This page contains all the day to day happenings,inventions,discoveries,discussions,and updates in the field of Science and Technology.
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Facebook Shuts Down Apps Without Prior Warning
Over the last few days, Facebook, the phenomenally popular social networking site, has begun to shutdown numerous applications that are available on the site without any warnings to users or the developers of the applications.The decision to remove the applications came as a part of a “new enforcement system” that Facebook recently put into place to respond to complaints made by users and to reduce spamming on the platform.
A statement made by a Facebook engineer indicated that most of the applications had been disabled because of high negative user feedback or because they had very high mark-as-spam numbers.
According to the blog All Facebook, the shutdown mostly affected smaller applications with tens of thousands of users, but the move also affected some popular blockbusters like Photo Effect, which has 7.5 million registered users, Social Interview, and Good Reads.
However, Good Reads, unlike most other applications repealed the decision and was restored a few days later.
Facebook’s ability to shutdown applications without a warning and without providing a reason to the owners serves as a warning to many developers.
According to Otis Chandler, the CEO of Good Reads, “We didn’t know the reason we were shut down, but audited our app and cleaned up a few things just to be sure, and appealed again…A great reminder of the power Facebook has over all of us developers”.
G-Wagen drives in!
And it's finally here! Mercedes-Benz has launched the G-Wagen in India. The car that makes it India is the AMG fettled G55 that comes with a 5.5-litre V8 under the hood. The car puts out a power of 507 bhp at 6100rpm. It comes with a torque figure of 71.4 kgm at 2750 rpm.
As for acceleration figures? Well the G-Wagen does weigh a whopping 2.5 tonnes, but this doesn't stop it from hitting the tonne in 5.5 seconds.
The car comes with permanent all-wheel drive, a 5-speed automatic gearbox, ESP and electronic traction control.
The Geländewagen (that's the long version of G-Wagen) costs a tidy sum indeed. If you want to drive this monster home, you need Rs 1.1 crore (ex-showroom, Mumbai). And believe it or not, 12 of these cars have already been sold!
Facebook to get New Photo Viewer.
After announcing plans to support the upload and hosting of high resolution images back in October last year, Facebook said it will release a revamped photo viewer over the next few weeks. The new photo viewer will display images as a light-box like pop-up, which is a major change over the static nature of the existing photo viewer. The new design also aims to make comment viewing and sharing simpler.With the new viewer, the UI offers keyboard shortcuts to skip and move around the gallery or do the same by the regular means of mouse based navigation with the help of thumbnails. The keyboard shortcuts include right or left arrow keys to scroll through the album and the escape key to close the viewer. The Facebook developer diary claims that the new viewer fixes all the problems plaguing the existing viewer, like the inability of images to load without a page refresh, which should certainly make life easier.
According to Facebook, the photo viewer component was "supported by some of the oldest code in the system and was in dire need of an upgrade", and it believes that the revamped photo viewer will boost photo views by 5 percent, which should translate to a difference that numbers in the billions considering the scope of the social networking platform.
Tracking Your Teen Driver
Can Electronic Surveillance Keep Teen Drivers Safer?
There are dozens of devices that can track the whereabouts of your car, and we recently spent time testing a simple and inexpensive unit called the Safe Driver from Lemur Vehicle Monitors. Safe Driver is intended as a tattletale for parents to monitor how their teens are driving. But unlike GPS-based systems that require downloading to computers, subscribing to a satellite service, or hiding somewhere on the car, the Lemur system is cheap (about $60), easy to install (a tiny box plugs into the car's OBDII port under the dash and transmits wirelessly to a key fob attached to the car's keyring), and simple.
The company makes a trio of monitors, one that allows you to set a speed limit and sound an alarm if you exceed it, one that tells you your fuel economy and cost per trip, and this one, which records the distance driven, any stop that activates the anti-lock brakes, and the maximum speed reached by the car. If the device is unplugged, it will display a "Tamper" message, so the parent will know that the teen has deactivated the unit. During a week's driving in the mountains of northern California, we found it works as promised. But using this device, or other more complex tracking systems, raises other questions -- like whether parents should be surveilling their children at all.
Anthony E. Wolf, an expert on teen behavior and author of the book "Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me And Cheryl to the Mall," says that electronic surveillance is neither good nor bad, but parents should be aware of why they want to have electronics keeping tabs on their kids. If the goal is to teach safe driving skills and to help a teen gain experience in the first year of driving, there is a benefit in using these tracking devices. However, he cautions, if the parents don't trust a teen and use the devices to circumscribe autonomy, they run the risk of creating even more emotional distance between themselves and their child.
How Using The Device Can Work -- For Both Parent And Teen
"If you use the tracking devices as a driver training tool, and you share safe driving discussions with the teen, and if the teen is actually looking at the data from the device with the parent, and if the parent says 'I want you to be a safer driver,' I think that's a good thing," says Wolf. "If the parent doesn't trust the teen, [and is] using the device just to see where the kids are going -- what is different about that than putting a chip inside the kid to monitor where the kid goes?"
Michael Thompson, co-author of "The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Find Success in School and Life," says the two biggest issues today in parent-teen relationships are the increasing autonomy teens have today, and how to deal with the increasing anxiety that parents have about their children's safety. Other experts suggest that setting boundaries such as using tracking devices on some trips but not every time the child leaves the house are a way of balancing between too much and too little control.
"Teens are absolutely going to take chances when they think that they will be okay with taking chances," Wolf says. "A better way of monitoring teens is to have as much back-and-forth communication as possible from when the child is little."
Ultimately, different parents have differing opinions about how to raise their children -- just as they always have. The kids, on the other hand, are more unified in their opposition to monitoring.
"I was once on a panel that was set up by an insurance company to ask kids what they thought of being monitored this way," says Wolf. "The kids were all smart and articulate, and they were all unwaivering in being against any monitoring device in their cars. Of course that doesn't mean they are bad devices, but that good kids, bad kids, and in-between kids universally were against the devices."
SAFE DRIVING PEOPLE!!!!!
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Kids' Bumblebee Study Creates Buzz in Science Journal
A study published in the prominent British science journal Biology Letters has discovered that bumblebees "can use a combination of color and spatial relationships in deciding which color of flower to forage from." And also, that "science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."
Those were the conclusions reached by the study's authors, who are almost all between the ages of 8 and 10. The students at the Blackawton Primary School in Britain observed local bees and found them capable of using color patterns to find the sweetest flower.
Study researchers from the U.K.'s Royal Society called their conclusion a "genuine advance" in bee science.
"This paper represents a world first in high-quality scientific publishing," Brian Charlesworth, editor of Biology Letters, told the BBC. The students worked with their teachers and a professional (i.e., adult) scientist, Beau Lotto. But Lotto said the study was "entirely conceived and written" by the students, according to the BBC.
And indeed, the study has traces of its pint-sized authors everywhere, from the colored pencil the kids used to demonstrate patterns in the bees' behavior, to peppered references to the novel nature of their work. "This experiment is important, because, as far as we know, no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before," the students wrote in the study.
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The kids even used puzzles to get to the question at the center of their study: Can bees figure out which flowers have salt water in them and which have sugar water instead? They can, the students concluded.Lotto said that while the study lacked statistical analysis, "the experimenters have asked a scientific question and answered it well," according to The Guardian. He said that while the students at Blackawton are impressive, children around the world should have the opportunity to work on such projects.
"I certainly don't think this is something that only we could have done. It's something that lots of schools could do," he told Wired.com. "It would be lovely to have this sense of community around learning all over the country and all over the world."
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