Should Microsoft Dump Bing?

Does Microsoft need Bing, and the massive losses that it entails? Or would the company be better off jettisoning it, taking a piece of the new independent Bing, and walking away?

It depends on who you ask. An opinion piece that landed on both Reuters and the NYTimes website argues that Microsoft would be in an improved fiscal spot without Bing, as its negative profits are hurting the company?s bottom line. They posit that sans Bing, Microsoft could boost its total profit by a hefty amount, 10% even if the company dropped its entire Online Systems division.

Microsoft?s now infamously dragging stock could use the boost, the piece claims. Their view rests on a single point of assumed truth: that Bing is not mission-critical for Microsoft in the next ten years. Is that correct? Not everyone agrees.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet makes the case that Bing is more than a simple search engine that should be compared only, and directly, to Google. She phrases it like this: ?What many outside Microsoft seem to forget is that Bing isn?t a standalone entity. Yes, it is a search engine (one that?s very slowly growing in market share). But it?s a lot more than that to Microsoft. It?s a technology that is being baked into products all across the company.?

This, of course, explicitly refutes the case that the original opinion piece made (that Bing is axable) as it explains that Bing is a layer of search (or data retrieval and sorting, in other words) that Microsoft will deploy across its every product. From that perspective, selling Bing would be remarkably foolish as it would cut at the knee Microsoft?s ability to effectively manage user data on its various platforms, let alone combat Google on its own turf.

The Bing brand, in other words, is far more than a simple search market share number. It is an interconnected web of search related products that are being systematically baked into every corner of the Microsoft empire. Microsoft should sell that? Simply because it is expensive? Could it even sell Bing, as it is so deeply tied to a plethora of products?

It?s almost sheer lunacy, but the craziness behind the idea of pushing Bing off the back of the boat goes even farther, as the search engine is also one of Microsoft?s best moors to the Facebook boat. Bing is deeply integrated in Facebook, and Facebook into Bing. To sell off Bing would be to cut the biggest tie that Microsoft has to the social behemoth, harming the company?s future; Facebook is a critical, and critically willing, Microsoft partner.

This is why bean counters cannot be trusted to run a company. If all you look at is Microsoft?s PE and PEG ratios, and stare at its balance sheet and worry about its dividend yield, you will fail to recognize that Bing is going to be a key feature in Xbox, Windows Phone, Windows 8, and the firm?s entire Internet strategy. Yes, it loses money, but that is hardly a surprise given how hard Microsoft is driving the product, which is still quite immature compared to the company?s vision for its future.

So yes, Bing is setting fire to truckloads of currency, but that can be chalked up to product development and future positioning. Microsoft has 52 billion dollars in cash and short-term investments. It can take the Bing losses, and not care a whit about them because they frankly pale compared to the potential of the product that is being built.

Therefore, Mary Jo and I are in the same camp: Microsoft will not drop Bing, and it should not. Even Ballmer agrees.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/07/26/should-microsoft-dump-bing/

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News Analysis: A ?Unique Opportunity? on the Debt Ceiling, Lost

Instead, it is shaping up to be a lost opportunity.

Whatever deal Congress and President Obama devise in this final week to allow the government to keep paying its bills after Aug. 2 and avert an economy-rattling default, it almost certainly will fall short of the compromise that Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, nearly struck last week ? before details of the negotiations leaked, opponents in both parties protested and Mr. Boehner left the table.

The difference between that attempted ?grand bargain? and what Congress is coming up with is not just a matter of dollars. Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner did tentatively agree to more than $3 trillion in savings over 10 years ? at least hundreds of billions more than is called for in the fallback plans now bandied about in Congress to clear the way for a vote to increase the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling by next Tuesday.

But the more significant difference is in where the savings would come from. The Congressional proposals mainly seek caps on annual spending for domestic and military programs and no additional revenues.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner tentatively agreed to raise $800 billion in revenues after 2013 by overhauling the tax code and getting significant future savings from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security ? the entitlement programs whose growth as the population ages is driving long-term projections of unsustainable debt. While Republicans rebelled at the idea of tax increases, the package?s total spending cuts exceeded new revenues by more than three to one.

The Obama-Boehner package still could serve as the basis for a bigger and more comprehensive debt-reduction deal. But that probably would not be before the 2012 elections, people in both parties say, given House Republicans? unyielding stand against higher taxes.

More likely, they say, the debate over what Mr. Boehner called their ?different visions for our country? will define next year?s elections, along with the blame game if the two parties remain at loggerheads. How it plays out could determine both Mr. Boehner?s future as speaker and Mr. Obama?s as president.

Each believed his party would benefit politically by a comprehensive deal, not least by easing many Americans? pox-on-both-your-houses frustration with Washington gridlock ? a threat to incumbents ? and by avoiding blame for an economic crisis.

And while Mr. Obama also seeks to appeal to independent voters who make the difference in presidential elections, many Democrats complain he is too willing to compromise, potentially disillusioning their party?s voters and muddying the case against Republicans for proposing much deeper entitlement program cuts. Mr. Boehner?s problem is that some otherwise persuadable Republicans worry less about the general election than party primaries, and fear they could draw a conservative rival by supporting a deal with Mr. Obama.

?If that means more to you than getting a plan and stabilizing this economy, you?ve really got to wonder why you?re there,? said Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader who was a co-chairman of the bipartisan fiscal commission Mr. Obama set up last year.

A package like the one Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner were discussing would be the most ambitious deficit-reduction effort in memory. Former Republican lawmakers who fought in the deficit-cutting wars of the 1980s and 1990s, including Mr. Simpson, express puzzlement or dismay at House Republicans? willingness to let the tax issue stop them from taking Mr. Obama?s offers on reducing entitlement spending, especially since the new revenues would flow from an overhaul of the tax code that would lower most rates.

?If I were there,? said Mickey Edwards, a House Republican leader in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, ?I would say, ?My God, declare victory.? ?

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c178d46e89fc50296a4aa78227a8a568

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News Analysis: A ?Unique Opportunity? on the Debt Ceiling, Lost

Instead, it is shaping up to be a lost opportunity.

Whatever deal Congress and President Obama devise in this final week to allow the government to keep paying its bills after Aug. 2 and avert an economy-rattling default, it almost certainly will fall short of the compromise that Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, nearly struck last week ? before details of the negotiations leaked, opponents in both parties protested and Mr. Boehner left the table.

The difference between that attempted ?grand bargain? and what Congress is coming up with is not just a matter of dollars. Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner did tentatively agree to more than $3 trillion in savings over 10 years ? at least hundreds of billions more than is called for in the fallback plans now bandied about in Congress to clear the way for a vote to increase the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling by next Tuesday.

But the more significant difference is in where the savings would come from. The Congressional proposals mainly seek caps on annual spending for domestic and military programs and no additional revenues.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner tentatively agreed to raise $800 billion in revenues after 2013 by overhauling the tax code and getting significant future savings from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security ? the entitlement programs whose growth as the population ages is driving long-term projections of unsustainable debt. While Republicans rebelled at the idea of tax increases, the package?s total spending cuts exceeded new revenues by more than three to one.

The Obama-Boehner package still could serve as the basis for a bigger and more comprehensive debt-reduction deal. But that probably would not be before the 2012 elections, people in both parties say, given House Republicans? unyielding stand against higher taxes.

More likely, they say, the debate over what Mr. Boehner called their ?different visions for our country? will define next year?s elections, along with the blame game if the two parties remain at loggerheads. How it plays out could determine both Mr. Boehner?s future as speaker and Mr. Obama?s as president.

Each believed his party would benefit politically by a comprehensive deal, not least by easing many Americans? pox-on-both-your-houses frustration with Washington gridlock ? a threat to incumbents ? and by avoiding blame for an economic crisis.

And while Mr. Obama also seeks to appeal to independent voters who make the difference in presidential elections, many Democrats complain he is too willing to compromise, potentially disillusioning their party?s voters and muddying the case against Republicans for proposing much deeper entitlement program cuts. Mr. Boehner?s problem is that some otherwise persuadable Republicans worry less about the general election than party primaries, and fear they could draw a conservative rival by supporting a deal with Mr. Obama.

?If that means more to you than getting a plan and stabilizing this economy, you?ve really got to wonder why you?re there,? said Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader who was a co-chairman of the bipartisan fiscal commission Mr. Obama set up last year.

A package like the one Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner were discussing would be the most ambitious deficit-reduction effort in memory. Former Republican lawmakers who fought in the deficit-cutting wars of the 1980s and 1990s, including Mr. Simpson, express puzzlement or dismay at House Republicans? willingness to let the tax issue stop them from taking Mr. Obama?s offers on reducing entitlement spending, especially since the new revenues would flow from an overhaul of the tax code that would lower most rates.

?If I were there,? said Mickey Edwards, a House Republican leader in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, ?I would say, ?My God, declare victory.? ?

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c178d46e89fc50296a4aa78227a8a568

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Amazon eyeing success in cloud computing

Cloud-based computing services aren?t new by any meaning of the word, but only in the past few years have we been hearing an increasing buzz in the community on the subject. Big names like Microsoft and Google have already established successful cloud computing platforms while others like Apple and their iCloud service are just around the corner. Reuters is reporting that Washington-based online retailer Amazon suspects that ?the Cloud? will be responsible for their next billion-dollar business. 

Amazon is primarily known for their online store but the truth is that they have been offering cloud computing to business for many years. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the company realized that their servers were grossly unutilized as loads rarely stressed the powerful hardware. In an effort to put the unused processing power to good use, the company started Amazon Web Services (or AWS) in 2006. AWS is an online cloud computing service based on utility computing which is a metered service that charges the customer for only the amount of resources they need and doesn?t require a contract.

Up to this point, little has been released about the internal workings of AWS. We do know that AWS consists of two major components. S3 sells data storage while EC2 sells computing power. Amazon claims to have hundreds of thousands of customers already enrolled in the program, spanning more than 190 countries worldwide.

"While still very small for Amazon (likely about $750 million revenue run rate), given the size of the market opportunity and Amazon's strong competitive positioning, we believe that this could soon be a $1 billion revenue segment," said Citigroup Internet analyst Mark Mahaney in a note to investors.

Another industry analyst, Doug Anmuth from J.P. Morgan, thinks that AWS revenue will reach as high as $2.6 billion within four years as the need for off-site data centers increase.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44817-amazon-eyeing-success-in-cloud-computing.html

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Is There Still a Need for Water-Cooling?

For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.

Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.

Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.

Even as far back as the release Intel's first mainstream quad-core CPUs, such as the Core 2 Quad Q6600, air coolers were quickly becoming potent enough for newcomers to question the significant outlay involved with water-cooling. The new heatpipe-clad tower coolers were becoming more efficient at every step, and there's usually an air cooler that will enable you to push all but the hottest running CPUs to the max, albeit with additional noise.

However, with Intel's LGA1155 CPUs, we've seen time and time again that air coolers such as Thermaltake's Frio and BeQuiet Dark Rock Advanced are more than able to provide just as much overclocking headroom as a decent water-cooling kit, and with similar noise levels too. Our current LGA1155 thermal test kit is a case in question - we've overclocked our Core i7-2600K to a lofty 4.6GHz, and both the aforementioned coolers handled this overclock admirably.


Graphics cards are a slightly different matter, however, as we've found just as much reason to water-cool the current graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 590 3GB as any previous generation. In fact, even mid-range graphics cards such as the GTX 560 Ti 1GB get quite warm and noisy under load, and many third party coolers haven't been able to tame them significantly.

Motherboards are a bit of mixed bag, though. I'd go as far as saying that I've had far fewer failures and stability issues since I've been water-cooling the motherboard in my PCs - the hot-running chipset on LGA1366 motherboards, for example, is almost certainly the reason for quite a few dead systems in our lab, as well as other problems I've read about in various forums.


However, water-cooling your motherboard is an expensive business - full cover blocks can retail for over £100, and most LGA1155 motherboards simply don't require shedloads of voltage either. With Intel and AMD's next-generation high-end CPUs on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how future families of motherboards fare on a day to day basis - will LGA2011 be another hot-running LGA1366 for example?

Aside from noise reduction, where water-cooling still has the edge in a few key areas, there is one other reason to invest in water-cooling. It looks fantastic. There's a reason why we award points to cases that look good, and why modding projects are so popular. Lots of us want to have a cool-looking PC and are willing to spend money achieving that goal. Thankfully, the water-cooling industry has taken notice and strived to meet the demand for a diverse and flexible range of hardware.

You only have to look at websites such as Aquatuning, Chilled PC and FrozenCPU to see the huge the range of components on offer these days, which makes it very easy to make a unique water-cooled PC. In addition, the huge range of gear is appealing to those who want to go one step further than just bolting a load of off-the-shelf parts together, and instead want to either mod their PC or even build it from scratch.

Even if the next generation of hardware doesn't notably benefit from water-cooling, there's always a small gap between air cooling and extreme cooling, and there will still be a huge market for it, for the simple reason that it's cool.

What do you think the future has in store for water-cooling? Have you been put off for any reason, or do you swear by it? Let us know in the forums.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/6kLCR_8EuZY/

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Primary Calendar Stirs Republican Anxiety

The 2012 presidential race is the first to fall under new rules from the Republican National Committee, which had intended the contests to start in February, a month later than in 2008. But at least a half dozen states are threatening to defy the rules and move up their primaries.

The result is that the first ballots are once again likely to be cast in January as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina move up the dates of their contests to protect their franchises as the early voting states.

At the same time, the rush toward the front of the calendar by Florida, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Missouri is accompanied by another trend: several states are pushing back their presidential primaries ? or canceling them entirely ? because of tight state budgets.

The outcome is a sharply scaled-back set of contests in the weeks after the initial flurry ? with Super Tuesday in particular diminished in importance ? followed by a stretch of primaries lasting until summer.

The California presidential primary, which in 2008 took place in February, is most likely to be held in June, the same day as the statewide primary, to save the state $100 million. New York, which also held its presidential primary in February last time, has pushed back its date to April 24. And the state of Washington will not hold its presidential primary to save $10 million.

?If there was ever a calendar that was designed for the nominating battle to go the distance, this is it,? said John Weaver, the chief strategist for the campaign of Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah. ?It could easily go into April and May.?

The unsettled calendar has created anxiety and opportunity for Republican candidates.

If Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enters the race, as his advisers believe he will in the next few weeks, he could face a hospitable run of primaries. The Texas primary on March 6, which comes with a large trove of delegates, will be followed by several other contests across the South.

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has been working to build a muscular political organization to help fortify him through a drawn-out nominating fight. His associates have urged Utah, which he won in 2008, to move up its primary so a clutch of Western states could provide friendly terrain. Republicans in Idaho voted last week to hold caucuses on March 6.

A game of leapfrog takes place every presidential election cycle, with states trying to break the monopoly that Iowa and New Hampshire have held for decades by holding the first caucus and first primary. Yet every effort has produced the same result: Iowa and New Hampshire simply move up their contests.

?At this point, there are a few more states in play than there were four years ago,? said William M. Gardner, New Hampshire?s secretary of state. ?New Hampshire will be the first. I just don?t know when it will be.?

The catalyst in the intense jockeying among states is Florida. Republican leaders want the state to hold a prominent spot in the early phase of the nominating process. The Legislature formed a committee to select a primary date, which is likely to be in early March, but could move to February or late January if other states advance their contests.

The ambitions of Florida are being carefully watched by Republican leaders in other states that have their own aspirations to play a key role in helping to select the party?s nominee.

?We can?t let Florida establish an early beachhead in the process,? said Saul Anuzis, a member of the Republican National Committee who is from Michigan. ?There?s been this game of chicken between Florida and Michigan, saying if you guys go early, we?re going to go early.?

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=734fa533aa4b287f3c2df622c24279a1

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Is There Still a Need for Water-Cooling?

For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.

Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.

Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.

Even as far back as the release Intel's first mainstream quad-core CPUs, such as the Core 2 Quad Q6600, air coolers were quickly becoming potent enough for newcomers to question the significant outlay involved with water-cooling. The new heatpipe-clad tower coolers were becoming more efficient at every step, and there's usually an air cooler that will enable you to push all but the hottest running CPUs to the max, albeit with additional noise.

However, with Intel's LGA1155 CPUs, we've seen time and time again that air coolers such as Thermaltake's Frio and BeQuiet Dark Rock Advanced are more than able to provide just as much overclocking headroom as a decent water-cooling kit, and with similar noise levels too. Our current LGA1155 thermal test kit is a case in question - we've overclocked our Core i7-2600K to a lofty 4.6GHz, and both the aforementioned coolers handled this overclock admirably.


Graphics cards are a slightly different matter, however, as we've found just as much reason to water-cool the current graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 590 3GB as any previous generation. In fact, even mid-range graphics cards such as the GTX 560 Ti 1GB get quite warm and noisy under load, and many third party coolers haven't been able to tame them significantly.

Motherboards are a bit of mixed bag, though. I'd go as far as saying that I've had far fewer failures and stability issues since I've been water-cooling the motherboard in my PCs - the hot-running chipset on LGA1366 motherboards, for example, is almost certainly the reason for quite a few dead systems in our lab, as well as other problems I've read about in various forums.


However, water-cooling your motherboard is an expensive business - full cover blocks can retail for over £100, and most LGA1155 motherboards simply don't require shedloads of voltage either. With Intel and AMD's next-generation high-end CPUs on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how future families of motherboards fare on a day to day basis - will LGA2011 be another hot-running LGA1366 for example?

Aside from noise reduction, where water-cooling still has the edge in a few key areas, there is one other reason to invest in water-cooling. It looks fantastic. There's a reason why we award points to cases that look good, and why modding projects are so popular. Lots of us want to have a cool-looking PC and are willing to spend money achieving that goal. Thankfully, the water-cooling industry has taken notice and strived to meet the demand for a diverse and flexible range of hardware.

You only have to look at websites such as Aquatuning, Chilled PC and FrozenCPU to see the huge the range of components on offer these days, which makes it very easy to make a unique water-cooled PC. In addition, the huge range of gear is appealing to those who want to go one step further than just bolting a load of off-the-shelf parts together, and instead want to either mod their PC or even build it from scratch.

Even if the next generation of hardware doesn't notably benefit from water-cooling, there's always a small gap between air cooling and extreme cooling, and there will still be a huge market for it, for the simple reason that it's cool.

What do you think the future has in store for water-cooling? Have you been put off for any reason, or do you swear by it? Let us know in the forums.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/6kLCR_8EuZY/

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Massive Project to Study the Link between Genetics and Health

Most health insurers are wary of genetics because, in most cases, it's not yet clear how a particular genetic variation influences an individual's health, or whether it should affect their care.

Now Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest nonprofit health plan, has announced that it's finished the first phase of a massive project to compile genetic, medical, and environmental information for 100,000 of its members. Researchers also analyzed the length of participants' telomeres?a molecule structure at the tip of the chromosome that has been linked to aging. This represents the largest telomere study to date.

The resulting data, gathered in collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco, will soon be available to outside researchers who study how different genetic and environmental factors influence disease. It took about 15 months for the team to collect and analyze the genomes of 100,000 people ranging in age from 18 to 107. The team used gene microarrays?small chips designed to quickly detect hundreds of thousands of genetic variations across the genome.

While genetic studies have been done on this scale before, they focused on one or a few diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. The Kaiser project is unusual in that it includes years of comprehensive medical information?including blood-test results, medications, and other conditions?in the form of electronic health records. (Kaiser was one of the earliest adopters of electronic medical records in the United States.)

"The computerized data goes back 15 years," says Neil Risch, a statistical geneticist at UCSF who co-led the study.  "It's not like we have 100,000 blood-pressure measurements?it's closer to a million." By combining that information with prescriptions, for example, researchers could examine how genetics influence blood pressure and the effectiveness of medication.

Researchers will also incorporate environmental data, such as air-quality and water-quality records, based on knowledge of where participants lived and when.

Because the average age of the participants in the study is 65, "we think some of the most interesting initial questions will relate to aging," says Cathy Schaefer, executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Program on Genes, Environment, and Health, and a co-leader on the project. "Specifically, are there genetic and environmental influences that lead to people living to a ripe old age without serious problems?"

Researchers will continue to follow participants as long as they continue to receive health care from Kaiser. They can examine, for example, how accurately telomere length can predict longevity or healthy aging.

Genetic studies such as these have often raised privacy concerns?the concern is that individual participants could be identified and their data misused. Because the health-plan provider is involved in the research, the fear in this case is that Kaiser could use genetic information to alter rates or drop some members. But this type of discrimination is outlawed by the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, passed in 2008. In addition, research participants' information has special protection under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Patrick Taylor, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, says he is not concerned about privacy issues in this case, in part because the project has oversight from the National Institutes of Health. (The project was funded by a two-year $24.8 million grant from the NIH.)  In addition, Kaiser has a long history of commitment to its members, says Taylor, who has studied the organization.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=2c57089f60c2fb57c8c33bf07712a997

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Mozilla is building a mobile OS to take on Android?s faux-openness

Mozilla has announced its own new project to offer a truly open alternative: a Gecko-based mobile operating system, CNET reports.

Gecko is the rendering engine that drives Firefox (and other browsers such as Camino) and Thunderbird.

Mozilla?s project will be called Boot to Gecko and code will be made available to the public as it is written. Andreas Gal says:

We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process. We aren?t trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we?re trying to have them run on the web.

Gal goes on to say that ?we propose a project we?re calling ?Boot to Gecko? (B2G) to pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web? that will run on phones and tablets.

The implication behind Mozilla?s stress on an entirely open development process with real-time publishing of new code is that the foundation doesn?t believe competitor Google?s Android is really built in the spirit of open source software.

Android has been called out in the past for taking advantage of the marketing benefits that come from adopting the open source label when the biggest competition, Apple?s iOS, is infamously closed and proprietary. Despite adopting the label, Google routinely closes off insight into the Android development process and even releases the source code for new projects well after the binary releases.

Despite the implication, the Boot to Gecko project will use some Android kernel and driver code to enable it to run on Android devices.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/07/26/mozilla-is-building-a-mobile-os-to-take-on-androids-faux-openness/

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Glucose Meter Can Detect Cocaine, Uranium in Blood

Researchers have shown that an off-the-shelf glucose meter can be used to test blood samples for a variety of substances, including cocaine, the pathogen-related protein interferon, the biochemical adenosine, and traces of uranium. The ability to measure such medically important targets without expensive lab testing could be particularly vital in developing countries.

The researchers modified the chemistry of blood samples in order to use glucose concentration as a proxy for detecting the concentration of these substances. The research was conducted by Yu Xiang and Yi Lu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"There's an elegant simplicity to their repurposing," says Kevin Plaxco, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The development of a general sensing platform with the convenience and form-factor of the home glucose meter is the holy grail of biosensor research," he says.

To achieve this, Xiang and Lu first modify a sample (typically blood) with a solution containing microscopic magnetic beads. Attached to these beads is a piece of DNA that binds to a desired target, as well as invertase, an enzyme that drives the breakdown of sucrose into glucose. When the target binds to the DNA, it releases invertase from the magnetic bead. Once the target is bound to the DNA?a process that takes anywhere from seconds to minutes, depending on the target?the solution is exposed to a magnet, which pulls out the remaining magnetic beads, which hold the unreleased invertase. The solution is then mixed into another that contains sucrose. The released invertase breaks the sucrose down into glucose?and the concentration of glucose is directly related to the concentration of the target. In a final step, the solution is put onto a test strip and into the glucose meter, giving a reading of the concentration of the target substance in the original sample.

"This paper sets an excellent example in combining novel sciences with existing technologies for translational research and development," says Weihong Tan, a chemistry professor at the University of Florida. "This will revolutionize the field of biosensors and push biosensors to be practically useful in personalized medicine and in medical diagnosis."

Colin Campbell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, says Xiang and Lu have "steered around one of the common questions asked of such technologies: 'Can you really make it small enough and simple enough that anyone could use it?' " Furthermore, he says, "It is important and impressive that the authors have demonstrated detection in complex samples like blood."

However, "several hurdles should be overcome if this technique is commercialized," says Jaebum Choo, a professor of bio-nano engineering at Hanyang University. "First, there are not many target contents which can be captured by specific sequences of DNA." He also sees the magnetic separation, which adds another step to the process, as a problem, calling it "another hurdle to be considered in the integration process for the commercialization."

Lu hopes to make the process simpler by replacing the magnet with a filter that would separate the unreleased invertase from the mixture as it is injected into the sucrose solution via syringe. He hopes to see his research lead to commercially available chemical testing kits. "The science and technology are already well developed," he says, "and there are only several engineering challenges that need to be overcome to reach this goal."

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