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Thursday, May 3, 2012
Spotify for iPad: A Glimpse at the Future of Spotify [Video]
Samsung Galaxy S III focuses on photography sharing features, not cutting-edge optics
Samsung's Galaxy S III doesn't boast 41-megapixel captures or top-of-the-line optics. Instead, its camera's strengths are in its intelligent organization and social features, increasing the handset's appeal as a point-and-shoot alternative for casual photographers. Samsung's latest round of compacts and mirrorless dedicated snappers reaffirm suspicions that the company is taking a different approach to photography, focusing on connectivity and social enhancements, rather than updated sensor and low-light shooting technologies. While such decisions may prompt advanced shooters to bring their business to competitors, it highlights Samsung's strengths on a broader level, as a connectivity enabler, rather than a camera maker.
The company is clearly committed to growing its ecosystem and uniting product divisions in an effort to increase penetration throughout different categories, developing sharing tools that simplify workflows and increase appeal. Samsung's latest flagship smartphone packs standard specs, like 8-megapixel stills and 1080p video, but it offers a handful of software features that combine to make the device a compelling upgrade, especially from an imaging perspective. Join us past the break as we detail the Galaxy S III's photography enhancements, from Best Photo to Face Zoom.
Samsung Galaxy S III focuses on photography sharing features, not cutting-edge optics originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 May 2012 14:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Workers demand pay hikes in May Day marches
Protesters burn an effigy of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III during a rally near the Presidential Palace in Manila to celebrate international Labor Day known as May Day Tuesday May 1, 2012 in the Philippines. Thousands of workers marched under a brutal sun in Manila to demand a wage increase amid an onslaught of oil price increases, but the Philippine President rejected a $3 daily pay hike which the workers have been demanding since 1999 and warned may worsen inflation, spark layoffs and turn away foreign investors. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
Protesters burn an effigy of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III during a rally near the Presidential Palace in Manila to celebrate international Labor Day known as May Day Tuesday May 1, 2012 in the Philippines. Thousands of workers marched under a brutal sun in Manila to demand a wage increase amid an onslaught of oil price increases, but the Philippine President rejected a $3 daily pay hike which the workers have been demanding since 1999 and warned may worsen inflation, spark layoffs and turn away foreign investors. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
A protester shouts slogans during a brief rally at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, Philippines Monday, April 30, 2012, to protest the upcoming bilateral talks in Washington D.C. between the top foreign affairs and national defense chiefs of the Philippines and the United States. The sign at right reads "Boot Out US Troops Now!" (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
Protesters dance around the burning effigy of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III during a rally near the Presidential Palace in Manila to celebrate international Labor Day known as May Day Tuesday May 1, 2012 in the Philippines. Thousands of workers marched under a brutal sun in Manila to demand a wage increase amid an onslaught of oil price increases, but the Philippine President rejected a $3 daily pay hike which the workers have been demanding since 1999 and warned may worsen inflation, spark layoffs and turn away foreign investors. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
Workers chant slogans during a May Day rally to call for a minimum wage law in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, May 1, 2012. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)
Workers march on a street during a May Day rally to call for a minimum wage law in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, May 1, 2012. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)
MANILA, Philippines (AP) ? May Day moved beyond its roots as an international workers' holiday to a day of international protest Tuesday, with rallies throughout Asia demanding wage increases and marches planned across Europe over government-imposed austerity measures.
Thousands of workers protested in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and other Asian nations, with demands for wage hikes amid soaring oil prices a common theme. They said their take-home pay could not keep up with rising consumer prices, while also calling for lower school fees and expressing a variety of other complaints.
In debt-crippled Greece, more than 2,000 people marched through central Athens in subdued May Day protests centered on the country's harsh austerity program. Other Europeans also planned to take to the streets to protest measures to cut spending that are being blamed for a big jump in the number of unemployed, particularly in Spain, where one in four people is now out of work.
In the United States, demonstrations, strikes and acts of civil disobedience were planned, including what could be the country's most high-profile Occupy rallies since the anti-Wall Street encampments came down in the fall.
Around 100,000 people in Moscow ? including President Dmitry Medvedev and President-elect Vladimir Putin ? took part in the main May Day march through the city center.
Television images showed the two leaders happily chatting with participants on the clear-and-cool spring day.
Many banners and placards criticized the Russian opposition movement that has become more prominent in Moscow over the past half-year. One read "spring has come, the swamp has dried up," referring to Bolotnaya (Swampy) Square, the site of some of the largest opposition demonstrations in recent months.
In Asia, workers demanded wage increases in peaceful but noisy protests.
In the Philippine capital, Manila, more than 8,000 members of a huge labor alliance, many clad in red shirts and waving red streamers, marched under a brutal sun for 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to a heavily barricaded bridge near the Malacanang presidential palace, which teemed with thousands of riot police, Manila police chief Alex Gutierrez said.
Another group of left-wing workers later burned a huge effigy of President Benigno Aquino III, depicting him as a lackey of the United States and big business. A few hundred workers marched to the U.S. Embassy, but were stopped by riot police about a block away. The protesters burned a mock U.S. flag and went away.
Aquino rejected their calls for a $3 daily pay hike, which he warned could worsen inflation, spark layoffs and turn away foreign investors.
Aside from pay hikes, protest leader Josua Mata from the Alliance of Progressive Labor urged Aquino to back proposed legislation against the widespread practices by businesses of contracting out some operations to other companies to save on costs and prevent workers from organizing trade unions.
In Indonesia, thousands of protesters demanding higher wages paraded through traffic-clogged streets in the capital, Jakarta, where 16,000 police and soldiers were deployed at locations including the presidential palace and airports.
In Taiwan, several thousand anti-government protesters marched through downtown Taipei, demanding higher wages, lower school tuition and better conditions for foreign workers. Workers waving the Thai flag rallied in Bangkok for better pay.
"It is always the case that low-income groups across Asia feel a disproportionately larger impact of rising prices," said Wai Ho Leong, a Singapore-based economist with Barclays Capital. "Coupled with rising inflation expectations, the case is building to do more for lower income (workers). Minimum wages are one way."
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, some 500 people rallied, calling for a higher minimum wage than the one announced Monday by Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Najib's plan for the country's first-ever minimum wage calls for minimum monthly pay of 900 ringgit ($297) for private-sector workers in peninsular Malaysia and 800 ringgit ($264) in two poor eastern states. The move is expected to benefit 3.2 million low-income workers, who account for about a third of the country's work force.
The protesters marched from a market to the headquarters of Maybank, the nation's largest bank, calling for a minimum monthly wage of 1,500 ringgit ($496) a month.
In Hong Kong, more than 1,000 joined a protest march to demand that the city's minimum wage, which was introduced exactly a year ago, be raised to 33 Hong Kong dollars ($4.25) per hour from HK$28 ($3.60), according to local broadcaster RTHK. They also want the government of the southern Chinese financial hub to implement a 44-hour work week.
In nearby Macau, about 500 people marched for workers' rights and full democracy in the legislature, the broadcaster said.
___
Associated Press writers Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Kelvin Chan in Hong Kong, Peter Enav in Taipei, Taiwan, Jim Heintz in Moscow, Nicholas Paphitis in Athens and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.
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On anniversary of Bin Laden's death, Romney says he would have given the order
Controversy has swirled over a earlier comment by the candidate that he opposed sending troops into Pakistan.
Once a moment of national unity, the political battle over Osama bin Laden's death intensified Monday as presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sought to minimize the role President Barack Obama has carved out for himself in killing the terrorist leader.
Skip to next paragraphThe president's re-election campaign has raised questions about Romney's willingness to assassinate the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Obama authorized the U.S. military raid in Pakistan that ended with bin Laden's death after a decade in hiding one year ago this week.
Romney pushed back Monday, saying "of course" he would have made the same decision.
"Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order," Romney said, referencing the former president in his answer to a reporter's question after a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.
Romney was scheduled to appear Tuesday in New York City with firefighters and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani to help mark Wednesday's anniversary of bin Laden's death. Obama and his national security team will be featured in a NBC prime-time special Wednesday night that reconstructs the operation from inside the White House Situation Room.
Obama said Monday that the anniversary is a time for reflection, not celebration.
"I hardly think you've seen any excessive celebration taking place here," he said at a White House news conference. "I think that people, the American people, rightly remember what we as a country accomplished in bringing to justice somebody who killed over 3,000 of our citizens."
But Obama is using the successful military operation to help maximize a political narrative that portrays him as having the courage to make the tough calls his opponent might not.
Bin Laden was killed his compound in Abbottabod, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs after evading capture for nearly 10 years.
Obama sent in the U.S. forces with no assurance that bin Laden was at the site, leading to a heart-pounding scene in the Situation Room that was captured in one of the most famous photos of Obama's presidency.
But Romney and his advisers suggested Monday that the decision to order the raid was an easy one. In evoking Carter, however, Romney may have clouded his message.
Carter demonstrated how dangerous such decisions can be when he ordered an attempt to rescue American hostages held in Iran. The 1980 mission ultimately embarrassed the nation, ending with the death of eight servicemen and the loss of several American helicopters. The hostage crisis lasted more than a year and helped deny Carter a second term.
On Sunday, Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs said it was unclear whether Romney would have made the same decision as Obama.
"Look, just a few years ago, President Obama ? then a candidate ? said in a speech that if we had actionable intelligence of a high-value target in Pakistan, we'd go in and get that high value target," Gibbs said on NBC's "Meet the Press." ''Mitt Romney said that was foolish. He wouldn't do such a thing. That he wouldn't move heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden."
Obama's campaign last week released a video featuring former President Bill Clinton that seeks to reinforce Gibbs' doubts about what Romney would have done in that situation. "Which path would mitt Romney have taken?" the video asks.
Democrat Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, said the campaign ad went too far.
"I think it's one thing to celebrate the fact that they did such a great job. All that is perfectly legitimate," she said on CBS' "This Morning." ''But to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do."
Former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, a key Romney supporter who was chief of staff in the first Bush White House, said Obama is wrongly taking credit for bin Laden's killing. Sununu said the decision to strike was ultimately made by a Navy admiral.
"It's wrong in taking credit and it's wrong in implying that someone else would not have made the same decision," Sununu said before Romney addressed a crowd on Portsmouth Fish Pier. "There is no way that anyone sitting in that White House would not have at least done what he did."
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16th Annual Webby Award Winners: The Complete List
The 16th annual Webby Awards are upon us, and Mashable has an exclusive list of all the winners.
Considered by many to be the Internet's Academy Awards, the Webbys honors online media in four categories: websites; interactive advertising and media; online film and video; and mobile and apps.
Each category awards two prizes -- the Webby Award, which is chosen by the International Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Webby People's Voice Award, which is chosen by the public in an online voting system. A record 1.5 million people voted online this year.
Some of this year's notable wins include Pinterest, Spotify and Google+ -- all first-time winners -- as well as Facebook, which beat out Twitter, Kiva, YouTube and Change.org in the category of "People's Special Achievement Webby for Social Change."
This year marks the first time the award is being given to honor the Internet as a driving force in advancing and organizing societies around the world.
Another 2012 Webby highlight is Instagram, which is being honored as the "Webby Breakout of the Year" in light of its billion dollar acquisition by Facebook.
Icelandic singer-songwriter Bjork is receiving recognition for her album Biophilia, which incorporated touchscreen technology in a multi-dimensional, digital album.
Juliette Lewis and Graydon Sheppard are both receiving special "Best Actresses" awards for their wildly popular YouTube series "Sh*t Girls Say."
Mashable is humbled to receive the Webby Award in the "Best Blog - Business" category.
The 2012 Webby Award winners will be honored at a gala in New York City on May 21. You can see a full list of this year's nominees at WebbyAwards.com.
Are you pleased with this year's winners? Sound off in the comments.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Control of gene expression: Histone occupancy in your genome
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) ? When stretched out, the genome of a single human cell can reach six feet. To package it all into a tiny nucleus, the DNA strand is tightly wrapped around a core of histone proteins in repeating units -- each unit known as a nucleosome. To allow access for the gene expression machinery the nucleosomes must open up and regroup when the process is complete.
In the May 1, 2012, issue of Genes & Development, researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research demonstrate how failure to restore order has lasting consequences. During the process of gene expression, a factor known as Chd1 promotes nucleosome reassembly on the DNA strand. Without it, yeast cells are unable to attach a chemical mark called ubiquitin to one of the four types of histone proteins, which in turn hampers nucleosome re-establishment throughout the entire yeast genome. In mammalian cells, this important step could be perturbed in disease states such as cancer.
"We have used the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model system to study histone mono-ubiquitination and found that the mechanism is conserved in human cells," says Stowers Investigator Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., who led the study. Why that's important dates back to studies initiated a decade ago on a gene called MLL, which is involved in the development of an aggressive type of leukemia in infants.
Previously, when Shilatifard's group analyzed the yeast version of MLL, they found that it enzymatically modified a histone called H3 by decorating it with a biochemical flag. In this case, that flag was not an ubiquitin, but rather a methyl group. Genes occupied by nucleosomes containing methylated H3 are generally switched on. Later, the lab confirmed that the same histone methylase activity was evolutionarily conserved from yeast to human cells, setting the stage for the molecular analysis of MLL activity in yeast.
The current study is based on a concept known as "histone crosstalk." It posits that rather than acting individually, histones within a nucleosome, particularly H3 and H2B, carry on a complex biochemical conversation among themselves based on how they are chemically modified. For example, previous studies had hinted that mono-ubiquitination at one histone (H2B) precedes methylation of another (H3), suggesting that the primary role of the former was to stimulate the latter. Thus, in this paper, Shilatifard and his team asked whether the sole function of H2B mono-ubiquitination was to regulate H3 methylation.
What Jung Shin Lee, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher and the study's first author, and Alexander Garrett, a bioinformatics specialist in the Shilatifard lab and co-author, found was unexpected: although yeast carrying mutant Chd1 showed a loss of H2B ubiquitination, H3 methylation was fairly unaffected. "Surprisingly, when we looked genome-wide, we observed that methylation patterns of other histones within nucleosomal complexes were fairly normal in Chd1 mutants," says Lee. "That told us that there are other functions associated with ubiquitination of H2B besides methylation of H3."
To reveal what those functions were, the investigators applied a technique that has been mastered by Penn State biochemist Frank Pugh, Ph.D. The methodology, known as nucleosomal occupancy mapping, can nail down to a single DNA base the very spot on a DNA strand where a complex of histone proteins is sitting -- not in just one gene, but in all 5,700 or so yeast genes simultaneously.
Collaborating with Pugh's lab, Shilatifard's group used the technique to map loci where nucleosomes formed in the genome of normal versus Chd1-mutant yeast. Mutants showed decreased occupancy of nucleosomes compared to non-mutant cells, particularly in longer genes, suggesting that mutants have difficulty recreating the proper nucleosome array after gene expression.
"To synthesize RNA from DNA, the normal chromosome structure must be loosened to make way for RNA polymerases, enzymes that transcribe DNA," explains Garrett. "After that, the DNA must be re-condensed through the reassembly of nucleosomes." That, rather than H3 methylation, is the primary activity impaired when the protein Chd1 is nonfunctional. Finally, the investigators experimentally manipulated cultured human cells to eliminate expression of the human counterpart of Chd1 -- a molecular trick equivalent to analyzing Chd1-mutant yeast -- and observed impaired mono-ubiquitination of human H2B, just like in yeast.
"These experiments show that the function of Chd1 that we see in single-celled yeast is conserved in humans," says Shilatifard, praising what he calls the awesome power of yeast biochemistry and genetics. "Basically, we are able to use yeast as a test tube to discover what the function of these proteins is in you and me. Given the fact that histone mono-ubiquitination is associated with processes that can lead to the development of human cancer, the molecular information obtained in yeast are indispensable for better understanding the role these factors play during human development and disease pathogenesis," says Shilatifard.
Additional co-authors of the study from the Stowers Institute include Yoh-Hei Takahashi, Ph.D., Deqing Hu, Ph.D., and Chris Seidel, Ph.D. Also contributing were Kuangyu Yen, Ph.D. of the Pennsylvania State University, and Jessica Jackson of St. Louis University School of Medicine.
Funding for the study came from the National Institute of General Medicine, the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer, and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stowers Institute for Medical Research, via Newswise.
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