Chinese children suffering lead poisoning from polluting smelters and factories have been denied testing, effective treatment and even basic information by officials who downplayed health threats, a human rights advocacy group said on Wednesday.
The report from Human Rights Watch comes after China's latest lead pollution outbreak, when 103 children and scores of adults were poisoned by tinfoil-making workshops in eastern Zhejiang province.
Beijing has vowed to clean up this chronic pollution, but New York-based Human Rights Watch said those efforts only go so far in addressing the needs of hundreds of thousands of children it says are suffering from lead poisoning in China.
Lead, especially harmful for children, can lead to learning difficulties and behavioral problems, and often parents who work at the plants bring home extra doses on their clothes and skin.
"I want to know how sick my son is, but I can't trust the local test results," one mother from Hunan province in southern China told investigators, according to the report available on the Human Rights Watch website: (www.hrw.org).
Citizens who complain about the problem face pressure, the rights watchdog said, citing dozens of interviews with parents in areas afflicted by pollution.
"Parents, journalists, and community activists who dare to speak out about lead are detained, harassed, and ultimately silenced," Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement released with the report
Rapid industrial growth in China has increased citizens' worries about their health, especially where towns and villages located next to poorly regulated factories and workshops have been stricken by pollution problems.
China is the world's biggest consumer of refined lead, and battery making accounts for 70 percent of that consumption, which is likely to grow to 4.1 million tonnes in 2011.
China's environment ministry has promised to tackle heavy metal poisoning as widespread cases have sparked public anger and protests.
Three-quarters of lead-acid battery manufacturing plants in China could be phased out in the next two to three years, an industry body said last month.
MISLEADING INFORMATION
Despite those vows, leaders in Beijing have struggled to rein in local officials who put jobs and economic growth ahead of environmental protection.
Based on 52 interviews, Human Rights Watch found that local governments denied the scope of potential poisoning and issued misleading information about the dangers of living close to polluting factories.
Parents were often told that drinking milk or eating garlic and eggs was adequate treatment for lead poisoning, the advocacy group said.
"The doctor told us all the children in this village have lead poisoning. Then they told us a few months later that all the children are healthy. They wouldn't let us see the results from the tests though," said a parent from Yunnan province quoted in the report.
"The government doesn't want to have to give us anything so they make up the results," another parent from Henan province said.
Lead poisoning can build up through regular exposure to small amounts, damaging the nervous and reproductive systems and kidneys, as well as causing high blood pressure and anemia.
"In villages where lead exposure is highest, a generation of cognitively and physically disabled children will need significant and ongoing support," the report said.
The group compared the corruption and cover-up of nationwide lead poisoning cases to the high-profile AIDS and SARs scandals that shattered international confidence in China's public health administration in the 1990s and early 2000s.
"The response to lead poisoning has so far followed this same road, but it is not too late for the Chinese government to take a different approach," the report said.
■単語
lead１
音節lead１ 発音記号/líːd/音声を聞く
【動詞】
(音節led 発音記号/léd/) 【他動詞】
1a〔+目+副(句)〕〈人を〉(…に)導く，案内する 《★【類語】 lead は先に立って人を連れていく; guide は人に付きっきりで案内する; direct は道順・方向などを人に教える; conduct は人をある場所に連れていく》.
用例
lead a visitor in [out, back] 客を中まで[外まで, またもとへ]案内する.
b〔+目+副(句)〕〈人・動物を〉(手を取って)連れていく，(綱などをつけて)引いていく.
用例
She led the child across the street. 彼女はその子の手を取って通りを渡っていった.
c〔+目+by+名〕〈人の〉〔手を〕引く 《★【用法】 体の部分を表わす名詞の前に the を用いる》.
用例
lead an old man by the hand 老人の手を引く.
2a〔+目+副(句)〕〈道路などが〉〈…を〉(ある場所に)導く，もたらす，運ぶ.
用例
This street will lead you to the station. この通りを行けば駅に着きます.
b〔+目+前+(代)名〕〈…を〉〔…の状態・結果へ〕導く 〔to，into〕.
用例
A chance idea led him to the discovery. まぐれの思いつきから彼はその発見に至った.
c〔+目+to do〕(誘因となって)〈人に〉〈…する〉気にさせる.
用例
Nervousness led me to make mistakes. 私はあがってしまったのでいくつか間違いをした.
d〔+目+into+doing〕〈人を〉うまく〔…するように〕させる.
用例
She led him into believing that she was unmarried. 彼女は独身だということをうまく彼に信じ込ませた.
3〈…を〉先導する，指揮する，〈…の〉先頭に立つ; 〈…を〉率いる.
用例
lead an army [a search party] 軍[捜索隊]を指揮する.
4〈…の〉首位を占める.
用例
She leads the company in sales. 彼女は売り上げでは会社の一番である.
5a〈ある種の人生を〉過ごす，送る.
用例
He led a life of poverty for many years. 彼は何年も貧乏暮らしをした.
b〔+目+目〕〈人に〉〈ある人生を〉送らせる.
用例
His wife led him a miserable life. 妻のために彼は悲惨な生活を送った.
6【トランプ】 (ゲームの一巡で)〈初めの人が〉〈ある札を〉最初の手として出す，打ち出す.
用例
He led a heart. 彼は最初にハートの札を出した.
【自動詞】
1a先に立って行く; 案内役[先導]を務める.
用例
The green car is leading. 緑の車が先頭を走っている.
b指揮をする; 指揮者となる.
2a〔+副(句)〕〈道路などが〉(…に)至る，通じる，(…を)通る.
用例
All roads lead to Rome. ⇒Rome 1.
b〔+to+(代)名〕(結果として)〔…と〕なる.
用例
That will only lead to trouble. そんなことをすれば面倒なことになるだけだ.
3〔動(+in+(代)名)〕
a〔競走などで〕先頭に立つ，リードする.
用例
The horse led easily until the homestretch. その馬はホームストレッチまで楽々とリードして走った.
b〔…で〕首位を占める.
用例
I lead in French. フランス語では私が一番だ.
4【トランプ】 最初に札を出す.
自動詞としての「lead」のイディオムやフレーズ
léad a person a (mérry) dánce léad ánywhere
léad a person a (prétty [jólly，mérry]) dánce léad astráy
léad a person by the nóse léad nówhere
léad óff léad ón
léad a person ùp the gárden pàth léad úp to…
【名詞】
1[単数形で]
a先頭(の位置), 先導.
用例
He was in the lead. 彼は先頭に立っていた.
b率先; 指揮，指導力.
2【可算名詞】 手本，模範.
用例
follow a person's lead 人に(手本として)ならう.
3a[the lead] (競走などでの)先頭，首位; 第一位，一等.
用例
gain [have] the lead in a race レースで首位に立つ[立っている].
b[a lead] 勝ち越し(の差) 《距離・時間など》, リード 〔of〕; 優勢 〔over〕.
用例
He had [held] a lead of three laps over the second‐place car at the finish. 彼は決勝戦で 2 位の車よりも 3 周リードしていた.
4【可算名詞】 《口語》 (問題解決の)きっかけ，手がかり.
用例
So far there're no firm leads as to who the hit‐and‐run driver is. 今のところひき逃げ犯人を割り出す確かな手がかりがつかめていない.
5[the lead] 【演劇】 立て役，主役; 主役俳優，立て役者.
用例
play the lead 主役を演じる, 主演する.
6【可算名詞】 (新聞記事などの)書き出し，冒頭.
7【可算名詞】 (犬などの)引きひも.
用例
have [keep] a dog on a lead 犬をひもにつないでおく.
8[単数形で; 通例 the lead] 【トランプ】 打ち出し(の権利); 打ち出し番の人.
9【可算名詞】 【電気】 導線; (アンテナの)引き込み線.
名詞としての「lead」のイディオムやフレーズ
tàke the léad
【形容詞】【限定用法の形容詞】
1先導する，先を行く.
用例
the lead car 先導車.
2(新聞・ラジオ・テレビの)主要記事の，トップニュースの.
用例
a lead editorial 社説, 論説.
［古期英語から］
lead２
音節lead２ 発音記号/léd/音声を聞く
【名詞】
1【不可算名詞】 【化学】 鉛 《金属元素; 記号 Pb》.
用例
⇒red lead, white lead.
2a【可算名詞】 (船から水深を測るために用いる)測鉛.
用例
cast [heave] the lead 水深を測る.
b[複数形で] 《主に英国で用いられる》 屋根ふき用鉛板; トタン屋根.
c[複数形で] (窓ガラスの)鉛枠 《ステンドグラスの窓に用いる》.
3【不可算名詞】 [集合的に] (鉛の)弾丸.
4【不可算名詞】 [種類には 【可算名詞】] 鉛筆の芯(しん).
用例
a soft [hard] lead 柔らかい[硬い]鉛筆の芯.
5【可算名詞】 【印刷】 差し鉛，インテル 《行間をうめる鉛片》.
名詞としての「lead」のイディオムやフレーズ
gét the léad óut swíng the léad
【形容詞】【限定用法の形容詞】
鉛(製)の.
用例
a lead pipe 鉛管.
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1a〈…を〉鉛でおおう[ふく].
b〈…に〉鉛を詰める.
2〈…に〉鉛化合物を入れる.
3【印刷】〈…に〉インテルを入れる.
downplay
【動詞】
1
重要性や質を過小に言う
(understate the importance or quality of)
2
それほど重要でない、または重大でないと主張する
(represent as less significant or important)
pollution
音節pol・lu・tion 発音記号/pəlúːʃən/音声を聞く
【名詞】【不可算名詞】
1a汚染(すること，している状態); (汚染による)公害.
用例
environmental pollution 環境汚染.
b汚染するもの[ごみ].
2(精神的)堕落.
［POLLUTE+‐ION］
dose
音節dose 発音記号/dóʊs｜dˈəʊs/音声を聞く
【名詞】【可算名詞】
1〔薬の〕一服; (特に)〔水薬の〕服用量(の 1 回分) 〔of〕.
用例
in large doses 大量に.
2〔刑罰・苦役などの〕 1 回分，少量 〔of〕.
用例
give a person a dose of labor 人にひと仕事をさせる.
3《俗語》 淋病.
可算名詞としての「dose」のイディオムやフレーズ
lìke a dóse of sálts
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1a〈人に〉投薬する.
b〔+目+with+(代)名〕〈人に〉〔薬を〕服用させる.
用例
The doctor dosed the girl with antibiotics. 医者は少女に抗生物質を服用させた.
c《主に米国で用いられる》 〔+目(+out)〕〈薬を〉盛る，分ける.
用例
He doses out aspirin for every complaint. 彼は(やぶ医者なので)どの病気にもアスピリンを与える.
2〔+目+with+(代)名〕〈ワインなどに〉〔風味・補強などの成分を〕添加する.
［ギリシャ語「与える」の意］
detain
音節de・tain 発音記号/dɪtéɪn/音声を聞く
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1〈人を〉引き止める，待たせておく.
用例
I won't detain you (long). お手間はかけません.
2【法律, 法学】〈人を〉留置[拘留，監禁]する.
用例
The police detained the suspect for further questioning. 警察はさらに尋問するために容疑者を拘留した.
［ラテン語「押さえつけておく」の意 (DE‐+tenēre 「つかむ，保つ」); 【名詞】 detention］
harass
音節ha・rass 発音記号/hərˈæs, hˈærəs｜hˈærəs, hərˈæs/音声を聞く
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1〈人を〉(しつこく)悩ます，困らせる，うるさがらせる，苦しめる 《★しばしば受身で用い，「〈人が〉〔…に〕悩む，困る，うるさがる，苦しむ」の意になる; 前置詞は by，with; ⇒harassed 1》.
用例
He was harassed by [with] crank phone calls. 彼はいたずら電話に悩まされた.
2(間断なく攻撃して)〈…を〉悩ます.
用例
Our advance was harassed by the enemy. わが軍の前進は相次ぐ敵の攻撃ではばまれた.
［(古期)フランス語; 犬をけしかける時の叫び声から; 【名詞】 harassment］
tackle
音節tack・le 発音記号/tˈækl/音声を聞く
【名詞】
1【可算名詞】
a【アメフト・ラグビー】 タックル 《ボールを持つ敵に組みついて前進を妨げること》.
b【アメフト】 タックル 《攻撃線にいる 2 選手中の一人》.
2[海語では /téɪkl/] 【可算名詞】 [集合的には 【不可算名詞】] 船の索具; (特に動索の通っている)滑車装置，テークル.
用例
a single [compound] tackle 単[複]滑車.
3【不可算名詞】 道具，用具，装置.
用例
fishing tackle 釣り具.
名詞としての「tackle」のイディオムやフレーズ
blóck and táckle
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1【アメフト・ラグビー】〈相手に〉タックルする.
2a〈仕事・問題などと〉取り組む.
用例
tackle an urgent problem 緊急の問題に取り組む.
b〔+目+前+(代)名〕〈人と〉〔…について〕議論をたたかわす 〔on，about〕.
用例
I tackled him on the question of the future of the Cabinet. 内閣の将来に関する問題について彼と大いに論じ合った.
3〈人を〉つかむ，〈…に〉組みつく.
用例
He tackled the thief fearlessly. 彼は勇敢に泥棒に組みついた.
【自動詞】
【アメフト・ラグビー】 タックルする.
rein
音節rein 発音記号/réɪn/音声を聞く
【名詞】【可算名詞】
1a[しばしば複数形で] (通例革製の，馬につける)手綱(たづな) (⇒harness さし絵).
用例
pull [draw in] the reins 手綱を引く[引いて馬を止める].
b[複数形で] (幼児などにつけて一端を親が持つ)安全ひも，手引きひも.
用例
⇒leading reins.
2[複数形で] 統御，制御，抑制.
用例
impose reins on… … を制御[抑制]する.
可算名詞としての「rein」のイディオムやフレーズ
dráw réin gìve frée réin to…
kèep a tíght réin on…
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1〔+目 (+副(句))〕〈馬を〉(…に)手綱であやつる，御する.
2〈感情などを〉抑える，抑制する.
他動詞としての「rein」のイディオムやフレーズ
réin báck [《主に米国で用いられる》 úp] réin ín
［ラテン語「抑えるもの」の意］
garlic
音節gar・lic 発音記号/gάɚlɪk｜gάː‐/音声を聞く
【名詞】【不可算名詞】
1【植物, 植物学】 ニンニク.
2にんにく.
用例
a clove of garlic にんにくひとつ[の 1 片].
［古期英語から (gar 「槍(やり)」+lēac 'leek'); 葉が槍(やり)に似ていることから; 【形容詞】 garlicky］
2011年6月15日水曜日
File syncing made easy with Iomega cloud
Every big consumer IT company - like Apple with its iCloud, Microsoft with SkyDrive, and Amazon with Cloud Drive - is moving into some kind of cloud-based storage sharing solution in the marketplace.
Don't even mention the dozens of smaller companies in this space like trailblazer Dropbox, Tonido and Pogoplug out there.
Now even consumer product manufacturers are moving in on the act to enable "cloud sharing" on their devices.
At a media launch in Singapore today, storage vendor Iomega trotted out their new range of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that allow people to share data with others on their new personal cloud.
Basically it allows other machines to download, upload and even sync data with the NAS devices - after having been given permission by the owner of course - via authenticating through an Iomega server. It's backed by an AES 128-bit key encryption, so it defeats man-in-the-middle hijacks.
Currently the devices work on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, with support for iOS included. According to the Iomega folks, support for Android is on the way.
Actually, I like the home media network hard drive cloud editions Iomega were showing off today. The 1TB and 2TB versions are being sold at US$189.99 (S$209) and $S299.99 (S$283), which has fairly decent specs, device support and software bundled in for such a price point.
These products were just available in Singapore during the recent PC Show 2011 at Suntec City last weekend.
File sharing made easy
Adding in easy file sharing and syncing capabilities was a smart move on Iomega's part, and I suspect it might become a huge hit with casual users.
I know several savvy geek friends who already run file servers that friends can FTP into, but the pitch for Iomega's personal cloud is that it is easier to use. Invite a friend via an email address, authenticate through a web interface to Iomega servers, which will then create a secure tunnel for file sharing.
It's not anywhere new though, and just drawing from a local example I've seen slivers of this technology on our homegrown Singapore iTwin product almost two years back, about a year-and-a-half before Iomega announced this in January this year at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
Sure iTwin is point-to-point, auto-discovery of dongle, and even more brain-dead simple to use as its just plug-and-play, but it's essentially a similar secure remote access file sharing technology.
I think Iomega's NAS drives with their "cloud" capability is a far stronger proposition though. Storage is a product that businesses and people consume more and more, given that we live in a world of increasing data explosion.
Will people buy iTwin just for remote file sharing, however simple? Not sure about that.
Just how many more flavours of cloud do we have?
And finally a rant that's entirely off topic.
As a cranky curmudgeon, I've already written reams about the bastardization of the term "cloud" just because it is the in-word.
Essential to the cloud definition, at least in the past, was that the application or data is hosted off-premises. Does turning your PC into a miniaturized data centre for friends justify coining yet another version of the cloud word?
Apparently yes.
You know, not too long ago, we had a term for this definition of "personal cloud": It's called remote access and file sharing.
Samsung Poised to Edge Nokia in Smartphone War
Samsung Electronics is expected to become the world's largest producer of smartphones in the second quarter of this year, Reuters reported on Monday, citing market research firm Nomura.
This means that Nokia, which has been leading the global market for cell phones since 1996, is likely to relinquish top spot to Samsung in this category.
Nomura also predicted that Nokia's smartphone sales will be overtaken by Apple in the third quarter, relegating the Finnish phone maker to third place in the global rankings.
Nokia's sales are expected to rank alongside those of Taiwan-based HTC next year.
SingTel launches HTC ChaCha
SingTel has introduced the HTC ChaCha, a social networking smartphone. The handset, which is powered by Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, features a dedicated Facebook button for one-touch access to the key functions of Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook messages and conversations are integrated within the phone and appear within text messages and e-mail inboxes alongside regular conversations. When a phone call is made or received, the screen displays friends' latest statuses and photos. The ChaCha comes with a Qwerty keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, and a VGA front-facing camera. The device also features a 2.6-inch, 480 x 320 resolution landscape touchscreen and comes pre-loaded with SingTel's AMPed music service, MobileTV video streaming service as well as MySingTel app which allows customers to view their SingTel bills, manage their mobile services, check data usage and subscribe to overseas data roaming on the go. The HTC ChaCha is available exclusively from SingTel for SGD 0 with 3G Flexi AMPed plans and selected iPlans.
China shares drop after bank reserve hike
China's main stock index opened down 0.5 per cent today after the central bank surprised the market with a rise in banks' reserve requirement ratio (RRR) after the market closed yesterday.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index opened at 2717.7 points after it closed up 1.1 per cent on Tuesday following data showing annual consumer inflation at 5.5 per cent in May, a 30-month high but within market expectations.
China's main property index dropped 0.6 per cent after S&P revised the outlook for China's property developers to negative.
In a move to help fight high inflation, the People's Bank of China announced a 50 basis-point RRR increase to take effect next Monday, its sixth such move this year, forcing big banks to put aside a record high 21.5 per cent of their deposits as required reserves.
3D wave set to sweep broadcasting, media trade show in Singapore
The wave of three-dimensional ( 3D) devices are expected to sweep the upcoming BroadcastAsia in Singapore, with over 650 companies showing the latest products such as 3D and Hybrid TV as well as digital devices and professional audio technologies, organizers said Tuesday.
About 86 percent of the exhibitors at the show, slated for June 21 to June 23, will be from outside Singapore. There will be a strong European presence this year with the group pavilions from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain.
It will also highlight a new cinematography/film/production zone to bring together production companies.
"I think with Asian films evolving and moving at a very astounding speed and also most of the films right now in Asia, you can see they are highly recognized more viewership. So we felt there is a need for us to continue to put equal or important emphasis on cinematography, film and production," said Calvin Koh, senior project manager of BroadcastAsia.
A growth of 5 to 7 percent in the number of visitors is expected for the show this year.
The BroadcastAsia 2011 International Conference will feature over 80 high-level, international speakers.
"I think 3D is still on a wave and will continue. In fact, we got two new cameras at BroadcastAsia -- one is compact size, another is a shoulder camcorder for 3D use. So yeah, we see demand and sales growing in that area," said Chris Grey, head of Content Creation Solutions at Sony Electronics Asia Pacific.
Sony Corporation will unveil a few new products at the event, including the BVM series OLED monitors, as well as the first fully integrated 3D compact camcorder HXR-NX3D1P.
2011年6月13日月曜日
Apple's iCloud aims to 'demote the PC'
Steve Jobs, still gaunt from his battle with a rare form of cancer, interrupted his medical leave to unveil Apple Inc.'s new venture in the cloud.
In what the Apple chief executive described as a major shift in how millions of people would store and organize their music, documents, photos and emails across multiple devices, he showed off an online service that will let Apple users access their digital media from anywhere.
Jobs, who introduced this iCloud service at the opening day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, said people could no longer rely on the personal computer as their digital hub.
"Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy," he said. "We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud."
Apple, the world's largest distributor of music, is giving consumers access to all the music saved on their hard drives — no matter whether they copied it illegally — for $25 a year, with the music industry's consent. Jobs said that was a first.
Apple is also pushing consumers to store their information in the cloud to capture even more of people's digital lives. It's a bid to keep its dominant position in the smartphone and tablet markets as it faces rising competition from devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software, analysts say.
And just as it did with the iPhone — a latecomer that went on to revolutionize the smartphone — Apple may ultimately be the company to popularize cloud computing and, in so doing, gain an edge over competitors Google and Amazon.com Inc.
"Apple will set the tone for the way consumers will view what a cloud service should be like in the future," Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin said.
But Apple is jumping into cloud computing at a time when the concept is under rising scrutiny. Last week's hijacking of hundreds of Google's Gmail accounts, including those of senior U.S. government officials, underscored the vulnerability of information stored on the Web.
In Google's case, a user can access to dozens of online services through a single account. Should hackers trick someone into handing over his or her password, they gain access to the person's files, calendar, contacts and any personal information stored or sent through email.
Although Apple's services have a pretty good track record for security, experts say iCloud could further protect sensitive information by offering an additional authentication step such as a security token that pings the user with a new passcode to log in. Google and Facebook offer such a feature.
"If somebody steals your password, they still need to get that code," said Tin Zaw, a security expert based in Los Angeles, "and that code can only be used once."
The latest attacks on cloud computing will not deter consumers and large organizations from using the technology because of the advantages it offers, analysts said.
The iCloud service, which replaces a previous $99-a-year service that let people synchronize their emails, contacts and calendars, also gives users access to documents, apps and photos through a new service, Photo Stream.
Apple is also making it easier for 200 million iTunes users to download and listen to their music collections on any device rather without having to manually upload every song in their libraries. It can do that because it reached deals with the four major record labels and music publishers to license their recordings.
Apple's new technology, iTunes Match, scans a user's hard drive looking for songs and authorizes the user to listen to iTunes' copy of any song it identifies — regardless of whether the user bought the song from iTunes. The only songs the user must spend time uploading are the ones that are not in iTunes' library.
In a dig at Amazon and Google — which have not reached deals with the music industry and require users to upload every song in their libraries to the Web before they can listen to them on multiple devices — Jobs said Apple's service works in minutes, not hours or days.
Apple will split the $24.99 annual fee for the iTunes Match service with record companies and publishers.
Jobs' decision to make what was only his second major public appearance since taking an indefinite medical leave in January signaled the importance he is placing on Apple's move into the cloud. He called the idea, which first emerged at Apple a decade ago, its "next big insight."
James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)" played right before Jobs walked onstage. Jobs, looking thin in his signature black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, was met with a standing ovation as thousands of software developers snapped photos of him with their iPhones and iPads. One yelled "We love you," to which he replied that it "helps."
Jobs did not discuss his health, which he has said is a personal matter. He shared the spotlight with other Apple executives but was animated as he introduced iCloud, walking back and forth onstage, although he descended the stairs from the stage slowly.
"We think this is going to be pretty big," he said.
■単語
gaunt
音節gaunt 発音記号/gˈɔːnt/音声を聞く
【形容詞】
(gaunt・er; gaunt・est)
1〈人が〉(飢え・病気などで骨が出るほど)げっそりやせた，やせ衰えた.
2〈場所が〉不気味な，寂しい.
用例
the gaunt moors 荒涼とした荒れ野.
gauntly 【副詞】
gauntness 【名詞】
venture
音節ven・ture 発音記号/véntʃɚ｜‐tʃə/音声を聞く
【名詞】【可算名詞】
1冒険的事業，投機的企業，ベンチャー 《★特に事業で金銭上の危険をかけた行為にいう》.
用例
a joint venture 合弁企業.
2投機，思わく，やま.
用例
a bold venture 大やま.
3(危険を伴う)冒険 《★adventure のほうが一般的》.
可算名詞としての「venture」のイディオムやフレーズ
at a vénture
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1a〈…を〉思い切ってやる，敢行する.
用例
venture a flight in a storm あらしをついて飛行を敢行する.
b〔+to do〕思い切って〈…〉する; 大胆[無謀]にも〈…〉する.
用例
No one ventured to object to the plan. あえてその案に反対した者はなかった.
2〈…を〉思い切って言う[する].
用例
I would rather not venture an opinion [a guess]. 意見[推測]は差し控えたい.
3a〈生命・財産などを〉危険にさらす.
用例
They ventured their lives for the national cause. 彼らは国の大義のために身命を賭(と)した.
b〔+目+on+(代)名〕〈生命・財産などを〉〔…に〕賭(か)ける.
用例
He ventured all his wealth on the enterprise. 彼はその事業に全財産を賭けた.
4〈…の〉危険に身をさらす，進んで〈…に〉当たる.
用例
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.＝Nothing venture, nothing gain [win, have]. 《諺》 危険を冒さなければ何も得られない, 「虎穴(こけつ)に入らずんば虎子(こじ)を得ず」.
【自動詞】
1〔+前+(代)名〕危険を冒して〔…に〕乗り出す，思い切って〔…を〕試みる 〔on，upon〕.
用例
venture on a risky undertaking 危険な企てにあえて乗り出す.
2〔+副(句)〕思い切って進む，危険を冒して行く.
用例
They ventured out on the stormy sea to rescue us. 彼らは我々を救助するために勇気を奮ってあらしの海に乗り出した.
［フランス語 aventure 'adventure' の語頭音が落ちたもの］
demote
【動詞】
1
より低い位置へ割り当てる
(assign to a lower position)
She was demoted because she always speaks up 彼女は、常に遠慮なく言うので、降格された
In what the Apple chief executive described as a major shift in how millions of people would store and organize their music, documents, photos and emails across multiple devices, he showed off an online service that will let Apple users access their digital media from anywhere.
Jobs, who introduced this iCloud service at the opening day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, said people could no longer rely on the personal computer as their digital hub.
"Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy," he said. "We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud."
Apple, the world's largest distributor of music, is giving consumers access to all the music saved on their hard drives — no matter whether they copied it illegally — for $25 a year, with the music industry's consent. Jobs said that was a first.
Apple is also pushing consumers to store their information in the cloud to capture even more of people's digital lives. It's a bid to keep its dominant position in the smartphone and tablet markets as it faces rising competition from devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software, analysts say.
And just as it did with the iPhone — a latecomer that went on to revolutionize the smartphone — Apple may ultimately be the company to popularize cloud computing and, in so doing, gain an edge over competitors Google and Amazon.com Inc.
"Apple will set the tone for the way consumers will view what a cloud service should be like in the future," Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin said.
But Apple is jumping into cloud computing at a time when the concept is under rising scrutiny. Last week's hijacking of hundreds of Google's Gmail accounts, including those of senior U.S. government officials, underscored the vulnerability of information stored on the Web.
In Google's case, a user can access to dozens of online services through a single account. Should hackers trick someone into handing over his or her password, they gain access to the person's files, calendar, contacts and any personal information stored or sent through email.
Although Apple's services have a pretty good track record for security, experts say iCloud could further protect sensitive information by offering an additional authentication step such as a security token that pings the user with a new passcode to log in. Google and Facebook offer such a feature.
"If somebody steals your password, they still need to get that code," said Tin Zaw, a security expert based in Los Angeles, "and that code can only be used once."
The latest attacks on cloud computing will not deter consumers and large organizations from using the technology because of the advantages it offers, analysts said.
The iCloud service, which replaces a previous $99-a-year service that let people synchronize their emails, contacts and calendars, also gives users access to documents, apps and photos through a new service, Photo Stream.
Apple is also making it easier for 200 million iTunes users to download and listen to their music collections on any device rather without having to manually upload every song in their libraries. It can do that because it reached deals with the four major record labels and music publishers to license their recordings.
Apple's new technology, iTunes Match, scans a user's hard drive looking for songs and authorizes the user to listen to iTunes' copy of any song it identifies — regardless of whether the user bought the song from iTunes. The only songs the user must spend time uploading are the ones that are not in iTunes' library.
In a dig at Amazon and Google — which have not reached deals with the music industry and require users to upload every song in their libraries to the Web before they can listen to them on multiple devices — Jobs said Apple's service works in minutes, not hours or days.
Apple will split the $24.99 annual fee for the iTunes Match service with record companies and publishers.
Jobs' decision to make what was only his second major public appearance since taking an indefinite medical leave in January signaled the importance he is placing on Apple's move into the cloud. He called the idea, which first emerged at Apple a decade ago, its "next big insight."
James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)" played right before Jobs walked onstage. Jobs, looking thin in his signature black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, was met with a standing ovation as thousands of software developers snapped photos of him with their iPhones and iPads. One yelled "We love you," to which he replied that it "helps."
Jobs did not discuss his health, which he has said is a personal matter. He shared the spotlight with other Apple executives but was animated as he introduced iCloud, walking back and forth onstage, although he descended the stairs from the stage slowly.
"We think this is going to be pretty big," he said.
■単語
gaunt
音節gaunt 発音記号/gˈɔːnt/音声を聞く
【形容詞】
(gaunt・er; gaunt・est)
1〈人が〉(飢え・病気などで骨が出るほど)げっそりやせた，やせ衰えた.
2〈場所が〉不気味な，寂しい.
用例
the gaunt moors 荒涼とした荒れ野.
gauntly 【副詞】
gauntness 【名詞】
venture
音節ven・ture 発音記号/véntʃɚ｜‐tʃə/音声を聞く
【名詞】【可算名詞】
1冒険的事業，投機的企業，ベンチャー 《★特に事業で金銭上の危険をかけた行為にいう》.
用例
a joint venture 合弁企業.
2投機，思わく，やま.
用例
a bold venture 大やま.
3(危険を伴う)冒険 《★adventure のほうが一般的》.
可算名詞としての「venture」のイディオムやフレーズ
at a vénture
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1a〈…を〉思い切ってやる，敢行する.
用例
venture a flight in a storm あらしをついて飛行を敢行する.
b〔+to do〕思い切って〈…〉する; 大胆[無謀]にも〈…〉する.
用例
No one ventured to object to the plan. あえてその案に反対した者はなかった.
2〈…を〉思い切って言う[する].
用例
I would rather not venture an opinion [a guess]. 意見[推測]は差し控えたい.
3a〈生命・財産などを〉危険にさらす.
用例
They ventured their lives for the national cause. 彼らは国の大義のために身命を賭(と)した.
b〔+目+on+(代)名〕〈生命・財産などを〉〔…に〕賭(か)ける.
用例
He ventured all his wealth on the enterprise. 彼はその事業に全財産を賭けた.
4〈…の〉危険に身をさらす，進んで〈…に〉当たる.
用例
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.＝Nothing venture, nothing gain [win, have]. 《諺》 危険を冒さなければ何も得られない, 「虎穴(こけつ)に入らずんば虎子(こじ)を得ず」.
【自動詞】
1〔+前+(代)名〕危険を冒して〔…に〕乗り出す，思い切って〔…を〕試みる 〔on，upon〕.
用例
venture on a risky undertaking 危険な企てにあえて乗り出す.
2〔+副(句)〕思い切って進む，危険を冒して行く.
用例
They ventured out on the stormy sea to rescue us. 彼らは我々を救助するために勇気を奮ってあらしの海に乗り出した.
［フランス語 aventure 'adventure' の語頭音が落ちたもの］
demote
【動詞】
1
より低い位置へ割り当てる
(assign to a lower position)
She was demoted because she always speaks up 彼女は、常に遠慮なく言うので、降格された
Rooting out resume lies
With exams over, it is that time of the year when graduating students send out their resumes to land the ideal job.
A good curriculum vitae is likely to get a job seeker shortlisted for an interview. Yet, without much work experience, preparing a resume is a daunting prospect for many new entrants to the job market, as they would likely be competing against better-qualified professionals looking for greener pastures. So it is not surprising if some hopefuls are tempted to "spruce up" or embellish their resumes.
An example of this is the statement "extremely fluent in English and French", when in reality, the applicant is hardly conversant in the latter. Exaggerations in resumes are common: Some experts have estimated that 40 to 70 per cent of individuals do that.
Individuals also lie through omission, for example by leaving out criminal records or a low grade point average (GPA). (Note that embellishment refers to gross exaggeration or omission of information to the extent that it constitutes a lie, rather than mere fanciful ways of describing responsibilities.)
So is there a way to prevent, or at least minimise, instances of resume embellishment?
We conducted a study on 198 undergraduates, who had to compete for a coveted job after being shown a mock recruitment ad. The hypothetical job included several requirements, such as proficiency in English and Chinese.
The students were asked to state their proficiency in the languages before, and after, the advertisement was shown to them. Their answers pre- and post- advertisement were compared; any difference in their stated level of proficiency was considered a lie.
Participants were also asked three questions to find out if they had social connections that could help them get a job: "I know people in my type of work who might help me get a job", "I have some connections with people that will help me find a job" and "I have good job/internship references".
We found that students with such social networks had stronger attitudes against resume embellishment. Almost three in 10 of the students with job contacts did not lie about their language proficiencies. In contrast, the majority (82.3 per cent) of those without any connections were less than honest.
Respondents with social networks felt their ties could help them get a job. In addition, there was the fear of breaching the trust they enjoyed with their contacts. These factors reduced the incentive for these respondents to lie or cheat on their resumes. We also measured the effects of one's moral values but found that they had no impact on tendencies towards lying - this suggests that social networking, in itself, may serve as a deterrent.
Our findings hold important lessons for organisational hiring practices. They show it is better to build social ties with potential future employees, compared to assessing them purely through their resumes. For instance, hiring managers could go to career fairs and meet potential candidates.
By establishing some level of trust prior to the submission of a resume and by getting to know the job candidates better, recruiters will more likely hire the better candidates anyway. Firms could also avoid advertising themselves as "only hiring the best", which may compel job seekers to lie.
Applicants should bear in mind the potential consequences of lying on their resumes: Advances in communications technologies make it easier for information to spread not only within a company but within an industry as well.
2011年6月10日金曜日
Nintendo president puzzled by investor reaction to Wii U
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said he was surprised at the tumble in the company's share price following the unveiling of a successor to its smash hit Wii games console, adding that the new gadget had to be played to be understood.
Shares in Nintendo fell almost 10 percent in the two days following the company's splashy presentation of the Wii U, which features a tablet-style controller and high-definition graphics, and goes on sale next year.
"Honestly speaking, the reaction to (Tuesday's) presentation and what I heard from people I met and the mood of the convention did not chime at all with what happened in the stock market," Iwata said in an interview at the E3 games show in Los Angeles on Wednesday. "It's very strange."
But he added that the reaction reminded him of the mixed reaction to the original Wii in 2006 and that it showed that those who had not experienced the new gadget did not fully understand its potential.
"In the end, it is easy to get the mistaken impression that this is just a game console with a tablet," he said. "People who came to the presentation and tried it out have understood very well that it opens up a lot of new possibilities. But people who have not tried it will find it hard to believe that this controller will change things."
In the year following the launch of the first Wii in November 2006, shares in Nintendo tripled but have since given up all those gains. The stock was down 0.6 percent at 16,080 yen on Friday.
Nintendo is emphasizing its plans for the Wii U to bring together the casual gamers who bought the Wii and the more dedicated "core" gamers who tend to prefer rival Sony's Playstation or Microsoft's Xbox.
"At the moment, there is a barrier between the Wii, which is seen as for casual users and the other companies' consoles, which are seen as for core gamers. We are questioning whether that barrier needs to be there," said Iwata.
To that end, Nintendo worked hard on winning over the third-party game developers favored by serious gamers, who failed to back the Wii.
At E3 this week, both Electronic Arts Inc, known for its sports titles, and Activision Blizzard, the owners of the Call of duty shooter franchise, voiced strong support for the Wii U.
Sony back in stride at E3 videogame extravaganza
People queued for hours on Thursday to try Sony's next-generation gaming handset or peeks at a 3D "Drake's Uncharted" videogame being released later this year.
Crowds thronged Sony booths each day of an Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) extravaganza as the Japanese firm put its back to an embarrassing hack of its online network for games, films and music.
"It's been a great E3 for us," Sony spokeswoman Julie Webber said as videogame industry insiders tried upcoming titles and the PlayStation Vita gaming handset.
"There has been a lot of buzz," she continued. "We're 100 percent committed to consumer satisfaction and safety with PlayStation Network, but this is our chance to really show all the new content and hardware we have coming out."
Sony introduced "PS Vita" and blockbuster 3D console titles at E3 as it sought to shake off the stigma of cyber attacks on its system.
PSN was shut down after hackers broke in and looted user data. Sony brought the system back online gradually the week before E3 after hardening its defenses.
"Despite all the craziness, it was a very proud moment, in a way, to be working there because there was so much resilient focus on how to make this right and bring back the best entertainment experience," PSN senior director Susan Panico said in an interview.
"A lot of people in the company hunkered down for days working on a 24-seven basis to resolve this," she continued. "I was proud of the way people pulled together."
Content is king when it comes to entertainment, and Sony believes its troves of movies, music and videogames put it in a position to keep and win fans of its devices and services.
"We have movie studios, record labels, games and consumer electronics technology," she said. "We see PSN as a backbone of entertainment that ultimately transcends Sony devices."
PSN boasts about 77 million registered accounts, with nearly half of those belonging to people in North America.
Panico saw current trends in playing games on smartphones or tablet computers as complementing videogame consoles which offer more cinematic and sophisticated experiences and link to the Internet "cloud."
"Certainly every form of entertainment competes for people's time," Panico acknowledged. "What's great about smartphones or tablets is they are gateways into gaming when people want more immersive, deeper experiences."
A "holy grail" for the videogame industry is to have content converge in the "cloud" where it can be accessed through arrays of Internet-linked devices, according to Panico.
"For the foreseeable future there is a place in the living room for consoles like the PlayStation," she said. "You're not going to download one of these games on the infrastructure in the United States, that's for sure."
In a bid to make 3D more ubiquitous, Sony will release a 24-inch (61-centimeter) display for the format bundled with special glasses, an HDMI cable and a copy of the coming "Resistance 3" videogame at a package price of US$500.
Sony is certain that console videogame lovers want to be more immersed than ever in big, bold on-screen adventures.
The gamemaker is backing its belief with blockbuster 3D titles, motion-based controls and a Sharp Shooter faux assault rifle which players can use to pick off in-game enemies.
Sony expanded the appeal of its Move motion-sensing PS3 controls with an array of sophisticated titles, including basketball, shooters and a coming version of "Bioshock" tailored for the devices.
A PS Vita model that connects to the Internet only using Wi-Fi will be priced at US$249, while a version of the gadget featuring 3G connectivity to telecom data services will be priced at US$299.
PS Vita is due to launch in Japan, Europe and the United States by the end of the year.
The portable system features a five-inch (12.7 cm) multi-touch OLED screen with a touch control pad on the back for "touch, grab, trace, push and pull" finger motions. The handset also has front and rear facing cameras, along with a pair of console-like toggles for playing fighter, shooter and action games.
Sony Computer Entertainment chief Kazuo Hirai acknowledged that Vita is launching at a time when smartphones are becoming increasingly popular gaming gadgets but was confident the new-generation portable would win over players.
■単語
throng
音節throng 発音記号/θr????｜θr???/音声を聞く
【名詞】【可算名詞】
[集合的に] 群衆; 人だかり 〔of〕《★【用法】 集合体と考える時には単数，構成要素を考える時には複数扱い》.
用例
a throng of people [seagulls] 人[カモメ]の群れ.
【動詞】 【自動詞】
群がる，殺到する.
用例
They thronged around him. 彼らは彼の周りに群がった.
【他動詞】
〈場所に〉群がる; 押しかける，殺到する 《★しばしば受身で用い，前置詞は with》.
用例
People thronged the church to hear the sermon. その説教を聞こうと人々が教会に押しかけた.
embarrass
embarrass
音節em・bar・rass 発音記号/?mb?ar?s, em‐/音声を聞く
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1〈人を〉(人前で)恥ずかしい思いをさせる，きまり悪がらせる，まごつかせる 《しばしば過去分詞で形容詞的に用いる; ⇒embarrassed 1; ★【類語】 ⇒→bewilder》.
用例
Meeting new people embarrasses Tom. 初めての人たちに会うとトムはどぎまぎしてしまう.
2〈人を〉金銭上困らせる，〈人に〉借金を負わせる 《★通例 過去分詞で形容詞的に用いる; ⇒embarrassed 2》.
［スペイン語「妨げる」の意; 【名詞】 embarrassment］
blockbuster
音節block・bust・er 発音記号/bl?kb`?st?｜bl??kb`?st?/
【名詞】【可算名詞】
1超大型爆弾.
2《口語》 強い影響[感銘]を与える人[もの]; 大ヒット作.
用例
That movie is a blockbuster. あの映画はすごいヒット作だ.
3《米口語》 ブロックバスティング (blockbusting) をする投機家.
stigma
音節stig・ma 発音記号/stigm?/音声を聞く
【名詞】
(《複数形》 音節stig・mas，3 では stig・ma・ta 発音記号/st?gm????, stigm?‐/)
1【可算名詞】 汚名，恥辱.
2【可算名詞】 【植物, 植物学】 柱頭.
3【可算名詞】 [the stigmata] 【キリスト教】 聖痕(こん) 《聖人の身体に現われた，十字架上のキリストの傷と同一形状のもの》.
［ギリシャ語「印」の意］
loot
音節loot 発音記号/lu?t/音声を聞く
【名詞】【不可算名詞】
1a[集合的に] 戦利品，略奪品; 盗品.
b略奪(行為).
2(公務員などの)不正利得.
3《俗語》 金(かね).
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1a〈物品を〉分捕る.
b〈都市・家などから〉略奪する.
2〈…を〉不正収得する，横領する.
【自動詞】
1略奪を行なう.
2横領する.
音節loot・er 発音記号/‐??｜‐t?/ 【名詞】
［ヒンディー語から］
craziness
【名詞】
1
愚かな、または無分別な行為
(foolish or senseless behavior)
2
軽率でばかげていること
(the quality of being rash and foolish)
3
精神異常のための非公式の用語
(informal terms for insanity)
resilient
音節re・sil・ient 発音記号/r?zilj?nt/
【形容詞】
1はね[とび]返る; 弾力のある.
2たちまち元気を回復する; 快活な，溌刺(はつらつ)とした.
resiliently 【副詞】
hunker
音節hun・ker 発音記号/h???k?｜‐k?/
【動詞】 【自動詞】
しゃがむ，うずくまる 〈down〉.
troves
名詞
Plural form of trove.
アナグラム
stover
strove
voters
ubiquitous
音節u・biq・ui・tous 発音記号/ju?bikw???s/
【形容詞】
1(同時に)至る所にある，遍在する.
2〈人が〉至る所に姿を現わす.
ubiquitously 【副詞】
ubiquitousness 【名詞】
faux
のど
assault
音節as・sault 発音記号/?s???lt/音声を聞く
【名詞】
1【可算名詞】 突然襲いかかること，急襲，強襲 〔on，upon〕.
用例
carry [take] an enemy position by assault 敵陣を強襲して占領する 《★by assault は無冠詞》.
2【不可算名詞】 [具体的には 【可算名詞】]
a【法律, 法学】 暴行.
b《婉曲》 強姦，レイプ.
名詞としての「assault」のイディオムやフレーズ
assault and battery
【動詞】 【他動詞】
1〈人・陣地を〉急襲する，強襲する.
2a【法律, 法学】〈人に〉暴行する.
b《婉曲》〈女性を〉レイプする.
［ラテン語「跳びかかる」の意 (AS‐+sal?re 「跳ぶ」); ASSAIL と同語源］
2011年6月9日木曜日
Apple iCloud: the criticism
Apple's latest product, the iCloud, has - as usual for an Apple launch - met with a storm of media interest. But not everyone's convinced. Here's a look at some of the criticism it's been receiving on the web.
No full streaming
The guys at ReadWriteWeb are unimpressed. "Apple's new offer does not involve music streaming", they say. "True, you can have your music collection synced across devices (up to 10 of them). But you will still have to download the music you want to play on to your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch or Mac. You won't be able to access your entire collection and randomly shuffle between all the glorious gigabytes." Google and Amazon will "breathe a sigh of relief".
Only your own music
Over at MusicMachinery they make a related criticism: it's only your own music you can listen to. They suggest that over the years, music companies have been pushing the "delusion" that you can buy music, but in fact you're just "renting it until the next format change comes along", and that a music subscription service is the logical extension of that. Paul Lamere says: "Apple (along with Amazon and Google) are going down the wrong path. The music cloud shouldn't be a locker in the sky where I can put all the music I own, it should be the Celestial Jukebox - a place where all music is available for me to listen to."
Evolver.fm concurs: "Apple's music locker is a nice feature for those who like Apple's hardware and software, but it's not the cloud endgame: a Rhapsody- or Spotify-type music subscription service on steroids."
Limited storage space
Most of your music won't require storing: iCloud will recognise it and give you access to its iTunes version, rather than requiring you to store it. But if the music's not on iTunes, you'll have to upload it into the cloud yourself - and with a respectable but hardly voluminous 5Gb storage space in the cloud, you may find yourself short of room, as Rachel King at ZDNet asks: "What about movies and music not purchased via iTunes? Or other large collaborative files such as graphic-heavy presentations? That 5GB could go fast. Then again, it's free so it's hard to complain." She also points out that "Uploading to the cloud could get expensive quickly" for 3G and 4G users, especially "if someone is constantly uploading new versions of documents, music files and apps all the time."
No TV or video
FierceIPTV, the internet TV monitor, says that Apple has "missed the bullseye" by failing to provide streaming video and full syncing. "It does allow users to sync video content", they say, but: "The process may be a drag because users will have to upload and download files in full between devices and iCloud."
File it "in the 'needs more work' queue", they say, although they expect more from Apple soon.
Apple have tried this before, and screwed it up
This isn't Apple's first venture into the cloud. Wired points out that: "iCloud will be Apple's sequel to MobileMe, a paid online service for synchronizing personal information, such as your calendars, address books, e-mail and photos, across multiple devices. Tech observers agree that MobileMe has been one of Apple's most embarrassingly flawed products, thanks to its extremely buggy launch and limited functionality."
Worse still, even Mobile Me wasn't the first: it was "itself a 2008 rebranding of .Mac, which began its life in 2000 as iDisk", they say. Can they manage to get it right fourth time? And if they do, what will happen to the MobileMe users who've paid $99 a year for something they're now giving away for free? "Apple has been known to offer refunds and price adjustments in the past, most notably after the price drop of the first iPhone in 2007, which settled an uproar amongst those who shelled out $599 rather than $399. Thus, Apple might find itself in such a pinch once iCloud launches this fall", says Rachel King of ZDNet.
Steve Jobs takes the stage to discuss the iCloud service at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Photo: REUTERS)
It's not safe
In the wake of recent data scares, people are understandably wary of floating all their personal data and documents into the ether. Our own Adrian Hon writes: "Seventy-five million users' passwords and personal data on Sony's Playstation Network were recently accessed by hackers, handily demonstrating that even the biggest companies don't have bulletproof security. If we are going to entrust all our data and work to a single company and a single point of failure, whether it's Apple or Google or Amazon, we need to be confident that we're safe. We also need to be aware that this isn't all for our benefit, either. There are billions to be made from accurately targeting consumers with adverts and recommendations, and with a record of every piece of media we consume and purchase, companies can influence our tastes and behaviour in ever more subtle and powerful ways."
The New Yorker agrees: "But how do you know that these companies are going to keep your e-mail, photographs, dissertation research, financial records, or notes on an article about the next Wikileaks from other corporations or from hackers or from governments? Ultimately, you don't. The future of cloud-based companies depends upon maintaining privacy, but we use their products in the present. Accidents happen, smart people can fall for phishing scams, and thieves find ways of breaking into things, whether it's the Kryptonite bike lock or Gmail."
China's dark horses challenge Ipad
Figures released by market researcher Canalys shows the iPad accounted for more than 74 percent of total global shipments of tablet computers in the first quarter.
Tablet PC makers around the world are stepping up efforts to snap up a larger share in this increasingly profitable market. But is there any tech company out there up to taking on Apple? As Yin Hang's report continues, that dark horse could be a brand you've never heard of.
With the hugely-popular iPad commanding almost 75 percent of the tablet market, it's a plucky company indeed that paints itself as Apple's major competitor.
Fang Liyong, COO Beijing Ereneben, said, "There are only two tablet computer makers that are superior to all others in the world. One is Apple, the other is Ereneben. And the rest of the tablet PC makers are lost in Apple's shadow."
The Chief Operating Officer of Beijing-based Ereneben Information Technology certainly has plenty of confidence. The first generation of the company's "hand-writing touch screen gadgets" were released onto the market long before the world caught iPad fever.
Fang's bullish assessment of his company's position in the market is based on some pretty solid sales figures - at least in China.
Fang Liyong, COO Beijing Ereneben, said, "Our sales last year were the highest among Chinese tablet makers, reaching around 300 million yuan, or around 46 million U.S. dollars. We plan to maximize our sales to 1 billion yuan this year."
But like other Chinese-made tablet computers, such as Hanwang's version and Lenovo's Le-Pad, Ereneben's gadget isn't nearly as high-profile as the iPad. It's hard to spot it on the street, or the subway, or clutched in the arms of a consumer so obsessive, they're willing to camp overnight to get their hands on it.
Xiang Ligang, Vice President, 3G Industry Asso., said, "Besides Apple, other tablet computer makers in the world have three characteristics. They start later. Their function, in terms of apps and processing abilities, are not competitive enough to challenge the iPad. And their prices are not attractive. China-made tablet computers are largely the same."
Analysts say, Steve Jobs has nothing to lose sleep over. At least not until a competitor can bring something bold, innovative and fresh to the market.
Online "microresumes" are a hit for China's job seekers
BEIJING, May 21 (Xinhua) -- One hundred and forty words isn't a lot, but China's job seekers are cramming an entire career's worth of experience into a few sentences in order to help them find the perfect job.
"Microresumes" have become especially popular this May, as prospective university graduates are getting ready to enter the workforce. Graduate students are particularly likely to post their resumes on their microblogs.
"Microresumes" have become especially popular this May, as prospective university graduates are getting ready to enter the workforce. Graduate students are particularly likely to post their resumes on their microblogs.
"I am from the city of Qingdao city and I am looking for a temporary job to help me get by. I will take my post-graduation examinations next year," wrote a graduate student from Qingdao University in east China's Shandong Province on weibo.com, China's most popular microblogging site.
There were more than 17,000 microresumes posted on weibo.com as of last Friday.
College graduates aren't the only ones taking to their keyboards to find a new job. China's gainfully employed are also using microblogs to seek bigger and better opportunities. Ruan Xin, a senior manager with a company in China's economic hub of Shenzhen, recently posted a microresume in the hopes of finding a better job.
Ruan was quoted in a Thursday article in the China Youth Daily newspaper as saying that microresumes are an efficient way for both job seekers and employees to achieve their goals.
Direct and short introductions can quickly spread over the Internet, which helps employers save time when they're trying to find the right candidates, he said, adding that the speed at which short introductions can spread on the Internet also allows prospective job seekers to make more connections than they would with traditional resumes.
Several companies have begun looking at microblogs as an effective channel for recruitment. A recruiter for Alipay, China's largest third-party online payment service, said that Alipay has been recruiting employees via microblogs since 2009, according to the China Youth Daily article.
The recruiter says that microblogs can "yield twice the result with half the effort" in helping companies to recruit new employees.
New figures show that about 140 million people have signed up for accounts at weibo.com. Chinese media giant Sina, which owns weibo.com, estimates that the site will have 200 million registered users by the end of this year.
However, summing up an entire career in just 140 characters is a challenge for many job hunters. Some of the microresumes posted online seem to be posted just for their humorous content, rather than for the purpose of actually finding a job.
"Some microresumes are more like micronovels, just another instance of online entertainment," says Wang Yan, a college student majoring in journalism at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, the capital city of central China's Hubei Province.
Wang Dong, a human resources director working for an online advertising company, says that he is very cautious when dealing with microresumes. He believes that they aren't long enough to provide a suitable introduction for employers.
"Microresumes aren't necessarily suitable for every industry," Wang says. "Advertisers and media companies are the most suitable targets for this kind of recruitment."
He suggests that good microresumes should be clear and tightly focused, with links to the poster's personal website, if he or she has one. This can allow employers to understand the candidate more easily, he says.
China to promote building of national digital library network
BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhua) -- China will launch a national project to promote the building of a digital library network in the next five years.
The project aims to build a nationwide digital library network with the National Digital Library of China at the center, integrating local libraries, said a statement jointly issued by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday.
The focus of the project will be promoting the construction of an interconnected digital library platform and a group of widely-spread resource libraries that provide multi-media library services for the public, the statement said.
The services will be available in public libraries and through the Internet, mobile phones and mobile televisions.
Over recent years, the construction of digital libraries has made technological advancements, and the promotional project is expected to increase the capability and capacity of the country's digital library services and improve the public culture services, said Zhou Heping, director of the National Library of China.
Zhou called for an emphasis on the planning, human-resource training, expenditure management and the building of an information sharing system during the promotion.
As of September last year, the digital resources maintained by the National Digital Library of China had reached 460 TB, with over 76 percent accessible across the country.
In February of last year, China launched a scheme to promote the building of digital libraries at the county level in a bid to equip the country's over 2,900 county-level libraries with digital services.
Google's groundless accuses hurt global trust on Internet
BEIJING, June 2 (Xinhua) -- Again, Google complained about China undermining its cyberspace service. Just as its previous accusations, the world's largest Internet search engine provided no solid proof to support its statement.
In a blog post updated on Wednesday, Google said a clandestine campaign originating in China targeted some users of Gmail, its e-mail service, aiming at stealing passwords and monitoring e-mail accounts.
It was the second time that Google arbitrarily pointed its finger at China. Last year, Google groundlessly accused the Chinese government of supporting hacker attack against it and pushed China to abandon legal regulations on the Internet by threatening to withdraw from the Chinese market.
The chimerical complaints by Google have become obstacles for enhancing global trust between stakeholders in cyberspace.
Nobody would doubt Google's leading role on the Internet. Founded in 1998, Google runs more than 1 million web servers in data centers around the world, and processes more than 1 billion online search requests.
However, it was too imprudent for the online giant to lash out at others without solid proof to support its accusation.
Last year, Google invited the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a spy agency, to help with its inquiry into cyberattacks against it, even though the cooperation was considered to be a serious threat to Internet neutrality.
Then unidentified American security investigators said, they traced the attackers to computers at Chinese Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, according to the New York Times.
The report amused many Chinese at that time since Lanxiang Vocational School enjoys a good fame at training chefs for local restaurants.
But the American investigators suggested that the school had the capacity to stage the cyber attacks and made the world's No. 1 search engine suffer. It is really hard for people with common sense to understand.
Furthermore, it is not appropriate for Google, a profit-first business, to act as an Internet judge.
Google has not always followed business ethics as it says. The American media reported in mid-May that Google had not been vigilant about policing online pharmaceutical advertisements because they are so lucrative. As a result, the Internet search leader distributed online advertisements from illegal pharmacies.
In fact, individual criminals, rather than states, are the major treat to Internet safety, as some U.S. experts say.
China, the United States and many other countries are all victims of hackers. In China, for instance, about 60 percent of the Internet users experienced hacker attacks during the first half of 2010. More than 30 percent of China's netizens had their online accounts or passwords stolen.
Global cooperation is urgently needed to keep the Internet safe.
It is a real pity that Google's baseless complaints have distress mutual trust and the efforts to establish new global governance in cyberspace, letting real online criminals obtain illegal profits without being punished.
Lenovo intends to buy control of Germany's Medion
BEIJING, June 2 (Xinhua) -- Lenovo Group Ltd., China's biggest maker of personal computer, aimed to buy control of Medion AG, a multimedia and consumer electronics maker, to double its market share in Germany, the China Daily reported Thursday.
The purchase will be Lenovo's biggest acquisition since it acquired International Business Machines Corp's PC business in 2004.
Lenovo estimated that after the acquisition, it will be the third-largest PC company in Germany, which is Europe's largest PC market. Lenovo will have more than 14 percent of the German and 7.5 percent of the Western European PC market, the newspaper said.
Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing said the deal will complement both Lenovo's core PC business and new businesses, which are key areas for development.
The Chinese PC maker said it hopes the deal will be completed in August and that it will acquire 50 to 75 percent of the Medion AG's stock, according to the newspaper.
Lenovo was ranked the fourth-largest PC company and held a 9.9 percent market share worldwide in the first quarter of 2011.
Sony unveils next-gen portable device "Vita"
Three weeks after Sony's PR nightmare when its PlayStation network was hacked, the Japanese company is set to woo back consumers at the opening of the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles.After Sony President and CEO, Jack Tretton, offered his apologies to the crowd, he unveiled the newest collection of games.
The most anticipated announcement of the event though, was for the new handheld gaming device, called the PlayStation Vita. The Vita is set to compete Nintendo's DS and handheld gaming on smartphones. It will go on sale for 249 dollars, or 299 for a 3G mobile version.
The new console is set to hit the market during the holiday season, at the end of this year. Sony also plans to integrate Android capable devices into its network to expand its target group.
Two more Taiwan food products recalled
Two more food items from Taiwan have been recalled after similar products being imported by Hong Kong were suspected of being carcinogenic.
Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (FDA) informed Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety (CFS) that Jin Zhuan Lifesciences Enterprise Co Ltd products, which were imported by Cosway Hong Kong Ltd, were suspected of containing carcinogens.
In a press release yesterday, Health Ministry director-general Datuk Dr Hasan Abdul Rahman said Taiwan FDA had informed the ministry on Friday that these items had been exported to Malaysia.
"The ministry has ordered Cosway Malaysia Sdn Bhd to immediately recall the suspected items that are being imported into Malaysia," said Dr Hasan.
The items suspected of being tainted with di-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) include Oriyen Nutri Grow (boy) Orange Drink Premix (330g) and Oriyen Nutri Grow (girl) Cranberry Drink Premix (330g) with an expiry date on Aug 13, 2013.
"The ministry has taken samples to be analysed for DEHP and the products from the batch will be released if the analysis results prove them to be free of DEHP.
"All distributors under Cosway Malaysia Sdn Bhd are advised to cease sales of the products and users that have purchased the products are advised not to consume them," said Dr Hasan.
He said nine other food products from Taiwan suspected of being tainted with DEHP had been analysed and found not to contain the chemical.
The items include apple juice, guava juice, grape juice and carambola juice by Uni-President and Frugurt Assorted Flavors, Fibrous Jelly White Peach Flavour, Fibrous Jelly Mango Flavor, Fibrous Jelly Grape Flavour and Squez'n Bites by New Choice.
The ministry would continue to monitor food products from Taiwan confirmed not to contain DEHP, including Pickled Strip Cucumber by Melovocom, Preserved Chili Bean Curd by Master and Yam Nutritious Cereal by Greenmax.
"The public need not worry about the safety of food imported from Taiwan as safeguards have been put in place to monitor the products," said Dr Hasan.
Sony sees brisk sales of new games device
"If we were able to hit that 70 million mark for PlayStation Portable, we want to exceed that both in terms of numbers and timing to get to that number," Sony's No. 2 executive Kazuo Hirai said in an interview on Tuesday on the sidelines of the E3 games convention in Los Angeles.
Sony's Vita comes as more and more people use smartphones and tablets to play games on the go.
Apple Inc's online gaming network, accessed through its iPhone and other mobile devices, now boasts of 50 million users. But despite the competition, Sony's Hirai said the aim is to make a profit on hardware sales of the new handheld PlayStation Vita in less than three years.
That contrasts with the PlayStation 3 home console, which analysts say initially cost the company hundreds of dollars per unit to sell and took years to make a profit after launching in 2006.
Jay Defibaugh, an analyst at MF Global, said Sony's Vita could outsell the PlayStation Portable. "I think it's definitely possible, although I don't model that right now, given the bigger emphasis on connectivity," he said.
"All things considered, the handheld market has more exposure to the increasing popularity of smartphone-based gaming."
In a separate interview, the head of Sony Computer Entertainment's U.S. division, Jack Tretton, said the Vita would go on sale in Japan by the end of the year, while launches in some regions could be pushed into 2012.
Sony, which revealed the pricing for Vita at a flashy event featuring sports and rock stars, is already facing criticism the gadget is too expensive.
Vita's pricing -- $249, or $299 for a 3G mobile version -- would help Sony reach its goal of making money off the device in less than three years, however.
"That's in line with what they've been saying about not making losses on the scale of the PS3, which was losing them hundreds of dollars per unit at first," Defibaugh said, adding it was unclear how Sony was calculating profitability on the device.
2011年6月8日水曜日
Countering Video Game Rivals, Nintendo Introduces a Touch-Screen Wii
LOS ANGELES - Nintendo on Tuesday announced a new version of its Wii video game console, in a move to counter increased competition from higher-resolution consoles from Microsoft and Sony, as well as multifunction devices like the Apple iPad.
The new system, the Wii U, incorporates a tabletlike game controller that literally brings a new dimension to the game. The hand-held, 6.2-inch touch-screen unit includes the functions of the previous controller, including the ability to control play through motion; besides the screen, a camera, microphone and speaker have been added.
The new console, available in 2012, can also display high-definition graphics; the current version of the Wii cannot.
The company says the new controller can both mirror gameplay seen on a big screen and act as a second screen, similar to the way that tablet applications from program providers like DirecTV provide consumers with additional information when they watch a video program.
With the Wii U, the experience will be "deeper and wider," said Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, speaking at the annual E3 gaming convention here in Los Angeles. "You will see games in a different way."
The Wii successfully brought a new segment of casual, and older, consumers to video games, players undeterred by the system's rather basic graphics and simplified gameplay. The Wii outsold its console rivals, with 35.5 million sold in the United States. Sony has sold 16.7 million of the PlayStation 3, while Microsoft has sold 27 million Xbox 360s, according to the market research company NPD Group.
The Wii U is compatible with existing Wii accessories. The company has not said what it will cost, or whether it will replace or supplement the existing model.
Michael Pachter, a video game industry analyst with Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles, gave the Wii U high marks, calling it "really intuitive," and saying "the integration with the TV is very good."
"If they can price this under $300," he added, "they'll do very well."
The current Wii console, including accessories, retails for $150. No games optimized for the Wii U were announced, but John S. Riccitiello, chief executive of the game developer Electronic Arts, said the Wii U was "a better platform than we've ever been offered by Nintendo."
In several technology demonstrations at the convention, gameplay was either replicated or seen from a different perspective on the hand-held tablet, or, with the brush of a hand, "flipped" from the tablet to the television.
The unit was lightweight and comfortable to hold, with all controls in easy reach. In one example, it could be used as a shield, held up to stop arrows launched from a ship on the TV screen. In a game of golf, the tablet was placed on the ground; a second, current Wii controller was used to hit the virtual ball, which left the tablet's screen and appeared on the TV's screen. And in a game with two players, one received information on the tablet controller that allowed him to run from a pursuer, while the other tried to catch him as she watched a limited view of the scene on the TV itself.
The tablet can also be used to continue gameplay if another family member wants to watch a TV show. And, like Apple's iPad 2, it doubles as a video chat device.
Nintendo also announced a software update for its 3DS hand-held game, which allows consumers to purchase certain new and classic games remastered for 3-D directly from its eShop download service. New 3DS games include Super Mario, Luigi's Mansion 2, Mario Kart and Kid Icarus: Uprising.
Japan raises spectre of Fukushima 'melt-through'
For the first time, Japanese authorities have suggested the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant may have gone beyond a meltdown.
An official report, which Japan will submit to the UN's nuclear watchdog, says nuclear fuel in three reactors at Fukushima has possibly melted through the pressure vessels and accumulated in outer containment vessels.
Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper says this "melt-through" is far worse than a core meltdown, and is the worst possibility in a nuclear accident.
This is the first official admission that a "melt-through" may have occurred.
In the report, Japan also admits it was unprepared for the scale of the Fukushima disaster, which struck after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March.
The report also acknowledges there was insufficient communication between the government and the plant's operator.
Life in the clouds offers new benefits
Before the collapse of the Iron Curtain, some people, including a brilliant photographer I knew, prepared for a simpler time. They collected hand tools that would need no electricity, learned how to fish and hunt, and mapped out remote locations where competition for living off the land wouldn't be too fierce.
These Cold War survivalists believed that nuclear Armageddon was inevitable and that they needed to be ready for the day when all of the modern conveniences we counted on would no longer function, when there would be no gas for vehicles, electricity, food stores or indoor plumbing.
I was reminded of my friend, the survivalist, this week with Apple's announcement of the iCloud, its entry into the rapidly growing business of cloud computing.
Apple is hoping that it can do for cloud computing what it has already done with cellular telephones and personal music players, taking an existing concept, redesigning it in a way that makes sense for people who aren't computer geeks and giving it mass appeal.
For consumers, stepping into the cloud requires a leap of faith, similar to the one we took when our ancestors turned our gold and silver over to a bank in return for a slip of paper that promised their wealth would still be there when they came back later to get it.
With the cloud, we are encouraged to put our faith in a system over which we have no real understanding or control and trust that our personal information will be kept safe, that it will be there when we need it and that it won't be used against us.
Cloud computing has been around for several years or even longer, depending on how you define it. It is essentially a commercial service that offers storage and computing power at remote locations. Rather than maintain capacity that is only partly used most of the time, businesses rent computing services in the cloud, so-called because the physical location may not always be the same, depending on what capacity is available at any given time.
The physical heart of the cloud is anything but amorphous, however. It is the giant server factories like the one showcased by Apple on Monday that have row after row of unstaffed computers, quietly digesting whatever they are fed and regurgitating on command everything from suggestions for new friends on Facebook to schedules for delivering vegetables to market.
The cloud raises a number of personal privacy and security issues. Like a bank vault, putting all that data in one place - whether a single physical location or simply behind a single door - makes cloud servers a rich target for hackers.
Some observers have also warned that Apple's plan to offer a mirror site for individual music libraries might create an opportunity for users to be caught up in lawsuits looking for copyright violators, who on their own are not worth pursuing but aggregated through Apple might make an attractive target.
And I wonder what access the United States Department of Homeland Security has, either secretly or with search warrants.
In return for that risk, Apple's iCloud will offer the convenience of being able to access our music, photos and work files from almost any Apple product, anytime and anyplace with Web or phone access.
That convenience and utility for businesses that use the cloud as a productivity tool mean that we will inevitably come to lean on it for functions that will no longer be accomplished elsewhere and indeed may not have been possible without it.
All of which got me thinking about my old friend, whom I haven't seen or heard from since he headed off to Yukon more than 30 years ago.
We no longer require global nuclear war to end our civilization as we know it. All it would take is unplugging the cloud. Then again, the survivalists prepared for a war that never came.
2011年6月7日火曜日
Xbox 360 with Kinect shows off new tricks at E3
Microsoft on Monday added YouTube, voice commands, television shows and more to its Xbox 360 with Kinect as the hot-selling videogame console matures into an entertainment center for all.
Studios joined Microsoft on the eve of a premier Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles to unveil blockbusters such as "Mass Effect 3″ that let players use body motion or voice to execute tactics once the exclusive duty of toggles or buttons in controllers.
"Kinect is a natural way to converse with characters," said BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka, whose studio is behind hit videogame franchise "Mass Effect."
"In a game that already reacts to every decision you make, you will feel even more connected."
Microsoft was intent on broadening the array of Kinect titles to appeal to the traditional "hard core gamers" devoted to shooter games as well as the "casual" audience happy with virtual darts or bowling.
Microsoft ramped up voice capabilities in Kinect to allow Xbox users not only to give commands to in-game characters but to speak Bing searches for games, movies, television shows, music and other entertainment content.
"This is an incredible time of growth and innovation for our business leveraging technologies that see us, hear us and connect us all together," said Microsoft president of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick.
"This year by bringing together the power of Kinect for Xbox 360 and the intelligence of Bing, we are transforming how people enjoy entertainment."
Microsoft has sold more than 10 million of the gesture-sensing Kinect accessories for the Xbox 360 consoles worldwide since they hit the market in November of last year.
Kinect uses a 3D camera and motion recognition software to let people play videogames on the Xbox 360 using natural body movements and voice commands instead of hand-held controllers.
More than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.
Microsoft has teamed with television operators in Britain, France and Australia in the past two years to bring television shows to local audiences through an Xbox Live online entertainment service.
Executives from the Seattle, Washington-based company said Monday they are making alliances to do the same in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft was also adding Google-owned online video-sharing service YouTube to an Xbox Live line-up that includes Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Zune.
"We feel that we have all the great momentum," said Dennis Durkin, chief operating officer of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business. "With our hardware, Kinect sensor, and Live services we feel we can go from being Number One in North America to being Number One worldwide."
Studios joined Microsoft on the eve of a premier Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles to unveil blockbusters such as "Mass Effect 3″ that let players use body motion or voice to execute tactics once the exclusive duty of toggles or buttons in controllers.
"Kinect is a natural way to converse with characters," said BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka, whose studio is behind hit videogame franchise "Mass Effect."
"In a game that already reacts to every decision you make, you will feel even more connected."
Microsoft was intent on broadening the array of Kinect titles to appeal to the traditional "hard core gamers" devoted to shooter games as well as the "casual" audience happy with virtual darts or bowling.
Microsoft ramped up voice capabilities in Kinect to allow Xbox users not only to give commands to in-game characters but to speak Bing searches for games, movies, television shows, music and other entertainment content.
"This is an incredible time of growth and innovation for our business leveraging technologies that see us, hear us and connect us all together," said Microsoft president of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick.
"This year by bringing together the power of Kinect for Xbox 360 and the intelligence of Bing, we are transforming how people enjoy entertainment."
Microsoft has sold more than 10 million of the gesture-sensing Kinect accessories for the Xbox 360 consoles worldwide since they hit the market in November of last year.
Kinect uses a 3D camera and motion recognition software to let people play videogames on the Xbox 360 using natural body movements and voice commands instead of hand-held controllers.
More than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.
Microsoft has teamed with television operators in Britain, France and Australia in the past two years to bring television shows to local audiences through an Xbox Live online entertainment service.
Executives from the Seattle, Washington-based company said Monday they are making alliances to do the same in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft was also adding Google-owned online video-sharing service YouTube to an Xbox Live line-up that includes Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Zune.
"We feel that we have all the great momentum," said Dennis Durkin, chief operating officer of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business. "With our hardware, Kinect sensor, and Live services we feel we can go from being Number One in North America to being Number One worldwide."
iCloud is free, iTunes Match is $25 a year
As expected, Steve Jobs said Monday that Apple's iCloud service will offer a feature called iTunes in the Cloud that replicates users' music collections (instead of copying the files from their hard drives into the cloud) for free.
And, as reported by The Times before Jobs' announcement, a $25 annual subscription option will be made available. The Apple chief executive called it iTunes Match.
For $25 a year, an iTunes Match user will be able to add music not purchased from iTunes to his or her iCloud music collection. The number of songs an iTunes Match subscriber can store is unlimited, Jobs said at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday.
"Here's how it works," Apple said on its website. "iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can't match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch."
Songs with a match in the iTunes catalog are all replicated in a user's iCloud library at 256-kbps quality, which audiophiles should appreciate, even if the user had lower-quality files.
Matching a user's iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks, Apple says. By contrast, Google's Music Beta and Amazon's Cloud Player services require users to upload song files to "cloud lockers" themselves and offer no matching options.
In order to pull all this off, Apple reached large contracts with major record labels, agreeing to give them a share of the revenue from iTunes Match subscriptions.
If iTunes Match users let their subscriptions run out and don't pay to re-up, their iCloud libraries would revert to just the songs they've bought from iTunes.
Apple released a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud on Monday for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users running iOS 4.3. ITunes Match will arrive this fall.
The cloud efforts will be taxing on Apple's servers, but the company says it is prepared for the increased traffic.
"Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, N.C.," the company said in a statement. "Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services."
Last-minute iOS 5 Rumors: Notifications, Widgets, and More!
Nothing like an 11th hour WWDC rumor, right before the main event! TiMN has a source claiming to know what Apple's iOS 5 will feature. Here are the tasty (albeit not totally surprising) tidbits:
Messaging: This one looks like a strike right to the heart of BBM (BlackBerry Messaging). Apple will presumaby launch its very own native MMS/SMS protocol capable of automatically identifying iOS messaging recipients. (If you're familiar with the Textie application, this should feel familiar to you, just more simplified).
Notifications: Annoying pop-up windows, your days are numbered! Word has it, notifications are indeed getting a makeover. Alerts will show up in the top banner that disappears subtly or be pulled down with a single downward swipe of the finger (sort of like the jailbroken Mobile Notifier, pictured). The notifications will stay housed in the drop-down list, plus…
Widgets/notification window: The pull-down will also hold widget-like items for weather, stocks, and more. Unfortunately, the weather widget's icon won't be live-updating, though.
Lock screen: Here's another reboot - notifications will also be housed on the lock screen. There will be a small icon, swipeable to open/launch the related app for the alert.
So how accurate is this? Only mere minutes until we find out for sure! Stay tuned to TechnoBuffalo, as we dish out all the little goodies from the keynote.
Apple's iOS 5 and the cloud
With iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple is re-orienting its mobile devices. Subtly, its shifting the locus of the "mobile experience" from the personal device by itself, or as an adjunct to a personal computer, to a networked personal device leveraging cloud-based services. In some respects, it's catching up to Palm's webOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone 7, as a range of pundits have argued. But that's not the point.
The point was made in a startling admission by Apple CEO Steve Jobs talking about his company's first iOS cloud service, MobileMe, introduced almost exactly three years ago as an Internet service for pushing email, contacts and calendars from the cloud to the family of Apple hardware products. In his introduction of the iCloud services, Jobs said told his audience that iCloud will store all their content off the device, wirelessly push it to all their devices, and be an automated service that's completely integrated with all their apps.[See "Three things you need to know about Apple iCloud"]
And then he said, "You might ask, why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought me MobileMe." At which point, according to one liveblogger, "huge cheers" broke out. "It wasn't our finest hour," he said. "But we learned a lot." And indeed they have.
There aren't many companies, let alone many CEOs who are willing to introduce a new product by acknowledging the failures of its predecessor. The reason it's important now, is that Jobs, and Apple, explicitly acknowledges that they as well as their customers are still part of the process of figuring out what the terms digital, mobile, Internet, and the cloud mean when used together.
So, the point of Apple's iOS 5 changes coupled with the new, free iCloud services is that Apple's move in this direction is erasing or at least weakening a boundary -- between personal mobile devices and the wider world -- in a way that's going to be highly intuitive and effective for millions of iOS users and thousands of iOS software developers.
The new Notification Center is a case in point: apparently Apple hasn't changed the underlying Apple Push Notification System that makes remote alerting possible. But it has dramatically changed the way iOS users receive and interact with realtime alerts. For the first time since 2009 when push notification was introduced, the iOS user experience isn't "broken" by an interruption that suspends whatever the user is doing and forces him to acknowledge the alert.
Now, alerts are brought to the user's attention in a way that lets users see what the alerts are about, and act on them based on what importance or urgency the user decides is relevant. I'm not sure of the details of all this yet, but on the surface it seems somewhat similar to what Microsoft introduced with its Live Tiles, each of which represent an application and can show on its "surface" that updates, alerts, changes are pending, without having to open the app.
The "PC Free" feature, which technically is the "PC and Mac Free" feature, now cuts iOS 5 device free from having to rely at all on a personal computer: iOS software updates can be delivered directly from the cloud to the iPhone or iPad or iPod touch, via a SSL-secured Wi-Fi connection. And, smartly, they can be delivered incrementally -- only the code or content that's changed is downloaded.
Apple is also leveraging the "network effect" of multiple types of mobile devices running the same OS, with iMessage: a messaging client extended from the iPhone to iPad and iPod touch with iOS 5, so any and all of them can share messages and content easily.
iCloud replaces MobileMe, redesigning its calendar, contacts and mail applications and adding new ones including App Store, backup and "documents in the cloud." The latter is used not only by Apple's various document-creating apps, but also by third-party apps that output documents and want to have them stored on iCloud.
Again, that's not new in and of itself. It's how Apple can leverage its device OS, and the apps that run on it, with its own cloud-based services on behalf of the enduser.
The cloud services and Notification Center and the other changes mentioned above somewhat obscure the fact that Apple apparently has made very few changes to the iOS UI, where as developer Kevin Hoffman has said, the individual, standalone app is still the "main unit of work." I think Palm's webOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 show that the app-centric UI has some inherent limitations that are going to become more apparent as the enduser's mobile digital world becomes more complex. And Apple's moves toward greater app integration and reliance on the cloud are an early attempt to deal with those limits and reshape the user experience.
5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
There are no two ways about it: E-books are here to stay. Unless something as remarkable as Japan's reversion to the sword occurs, digital books are the 21st century successor to print. And yet the e-book is fundamentally flawed. There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can't replicate (at least not easily) - yet.
Let's put this into some context first. Amazon sparked the e-reader revolution with the first Kindle a mere twothree-and-a-half years ago, and it now already sells more e-books than all print books combined. Barnes & Noble, the century-old bricks-and-mortar bookseller, is being pursued by Liberty Media not because it has stores all over the place but because its Nook e-reader is the Kindle's biggest competitor.
Reasonable arguments that the iPad would kill the e-reader seem laughable now, as both thrive and many people own one of each. One thing E-books and books are equally good at: In their own ways, they're both platform agnostic.
But for all of the benefit they clearly bring, e-books are still falling short of a promise to make us forget their paper analogs. For now, you still lose something by moving on.
It isn't always that way with tech: We rejoice at cutting the phone cord, we don't fret that texting causes lousy penmanship and we are ecstatic that our computers, tablets and phones are replacing the TV set.
I'm not resorting to variations on the ambiguous tactile argument ("The feel and smell of paper is an integral part of the reading experience….") that one hears from some late-to-never adopters. And - full disclosure - I have never owned an e-book reader, because I have an ingrained opposition to single-purpose devices. But since getting an iPad on day one, I haven't purchased a print edition of anything for myself.
I am hooked - completely one with the idea that books are legacy items that may never go away, but have been forever marginalized as a niche medium. With that in mind, however, here are five things about e-books that might give you pause about saying good riddance to the printed page.
Fix these problems, and there really will be no limits to the e-book's growth.
Continue reading …
1) An unfinished e-book isn't a constant reminder to finish reading it.
Two months into 2011, The New York Times tech reporter (and former Wired reporter Jenna Wortham) wrote excitedly that she had finally finished her first e-book - how is such technological tardiness possible for someone so plugged in? Wortham had an excellent explanation: She kept forgetting to pick up any e-book she had started reading. It took the solemn determination of a New Year's resolution to break that spell.
E-books don't exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started. They do not serve as constant, embarrassing reminders to your poor reading habits. Even 1,001 digital books are out of sight, and thus out of mind. A possible solution? Notifications that pop up to remind you that you've been on page 47 of A Shore Thing for 17 days.
2) You can't keep your books all in one place.
Books arranged on your bookshelves don't care what store they came from. But on tablets and smartphones, the shelves are divided by app - you can't see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. There is simply no app for that. (With e-readers, you are doubly punished, because you can't buy anything outside the company store anyway).
Apple doesn't allow developers to tap into root information, which would be needed to create what would amount to a single library on an iOS device. If that restriction disappeared, there would still be the matter of individual vendors agreeing to cooperate - not a given since they are competitors and that kind of leveling could easily lead to price wars, for one thing.
But the way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we've arranged and pick something out. In the digital equivalent, we would see everything we own, tap on a book and it would invoke the app it requires - Kindle, Nook, Borders, etc. With the current sequence - open up a reader app, pick a book - you can easily forget what you own. Trivial? Try to imagine Borders dictating the size and shape of your bookshelf, and enforcing a rule that it hold only books you bought from them, and see if that thought offends you even a little bit.
3) Notes in the margins help you think.
It's not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original - a separate notebook is ridiculous, even with a clever indexing system that seems inventable but is yet to be invented.
Books don't offer much white space for readers to riff in, but e-books offer none. And what about the serendipity of sharing your thoughts, and being informed by the thoughts of others, from the messages in shared books?
Replicating this experience will take a new standard, adopted universally, among competitors whose book tech, unlike paper, is proprietary. For a notion of what this might look like, check out OpenMargin.
4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren't priced that way.
This one is simple, and also easy to oversimplify since people still have to get paid. But until e-books truly add new value, the way Hollywood did with DVD extras, it's just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental. E-books cost virtually nothing to produce, and yet the baseline cover price, set by publishers, is only fractionally below the discount price for the print version of new releases.
E-books can't be shared, donated to your local library shelter, or re-sold. They don't take up space, and thus coax conflicted feelings when it is time to weed some of them out. But because they aren't social, even in the limited way that requires some degree of human contact in the physical world, they will also never be an extension of your personality. Which brings me to …
5) E-books can't be used for interior design.
Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It probably began that time you toted The Cat in the Hat, trying not to be dispatched to bed during a grown-up dinner party.
It may be all about vanity, but books - how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep - say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.
It's a truism that no new medium kills the one that it eclipses - we still have radio, which pre-dates the internet, television and movies. So it would be foolish to predict the death of books anytime soon. And we haven't seen the end of creative business models - there is no "all access pass" in book publishing, as is the trend now for magazines and the newspapers which have put up paywalls. Getting an e-book along with your print edition (or, the other way around) could be the best of both worlds, or the worst.
It would certainly solve my unexpected home decor problem.
2011年6月6日月曜日
Smokers quit after ban, but numbers ebb - study
A 2007 ban on smoking inside public places across the United Kingdom may have led to a spike in the number of smokers trying to quit, but the rise ebbed within months, a study said.
The findings, published in Addiction, suggest that while smoking bans may influence smokers to quit, they are likely to already be those who are motivated to give up tobacco and that further efforts may be needed to get more to quit.
"Other contextual factors and social norms continue to influence smoking behavior," said Lisa Szatkowski, a researcher at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study.
"Factors such as the provision of outdoor facilities for smoking, or spending time with smoking friends, may mean smoke free legislation does not act as a continuing stimulus to quit over time," she told Reuters Health by email.
The study looked at the change in numbers of prescriptions doctors wrote for medications to help smokers quit before and after the law was enacted on July 1, 2007, focusing on 350 medical practices.
The medications included nicotine replacement therapy, the antidepressant bupropion, and the newest antismoking aid varenicline, sold as Chantix in the United States, that came on the U.K. market in 2006.
In the nine months preceding the ban, prescriptions for all the medications rose by 6.4 percent, but nine months after the ban they dropped by 6.4 percent.
"It's frankly a little disappointing, but not surprising," said David Abrams, the executive director of the Steven A. Schroeder National Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at the anti-smoking organization legacy.
Abrams, who was not involved in the study, said the impending ban likely motivated people who were already poised to quit.
Once the ban is in place, "maybe you've already skimmed the cream off the top of those who were already motivated to quit," he added, noting that smoke-free legislation might lead to more quitting if there was additional encouragement from media campaigns, healthcare providers and outreach efforts.
But both he and Szatkowski said the results did not mean that smoking bans are ineffective.
"The primary aim of smoke free legislation was to reduce non-smokers' exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, and the bans in the UK have undoubtedly been successful in meeting this aim. Other research supports this," said Szatkowski.
A previous report found that in the year following the U.K. smoking ban, hospitalisations for heart attacks dropped 2.4 percent, which the researchers attributed to the legislation.
■単語
ebb
[名]((単数形))
1 下げ潮，引き潮，落潮，退潮(ebb tide)（⇔flood tide）
the ebb and flow of the sea [the tide]
海［潮］の干満
be at [on] the ebb
潮が引いている
Every tide has its ebb.
((ことわざ)) 満ちれば欠けるが世の習い.
2 衰退，衰微，衰亡；衰退［衰微］期
the ebb and flow of life
人生の盛衰
at a low ebb
低調［衰退期］で.
━━[動](自)
1 〈潮・水が〉引く（⇔flow）((away)).
2 〈気力・活力などが〉衰える，減退する，〈身代などが〉傾く，左前になる；〈光が〉薄らぐ((away))
The joy ebbed out of her heart.
喜びが彼女の心から消え去った
My youth is ebbing away.
私の青春は過ぎていく.
［古英語ebba（引き潮）］
spike
[名]
1 （太い木材を止める）大くぎ，（鉄道レール用の）犬くぎ.
2 （武器に用いる）先のとがった金属；（へいの上につける）忍び返し.
3 （靴底に打つ）スパイク；((〜s))スパイクシューズ.
4 （子ジカの）一本角；若サバ（体長約15cm）；（大砲の）火門栓；((俗))銃剣.
5 （折れ線グラフで）（上に）山形に折れた部分；急上昇，急増.
6 ((米俗))注射針［器］.
hang up one's spikes
((米俗))野球［プロスポーツ］界から引退する.
━━[動](他)
1 …を大くぎで止める；…を大くぎで［に］突き刺す.
2 〈靴に〉スパイクを打ちつける；〈へいに〉忍び返しを取りつける.
3 （スポーツで）…をスパイクシューズで傷つける，スパイクする.
4 〈口装砲の〉火門をふさぐ.
5 …を無効にする；〈発熱などを〉抑える；〈記事を〉没にする.
6 ((略式))〈飲み物に〉（アルコール・麻薬を）加える；…に（きつい香辛料を）加える((with ...)).
7 （バレーボールで）〈ボールを〉スパイクする.
8 ((俗))〈人を〉撃つ(shoot).
━━(自)大くぎのように突き出る
The pointer's tail spikeed upward.
猟犬の尾はピンと立った.
［古ノルド語. △SPIKE2, SPOKE2］
addiction
[名][U][C]（麻薬などの）常用癖，依存症，中毒；（悪癖に）おぼれること，耽溺(たんでき)；（…を）欲しくてたまらない気持ち((to ...))
addiction to alcohol
過度のアルコール依存.
Contextual
[形]文脈上の，前後関係から見た.
Provision
[名]
1 [U][C]（食糧などの）供給，（…への）支給，提供，人員配置，定員((for ...))
public provision for the poor
貧民に対する公の食糧支給.
2 [U]（予測される危険などに対する）準備，用意((for, against ...))
make provision for the future
将来に備える
He made financial provisions for his family.
彼は家族の経済的な備えをした.
3 支給量；用意［準備］された物；設備；貯蔵品，たくわえ，ストック.
4 ((〜s))食糧，糧食.
5 （法律などの）条項；（…という）規定，条款，ただし書き((that節)).
6 [U]キリスト教叙任，叙階；聖職直任.
━━[動](他)（…のために）…に食糧を供給準備する.
Legislation
[名][U]
1 立法行為，法律制定
Congress has the power of legislation.
議会が立法権をもっている.
2 ((時に集合的))（制定された）法律.
Stimulus
[名]（複 -li /-li/）
1 [C][U]刺激（するもの）；励み；激励
Reduced tariffs are a stimulus to trade.
関税引き下げは貿易を促進する.
2 刺激物，興奮剤.
Therapy
[名]（複 -pies）[U][C]
1 （病気の）治療，療法；理学療法
get into therapy
治療を受ける
in therapy
治療を受けて
be in therapy
治療を受けている.
2 治療効果.
3 ＝psychotherapy.
4 緊張をときほぐす治療.
Microsoft connects with smartphone
Microsoft is making a major push to outgun Apple and Android in the smartphone market, launching an operating system that departs from the traditional desktop screen with a slew of icons.
The Windows Phone 7 is made up of a series of "hubs," which alleviate the need for lots of different applications. Instead of clicking on an icon, users view information on the home screen, organized through a series of "live tiles" that contain up-to-date information on friends, phone calls and tasks.
For instance, instead of clicking on separate applications for Facebook and contacts, users simply locate people in a hub that contains information including friends' pictures, status updates and phone numbers all in one place.
All the major wireless carriers and dozens overseas now offer phones running the Windows Phone 7 platform, such as the HTC Trophy on Verizon, which became available in stores on Thursday. What's more, Microsoft plans to push out a major software update for phones already in use, called "Mango," that will have over 500 new features.
Though the phone itself is promising, some analysts are skeptical that Microsoft will have the marketing prowess to compete with the buzz of iPhone and Android.
"It could be the best phone in the world, but it's got to crack the code with the customer," said telecom analyst Jeff Kagan. "That means you have to get the customers to want it. You've got to build a brand. Get sizzle. And that's the hardest thing to do."
Some have also questioned the wisdom of naming the phone after an operating system that although reliable, is hardly sexy.
"Windows is one of the most recognizable brands in the world and is core to Microsoft's strategy, so it made sense to align the phone with that brand," said Microsoft spokeswoman Pamela Jonah.
Some forecasts are surprisingly optimistic for the Windows Phone 7, spurred by Nokia's recent announcement that it will to shift from its Symbian operating system to the Windows Phone.
International Data Corp.'s quarterly mobile tracker predicts 45 percent of smartphone users worldwide will have an Android model by 2015, up from 40 percent today, making it the most popular platform. Use of the Windows Phone is forecast to go from 6 to 21 percent, and projections have Apple's iPhone increasing its market share (by just 3 percent) to 19 percent of all smartphone users by 2015.
Said Kagan, "Every time we look at the company, we think it's a natural. It's a great company with a great customer base and great technology. But Microsoft hasn't been successful yet, and we have to ask why."
Invest with your head, not your heart
WEALTHY individuals who make investment decisions based on emotion rather than strategy can lose up to 20 per cent of their returns over a 10-year period, a Barclays Wealth study on Monday showed.
Following a pre-determined investment strategy can help investors avoid costly mistakes like buying high and selling low when markets are in crisis, the report said.
'We are suggesting to people not to trade so much because it is not in their interest ... You should only change strategy in periods of quite reflection. (Investment strategy) is allowed to evolve over time but you have to do it in a thoughtful way,' Mr Greg Davies, head of behavioural finance at Barclays Wealth, said.
That discipline pays dividends, Mr Davies said, pointing out that those who stuck to a structured investment strategy are on average 12 per cent richer than those who do not.
Mr Davies and his team of behavioural finance specialists track and analyse investor reaction to market dynamics and study how their emotions impact investment decisions.
Their study - Risk and Rules: The Role of Control in Financial Decision Making - has highlighted that many of the world's rich wish they had greater willpower to maintain their investment strategies.
Tokyo shares open lower
Tokyo shares opened 0.26 percent lower on Monday, tracking a fall on Wall Street last week due to a dismal US jobs report.
The benchmark Nikkei index fell 24.84 points to open at 9,467.37 with market players disheartened by the weaker-than-expected US jobs data and a subsequent rise in the yen against the dollar.
US stocks dropped Friday after the Labor Department reported that the economy added a paltry 54,000 jobs in May.
In closing trades the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 97.29 points (0.79 percent) at 12,151.26.
"Investors want to further assess whether the weak data was a result of lingering impact from disruptions to Japan's supply chain (due to the March 11 quake disaster) or a reflection of the slowdown in the overall US economy," said Yumi Nishimura, a senior market analyst at Daiwa Securities.
The dollar remained weak against the yen in early Tokyo trade, fetching 80.27 yen in line with levels in New York late Friday.
The euro bought $1.4644, slightly up from $1.4637 in New York where the European single currency soared as indebted Greece won pledges of a new bailout deal coupled with fresh funds, possibly including help from private banks.
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