Friday, January 25, 2008
File:Air Canada Center.jpg
The struggling Toronto Maple Leafs National Hockey League team is under new, interim management this week. Leafs General Manager John Ferguson, Jr. was replaced by Cliff Fetcher. Ferguson’s contract was due to expire at the end of June. Fletcher was the Leafs’ General Manager from 1991 to 1997.
The new management began on a positive note as the Leafs won 3-2 over the Washington Capitals on Wednesday.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Sixteen-year-old student Ang Chuang Yang of Singapore has earned a place in the record books, thanks to his fast thumbs.
Yang typed a 160-character SMS message in just 41.52 seconds, beating the previous record by seven-tenths of a second. The student was competing in a competition organized by SingTel.
The record was first set by 18-year-old Ben Cook of Utah, two years ago. He soon lost the record to a girl in Asia, then won it back last July, “significantly besting his own previous typing speed”, says the website impulse.
Each record is set by typing a standard text chosen by Guinness World Records, the organization to which the record has been submitted. The message reads: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”
He claims his secret is using a phone with a larger keypad. Speech-to-text software recently introduced by mobile company Nuance is not allowed for use under Guinness rules.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The name Robert Cailliau may not ring a bell to the general public, but his invention is the reason why you are reading this: Dr. Cailliau together with his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, making the internet accessible so it could grow from an academic tool to a mass communication medium. Last January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged.
Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.
Wikinews: At the start of this interview, we would like to offer you a fresh pint on a terrace, but since this is an e-mail interview, we will limit ourselves to a virtual beer, which you can enjoy here.
Robert Cailliau: Yes, I myself once (at the 2nd international WWW Conference, Chicago) said that there is no such thing as a virtual beer: people will still want to sit together. Anyway, here we go.
People are always looking for new jobs, but they sometimes look beyond their reach. This is one of the first aspects you will deal with when you are going to use a regular job site so you can find a position in a specific field. If you do not want to deal with bogus competition for certain jobs, you have to find sites that specialize in your field.For instance, if you are looking for medical jobs, should you turn to a regular site to find a position that will meet your demands? Should you deal with all the other people that will apply for the same job even if they do not have the skill or the training for it? If you are looking for accurate results, you have to use specialized sites for the task.A site that specializes in medical jobs from secretaries to brain surgeons will always filter through the results you will get. If you turn to a regular job site, you will get the wrong impression that there are many other people who are up for the same challenge. In reality only a very small part of the applicants will be called at an interview for the job.If you will turn to a site that specializes in ads for medical jobs will keep the bogus competition away. This is where you will only find people who have been trained for a position in a medical office or the ones that already have the experience needed for the task. This is where you will find out how many other candidates you will compete with.One of the things you have to keep in mind is that you do not have to go through med school so you can occupy medical front office jobs. You will need a little more training than just a regular secretary course, but you will need to focus on your skills before you will apply. This is going to play the most important role in the decision you make.If you know the terms you will deal with and you have excellent skills when it comes to organization, the medical front office jobs will be available on the spot. Once you find the positions that will meet your demands, you should apply and then you must wait for their call. If they like your resume they will surely organize an interview for you.Always be sure to include all the right details that will help you get the medical front office jobs. The experience you have in the field and the training you have been through so you can occupy such a position should be at the top of the list. There are several other aspects that might help you get the interview, but pointless details will not have any impact on the employers. The site of doctorcpr.com will help you connect with the offices that are hiring.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
This Monday Hewlett-Packard is to announce that it is expanding its partnership with SAP. The partnership will be working with NetWeaver around several new services. The company is also expected to mention about its new enterprise solutions that are currently in development.
Hewlett-Packard will offer its clients services for upgrading servers, storage and NetWeaver – SAP’s application builder platform meant for integrating business processes throughout different systems. Among other services that the company is going to provide comprise assessment, governance and some architecture services for R3.
The manager of Worldwide Packaged Applications for Enterprise Applications Services at HP Services Consulting & Integration, Tim Treat, stated that the company first of all looks at servers, storage and management and only afterwards it makes a proposal regarding the things that are to be updated. He mentioned that when Hewlett-Packard will work on upgrading servers and management, it will turn its attention towards Intel.
After performing all the upgrades, the company is going to offer its clientele a variety of services package options that are related to NetWeaver. The services offered by Hewlett-Packard will include: enabling the service, design and implementation, application development and management.
Tim Treat said that adaptive infrastructure is one of the company’s new things that are to come. Recently the company’s clients have put in place enough hardware capacity and infrastructure with the goal of supporting peak or quarter-end processes. However, a big amount of that capacity is unused till peak times. This is why Hewlett-Packard looks forward to bring solutions that are to allow users pay for the things they really use.
Treat also outlined the fact that, besides its new services, the company is to announce business-process consulting together with IDS Scheer – software and consulting company, which is one of the leading providers of Business Process Management and IT solutions.
Monday, August 26, 2013
German non-profit organization Definetz announced on Friday the development of the ‘Defikopter’: a medical drone, launched by smartphone app, designed to be able to fly defibrillators to heart attack victims in remote areas quicker than an ambulance.
The Defikopter is to be launched by an app that sends out the GPS coordinates of the victim. With the ability to fly at 70km per hour in all weather conditions, the eight-armed octocopter could reach any patient within a ten kilometre radius.
The invention has received cautious praise from German medical services; the drone is still in the development and testing stage. Definetz and collaborating drone builder Height Tech have not issued any information about the release of the smartphone app or about when the drone will be available for medical services to purchase.
“We’ll have to see how much these drones can help,” German emergency services union representative Marco König told The Local. German news site Mittelbayerische reports a price tag of €20,000 (US$26,000) apiece.
One major problem Definetz faces is the law that requires all unmanned flying vehicles in Germany to be supervised. Another is that only members of the public who downloaded the app ‘just in case’ of an emergency, plus emergency workers with the app, could summon a drone.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Rico Daniels is a British TV presenter living in France who is known for his two television series — The Salvager — whilst he still lived in the UK and then Le Salvager after he moved to France. Rico has been in a variety of jobs but his passion is now his profession – he turns unwanted ‘junk’ into unusual pieces of furniture. Rico’s creations and the methods used to fabricate them are the subject of the Salvager shows.
Rico spoke to Wikinews in January about his inspiration and early life, future plans, other hobbies and more. Read on for the full exclusive interview, published for the first time:
Gain Your Independence With A Home Health Care Agency
by
Allen Fitch
Perhaps it is time to seek the assistance of a home health care agency if you find that your loved one needs either medical or non medical assistance. Whilst you\’ve got intentions to be the only care provider for your loved one, this may become quite difficult, on the other hand, the very last option is placing them in a house. A company that provides home healthcare services may help with this matter and it is essential to understand that lots of people experience this same burden.
A home healthcare agency provides many helpful services to you and your family member. You will be able to gain back freedom and personal time, while encouraged in the truth that your loved one receives the very best care probable. These many services are offered right inside your home instead of having to constantly drive from one physician to another. If you are not certain that a home healthcare agency will be able to assist you as well as your loved one, here\’s a concept of the services many agencies make available. To begin, an agency will help with different types of therapies. Particularly, therapies such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and also respiratory therapy. It doesn\’t matter how old your loved one is, these therapeutic services let your loved one to enjoy life conveniently. If the sufferer is your spouse, kid, parent, sibling and more, a company that specializes in home health care can be useful to you. Second, if your family member needs assistance with things such as personal needs, you will find services that can help whether it is with eating, bathing, escaping of the home, going on meetings, and much more. In picking the best home healthcare agency, consider one which provides live-in care, respite care, as well as personal care. If you need these facilities for just a single hour each day or for every single day of the week for twenty-four hours, they can satisfy your desires. Health care professionals are there to assist with numerous tasks including things like laundry, keeping the patients room maintained, keeping an eye fixed on their diet plan, and also running errands. An agency really should be capable to provide all of these assistance. In general, no matter what needs of you or your family member, a home health agency will assist to restore quality of life, all for a practical price. Once you know what services you will need, a plan will be developed and accomplished by the experts doing work for the agency. They\’ll enable you to have freedom whether you would like to go on a trip, or just not need to worry while you are at work. The services offered by an agency won\’t just allow you more freedom, but will also provide more comfort and dignity for your family member. These provided services will help all family member, irrespective of the patients needs. Scarlet Haven Nursing Care
, which offers services in Northern Virginia, is authorized by Medicaid and is licensed by The Joint Commission
Home Health Care Agency
. Services like Physical Therapy, Skilled Nursing Care, Respite Care, Respiratory Care, Private Care, Live-In Care, Pediatric Care and Occupational Care are all provided by Scarlet Haven. Don\’t hesitate to contact us at 703.490.1197 to find out more on how we can help with your home healthcare demands.
Article Source:
ArticleRich.com
Wednesday, November 30, 2005File:Turing1.jpg
More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.
The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg
Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.
Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.
In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.
Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.
Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”
Thursday, March 9, 2006
Toronto’s public utility, Toronto Hydro Telecom, will make Canada’s largest city into a huge wireless hotspot.
“This is both an exciting and very important initiative for the city of Toronto”, said Toronto’s mayor, David Miller. “It puts us on the leading edge of the telecommunications industry nationwide and globally.”
Toronto Hydro Telecom will offer customers free access for the first six months. After that, it will begin to charge for services.
“Wi-Fi technology is the new benchmark for urban living”, stated Toronto Hydro president David Dobbin. “It’s standard equipment in many electronic devices, from laptops to portable entertainment units.”
Private telephone companies are questioning why a public utility needs to compete with the private sector.
Mike Lee of Rogers Communications Inc. questioned why the city of Toronto wanted to enter the internet access business.
“It will not be an easy business”, Lee told the National Post. “In this day and age, the focus should be on core operations more than anything. I was surprised to see they are looking to get into this business.”
Brian Sharwood, a telecom analyst in Toronto, said the municipality will likely install the wireless transmitters and receivers on its lamp posts as a way to blanket the city, a process known as “wireless mesh networking”.
