Facebook Displays Visually Its Impact and Spread..

Facebook’s intern Paul Butler made an attempt to visualize data on Facebook connectivity. In the blog he wrote ‘When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship’.

Butler took a sample size of ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, Facebook’s data warehouse and then combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities.

The outcome of this study represented relationships on a world map, that apart from being a picture that is beautiful and an image of how people of the world are interconnected, it also reaffirms the fact of how widespread an impact Facebook has in today’s internet world.

courtesy of: www.techprone.com

2010: A year in review...

Popsci's innovation of the year goes to "Waterboxx"

Deforestation and overfarming have helped decrease the productivity of about 70 percent of the world’s arid and semi-arid lands, which could force the migration of 50 million people by 2017. Our innovation of the year, the Groasis Waterboxx, an irrigation-free plant incubator, could help make these lands fertile again. And it’s nothing more than an exceptionally well-designed bucket.

Drylands actually have enough water to sustain trees for decades, but it’s several feet beneath the surface. Because rain and irrigation evaporate quickly, many young plants die before their roots can tap that reservoir. The Waterboxx, shaped more like a doughnut than a box, helps plants survive long enough to make it through that layer of dry soil. Place the tub around a freshly planted seedling, and fill the evaporation-proof basin—just once—with four gallons of water.

The Waterboxx does the rest. At night, its top cools faster than the air, collecting condensation to supplement those initial gallons. The tub drips about three tablespoons of water a day into the soil, sustaining the plant while encouraging its roots to grow deeper in search of more water. Once the plant reaches the moist soil layer, usually after a year, the farmer lifts the box off the plant and reuses it on the next sapling. Each Waterboxx is expected to last 10 years, and, for about a buck or two per tree grown, is cheap enough to use in poor nations.

In tests in the Sahara, 88 percent of Waterboxx-sheltered trees survived, versus 10 percent of trees with traditional cultivation. But the mighty tub’s inventor, Pieter Hoff, still isn’t satisfied. He’s working on a biodegradable version that decomposes to feed the plant too.

http://www.popsci.com/best-whats-new/gallery/2010-11/gallery-aquapro-holland-groasis-waterboxx

Wikileaks explained through a animated video!!! (Brilliant Idea)

Events surrounding wikileaks greatly animated video by a Taiwanese site.

More news about Chrome OS...

The newly launched Chrome OS comes with many extraordinary features. It is an attempt to bring people to experience web computing. No software installation required, no desktop environment. Everything you will do is in the cloud. There are plenty of features comes in the OS which you surely hadn’t heard about. Let’s take a look at the features.



1. Less boot time

Boot time of Chrome notebook is 10 seconds. It means when you switch on your computer, wait for just 10 seconds to login screen to be appear. After it enter your username and password or use Chrome OS guest browsing and get ready for work.

2. Instant sleep resume

With fever sleep options availability, Chrome OS developers focussed on the most basic one. There is a sleep mode in this OS to save the battery power. Close the lid to send it to sleep state or it will automatically go to sleep state after 8 minutes of inactivity. Tap any key to back to work, unlike windows computer, it won’t take time to resume.

3. Different keyboard and touchpad on Chrome OS netbooks

The keyboard used in this notebook is different from traditional one. There are special keys to perform web activities such as go to previous and next page in browser history, reload page, switch to next tab. Also there are keys to adjust screen brightness, and adjust volume.

4. Faster technology

The main aim of Google team behind introducing this OS is to improve the speed of accessing the computer. With crankshaft engine, Chrome OS gives you faster computing experience and you can access websites or web apps quickly.

5. All your data will store in cloud

If you are Dropbox user then you might know about cloud computing. In Chrome OS all the data you access, all the files you download and all your browsing session will store on cloud. It means you can access it even if you lose your computer.

6. All the data will be secure

Google assured security of your data. To access your data login is must. Also there will be less chance of malware and virus attack.

7. Access your data from any computer

Suppose you lose your computer while travelling or your laptop got stole then you don’t need to worry about data inside it because everything is stored in cloud. It means you can access your data from any other computer you want. Only thing required is your login credentials.

8. Automatic update

You turn on your notebook and it automatically upgrades itself to the latest features. No annoying update notifications will hit your notebook.

9. No software installation required

A notebook without any software. Chrome web app store will take care of all your needs. Developers made some amazing apps to fulfill all your needs. According to Google

In the near future, you’ll also be able to run traditional software remotely on our Chrome notebook. Companies like Citrix are developing solutions that will be available in the Web Store, and we are developing a free service called Chromoting that will enable Chrome notebook users to remotely access their existing PCs and Macs.

10. Chrome web app store

The coolest things for Chrome notebook users. Google revealed Chrome app store where you can find thousands of amazing web apps at single place. Apart from apps you’ll get Chrome extensions and beautiful themes to enhance your browsing experience. My two most favorites one are Tweetdeck and Snapshot.

Google OS is out!!!

One of the big announcements made yesterday by Google is that it has a Chrome OS Cr-48 netbook ready to ship out as part of a pilot program.

If you wanted one there is a sign-up page where you can fill out your details and cross your fingers. What we didn’t know at the time was just how many of these netbooks Google was planning to ship. All we knew is that they would only be sent to interested users in the U.S.

The netbook is being manufactured by Inventec, and DigiTimes has had it confirmed that the company has shipped 60,000 Cr-48 netbooks to Google. It’s therefore safe to assume the vast majority of those will be used as part of the pilot program.

While we don’t know how many people signed-up for the pilot yesterday, having 60,000 available means there’s a good chance you are going to get one if you did sign-up soon after the announcement was made.

For more >>

http://www.google.com/chromeos/index.html

Rohan Saparamadu appointed Chief Designer at Maruti-Suzuki

Rohan Saparamadu will become Chief Designer and Advisor to Styling at Maruti-Suzuki on September 7, 2009. Click for larger images

The 1996 L-Series sedan (left) and the 1997 Saturn SC coupe (right): the brand's first global market sedan and first sports coupe, respectively

Saab 9-7X design came from an early concept sketch that Saparamadu prepared for Bob Lutz in 2003

Rohan Saparamadu has been appointed Chief Designer and Advisor to Styling at Delhi, India-based Maruti-Suzuki. Saparamadu, a veteran of GM Design for the last 23 years, was offered the position after he accepted an early retirement from the automotive giant late last year.

Buick Rainier (2004)

Cadillac CTS (2007)

"The company was good and that's what kept me there all those years," Saparamadu told CDN of his career at General Motors. However, when he was given the option of an early retirement he decided to take the chance.

"For a couple of years I was thinking of making a change because I knew that I needed to do something different at a different company," Saparamadu said, adding that the position at Maruti-Suzuki had simply been "excellent timing".

In his new role, Saparamundu will be the company's styling advisor responsible for a "small and very young" group of 22 designers, clay modelers and digital designers. He starts his new role at Maruti-Suzuki, which has more than 50 percent of the market in India, on September 7th.

Born in Sri-Lanka, Saparamadu studied at CCS in Detroit and started his career at GM soon after graduation. Rising through the ranks to become Assistant Chief Designer, Saparamadu worked on the interior and exterior design for Buick and Cadillac concept vehicles as well as the first Saturn L-Series, which was created in collaboration with Opel engineering in Morfelden while he was on a two year assignment in Germany.

Saparamadu also worked on other GM concept vehicles during that time, emphasizing brand characteristics within each project, and was promoted to Lead Designer in 1994.

His appointment to Design Manager in 2002 saw him lead the teams that developed the Cadillac and Saab crossover vehicles as well as an electric vehicle for the Cadillac brand. The Saab 9-7X design came from an early concept sketch that he prepared for Bob Lutz in 2003, which had been inspired by Buick's first SUV, the 2004 Buick Rainier, also penned by Saparamadu. More recently, he led the Perceptual Quality team for the award-winning Cadillac CTS.