Why does Facebook want its employees to dump iPhone for Android?

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Once upon a time Facebook used to give its employees iPhones. But now suddenly it wants them to switch to Android. A TechCrunch report noted that a number of ‘vaguely propagandistic’ posters had appeared around the Facebook campus, asking them to switch.

This comes in the wake of a similar report by CNet all the way back in August which said, “Facebook employees were being “nudged, cajoled, and even ordered to give up their iPhones for Android devices”.

But what’s up with that? Is the company losing money after its disastrous IPO? Is there some sort of shady deal with Google afoot?

Nothing so dramatic it seems.

The company merely wants more people using Android phones so that more employees are using, and therefore testing, the Facebook app for the OS. This is a technique known as ‘dog-fooding’ in which employees are encouraged to use their own products.

TechCrunch notes, “If the social network wants to give Android users the best experience, it needs a fair portion of the company testing its Android apps and brainstorming what could be done next with the operating system’s flexibility.”

Aakash 2 made in China?

In this i would like share about akash 2 tablet ...
Is India’s tech-showpiece Aakash 2, the world's cheapest tablet, made in China? Documents reviewed by HT show DataWind founders and NRI brothers Suneet and Raja Singh Tuli may have procured these devices off-the-shelf from manufacturers in China for $42 ( Rs. 2,263 then), exactly the price at which they sold these to the Indian government.

DataWind bought more than 10,000 or more "A 13" made-in-China tablets from at least four manufacturers in Shenzhen and Hong Kong between October 26 and November 7.

These were shipped to India duty-free as they were meant for school students under an HRD ministry programme.

Last year, Canada-based DataWind won a bid to supply 100,000 low-cost computing devices to students. Aakash 2, which is meant to be India-made, is part of that agreement.

DataWind had no role either in the design or manufacturing of Aakash 2 tablets, a source said. 

Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind however insisted that the current Aakash 2 is designed by his firm.

"For the first 10,000 units for IIT, and for expediency sake we had the motherboards manufactured in one of our Chinese subcontractor’s facilities And then the units have been ‘kitted’ in China at various manufacturers for expediency, whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in India.  We finished this batch of 10,000 units and delivered them to IIT and will be starting another batch of 20,000 units for them in two weeks," Tuli said in an e-mail response to HT.

Documents with HT show that DataWind bought the tablets from at least four manufacturers, Dasen International Electronics, Shenzhen Shitong Zhaoli Technology, Kalong Technology and Trend Grace Ltd.

DataWind's manufacturing partner in Hyderabad --- VMC Systems---had not built any device over the last couple of months, said a source. Its manufacturing partners and facilities in Delhi and Amritsar, respectively, too, had not produced even a single tablet over the last couple of months, the source said.

“Instead of manufacturing these low-cost tablets themselves… DataWind has simply purchased these 'off-the-shelf' from China and supplied it to the Indian government,” the source told HT, requesting not to be identified.

It now appears that Datawind handed over the China-made tablets to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay for testing. IIT-B's role is limited to testing and installing apps.

These, it emerges, were subsequently unveiled as Aakash 2 on November 11. IIT-B did not respond to an emailed questionnaire.read morehere

FACEBOOK ARREST....

MUMBAI: Two police officers were on Tuesday suspended for the arrest of two girls over a Facebookpost criticising the shutdown for Bal Thackeray's funeral. Also, the Bombay high court transferred judicial magistrate RG Bagade, who remanded Shaheen Dhadaand Renu Srinivasan in custody.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan has defended the suspension of two police officers over the arrest of two girls for their posts on Facebook regarding the bandh observed for Bal Thackeray's funeral.

He said Thane SP Ravindra Sengaonkar and Senior inspector Shrikant Pingle had acted against the directions given by their seniors while arresting the girls in Palghar. Maharashtra home minister RR Patil said SP Ravindra Sengaonkar and senior police inspector Shrikant Pingle have been suspended and a departmental inquiry ordered against them. He said the departmental inquiry would be completed in the shortest possible time. Patil said Additional SP Sangram Nishandar has been "warned in writing and reprimanded" for dereliction of duty.

"Wrong sections were applied against the girls. There was no need to take hasty action (against the girls)," Patil said.

Shiv Sena has called for a bandh in Palghar, in the adjoining Thane district, on Wednesday in protest against the suspension.

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SCIENTIFIC INVENTION

Waxing Innovative: Researchers Pump Up Artificial Muscles Using Paraffin

Artificial muscles have mostly been flaccid as a replacement for motors. Could carbon nanotube yarns soaked in paraffin wax change this? 

When Scientific American heard from chemist Ray Baughman a year ago, he and his international team of nanotechnologists had taken artificial-muscle technology to the next level. Their innovation relied on spinning lengths of carbon nanotubes into buff yarns whose twisting and untwisting mimicked natural muscles found in an elephant's trunk or a squid's tentacles.

Now the researchers are reporting a new artificial muscle–building technique that makes their carbon nanotube yarns several times faster and more powerful. These qualities could help deliver on the technology's promise of developing compact, lightweight actuators for robots, exoskeletons and other mechanical devices, although several challenges remain.

The latest breakthrough comes from infusing the carbon nanotube yarns with paraffin wax that expands when heated, enabling the artificial muscles to lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than mammalian skeletal muscles of comparable size, according to the researchers, whose latest work is published in the November 16 issue of Science.

The previous-generation artificial muscles were electrochemical and functioned like a supercapacitor. When a charge was injected into the carbon nanotube yarn, ions from a liquid electrolyte diffused into the yarn, causing it to expand in volume and contract in length, says Baughman, director of the University of Texas at Dallas's Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute. Unfortunately, using an electrolyte limited the temperature range in which the muscle could function. At colder temperatures the electrolyte would solidify, slowing down the muscle; if too hot, the electrolyte would degrade. It also needed a container, which added weight to the artificial-muscle system.

The wax eliminates the need for an electrolyte, making the artificial muscle lighter, stronger and more responsive. When heat or a light pulse is applied to a wax-impregnated yarn about 200 microns in diameter (roughly twice that of a human hair), the wax melts and expands. In about 25 milliseconds this expansion creates pressure causing the yarn's individual nanotube threads to twist and the yarn's length to contract. Any weightlifter will tell you that the success of any muscle—artificial or natural—depends in part on the degree of this contraction. Depending on the force exerted, the Baughman team's muscle strands could contract by up to 10 percent.

Muscles are also judged by the weight they can lift relative to their size. "Our muscles can lift about 200 times the weight of a similar-size natural muscle," Baughman says, adding that the wax-infused artificial muscles can also generate 30 times the maximum power of their electrolyte-powered predecessors.

The researchers' latest artificial muscles move the technology closer to commercialized products such as environmental sensors, aerospace materials and even textiles that take can take advantage of nanoscale actuators, University of Cincinnati mechanical engineering professor Mark Schulz, wrote in a related SciencePerspectives article. This new artificial muscle outperforms existing ones, allowing possible applications such as linear and rotary motors; it also might replace biological muscle tissue if biocompatibility can be established, he adds.

However, Schulz points out—and Baughman is quick to acknowledge—that even this new crop of artificial muscles faces many challenges before they can be a practical alternative to mini–electric motors in many of the products we buy. Despite their improvements, the latest artificial muscles are for the most part inefficient and limited in the combinations of force, motion and speed they can generate, according to Schulz.

Indeed, these new artificial muscles operate at about 1 percent efficiency, a number Baughman and his colleagues want to increase at least 10-fold. An option for improving efficiency is to use a chemical fuel rather than electricity to power the muscles. "One way to compensate for a lack of efficiency is to use fuel like methanol instead of a battery," he says. "You could store more than 20 percent more energy in a fuel like methanol than you can in a battery."

Another challenge is that the artificial muscles must be heated and cooled to contract and release, respectively. Short lengths of yarn can cool on their own in a matter of seconds, but longer pieces would need to be actively cooled using water or air, otherwise the muscle would not relax. "Or you'd need [to use a] material that doesn't require thermal actuation," Baughman says. "If you keep making the [carbon nanotube] yarn longer and longer, your cooling rate increases."

This issue of scale poses perhaps the greatest challenge. A one-millimeter length of artificial muscle can lift about 50 grams, according to Baughman. That means lifting several tons would require a greater length of carbon nanotube yarn than is practical. "We'd like our artificial muscles to be used in exoskeletons that help workers or soldiers lift objects weighing tons," he says. But the researchers are still working out ways to pack enough yarn to perform such tasks into the length of an exoskeletal limb.

Carbon nanotube artificial muscles are more likely to first appear in products requiring only short lengths. Baughman envisions artificial muscles used in a catheter for minimally invasive surgery, "where you want to have lots of functionality on the end of the catheter to do surgical manipulations." Another application with flex appeal—"smart" fabrics that can automatically react to their environments, becoming more or less porous when they detect heat or harmful chemicals in the air.

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ENGINEERS SALARY

HI friends............

    THIS IS MY FIRST BLOG....

             I've serious doubt about engineers salary nowadays...........!!!!! Because even MASON,CARPENTER getting salary 15000RS(500/day).While we engineers getting 10000RS,it doesnt give meaning to what we studied for last 16years.What will be the reason behind this????

           Its because of  the degradation of engineering we learn and because of lecturersss too...Most of the lecturers taking class for us is not willing pursued their JOB.they were forced to do it.Since they have more jobs in teaching side comparing to industry side.I'm not accusing all teaching staffs..I dono where this instable things going end..

          

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