Apple and the iWatch conundrum

Will Apple ever make an iWatch?

(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

Ever since the sixth-generation iPod Nano, lots of people have thought that Apple making its own branded watch is not merely a smart potential move but simply a matter of time. No matter what some have recently argued, I doubt, however, that today's Apple is hungry enough to create the fabled iWatch device.

I've been covering the technology beat long enough to feel, no, smell certain shifts in the gadget market. I'm talking about those cycles when a new product category springs up from nowhere and first seems like a completely goofy notion. Soon after, the segment really heats up with scores of companies jumping into the fray to make a quick buck.

Traditionally, if Apple senses a legitimate opportunity it steps in at the right moment after figuring out the secret to success and sucks the air right out of the market.
Tablets and MP3 players existed well before Apple launched the
iPod and iPad, but their arrival completely transformed the playing field. Remember music players from Creative Labs, Rio, or even Microsoft's clunky Windows Tablet PCs?

I'm getting the same tingling sensation right now from smartwatches. At
CES in January the sleeper hit of the show was wearable tech, essentially devices you could strap or clip to yourself as you would an accessory or article of clothing. A lot of smartwatches, fitness bands, or some hybrid of the two, were talked up at the conference.

These included everything from the long-awaited and crowd-funded Pebble and the Dick Tracy/007-inspired Martian Passport Watch to the Fitbit Flex fitness tracker and the Basis Band. When you factor in the success of the Nike FuelBand, Nike being a company Apple has partnered with in the past to create fitness products, I'd say the time is ripe for Apple to swoop in for the kill.

Chat through the Martian Passport like a speakerphone.

(Credit:
Brian Bennett/CNET)

This is a move the Cupertino company used to accomplish without breaking a sweat. Apple has the knack of catching the competition completely flat-footed, surprising since many already had a big head start. The iPhone is a perfect example. Smartphones had existed for years but the iPhone sounded the death knell for Microsoft's struggling Windows Mobile products -- trust me, I was saddled with a T-Mobile Wing at the time. The Sidekick and a legion of keyboarded feature phones suffered the same fate.

I'm afraid Apple hasn't demonstrated its signature ferocity in recent years. We haven't seen a truly disruptive product from the company since the first iPad. Every noteworthy hardware release since then has been evolutionary and incremental, not transformative. The iPad Mini is simply a smaller iPad, while the iPhone 5 essentially increased the screen from 3.7 to 4 inches. Its A6 processor is also dual-core where many Android CPUs have gone to full quad-core and it received 4G LTE well after its rivals.

What Apple needs here is true out-of-the-box action to quell the doubters at large and on Wall Street. A serious example of nonlinear thinking that matches the creation of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Something that would merge multiple gadgets and applications into something entirely new or perhaps clean up the confused mess other manufacturers tout as useful gadgets. Something like a fabulous, shiny Apple iWatch.

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

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  Solar Dragon

  Image courtesy SDO/NASA

  Resembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

  Most of the electrically charged gas, imaged in extreme ultraviolet light, was unsuccessful in its escape attempt and fell back into the sun.

  Filaments form when magnetic field lines push out of the sun in loops, holding dense gas above the surface of the sun. (Read about a huge solar filament that erupted in August 2012.)

  —Jane J. Lee and Christine Dell'Amore

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Aurora On The Road

  Photograph by Marcel Mivelaz, My Shot

  Northern lights writhe behind a thin cloud layer above a road on Ringvassoya Island, Norway, in this picture submitted to National Geographic's My Shot photography community on January 31.

  Born of violent eruptions of plasma from the sun's surface, auroras occur when the ejected gas slams into the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field. (Watch a video about the birth of auroras.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Celestial Seagull

  Image courtesy ESO

  Like a parrot perched on a pirate's arm, the Seagull Nebula resides in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

  This new image, released by the European Southern Observatory on February 6, shows a closeup of one of the "wings" of the Seagull Nebula. Red clouds of hydrogen gas glow from the intense ultraviolet radiation given off with the birth of stars.

  The entire nebula is actually comprised of three large gas clouds arranged in the shape of a bird. (See pictures of other nebulae.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Saturn's North Pole

  Image courtesy Caltech/SSI/NASA

  Saturn's hexagon-shaped north pole is lit by the sun now that spring has come to the planet's northern hemisphere, as seen in a NASA picture released this week.

  The 15,000-mile-wide (25,000-kilometer-wide) cloud formation, captured by the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera in November, was initially spied during the Voyager missions in the 1980s. (See another Cassini picture of the hexagon.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Martian Avalanches

  Image courtesy U. Arizona/NASA

  A 2011 frost avalanche kicks up dust on Mars in a picture released this week by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera team.

  Frost avalanches usually occur at the onset of the Martian spring, when layers of carbon dioxide frost warm, causing ice and dust to cascade off of cliffs.

  "While HiRISE has captured other frost avalanches before, they never cease to amaze, since it demonstrates that there are indeed active processes on the red planet," according to the HiRISE website. (Related: "First Mars Avalanches Seen In Action.")

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Luminous London

  Photograph courtesy NASA

  London gleams in a nighttime picture taken from the International Space Station on February 2.

  Expedition 34 Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield captured the English city while flying about 240 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











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  Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  

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Great Energy Challenge Blog

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Riot police fire water cannon at India rape protestors

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India: Riot police fired water cannon on Friday at hundreds of protestors in the Indian state of Kerala demanding the resignation of a lawmaker over allegations he raped a schoolgirl 17 years ago.

P.J Kurien, 72, the deputy speaker of the state's upper house, was acquitted of rape in a trial in 2005 but he has come under new pressure after his accuser demanded a fresh probe in the wake of the storm over a deadly gangrape in Delhi in December.

The resurrection of the allegations have embarrassed the ruling Congress party, which promised to get tough on sex attackers in the wake of the Delhi gangrape.

Demonstrators have been camped outside the state assembly for the last five days to demand Kurien's resignation, and managed to stall proceedings by preventing local lawmakers from entering the building.

"It's a disgrace for India and the women of this country that Kurien can chair a debate on laws to protect women," VS Achuthanandan, Kerala's veteran Communist party leader, told AFP.

The alleged victim's mother has written to Congress leader Sonia Gandhi to urge her to sack Kurien, who has been a lawmaker in Kerala for the last 19 years.

Kurien says the accusations are part of a politically-driven media smear campaign.

"I've been exonerated by the Supreme Court and acquitted after three police investigations," Kurien said.

Meanwhile in the capital New Delhi, a judge on Friday summoned a federal lawmaker over allegations that he ordered the abduction of a minor who was later raped.

Mahabal Mishra, who is a Congress representative, has ignored a previous summons. His office said that Mishra was in Allahabad where the Maha Kumbh Mela -- a massive religious festival on the banks of the Ganges -- is taking place.

- AFP/al

Read More..

Crave giveaway: Nuance Dragon Dictate for Mac 3

Congrats to Craig L. of East Wenatchee, Wash., for winning a $200 gift certificate to geek shop KlearGear.com in last week's giveaway, and to Chuck V. of Eden Prairie, Minn., for a scoring a bag of CES swag the week before that. Now, on to this week's business...

Are you a fan of speech recognition software? Put your hands up in the air. We're giving away a copy of the latest version of Nuance's Dragon Dictate for
Mac.

Dragon Dictate for Mac 3 promises 15 percent better out-of-the box accuracy than its predecessor, as well as faster mistake correction, among other improvements. Also, if you like to capture your spontaneous fits of genius using a digital voice recorder or iPhone,
iPad, or
iPod Touch, the software will transcribe the recorded audio files when you connect to your Mac.

Normally, Dragon Dictate for Mac 3 would cost you $199.99, but you have the chance to get it for zero, nada, bupkis. How do you go about doing that? There are a few rules from our department of people who make rules, so please read carefully.

• Register as a CNET user. Go to the top of this page and hit the Join CNET link to start the registration process. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again.


• Leave a comment below. You can leave whatever comment you want. If it's funny or insightful, it won't help you win, but we're trying to have fun here, so anything entertaining is appreciated.


• Leave only one comment. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than one comment, you will be automatically disqualified.
  


• The winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) copy of Nuance Dragon Dictate for Mac 3, with a retail value of $199.99.


• If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.


• Entries can be submitted until Monday, February 11, at 12 p.m. ET.

And here's the disclaimer that our legal department said we had to include (sorry for the caps, but rules are rules):

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR D.C., 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes ends at 12 p.m. ET on Monday, February 11, 2013. See official rules for details.

Good luck.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Door-to-Door Search for Suspected Cop Killer

More than 100 police officers were going door-to-door and searching for new tracks in the snow in the hopes of catching suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner overnight in Big Bear Lake, Calif., before he strikes again as laid out in his chilling online manifesto.

Police held a news conference late Thursday, alerting the residents near Big Bear Lake that Dorner was still on the loose after finding his truck burning around 12:45 p.m. local time.

San Bernardino County Sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said the authorities can't say for certain he's not in the area. More than half of the 400 homes in the area have been searched by police, who are traveling in two-man teams. Bachman urged people in the area to not answer the door, unless you know the person or law enforcement in uniform.

After discovering Dorner's burning truck near a Bear Mountain ski resort, police discovered tracks in the snow leading away from the vehicle. The truck has been taken to the San Bernardino County Sheriffs' crime lab.

Read More About Chris Dorner's Allegations Against the LAPD

Bachman would not comment on Dorner's motive for leaving the car or its contents, citing the ongoing investigation. Police are no aware of Dorner having any ties to others in the area.

Former LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner Sought: 'Armed and Dangerous' Watch Video

Christopher Dorner: Ex-Cop Wanted in Killing Spree Watch Video

Engaged California Couple Found Dead in Car Watch Video

She added that the search in the area would continue as long as the weather cooperates. However, a snowstorm was forecast for the area. About three choppers were being used overnight, but weather conditions were deteriorating, according to Bachman.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is suspected of killing one police officer and injured two others Thursday morning in Riverside, Calif. He was also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday. And he allegedly released an angry "manifesto" airing grievances against police and warning of coming violence toward cops.

In the manifesto Dorner published online, he threatened at least 12 people by name, along with their families.
"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner wrote in his manifesto.

One passage from the manifesto read, "I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty."

"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," it read. "I'm terminating yours."

Hours after the extensive manhunt dragged police to Big Bear Lake, CNN's Anderson Cooper said Dorner had sent him a package at his New York office that arrived on Feb. 1, though Cooper said he never knew about the package until Thursday. It contained a DVD of court testimony, with a Post-It note signed by Dorner claiming, "I never lied! Here is my vindication."

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

It also contained a keepsake coin bearing the name of former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton that came wrapped in duct tape, Cooper said. The duct tape bore the note, "Thanks, but no thanks Will Bratton."

Bratton told Cooper on his program, "Anderson Cooper 360," that he believed he gave Dorner the coin as he was headed overseas for the Navy, Bratton's practice when officers got deployed abroad. Though a picture has surfaced of Bratton, in uniform, and Dorner, in fatigues, shaking hands, Bratton told Cooper he didn't recall Dorner or the meeting.

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review

A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the data

Universal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis

A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic resistance

Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?

Genes mix across borders more easily than folk tales

Analysing variations in folk tales using genetic techniques shows that people swap genes more readily than stories, giving clues to how cultures evolve

Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

Wouldn't it be wonderful to pack a good night's sleep into fewer hours? Technology has the answer - and it could treat depression and even extend our lives too

Closest Earth-like planet may be 13 light years away

A habitable exoplanet should be near enough for future telescopes to probe its atmosphere for signs of life

Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

How can lifelogging - wearing a camera round your neck to record your every move - reveal what's healthy and unhealthy in the way we live?

Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform

Magnitude 8 earthquake strikes Solomon Islands

A major earthquake has caused a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least five people

Nuclear knock-backs on UK's new reactors and old waste

Plans to build new reactors in the UK are stalling as yet another company pulls out, and there is still nowhere to store nuclear waste permanently

Amateur astronomer helps Hubble snap galactic monster

An amateur astronomer combined his pictures with images from the Hubble archive to reveal the true nature of galactic oddball M106

Nightmare images show how lack of sleep kills

Fatigue has been blamed for some of worst human-made disasters of recent decades. Find out more in our image gallery

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Japan's Suzuki sees April-December net profit rise 19%

TOKYO: Japan's Suzuki Motor said Thursday its net profit in the nine months to December jumped 19.2 per cent to US$517.8 million, thanks to strong Asian and domestic sales that offset a slump in Europe.

The small-car maker earned 48.42 billion yen (US$517.8 million), while operating profit rose 5.9 per cent to 92.87 billion yen on sales of 1.82 trillion yen, up 1.4 per cent from a year earlier.

The firm also said it expected to earn a net profit of 70 billion yen in the year to March on estimated revenue of 2.6 trillion yen.

On Wednesday, Suzuki said it will resume production at its small unit in Myanmar, the latest in a push by Japanese firms to tap the once-isolated state as it embarks on a programme of social and economic reforms.

The firm withdrew from its money-losing US business late last year and has said it plans to renew its focus on fast-growing markets in Asia, including India, where it has seen huge success with its Maruti Suzuki unit.

Japan's automakers have been posting strong results in the latest earnings season, underscoring a recovery from the quake-tsunami disaster in 2011 and the surging value of the yen, which has sharply declined recent months.

- AFP/jc

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Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen stepping down

Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen.

(Credit:
Alcatel-Lucent)

Alcatel-Lucent announced today that Ben Verwaayen is resigning after serving four years as the Franco-American network equipment maker.

The imminent resignation of Verwaayen, who will stay on while the company's board searches for a replacement, was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.

"Alcatel-Lucent has been an enormous part of my life," Verwaayen said in a company statement. "It was therefore a difficult decision to not seek a further term, but it was clear to me that now is an appropriate moment for the Board to seek fresh leadership to take the company forward."

Verwaayen, the former head of BT Group PLC, was tapped in September 2008 to be chief executive in a bid to turn around the fortunes of the company, which had lost more than half its value since the former rivals started operating as a single entity in December 2006.

The Paris-based telecommunications equipment maker soon embarked on a significant restructuring as it tried to position itself to dominate telecom infrastructure in a post-recession world. But the past six years have been tough on the networking-equipment sector, particularly for the combined company, which has struggled to compete with the likes of Sweden's Ericsson and Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei.

When the company reveals its 2012 financial results later today, analysts expect a decline in quarterly operating income of more than $1 billion -- its seventh consecutive year of negative cash flow, according to the Journal.

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Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

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