Digg Launches Newswire, a Social News Curation Tool

Digg launched a new social news discovery function called Newswire on Monday.

Newswire “gives you the tools to shape the breaking stories on Digg,” according to the social news site’s blog. Unlike other areas on Digg, the Newswire updates news in real-time — as stories are submitted, they appear in the “Recent” section within Newswire. As they are Dugg, stories move up in the “Trending” section within Newswire.

As the company notes on its blog, the key to picking the top stories on Digg is finding them. This tool was created to help alleviate the pain of sifting through a ton of subpar content to find the diamonds. Instead, users will find the most recent submissions in “Recent” and the most popular stories in “Trending.”

Popularity is calculated “by looking at how many Diggs, Likes and Tweets [a story] has, who has Dugg it, when it was submitted, the past quality of similar stories, and a handful of other signals,” according to Digg’s blog.



The Newswire feed can be customized by focusing search results with the following pieces of information:

By “Recent” or “Trending” stories
By type of media, including images, videos or text (or all stories)
By number of Diggs (“more than” or “less than” a certain number of Diggs)
By topic, such as business, entertainment, technology, etc.
To further the transparency of how news is developing, the Newswire also features an activity feed in the right column, as well as on its own page.

Digg has been facing hard times — founder Kevin Rose left the company earlier this year, the site has faced plummeting traffic, competitor site Reddit has been benefiting from Digg’s decline and the company made major staff cuts late last year.

This new feature could be a positive blip in Digg’s history, or it could just be another update gone unseen. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Source BY Mashable.com

Dream School goes to the Education Select Committee

Yesterday I went to the House of Commons to give evidence at the Education Select Committee, who had decided to discuss what came out of the Dream School experience, and what lessons miht be learnt. I had been a bit sceptical about this. I mean it was only a reality tv show and -- while it might have prompted some interesting debate about things educational -- it was not a guide to what is, or is not going on, in the nation's schools. Certainly the idea that you can get any clear idea of issues of discipline from what happens when a tv camera is pointed at 20 late teenagers and a group of (fairly media hungry) pretend "teachers" is simply bonkers.

Actually my worries were, by and large, allayed. I had never been to a Select Comittee before, though I had watched them on the television (OK, next question .. what happens to a group of media hungry politicians when you point a tv camera at them?). But I knew that many people thought that (after the House of Lords) they were the best place for finding reasoned and reasonable discussion in our parliamentary process. And so it turned out to be. The discussion took planty of time (2 hours), the MPs had a reasonable knowledge, had done their homework and listened.

So how did it go from our sides? Well first some of the kids were interviewed. They were brilliant.

If you watched all that footage of the fighting and the lippiness and the tears on the Dream School series, then try this for an antidote. (Click here to watch the Committee.) They contributed clearly, Photo-156 articulately and often movingly -- about what had gone wrong for them at school and what they were hoping to do now. (One is going round talking to primary schools and hoping to move into journalism, one is about to do a childcare/youth work qualification, one is holding three conditional offer for an IT place Photo-155 at Uni, and so on..) It looks like a total transformation, which of course it can't be. They must have been like this all along underneath. (On the right is a couple of us in the pub after, and in the House of Commons corridor on the left).

Then it was the turn of some of the teachers: the head, plus me, Alvin Hall, Robert Winston, Jazzie B and David Starkey.

Most of us were singing pretty much from the same hymn sheet, not too full of doom and gloom about the British system, a desire to free teachers up a bit, and no passion for the kind of old fashioned discipline that people our age like to imagine is just what the kids need (and will "work"... whatever that means!). Oh and plenty of praise for Latin! Not so Starkey.

He was the only one of us not to turn up to hear the kids give their evidence. OK he has obviously hurt his foot, which is some excuse. But it would in the circumstance have been wise to have taken the trouble to hear the pupils in action. For when he later opened his mouth to say what a wild undisciplined bunch they were, this was dramatically undercut by what the rest of us had just seen of them when they gave their evidence.

By and large, he came out with the old Starkey stuff, interspersed with some silly ad hominess's attacks on John D'abbro the head (who Starkey had somehow failed to see was in the same boat as the rest of us in a way, in relation to the TV).

Now Starkey is not stupid, and not everything he says would I disagree with. But his claim that schools which strictly enforce rules on uniform do not have any "discipline problems" cannot possibly be true (for a start, "discipline problems" is not a fixed and objective category . . . I shudder to think what got punished at my school).

Overall Starkey is the victim of the the kind of tunnel vision that affects many of the successful middle aged. Because he is a success, he thinks that the kind of schooling he had was the right one. So it might have been -- for him. But he has decided not to think of the "failures" next to whom he sat, still less of the 80% at the local Secondary Modern. (Grammar School, excellent as I am sure many of them were and are, always are seen from the point of view of those who got there.. not the rejects.) Not that me and my chums are immune from this kind of glowing nostalgia. When we complain that the kids dont sit down and read as much Latin and Greek during their degrees as we used to do, we tend to forget that "we" were always unusual even for Cambridge . . .of course we were, else we wouldn't now be profs there.)

And Starkey could have done his homework better. He lamented that fact that, although he had taken Danielle up to see around Cambridge, and although she was very bright, she still wanted to become a beautician. What a waste, what a lack of ambition, he lamented (and what a failure of the education system).

What he had failed to notice was that Danielle has just landed a big part in East Enders. Some ambition there, I suspect.

(Then for me it was back to Cambridge to say goodbye to the daughter, who is off to South Sudan for more or less a year. Wish her luck, folks.)

Source BY timesonline.typepad.com

Goodnight sun: Sunspots may disappear for years

SETH BORENSTEIN

AP Science Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — The sun is heading into an unusual and extended hibernation, scientists predict. Around 2020, sunspots may disappear for years, maybe decades.

But scientists say it is nothing to worry about. Solar storm activity has little to do with life-giving light and warmth from the sun. The effects from a calmer sun are mostly good. There'd be fewer disruptions of satellites and power systems. And it might mean a little less increase in global warming.

It's happened before, but not for a couple centuries.

"The solar cycle is maybe going into hiatus, sort of like a summertime TV show," said National Solar Observatory associate director Frank Hill, the lead author of a scientific presentation at a solar physics conference in New Mexico.

Scientists don't know why the sun is going quiet. But all the signs are there.

Hill and colleagues based their prediction on three changes in the sun spotted by scientific teams: Weakening sunspots, fewer streams spewing from the poles of the sun's corona and a disappearing solar jet stream.

Those three cues show, "there's a good possibility that the sun could be going into some sort of state from which it takes a long time to recover," said Richard Altrock, an astrophysicist at the Air Force Research Laboratory and study co-author.

The prediction is specifically aimed at the solar cycle starting in 2020. Experts say the sun has already been unusually quiet for about four years with few sunspots — higher magnetic areas that appear as dark spots.

The enormous magnetic field of the sun dictates the solar cycle, which includes sunspots, solar wind and ejection of fast-moving particles that sometimes hit Earth. Every 22 years, the sun's magnetic field switches north and south, creating an 11-year sunspot cycle. At peak times, like 2001, there are sunspots every day and more frequent solar flares and storms that could disrupt satellites.

Earlier this month, David Hathaway, NASA's top solar storm scientist, predicted that the current cycle, which started around 2009, will be the weakest in a century. Hathaway is not part of Tuesday's prediction.

Altrock also thinks the current cycle won't have much solar activity. He tracks streamers from the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere seen during eclipses. The streamers normally get busy around the sun's poles a few years before peak solar storm activity. That "rush to the poles" would have happened by now, but it hasn't and there's no sign of it yet. That also means the cycle after that is uncertain, he said.

Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory, another study co-author, said sunspot magnetic fields have been steadily decreasing in strength since 1998. If they continue on the current pace, their magnetic fields will be too weak to become spots as of 2022 or so, he said.

Jet streams on the sun's surface and below are also early indicators of solar storm activity, and they haven't formed yet for the 2020 cycle. That indicates that there will be little or delayed activity in that cycle, said Hill, who tracks jet streams.

"People shouldn't be scared of this," said David McComas, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who wasn't part of the team. "This is about the magnetic field and the ionized gas coming out of the sun. It's a reduction in that, not the light and the heat."

There are questions about what this means for Earth's climate. Three times in the past the regular 11-year solar cycle has gone on an extended vacation — at the same time as cool periods on Earth.

Skeptics of man-made global warming from the burning of fossil fuels have often pointed to solar radiation as a possible cause of a warming Earth, but they are in the minority among scientists. The Earth has warmed as solar activity has decreased.

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said there could be small temperature effects, but they are far weaker than the strength of man-made global warming from carbon dioxide and methane. He noted that in 2010, when solar activity was mostly absent, Earth tied for its hottest year in more than a century of record-keeping.

Hill and colleagues wouldn't discuss the effects of a quiet sun on temperature or global warming.

Source BY Guardian News - guardian.co.uk

Skywatchers enjoy lunar eclipse

Joanna Gosling and Jon Sopel describe the eclipse as it was seen in South Africa



Skywatchers in parts of Europe, Africa, Central Asia and Australia have been watching the first total lunar eclipse of 2011 and the longest in nearly 11 years.

This type of eclipse occurs when the Earth casts its shadow over the Moon.

But indirect sunlight can still illuminate the Moon turning it a dramatic shade of red.

The shadow started to fall at 1724 GMT and ended at 2300 GMT.

"Totality" - when the lunar face is completely covered - lasted from 1922 GMT until 2102 GMT.

The 100-minute period of totality was the longest since July 2000.

Observers throughout Europe missed the early stages of the eclipse because they occurred before moonrise. However, totality could be observed throughout the continent except for northern Scotland and northern Scandinavia.

In the UK, observers were able to view the eclipse from 2100 BST (2000 GMT).

In the Americas, the totality was be visible from eastern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. But none of the eclipse was visible from North America.

Eastern Asia, eastern Australia and New Zealand missed the last stages of the eclipse because they occurred after moonset.


Source BY BCC News - BBC.CO.UK

Murali magic sets India back in rain-hit Test

Galle: Retiring spin wizard Muttiah Muralitharan dismissed Sachin Tendulkar cheaply as Sri Lanka seized control of the rain-ravaged first Test against India on Tuesday.

The world's most successful bowler, who was eight short of the 800-wicket mark in his final appearance, trapped batting record holder Tendulkar leg-before for eight before stumps on the third day.

The blow left India on an uneasy 140-3 at close after a superb rearguard action by Sri Lanka's tailenders helped the hosts pile up 520-8 declared in their first innings by tea.

Virender Sehwag hit a typically robust 85 not out to keep India afloat following the cheap dismissals of opener Gautam Gambhir, Rahul Dravid and Tendulkar in the final session of play.

Sehwag hit 14 boundaries and a six before play was called off 10.2 overs early due to bad light at the Galle International Stadium. The sun broke for the first time in two days to allow play to begin after the entire second day had been washed out and 22 overs were lost on the first day due to heavy rain.

India's seamers had grabbed four important wickets, three of them to the lanky Ishant Sharma, as Sri Lanka slipped from Sunday's total of 256-2 to 344-6 before lunch. But Rangana Herath and Lasith Malinga proved unlikely saviours with career-best scores during a rousing stand of 115 for the eighth wicket.

Herath, who had put on 49 for the seventh wicket with Prasanna Jayawardene, remained unbeaten on 80 with 10 fours and a six. The left-arm spinner was confident Sri Lanka can win the match and take the lead in the three-match series.

"The wicket has started to take turn, and even if India avoid the follow-on, we have a good chance to win the game," said Herath.

Malinga smashed nine boundaries and two sixes in a breezy 64 off 75 balls before his dismissal, which signalled the entry of Muralitharan to the crease. Muralitharan, who retires after this Test, was welcomed to the crease by fireworks in the stands as the Indian fielders lined up to applaud him with a guard of honour.

The off-spinner, who led his team onto the field when India batted, came on to bowl the 17th over and removed Tendulkar with his 16th delivery as the batsman missed a sweep shot. Muralitharan now has two days to add to his record 793 Test wickets as Sri Lanka attempt to push home the advantage.

When play started an hour late on Tuesday, India's young seam attack of Sharma and debutant Abhimanyu Mithun rattled the Sri Lankans with appreciable movement both in the air and off the wicket.

Opener Tharanga Paranavitana, who hit a maiden Test century on the first day, managed to add just one run to his score of 110 when he was caught behind off Sharma in the day's second over.

Mahela Jayawardene made 48, sharing a fifth-wicket stand of 62 with Angelo Mathews. Mithun, a 20-year-old from Karnataka, finished with 4-105 in his first Test. Sharma claimed 3-145, while spin spearhead Harbhajan Singh went wicketless in 30 overs at the cost of 98 runs.

Paul the octopus has made his final selections

As the international tug-of-war between Germans wanting to eat him and Spaniards wanting to protect him to the death does something less than rage on, Paul the Oracle Octopus has continued with his charlatan ways and picked winners of both the third-place match and the World Cup final. Given Paul's perfect record in picking his food out of the box covered with the flag of the team that goes on to win the World Cup match, these choices have now reached gospel status. Television networks in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands interrupted their programming to broadcast their octopus overlord's decisions live on Friday. And then they waited, eager and nervous. For an octopus to eat a piece of food.

First up was the Uruguay vs. Germany third-place match. And according to Reuters, Paul is becoming a bit of a showman:

On Friday Paul first settled on top of the Germany container but after a few minutes shifted to the Uruguay container. Then after about 15 minutes he went back to Germany container, quickly opened the lid and ate the morsel of food inside.

Fifteen minutes to make a pick? Come on, Paul. Don't be like LeBron.

Picking Germany was probably a smart decision, though. Maybe it will quell the death threats and allow Paul to finally get back to a normal life. Yet, we do know that Paul didn't make his pick under duress because, well, he's an octopus and doesn't know what these people are doing to him.

Anyway, which box would Paul select when humbly asked to make a special non-German match second selection? Who will win it all, Paul — Spain or the Netherlands? Tell us so we can bask in your tentacled glory! Spanish television personalities awaited his decision with mild interest...




Spain! Pulpo Paul is attempting to cement his bid to become the new king of Spain — the first step in his deliberate plot to seize absolute power over the entire universe — by picking them to win their first World Cup. And so it is foretold, and so it is written.

Also featured in that Reuters video report at the top is that prognosticating parakeet threat to Paul's crown, and Paul's captor speaking casually about the octopus' rapidly impending death. Assuming, of course, that Paul is like every other mortal octopus and not, in fact, the Highlander.

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