IIMB to start 1-yr course

IIMB to start 1-yr course

INDIAN Institute of
Management, Bangalore (IIMB)
will be launching a new one year
full-time post-graduate pro-
gramme in management start-
ing in 2009. The new course will
targe...read more...

Cell Phone Users Secretly Tracked

Cell Phone Users Secretly Tracked
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
June 4, 2008 -- Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives. Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.
The scientists would not disclose where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.
Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time period.
The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed.
Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn't know the individual phone numbers because they were disguised into "ugly" 26-digit-and-letter codes.
That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking, however, is legal and even marketed as a special feature by some U.S. cell phone providers.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, opens up the field of human-tracking for science and calls attention to what experts said is an emerging issue of locational privacy.
"This is a new step for science," said study co-author Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, director of Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research. "For the first time we have a chance to really objectively follow certain aspects of human behavior."
Barabasi said he spent nearly half his time on the study worrying about privacy issues. Researchers didn't know which phone numbers were involved. They were not able to say precisely where people were, just which nearby cell phone tower was relaying the calls, which could be a matter of blocks or miles. They started with 6 million phone numbers and chose the 100,000 at random to provide "an extra layer" of anonymity for the research subjects, he said.
Barabasi said he did not check with any ethics panel. Had he done so, he might have gotten an earful, suggested bioethicist Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania.
"There is plenty going on here that sets off ethical alarm bells about privacy and trustworthiness," Caplan said.
Studies done on normal behavior at public places is "fair game for researchers" as long as no one can figure out identities, Caplan said in an e-mail.
"So if I fight at a soccer match or walk through 30th Street train station in Philly, I can be studied," Caplan wrote. "But my cell phone is not public. My cell phone is personal. Tracking it and thus its owner is an active intrusion into personal privacy."
Paul Stephens, policy director at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, said the nonconsensual part of the study raises the Big Brother issue.
"It certainly is a major concern for people who basically don't like to be tracked and shouldn't be tracked without their knowledge," Stephens said.
Study co-author Hidalgo said there is a difference between being a statistic -- such as how many people buy a certain brand of computer -- and a specific example. The people tracked in the study are more statistics than examples.
"In the wrong hands the data could be misused," Hidalgo said. "But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns....We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better."
Knowing people's travel patterns can help design better transportation systems and give doctors guidance in fighting the spread of contagious diseases, he said.
The results also tell us something new about ourselves, including that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly, he said.
"Despite the fact that we think of ourselves as spontaneous and unpredictable...we do have our patterns we move along and for the vast majority of people it's a short distance," Barabasi said.
The study found that nearly half of the people in the study pretty much keep to a circle little more than six miles wide and that 83 percent of the people tracked mostly stay within a 37-mile wide circle.
But then there are the people who are the travel equivalent of the super-rich, said Hidalgo, who travels more than 150 miles every weekend to visit his girlfriend. Nearly 3 percent of the population regularly go beyond a 200-mile wide circle. Less than 1 percent of people travel often out of a 621-mile circle.
But most people like to stay much closer to home. Hidalgo said he understands why: "There's a lot of people who don't like hectic lives. Travel is such a hassle."

Hi-tech CEOs offer Yahoo, Microsoft merger advice

Hi-tech CEOs offer Yahoo, Microsoft merger advice
By Eric Auchard Thu May 29, 11:31 PM ET
CARLSBAD, Calif. (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc seem to hang out in all the same places but somehow keep missing each other.
That's turned speculation over what it will take to get the two of them together into something of a CEO parlor game.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch said this week he is "mystified" the two have not come to terms. E-commerce mogul Barry Diller said Microsoft should never have fired a hostile shot at Yahoo if they didn't plan to stick it out.
Yahoo board member Bobby Kotick joked that he had tried to get top executives from Microsoft and Yahoo together to play Guitar Hero 4, the hit video game from the company he runs, Activision Inc.
In separate appearances at the D: Conference this week, the top executives of Microsoft and Yahoo said no progress had been made on a merger, though they were discussing lesser deals.
The two had held abortive takeover talks over a three-month period that ended May 3, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock has said.
Microsoft walked away from a proposal to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 a share, after Yahoo rebuffed it, saying it wanted $37 a share. Then in mid-May, the companies said they had begun talks on an unspecified deal short of a merger.
On Wednesday, Yahoo's co-founder and chief executive, Jerry Yang, threw cold water on speculation that they might be edging back into merger discussions.
"Microsoft is no longer interested in buying the company, and we are talking about other things. We definitely have to understand what they're proposing ... they clearly have an interest in Yahoo, and we need to understand more," he said.
In an on-stage interview at the conference, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said talks had broken down largely over price. Appearing with Yang, Yahoo President Susan Decker agreed price had always been the biggest barrier to reaching a deal.
Diller, who runs the company behind rival Ask.com, believes a merger of Microsoft and Yahoo is necessary to gain the scale to take on Google in Web search and advertising.
Diller expressed surprise at Microsoft's decision to withdraw its offer and "move on" after pursuing Yahoo at regular intervals over the past two years.
"It seems to me if you fire a gun in a hostile offer, the bullet has to land in the heart," he said in his own on-stage appearance at the conference on Wednesday. "Otherwise, I can't imagining firing at all."
Murdoch agreed, saying that given the original 62 percent premium Microsoft was willing to pay for Yahoo, Ballmer should be more patient.
"You aim the gun and you fire," Murdoch said, echoing Diller. "They are not used to big deals, so they backed off."
Murdoch's News Corp has gotten nowhere in its own efforts to talk to both sides in recent months about alternative deal arrangements involving his MySpace Web business.
The wily 77-year-old deal-maker ruled out prospects for an alternative deal between Yahoo and Google Inc to succeed, saying regulatory issues would likely derail it.
And he dismissed activist investor Carl Icahn's campaign to replace the Yahoo board in a proxy fight at the company's July annual shareholder meeting as "helpful noise" to Microsoft and a threat that Yahoo shouldn't bother worrying about.
"That is not serious," Murdoch said of Icahn. "Look, he wants to make a few hundred-million dollars for himself."
Murdoch's conclusion is that Microsoft and Yahoo need to lock themselves in a room and put their last respective offers on the table and settle on a deal.
Speaking as if he were one of the negotiators, Murdoch said "Look, if it is complicated, we will clean it up afterward."
Anticipating the flood of free advice from other executives, Yahoo made up its own joke video in which Yang and Decker are seen being inundated with unsolicited advice from top technology industry CEOs, investors and media pundits.
Warren Buffett's advice to Yang? "Buy low, sell high."

Dull jobs really do numb the mind

Mistakes can be predicted by patterns of brain activity
Boring jobs turn our mind to autopilot, say scientists - and it means we can seriously mess up some simple tasks.
Monotonous duties switch our brain to "rest mode", whether we like it or not, the researchers report in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
They found mistakes can be predicted up to 30 seconds before we make them, by patterns in our brain activity.
The team hopes to design an early-warning brain monitor for pilots and others in "critical situations".
The scientists say the device would be particularly suitable for monotonous jobs where focus is hard to maintain - such as passport and immigration control.
Mistakes 'foreshadowed'
"We might be able to build a device (that could be placed) on the heads of people that makes these easy decisions," said Dr Eichele, of the University of Bergen, Norway.
"We can measure the signal and give feedback to the user that your brain is in the state where your decisions are not going to be the right one."

Headsets could be designed to offer "early warning" of mistakes
In the study, Dr Eichele and his colleagues asked participants to repeatedly perform a "flanker task" - an experiment in which individuals must quickly respond to visual clues.
As they did so, brain scans were performed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
They found the participants' mistakes were "foreshadowed" by a particular pattern of brain activity.
"To our surprise, up to 30 seconds before the mistake we could detect a distinct shift in activity," said Dr Stefan Debener, of Southampton University, UK.
"The brain begins to economise, by investing less effort to complete the same task.
"We see a reduction in activity in the prefrontal cortex. At the same time, we see an increase in activity in an area which is more active in states of rest, known as the Default Mode Network (DMN)."
Workplace safety
This is not a sign of the brain going to sleep, says Debener.
"Autopilot would be a better metaphor," he explains. "We can assume that the tendency to economise task performance leads to an inappropriate reduction of effort, thus causing errors."

Device could help pilots and air traffic controllers maintain focus
Since this state begins about 30 seconds prior to a mistake being made, it could be possible to design an early-warning system that alerts people to be more focused or more careful, said the researchers.
That could significantly improve workplace safety and also improve performance in key tasks, such as driving, analysis of X-rays, or airport security screening.
But MRI scanners are neither portable enough nor fast enough to be practical for these real life scenarios, so the next step is to see if more mobile EEG devices are able to detect the phenomenon.
A prototype of a wireless, mobile, and lightweight EEG amplifier is currently in development and could be ready for the market in "10 to 15 years", says Dr Debener, who is based at the MRC Institute of Hearing Research, at Royal South Hants Hospital.
"But first, we must establish what is causing these mistakes," he adds.
"We do not know whether the change in brain activity we see has a causal link to the mistakes. After we establish that, we can try to develop monitoring devices."

New discoveries on the sun's surface The sun's turbulent surface Astronomers have detected huge regions of the sun's surface that are rising and falling. These convection cells play an important role in how the sun rotates. Our science correspondent David Whitehouse explains.
When astronomers look closely at the sun's 6,000 degree Celcius surface they can see that it is bubbling. Earth-sized regions of the suns surface are rising and falling as gas floats to the surface, cools and descends to be reheated.
However for 30 years astronomers have scrutinised the sun's surface with sensitive detectors looking for much larger convective cells that they believe should be there.
Cells on the sun - Jupiter shown to scaleA team from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center said: "It is like finding the high and low pressure weather systems that govern the weather on earth."
While these giant regions will tell scientists more about what happens on the sun's turbulent surface they may also have practical implications back on earth.
"I'm convinced that it should enhance our ability to predict space weather," said Dr David Hathaway. "This is because the giant cells influence the position of sunspots."
It is sunspots that throw into space streams of particles that can strike the earth.
The giant convection cells could also explain another solar mystery: why it rotates faster at the equator than at the poles.
"These new observations open a new avenue for understanding the sun," Dr Hathaway said.

Wisdom can be acquired through Knowledge and Experience

Knowledge leads the world all the time. So, try to acquire as much as knowledge everyday. Knowledge is a never ending process.