actually affect the game at large. The controls are intuitive, though, and the game-speed is occasionally enough to plumb you into a Zen state of tapping ? one which can only be spoiled by an errant finger.


However, there are a few bugs that plague the game, which undermines the slickness of the controls and animations, and ultimately prevented us from finishing all 60 levels. The biggest problem involved levels that just don?t seem to end, despite the halt of advancing kittens. These bugs are likely to be ironed out in the next update, but for now it?s hard to overlook errors such as these.

Verdict: Chicks vs. Kittens is a pleasant distraction if you need to kill time on the bus everyday; it's a fun game with a casual core at its heart. However, its charm isn?t enough to recommend it when there are bugs that mar the experience to this degree and plentiful similar titles on the AppStore.

Chicks vs. Kittens is available from the Apple AppStore for 59p or 99c.

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Kuwaiti arrested for criticising Bahrain and Saudi Arabia governments on Twitter

It may not be the first time that a Twitter user is arrested for their tweets, but Nasser Abul is the first Kuwaiti citizen to face this charge. The irony in his arrest is that his criticism was not of the Kuwaiti government itself, but rather of criticizing the Bahraini and Saudi governments, particularly in relation to their treatment of the Shi?ite minority, of which he is one. His arrest is just one more trend in the clearly iron clad links between the GCC governments.

But that is not the only controversy in this story. Nasser Abul?s arrest on Thursday garnered mixed reactions from Twitter users, due to his vocal support of the Syrian regime. But support for the arrested Twitter user has far outweighed anything else. Kuwaiti Shi?ite Member of Parliament Hassan Johar tweeted that Abul?s arrest was a violation of freedom of expression and that he should not be held without any charges being brought against him.

This is not the first time an online activist?s arrest has been met with mixed reactions in the Middle East. Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil?s, arrest and three year prison sentence earlier this year went unheeded by many Egyptian activists due to the blogger?s pro-Israeli stance.

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Two New Tools for Self-Tracking

As Nadeem Kassam sauntered down the hall of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, over Memorial Day weekend, all attention was on his wrist. The museum was host to the first annual Quantified Self conference, a gathering of people who use different tools to record a variety of personal metrics with the goal of improving their health, happiness, and productivity.

Kassam was sporting the hottest new fitness monitoring gadget: a device that looks and acts like a watch, but which also measures heart rate and other physiological factors. The monitor, made by self-tracking startup called Basis (which Kassam cofounded), is unique in the number of metrics it tracks; it detects heart rate from the wrist using near infrared spectroscopy, along with both skin and ambient temperature, and galvanic skin response, a measure of sweat on the skin that is linked to both physical activity and stress or excitement. Only a few people have been selected as beta testers for the device, which is slated to come out "soon."

"We analyze five different data streams and figure out what people are doing in the context of life," says Julie Wilner, product director at Basis. "High heart rate and temperature probably means someone is exercising." Low activity, as recorded by the accelerometer, suggests the wearer is sleeping. The device also tracks quality of sleep based on movement during this phase. It combines various measures to calculate the number of calories burned during the course of a day. Accompanying software helps users track and visualize how they are progressing over time. "Are they becoming more active?" says Wilner. "Do they get better or worse sleep on certain day of the week?"

The Basis watch is one of a growing number of new tools that seeks to passively collect data on the wearer's health and behavior with the aim of helping them to change it for the better. These devices are part of the new movement in self-tracking, enabled by a new generation of wireless devices and smart phone apps to track exercise, nutrition, sleep, mood, and other variables.  "In the past, only a motivated few would keep a diary for more than a few weeks," says Wilner. "We want to bring these tools to people who wouldn't do this on their own, people who make New Year's resolutions but don't keep them."

Green Goose is another startup with technology that generated a big buzz at the conference. The company takes a different tack on self-tracking, with cheap, sensor-laden stickers for everything from your toothbrush to the dog's leash. The sensors have an embedded accelerometer, along with an ultralow power wireless transmitter to send data on the object's movement to a central base station.

The company's ultimate idea is to transform healthy behavior into a game. Users can set specific goals?walk the dog twice a day, brush after every meal?and software will award points for successful completion. Green Goose cofounder Brian Krejcarek said at the conference that the company is working on a couple of initial applications for the sensors, but it also plans to partner with others to create a variety of games and other applications. 

"Once you get low enough in price, imagination explodes in terms of what you can do with the sensors," said Krejcarek.

One of the benefits of Green Goose's approach is that because the stickers become an embedded part of everyday objects (each sticker has a year's worth of battery power), they can't be tossed in a drawer once the novelty wears off. "If you stop looking at the data, you can jump right back in again," said Krejcarek. They expect to have the stickers on the market next year.

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Blog - How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards

Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon, etc. Since 2005, however, the ICO has also included computer simulations of billiards.

Pool is a hard game for computers to play because it's not just about sinking balls -- it's also about setting up the table to your opponent's disadvantage. Throw in opportunities to sink more than one ball at a time and the literally infinite number of shots that can be taken in every turn, and you've got a gigantic parameter space for a computer to chew on.

And that's before you get to the problem of translating the computer simulations of pool to the real world. Right now there are a handful of robots capable of playing the game, most notably Deep Green of Queen's University, which is an industrial robot.

Warning, the following video has unnecessarily loud, pounding music:

But back to the world of virtual pool: in this realm, advances are being made all the time, in hopes of creating a pool AI so powerful that it can some day be paired with a physics simulator and robot capable of beating the world's best human players.

The latest development, while modest, allows a pool-playing AI to better optimize its shots for both pocketing extra balls and breaking clusters of them. Researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Quebec, are tuning their AI's decision-making model to take multiple factors into account when planning its shots, since pool is about strategy as much as skill.

Part of the value of attacking this problem is that it's so distinct from other models problems in computer science and artificial intelligence, such as Chess. In Chess, all the options available to a player are discrete -- there are only so many pieces that can be moved, in a prescribed number of ways, at any given moment.

Pool, on the other hand "features a unique combination of properties that distinguish it from others such games, including continuous action and state spaces, uncertainty in execution, a unique turn-taking structure, and of course an adversarial nature." That's a quote from Computational Pool: A new challenge for game theory pragmatics (pdf), which announces the next tournament for virtual pool, to be held in August 2011.

Interestingly, this competition will attempt to simulate what it would be like for these virtual pool players to have their models translated into real-world pool by robots: "The championships will feature separate competitions at different noise levels, allowing for innovation and new ideas, since new strategies may be most effective at the new noise levels."

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Weiner to Enter Treatment Center and Seek Leave From House

The announcement came as three top Democratic leaders declared that Mr. Weiner, 46, once a rising star in the party, needed counseling and should step down from Congress.

Pressure on Mr. Weiner to leave the House, and spare the Democratic Party from an increasingly embarrassing scandal, had been building all week, but intensified on Friday, after it was revealed that Mr. Weiner had traded private messages with a 17-year-old girl in Delaware.

Mr. Weiner, who friends say has become distraught and fragile in recent days, will use the leave to think about his future and whether to leave Congress, a possibility he has not entirely ruled out, a person close to him said.

But Mr. Weiner?s plan did not satisfy exasperated Democratic leaders, who have been trying to persuade him that he is damaging himself, his family and his party by remaining a member of the House.

The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, spoke to Mr. Weiner on the phone Saturday morning and, notably, released her statement calling for his resignation after he told her of his plan to
get treatment and to take the leave. Mr. Weiner received a similar phone call from Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, urging him to resign.

Mr. Weiner has been talking with a therapist in New York City over the past couple of days, as fallout from his online scandal worsened and he absorbed the message from his colleagues and advisers that his conduct reflected not just bad judgment but perhaps a deeper psychological problem.

?Congressman Weiner departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person,? said his spokeswoman, Risa Heller. ?In light of that, he will request a short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well.?

Ms. Heller would not identify the facility or the precise kind of counseling Mr. Weiner, who has admitted having explicit communications with six women he met online, would receive. She stressed that he was carefully considering the calls from his fellow lawmakers urging him to give up his seat.

Mr. Weiner has been resistant in telephone calls over the past week with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Israel, who have been warning him that if he does not quit, they will make their case publicly.

They were especially frustrated, according to one high-ranking Democratic official, when Mr. Weiner repeatedly told them he could not resign now because his wife, Huma Abedin, was traveling abroad with her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ? an assertion they viewed as an unpersuasive pretext.

Ms. Pelosi had hoped that the congressman would reach the decision on his own to go. In addition to her concerns about the political distraction Mr. Weiner had become, Ms. Pelosi concluded that his behavior required medical intervention.

?When you are this self-destructive, there is obviously something deeper going on with you,? said a Pelosi adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being seen as betraying her confidence.

Asked how Mr. Weiner reacted to his phone call Saturday morning, Mr. Israel said, ?He absorbed it, but he obviously had more pressing matters to deal with.?

The pressure from colleagues had been building throughout the week, but the report on Friday that Mr. Weiner corresponded on Twitter with the 17-year-old girl further inflamed the situation. A Democratic National Committee official told members of Mr. Weiner?s staff that the congressman?s assertion that his exchanges with the girl, a high school junior, were ?neither explicit nor indecent? did not really matter at this point.

The concerns of Democratic leaders were echoed by those closely advising Mr. Weiner throughout the week, who said they watched him become more anguished as sensational news media coverage continued about his graphic interactions with the women on social media.

One friend said it had become abundantly clear that Mr. Weiner was no longer in a position to make clear-headed decisions about his career and health.

?He was falling apart,? said a longtime friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the relationship.

Thomas Kaplan and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

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