Author Archives: Guest Post

Apple iOS Platform Outreaches Android by 59 Percent in U.S. When Accounting for Mobile Phones, Tablets and Other Connected Media Devices

*comScore Releases First Public Data on Apple iPad Users from MobiLens Service*

RESTON, VA, April 19, 2011 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the results of a U.S. study of Apple iPad owners, based on data from the comScore MobiLens service. The report includes comScore’s first publicly available data showing demographics and other characteristics of users of connected media devices, such as the iPad and iPod Touch. Initial research indicates that Apple’s iOS platform, which resides on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, has a combined platform reach of 37.9 million among all mobile phones, tablets and other such connected media devices, outreaching the Android platform by 59 percent.

“comScore is excited to announce the availability of connected device data as part of the comScore MobiLens service,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “This new data set enables us to not only understand the comprehensive ecosystem of mobile and connected media device users, but it also allows us insight into their detailed demographic and behavioral attributes.” (more…)

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Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think

Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”

But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.” (more…)

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IBM Honors the 25th Anniversary of High-Temperature Superconductivity

IBM scientists, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller, discovered the first successful high-temperature superconductor using a breakthrough ceramic material

ZURICH – 18 Apr 2011: Twenty-five years ago IBM scientists, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller altered the landscape of physics when they observed superconductivity in an oxide material at a temperature 50 percent higher(1), (-238 deg C, -397 deg F) than what was previously known. This discovery opened an entirely new chapter in the field of physics and earned them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1987. (more…)

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Ancient Fossils Hold Clues for Predicting Future Climate Change, Scientists Report

By studying fossilized mollusks from some 3.5 million years ago, UCLA geoscientists and colleagues have been able to construct an ancient climate record that holds clues about the long-term effects of Earth’s current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key contributor to global climate change. 

Two novel geochemical techniques used to determine the temperature at which the mollusk shells were formed suggest that summertime Arctic temperatures during the early Pliocene epoch (3.5 million to 4 million years ago) may have been a staggering 18 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. And these ancient fossils, harvested from deep within the Arctic Circle, may have once lived in an environment in which the polar ice cap melted completely during the summer months.  (more…)

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WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

“Starting today thousands of new eyes will be looking at WISE data, and I expect many surprises,” said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the mission’s principal investigator. (more…)

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