Twitter Troll Who Posted Fake Sandy News Apologizes to Internet

A Twitter troll who got his kicks on Monday by tweeting a series of dire but fake news updates as Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City took to the microblogging service on Tuesday night to publicly apologize.
Shashank Tripathi is a New York City hedge fund analyst who — until resigning Tuesday — also managed Republican Christopher Wight’s campaign for the House of Representatives in New York. He uses the Twitter handle @ComfortablySmug (that’s his avatar pictured above right).On Monday, as anxiety and panic gripped New York, he tweeted a series of false updates that began with “BREAKING.” One said that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded. Another said that power company Con Ed would cut off service to all of Manhattan.
The messages were retweeted widely and even reported on by national media. They helped spread misinformation about the storm as worried New Yorkers and observers tried to find out what was happening. Some have publicly wondered since whether people who deliberately use social media to disseminate false information during national disasters should be prosecuted. 

Today Is a Big Day for Facebook’s Stock

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Today Is a Big Day for Facebook’s Stock

The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ are both planning to re-open on Wednesday after having ceased all trading for two days as a result of Hurricane Sandy. For some employees at Facebook, Wednesday probably can’t come soon enough.

The first of three big lockups for Facebook stock expired on Monday, giving employees the option to sell off their shares in the company for the first time since Facebook went public in May. In total, 234 million shares of Facebook stock were freed up as part of the lockup expiration, but because the stock market was closed, employees and shareholders have been unable to trade that stock so far this week.That all changes on Wednesday.Facebook employees have spent more than five months watching as the company’s stock plummeted from its IPO price of $38 a share to as low as $17.55 in early September, without having the option to sell off any of their shares. CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged to employees that the declining stock price was “painful” to watch for all.On the day that the stock hit its all-time low, Facebook announced that it would bump up the first lockup expiration date for employees from Nov. 14 to Oct. 29, which some argued was an attempt by the company to boost employee morale. Since then, Facebook’s stock has staged a bit of resurgence and currently sits at $21.70 a share. While that’s well above the low point, it’s also still well below the IPO price — in fact, as of earlier this month, Facebook employees had lost an average of $2 million each since the IPO.The big question going into Wednesday is how quickly Facebook employees will be to pull the trigger on cashing out their stock. If they flood the market by selling millions of shares, it could send a signal to investors that even Facebook employees are not confident in the company’s future, which could have a significantly negative impact on the company’s stock price.A similar situation took place back in August, after the first lockup period expired for 271 millon shares held by Facebook insiders. Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s first investors, quickly sold off nearly all the stock he owned in the company (about 22 million shares), a red flag for investors that hurt the price of the stock.The average Facebook employee selling this time around certainly doesn’t have 22 million shares to sell, but if employees begin to sell off en masse, it could have a similarly damaging impact on the stock. What’s more, in two weeks, another lockup period will expire for a whopping 777 million shares, which could disrupt the stock’s performance even further.

16 People Died in US super storm Sandy leaves & Six million People in Without Power Due to WaterFlood!!!!

More than 1 million people across 12 states were under orders to evacuate as the massive storm continued to plow westward.

NEW YORK: Superstorm Sandy, one of the fiercest storms before ever  hit the United States, has left at least 16 people dead and over six million people in darkness as it continues to batter the nation's eastern seaboard with unprecedented ferocity.

As the damage from the 'Frankenstorm' continues to grow, President Obama declared a state of emergency in New York City, AFP reported.

Though downgraded to a "post-tropical" superstorm Monday evening by the National Hurricane Centre, Sandy unleashed powerful winds and torrential rains from North Carolina to Maine and knocked out power across 11 states and the national capital.

More than 1 million people across a dozen states were under orders to evacuate as the massive system continued to plow westward.

One disaster forecasting company predicted economic losses could ultimately reach $20 billion, only half insured.

In New York City, emergency backup power failed and 10 feet of water flooded the basement of NYU Langone Medical Center, forcing the evacuation of 260 patients. Nurses manually pumped air to the lungs of those on respirators, reported CNN.

Sandy wrecks havoc in NYC

Lower Manhattan's Battery Park recorded a 12.75 ft tide, breaking a record set in 1960 with Hurricane Donna. The city halted service on its bus and train lines, closing schools and ordering about 400,000 people out of their homes in low-lying areas of Manhattan and elsewhere.

As New York's skyscrapers were being battered, a crane snapped and dangled from the side of a luxury high-rise under construction Far above West 57th Street.

The iconic Grand Central Station in New York bore an eerily deserted look and the subway shut down for only the second time in its history.

Hurricane-force winds stretched from Cape Cod to the Virginia coast as Sandy swept ashore, with its storm surge setting new high-water records for lower Manhattan and swamping beachfronts on both sides of Long Island Sound.

Mass transit shut down across the densely populated Northeast, landmarks stood empty and schools and government offices were closed. The National Grid, which provides power to millions of customers, said 60 million people could be affected before it's over.

"I've been down here for about 16 years, and it's shocking what I'm looking at now. It's unbelievable," Montgomery Dahm, owner of the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City, which stayed open as Sandy neared the Jersey Shore, was quoted as saying.

By Monday afternoon, 23 states were under a warning or advisory for wind related to Sandy. Thousands of flights had been cancelled, and hundreds of roads were flooded.

With the storm expected to linger longer than most, the federal workforce and public employees in the national capital, Maryland and Virginia were told to stay home for a second day Tuesday.

There are no flights were expected Tuesday in or out of the region's three airports, where scores of travellers were stranded Monday after airlines halted service throughout the Northeast. (Agencies)

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Internet Explorer and Firefox teams celebrate new versions with cake-giving tradition

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Internet Explorer and Firefox teams celebrate new versions with cake-giving tradition

Internet Explorer is no longer the  completely dominant browser it used to be. no longer the completely dominant browser it used to be, but that hasn't stopped its team from continuing its cake-giving tradition with the makers of Firefox.According to Mozilla Employee Matt Bruceck, the IE team began it all when it sent over a cake to congratulate the company on the launch of Firefox 2 in 2006. Since then, the Internet Explorer crew has continued to send over cakes for each new version, though they smartly switched over to less-costly cupcakes when Mozilla began its accelerated 6-week upgrade cycles. To return the favor, Matt hand delivered a massive cake to celebrate the launch of Internet Explorer 10 this week to the Microsoft team's headquarters in Redmond, and signed it "Love Mozilla." Who said competition precludes a bit of playfulness between rivals?

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Facebook Hacked

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 I have had Facebook account for years without any issues. I recently upgraded to Windows 8 Pro and did a clean install. Shortly after that my FB account started sending out vulgar messages to my friends. I have changed my password numerous times in an effort to stop the problem but it persists. I have also done a virus check with Windows Defender that came back clean..Has anyone had this issue? I have tried going through the FaceBook help pages but have gotten nowhere.Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kidnapped Indian-origin baby Saanvi Venna found dead: US media reports

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Washington: 10-month-old baby Saanvi Venna, who went missing from her family's suburban Philadelphia apartment earlier this week, has been found dead and a family friend is charged in her death and her grandmother's killing. Saanvi's body was found today in the basement of another building in the apartment complex.
Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman says a family friend planned to kidnap the girl and ransom her for $50,000. Ferman says that plan went awry when Saanvi's paternal grandmother, Satyavathi Venna, was killed trying to fight the man off. Mrs Venna had arrived from Andhra Pradesh in July and was scheduled to return home in January.

Baby Saanvi's parents, father Venkata Konda Siva Venna, and mother Chenchu Latha Punuru, emigrated to the US from India in February 2007. The couple lived in San Antonio, Cleveland and Troy, Michigan, before moving to the Philadelphia-area apartment complex in June this year.

The local police and the Telugu community had announced a $30,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of the baby on Wednesday. This was later increased to $50,000. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had also joined the massive search for the baby.

Does Facebook Know Your Love Secrets? [Infographic]

Does Facebook Know Your Love Secrets? [Infographic]

 Like to keep your love life under wraps? Be careful if you’re on Facebook.

 The social network may be able to predict how happy you are in your relationships, how satisfied your boyfriend or girlfriend is, when you’re most likely to break up or make things official with someone new and even what songs you’re most likely to listen to when you’re on a hormone high or down in the dumps.

 

“It’s not official until it’s on Facebook,” goes the not so old maxim. If that saying holds true though, people are most ready to start going steady around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, with the beginning of April not far behind. On Feb. 14, new relationships outpace fresh breakups by 49%, according to data from the social network. On Dec. 25, the difference is 35%, and on Dec. 24 it’s 28%.

Warm weather and sunshine, meanwhile, seem to get people feeling restless — early spring and the summertime are two of the peak breakup seasons, according to people’s relationship status updates. And people are most likely to broadcast their breakups on Fridays and Saturdays.University of Wisconsin researchers even found that profile pictures and the presence or absence of a declared relationship status can predict the level of harmony between two people. Men who post their status as “In a Relationship” rather than leave it blank were more satisfied with their relationships, the Wisconsin researchers found. Women whose profile pictures include their partners were similarly more satisfied.

The online education directory WorldWideLearn gathered all these findings and more from research by Facebook and a number of news outlets to produce the infographic below. Check it out for the fuller picture of how much Facebook can reasonably predict about your love life.

Do these findings match your own experiences in romance and Facebook? Share your stories in the comments below.

Click Image to Enlarge

 

More than 83 million Facebook Profiles are Fakes

More than 83 million Facebook Profiles are Fakes

 Facebook has somewhere around 955 million members – the trouble is, not all of them are real.

 

 According to the company’s own filings published last week, around 83 million people on the social network are bogus, either as duplicates of other accounts, accounts made for things other than people, or accounts specifically made to distribute spam. The news comes just after startup “Limited Run” suggested that up to eighty percent of its clicks on Facebook were coming from bots, and another experiment found that blank ads did as well or only slightly worse than other kinds of ads on Facebook.

At the BBC, technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called “Virtual Bagel” to investigate fake likes. He found that his company got a huge number of users with doubtful back stories originating from the Middle East and Asia.

It’s all bad news for a social media giant that still relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue. The cloud of doubt over the effectiveness of Facebook advertising has been growing in the wake of the company’s first filings, and the stock price has been tanking.

“The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business,” says the filing.

A quick look at any given Facebook page makes it clear that the ads are low quality in the current format. Advertisers have less space than a tweet to make their pitch next to photos that can barely convey what product they’re selling. If Facebook wants those ads to continue to be worth the money, it needs massive numbers of impressions, but these numbers cast doubt on whether the impressions are genuine.

Facebook has never been particularly responsive to its user base, and yet membership has continued to grow. Giving up a free service just isn’t worth the hassle. But advertisers are Facebook’s real customer base, and they’ll need more reassurance from Facebook that their money is well spent, or the bubble will burst.

UPDATE OF THE UPDATE

UPDATE OF THE UPDATE

 In the article, we linked to a smaller “Morgan Freeman Death” Facebook page. The real action is going on at this Facebook group – it’s sitting at over 800k “likes!” Go forth, readers! Flag and flame to put a stop to the idiots perpetuating this ridiculous rumor!

UPDATE: As of this posting, it appears that the “thousands” of fooled masses have figured it out, as the R.I.P. Morgan Freeman Facebook page has shrunk in status to about 30 “likes.” Good job, people!

Morgan Freeman is dead. On Facebook. Yes, the respected actor has become the latest celebrity victim of the fabled “social media death hoax,” a ruthless killer that has claimed many of our beloved celebrities this year.

 

An R.I.P. Morgan Freeman Facebook page was created on September 5, 2012 claiming that the actor is dead, in much the same way that Bill Cosby was “killed” a short time ago in his own celebrity death hoax. The Cosby death hoax stirred mostly anger and disappointment in people (including a friend of the Cos, who was reportedly left in tears over the rumor) who said that the page was created for no good reason whatsoever, aside from attention and the maker’s contention that it was a “funny prank.” Not so, said the internet. Now, this “thoughtless” and “mean” prank has claimed another: The Dark Knight Rises star Morgan Freeman.

SEE ALSO: Michael Clarke Duncan Dies at 54

Morgan Freeman is currently in stable condition, recovering from a celebrity death hoax started on Facebook. This viral condition has affected dozens of celebrities just this year, including wrestler/actor John Cena, magician/professional creeper David Blaine, and children’s scientist Bill Nye.

Freeman will have to defend his status as a living celebrity once again (he’s battled fake death hoaxes before, notes NYDaily) in the face of thousands upon thousands of “likes” piling up on the R.I.P. Morgan Freeman page.

“Celebrities are still normal people with family members and friends just like us. How would you feel if someone said your most precious loved one has passed away? You can’t joke about someone’s death,” wrote one Facebook user.

The best way to combat celebrity death hoaxes, as noted by MStarz, is to battle the temptation to “tweet it” until the report can be verified by one of the major and respected media outlets, like this one here. You can also brush up on your Death Hoax spotting skills by taking the Inquisitr’s new Death Hoax 101 course.

So R.I.P., Morgan Freeman. Have a good rest of the day, sir.

 

DARPA's latest humanoid robot jumps and climbs with athletic precision

DARPA's latest humanoid robot jumps and climbs with athletic precision

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The firm behind some of the most impressive robots we’ve seen this year is back at it again with an anthropomorphic, bipedal robot that can climb and jump its way out of tough situations. PET-PROTO is a relative of last year’s PETMAN, and its builder, Boston Dynamics, hope to use the advances it’s squeezed into the new robot in competition at DARPA’s Robotics Challenge in June. The Challenge is designed to robots' ability to perform complex tasks in "dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments."

In its newest video (below), posted by Wired, DARPA shows the PET-PROTO facing off against the kinds of obstacles it might encounter at the Challenge, using its Gekko-like legs to scale a knee-high ledge and leaping to the floor with a femur-splintering thud before traversing a wall-to-wall hole in a hallway floor. The video demonstrates the robot’s ability to perform autonomous decision-making, says the Agency.

PET-PROTO is one step closer to Boston Dynamics’s Atlas robotic platform, which DARPA will make available at its Challenge to teams that wouldn’t otherwise have the necessary hardware expertise or capital to take part. For a look at what other teams are planning to compete with, this post from IEEE Spectrum offers a thorough breakdown, including Virginia Tech’s THOR (Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot), pictured below.

Hidden Picasso revealed by infrared imaging

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For over 100 years, Pablo Picasso's Woman Ironing has concealed another painting beneath its surface. Art historians have known this to be true since the late eighties, but thanks to infrared imaging the long-hidden work has now been unveiled. John K. Delaney, senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, used two types of infrared cameras, one hyper-spectral and one multi-spectral, to compose a highly-detailed image of the painting. In a New York Times article yesterday, the paper revealed the story behind the mysterious painting, and its website includes an interactive image that lets you "scratch" away the surface of Woman Ironing to reveal the image beneath. The painting is currently on show at New York's Guggenheim museum as part of its Picasso Black and White exhibition.

Soundtrack to History: 1878 Edison Audio Unveiled

Soundtrack to History: 1878 Edison Audio Unveiled                 iThinkShare

 It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper.

The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.

The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.

At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison's tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development of recorded sound.

"In the history of recorded sound that's still playable, this is about as far back as we can go," said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science, where it will be played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.

The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme.

"Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.

John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of... View Full Caption

When the recording is played using modern technology during a presentation Thursday at a nearby theater, it likely will be the first time it has been played at a public event since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum officials said.

The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year.

A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter.

Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century.

"Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it," he said.

Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.

Hunter said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen name I.X. Peck.

Edison company records show that one of his newly invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No. 8, was sold to Mason for $95.50 in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, the curator said.

A woman's voice says the words "Old Mother Hubbard," but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said.

 

SamsungChromebook review

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People laugh when I pull the old Samsung Series 5 Chromebook out of my bag. I almost feel the need to apologize for it when I turn it on: “Here’s a $450 laptop that just browses the web. Sorry, everyone!” The big Chrome logo on the machine’s lid is a constant reminder to passers-by that I’m definitely not playing World of Warcraft (perhaps a good thing), using Spotify, or doing a Skype video call.

On some level, a chuckle is a fair response — the notion of spending several hundred dollars on a weakly-configured machine that won’t run your existing apps and can’t really do much of anything without an internet connection is a tough sell. But that’s not a new argument: Chromebooks have been in the market for over a year now, and people have been saying this since day one. Outside of Google I/O and the occasional press event (and my house), I’ve never seen a Chromebook in the wild; it’s not a very scientific study, but I suspect they haven't sold well.
But Samsung’s latest model could fix that. The new Chromebook capitalizes on ARM’s stratospheric ascent — both in popularity and horsepower — to extricate Intel from the machine, reducing cost, power consumption, and heat dissipation in the process. On paper, that sounds like a win / win / win. In fact, this new model is the first retail device to use Cortex-A15, ARM’s next-generation architecture that could prove to be one of x86’s most formidable competitors in the consumer PC space ever.
In practice, this Intel-free design means that it's light, fanless, diskless, completely silent, and at $249, cheap enough to grab your attention — even if you’re still skeptical (and understandably so) about the concept of a web-only laptop. But does it hit the magical sweet spot on the price-to-capability curve?

A new kind of Chromebook

It's $1,000 worth of design made with $100 worth of materials 

I think I've found the perfect phrase to describe the hardware: it's $1,000 worth of design made with $100 worth of materials. It's a nice-looking machine, probably the most attractive Chromebook to date, and it's light enough to be completely effortless to toss into a bag or tuck under your arm (at 2.4 pounds, it's almost a full pound lighter than its Intel-powered counterpart). And the silver color is no coincidence: squint your eyes from a distance and you could easily be fooled into thinking this is an aluminum laptop.

It's light, fanless, diskless, and completely silent:

But it's not aluminum, it's plastic. That's mostly fine — you can't realistically expect a 2.4-pound, $249 laptop to be constructed of MacBook-esque unibody aluminum — but my unit does have an annoying creak in the right side of the wrist rest that makes almost constant noise while typing. I'm assuming this isn't a widespread issue, but it's something to look out for. It drove me nuts typing in a quiet room.
The trackpad is light years ahead of the terrible component that Samsung specced on the original Series 5 — smoother, much larger, and far more able to capture gestures like two-finger scrolling. It's a little loud when physically clicking, but like most trackpads, you can just tap instead of clicking if you prefer. The keyboard, meanwhile, should be an easy transition for anyone who's accustomed to chiclet-style keys.
I'm not in love with the port layout: everything is on the back except for the headphone jack, which is on the left side all the way toward the back. I'm regularly plugging things into my computers while I'm working, and putting the ports on the rear means you need to either stand up to look at what you're doing or lower the lid. The inclusion of USB 3.0 is a nice touch — overkill for a Chromebook, perhaps, but I'm not going to complain.

I never felt like I was missing out on some vast reserve of Intel processing power

The 11.6-inch display seems plucked from the same parts bin as Samsung's other Chromebooks, albeit at a smaller size. Is that a good thing? That depends on who you ask. These machines use matte displays, which sacrifice some clarity and saturation to make sure you never need to see your own face reflected in the screen; the matte-versus-glossy battle is as old as time itself, and we're certainly not going to be able to settle it in this review. For casual browsing and Google Docs use, the display was perfectly usable.

Software-wise, the new Chromebook is no different from others, nor should it be: they're all just running Chrome OS, which is about as close to a blank slate as you can get. It's that simplicity, in large part, that makes it an appealing choice for low-end hardware — Intel Atoms, Celerons, and now ARM in the new model. The recent "Aura" update, launched on Samsung's Intel-powered Chromebook 550, works exactly the same here as it does on every machine dating back to the proto-Chromebook, Google's own nondescript Cr-48. Aura pulled back a tad from the strict interpretation of the web-only mantra by adding a dedicated taskbar along the bottom and a desktop of sorts; it's still very Chrome-centric, but it's a big improvement in appearance, organization, and usability over the Chrome OS of old.
So the question with the ARM-based Chromebook is not how Chrome OS looks and feels, but how it performs. Can it hang with the heavier, hotter, and more expensive Intel models? The short answer is "yes," but the bar was pretty low in the first place. The original Samsung Series 5 was never a solid performer and regularly stutters during scrolling and when changing tabs. The updated model — this year's Celeron-powered 550 — does better, but it can still grind to a halt under heavy loads. The new model clocks a SunSpider score of 704.1ms, compared to 950.8ms for the 550; for reference, I get scores of just over 200ms in Chrome on my Core i7-powered iMac (lower is better). From full charge to dead, I got 6 hours, 45 minutes of battery life, matching Samsung's claim of "over 6.5 hours." That's enough to comfortably make it from New York to LA, assuming you've either got Wi-Fi on your flight or you enabled offline mode in all of your Google apps ahead of time.

Fun Facts About The World Series

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Fun Facts About The World Series

The World Series, also known as the Fall Classic, gets underway on Wednesday when the American League champion Detroit Tigers head to the city by the bay to take on the National League champion San Francisco Giants.
Most fans will be focusing on what looks to be an exciting match-up between two clubs that were not atop many preseason lists of potential World Series teams. At the start of the season, the odds on the Tigers winning the World Series were 8-1, according to oddshark.com. The odds on the Giants winning the team's second fall classic in three years were even longer at 18-1.

Regarding economics, research from Dr. Michael Bernacchi of University Detroit-Mercy indicates baseball's "final four" – Detroit, San Francisco, the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees – all had payrolls among the league's top-10. However, only the Yankees were among the top four teams overall in terms of payroll with a late September tab of $230 million. All that bought the Bronx Bombers a 4-0 American League Championship Series at the hands of Detroit.
At least the Yankees can say they are baseball's most valuable. Citing Forbes, Bernacchi notes the Yankees are worth $1.85 billion. Impressive, but that also means the SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE: GLD [FREE Stock Trend Analysis]) is 40 times more valuable than the Yankees.
Last year, none of the final four teams in this year's baseball's playoffs finished in top-four in terms of operating income, according to Bernacchi. By average ticket cost, it is almost $4 cheaper to attend a Giants game than a Tigers game, Bernacchi's research indicates. The two highest average ticket prices in the majors this year were Boston's Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.
San Francisco had the fourth-best attendance this year while Detroit was ninth, though both clubs topped 3 million.
The Giants play in a stadium sponsored by AT&T (NYSE: T). Shares of the Dow component are 15.7 percent this year. Regional bank Comerica (NYSE: CMA) is the corporate sponsor of the Tigers' home stadium. That stock is up 13.7 percent year-to-date.
In 2011, the year after the Giants last won the World Series, shares of AT&T gained nearly three percent. In 2007, the year after the Tigers last appeared in the World Series, shares of Comerica plunged almost 25 percent.

Facts of the Human Body

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 Facts of the Human Body

 Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.

• Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.
• Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man.
• Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day, without even thinking. They are large enough to cover a tennis court.
• Our hearing is so sensitive it can distinguish between hundreds of thousands of different sounds.
• Our sense of touch is more refined than any device ever created.
• Our brain is more complex than the most powerful computer and has over 100 billion nerve cells.
• We give birth to 100 billion red cells every day.
• When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 mph.
• We have over 600 muscles.
• We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.
• We are about 70 percent water.
• We make one litre of saliva a day.
• Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.
• In one square inch of our hand we have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors.
• We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese, phosphates, nickel and silicon in our bodies.

World’s Smallest Revolver

World’s Smallest Revolver

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 This gun is made by SwissMiniGun and is dubbed the tiniest one in the world. It’s even smaller than a rasin!Price: $6,741.35

 If you want the ultimate concealable firearm then look no further than the world’s smallest revolver. Capable of firing real ammunition, this incredibly tiny yet functional handgun measures only 2.16 inches long and is a great gift idea for gun collectors, or tiny hitmen.

 

100 GUNS is an interactive CD-ROM.

You put it in your PC-compatible computer, and view high resolution photographs of the guns, hear sounds, look at diagrams and cut-away views, watch videos, activate animations, listen to stories, and read text about some of the most fascinating firearms in the world. After the opening sequence you can choose from six catagories of guns: Sporting, Ancient, Modern Military, Civil War/Frontier, Odd and Early Military. I cannot demonstrate the full interactivity of this CD-ROM on the internet. But by clicking on the small pictures you can down load the full-size pictures and see how they will look on your computer. These are large, high-resolution full-color files that may take 15 seconds or more to download. But I think you will agree that they are worth the wait.

Laden would have escaped if US had sought Pak's permission before raid: Obama

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Laden would have escaped if US had sought Pak's permission before raid: Obama

 WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama, in some of his most blunt remarks to date, said on Monday that Osama bin Laden would have escaped if the United States had sought Pakistan's permission ahead of the raid on the al-Qaida leader's compound.

Obama administration officials have previously justified the decision not to involve Islamabad by citing the risk that bin Laden might somehow be tipped off and flee his compound in Abbottabad before the team of Navy SEALs arrived.

Leon Panetta , then the director of the CIA and now defense secretary, said in an interview with TIME magazine shortly after the May 2011 raid that there was a concern that the Pakistanis "might alert the targets."

But in Monday's presidential foreign policy debate against Republican opponent Mitt Romney, Obama presented such risk as a certainty.

"If we had asked Pakistan (for) permission, we would not have gotten him," Obama said.

The bin Laden raid was one of the many issues Obama used to differentiate himself from his opponent.

Romney - during his failed bid for the 2008 Republican nomination - criticized Obama for warning publicly that, if Islamabad didn't act, he would go into Pakistan to get high value targets like bin Laden. Romney suggested such comments were not helpful in building ties.

On Monday, Romney said he also would have ordered the raid.

"We had to go into Pakistan. We had to go in there to get Osama bin Laden. That was the right thing to do," Romney said.

The question of who in Pakistan might have known about bin Laden's whereabouts is still a matter of speculation.

The Pakistani ambassador to the United States at the time of the raid, Husain Haqqani, told a forum in Washington in August that he believed someone somewhere in Pakistan must have known -- a similar sentiment echoed by Panetta.

"I don't have any hard evidence, so I can't say it for a fact. There's nothing that proves the case. But as I said, my personal view is that somebody somewhere probably had that knowledge," Panetta told CBS' "60 Minutes" program in January.

 

 

Military Use Of Robots Increases

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Military Use Of Robots Increases

War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though — it is Packbot from the iRobot Corporation

Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis's Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the Army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020. Of course, they aren't envisioning robotic soldiers from movies like "Star Wars" and "I, Robot."
"When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots," says Smart assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
All of the Army's robotic force is teleoperated, meaning there is someone operating the robot from a remote location, perhaps often with a joystick and a computer screen. While this may seem like a caveat in plans to add robots to the military, it is actually very important to keep humans involved in the robotic operations.
"It's a chain of command thing. You don't want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system. You want to have a human hit the button," says Smart. "You don't want the robot to make the wrong decision. You want to have a human to make all of the important decisions."
Not like the Terminator
While movies display robots as intelligent beings, Smart and Few aren't necessarily looking for intelligent decision-making in their robots. Instead, they are working to develop an improved, "intelligent" functioning of the robot.
"It's oftentimes like the difference between the adverb and noun. You can act intelligently or you can be intelligent. I'm much more interested in the adverb for my robots," says Few.
Few, who is Smart's Ph.D. student, is also interested in the delicate relationship between robot and human. He is working to develop a system in which the robot can carry out a task while keeping a human in the loop and with the ability to create new goals for the robot. Few says that there are many issues that may require "a graceful intervention" by humans and these need to be thought of from the ground up.
Meet George Jetson
"When I envision the future of robots, I always think of the Jetsons," says Few. "George Jetson never sat down at a computer to task Rosie to clean the house. Somehow, they had this local exchange of information. So what we've been working on is how we can use the local environment rather than a computer as a tasking medium to the robot."
To work toward this goal, Few has incorporated what many would simply consider a toy into robotic programming. Using a Wii controller, Few capitalizes on natural human movements to communicate with the robot. Using something as simple and as common as this video game controller also has added benefits in a military setting. Rather than carting around a heavy laptop and being forced to focus on a joystick and screen, soldiers in battle can stay alert and engaged in their surroundings while performing operations with the robot.
"We forget that when we're controlling robots in the lab it's really pretty safe and no one's trying to kill us," says Smart. "But if you are in a war zone and you're hunched over a laptop, that's not a good place to be. You want to be able to use your eyes in one place and use your hand to control the robot without tying up all of your attention."
Robots are already finding a place among deployed troops. There are unmanned aerial vehicles and ground robots for explosives detection. Robotics advancements do, however, raise new ethical questions, such as where to place the blame if a robot kills someone. Nevertheless, as the technology progresses, more robots are being sent into battle first. The mangled Packbot on display at iRobot is just one such example of a fortunate casualty.
"When I stood there and looked at that Packbot, I realized that if that robot hadn't been there, it would have been some kid," reflects Few.