13 Best Android Apps 2013

1.Pocket(free)

                       Let’s say you find a long article on the web — something you need at least 10 minutes to read — but you’re at work or otherwise too busy to read it all right away. Just install the Pocket extension or bookmarklet in your browser, and you can save the story for your lunch break. Pocket’s Android app formats web pages in a clean, booklike view, and it stores content off-line so you can still catch up on reading in a dead zone

2.Flipboard(free)

                               Flipboard is like a personalized miniature magazine for Internet content. It takes stories from around the web and reformats them into little pages of text and images, so you can flip through by swiping up and down. You can also plug in your Twitter or Facebook profiles, and Flipboard will pull the links that people share into the mix — along with the occasional tweet or timeline post.

3.Mighty text(free)

                                 Want to make iPhone owners jealous? Tell them about how you can send and receive all your text messages right from your laptop or desktop web browser. To make it happen, install the MightyText app on your phone, thenset up the web app on your computer.

4.Pulse news(free)

                                           Pulse News is a great way to scan through the headlines and find the stories you want to read. Just pick the news sources you want — or use the built-in suggestions — and you’ll get a scrolling view of thumbnail images and story snippets. The app also has a widget, so you can glance at your favorite news sources from your phone’s home screen.

5.Stitcher radio(free)

                                      Why settle for one talk-radio source when you can choose from thousands? Stitcher brings together live stations, recorded talk-radio shows and podcasts from around the web into a single app and lets you create custom stations based on your favorites. Plus, it doesn’t get all weird around power lines the way AM radio does.

6.Fandango movies(free)

                                                         Fandango is one of a few apps for movie listings, trailers and ticket purchases, but its simple interface and clean design leave it a cut above the rest

7.Songkick concert(free)

                                                  Songkick helps you find concerts with minimal effort. The first time you open the app, it scans your music library, Google Play Music account and Last.fm account (if you have one), and then lists nearby shows for the bands in your catalog. You can also get alerts for new concerts and add a widget to the home screen to keep an eye on upcoming shows. It’s perfect for people who aspire to see more music but always forget to look things up.

Songkick Concerts (Free)

8.Convertpad(free)

                                               ConvertPad isn’t the prettiest unit-conversion app around, but it’s free, and it’s loaded with pretty much everything, from weight and distance to energy flux and radiation absorbed dose. It does currency conversions as well and keeps itself up to date on exchange rates. You can also customize which categories you want to see, just in case viscosity and capacitance aren’t things you’ll be converting anytime soon.

9.Triply(free)

                                      With a little extra effort up front, TripIt spares you from digging for your travel details later. Just forward your flight, hotel, car rental and restaurant reservations to plans@tripit.com, and the app pulls them into separate itineraries. And if you use Gmail, Tripit gathers those details automatically.

10.Onavo extend(free) 

                         If you regularly run into overages or speed limits with your monthly data use, Onavo Extend can help out. The free app reroutes your mobile Internet traffic through its servers and compresses data when possible so you don’t use as much of it. (Here’s a tip, though: if you don’t want the app to pester you when it’s turned off, go into its settings and turn “Savings Alert” off.)

11.Shazam(free)

                                   You hear a song you like. You don’t know who plays it. You open Shazam and press the big button, and a few seconds later, the app tells you the title, the artist, the album and even the lyrics. It’s basically the embodiment of what mobile apps are all about.

12.GOOGLE KEEP(free)

                                                  Keep is a relatively new addition to Google’s stable of homemade apps, and it’s definitely worth checking out if you need a quick way to get your thoughts down. You can create notes with text, by voice (with automatic transcription), with photos or as a list, and they’ll show up in chronological order. Notes are automatically saved online, so you can access them on your computer’s web browser at drive.google.com/keep.

13.TeamViewer(free)

                                             TeamViewer is a free app for remotely accessing your PC over the Internet. The app can transfer files between devices and provide direct access to your desktop from anywhere, as long as you’ve installed the desktop software on the PC you’re trying to access. Keep it handy in case you forget a file or need to provide some remote tech support for a loved one.

Altitude Sickness: Genetics May Explain Why Only Some Fall Ill

  Genetic changes, described today (Aug. 15) in the American Journal of Human Genetics, allow people to take in enough oxygen from the thin mountain air without developing the heart attacks and strokes of chronic mountain sickness.

"We have ascertained there is a major genetic component that allows populations at high altitude to live better," said study co-author Dr. Gabriel Haddad, a pediatric pulmonologist at the University of California at San Diego.

Mountain sickness

When people who live at low-altitude lowlands go to the highlands, the short-term lack of oxygen can cause acute mountain sickness, which brings headaches, nausea and brain swelling.

Some people, however, live all their lives at higher altitudes, yet still face chronic mountain sickness. To adapt to the lower oxygen content of the air, their bodies have increased the fraction of red blood cells, making their blood more viscous, which in turn makes it more likely that the cells will block blood vessels.

As a result, these people are more prone to heart attacks and strokes, Haddad said. They also suffer from fatigue, depression and headaches.

However, in populations where people's ancestors have lived for thousands of years at altitude, some people are able to get enough oxygen from the air without developing the increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Genetic adaptation

Haddad and his colleagues analyzed the genes of 20 people who lived at least 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) above sea level in the Andes Mountains, and whose ancestors had done so for generations. Half the people had signs of chronic mountain sickness

Those people who had chronic problems tended to have differences in 11 gene regions, compared with those who did not have health problems.

The researchers inserted the genes from the well-adapted people into fruit flies, and placed the flies in low-oxygen chambers.

Fruit flies that had two of these mutations survived longer in the low-oxygen condition, suggesting those genes were responsible for the human adaptation to altitude. Still, the researchers said it remains unclear exactly how those genes work.

And while these two genes may have evolved to help people live at altitude, there are probably other mutations that also help them, and different populations around the world — for example people in the highlands of Ethiopia, or in the Himalayas — may have different mutations still,

HEC announces ranking of universities 2013

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Friday announced ranking of public sector universities in the country.

According to the ranking based on the 2011-12 data provided by the institutions, the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Science, Islamabad, Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), the Aga Khan University (AKU), Karachi, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad and the University of Faisalabad were placed on the top of the national list.

For the first time, some universities from the remote areas also managed to get into the top five positions in different categories. These are: Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam, the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Sukkur, the Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, Gomal University D.I. Khan, University of Science and Technology, Bannu, and Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Jamshoro.

In the agriculture/veterinary category, the top five universities are: University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi, University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore, the University of Agriculture Peshawar and Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam.

In the engineering and technology category, the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Science, Islamabad, University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering and Technology, Swabi, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, and Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad, were on top of the list.

In the business education, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, the Institute of Business Administration, Sukkur, and Shaheed Zulifikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, Karachi, were on the top.

In the medical category, the Aga Khan University (AKU), was ranked at the top followed by the University of Health Sciences, Lahore, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Jamshoro, Khyber Medical University, Peshawar, and King Edward Medical University, Lahore.

The general category has been divided into three sub-categories - large, medium and small. In the general universities (large), the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, University of the Punjab, Lahore, University of Karachi, the Comsats Institute of Information Technology Islamabad and Government College University Faisalabad were placed on the top.

The top general universities (medium) included Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Government College University, Lahore, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad, Fatima Jinnah Women University Rawalpindi and Gomal University, D.I Khan.

General universities (small): The top institutions are: University of Faisalabad, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad, University of Science and Technology, Bannu, Isra University, Hyderabad, and Foundation University, Islamabad.

Speaking to a press conference, HEC Chairperson Dr Javaid R. Laghari said the primary purpose of the ranking exercise was to drive the higher education institutions (HEIs) towards improved quality.

The ranking criteria for the universities revolve around three main parameters: implementation status of quality assurance criteria, teaching quality and research. The HEIs established after December 2008 and the distance education institutions like AIOU and Virtual University were excluded from the ranking list.

In reply to questions of the mediapersons, Mr Laghari said in general category universities having over 7,000 students were considered large, less than 7,000 students medium and universities having less that 3,000 students small.

He said there were different divisions of the HEC that verified the universities and awarded them marks for having facilities, PhD faculty members and research work. He said from the next year OIC will also adopt the criteria of HEC for ranking the universities of its member countries.

Industrial Infrastructure Security Flaws Pile Up

Three presentations scheduled to take place at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas today will reveal vulnerabilities in control systems used to manage energy infrastructure such as gas pipelines. These are just the latest sign that such systems remain dangerously susceptible to computer attacks that could have devastating consequences; and although the researchers proposed fixes for each flaw they’ve identified, they caution that, on the whole, industrial infrastructure remains woefully vulnerable.

The vulnerabilities add to a growing list of problems identified due to a recent surge in research into the security of industrial systems. Progress to fix such security issues has been slow going, due partly to the poor design of existing systems, and partly to a lack of strong incentives to fix the flaws quickly.

One demonstration today will spray the audience with water from a replica water plant component forced to overpressurize. Another will show how wireless sensors commonly used to monitor temperatures and pressures of oil pipelines and other industrial equipment could be made to give false readings that trick automatic controllers or human operators into taking damaging action. A third talk will detail flaws in wireless technology used in 50 million energy meters across Europe that make it possible to spy on home or corporate energy use and even impose blackouts.

U.S. officials have frequently warned that vulnerabilities in industrial control systems could permit damaging attacks on public infrastructure resulting in power outages, environmental damage, or even loss of life (see “U.S. Power Grids a Hacking Target”).

All the attacks to be mentioned today require significantly fewer resources and skill than what was required to employ the best-known attack on an industrial system, the U.S.-Israeli-backed Stuxnet operation against the Iranian nuclear program (see “New Malware Brings Cyberwar One Step Closer”).

“We have demonstrated a few scenarios that will cause a catastrophic breakdown—a pipe to burst or tank to overflow—while sending a completely different view to the controller,” says Brian Meixell of Texas security company Cimation, who brought the replica water plant component to show off the vulnerabilities he discovered.

With colleague Eric Forner, Meixell exploited a protocol called Dbus that has been used to control industrial equipment since the 1970s and is still in wide use today on devices often connected directly to the Internet. Scans of public IP addresses have revealed that at least 90,000 industrial control devices are online and vulnerable to that type of attack, says Forner (see “What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet”). Dbus is insecure because no one in the industry that uses it thought it was a priority to make it secure, says Meixell.

Lucas Apa, a researcher with IOActive, says this attitude also underpins the flaw he and colleague Carlos Mario Penagos found in wireless sensors that are used to monitor oil, water, nuclear, and natural gas infrastructure. The three leading suppliers of those sensors designed them so that they can be made to give spoof readings, or even be shut down with a relatively cheap 40-mile-range radio transmitter, says Penagos. “We can show total shutdown of the plant,” he says.

That problem—and the one discovered by the Cimation team—is now known to the companies that make the equipment, and to the industrial and infrastructure companies that buy them, thanks to a data-sharing program run by the Department of Homeland Security. That program, called ICS-CERT, for Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team, shares newly published data on vulnerabilities with affected companies and industrial operators.

However, just because ICS-CERT highlights a problem doesn’t mean it gets fixed promptly.

Apa says he expects many sensors will remain vulnerable to his wireless attack despite ICS-CERT’s action because fixing it requires physically connecting to the sensors to upgrade their software. “Because the devices are used on hazardous places, it can be very hard to grab them,” he says, and some companies will have many hundreds of sensors or more.

Sameer Bhalotra, the former senior director for cybersecurity at the Obama White House and now chief operating officer of Web security company Impermium, told MIT Technology Review that although the ICS-CERT functions well, it doesn’t speed the progress in industrial security. In contrast, software companies such as Microsoft have become adept at rapidly patching vulnerabilities, to the point where major flaws are now rare, says Bhalotra. Companies that make industrial control equipment and software have never had to worry much about security, and so they’re not capable of generating patches quickly, or making significant design changes. “Nothing well organized is happening today,” he says. “Vendors are just going to have to get faster and better at patching, and that’s going to take some time.”

One reason the process is so slow is a lack of clear incentives, says Bhalotra. Current law doesn’t make energy operators or the manufacturers of control systems liable for the consequences of poor security, such as damage caused by an explosion or a lengthy power outage. Only the introduction of new legislation to clear up the liability issue is likely to speed the evolution of more secure industrial control systems, says Bhalotra.

Is Economics More Like History Than Physics?

Is economics like physics, or more like history? Steven Pinker says, “No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics.” Yet some economists aim close to such craziness.
Pinker says the ”mindset of science” eliminates errors by “open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods,” and especially, experimentation. But experiments require repetition and control over all relevant variables. We can experiment on individual behavior, but not with history or macroeconomics.

Isaiah Berlin pointed out that “because” is used differently in science and history. In science, it means reliably causal. In history, it means a looser, narrative kind of causation, a useful explanation of the complex web of factors affecting a particular situation. Since Plato many have privileged universal timeless truths. But history’s truths are typically particular and time bound, describing changes through time.

Pinker’s science needs types and theories. It assumes that phenomena “may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves.” But Berlin noted that knowledge can be nomothetic or idiographic. “Nomothetic” means fit for law-like generalizations, having reliably repeatable regularities. “Idiographic” means much the same as the Hebrew word “da’at”: knowledge gained through direct relationship with the particular (not via theories or types). ()

Physics is fortunate to enjoy a kind of closedness that human life lacks. Nothing in physics chooses. And nothing it studies innovates. History and economics study things that can change how they act and react. So the methods of the inanimate sciences face extra challenges when used on people. Even statistics and probability can’t always help. Previously measured distributions can be upset by the spread of behavioral changes, making social systems less predictable.

Jerome Kagan notes that “19th century economists, mimicking the physics of the era…adopted the mathematics that physicists used to describe” inanimate equilibria. Many economists still use such methods. And macroeconomists try to model events essentially as complex as world wars, using (insanely by Pinker’s standards) the language of physics.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “science” originally just meant knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy) were also called the “seven liberal sciences.” Shakespeare used science in that sense: “Cunning in Musicke, and the Mathematickes, To instruct…in those sciences.”

We risk blinding ourselves with science, in its now narrower highly reliable form. It is dazzling. But it also has limits. Its tools don’t fit all situations. Economics, especially the macro kind, has history-like aspects. Its narratives might be woven with data, but not everything that counts can be counted. It must deal with different kinds of change that (to paraphrase Shakespeare) were never dreamt of in our physics. Perhaps this limits economics to moderately reliable maxims.

Crowdfunding Campaign Bids to Launch Tiny Interplanetary Probe

A mini-satellite, no bigger than a loaf of bread, could push itself out of Earth’s orbit as soon as next year if a crowdfunding campaign to support development of a diminutive propulsion system succeeds. If such small spacecraft can be made to operate far from Earth, they could one day make inexpensive expeditions to asteroids, Mars, and beyond.

Interplanetary spacecraft are typically bigger than a car, cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and take many years to develop and launch. In recent years researchers have been pondering how to send small satellites, called CubeSats, which have been launched into Earth orbit over the past decade, mainly by university teams, farther afield.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have a design for a propulsion system they believe is ready to send a CubeSat on an expedition into deep space. Their campaign on the fundraising site Kickstarter asks for $200,000 to pay for development needed to make a test launch next year.

Since July 4, more than 800 people have pledged over $32,000 to the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster project. That’s well short of the final goal, but the campaign seems likely to succeed thanks to interest from some deep-pocketed donors. “We’ve already had a couple of people contact us and tell us they just want to fund the whole thing,” says team leader Benjamin Longmier. The Michigan researchers have also applied for grants from U.S. government agencies.

The satellite could launch in a year, says Longmier, and embark on an interplanetary trip after being tested in low-Earth orbit. It is not clear how long it would survive, but on the Kickstarter page, the team jokes that 100 million years from now, the little probe could be found and displayed in a museum in the Alpha Centauri system.

No CubeSat has left Earth orbit before, but the Michigan team believes its propulsion system solves a key barrier to cheaper interplanetary exploration. CubeSats are made from one or more 10-centimeter-wide instrument boxes, and hitch rides to orbit with larger, more expensive spacecraft. That limits the kinds of propulsion systems that can be installed onto a CubeSat. Common systems that use explosive chemicals or highly pressurized gases to produce thrust would pose too much risk to a CubeSat’s pricier launch mates. Nearly all of the 100 or so CubeSats launched to date have had no propulsion system at all.

The Michigan system would pose no danger to the launch it was hitchhiking with because it would use a non-explosive propellant such as iodine or water stored in an unpressurized container.

To propel the satellite, a heater would vaporize the propellant, sending neutral atoms of gas into a small chamber. A radio antenna around that chamber would energize the gas, causing collisions that would knock electrons off the gas atoms to create a plasma. A ring-shaped permanent magnet would then accelerate these charged particles out a nozzle to thrust the CubeSat in the opposite direction.

The Michigan team says its system could fit inside one 10-centimeter-wide module of a three-unit CubeSat, and propel it at speeds of up to 10 kilometers per second. That would be enough to push the satellite at least a million kilometers from Earth, out of the planet’s gravitational grip.

Paulo Lozano, director of the space propulsion lab at MIT, says he has some doubts about the project. The plasma will need to be extremely dense to provide ions for thrust, he says, and high-density plasmas tend to damage anything they contact. “If they are able to do it, that’s great,” says Lozano, who is developing another electric propulsion system that uses ions in salty liquids, rather than plasmas, to generate thrust.

Longmier responds that the magnet that directs the spew of ions out of the thruster will also prevent most plasma from contacting the walls of its chamber, buying enough time for a CubeSat to escape Earth’s orbit. “It looks like we can process up to about 10 to 20 kilograms of propellant with our little thruster,” says Longmier, and simulations suggest less than three kilograms are needed to send a CubeSat beyond Earth. Erosion, he says, seems to be a “nonissue.”

Other spacecraft components—such as power and communication systems—still need to be developed for CubeSats to do much when they’re far from Earth. But in a few more years, they could be sent to study asteroids or to look for signs of life on distant icy moons, the team writes on its Kickstarter page. Because of their size, the petite probes may be able to take only a single type of measurement at each location rather than carry multiple instruments like a traditional craft, but Lozano says they have one big advantage over larger missions: “They are very inexpensive.”

Device Could Spot Seizures by Reading Brainwaves through the Ear

Neuroscientists often use electroencephalography (EEG) as an inexpensive way to record electrical signals in the brain. Though it would be useful to run these recordings for long periods of time, that usually isn’t practical: EEG recording traditionally involves attaching many electrodes and cables to a patient’s scalp.

Now engineers at Imperial College in London have developed an EEG device that can be worn inside the ear, like a hearing aid. They say the device will allow scientists to record EEGs for several days at a time; this would allow doctors to monitor patients who have regularly recurring problems like seizures or microsleep.

“The ideal is to have a very stable recording system, and recordings which are repeatable,” explains co-creator Danilo Mandic. “It’s not interfering with your normal life, because there are acoustic vents so people can hear. After a while, they forget they’re having an EEG.”

By nestling the EEG inside the ear, the engineers avoid a lot of signal noise usually introduced by body movement. They can also ensure that the electrodes are always placed in exactly the same spot, which, they say, will make repeated readings more reliable.

Since the device attaches to just one area, it can record only from the temporal region. This limits its potential applications to events that involve local activity. Tzzy-Ping Jung, co-director of the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Advanced Neurological Engineering, says that this does not mean the device will not be valuable.

“Different modalities will have different applications. I would not rule out the usefulness of any modalities,” says Jung. “I think it’s a very good idea with very promising results.”