Google Glass easter egg reveals the team that built it

Google has a long history of doling out easter eggs to amuse and delight the public, so naturally it decided to sneak one in the Explorer Edition of Glass as well. New Glass Explorer Jay Lee discovered that when you select View Licenses under Settings and Device Info, then tap the touchpad nine times (an audible beep increasing in pitch will follow each tap), you'll be able to see the entire Project Glass team in a panoramic shot. Mike LeBeau from the Glass team confirmed that he snuck that easter egg in to pay tribute to his colleagues. Naturally, now we can't help but wonder if shaking your head in tune to the Konami Code (sans A and B button-pushing) will uncover more hidden gems.

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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Via: Living thru Glass, Karthik's Geek Center

Source: Jay Lee (G+)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/25/google-glass-easter-egg/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Amazon reports lower 1Q earnings, higher revenue

NEW YORK (AP) ? Amazon.com Inc.'s net income declined in the first three months of the year even though revenue increased 22 percent, as the online retailer continued to spend heavily on order fulfillment and rights to digital content.

The world's largest online retailer, which also sells the Kindle devices and services, said Thursday that it earned $82 million, or 18 cents per share, in the first quarter. That's down 37 percent from $130 million, or 28 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. But it's higher than the 7 cents expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue rose 22 percent to $16.07 billion, from $13.19 billion. Analysts expected $16.14 billion.

Amazon's operating expenses rose 22 percent to $15.9 billion, from $13 billion. The company has been investing a lot of its income in enhancing its distribution network, its shopping website and its Kindle business as part of a long-term growth plan. Because of that, and deep discounts it offers customers, Amazon's profit margins have been thin.

For the current quarter, Amazon expects revenue of $14.5 billion to $16.2 billion. The midpoint of the range is lower than the $15.92 billion that analysts had expected, but the company typically gives a conservative forecast.

Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said that a measure called paid unit growth ? 30 percent ? was a bit slower than expected. This figure refers to the physical and digital goods that Amazon and its third-party sellers sell on its sites worldwide, excluding returns and cancellations.

Currency fluctuations, especially a weak yen, are also weighing on Amazon's results, as has been the case for other technology companies. A weak yen translates to fewer dollars on sales in Japan. Excluding the effects of currency rate changes, revenue would have increased 24 percent rather than 22 percent in the first quarter.

Amazon is stretching well beyond online retailing. The Seattle-based company soon plans to debut original TV programming. Amazon is running introductory pilots for 14 TV shows on its website for anyone in the U.S., U.K. and Germany to watch. Viewers will get to help decide which shows get additional episodes.

"The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say," Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, said in a statement. "I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don't matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production."

Amazon's stock slid $6, or 2.2 percent, to $268.70 in extended trading after the results came out. The stock had closed up $5.92, or 2.2 percent, at $274.70.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/amazon-reports-lower-1q-earnings-higher-revenue-202944865--finance.html

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Computer scientists suggest new spin on origins of evolvability: Competition to survive not necessary?

Apr. 26, 2013 ? Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.

In a paper published this week in PLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.

Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

"The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse," said Kenneth O. Stanley, an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He co-wrote the paper about the study along with lead author Joel Lehman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

The finding could have implications for the origins of evolvability in many species.

"When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past," Lehman said. "The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure."

During the simulations, the team's simulated organisms became more evolvable without any pressure from other organisms out-competing them. The simulations were based on a conceptual algorithm.

"The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism," explained Lehman.

The team's hypothesis is unique and is in contrast to most popular theories for why evolvability increases.

"An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases," Stanley said.

Stanley is an associate professor at UCF. He has a bachelor's of science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has over 70 publications in competitive venues and has secured grants worth more than $1 million. His works in artificial intelligence and evolutionary computation have been cited more than 4,000 times.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Central Florida.

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Journal Reference:

1. Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley. Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e62186 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062186

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/information_technology/~3/yFudqCEhgpw/130426115612.htm

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Look in the mirror: Just substitute 'Canadian' for 'American child-care ...

An article in the April 29 issue of The New Republic has generated considerable interest in U.S. child care as its content and perspective have been picked up and extended in social media, other magazines, U.S. TV, radio and daily newspapers and even in offshore news media. The hell of American daycare: the barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children describes a case of a fire in a family child-care home caring for seven very young children. The case -- prominent in the media for some time -- involved an untrained 23-year-old caregiver/owner who had left the kids alone to go shop at Target, a practice that --? testimony at the trial asserted -- was not new. An oil-filled pot left cooking on the stove caught fire and four children died. Eventually the caregiver who -- it became clear -- had a criminal record -- was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

The article indicts the United States for -- essentially -- child neglect. The author writes that ?despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system. Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it?s Dickensian.?

Jonathan Cohn, the author, reports research that ?deemed the majority of operations to be ?fair? or ?poor? and notes that while ?day care is a bruising financial burden for many families,? ?only minimal assistance is available to offset these expenses. And so many parents put their kids in whatever they can find and whatever they can afford, hoping it will be good enough.? The article chronicles how President Richard Nixon?s presidential veto of a national child-care program back in 1970 had ended movement towards a child-care system in the U.S. ?

Does this all sound familiar? To me, it?s like looking at a mirror image of our own child-care situation. Reading Cohn?s story, I found myself substituting ?Canadian? for ?American,? and expect that others with an interest in early childhood education and child care, young children and social policy in Canada will be doing the same. ?

The article illustrates the absence of a child-care system, which for parents translates to mean that there are few (or no) options, and that securing good child care is in large part, a matter of luck. Cohn?s interview with one of the dead toddlers? mothers, a single mother trying to keep a job to earn a living for herself and her child -- and maybe even advance to a better job -- says it all about what the lack of child-care options to help her and other parents mean. This is not different than what we hear in Canada -- the stories parents tell about the lack of choices available in Canada reflect our equally dismal situation.

The story of ?Jackie?s Daycare? -- the child-care home in which the tragedy occurred -- with its lack of public oversight and unsafe, insalubrious conditions (the home child care in this case was ?registered,? with virtually no requirements and monitored not at all, or minimally, at best) reflect the kinds of perilous conditions in some unregulated (sometimes illegal) child care revealed in a CBC Marketplace story only last month. And while Canada has not experienced a child-care tragedy on the scale of this one in some time, just in the last two weeks, two child death cases in unregulated child care in Mississauga, ON and Port Coquitlam, BC have come back to the criminal courts, though they have received much less media interest in Canada than the ?Jackie?s Daycare? case did in the U.S. ?

There is also a telling parallel (though different methodology) between the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study that found that most of the child care it studied was ?fair? or ?poor? and the sole national Canadian study of quality, You Bet I Care! (now almost 15 years old) that reported that of the centres it studied, ?the majority provided care that was of minimal to mediocre quality.?

Demand for child care has grown as the labour force participation rate of mothers with young children has continued to rise in both countries (though more steeply and to a higher rate in Canada) while today the child development value of high quality early childhood education and care is well recognized by experts and the general public in both countries.

And ironically, the rejection of a national child-care program by the highest government official in the U.S. and in Canada -- President Richard Nixon in 1971 and Prime Minister Stephan Harper in 2006 -- is unique to the two countries. In 1971, as a very recent immigrant to Canada fresh from working on the American Head Start program, I had been following the successful progress of national legislation to begin building the first U.S. national child-care program through both houses of Congress. I was stunned when Nixon exercised the rarely-used presidential veto to override Congressional assent (his veto message spoke of the threat of ?Sovietizing? the American family and his opposition to coming down on the ?side of communal approaches to child rearing against the family-centered approach") -- just as I was stunned 35 years later when Stephen Harper unilaterally abrogated the hard-won federal-provincial bilateral agreements that were to set the stage for building Canada?s first national child-care program.

Following the end of Canada?s first effort at a national child-care program, in 2008, Canada was ranked lower than the United States (which was among the lower ranking countries studied) in a 25-country UNICEF study of early childhood education and child-care access and quality benchmarks. ?

This year, in his federal budget proposal, Barack Obama included funds to the states for preschool targeted to modest and low income families, as well as increased funds for Head Start -- not quite the comprehensive national early childhood education and care program we envision here in Canada. Still -- it?s a far cry from the contempt for ECEC that Canadians with an interest in child care have been experiencing from the Conservative federal government since 2006 and the ?we can?t afford it? from tax-cutting and books-balancing provincial political parties and governments. Indeed, based on the UNICEF study, it seems that Canada spends even less money on ECEC than does the U.S.

So Canadians who still think that most young families need, and want, the kinds of options for decent quality affordable child care and early childhood education that families in other countries enjoy need to be thinking about their political choices and preparing to join with others in exercising them. Otherwise, our child-care choices for the foreseeable future will remain limited to cross-border examination of our own unsatisfactory reflection in American mirrors.

Source: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/child-care-canada-now/2013/04/look-mirror-just-substitute-canadian-american-child-car

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RBAF Combat Net Radio System Contract Signing Ceremony ...

The Ministry of Defence Negara Brunei Darussalam (?MINDEF?) signed Supplemental Agreement and Blanket Order Agreement for the supply of Combat Net Radio (CNR) System for the Royal Brunei Armed Forces (?RBAF?) with Harris Corporation, RF Communications Division (?Harris?) from United States of America.

The Contract Signing Ceremony was held at MINDEF?s premises at Bolkiah Garrison on March 29th 2013. Signing on behalf of MINDEF was Hajah Suriyah binti Haji Umar, Permanent Secretary of Administration and Finance and Allan Callaghan, Vice President International Sales and Managing Director Asia Pacific, signing on behalf of Harris.

The CNR Supplemental Agreement is an enhancement contract to the Master Agreement signed in January 2008 in which Harris supplied tactical radios, accessories and other equipment to the RBAF. The New Supplemental Program, to be implemented in five phases over a five-year period, provides the deployment of networked communications delivering secure tactical communications to individual soldiers, and improving situational awareness and force effectiveness. In addition to the Supplemental Agreement, the Blanket Order Agreement provides enhancement to RBAF?s ability to maintain and support the CNR System throughout its expected service life.

The Supplemental Program will enhance RBAF?s C4I (Command, Control, Communication, Computing & Intelligence) Systems, enabling secure voice communication links and wideband data performance allowing for information superiority in today?s battlefield.

Naval Today Staff, April 25, 2013; Image: MINDEF

Source: http://navaltoday.com/2013/04/25/rbaf-combat-net-radio-system-contract-signing-ceremony/

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Watch: Five Presidents Gather to Open the George W. Bush Library

MADRID, April 25 (Reuters) - Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina said the 10-match ban given to his team mate Luis Suarez for biting an opponent was 'absurd' and 'excessive'. Uruguay international Suarez was punished on Wednesday by the English Football Association (FA) after he bit the arm of Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic at the weekend. "He knows he is in the wrong, and that it was a mistake, but the 10-game punishment seems absurd to me, excessive and unfair," Spanish international Reina was quoted as telling radio station Cadena Cope by sports daily AS on Thursday. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/watch-five-presidents-gather-open-george-w-bush-145637884.html

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Latos outduels Samardzija as Reds edge Cubs 1-0

By MARK SCHMETZER

Associated Press

Associated Press Sports

updated 5:15 p.m. ET April 24, 2013

CINCINNATI (AP) - Todd Frazier gave Mat Latos all the run support he needed, and Latos gave the Cincinnati Reds exactly what they needed to finish off a 10-game homestand in style.

Latos retired the first 10 batters and 15 of the first 16 he faced and mostly spared an overworked bullpen, and Frazier hit a long home run and the Reds beat the Chicago Cubs 1-0 Wednesday.

"This is what we wanted so bad," Reds manager Baker said. "This sets us straight for a couple of days."

With one out in the sixth inning of a scoreless tie, Frazier blasted a 2-1 pitch from Jeff Samardzija 480 feet to straightaway center field to increase his team-leading home run total to six. The homer, which bounced high off the batter's eye, is the longest at Great American Ball Park this season and the seventh-longest in the facility's 11-year history.

"I was just trying to get a fastball," said Frazier, who became the first Cincinnati player to homer in a 1-0 win since Sean Casey against St. Louis on Aug. 26, 2004. "I haven't seen too many lately. I got one, and I took advantage of it. I took a couple of steps and figured it was out, but I didn't know how far until I saw it hit the (batter's eye)."

Latos (1-0), the victim of two blown saves among his first four starts this season allowed four hits and a walk with four strikeouts. He had to rely solely on his two- and four-seam fastballs, too.

It turned out not to be a problem.

"In the bullpen, I had a really good slider and changeup," said Latos, who's strung together 11 consecutive scoreless innings. "I don't know what the hell happened. It's tough. Everybody in the big leagues can hit the fastball. I had to focus on hitting spots, keeping the ball down and away and getting them to hit it on the ground."

Jonathan Broxton replaced Latos with two runners on base and nobody out in the eighth. Both runners moved up on Cody Ransom's sacrifice bunt, but pinch-hitter Alfonso Soriano struck out and shortstop Zack Cozart went deep behind second base to flag down David DeJesus's grounder and throw him out to end the inning.

"I was going to throw it regardless, because there were two outs," Cozart said. "I saw out of the corner of my eye that he wasn't too close to the bag. I've been struggling at the plate lately, so to make a play like that makes you feel pretty good."

Cubs manager Dale Sveum said that's just the way it's been going for the Cubs, who are 1-5 on their current road trip.

"That was an unbelievable play in that situation," he said.

Aroldis Chapman pitched the ninth for his fourth save. Latos's effort left Cincinnati's starting pitchers with a combined 5-0 record and 1.54 ERA on the homestand.

Samardzija (1-4) had his fourth consecutive loss after beating Pittsburgh on Opening Day. The right-hander allowed seven hits and three walks with eight strikeouts and a wild pitch.

The Reds had baserunners in each of the first five innings, including the third, which Devin Mesoraco and Latos led off with singles before Samardzija struck out Shin-Soo Choo, Cozart and Joey Votto - the top three batters in Cincinnati's lineup.

The Reds wrapped up the home stand, one of two of 10 games on their schedule this season, with eight wins despite playing two games that lasted 13 innings, another that went 10, a third that was suspended almost 19 hours from one night to the next day by rain, and Wednesday's game, the start of which was delayed 89 minutes by rain. They won eight games on a homestand of 10 or fewer games for just the sixth time in franchise history and the second in two years. They went 8-2 against St. Louis, Arizona and Milwaukee on a homestand last July.

"This was a weird home stand," Cozart said. "It was a battle every game."

NOTES: A sharp one-hopper by Julio Borbon, the second batter in the game, glanced off Latos's right foot. He recovered to grab the ball and throw Borbon out and stayed in the game after a couple of practice tosses in front of manager Dusty Baker and trainer Paul Lessard. ... Samardzija's effort to catch Choo's bouncer in the bottom of the first left him with a slight cut on his pitching hand, but it quickly closed enough to allow him to continue. ... Choo, who went into the game leading the major leagues with a .535 on-base percentage, has reached base at least once in all 21 of the games he's played this season.

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Should've, would've, could've...

CSN: Roy Halladay had another strong start and Chase Utley and Ryan Howard both hit solo home runs, but the Phillies' bullpen blew it and squandered chances led to a 5-3 loss to the Pirates

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/51650507/ns/sports-baseball/

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