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Monday 14 March 2016

Albert Einstein: Top 10 quotes of the father of modern physics

On the power of imagination
 "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

On romance
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's two minutes. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think its two hours. That's relativity."
                                               
On mistakes
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
On scientific career
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

 On education
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
 On technology
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
On the secret to success
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, 
education, and social ties; no religiousbasis is necessary. Man would 
indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

On over-thinking
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

On facts of life
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."




Celebrating Albert Einstein's 137th birthday! and Pi Day

Monday (14 March) marks the 137th birthday of the father of modern physics Albert Einstein. He was born in 1879 in what used to the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in Germany.

He is credited with shaping modern and theoretical physics with his general theory of relativity and is also the creator of the world's most recognised equation E=mc2.


New discoveries on Einstein's gravitational waves theory, which was recently confirmed by Ligo scientists, show how the genius of Einstein's work is still defining our understanding of physics.

Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his "services to theoretical physics". After becoming an American citizen, he began working at Princeton, where he stayed well after his retirement.

Saturday 12 March 2016

Indian finds bug on facebook awarded Rs 10 lakh


Bengaluru- based hacker Anand Prakash has been awarded $15,000 (approximately Rs 10 lakh) for finding a bug in Facebook's login system. The bug, if exploited, could let hackers access a user's messages, photos and even debit/credit card details stored in the payments section, among others.


Friday 11 March 2016

Apple iPhone 'Special Edition' will be missing one major feature

Apple is expected to launch the iPhone SE, as well as a new iPad and Apple Watch accessories, at an event held on March 21, Buzzfeed reports.



Highly reliable supply chain analyst Ming Chi Kuo has detailed what to expect from the iPhone 'Special Edition' (SE), the latest rumored device in Apple's phone lineup.

  iPhone SE features

 Display  : 4-inch Touch Screen
Chip       : iOS 9
Camera  : 12 MP Primary
                         1.2 MP Secondry
Memory :2GB RAM, 16GB Rom




* One key feature is missing: 3D touch, one of Apple's key features for the Phone 6S that enables what is essentially a "right click" interaction, is expected to remain exclusive to Apple's more premium iPhones







Apple set to launch cheaper iPhone on March 21

NEW DELHI: Apple has sent out media invites for a product launch scheduled for March 21, just a day before the company squares off with US federal authorities over their demand to unlock an encrypted iPhone.




The tech community widely expects the company to release its first small-screen iPhone since 2013, along with a smaller version of the iPad Pro, at the March 21 launch event.

Apple's media invite only says: Let us loop you in.


The rumoured small-screen iPhone is reportedly named iPhone SE, which is said to stand for Special Edition, and feature a 4-inch screen. According to leaks, the upcoming Apple smartphone looks the same as iPhone 6S, but in a smaller frame, and is powered by the current flagship's A9 chipset. It will also support features like Apple Pay and Live Photos but not 3D Touch, which will remain exclusive to iPhone 6S and 6S Plus for now.




KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, widely considered the most accurate researcher on Apple, previously said in a note that iPhone SE will be priced at $450. Apple currently sells the 2.5-year-old iPhone 5S at that price point. He also said that the price of iPhone 5S will be cut in half after the launch of iPhone SE.

With iPhone sales now starting to plateau, analysts say Apple could spark additional demand by offering an updated 4-inch iPhone alongside the bigger models. The smaller iPhone's is also expected to appeal to those who never bought into the larger screens of the smartphones the company has launched over the past two years.




Similarly, Apple has been trying to boost sagging iPad sales by offering more sizes and models. The new iPad tablet is expected to be a 9.7-inch version of the iPad Pro, which Apple introduced last year. While the new model will be the same size as Apple's regular iPads, it's also a step back from the first iPad Pro, which has a larger, 12.9-inch screen and other features for professional users -- including a thin, detachable keyboard and stylus that are sold separately.

The backdrop to this year's event is Apple's high-stakes legal dispute with FBI and the Obama administration, which has chafed at Apple's use of encryption that make its customers' data unreadable to others.




Federal authorities want Apple's help in over-riding security features on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino mass shooters. Apple CEO Tim Cook contends the government's demand would make other iPhones vulnerable. Both sides are scheduled to make their case to a federal magistrate in Riverside on March 22.




Wednesday 9 March 2016

Wikipedia Editors Woo Scientists to Improve Content Quality


The online encyclopedia hosted a conference to enlist the help of scientists and reduce disputes about the quality of entries

Wikipedia is among the most frequently visited websites in the world, and one of the most popular places to tap into the world’s scientific and medical information. But scientists themselves are generally wary of it, because it can be edited by anyone, regardless of their level of expertise. At a meeting in London last week, the non-profit website’s volunteer editors reached out to scientists to enlist their help and to bridge the gap between the online encyclopaedia and the research community.
“A lot of academics have the impression that because anyone can edit, that means it’s a Wild West,” says Martin Poulter at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, UK, and an organizer of the meeting. “But Wikipedia is a community of ultra-pedants who care about facts being right.”
And it is that community of ultra-pedants, replete with laptops bearing the garish stickers of previous campaigns, that Poulter mobilized for last week's summit. He brought them together with scientists, academics and publishers who had never attempted a Wikipedia edit for the first ever Wikipedia Science Conference in London on September 2–3.
Cultural barrier
Poulter says that in many cases, Wikipedia content already is of high quality, although some dispute that. Because scientists are experts in their respective fields, their involvement could help to improve it.
But by and large, scientists are not getting involved. The number of people editing Wikipedia is, in fact, falling, says Alex Bateman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK. He hopes to make more scientists comfortable with the idea of editing Wikipedia pages in their field of expertise. “Most articles grow really organically, sentence by sentence”, which is a very different experience from writing a scholarly paper, he says.
“There is a cultural barrier,” Poulter says, adding that academics often feel too busy to get into some of the admittedly “petty discussions” that sometimes take place around Wikipedia edits. “There have to be changes from both sides. That’s what we’re discussing.”
“There are lots of disparate efforts going on around the world”, to reach out to scientists, says Bateman, “but essentially, this community hasn’t got together before.”
Error fixing
In one such effort to reassure scientists about the quality of the website’s articles, Wikipedia is trying to improve its biographies of living scientists. The first to benefit have been fellows of the Royal Society, Britain’s pre-eminent scientific institution. Duncan Hull, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester, UK, persuaded the society to take on a ‘Wikipedian in residence’, a part-time editor to lead edit-a-thons at the society to fix errors of omission about the fellows. Of fellows accepted in the past 20 years—around 1,000 of them in all—30% do not have a Wikipedia page, and the biographies that do exist are often of poor quality, Hull told the conference.
“It’s a small step,” says Hull, “[but] having that information in Wikipedia might change the scientists’ attitude to Wikipedia. If they find out they’ve got an accurate biography of them and their work, that might change their view about Wikipedia as a way of communicating information to the wider public.”
Harnessing expertise
Two projects, called Pfam and Rfam—databases of protein and RNA families, respectively, which are hosted by the EBI but open to editing by anyone through Wikipedia—have shown that when scientists get involved, Wikipedia’s science content benefits, according to Bateman. The databases’ entries for a protein or RNA family reflect the content of that family’s Wikipedia page, and changes made on Wikipedia are automatically drawn into the main database.
“There have been 90,000 edits to these articles,” says Bateman, who co-founded the databases while at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, in the 2000s. From articles of just a few sentences at best, some entries have grown to be truly encyclopaedic. “We never would have gone to the trouble of writing such detailed articles,” Bateman admits. “There are so many experts around the world, if you can just harness them somehow.”
Although Wikipedia’s science content would benefit from getting more expert contributors—the site maintains a list of specific articles requiring expert attention—Poulter also thinks that academia can benefit from buying into Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is an opportunity to recapture some of the academic ethos that has been weakened by the commercial sector,” he says, pointing to the transparent process by which Wikipedia articles are created and edited.
“If you’re working in the open, you release all your data, your drafts and everything, and you invite comments from the start, rather than only after a process which is hidden away from the public,” he says.”

Wikipedia Turns 15 [Q&A]


What does the future hold for the world’s largest online encyclopedia?






Internet Institution: Wikipedia became one of the top 10 Web sites in the world in 2007 and remains the only non-profit in that elite group. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
It must be difficult for the roughly half a billion people who visit Wikipedia every month to remember a world without the free online encyclopedia. Since co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the site has grown into a behemoth of information with about 35 million articles and 30 million images available in nearly 300 different languages. The English-language Wikipedia site alone features more than five million articles.
There have been plenty of bumps along Wikipedia’s 15-year journey—the site has coped with a feud between the co-founders, criticism over the accuracy of its content and an exodus of volunteer editors, the last of these problems having only recently stabilized. These growing pains, however, have not stopped Wikipedia from turning up near the top of most search engine results nor has the site had to give up its nonprofit status or post advertising to draw revenue.
Wikipedia’s editing corps is one of its greatest strengths. Of the more than 100,000 volunteers registered as editors for the site’s English-language version, more than 80,000 make at least five edits per month. The site also benefits from more than 4,000 administrators, or experienced editors elected by their peers and given special privileges including the ability to block user accounts and IP addresses as well as delete (or undelete) pages.
Another key to Wikipedia’s success is the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella under which, among other educational resources, Wikipedia falls, and which has hosted and funded the encyclopedic site since June 2003. The foundation also raises money, distributes grants and develops software for Wikipedia sites. Scientific American spoke with Executive Director Lila Tretikov about the challenges of growth, the shift to mobile devices and how to stop the hemorrhaging of volunteers.
[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]
What are your top priorities for the site?
Open knowledge is a trend around the world. Even though 28 percent of the world’s population has grown up with Wikipedia as a free online resource for information, there are billions of people are coming online worldwide for the first time. One area we need to address is the growing use of mobile devices, which represent 50 percent of our traffic now. We also have to be sensitive to the differences among all of the people using the site. That means investing a lot in the translation of content into more languages, especially those that are large and underrepresented on Wikipedia. Some examples would be Arabic, Indonesian and Hindu. Another priority is to bring different kinds of content to the site’s articles, including video and audio.
What are the foundation’s specific plans to make Wikipedia easier to use and more relevant for mobile users?
The foundation launched Wikipedia apps for both Android and iPhone last year. The apps are different from the site because they offer more than just passive engagement. They are much more interactive, to the point where the apps can access your location information from your phone and point out all of the historical places around you.
Wikipedia struggled over the years to retain experienced editors to monitor and update the site’s content. What are you doing to address this?
It’s something that we do in partnership with our community. It’s not something we can do alone. And actually [2015] was the first time since 2007 that our editor numbers remained stable. We're not claiming any victory here yet but it’s been very exciting and very encouraging. There’s a lot that the community has done on their side to help with this, holding edit-a-thons and other competitions to encourage one another. On the foundation side, we do a lot of work to make the editing process easier and to provide more encourage to our editors. This year we have made a visual editing tool the default for each new editor on Wikipedia. In the past the format for editing required some knowledge of basic annotation, which we called wikitext. Today you do not have to do that anymore, it’s like editing in a word processor.
Another thing we have done is really attack performance on the site—increasing it by nearly 600 percent—which is especially important if you’re outside the United States. The farther you are from North America, the more important it becomes. Oftentimes an edit tends to fail if the load time is too slow. We’ve also created personalization algorithms for editors that help identify what areas editors are interested in as well as the languages in which they’re proficient. The software tool can recommend content for them to translate into those languages. The tool will also provide a basic translation of a page so the editor won’t have to start from scratch. Our research shows that [this type of assistance] nearly doubled the number of articles that an individual will create.
What are the foundation and its affiliates doing to get more subject-matter experts to contribute to the site?
We already have a large number of  subject matter experts on the site. If you look at our medical component alone, a huge part of that [content] comes from doctors and professionals. That said, we facilitate programs that engage with higher-education institutions. We do some of that work from the foundation but more often it’s done by our sister institutions. For example, [the Wiki Education Foundation] that is focused on the Year of Science [program] this year, and their core mission is to work with universities and university professors to implement Wikipedia programs in their classrooms. Professors work with their students to update scientific content as part of their classroom curriculum. We also have a program called the GLAM–Wiki initiative, in which galleries, libraries, archives and museums—such as the Smithsonian—have Wikipedians in residence contributing content from those sites.
Wikipedia’s core of editors has been primarily male throughout the site’s history. How is the foundation working to attract more female volunteers, and why is gender balance important to Wikipedia’s success?
It’s really important. Think of it as a derivative indicator. If you don’t have a diverse enough group of editors, if you have a ratio that does not represent the world overall, the content will oftentimes be affected. It may not be a direct, linear relationship but it definitely has an effect. The reason why it’s really important to us to make sure there are a lot of women editing is we want content that is about women and is important to women. It’s all related. We are focused on doing what we can to encourage our community to support women on Wikipedia. We also have an INSPIRE Grant Program where we gave grants to women editors to grow content.
Are you aiming to have a specific ratio of male to female editors for the site?
We did research on this in 2013 and a study by researchers Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw estimated that 23 percent of U.S. editors are women and 16 percent of global editors are women. We also try to target special programs on women, for example an education program in Arabic that is 80 percent women. Wikipedia is so diverse, which is why it’s hard to put just one number on it.

Monday 7 March 2016

ICICI deploys tech, allows women staffers to log in to work @home


MUMBAI: To help women work from home, the country's largest private lender, ICICI Bank, has deployed face recognition technology and extended a secure network that provides access to the core banking servers from its employees' laptops.

This is the first time any bank has opened up its core banking system for remote access by employees and takes the "work from home" concept to a different level. It enables almost every non-customer-facing task to be done from home for extended periods of time.




Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson of State Bank of India, the country's largest bank, said they are working on systems where remote relationship managers can work from home. "We have to get our operations in place to enable call recording and to maintain quality and security."

Launching the iWork@Home on the eve of International Women's Day, Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO of ICICI Bank, said an internal survey showed women leave the organization largely for maternity duties, to attend to childcare, or because of long commutes. "To ensure that women do not leave the workforce, we decided to put in place a stronger support system," she said. There are already 50 women trying out the iWork@Home project and the bank has received 125 requests. The bank expects to have around 500 women working from home soon. "One employee who had put in her resignation has decided to withdraw it because of this facility," said Kochhar.



Around 30% of ICICI's 73,000 employees are women.

Amazon Named India's Most Trusted Online Shopping Brand: TRA


World's largest e-retailer Amazon is India's most trusted online shopping brand followed by home-grown Snapdeal and Flipkart, a survey said. Other firms to figure in the top 10 trusted online shopping brands are eBay, Myntra, Yepme, Jabong,Naaptol, Shopclues, and Askmebazaar.

The survey was conducted among 2,500 respondents - aged 21 to 50 years -across 16 cities and its findings have been compiled in The Brand Trust Report, India Study 2016. The report is issued annually by TRA (formerly Trust Research Advisory).

"Amazon is India's most trusted online shopping brand with 36 percent of the trust pie. Together, these three brands make up for 76 percent of online shopping trust pie," TRA Chief ExecutiveOfficer N Chandramouli told reporters in New Delhi on Friday Overall,South Korean smartphone maker Samsung  Mobiles has emerged as the most trusted brand in the country followed by sony and LG,while Tata Group is the only Indian corporate to figure in the top five.

As per the study, the top five most trusted brands are Samsung Mobiles, Sony, LG, Nokia and Tata. The top 20 most trusted brands which have improved their ranking over last year include Samsung Mobiles,Sony, Nokia, Honda, ICICI Bank,Maruti Suzuki, HDFC Bank, Airtel, Hero MotoCorp, Dove, Lux, Samsung, Pepsi, and Puma.

Top 20 trusted brands which slipped in rankings are LG, Tata, Bajaj, and Apple. In the diversified FMCG space, Cavinkare has emerged as the most trusted brand,followed by Nirma, while Patanjali claimed the fourth position.

Maggi leads the FMCG food category, gaining 42 ranks from 2015 to occupy the 65th position in the overall trust rank list.

Amazon launches Echo-powered Dot, Tap voice-controlled devices



SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon.com is introducing two devices designed to amplify the role its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people's homes and lives.

The products unveiled on Thursday are echoes of
Amazon's Echo, a cylinder-shaped speaker with Internet
connected microphones that became Alexa's first major
showcase when it debuted in late 2014. Set these gadgets up and they'll listen for your voice and respond to commands -- for instance, to read the morning's headlines.



Both new devices, called the Amazon Tap and Echo Dot, cost less than the $180 Echo and offer slightly different features in an attempt to plant Amazon's internet-connected microphones in more homes and other places.




In doing so, Amazon hopes to outmaneuver rivals Google and Apple in their battle to build hubs in smart homes that are being furnished with appliances, electronics and other accoutrements that connect to the internet.





Alexa is competing against other voice-controlled services such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google's search engine that are built into the operating systems of smartphones and other devices that do more than the Echo.
The interest in smart homes appears to be rising as more people become enamoured with their smartphones. A recent online survey of more than 4,600 adults in the US by Forrester Research's Technographics found 57% of them either had used or were interested in using a smart home device.
Alexa, a riff on the Library of Alexandria, initially didn't do much but answer trivia questions, play music and order stuff from Amazon's website. The device's limited range raised the prospect that it might be a passing fancy or little more than a cute party trick for consumers who could afford to indulge in a curiosity like the Echo.




But the assistant has become increasingly versatile as Amazon.com learned more about what customers want. Last summer, the company gave outside programmers the ability to build applications that work with Alexa in a move that expanded service's skillset. Alexa can now perform more than 300 tasks, such as hailing car rides, turning on lights and controlling home thermostats.


The Echo now ranks among Seattle-based Amazon's top-selling items in consumer electronics, although the company hasn't specified how many have been sold so far. "The response has been nothing short of incredible," boasted David Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of devices.



The 6.25-inch Amazon Tap is a slimmed down "grab and go" version of the 9.25-inch Echo that sells for $130. Unlike the Echo, the Amazon Tap doesn't need to be plugged in.




To conserve battery power, however, the Tap requires people to touch a button on the front of the device to prompt Alexa to awaken and listen for a question or a command. The Echo operates on more energy-intensive technology that allows people to summon Alexa with spoken words that can be heard from as far as 25 feet away. The Tap connects to the internet through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals.

The Echo Dot, priced at $90, represents Amazon's attempt to expand Alexa's household presence beyond the kitchen or another room where the Echo typically remains anchored.





The Dot is shaped like a hockey puck because it doesn't have cylinder with a large speaker. Instead, it offers an option for people to plug into other sound systems to provide better audio than the speaker built into the Echo. Interactions with Alexa through the Dot can be started with a voice command from across the room, just like the Echo.




Both devices can be ordered on Amazon.com beginning Thursday. Anyone can buy the Tap, but sales of the Dot initially are being confined to Amazon Prime subscribers who have already bought an Echo or the company's Fire TV device. 
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