Are you working for the fastest shrinking industry in the United States? You are, if you’re working
for a newspaper according to this study by LinkedIn and the Council of
Economic Advisors.

The fastest-growing industries include renewables (+49.2%), internet
(+24.6%), online publishing (+24.3%), and e-learning (+15.9%). Fastest-shrinking
industries were newspapers (-28.4%), retail (-15.5%), building materials
(-14.2%), and automotive (-12.8%).

Instead of the growth in percentage terms, we also examined the
volume of job gain / loss by industry, as indicated by the largest bubbles
in the figure above. Our data show that even through the recession,
the industries with the largest volume of employment growth (the largest
circles on the figure above) were internet, hospitals & healthcare,
health, wellness & fitness, oil & energy, IT and renewables.
On the other side of the story, retail, construction, telecommunications,
banking, and automotive had the largest volume of job losses between
2007 and 2011.

Link
– via The
Atlantic

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Newspaper: America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry

iPad: The Khan Academy provides over 3,000 free educational videos, exercises, and lectures covering the span of everything from math, physics, finance, and history. It’s one of our favorite places to get a free education online, and now its complete library is available on-the-go on your iPad. More »

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Khan Academy for iPad Puts World-Class Educational Lectures in Your Hand [Ipad Downloads]

Microsoft is giving Windows Azure customers a 33 percent credit on their entire monthly bills because of an outage on Feb. 29 caused by a “leap day bug.” Azure executive Bill Laing announced the credit Friday night in a post that also offered further details on how the leap day bug took down Azure.

We’ve already noted that core parts of Azure were inaccessible to many customers for more than 12 hours, due to the service’s inability to calculate the correct date while trying to inspect SSL certificates. Laing now offers a more thorough root cause analysis.

New “transfer” certificates are generated when virtual machines are created, ensuring that application details are encrypted, he wrote. “When the GA (guest agent) creates the transfer certificate, it gives it a one year validity range,” Laing wrote. “It uses midnight UST of the current day as the valid-from date and one year from that date as the valid-to date. The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.”

Storage clusters and SQL Azure remained unaffected, but the outage did affect Windows Azure Compute, the Access Control Service, Azure Service Bus, SQL Azure Portal, and Data Sync Services. Because of the “extraordinary nature” of the outage, Microsoft is providing a “33% credit to all customers of Windows Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching for the entire affected billing month(s) for these services, regardless of whether their service was impacted.”

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Microsoft details leap day bug that took down Azure, refunds customers

Nanowires are ultra-tiny metal threads that, under specific conditions, grow like plants out of chemical and metal substrates. Now, in this incredible video, you can see what they look like when they’re growing. They’re pretty much nanoscopic Cthulhu tentacles. More »

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Watch nanowires growing in real time [Video]

Internet comedian Francis, who by now has his nerd shtick almost perfected, leaves his webcam and bedroom behind and takes to the streets for a Magic Card tournament. More »

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Magic Card Freakouts are the Best Kind of Freakouts [Video]

Super High Aperture. Heard of it? Probably not, but thanks to Apple, you’ll probably long for days when you didn’t in just a few months. According to an in-depth look from the folks at DisplaySearch, the aforesaid technique is the primary reason that Apple was able to shove 2,048 x 1,536 pixels into the 9.7-inch panel on the new iPad. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t Apple that conjured up the magic; instead, it was crafted by engineers at Sharp and JSR (a display materials maker from Japan), but it’ll be the iPad that makes an otherwise geeky achievement something that the mainstream covets. According to the science behind it, SHA is “a method of increasing aperture ratio by applying approximately a 3 [micrometer] thick photo-definable acrylic resin layer to planarize the device and increase the vertical gap between the [indium tin oxide] pixel electrodes and signal lines.” Reportedly, there are also “at least twice as many” LEDs in the panel compared to that on the iPad 2, further suggesting that there’s way more battery within the new guy than the last. Technophiles need only dig into the links below to find plenty more where this came from.

Super High Aperture: it’s why the new iPad’s Retina display is so dense originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink GigaOM | DisplaySearch | Email this | Comments

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Super High Aperture: it’s why the new iPad’s Retina display is so dense

Microsoft has demonstrated new software that can pull together real-time multilingual vocal translations using your own voice. Monolingual TTS currently handles 26 different languages, although it’s not instant just yet — it takes about an hour of training to get the experimental software acquainted with your own utterances. Demonstrated at Microsoft’s TechFest 2012 showcase, the software can even mix up foreign language pronunciation of place names with directions in your native tongue. It also complements those efforts with a 3D image of your head, animating your lips along to the foreign words you’d otherwise butcher. See how an algorithm-educated floating head handles Mandarin — and how it’s all done — right after the break.

Continue reading Microsoft demos vocal translator at TechFest 2012, uses your own dulcet tones (video)

Microsoft demos vocal translator at TechFest 2012, uses your own dulcet tones (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft demos vocal translator at TechFest 2012, uses your own dulcet tones (video)

MrSeb writes “Electrical engineers and material scientists at MIT have created a fiber-borne laser that could be woven to form a flexible display that could project different 3D images in any number of directions, to any number of viewers. MIT’s fiber is similar to standard telecoms fiber, but it has a tiny droplet of fluid embedded in the core. When laser light hits the fluid, it scatters, effectively creating a 360-degree laser beam. The core is then surrounded by layers of liquid crystal, which can be controlled like ‘pixels,’ allowing the laser light to escape from specific points anywhere along the length of the fiber. This means that you could have a display that shows one picture on the ‘front’ and another on the ‘back’ — or different, glasses-free 3D images for everyone sitting in front and behind. In the short term, the laser fiber is more likely to have a significant application in photodynamic therapy, an area of medicine where drugs are activated using light. Photodynamic therapy is one of the only ways to treat cancer in a relatively non-invasive and non-toxic manner. MIT’s laser could be threaded into almost any part of the body, where the ability to produce pixels of laser light at any point along its length would make it a highly accurate device.”

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MIT Fiber Points To Woven Glasses-Free 3D Displays

ReCellular’s hardly a new name in the recycling universe, but as more and more individuals toss their dumbphone for a smarter alternative, the Ann Arbor-based outfit is seeing a new wave of interest. iFixit, a company that thrives on tearing down gadgetry both new and old in order to inform people of their repair and upgrade options, recently had the opportunity to tour ReCellular’s monolithic warehouse, where some 10,000 used phones are processed every 24 hours. The tour also included a bit of back-and-forth with the founder, who isn’t against the seemingly endless churn of devices. In fact, he quips that “we have the right to get a phone that’s smaller and a prettier color if we want,” insinuating that ReCellular simply exists to provide a better home to older gizmos than in some landfill. Perhaps surprisingly, Chuck Newman even confesses that the whole “environmental message” isn’t very effective, which is why it distributes prepaid envelopes to encourage recycling that would probably not happen otherwise. Eager to read more? Give those links below a tap.

ReCellular’s headquarters toured by iFixit, recycling and redistribution gets a closer look originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ReCellular’s headquarters toured by iFixit, recycling and redistribution gets a closer look

Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.

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HTML5 roundup: Mozilla and Google aim to level up gaming on the Web