12 Promising New Web Sites and Services

-by Edward N. Albro
PC World


1. Really Simple Passwords:


Is the password for my bank Ra&18eR or rA#19eR? I can't remember and neither could most people, especially if they regularly access 20 or more online accounts. Usable aims to solve the problem by letting you use a simple word like "raider" to log in anywhere. The service (which is supposed to go live early next year) works like this: You visit your bank's Web site, but instead of encountering the usual sign-in boxes, you are greeted with an image like the one above. Usable remembers your user name, and you type in your simple password. Usable uses code on your PC and on their servers to slice and dice that simple word into a highly complex and secure password

2. Getting the Band Together:

Traditionally, bands have been some variation of four guys from Liverpool--friends who start playing music together and decide to get serious. But what if you live in Livermore instead of Liverpool and you can't find three other musicians who are interested in playing the kind of music you like? MixMatchMusic should help. Individual musicians upload their favorite bass lines or drum patterns. Then other musicians looking for good accompaniments to their new guitar lick can browse through the offerings and mix the individual components together to form a full song. If other people like the tune enough to download it, all of the artists involved get paid

3. Find Long-Lost Friends:

Whenever a company pitches a new search engine designed to find people, I test it by searching for a guy with whom I shared a cockroach-infested apartment in Boston. iSearch is the first engine to pass my test. The site conglomerates information from public records, social networks, white pages, news, and professional connections. I can't wait to reconnect with my old friend. I just hope he's forgotten about that $200 I owe him.

4. Financial Forecast:

Lots of financial services are good at telling you what you've spent in the past and how much money you have right now. But few online systems so far have attempted to tell you how much you'll have next week or next month, especially if you decide to buy a new iPod after all. Making contingent cash-flow projections is tough, but GreenSherpa's system (due to reach private beta next week) seems as though it could work. It lets you account for regular bills, but it also simplifies the task of entering one-time expenses or factoring in a bonus check.

5. Better Image Search:

Using keywords to search for documents makes sense because documents are made up of words. But using words to search for images doesn't work as well. Unless someone used the same keywords to label their image that you use to hunt for it, you have no chance of finding it. GazoPa, a not-yet-live search engine from Hitachi, aims to let people use colors or shapes as guides in searching for images. Have a canvas bag whose design you like, but you wish that it came in leather? You can use GazoPa to search for bags with similar designs from other manufacturers

6. Birds of a Feather:

You've heard of citizen journalism, in which average joes report on news that's important to them. Well, Birdpost hopes to be one of the leaders of a citizen science movement. Avid birdwatchers can join the site and post their latest sighting of a Phainopepla (aka Silky Flycatcher). Other birders or even novices can search for types of birds and in some cases can get a Google map that shows the species' range.


7. Cell Phone Thieves Beware:

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But when you want to even the score with whoever just stole your cell phone, revenge is perhaps most toothsome when served with an ear-splitting siren. Maverick Mobile's soon-to-be-released software will let you inflict that comeuppance on cell phone thieves--and retrieve your data while you're at it। If you have loaded Maverick's software on the stolen phone, you can use another phone to pull your contact data or other information off the purloined handset. You can also wreak remote havoc in such ways as hanging up on the thief's calls and setting off an alarm to alert everyone nearby that the scoundrel has taken that which belongs to another.

8.Fair and Balanced:

Think the news media is biased? Then SpinSpotter may be just what the counterspin doctor ordered. Site creators combine rules from a group of journalism advisors with a special algorithm to identify bias in news stories. Users armed with the site's browser plug-in can also edit news stories to make them more accurate; the results will be visible to other visitors to the page who use the same plug-in.

9. Wanderlust Engine:

The most fun I found on TravelMuse is with the Inspiration Finder. You plug in a few basic parameters for your trip: how far you're willing to travel, how much you can spend, and what you want to do. In response, Inspiration Finder will give you a selection of destinations that meet the criteria you specified. Once you've picked a destination, you can save the details of your vacation and share them with your fellow travelers, who can collaborate on your trip planning.

10. Carpool by iPhone:

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have an informal system called casual carpooling: People in need of a ride to San Francisco congregate in specific areas in the suburbs and drivers swing by and pick them up. Riders get a free trip to work, drivers get to speed along in the carpool lane and avoid paying a bridge toll--and fewer cars clog the road. Avego hopes to bring a similar concept to the iPhone. With the Avego app (which is due out in a few months) loaded on their phones, riders can enter their location and specify where they want to go. Drivers with the app will be alerted that a rider is in the area and can agree to pick them up. The system will then alert the rider, and it can even figure out how much the passenger should pay for the lift.

11. The Restaurant Diet:

WebDiet may help your waistline, or it may just emaciate your wallet. The system uses GPS on your phone to locate nearby restaurants; then it suggests meals at eateries that suit your needs for proper caloric intake. So if you had a double-double cheeseburger for lunch, Webdiet will try to compensate by suggesting a less indulgent evening meal--say, a vegan shake for dinner and maybe an ice cube for dessert. If you don't want or can't afford to eat all of your meals out, it's unclear how much WebDiet will help. The company's presentation at Demo didn't include information about how to enter food that you cook at home, but the site's FAQ (the service itself isn't yet live) indicates that this will be possible.

12.Web TV Guide:

The Web has many great video viewing options, but no great way to find them. Invision.tv aims to solve that problem by providing you with an electronic program guide to the Web. Videos are arranged by channels: CNN, Funny or Die, and the like. If you tell Invision what you're interested in, it will suggest good viewing options. For a different take on the same problem, check out ffwd.com.

Understanding the Universe - The Large Hadron Collider

-by Mahbub Manik
Einstein said, “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge”. Human imaginations don’t have any limits. People play with imaginations and imaginations open the horizons of limitless unknowns. Now scientists are being playing with a project that envisioning the creating of the same environment like after the creation of universe. To do that the largest underground scientific complex is made expensing more than $10 billion. The project is titles as ‘The Large Hadron Collider-LHC’. Recently the world has heard lots and there is huge enthusiasm, talk and debate on this issue. Basically it is the output of the nature and desire of human beings to know unknowns. Mystery of the universe’s creation is always a matter to research, rethink and rediscover. Physicists have been working relentlessly around the world to unearth the mystery of the universe’s creation.

What is the Large Hadron Collider-LHC?
The Large Hadron Collider- LHC is a gigantic scientific complex buried more than 300 feet underneath near Geneva, in Franco-Switz border. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe. The LHC is the largest machine in the world and the emptiest space in the Solar System.
It’s the hottest spots in the galaxy, but even colder than outer space. It is considered as the biggest and most sophisticated detectors ever built. The most powerful supercomputer system in the world is made to control, monitor and preserve the data of it.


Why the LHC?

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to resolve some key questions in particle physics. It may achieve some unexpected results that no one ever thought of it. There are some key issues in below that are the main issues of creating LHC.

Secrets of Big Bang
We all heard about the theory of ‘Big Bang’. The Big Bang model says the universe expanded from an extremely dense and hot state and continues to expand till today. But human minds have always wondered about the environment during the Big Bang and after that. What was matter like within the first second of the Universe’s life? The Collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot "soup" of tiny particles called quarks and gluons.
Gravity no gravity
There is another model called as ‘The Standard Model’ of particle physics. The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions among the elementary particles that make up all matter. But the model has not well accepted as there is no explanation of gravity and there are some missing links in the model.
There is another term ‘Higgs Boson’. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is predicted that during the Big Bang the ‘Higgs Boson’ particle existed. But no experiment could prove it.

Invisible mass
Again we may ask, what is mass? What is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weigh the amount they do? Why do some particles have no mass at all? At present, there are no established answers to these questions.
There is .an invisible problem. What is 96% of the universe made of?
Everything we see in the Universe, from an ant to a galaxy, is made up of ordinary particles. These are collectively referred to as matter, forming 4% of the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the remaining proportion, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.
Matter vs Antimatter
We may think about matter. But do we ever think on ‘antimatter’? Why is there no more antimatter? We live in a world of matter – everything in the Universe, including ourselves, is made of matter. Antimatter is like a twin version of matter, but with opposite electric charge. At the birth of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang. But when matter and antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other, transforming into energy. Somehow, a tiny fraction of matter must have survived to form the Universe we live in today, with hardly any antimatter left. Why does Nature appear to have this bias for matter over antimatter?
Extra Dimension
Do extra dimensions of space really exist? From Einstein we know about the three dimensions of space. But the String theory implies that there are additional spatial dimensions yet to be observed.
How the LHC works
The LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. It mainly consists of a 27 km ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field, achieved using superconducting electromagnets. These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to about 271°C – a temperature colder than outer space! For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.

Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets of 15 m length which are used to bend the beams, and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 m long, to focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to 'squeeze' the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing needles from two positions 10 km apart with such precision that they meet halfway!

All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams inside the LHC will be made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of the particle detectors.

The LHC experiments
There are six experiments are running at the LHC. They are (1) ATLAS - A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (2) CMS-Compact Muon Solenoid (3) ALICE -A Large Ion Collider Experiment (4) LHCb- Large Hadron Collider beauty (5) TOTEM- TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement (6) LHCf ­- Large Hadron Collider forward

The two large experiments ATLAS and CMS, are based on general-purpose detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator. They are designed to investigate the largest range of physics possible. Having two independently designed detectors is vital for cross-confirmation of any new discoveries made.

Two medium-size experiments, ALICE and LHCb, have specialised detectors for analysing the LHC collisions in relation to specific phenomena.

Two experiments, TOTEM and LHCf, are much smaller in size. They are designed to focus on ‘forward particles’ (protons or heavy ions). These are particles that just brush past each other as the beams collide, rather than meeting head-on

The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb detectors are installed in four huge underground caverns located around the ring of the LHC. The detectors used by the TOTEM experiment are positioned near the CMS detector, whereas those used by LHCf are near the ATLAS detector.


LHC Computing Grid
The Large Hadron Collider will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually – enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year! Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyse this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).

Data from the LHC experiments is distributed around the globe, with a primary backup recorded on tape at CERN. After initial processing, this data is distributed to eleven large computer centres – in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Taipei, the UK, and two sites in the USA – with sufficient storage capacity for a large fraction of the data, and with round-the-clock support for the computing grid.

These so-called “Tier-1” centres make the data available to over 120 “Tier-2” centres for specific analysis tasks. Individual scientists can then access the LHC data from their home country, using local computer clusters or even individual PCs.



9 .8 . 7 … 3. 2 . and ha ha ha … 1... start ...

The first beams were circulated through the Collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October. The experiments could generate enough data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.

The New Newage
Nothing could stop human being to think further and it’s the secret of existence of this universe. This experiment will lead further the movement of human knowledge. It will definitely open a new road of imagination. "When Columbus sails west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn't find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting," said Lykken, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of six experiments inside the collider complex. Lykken said right, some thing will come soon, just wait!

Microblogging- The New Lifestyle

Caption: Microblogging history timeline, Image Credit: Technology Review

Caption: An interesting cartoon that reveals the objective of 'Microblogging.

-by Mahbub Manik

Blog
The word ‘Blog’ is well known to the netizens. One can defines ‘Blog’ as a digital diary where one can post any thing like text, data, voice, image, video etc one after one and readers can put their comments. The people who post in blog are called Blogger. A blog can be controlled by single users or multiple users. Bloogging is a very popular activity of today. Many information, news and secrets are coming out through blogging.

Microblogging
But today we are going to talk on Microblogging. Although the concept of Microblogging is at least two years old, it is still very new to all. Microblogging turns into a very interesting matter in our life happening.

Everyday we want to know the latest condition of our family members and friends. We want to share everything from a big incident to very small happenings in our life, it may be sweet one or a bitter. It may be an experience. We may want to market an idea or want to share the link of our personal web, company web. To satisfy this thirst of human being, the concept of Microblogging came.

Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates.Usually 140 characters and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

Around 100 Microblogging services enabled sites are available in the Internet.

Common Microblogging

What's on your mind? ... the sentence that we ultimately see at first when we sign in facebook.com that provoke us to write something that is in our mind or happening around.

The users of popular social networking websites facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc update their statuses regularly. This is nothing but Microblogging. The most popular Microblogging service is Twitter.com, which was launched in July 2006 and won the Web Award in the blog category at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. The main competitor to Twitter has been Jaiku (although this has since been acquired by Google and closed public registrations).

Digg founder Kevin Rose, together with three other developers recently launched a service called Pownce, which integrates micro-blogging with file-sharing and event invitations.

Micro blogging services which seek to add to the minimalism of raw micro blogging include Spoink and Plurk. Spoink released a multimedia micro-blogging service that integrates blogging, podcasting, telephony and SMS texting and supports all major mobile audio, video and picture formats. Plurk utilizes a rich interface and horizontal time-line to add a spatial dimension to micro blogging.

Rakawa projects micro-blogging to another level, which is to document and inform about daily accomplishments of the users, based on the question "What have you achieved today?" and inspired by the work of the conceptual artist On Kawara.

Microblogging is interesting and definitely a tool to spread the status of one. Every thing is connecting with every thing and no one is left ... while microblogging happening.

4 things Mobile can do but we don't know

-from Web, forgot the source

There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies. Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival. Check out the things that you can do with it:

1. Emergency:

The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.Also in Australia , the Australian emergency number 000 can be dialled whilst your mobile phone keyboard is locked. This is another reason why 000 receives so many false emergency calls!

2. Have you locked your keys in the car?:

Does your car have remote key less entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone.Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).Editors Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!"

3. Hidden Battery Power:

Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370# Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

4. How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone:

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone!:star-hash-zero-six-hash* # 0 6 #. A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. When your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.Not only the above, but also in Australia your stolen phone is added to a "Stolen Mobile Phone" database, so if your phone is found later on it can be returned to you.

MacBook Air – the thinnest laptop ever

-by Mahbub Manik

Thinnovation plus plus !

Super Stylish Steve Jobs once again came into the center point of the world computing through releasing 'MacBook Air' – the world’s thinnest laptop ever. The MacBook Air was first introduced during Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at Macworld on January 15, 2008. The innovation of MacBook Air is coined as ‘Thinnovation’ for its super slimness. This is really a great innovation of thinness.

Features

The MacBook Air features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display that has a 1280 x 800-pixel resolution. The MacBook Air also features a built-in iSight webcam and a full sized MacBook-style black keyboard. The keyboard is backlit, similar to MacBook Pros, and has an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness. The notebook features a 1.8-inch hard disk drive with 80GB of storage capacity standard. A 64GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive is an option. The hard drive is a Parallel ATA (PATA) model that operates at 4200 RPM.
The laptop is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo chip running at 1।6GHz, with 1.8GHz available as an option.

Go Green computing …
The MacBook Air has an all-aluminum case, a mercury- and arsenic-free display, PVC-free internal cables, and circuit boards free of brominated flame retardants. In Consumer Electronics Show – CES we saw the participants presented environment friendly products. MacBook Air is also environment friendly. We should thank them for their initiative. If all industry try to develop green technology our world may long live.

And the Laptop Party in Bangladesh

Consumer Electronics Show – CES and Macworld Conference & Expo – these two mega events were the hot phenomena in world computing in whole January.The news of these events were flowed worldwide through technology websites, blogs, newspapers, TV channels, online forums and social networking sites. This time a laptop fair branded as ‘Laptop Party‘ was took place at Bangladesh China Friendship Conference Centre – BCFCC in Dhaka from January 25 through January 27 organized by ‘maker’ a marketing communication organization. But this fair could not make a place in world media for its very small size and capacity. But we should thank the organizers and the sponsors for their initiative. Surely it was a success story. Huge number of people went to the fair ignoring severe cold and untimely rain. It proved there is a big market of laptop in Bangladesh. The price of the laptop should fit the buying capacity of middle class people to click and unlock the opportunities. Our media also provide much coverage. It may pave the way to arrange large scale fair in future. We have a great scope to become capital of technology in Asia at least. We have to remake and rebrand our image in global arena. So wake up the policy builders and entrepreneurs.

-This article first published in Weekly Economic Times (www.weeklyeconomictimes.com)