Microsoft: King of The Patent Hill

Similar to a stash of weapons a player might rack up during an online adventure game, high technology companies for more than two decades have racked up as many patents as possible. Patents can come in handy, for instance, as a defense %26#150; or an offense%26#151;when one company sues another for patent infringement. On the other hand, cross-licensing patents between two or more companies can cement business collaborations. For years, IBM has been one of the most prolific tech companies in terms of piling up patents. Now, it's Microsoft's turn. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' (IEEE) IEEE Spectrum magazine listed Microsoft as the leader in new patents awarded in 2006 in its November 2007 issue. In addition, intellectual property consultancy the Patent Board this week ranked Microsoft first on its Patent Scorecard of top IT patent holders. The software titan has racked up a total of around 8,500 U.S. patents granted, the company said this week. Microsoft also has more than 15,000 additional patents pending, and is applying for about 3,000 per year, according to a company statement. That's partly due to the company's aggressive R%26D budget%26#151;a war chest of $7.1 billion in 2007 alone. While most of that money goes to creating products, it also yields a bounty of intellectual property. "We pursue patents on only those inventions that are in line with our business objectives and have strategic value to the company," Bart Eppenauer, Microsoft's chief patent counsel and associate general counsel, said in a statement. "Close alignment with our business strategies, goals and priorities has enabled Microsoft to become the new standard bearer for patent quality in the technology industry." Like virtually anything having to do with Microsoft these days, defending and protecting patents and other forms of intellectual property is highly controversial. Patents can, after all, be used as weapons and also as a means of intimidation. Last year, CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives asserted that Linux vendors, especially Red Hat, are in violation of as many as 235 of Microsoft's patents %26#150; although the company would not disclose which specific patents it believes are being infringed upon. However, that sword can cut both ways. Last year, Microsoft settled out of court with tiny Eolas Technologies, which holds a patent that lower courts found Microsoft had infringed upon with its Internet Explorer browser. In November 2006, in one of its most controversial patent deals to date, Microsoft signed an IP cross-licensing and collaboration deal with Linux vendor Novell. The deal was roundly criticized by other members of the open source community who claim Novell sold out by joining forces with Microsoft. Meanwhile, in September, the European Union's Court of First Instance upheld a European Commission (EC) order that Microsoft license IP, including patents, required for interoperability with its products to competitors.

Soccer: Not for the Faint of Heart

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 January 2008

It's not just terrorism and earthquakes that can precipitate heart attacks among the vulnerable. Soccer games do it, too. Researchers at the University of Munich, Germany, found that heart problems more than tripled in German men while their team was playing in the World Cup in the summer of 2006.

Physician Ute Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues analyzed reports of hospitalizations for heart attacks, chest pains, and arrhythmias collected by emergency medical teams on the 7 days that the German team played during the games, which were held around Germany from 9 June to 9 July. They compared the results with reports covering weeks immediately before and after the games as well as from summer months in 2003 and 2005--for a total of 4279 patients.

On the days of matches involving the German team, men in the Munich area experienced 3.26 as many cardiac events as they did during control periods. That's not too far from the fivefold increase reported after a 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles. Women were much less affected, with a cardiac event rate 1.82 times that during control periods. The games especially affected the vulnerable: 47%26#37; of the cases involved people with preexisting heart disease, compared with 29%26#37; during the control periods.

Various other studies have tried to link soccer madness with heart attacks or mortality, sometimes with conflicting results. For example, a study published in 2003 found a decrease in fatal heart attacks among Frenchmen the day France won the 1998 World Cup.

But Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues say theirs is the first study to track a precise temporal relationship between action on the field and in the chest. They found that the incidence peaked about 2 hours into a match and remained elevated for several hours afterward--indicating that the "acute trigger mechanisms" occur 1 or 2 hours before symptoms appear. Two matches in particular led to spikes in heart hospitalizations--a hard-fought victory over Argentina and an important loss to Italy--proving it's the excitement of the game and not the outcome that causes the intense stress. The team presents its findings in the 31 January issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Epidemiologist Diederick Grobbee of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands says the study strengthens the case for his earlier finding that the incidence of fatal heart attacks among Dutch males jumped significantly on the day of a tense soccer match. Grobbee notes that the patterns both of mortality and of the symptoms in the latest paper indicate that "rather than inducing new events [in people with no known heart trouble], the effect could be that an event that is bound to happen anyway is triggered earlier."

Mercury Reveals its Secrets

By Richard A. Kerr
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 January 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The untrained eye might have trouble distinguishing the latest images from Mercury from familiar images of Earth's moon, but the pictures are surprising experts. The planet "was not the place we expected," says Sean Solomon, the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission. The first close look at Mercury in 33 years, yielding images released here today at a NASA press conference, has revealed a side never seen: much more volcanism, deep-penetrating impact craters, and a unique feature in the solar system--"The Spider."

Mercury had its last visitor in 1975, when the Mariner 10 spacecraft returned images suggesting that lava once flowed across the surface, at least in places. But volcanism "wasn't accepted by everyone," says MESSENGER team member Louise Prockter of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The new images have removed the doubt. She pointed to impact craters hundreds of kilometers across with floors so smooth that they must have been partially filled by lava. Team member Robert Strom of the University of Arizona in Tucson also found that the side of Mercury seen by Mariner 10 turns out to be more heavily cratered by impacts than the side seen for the first time by MESSENGER. That means that lava has extensively flooded the MESSENGER side. "There's been a lot of volcanic activity on Mercury," says Strom.

The moon has its volcanic flooding too--witness the dark "seas" or maria of the moon--but MESSENGER found a mercurial variation on such light-dark patterning. Caloris is a huge--1550-kilometer-wide--impact basin glimpsed by Mariner 10 but now seen in its entirety by MESSENGER. On the moon, such giant impact basins were often filled with dark lava to form maria, but Caloris has the opposite pattern. Its interior is lighter and is surrounded by a darker ring. Perhaps the Caloris impact excavated deep, lighter-colored rock and left it at the surface, says Solomon, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C. Including smaller craters with distinctive dark rims, "we've got a variety of natural drill holes into Mercury's interior," says Solomon.

Then there's ?The Spider.? More than 50 troughs radiate from near the center of Caloris where a 40-kilometer crater has formed. Whether this inner crater has anything to do with the radiating troughs, Prockter can't say; no one has ever seen anything like the spider. One possibility is that the formation of Caloris somehow created a plume of molten rock that rose beneath the basin's center, bulging the basin floor upward and cracking the crust to form the troughs. The crater would then have been a coincidental impact.

More surprises may be in store as planetary scientists pore over the images, which are providing the first look ever at one-third of Mercury. They'll be busier still when MESSENGER returns in October for another look at Mercury on its way to entering orbit in 2011.

Related sites

MESSENGER Press Conference Multimedia Page

MESSENGER homepage

That Long-Rumored IBM/AMD Merger: Could it Work?

The relatively close working relationship between IBM and AMD has frequently led to speculation about the two companies joining up via a merger, but the idea is always quickly dismissed by both sides. Last week, the Financial Times threw a little gas on the fire with a lengthy story that cited unnamed sources who claimed the two companies are talking merger. It would seem a good fit; both have huge facilities in Austin, Texas. AMD farms out some of its semiconductor manufacturing to IBM. Additionally, the two are jointly building a large fabrication facility in upstate New York. The Times report didn't give a timeframe nor a target price. Based on its $7.62 share price at press time on Tuesday, AMD's market cap totaled $4.42 billion. AMD and IBM both declined to comment on the story's speculation. Various analysts contacted by InternetNews.com had differing opinions on the proposal, but did agree on a few things. First off, it likely won't happen. "It doesn't make any sense to me," said industry analyst Jon Peddie. "I don%26#146;t see any win for IBM. If IBM wants to have a stake in AMD%26#146;s technology, they could just buy a hunk of stock, not raise the FTC's eyebrows and exert influence that way." Added James Staten, senior analyst for Forrester Research, "I'd be surprised because of the size of the buy. That would be a heck of a big thing to swallow, and IBM tends to buy things that are big revenue and intellectual property gains." But Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, thinks it might work. "Right now, IBM has been very ambitious with what it's been trying to do in the microprocessor space and had some great successes in the past couple of years in being an agnostic vendor of custom chip products," he said. According to King's thinking, picking up AMD would give IBM an entr%26#233;e into the high-performance/high-end market, where it has its own efforts around the Power architecture. It certainly doesn't want to be in the commodity market; in recent years, IBM has sold off its PC business, its hard disk business and its printer business. In fact, Peddie noted that most of IBM's revenues stem from outside of the hardware business. "If you look at where their revenue is coming from, they're making all their money and putting all their investments into the software and services areas," he said. "The idea of making an investment in another chip company doesn't make sense to me." However, Staten saw a potential synergy for the two firms at the high end, similarly to what King described. IBM's Cell processor, which powers the Sony PlayStation 3 but is extremely powerful and being considered for use in supercomputers, is a fully programmable multi-core processor -- so it would be possible to set up the eight cores to do one task. Meanwhile, AMD is working on its own Fusion project, designed to put a GPU and CPU on the same die. As a result, the PCI Express bus where a video card typically goes would become free for a co-processor -- and Cell would fit that bill nicely. Staten imagines a scenario in which a Fusion-based system with a Cell co-processor would use one Cell core to do drive encryption and a second to encrypt network traffic, while a third compresses data for maximum network throughput. This would take a tremendous load off the CPU. As it is, IBM and AMD have something in that vein already in the works; the Roadrunner supercomputer being built with Sandia National Labs. It will incorporate Opteron and Cell processors in a petaflop design. "That's keeping with the Fusion vision that AMD has," Staten said. "They talk of heterogeneous cores in the same processor, but they haven't talked beyond AMD and ATI cores." And IBM has talked about Cell-based systems, but don't have an x86 instruction set to apply to the Cell and get the performance that they need," he added. Still, many analysts agreed that it would be tough to get this one past IBM shareholders, especially since AMD's star hasn't exactly been shining as of late. "It would be a significant payout, and I think given the problems AMD has been having, it would be a tough sell to make," King said.

A Clockwork Skin Cell

By Gisela Telis
ScienceNOW Daily News
29 January 2008

Are you a lark who springs from bed at dawn, or a night owl happy staying up late? Your skin knows, according to a new study. By testing skin samples from people with sleep problems, researchers have found the first ties between people?s behavior and the biological clocks they carry in their cells. The discovery could lead to cheaper and more practical ways to diagnose and treat sleep disorders and other ailments.

To make the most of the day, humans and other animals evolved roughly 24-hour internal clocks known as circadian rhythms. A cluster of brain cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) runs the clock in humans, and the body's other cells have their own "slave clocks" that are synchronized to the SCN. With timekeeping outposts throughout the body, the main clock helps regulate everything from sleepiness to concentration. Buried in the brain, the SCN is not easy to study. So biochemist Steven Brown of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues at the Free University of Berlin looked at slave clocks in skins cells, which are much more accessible.

They began by recruiting 28 extreme night owls and larks through newspaper and television ads. The team collected two small skin samples from each, and then cultured the cells in the lab and inserted the gene that makes fireflies glow into the gene that regulates the cells' clock. The result: luminous cells whose light waxes and wanes in time with their internal cycle, allowing the researchers to watch the clocks at work. To the scientists' surprise, the cells didn't desynchronize, and their behavior in the lab reflected the behavior of the humans they came from. The longest glowing cells belonged to night owls; lark skin cells glowed for shorter times, revealing a faster cycle.

"It's like a wristwatch: If it runs slow, you're late for everything; if it's too fast, you're early for everything," Brown explains. When the researchers induced the clock cycles to shift with chemicals or slight changes in temperature, they found that the cells also varied in their adaptability to change, in keeping with the volunteers' reports of varying responses to jet lag and other disruptions.

The study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises the possibility of an inexpensive and objective test of a person's "owlness" or "larkness." Such a test would be no small matter, given the prevalence of sleep disorders and the fact that many drugs, including cholesterol medications and chemotherapy, work more effectively if administered at certain points in a person's sleep/wake cycle. Pinpointing individual clock cycles could pave the way for personalized sleep and drug therapies, says Achim Kramer, a Free University chronobiologist who helped design the study.

Geneticist Paolo Sassone-Corsi of the University of California, Irvine, sees the study as an important and ingenious step. "No one had thought about taking biopsies to do this," he says. "This is a new tool, a possible new gateway to understand human rhythms."

Related sites

Find out whether you are a lark or an owl

Tutorial on biological clocks

The National Institutes of Health guide to sleep

2010 For Next Big Windows Release?

Windows Vista is only a year old this week, yet reported sightings of an early alpha version of the next release of Windows have been circulating on the Web for the past week, prompting assertions by some that Vista has been a market failure. A handful of posters to several blogs and Windows enthusiast sites claim to have the early build of Windows 7, which they say is referred to as "Milestone 1" or M1, although the reports are all but impossible to verify. Some observers have called purported screen shots and videos of Windows 7 posted on the Web "fakes." As usual, Microsoft is not talking %26#150; well, maybe a little. All of the brouhaha did cause Microsoft officials this week to at least peg a ballpark ship date for Windows 7 as sometime in 2010. "We are currently in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA %26#91;general availability%26#93;," a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an e-mailed statement. Given that Vista shipped a year ago, that's just two years away %26#150; but that's likely the earliest it will arrive. The spokesperson added that is not a hard and fast date. "The specific release date will be determined once the company meets its quality bar for release," she said. In fact, even when it has tried to be conservative, Microsoft has historically been overly aggressive about predicting Windows shipment dates, particularly in the early phases of development. Vista, for instance, was pushed back several times %26#150; and had capabilities stripped out of the originally promised feature set in order to make it out the door this time last year. Company officials have said very little about Windows 7 to date, at least partly so as not to distract attention from Vista. In fact, some critics and other observers have wondered aloud whether Vista is experiencing lackluster sales, and that is causing Microsoft to speed up delivery of Windows 7 %26#150; ostensibly so that users who decide to skip Vista and stay with Windows XP for a couple more years will have an upgrade path to the next major Microsoft system release. Microsoft, however, has repeatedly claimed Vista is selling well, and that those sales were an important contributor to its last two record financial quarters. "I don't see this %26#91;Windows 7 alpha version%26#93; as being in any way out of the norm, and no way can you use that to conclude that Vista's in trouble," Dwight Davis, vice president at researcher Ovum, told InternetNews.com. "Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place and it has to be that way, that they start development on a new version of Windows as soon as they finish the next one, given the complexity of modern operating systems," he added. Davis and several other analysts said they have not yet been briefed by Microsoft regarding Windows 7. Some suggested that PC OEMs are the most likely partners that Microsoft will provide early code to so that they can test for code validation issues. In addition, Microsoft is about to ship SP1 for Vista, which early reviews have said at least ameliorates some of the performance problems and stability issues that users have complained about since its launch. Indeed, the arrival of Vista SP1 sometime this quarter is widely expected to kick off large-scale corporate deployments of Vista. Among the changes expected in Windows 7 is a significantly smaller kernel, sometimes referred to as MinWin, for the operating system. The hope is that by moving many functions outside of the system's core or kernel, performance will be greatly improved. Davis cautioned, however, about making early assumptions about what will or won't be in Windows 7 when it finally does ship, even if it's based on what officials said. "A lot can happen in three years," Davis added.

Executive Shuffle at eBay

It's official: Whitman's out, Donahoe's in, and eBay's looking ahead. %26#9; With the operator's introduction of Meg Whitman, president and CEO, and John Donahoe, future president and CEO, eBay's fourth-quarter earnings call began with a human touch. Donahoe, 46, will take the helm on March 31, after serving as eBay's president of marketplaces for almost three years. "Many of you know I've said in the past that 10 years was about the right amount of time for any CEO to stay at the helm of a company," Whitman wrote in a blog post. "Now that I%26#146;ve reached that milestone myself, I still believe this. It's time for eBay, and this community, to have a new leadership team, a new perspective and a new vision." The news of the executive transition was widely expected. Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Whitman would make good on her 10-year credo. Whitman joined eBay in March 1998. Crunching the numbers, eBay reported record fourth-quarter revenue of $2.18 billion %26#150; the first period the company had cracked the $2 billion threshold. eBay's robust growth was driven in large part by PayPal, its payment services arm, which posted 35 percent year-to-year growth with $563 million in sales for the quarter, and $1.9 billion for the year. In the quarter, eBay pocketed $531 million in profits, or 39 cents a share, up from the $346.5 million, or 25 cents a share, it earned in the year-ago quarter. Excluding one-time items, eBay returned a profit of $611 million, or 45 cents a share, topping analyst estimates of 41 cents a share.. However, eBay's earnings guidance of $2 billion to $2.1 billion for the first quarter of 2008 fell short of Wall Street projections of $2.14 billion. After jumping 6.7 percent to close at $28.94 on the buzz about the executive transition, eBay's shares fell $1.44 a share, or 5 percent, to $27.50. eBay closed the year with $7.67 billion in revenue, up 29 percent from the 2006 mark of $5.97 billion. Despite the $1.4 billion write-down that eBay had to swallow in October to conclude its purchase of VoIP(define) service Skype, Whitman and Donahoe remained enthusiastic about the unit's prospects. "It's important to remember that Skype is an extremely successful four-year-old," Whitman said. "Skype is exiting 2007 much stronger than it was even in the summer." Whitman touted Skype's instant-messaging partnership with MySpace to provide instant messaging services as a precursor to future business partnerships to grow the business that many have disparaged as an anchor on eBay's growth. "Skype is still a young company on a great trajectory that is revolutionizing communications on the Net," Donahoe added. Skype posted fourth-quarter sales of $115 million, up 76 percent from the same period a year ago. eBay reported 276 million Skype subscribers at the end of 2007. Donahoe thanked Whitman for her service and transformative role in eBay's growth, and outlined some points of development to expect from the company under his tenure. Donahoe said that he would move aggressively to make eBay easier to use and safer for consumers. He said eBay had been scrutinizing the buying and selling experience, and improvements to the speed, reliability and convenience of the transaction process could be expected in the coming weeks. eBay will also be taking a closer look at its fixed-price sales, looking to blend the fun and selection of the auction model with the reliability of fixed-price selling, Donahoe said. "The growth of our fixed-price business is outstripping the growth of e-commerce as a whole," Donahoe said, announcing that auctions and fixed-priced selling would be blended in a "uniquely e-Bay way." Led by PayPal, the growth of eBay's merchant services outpaced its core business units in 2007, and Donahoe expects an even brighter future, declaring that "2008 will be PayPal's best year yet." eBay will also make an announcement lowering listing fees in the United States, Germany and the UK in the next week. It will also look to broaden its revenue base by seeking out advertising opportunities for PayPal, Stubhub and other business units. As for the executives, Whitman will continue to serve on the company's board of directors, but did not say what her next endeavor would be outside the company. Whitman is a longtime friend of former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and it has been rumored that she would be on the short list for a cabinet position should Romney win the election. The company also announced that PayPal President Rajiv Dutta will become executive vice president of eBay, and assume Donahoe's role as president of marketplaces. Dutta was also elected to eBay's board of directors. Scott Thompson, currently serving as PayPal's chief technology officer, will become PayPal's president. Bill Cobb is stepping down as president of eBay North America and will retire from the company at the end of the year. Lorrie Norrington, the current president of eBay International, will assume Cobb's responsibilities and move into the position of president of eBay marketplaces operations, reporting to Dutta.

What's Next For CEP Vendors?

Among the top-tier software vendors, imitation is less a form of flattery than a necessity to keep up with the competition. IBM on Wednesday made its first significant foray into the emerging but relatively low-profile complex event processing (CEP) market with its acquisition of privately held AptSoft. CEP applications aggregate information from corporate databases and applications in real time and applies rules to discern patterns and events that otherwise would go unnoticed. Having this automated "trigger" can give companies the ability to identify and anticipate problems and opportunities culled from seemingly unrelated events before they transpire. To date, CEP applications have mostly been deployed in the financial services industry%26#151;particularly at hedge funds and brokerage firms where detecting trading patterns on the fly is critical%26#151;but will soon find a home in other verticals such the advertising, transportation and health care industries. CEP, along with business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) applications, offers more bang for the buck for enterprise customers taking their first baby steps toward a full-scale SOA (define) transformation. Getting IT and business more closely aligned and using all these applications and services to respond to real-world business issues is exactly why vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP might soon be looking to snap up independent CEP vendors to round out their core middleware offerings for SOA-curious customers. Tibco, with its BusinessEvents offering, along with Coral8, Streambase and Aleri are among the most prominent independent CEP vendors developing applications that dig through legacy data to help predict future business events. One can only wonder if these companies' executives are already predicting their role in what some analysts see as a consolidation frenzy on the horizon. "I don't know who will go next," Roy Schulte, an analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com. "Many of them will be acquired during the next several years so it's hard to know the exact order. Some big vendors haven't announced offerings yet, so they might buy a company to catch up fast. An ambitious BI company might buy one of these vendors too, although the BI companies are themselves a target for acquisition." When a competitor like IBM makes a move, the competition can't help but take notice. But when Societe Generale, France's second-largest bank, on Thursday confirmed that a rogue trader lost more than $7.1 billion%26#151;roughly an entire year's worth of profits%26#151;through what the bank called "a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions," it captures everyone's attention. "You can bet that we'll be placing a call to Societe Generale," said John Morrell, director of product marketing at Coral8, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "We're seeing a lot of interest in our product from the investment services area. Our model is let your systems process and analyze the data, like trading patterns, and then tell you when something important happens so you don't have to keep constantly asking your systems yourself." The Societe Generale trader who made the ruinous trades was responsible for basic futures hedging on European equity market indexes, essentially betting billions on how the markets would perform in the future, the company said. Morrell said one customer is using his company's Coral8 Engine to identify illegal trading activity and patterns to protect it from exposing how many shares of a particular stock or stocks it's holding. "Another great thing about our CEP system is that it's very modular," he said. "Customers can start with a base set of analytics for monitoring their Web site and then extend it to customer abandonment. From there, they can expand it to fraud prevention and eventually to real-time adjustment of marketing campaigns." Beefing up SOA offerings On Wednesday, IBM said it was adding AptSoft's Director application to the existing business process management (BPM) functionality already residing in its flagship WebSphere middleware suite. The aim is to strengthen IBM's SOA and BPM portfolio and give customers the "most intuitive tools for business-led authoring and event management." Adding these complimentary CEP applications to the core middleware suite%26#151;just as Oracle and SAP have done with business intelligence through their respective acquisitions of Hyperion Solutions and Business Objects%26#151;gives corporate customers added incentive to commit to their SOA-related endeavors. Aite Group, a Boston-based research and consulting firm for the financial services industry, estimates that companies will spend more than $1 billion on CEP-related software and services by 2010. "CEP is compelling because of BAM, business activity monitoring, as in dashboards and similar tools for near-real-time situational awareness," Schulte said. "CEP tools cost less than hand coding the equivalent function in an application and enable the solution to get into production in less time. The next few years will see fast growth in this type of application." For now, Morrell said Coral8 sees a long and successful run as an independent CEP provider. "We%26#146;re independent and plan to be for as far as I can tell," he said. "It's hard to say how much consolidation there will be. There are some new folks that have come in recently. We've been looking at this type of architecture for the last six years or so. It's taken a while for CEP to really start moving. But it's caught on now and will grow very rapidly."

Can QlikTech Reveal Digg's Secrets?

How do you get a top listing on Digg, the community site that ranks news stories and Web sites based on popularity? Perhaps only the founders and high-level technical people at Digg know the true answer -- the algorithm and policies behind Digg's ranking system -- but that hasn't stopped others from trying to "game" the system. In fact, Digg just announced it made a few tweaks to its popularity algorithm, which the company said would ensure a wider group of users would get a bigger say in getting submission promoted to the home page. A separate announcement came yesterday from QlikTech, a business intelligence software provider. QlikTech said its free Dugg Analyzer tool isn't meant to give anyone an unfair advantage, but to help users understand what kind of Digg entries are floating to the top. "Today, if someone wants to make something popular on Digg, they don't know what metrics are being used," Anthony Deighton, vice president of marketing at QlikTech, told InternetNews.com. "Digg is good at telling you what's most popular right now, but not over time, and there is no neutral or third party to tell you that." "There is no analytic view of aggregate postings over time, or cross-dimensional views or particular category breakouts," he said. "That's what we're good at providing." At press time, a Digg spokesperson said no one from the company was available for comment. Digg's secret algorithm and ranking policies -- and its occasional changes to each -- have long been the subject of scrutiny from users. While it reveals few details of how either work, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose said in a recent blog post that the company recently changed its system to ensure top-ranked stories come from a wider group of sources. "Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page," Rose wrote. "When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will promote a story ... to the home page. This way, the system knows a large variety of people will be into the story." The changes come amid charges that Digg's system has been dominated by a tiny percentage of its users. QlikTech said it's simple to look at Digg data to determine that a small group of around 100 people is responsible for 40 percent of the site's posted content -- content seen and read by thousands. Still, this is down from a previously reported 56 percent of most popular content in 2006. Another recent change noted by QlikTech relates to YouTube's prominence on Digg. Historically, it said, the video-sharing site had been the most linked-to site on Digg by a wide margin, receiving than 10 times as many front-page rankings as the second most-popular video site. Since August, however, there has been a sudden drop in the number of YouTube stories reaching the front page. Today, YouTube news now rates similarly in popularity to other video sites, according to QlikTech. Deighton said his company doesn't have any special access to Digg data; the BI vendor said it just uses the public API (define) the site makes available. "What we do doesn't make Digg any less in control, if anything, it helps them and users check for fraudulent behavior like the same user registering 5,000 accounts," Deighton said. The company's new Dugg Analyzer is one of many free services the company offers to show off its software's analytic capabilities. In the past, QlikTech has offered free analyzers for fantasy football players and another showing relationships between different wines and food. The next freebie in the works, set to come out around the time of the Grammy Awards, is designed to show where songs received radio station airplay. QlikTech is working with another company that collects such data. "In this case, we can say with certainty it's not a fair market," Deighton said.

HP, Intel Give Old Stuff a New Shine

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- HP and Intel are promoting energy efficiency programs and new products that reflect those initiatives. At an event here Wednesday, HP announced new versions of two low-power desktops, one with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD), ie. flash memory drive. The new systems are the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC with SSD and the HP Compaq dc5800 Business PC will meet Energy Star efficiency and use all the latest techniques for power efficiency, such as a low wattage CPU and the power management from Intel vPro. The dc7800 can actually attach to the back of an LCD monitor for a small, albeit less than elegant footprint. Its SSD drive will consume just two watts of power instead of 10 to 12, according to Kirk Godkin, senior product manager for business PCs. Between the SSD drive, Intel's Core 2 processor and vPro management, HP claimed it can cost as little as $10 per year to operate, at least in terms of raw power. However, the SSD drive comes with just 16GB of capacity, making the dc7800 the computing equivalent of an iPod Touch. Godkin acknowledged that this system is not for everyone, or even many businesses, due to its low capacity. It's aimed at customers where the PC would be used in a single-use environment, like a kiosk. The 16GB drive runs around $300, vs. $120 for a 80GB standard hard disk. Godkin said in the future, as prices come down, there could be 32GB and 64GB versions as well. The HP Compaq dc7800 is available today in North America at a starting list price of $1,258, while the HP Compaq dc5800 is expected to be available on February 11, starting as low as $579. The PCs reflect the latest efforts of both companies to reduce harmful materials in computers and recycle as much as possible from old systems. Until recently, old PCs usually ended up in a landfill. Not any more. HP recycled 185 million pounds of PCs in 2006, according to Carl Eckersley, manager in the personal systems group supply chain operations at HP. That includes old servers, even from a competitor. "If you're buying HP stuff, we'll take %26#91;the old equipment%26#93;," he said. "We grind up the metal and plastics, recover the precious metals and reuse as much as we can." HP recently passed the one billion pounds recycled mark and hopes to recycle another billion pounds by 2010, he added. In addition to its low power push, Intel's contribution to the environment has been to make cleaner chips. The newly-launched Penryn line is free of lead and halogens, which will make them less polluting and easier to recycle. Intel is also working on recycling efforts, although it generally leaves system recycling to the OEMs, according to Todd Brady, corporate environmental manager for Intel. But Intel does have its own project to recycle its own waste in the works. "It's been a multi-year effort, both in the U.S. and overseas," he said. Intel manufactures chips in places like Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel and Ireland. If the local pollution control standards aren't particularly strong, Intel still brings back the waste to properly dispose of it. This includes chemicals like acids and salts used to etch the silicon wafers and the metals in the wafers. "We recycle about 80 percent of the chemical waste and minimize the amount that ends up in a landfill. Last year, about six percent of our total waste ended up in a landfill. Our ultimate goal is to get that to zero."

Motorola Forecasts Loss on Struggling Phone Biz

Motorola said on Wednesday it will post an operating loss in the current quarter as recovery in its mobile phone business is taking longer than expected, dashing Wall Street expectations for a profit and sending its shares down as much as 14 percent. The miss of as much as 16 cents per share for Motorola's first-quarter outlook overshadowed its fourth-quarter results, which were in line with expectations. "The figures had us scratching our heads checking the date to see if we were looking at an earnings release from 2002," JPMorgan analyst Ehud Gelblum said in a note to clients. Motorola's outlook suggested the company "either expects massive additional %26#91;market%26#93; share loss in the first quarter or even weaker margins across the board," he said. Shares fell to $10.55 in premarket trading, after dropping 7 percent to $12.32 on Tuesday. If the stock stays at that level after trade opens on the New York Stock Exchange, it would be its lowest since October 2003. The company forecast a first-quarter loss per share from continuing operations of 5 cents to 7 cents, before any reorganization charges. Analysts had expected a profit of 9 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates. Avian Securities analyst Tero Kuittinen said the outlook reflected Motorola's lack of a strong enough product line to beat rivals, such as Nokia and Samsung Electronics, to which Motorola has been losing market share. "People assumed there's some progress toward profitability in handsets," he said. "People were expecting a linear improvement, so obviously the level of competition has increased." Motorola plans to focus on cutting costs and getting mobile devices back to profitability. The division posted an operating loss of $388 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a profit of $341 million a year ago. Mobile phone sales fell 38 percent to $4.8 billion, with 40.9 million units sold. "We are focused on aggressively rationalizing the company's cost structure and working to get Mobile Devices back on track," Motorola CEO Greg Brown said in a statement. "The recovery in Mobile Devices will take longer than expected and there is a lot more work to be done." Brown, formerly chief operating officer, became CEO on January 1 after Ed Zander stepped down amid criticism of Motorola's phone lineup and its lack of a popular successor to the once-lauded Razr phone. Motorola said fourth-quarter profit was $100 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with $623 million, or 25 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue fell 18 percent to $9.65 billion. Excluding such charges as a legal settlement, Motorola earnings were 14 cents per share for the fourth quarter, compared with analyst expectations for earnings of 13 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates. Motorola shares have fallen about 53 percent since October 2006.

Microsoft Hires Disney CIO

Microsoft announced Thursday it has hired a new chief information officer (CIO) to replace the one it fired several months ago. The company terminated its last CIO, Stuart Scott, in early November for what it would only describe as "violation of company policies." Replacing him will be Tony Scott, who left the CIO position at the Walt Disney Co. to take the job at Microsoft. Despite sharing the same last name, the two are not related. Tony Scott has logged 25 years of experience in global IT, according to a Microsoft statement. Prior to Disney, Scott, who is 56, was previously CTO at GM as well as vice president of operations at Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In his new position at Microsoft, which begins next month, he'll report to Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer. As CIO, he has three basic charters, according to a Microsoft statement. At the top of the list is running Microsoft's 4,000-person international IT department. Secondly, the company typically first tests its products out on its own IT systems, so he is responsible for providing key early feedback to product groups. "Third, we will call upon Tony to connect and collaborate with CIOs around the world to regularly share best practices with our customers and partners," said his new boss, Turner, in a statement. In addition to the position of CIO, Scott also will hold the job title of corporate vice president. The hire comes as a number of Microsoft executives have either left or are planning their exits from the company. Last week, Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, announced he plans to leave after more than 25 years at the company. The same week, the software maker confirmed that Bruce Jaffe, vice president of corporate development, resigned after 12 years at Microsoft. Earlier this week, the company also confirmed that Rob Short, corporate vice president of Windows Core Technology, left in December. Of course, these moves also come in the context of company chairman and co-founder Bill Gates's own imminent plans to dramatically scale back his involvement at Microsoft. In June 2006, Gates stepped down from the role of chief software architect and announced his intention to leave his day-to-day participation at the company later this year. He will remain chairman following the change.

Passing the Buck on Environmental Damage

By Elizabeth Quill
ScienceNOW Daily News
22 January 2008

Humans inflicted $47 trillion worth of damage to the environment from 1961 to 2000, according to a new study, and poor nations are disproportionately footing the bill. Taking their estimates a step further, the researchers conclude that high- and middle-income nations owe poor nations $3.2 trillion for the damage their development has caused.

Sixty percent of ecological services--benefits such as clean air for breathing or timber for building--are degraded or being used unsustainably, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Science, 1 April 2005, p. 41). However, attaching monetary value to these damages is difficult because the costs are typically ignored during economic transactions. An airline, for example, does not pay for the pollution it emits.

Despite the challenges, environmental scientist U. Thara Srinivasan of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues wanted to ask an even bigger question: Who bears the costs of the damage? To simplify things, Srinivasan's team excluded areas that are hardest to monetize, such as loss of biodiversity, and instead focused on issues such as climate change, ozone layer depletion, and deforestation. First, using existing literature such as the Stern report, a U.K. study that discussed the effect of climate change on the economy (ScienceNOW, 30 October 2006), the researchers calculated the amount of damage done to the global environment between 1961 and 2000. The researchers then used existing literature to estimate how much of that damage, in dollars, was caused by high-, middle-, and low-income groups and how much these groups forgo in terms of lost ecological benefits.

The findings are striking, says Srinivasan. The highest estimates suggest humans have wrought $47 trillion worth of damage to the environment over 4 decades. (For comparison, the global gross domestic product in 2007 is estimated at $65 trillion.) Most of the blame lies with high- and middle-income nations. These countries have emitted the majority of greenhouse gases, for example, yet poor nations suffer more from the effects of the emissions, such as increased weather disturbances and increased incidence of infectious disease.

The study set the costs passed from the high- and middle-income countries to the poor countries for climate change alone at $3 trillion, a value greater than the poor countries' collective foreign debt. There are similar disparities for ozone-layer depletion and overfishing, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "To our knowledge, our study is the first to quantitatively look at where ecological footprints are falling," Srinivasan says. "Poor countries shoulder a disproportionate burden."

Srinivasan admits that there are a lot of uncertainties. The researchers had to take local estimates of annual damage--in some cases the only estimates available--and multiply those by the total area damaged and by the number of years of damage. Srinivasan says she expects the study to be controversial, but she does not intend the numbers to be taken literally. "Instead, we challenge people to think about the distribution of costs between nations," she says.

Economist Edward Barbier of the University of Wyoming, Laramie, says the effort is ambitious but unrealistic. He notes that there are simply not enough data to undertake this type of global analysis. "It's a step backward from serious attempts to bring economists and ecologists to tackle complex environmental problems, including valuing ecosystem services," he says. However, Daniel Cole, a political theorist at Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis, says this study shows how far ecological economics has come in the past few decades. "The only thing worse than error-prone efforts to assign values to nonmarket goods may be not to make such efforts," he says.

Related sites

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Stern Report

International Society for Ecological Economics

The Secret Ingredient in Yellowstone's Travertine

By Carol Potera
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 January 2008

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING--Bruce Fouke can't leave a rock or microbe unturned. For 10 years, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), marine geologist has studied the origin of terraces made of travertine--a stone commonly used in floors and countertops--in Yellowstone National Park's Mammoth Hot Springs. At a meeting hosted by the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman held here last week, Fouke presented the first evidence that heat-loving bacteria in hot pools catalyze the mineralization, a process long assumed to be largely inorganic. The finding could improve models used for gas and oil exploration and for estimating groundwater supplies.

For Fouke, Yellowstone's travertine terraces provide a window into how mineralization occurs in coral, clam shells, and even meteorites that have struck Earth. All are composed of calcium carbonate, and because travertine in hot pools grows at a rate of 5 millimeters a day--compared with just 1 millimeter per year for coral--Yellowstone offers an ideal natural lab for observing mineralization in action, he says. Geologists have chalked up the travertine growth to inorganic processes that involve carbon dioxide forming carbonic acid that reacts with minerals and ground water. Meanwhile, microbiologists have focused on the pools' thermophiles: heat-loving microorganisms that have provided blueprints for industrial enzymes. Fouke wondered whether the geologists and microbiologists might have something in common.

To see if the thermophiles might be contributing to travertine formation, Fouke performed fluorescence microscopy on the stone, which revealed microbes encrusted in travertine at the nanoscale level. Next, Fouke's crew set up a siphonlike contraption inside a hot-spring channel to filter out microorganisms. When unfiltered water flowed into the channel, millimeter-long calcium carbonate crystals formed within hours. But when microbes were filtered out, travertine mineralization dropped by 2.5-fold.

How are the microbes helping? Fouke and proteomics expert Peter Yau of UIUC have identified several microbial proteins in samples of water collected from hot pools where mineralization readily occurs. Fouke speculates that such proteins, including heat shock proteins that microbes use to protect themselves from heat damage, could reduce the amount of energy needed for mineralization. "The words 'microbiology' and 'thermophiles' should no longer be spoken without the words 'geology' and 'water chemistry,' " Fouke told meeting attendees.

Fouke's discovery "expands the linkage between microbiology, geochemistry, and geology," says microbiologist Gill Geesey of MSU. In addition, he notes, evaluating the fine structure of calcium carbonate mineralization deposited in hydrothermal systems during different periods of Earth's evolution may offer insights into which microbes lived at which times.

Fouke says his findings could improve models used by oil and gas geologists that predict underground spaces for drilling, because microbe-induced mineral growth may close off these spaces. Moreover, the work could enhance models that predict the availability of ground water for drinking, he notes, as groundwater access could also be impeded by such growth.

Related sites

More on Fouke's work

More on Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot Springs

PGP Updated to be a Good Citizen

PGP has updated a number of components in its flagship PGP Encryption Platform to improve performance, functionality and make it less obtrusive to the user. Three of the six tools have received a significant overhaul while the other three received only minor performance tweaks, according to John Dasher, director of product management for PGP. The release is officially dubbed PGP Encryption Platform 9.8-2.8. Overall, PGP's efforts behind this release were to make its security product play better with your system, said Dasher. "One of the things we're constantly concerned about is the deployment and maintenance experience of the product line," he told InternetNews.com. "We recognize one of the larger concerns is how do you live with it." The three updated tools are PGP Whole Disk Encryption, PGP NetShare and PGP Desktop Email. PGP Whole Disk Encryption is behaving itself by offering better support for updates to a computer without requiring the computer's user to be there or share their passwords. Administrators can now access a computer to perform maintenance and upgrades without needing the user's password for access. While Whole Disk Encryption does end-to-end protection of the drive, PGP NetShare does individual file protection. This new version allows for files to be encrypted when they are dropped in a designated folder, and they stay that way until removed. The file can be opened, edited and updated and remain encrypted and protected so long as it stays in that folder and the encryption is totally invisible to the end user, said Dasher. This makes it easier to protect folders and decide who can access what. PGP's PDF Messenger is a secure PDF file delivery mechanism that also acts like a certified mail delivery system, since the encrypted PDF file comes with a separate HTML file as well. When it's opened, the sender is informed that the e-mail has been received. Once securely connected, the HTML file also provides the pass phrase to open the encrypted PDF file. Changes in the other applications in PGP Encryption Platform include adding tie-ins to the other three applications for ease of deployment to reduce the number of screens to get set up. It also supports other strong authentication mechanisms, such as Aladdin, Gemalto and RSA Security, and allows administrators to enforce location-based data protection via PGP NetShare. The new offering adds support via PGP Command Line for encrypting and digitally signing OpenPGP and S/Mime-formatted e-mail messages for additional flexibility in processing business transactions. PGP Encryption Platform 9.8-2.8 is available now. Pricing is available from PGP.

Apple Lightens Up

SAN FRANCISCO -- A heavy fog descended here this morning, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs brought the Mac faithful a healthy dose of virtual sunshine at Macworld Expo. With rumors flying in the weeks leading up to the event, none of Jobs' announcements during today's keynote address came as complete surprises. But the overflow crowd at the Moscone Convention Center nevertheless hung onto every word as he detailed and demoed Apple's next big launches. Of his four announcements, the new MacBook Air notebook proved the star of the show. Jobs proclaimed it the thinnest notebook computer in the world. The three-pound, $1,799 MacBook -- scheduled to ship in two weeks -- is indeed tiny. At 0.76 inches at its thickest point and a mere 0.16 inches at its skinniest, the design trumps Sony's TZ series, which ranges from 0.8 to 1.2 inches in thickness. Additionally, Jobs said Apple avoided many of the compromises that he claimed Sony and other ultra-mobile computer vendors were forced to make, even with their thicker designs. For example, unlike other ultra-portable notebooks, the MacBook Air sports a full keyboard, a roomy trackpad and a faster processor -- a custom-designed version of Intel's Core 2 Duo running at 1.6 GHz. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who joined Jobs on stage, said that at Apple's behest, his company started working a year ago on reducing the size of its standard Core 2 Duo for the MacBook Air. "We didn't think it was possible when we started," said Otellini, who presented Jobs with one of the new coin-sized Core 2 Duo chips. Otellini said the new CPU is 60 percent smaller than the standard offering. The MacBook Air also offers a bigger screen -- 13.3 inches -- where competitive systems feature 11- or 12-inch-wide screens, Jobs said. He added that the Air's battery life of five hours also beats the competition by several hours. Light and thin as Air
Source: Apple In addition to its svelte design, the MacBook Air incorporates features from the iPhone's touchscreen interface. The notebook's multi-touch gesture support lets users rotate and move photos and scroll through images with a finger, or zoom in or out on images with a two-fingered pinch. Other standard features include 4MB L2 processor cache, 2GB of memory, 80GB hard drive, iSight Webcam, backlit keyboard, 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity. Apple also will offer an optional solid-state drive, he said. But the Air lacks one component standard in most full-sized notebooks: an optical drive. The design choice hearkens back to year ago, when Jobs made made the controversial decision to cease including floppy drives on the iMac line. With even more connectivity options available in the market today, the decision not to include an optical drive figures to be less controversial -- and it helps further lighten the system's weight. "If you really want one, we have a compact Superdrive for $99 with USB connections," Jobs said. "But we don't think most users will miss having an optical drive." To compensate for the loss, user can turn to wireless and other file transfer options, including a new feature Jobs introduced called Remote Disc. The feature enables Air users to wirelessly connect to another Mac or PC on the network and access that system's optical drive. The idea is that a user can install software on his or her MacBook Air from a CD or DVD drive loaded on another computer. Next page: Movies to rent, wireless backups, Apple TV and iPhone updates

IBM's IDS to Support Mac Platform

Maybe it's just a cat thing. IBM on Wednesday announced its Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) will support the Mac OS X 10.5 operating system, a.k.a. 'Leopard' beginning with the mid-year release of the latest version of IDS 11, code-named Cheetah 2. Developers can now download a beta version of IDS Developer Edition from the IBM Web site but customers looking for a production version of Cheetah 2 will have to wait for a few more months, Bernie Spang, director of IBM data servers, told InternetNews.com. "There are many Mac application developers in education and government who are looking for high performance, high reliability and scalability for database management software," Spang said. "It's important for them that it not complicate their experience. Mac is known for its ease of use. And ease of management really means no management at all." IBM chose this week's Macworld Expo as the venue for the announcement, hoping to spread the word to the thousands of Mac developers in attendance who, until now, had been excluded from the IDS party. Cheetah 2 will extend online transaction processing (OLTP) (define) data serving capabilities to the Mac platform in addition to its current support of Linux, Unix and Windows operating systems. IBM said IDS provides continuous availability and disaster recovery features, including support for multiple secondary servers, and claims 99.9 percent availability. Spang said the timing of the announcement was coincidental and reflects both IBM's commitment to the growing IDS platform and the work that Apple's done in the past year to revamp its flagship operating system software. "Maybe it's the cat names," he joked. "Somebody must have decided that we should be hunting the prey together." IBM rolled out IDS 11 in June, incorporating the continuous data-availability and disaster recovery technology from its mainframe machines to help customers better manage their server clusters regardless of the distance between backup datacenters. Spang added that the Cheetah 2 release, following the IDS 10 and initial IDS 11 offerings, demonstrate both IBM's commitment to the platform and its independence from its DB2 line. "The message we've been on and clearly demonstrating for several years is that Informix product line continues to be a strategic product line," he said. "We've been consistent in delivering capabilities in IDS that we've drawn from DB2 and capabilities from DB2 that we've drawn from IDS."

Intel Inside a White Box Blade System

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. %26#150; PC customers seeking choice can get a brand name PC, such as a Dell or HP computer, or can go to a system builder that makes a machine out of standard parts. These stores have long been known as "the white box market," or less politely as "screwdriver shops," since the computer is built on premises. Those custom built shops have served the small business market adequately for individual desktop and low-end server PCs, but there was never an option if a customer wanted a blade solution. For that, you had to go to the big name companies, such as HP with its c3000, a.k.a. "Shorty," or IBM's BladeCenter S. Well, IBM hopes to change that with Clear Bay, a modular, all-in-one blade system design that looks just like Shorty or the BladeCenter S but made from standard parts that a reseller can build for their customers. The Clear Bay server is based on the Modular Server Specification announced by Intel last July. It sets up a standard for blade server parts, such as compute blades, storage blades, backup blades, chassis design, power supplies and heat sinks. Clear Bay is a 6U-high blade chassis that can support up to six two-socket Xeon server nodes, 14 2.5-inch serial-attached SCSI (SAS) hard disks, two storage-control modules, a management module and two Ethernet switch modules. Intel believes offering a white box solution to the blade system market will help grow it, even more so than the $19.8 billion for SMB server spending this year as projected by Access Markets International Partners. "A lot of SMBs haven't considered upgrading their systems to baldes. There's a lot of unfulfilled potential out there," said David Brown, general manager of Intel's channel server marketing group at a briefing here. The resellers assembled with Intel were even more enthusiastic. "This allows companies like us to compete on equal terms with companies a lot larger than us," said Joe Toste, vice president of sales and marketing for Equus Computer Systems, which sells systems to resellers around the country. "We expect many more server customers will be able to go after a larger marketplace now that they have this option for customers." In addition to the hardware, the Clear Bay systems are fully manageable via a Web interface, so the administrator doesn't even need to be present with the hardware to manage it. Through a Web interface, servers can be brought online, taken offline, hard drives assigned to a specific server and specific applications assigned to a server. Pricing for servers based on the Clear Bay platform will be roughly $7,200 for a basic configuration, and when fully loaded, will run around $32,000.

IBM, Mayo Clinic Open Imaging Research Center

IBM and the Mayo Clinic on Wednesday announced the opening of a new collaborative research facility designed to speed the processing of compute-intensive algorithms used to deliver medical images from patients' MRI and CT scans. The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is the latest product of a four-year partnership between IBM and the Mayo Clinic, giving radiologists and physicians access to IBM's latest blade hardware and Cell microprocessor architecture %26#151; first used in Sony's PlayStation 3 %26#151; to render 3-D medical images that used to take hours in a matter of minutes. "There have been algorithms out there for years that can take two-dimensional images and process them into 3-D but they take a lot of processing power and can take hours to run," Bill Rapp, IBM distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for IBM%26#146;s Healthcare and Life Sciences team, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "But radiologists often don't use them because they only have five to 10 minutes to do a reading. By putting all this computing power together, these images can be registered 50 times faster and improve the quality of radiology reading and productivity," he added. Rapp said IBM and the Mayo Clinic are sharing the costs of staffing the six-person MI3C staff while IBM provided "hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of hardware. For this investment, IBM gets the opportunity to see what features and applications have the greatest commercial promise for future product releases and medical researchers get access to the technology and the ability to showcase to garner more federal research grants. In practice, the high-speed computations allow radiologists to fill in the imaging gaps and blurs created when patients breath or make slight movements during examinations. If multiple scans of a particular organ or limb are slightly different%26#151;say the head is tilted a bit to the right or the left in each scan%26#151;the algorithm adjusts to provide a consistent image. The MI3C is located on the Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minn. and is open to third-party researchers and medical professionals.

Lenovo Cautious on Expansion in U.S. Consumer Market

LAS VEGAS -- Lenovo%26#146;s chairman said the company is insulated for now from a possible U.S. recession as the company introduced its first nonbusiness PC line in that country. But Yuanqing Yang cautioned in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the Chinese economy has become highly dependent on U.S. market demand, and that could hurt Lenovo over time. "China relies on exports. I think, if the U.S. economy has some problems, it will impact China's economy," Yang said. Shares of Lenovo fell 11.9 percent to HK$5.78 in Hong Kong on Wednesday, knocking more than US$800 million off the company's market value. Traders cited U.S. recession fears for a broad Asia sell-off. Last week, Lenovo, China's largest maker of personal computers, moved forward with a long-anticipated international expansion by introducing a new line of consumer PCs in a dozen countries, including the United States, France and Australia. Through its acquisition of IBM's PC business three years ago, Lenovo is also one of the world's top three sellers of business PCs, known specifically for its ThinkPad notebook line. Yang said the main thrust of Lenovo's expansion is into emerging markets, such as Russia, Brazil, South Africa and Southeast Asia. "Ultimately, we will focus on emerging markets because growth there is faster than in mature markets. Also, as a Chinese company, we have more experience in emerging markets," Yang said. Lenovo aims to capitalize on a low-cost business model that has made it China's dominant PC maker and which has catapulted it to No. 2 in India within just 18 months. Initially, the company has said it only plans to introduce a limited number of stylish notebooks aimed at three U.S. hot consumer niches: PCs for multimedia, video gaming and ultraportable users. It has no U.S. plans to sell desktop PCs. "Given that our %26#91;consumer%26#93; market share outside China is zero, I don't think it %26#91;the risk of a U.S. recession%26#93; will have a significant impact on our expansion plan," Yang said. Yang said Lenovo will focus its consumer strategy in the U.S. market on premium customers attracted by innovative engineering and design, and ruled out introducing cut-rate models to grab share based on its low-cost global production capacities in China, India, Mexico and Poland. "In mature markets I don't think we will go to the low-end quickly," said Yang, who a year ago moved from Beijing to live near Lenovo's Raleigh, N.C., headquarters. Its lowest cost U.S. consumer notebook model starts at $895. Yang said Beijing-based Lenovo will test how its limited line of consumer PCs works in the initial dozen or so markets before deciding whether to expand to other national markets. Analysts say Lenovo's biggest challenge in entering a mature market such as the United States is winning shelf space at major retailers. Initially it will sell through BestBuy.com, Newegg.com and Tiger Direct, another online seller. "I think it's a smart approach to gradually expand your product portfolio," Yang said. Worldwide, Lenovo ranked fourth behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer in third-quarter PC shipments, according to research firm Gartner. In the United States, where Lenovo has previously sold only business computers, it ranked sixth.

Cosmic Cloud on Collision Course

By Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 January 2008

AUSTIN, TEXAS--It's large, it's fast, and it's heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation. In fact, the cloud contains enough gas to form a million stars like our sun, astronomers reported here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding also indicates that pristine material is still entering the relatively mature Milky Way.

Many clouds of hydrogen surround the Milky Way. But astronomers didn't start spotting them until a half-century ago--after the advent of radio telescopes, which are able to detect cold, neutral hydrogen gas. The early observations were not accurate enough to determine the clouds' distances, masses, or directions of motion, however.

Now, thanks to more powerful telescopes such as the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, these clouds are finally getting their close-up. The first to be spotlighted in extreme detail is Smith's Cloud, named after Dutch astronomy student Gail Smith, who discovered it in 1963. Curious about the cloud's elongated shape, a team of astronomers led by Felix "Jay" Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, took tens of thousands of radio brightness measurements. The data reveal that the cloud is just 8000 light-years away from the Milky Way's central plane, making it the closest one known. Its cometary shape is apparently due to the tidal effects of the Milky Way.

According to team member Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, the cloud is also closing in very fast on our galaxy. At its current speed, Smith's Cloud will collide with interstellar gas in the Milky Way's disk in less than 40 million years, says Benjamin. The crash will happen far from us, but it could still put on quite a show as the cloud's gas condenses into tens of thousands of bright, massive stars that will explode as supernovas within a couple of million years.

W. Butler Burton, a retired radio astronomer and expert on these fast-moving hydrogen clouds, says the new observations are a further step in solving the riddle of these cosmic beasts: "We never knew whether the clouds were blown out of the Milky Way, only to fall back at a later stage, or whether they are pristine intergalactic clouds falling in for the first time." Because Smith's Cloud turns out to contain almost no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which are relatively common in the Milky Way, it looks like a first-time visitor. Says Burton: "We might be witnessing the final stages of the formation process of our galaxy."

Related site

Green Bank Telescope, used in the research

AMD's Product Lines Shed Some Names

Do you find "AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+" a pain to say out loud? So does AMD. The company is giving its lengthy CPU brand names a makeover, with the goal of improving clarity for its buyers. The move had been erroneously reported in some quarters as the end of the line for the X2 product line. Rather, it's just the name that's going away: Instead of "Athlon 64 X2 6400+", it will simply be "Athlon 6400." Expect similar changes throughout the company's lineup, it said. Spokespeople said the move is because the names had become too confusing and unnecessary. "Those descriptors are not needed any more," Brent Barry, desktop brand manager for AMD, told InternetNews.com. "We're looking beyond the '64' and 'X2' labels because this stuff is becoming ubiquitous. Saying '64' is redundant. The industry has gone 64-bit. The same with 'X2' -- everything has gone dual-core." "So why put another number in there for people to trip over?" he said. In some instances, it helps to have a descriptor, like the new Quad-Core Opteron processor, since that is the first release of the product as a quad-core design. But Barry said the company plans to adopt a more Opteron-like numbering scheme for Athlon and Phenom, the successor to Athlon that offers dual-, triple- and quad-core designs. The Opteron uses three numbering schemes -- the 1000, 2000 and 8000 lines, for single-socket, dual-socket and four-/eight-socket motherboard designs, respectively. The first two Phenoms, the 9500 and 9600, don't quite sync with the core or clock speed for the chips. AMD said it's working on it. "We all know how confusing it's been to follow model numbers," Barry said. "It was the same rat hole Intel had fallen into when you have so many parts in your stack. We're going to look to make the model numbers be more of a situation where performance details can be found." It's about time, said semiconductor analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. "When you look at the official product names of some of these things, both from AMD and Intel, they go on forever and certainly the rest of us never use that stuff," he said. Brookwood added that companies like Intel and AMD need what they call "the trademark police" to examine every external document to make sure they conform precisely with trademark-naming conventions. As a result, shortening the name will be a relief for them and buyers alike.

IPv6 Set for Root Adoption?

IPv6 adoption (define) has a key adoption deadline looming this year, but is still facing plenty of barriers to adoption. Key among them is this: IPv6 address information is not included in most of the root DNS (define) servers that power the Internet. This makes IPv6 to IPv6 connections a difficult proposition. At a time when the current IPv4 protocol is running out of address spaces for Web sites, the barriers to IPv6 adoption need to be addressed, experts say. Starting on February 4th, at least one of those adoption barriers will be addressed as AAAA records for IPv6 addresses are added to four of the key root DNS servers. IPv6 AAAA records are a key resource record type for storing IPv6 address information on DNS servers. The IPv6 AAAA additions were announced by ICANN at the end of December in an e-mail announcement by Barbara Roseman, general operations manager for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, an organization working under the auspices of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and which is responsible for assigning new Internet-wide IP addresses. The inclusion of the IPv6 records could make the adoption and operation of IPv6 a more viable option for network operators. For Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium and an operator of the F root DNS server and creator of the popular BIND DNS software, the ICANN/IANA move to IPv6 is a very good thing. "This is one of the roadblocks to running an Internet device IPv6-only, and we're very glad to finally see this roadblock removed," Vixie told InternetNews.com. Vixie isn't the only one that is enthusiastic about the ICANN/IANA announcement of AAAA for IPv6 on some root DNS servers. Internet service provider Verio is also keen on the move. "The ICANN/IANA announcement of AAAA for IPv6 on root DNS servers is the first step toward having a worldwide IPv6-capable DNS system," Fred Clift, manager of VPS/MPS development for Verio, told InternetNews.com. "Since the DNS system is distributed across thousands of organizations, nations, companies etc., this is the logical and much needed first step. In the future, a majority of the Internet will need to be reachable via IPv6; the ICANN/IANA announcement is part of the progression towards this." Next page: Party and Counterparty Issues With IPv6

Hey, Wanna Buy a Subscription?

Beginning in early March, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) (define) will have a new option for licensing Microsoft software through resellers %26#150; via subscription. Dubbed the Open Value Subscription, the plan will enable SMBs to license the software they use on a "lease-like" basis, according to a posting New Years' Day on the Microsoft Small Business Community Blog. However, as the post points out, it is not a lease, although it has some of the financial benefits of one. "This option provides the up-front cost-saving benefits of a lease-type model %26#133; where they can pay to use the software for a set period of time with the flexibility to increase or decrease in size as their business size does year over year," said the post by Eric Ligman, Microsoft's U.S. senior manager for small business community engagement. "At the end of the initial term, clients have the options to continue the subscription, buy out the subscription to own the licenses, or to end the subscription," he added. To quell concerns among its partners that Microsoft may be making yet another move to take over their markets, Ligman also said that the plan does nothing to change the current sales model. An SMB buys the subscription from its preferred reseller, the reseller buys the subscription from its preferred distributor, and the distributor gets the subscription from Microsoft. The flow of payments works similarly, Ligman said in a later post. Translation: for partners, the status quo is maintained %26#150; at least for now. That may change over the longer term, however, as Microsoft moves into high gear with its developing "software-plus-services" business model, according to one analyst. That may eventually route payments directly to Microsoft, cutting out the middle man. "The whole software-as-a-service %26#91;concept%26#93; is more about the licensing than about the delivery method," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the research firm The Enderle Group. However, Microsoft has to be careful and tread lightly with its partners, many of whom already feel threatened by the company entering their established markets. "If they move too quickly, they anger the channel, so Microsoft is moving very carefully," Enderle added. In his view, that's part of the reason why Microsoft's business-oriented software-plus-services offerings to date have mostly been targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. "It's small business first because %26#91;that market%26#93; is the most exposed." At the same time, established business models are changing and Microsoft needs to keep up. "If they don't move when the market moves, you're left behind," Enderle said.

The Sun Is My Guide, Quoth the Butterfly

By Elizabeth Quill
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 January 2008

Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies wing it from their birthplaces in eastern North America to a small winter retreat in the mountains of central Mexico. Scientists have long puzzled at how the insects navigate the unfamiliar journey, which can span up to 3000 kilometers. Now researchers have exposed the cogs and gears that make a monarch's biological clock tick, timekeeping that they say is necessary for successful southward navigation.

Scientists believe monarchs follow the sun like a compass. But this is easier said than done. Because the sun appears to rise and fall each day, the insects must constantly adjust to its movements, lest they quickly lose their way. In 2003, Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, showed that butterflies use an internal timepiece to help them fly in the right direction (ScienceNOW, 22 May 2003).

In a pair of new studies, Reppert and his colleagues suggest that the connection between the clock and the compass relies on light-absorbing proteins called cryptochromes. First discovered in plants, cryptochromes help synchronize the internal clock--or circadian rhythm--in flies and mice (Science, 27 November 1998, p. 1628).

After assembling a database of expressed sequence tags--short DNA sequences that can be used to identify a gene expressed in a cell at a given time--Reppert and his colleagues located two families of cryptochromes in the monarch. That's unusual, Reppert notes, because other creatures studied have only one type of cryptochrome. Further molecular analysis revealed that monarchs have both a flylike cryptochrome (CRY1), which absorbs light to set the internal clock, and a mouselike cryptochrome (CRY2), which keeps the clock running. "This changes how we think molecular clocks can be put together," Reppert says. What's more, he notes, the monarch's clock may represent a timepiece that is ancestral to both flies and mice, which would imply that these creatures each lost one of the cryptochrome genes. If that's the case, studying monarch clock mechanics could provide important clues to how such timepieces evolved.

Reppert and colleagues also found that CRY2 levels oscillate daily in the part of the monarch brain responsible for following the sun like a compass. The protein might help the clock talk to the compass and therefore give the butterflies their bearings during the long journey. The team presents the database findings tomorrow in PLoS ONE and describes the role of cryptochromes in the butterfly clock today in PLoS Biology.

Gene Robinson, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, says the study provides a basis for the proposal that cryptochrome connects the circadian clock to the sun compass. Still, Orley ?Chip? Taylor Jr., an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, says the work does little to explain navigation. To make it to Mexico, monarchs coming from New York, Texas, or Iowa, for example, would have to follow different bearings and begin their journeys at different times. This is hard to reconcile with a specieswide clock, he notes. "We are a long way from understanding that," Taylor says.

Related sites

The PLoS ONE study

The PLoS Biology study

Monarch Watch

More on animal navigation

Technical information on cryptochromes

Cryptochromes and magnetic sensing

Rogue Black Holes May Abound in Milky Way

By Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

AUSTIN, TEXAS--Hundreds of massive black holes may be careering through our Milky Way galaxy, researchers announced here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. But don't worry, the galaxy is huge, so Earth's chances of being swallowed are tiny.

Black holes--regions of space where gravity is so strong that even light can't escape--come in various sizes. The smaller ones are a few times more massive than the sun and form when massive stars burn out and implode. In contrast, supermassive black holes reside in the cores of galaxies and can be up to billions of solar masses. And astronomers have circumstantial evidence for the existence of a third class: intermediate-mass black holes that weigh in at a few hundred to a few thousand suns. They might form within dense, spherical swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars known as globular clusters, although no one is sure how (ScienceNOW, 17 September 2002). If such intermediate-mass black holes do exist, then a new analysis suggests that many of them are spit out by the clusters and end up roaming through space alone, Kelly Holley-Bockelmann of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, reported at the meeting.

Why would a globular cluster eject its intermediate-mass black hole? The answer, according to Holley-Bockelmann and her colleagues, lies in mergers with smaller, stellar-mass black holes that would also form in the cluster and slowly sink to its core. According to general relativity, the merging of the two black holes produces a burst of gravitational waves, which are literally expanding ripples in spacetime itself. If the merger is off-center, or if the two black holes spin at different speeds or in different directions, the gravitational waves emerge asymmetrically. The asymmetric waves would act like a rocket on the combined black hole, flinging it out of the cluster with a velocity of thousands of kilometers per second.

As the Milky Way contains some 200 globular clusters, hundreds of rogue black holes may be crisscrossing our galaxy, says Holley-Bockelmann. Spotting them may be difficult, however. They would be visible only if they encounter interstellar gas clouds to feed on, in which case they would heat some of the gas and cause it to emit x-rays. Alternatively, says Holley-Bockelmann, a roaming hole might reveal itself if it passes in front of a more distant star. The black hole's gravity would then distort the image of the background star in telltale ways in a process called gravitational lensing (ScienceNOW, 6 October 2006).

"Learning more about intermediate-mass black holes and their possible fates is very interesting" because so little is known about them, says theoretical astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas, Austin. He notes that many other processes in the Milky Way may also send smaller black holes drifting through space: "There might be 100 million stellar-mass black holes out there."

So should we worry about a hefty intermediate-mass black hole coming our way? No, says Holley-Bockelmann, there are too few of them. "The most dangerous effect I can think of is a rogue black hole stirring up our solar system's Oort cloud of comets, which would send huge numbers of comets on a potential collision course with Earth. But the chance of that happening is only one in a quadrillion or so. There's no need to build black-hole shelters."

Related sites

Abstract of the research paper, with link to full text

Globular cluster primer

MicroRNAs Keep Tumors in Place

By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

When a cancer spreads, or metastasizes, it often becomes incurable. Now scientists are eyeing a new factor that may prompt tumor cells to start roaming: a deficit of molecules known as microRNAs, which modulate gene expression. Building on earlier work linking microRNAs to cancer, researchers have found that a lack of certain microRNAs encourages tumors to spread. They also report that in mice, the microRNAs can be manipulated to slow metastasis.

Metastasis is thought to occur for a host of reasons. Certain genes may be turned on or off in tumors, causing cells to jump ship; and some environments in the body are more hospitable to wandering cancer cells. Recently, scientists have begun to consider the role of microRNAs, which appear to be expressed at very low levels in tumors. That's led to speculation that when turned on, microRNAs can suppress tumors.

Joan Massagu%26eacute;, a cancer biologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, cast a wide net for disappearing microRNAs in breast cancers. He and his colleagues examined microRNA expression in cell lines from patients with aggressive breast cancer that had spread to bones or the lungs. They came up with six microRNAs whose expression was vanishingly low compared to normal tissue. The researchers injected mice with metastatic cells from a patient with breast cancer. When lesions formed in the bones or lungs of the animals, the team found very low expression of three of the six microRNAs.

Massagu%26eacute; and his colleagues also studied 368 banked tumor samples from breast cancer patients and looked at expression of the genes that are suppressed by the six key microRNAs; when gene expression is high, the microRNAs aren't active, and when it's low, they are. The researchers found that patients whose tumors expressed the genes had about a 50%26#37; chance of being alive and not having metastatic cancer after 10 years. Among those patients that were negative for all six genes--in other words, those whose microRNA expression was high and damping down gene expression--the number was about 75%26#37;, the team reports in the 10 January issue of Nature.

The team also investigated the impact of restoring expression of microRNAs in cancer cells injected into mice. Boosting expression of three of the six microRNAs before injecting the cancer cells dramatically reduced lung and bone metastases, although the mice still developed them eventually. "That was a very clean experiment," says Massagu%26eacute;. But "it's a far cry" from treating patients.

Laura van 't Veer, a molecular biologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, agrees that clinical applications are far off, but she says the findings are promising. At the very least, microRNAs "may represent especially good indicators of metastasis" and could be used diagnostically, says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose group last year described a microRNA that plays a role in breast cancer metastasis (ScienceNOW, 26 September 2007). Massagu%26eacute; is now studying whether the microRNAs he came up with help prevent metastasis in other cancers.

Related sites

Article from Science on metastasis

More on metastasis

Study Revises Iraq's Death Toll

By John Bohannon
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

Between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis died violent deaths between the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and June 2006. That's the conclusion of a study by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization (WHO) published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The new estimate throws fresh doubt on a controversial study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, published in The Lancet in 2006, that estimated a death toll four times higher (Science, 20 October 2006, p. 396).

Between 2006 and 2007, Iraqi surveyors led by WHO epidemiologist Mohammed Ali knocked on the doors of 9345 Iraqi homes. The addresses were chosen randomly within about 1000 neighborhoods and villages across the country. Besides basic information about the household, interviewers asked about illnesses and death among occupants since the beginning of 2002.

This survey, like the earlier Lancet study, found that violence became a leading cause of death in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion. The WHO team used the same method of extrapolation to calculate total death rate as the Lancet group did, but their average estimate of violent deaths is 151,000--far lower than the Lancet's 601,000. When the WHO surveyors were assigned a cluster of households in a neighborhood deemed too dangerous to visit, they used data from Iraq Body Count, a London-based database of media-reported Iraqi casualties whose numbers are considered a floor. "Some homes could not be visited because of high levels of insecurity," says Iraqi health minister Salih Mahdi Motlab Al-Hasanawi, who was not an author. "Nonetheless, the survey results indicate a massive death toll since the beginning of the conflict."

Researchers say any attempts to calculate death tolls during a war will have limitations, but they are impressed by the new study. "There are inherent biases in a household survey like this one," says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, particularly when the total population size is not well-known. "But their approach was rigorous, and they accounted for all reasonable criticisms."

Brownstein declined to comment on the Lancet study, noting only that the WHO study's sample size--five times larger than that of the Lancet study--makes it "more robust, all things being equal." But some researchers are not as forgiving. "This study is a slaughter of the Lancet study," says Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway, University of London, in the U.K. "Serious problems with that study have been evident for a long time, but this confirms it."

Intel to Fight EU Antitrust Charges

Chipmaker Intel said on Monday it had responded to antitrust charges filed by the European Commission and would seek a hearing, an Intel spokesman and a Commission spokeswoman said on Monday. The Commission charged Intel in July 2007 with slashing prices below cost and offering huge rebates in an illegal attempt to drive smaller competitor Advanced Micro Devices out of the market. Intel says it has followed the law. The charges and the response are confidential. The Commission confirmed that it had received the filing and an Intel spokesman said a hearing had been requested. Intel took advantage of its right to have its case aired before a hearing officer, in a closed-room review. The hearing officer will make no decision but will report directly to Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Typically, it takes several months in such a complex case before a hearing takes place. If so, the case will be heard in March or perhaps after the Easter break in early April. The Commission is the EU's antitrust watchdog and has powers to fine companies up to 10 percent of their global annual revenues for competition abuses.

November a Cool Month For Search Traffic

With only minor fluctuations in market share atop the leader board, four of the five major search engines saw the total number of searches conducted on their core properties decline in November, according to research from online metrics firm comScore. Americans conducted 5 percent fewer Web searches in November than in October, comScore found, attributing the decline in part to an expected seasonal slackening due to one fewer day in the month. Even accounting for the shorter month, core searches were still down. Crunching the numbers, the 10 billion searches conducted in November equates to 334.3 million searches per day, down from 339.6 million in October. Bucking the trend was the Time Warner's AOL, which saw its total searches increase by 2.4 percent last month. Time Warner ranked fifth in market share (4.5 percent) behind Google (58.6 percent), Yahoo (22.4 percent), Microsoft (9.8 percent) and Ask (4.6 percent). With a 0.2 percent increase in market share, Google built on its already monumental advantage, inching closer to a threefold lead over its nearest competitor, Yahoo. Google handled nearly 5.9 billion search queries in November, compared with the 2.2 billion recorded on Yahoo. The other three major search engines were all in single digits when ranked by market share. As it turned out, Yahoo was the biggest loser in both measures of the analysis, forfeiting 0.4 percent of its market share due to a 6.5 percent drop in the total number of search queries performed. In terms of market share, Microsoft held steady at 9.8 percent, while its volume of search queries fell 5.1 percent, consistent with the overall decline in core search. IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask search engine saw its market share drop just slightly (0.1 percent), while total queries fell 5.8 percent. Time Warner posted the biggest jump in market share, gaining a modest 0.3 percent. In evaluating search volume and market share of the core Web properties of the big five, comScore excluded from consideration mapping queries, as well as searches on local-directory sites and user-generated video sites. Expanding the rankings to include all of the top 50 Web properties, Google looks even stronger. Search queries on YouTube and all other Google properties (aside from its core search sites) were up 9.3 percent. Buoyed by the onset of the holiday shopping season were Amazon sites, which saw 22 percent more searches in November than October, and eBay, where searches rose 3.5 percent. Search queries conducted on Facebook fell 21.7 percent from October to November; searches on MySpace dropped 10 percent.

Technical Analysis: Stocks Stay Stuck

The two strongest months of the year could do nothing to break the market out of its six-month trading range. And election years tend to be choppy, so there's no guarantee that the indexes will break out any time soon. The S%26P 500 (see first chart below) remains stuck near the bottom of its trading range. If it goes much below 1440, 1428-1432 and 1420 come into play, while 1480-1500 remains a big hurdle to the upside. If 13,000 goes on the Dow (second chart), 12,800 could be next. To the upside, 13,360 is a big resistance area. The Nasdaq (third chart) has support here at 2600, with 2590 and 2540-2550 below that. Resistance is 2650-2660, 2680 and 2700. In short, still a very range-bound market, but one that could get a lift later this month in anticipation of more rate cuts. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.