[CORRECTION: In 7th to last graph “glass wool” dropped, as IARC reclassifed from “possibly carcinogenic” to “not classifiable”]Mobile phone users may be at increased risk from brain cancer and should use texting and hands-free devices to reduce exposure, the World Health Organisation‘s cancer experts said.
Experts “reached this classification based on review of the human evidence coming from epidemiological studies” pointing to an increased incidence of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, said Jonathan Samet, president of the work group.
Two studies in particular, the largest conducted over the past decade, showed a higher risk “in those that had the most intensive use of such phones,” he said in a telephone news conference….
Industry groups however played down the findings.
Global industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association said the UN agency “conducts numerous reviews and in the past has given the same score to, for example, pickled vegetables and coffee”.
It said that “limited evidence from statistical studies can be found even though bias and other data flaws may be the basis for the results.”
The French Federation of Telecoms said the health ministry there already took a precautionary approach, but no danger had been conclusively established and more research was needed.
“As of today, no one can say the risk does not exist, and now everyone – politicians, telecoms, employers, consumers and parents – have to take this into account,” said Janine Le Calvez, head of PRIARTEM, a consumer advocacy group concerned with cell phone safety.
Google vice president of payments Osama Bedier demonstrates how Google Wallet will work. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Google’s first payments from its new “electronic wallet” system may be to the online transaction company PayPal, which claims that the company and two of its executives stole trade secrets for the project.
Unveiled on Thursday, the Google Wallet project uses a technology called Near Field Communications (NFC) to allow contactless transactions between consumers’ phones and merchants’ terminals.
But PayPal has filed suit in California following the launch in New York, alleging that Google lured away PayPal executive Osama Bedier earlier this year to obtain trade secrets that are now being used in Google’s service. The suit also names Stephanie Tilenius.
I’m not sure if this is stupidity, laziness, or a mix of both, but check this out.
Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized version and began to market it to our existing IE users. The “splash page” looked like this:…
Today it seems that Google has similar intentions. So similar, that they decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. If you look, the design, layout, and most of the text are the same!
First, it was with their sidebar on the left. Next, it was having a wallpaper on your home page. Then, it was testing full-screen results. After that, it was showing results that included social data in an incredibly similar way to Bing (in relation to the recent announcement of Bing and Facebook being in cahoots but not to be confused with Google Social Search). Now, Google appears to be rolling out visual previews (called “instant previews”) of sites such that users can see them prior to clicking through to them. Personally, I think Google’s rendition of the feature is quite nice but it lets me know that we shouldn’t be so quick to count out Bing.
Big changes could be afoot in the way Americans pay for stuff. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are introducing a new service that will let customers easily transfer money from their checking account to someone else’s, the Wall Street Journal reports. The banks are hoping the service competes with eBay’s popular PayPal service, which now handles a lot of the transactions people used to use checks for. The payments could even be made on the go from a smart phone.
Google seems to be innovating constantly and many of its applications are relevant and not frills.
The current feature is a very valuable addition.
The Google New mobile app received an update today, that was announced at the Google I/O Conference. If you are a news hound then Google News is probably something you visit frequently. And now, it just got better on your phone or tablet. According to Google:
“Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”
If your phone tracks your location, and most do, then you can easily build a local new feed on your phone. To get started you will have to visit Google News from your Android or iOS device. A pop-up will ask you to share your location. Just say “yes” and the local news will auto-populate. You will then receive a “news near you” link at the bottom of you home page. You can turn off the feature at any time hiding the section in your personalization settings or by adjusting your mobile browser settings.
This update adds a nifty “local” aspect to Google News that has been lacking since launch. It’s a great way to keep up-to-date with what is going on around you. Google News has continued to improve since launch, despite threats from high-powered news orginaztions such as Ruppert Murdoch’s empire. Now they are muscling in on the territory of local papers and networks to go one step beyond.
Related:
20$ A Month laptop by Google?
News leaking out of Google’s big technology conference says the search-engine giant will announce a plan as soon as today to sell laptops bundled with its Chrome browser and operating system for as little as $20 a month — a price plan much like the way mobile-phone carriers subsidize phones to get you to sign up for a two-year service plan.
The goal would be to get people to use Google Apps like word processing and spreadsheets, and to move from an initial base in the price-sensitive education market toward corporate computing.
On its face, this is a pretty logical move. With Dell selling Inspiron Minis for as little as $279.99 at retail, it’s not hard to see how the economics could work. Even if Google paid retail for all the laptops, the deal pays out in 14 months even before Google sells an ad.
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