My Daily Inquirer

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that "more is needed" from Facebook to address privacy criticisms.

In a blog post, the civil liberties group praised Facebook for a "great first step" towards giving members of the site more control over their data.

However, it warned members against choosing the site's recommended privacy control setting.

Doing that shares "a substantial amount" of information widely, the group claimed.

"The changes are pretty good, though more is needed," wrote Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the EFF.

Facebook's decision to enable users to either select one setting to cover all information or to choose individual settings for different types of information (such as making photos more private than status updates for example) struck a "good balance" said Mr Bankston.

The foundation still had concerns about third-party access to individual profile information though.

"Facebook is a site that many people joined because it was a more private alternative to sites like MySpace and Twitter," wrote Mr Bankston.

"To keep in line with user expectations, no information should be required to be publicly available."
'Monolithic approach'

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, also questioned whether Facebook had gone far enough with its new arrangements.

"I don't know whether these reforms on their own are going to satisfy the overwhelming force for change and reform," he told the BBC.

"Perhaps people are unable to reconcile the two worlds they live in," he added, explaining that the concept of Facebook friendship is not as arbitrary as it is in face-to-face life.

"Facebook has a monolithic approach to friendship - but as you build friendship you build the privacy along with it. Perhaps a privacy model should follow that," he said.

Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at net security firm Imperva, said that services such as Facebook were ultimately designed for information sharing.

"The essence of social networks is to provoke solicited, and unsolicited, interactions between individuals," he said.

"Privacy does not coincide with the interests of Facebook creators or with the attitude of many Facebook users."

However the site must now fight to regain the trust of its members, he added.

"Today, Facebook is at a serious crossroads. If it continues giving the impression that user privacy is a football, it risks further alienating them."

Source: News

WASHINGTON – An experimental aircraft has set a record for hypersonic flight, flying more than 3 minutes at Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound.

The X-51A Waverider was released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern California coast Wednesday morning, the Air Force reported on its website. Its scramjet engine accelerated the vehicle to Mach 6, and it flew autonomously for 200 seconds before losing acceleration. At that point the test was terminated.

The Air Force said the previous record for a hypersonic scramjet burn was 12 seconds.

[Related: Secret X-37B space plane spotted by amateur skywatchers]

"We are ecstatic to have accomplished many of the X-51A test points during its first hypersonic mission," said Charlie Brink, an X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

"We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines," Brink said.

The Waverider was built for the Air Force by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing Co.

Joe Vogel, Boeing's director of hypersonics, said, "This is a new world record and sets the foundation for several hypersonic applications, including access to space, reconnaissance, strike, global reach and commercial transportation."

Four X-51A cruisers have been built for the Air Force, and the remaining three will be tested this fall.

"No test is perfect," Brink said, "and I'm sure we will find anomalies that we will need to address before the next flight."

Source: News

NEW YORK – In Facebook's vision of the Web, you would no longer be alone and anonymous. Sites would reflect your tastes and interests — as you expressed them on the social network — and you wouldn't have to fish around for news and songs that interest you.

Standing in the way is growing concern about privacy from Facebook users — most recently complaints that the site forced them to share personal details with the rest of the online world or have them removed from Facebook profiles altogether.

Facebook responded to the backlash Wednesday by announcing it is simplifying its privacy controls and applying them retroactively, so users can protect the status updates and photos they have posted in the past.

"A lot of people are upset with us," CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged at a news conference at Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters.

The changes came after Facebook rolled out a slew of new features in April that spread its reach to the broader Web. Among them was a program called "instant personalization" that draws information from a person's profile to customize sites such as the music service Pandora. Some users found it creepy, not cool.

Privacy groups have complained to regulators, and some people threatened to quit the site. Even struggling MySpace jumped in to capitalize on its rival's bad press by announcing a "new, simpler privacy setting."

To address complaints its settings were getting too complex, Facebook will now give users the option of applying the same preferences to all their content, so that with one click you can decide whether to share things with just "friends" or with everyone.

For those who found it complicated to prevent outside websites and applications from gaining access to Facebook data, there's now a way to do so in a couple of clicks.

Source: News

Ten people have been injured, including some with broken bones, when a flight from London to Los Angeles hit severe turbulence, officials said.

United Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Massier said United Flight 935 reported severe turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean and was diverted to Montreal, Canada.

The airline said nine passengers and one crew member were treated. None of the injuries are considered to be life-threatening.

The Boeing 777 aircraft was taken out of service and inspected for possible damage.

Ms Massier said another plane was sent from Chicago to Montreal to take the passengers and crew to Los Angeles.

The plane landed in Los Angeles at around 10pm (0500 GMT), about nine hours later than originally scheduled.

Source: News

Faced with a backlash that wouldn't go away, Facebook announced changes Wednesday that will make it easier for users to change privacy settings and block outside parties from seeing personal information.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that feedback from users over recent privacy changes, which made some user information public by default, was crucial in the decision to tighten controls.

"We think that they're the right thing to do," he said. "We listened to the feedback, and we agree with it."

Facebook will begin rolling out the new privacy controls Wednesday, he said, and they should be in place for most users within the next few weeks.

Zuckerberg said Facebook's new settings will give users "one simple tool" to control how their information is shared: with friends only, with friends of friends or with everyone.

A single click also will let users block all of their information from being accessed by third parties, such as game or application developers.

"All of the controls we had are still there if you want to use them," Zuckerberg said. "But we just wanted to make it easy for people who want to put themselves in one bucket very easily with just a couple of clicks."

The announcement marks a rare double-back for Facebook, the nearly ubiquitous networking site that has made a habit of rolling out changes and then weathering user grumbling until it subsides.

Among other changes, the site implemented a new tool last month that spreads user preferences and data across the Web. The tool allows Facebook users to more easily share articles and other Web pages they like but at the same time makes those picks easier for others to see.

Some Facebook users also have been vocally opposed to changes that switched default settings for much of their information to "public."

The Web information-sharing function requires users to sign up for it. And privacy settings can be reset. But the current setup of about 170 settings requires negotiating what The New York Times called "a bewildering tangle of options" to make the switch.

Wednesday's announcement addressed what Zuckerberg had acknowledged have been missteps with the site's recent changes.

Source: CNN

Global geothermal energy use and development has increased significantly over the last five years, with over 10,000 megawatts of installed capacity providing power to over 52 million people, according to a report by the Geothermal Energy Association.

Entitled Geothermal Energy: International Market Update, the report states that 24 countries increased their geothermal capacity by 20 percent since the release of a report by International Geothermal Association in 2005.

Seventy countries currently have geothermal projects under consideration, representing a 52 increase from the last international report compiled by the Geothermal Energy Association in 2007.

The association cited Europe and Africa as the regions with the most projects under development. Twenty-four European countries were listed to have geothermal projects under development, compared with the 10 countries in 2007. For instance, Turkey intends to bring 550 MW of geothermal power online by 2013.

Meanwhile, there are 11 African countries producing geothermal energy compared to only six identified by the association three years ago. Kenya, for example, plans to produce 490 MW of geothermal power by 2012 and as much as 4,000 MW over the next 20 years.

While the United States remains the world leader in geothermal electricity production, with about 3,086 MW of installed capacity from 77 power plants, countries from the Pacific Ring of Fire are catching up in the geothermal market.

The Philippines, in Southeast Asia, is still the second highest geothermal power producer with 1,904 MW, which makes up nearly 18 percent of the country’s electricity generation. On the other hand, neighboring Indonesia has set a goal of 9,500 MW of geothermal capacity, an 800 percent increase from its current installed capacity.

The report emphasizes that regional institutions play key roles in global geothermal development by financing projects as well as enhancing regional cooperation within the renewable energy sector. In France, Germany, Latvia, Britain and other European countries, government policies such as feed-in tariffs make highly risky and expensive projects more feasible.

However, although the study sees that the geothermal market is expanding to encompass most of the countries worldwide, this colossal growth only represents a small fraction of the geothermal potential that the world can use, said Karl Gawell, executive director of the association.

He noted that majority of countries do not fully use their geothermal resources. In 1999, the association identified 39 nations that could source 100 percent of their electricity needs from geothermal energy, but only nine of these countries actually have geothermal projects online.

“It’s as if we discovered a huge deposit of oil underneath our feet, enough to put gas in our cars forever, and didn’t use it; except this is a totally clean, renewable and constant energy source,” Mr. Gawell said.

Source: Environment

This year is on track to be the hottest ever after data published by America’s climate agency this week showed record global temperatures in April and the first four months of 2010.

“The combined April global land and ocean average surface temperature was the warmest on record at 58.1°F (14.5°C), which is 1.37°F (0.76°C) above the 20th century average of 56.7°F (13.7°C),” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report on its Web site dated Monday.

These temperatures surpassed the previous record set in 1998, the agency added.

The agency said April’s global land surface temperatures were the third warmest according to its records, which date back to 1880.

It noted warmer-than-normal conditions in Canada, Alaska, Eastern United States, Australia, South Asia, Northern Africa and Northern Russia.

“Cooler-than-normal places included Mongolia, Argentina, far eastern Russia, the western contiguous United States and most of China,” the agency said, adding global snow cover was the fourth-lowest on record.

China had its coolest April since 1961, but wettest since 1974, it said.

April was the largest since 2001, they were still below average for the 11th consecutive April as a result of warmer-than-average ocean surface temperatures.

The agency said Arctic ice covered around 5.7 million square miles (14.7 million square kilometers), 2.1 percent below the average extent from 1979 to 2000.

The El Niño weather pattern warming the Pacific Ocean weakened in April and is expected to continue through June, the agency said, echoing a March report by the World Meteorological Organization.

Scientists said El Niño was partly responsible for 2009 being the fifth warmest year on record.

Source: Environment

The Center awards approximately 20-25 residential fellowships annually to individuals with outstanding project proposals in a broad range of the social sciences and humanities on national and/or international issues. Topics and scholarship should relate to key public policy challenges or provide the historical and/or cultural framework to illuminate policy issues of contemporary importance.

Eligibility

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Citizens or permanent residents from any country (foreign nationals must be able to hold a valid passport and obtain a J1 Visa)
*

Men and women with outstanding capabilities and experience from a wide variety of -backgrounds (including government, the corporate world, professions, and academia)
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Academic candidates holding a Ph.D. (Ph.D. must be received by the application deadline of October 1)
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Academic candidates demonstrating scholarly achievement by publications beyond their doctoral dissertations.


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Sydney is indeed a cosmopolitan world city that is surrounded by the iconic beaches, lush hinterland, and World Heritage areas. It is in fact acclaimed as wine regions of the State of New South Wales.




Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre on Bennelong Point in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

MANGALORE, India – Human error might have caused the crash of an Air India Boeing 737-800 plane that killed 158 people over the weekend, India's civil aviation minister said Monday.

Weather conditions and other factors at the time the plane reached its destination "looked absolutely normal for a regular touchdown and a safe landing," Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told the CNN-IBN television news channel.

"You can't rule out a human error factor," Patel said.

Only an inquiry could establish what exactly went wrong as the aircraft overshot the hilltop runway and crashed and plunged over a cliff and into a ravine at dawn Saturday on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Mangalore, he said.

Of the 166 passengers and crew aboard, only eight people survived the crash.

Patel said there was no rain in the area and visibility was good at the time of the plane's landing.

Investigators and aviation officials searched through the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 strewn across a hillside to try to determine the cause of India's worst air disaster in more than a decade. They recovered the cockpit voice recorder, which they hope will give them important clues, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

A four-member U.S. forensic team also arrived in India to help in the investigation, said Harpreet Singh, an Air India spokeswoman.

By Sunday evening, 146 of the 158 bodies had been identified and given to grieving relatives for burial, said Arvind Jadhav, Air India's chairman and managing director.

Doctors were conducting DNA tests on 22 bodies that were so badly burned that relatives could not identify them, said Suresh Babu, an official at Wenlock hospital in Mangalore. They included a 2-year-old boy.

In nearby Uppala village, the relatives of brothers Mohammed Basheer and Aboo Backer Siddeeq were told it could take more than a week for the bodies of the two men to be identified, said their uncle B.K. Mohammed Haji.

"For two days we waited at the airport for the bodies," said Haji. "All the bodies were badly charred and very difficult to recognize."

The two men were returning home from Dubai for the wedding of their younger sister Sunday. The wedding was canceled and instead friends and relatives joined the grieving family under a canopy erected for the wedding to pray for the dead men.

The black box would be sent to New Delhi for decoding and further investigations, officials said.

The flight from Dubai to Mangalore carried some of the millions of Indians who work as cheap labor in the Middle East back to their families for a rare visit during India's summer holiday season.

Aviation experts said the eight survivors were seated in the center of the aircraft, near where it broke open, and they managed to get out before a fireball engulfed the plane.

"In this case it was pure luck of the draw," said Sidney Dekker, a professor of flight safety at the School of Aviation at Sweden's Lund University. "The luck of where you are in the airplane relative to how the fuselage disintegrates going into the ravine."

The crash was the deadliest in India since a November 1996 midair collision killed 349 people. Saturday's crash happened when the plane overshot the runway, airline officials said. Aviation experts said the Mangalore airport's "tabletop" runway, which ends in a valley, makes a bad crash inevitable when a plane does not stop in time.

Kapil Kaul, an aviation expert at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, said while India's air safety record is good, he hopes the crash will push officials to establish an independent national safety board to ensure standards remain high as the booming economy drives more traffic into the skies.

___

Associated Press writers Rafiq Maqbool in Mangalore, Ashok Sharma and Ravi Nessman in New Delhi and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

Source: News

Centre for the Resolution of Emergency Situation (CRES) on Thursday extended curfew in Bangkok and 23 other provinces for three more nights in a bid to end the riots which broke out after red shirts leaders surrendered to police on Wednesday.

The curfew will be from 9pm to 5am from Thursday to Saturday night to allow people more time to conduct their businesses. The curfew imposed on Wednesday was from 8pm to 6am.

CRES spokesman Col Sansern Kaewkamnerd announced the extension of the curfew in Bangkok and 23 provinces after 39 key places were set on fire by red shirt hardliners who were angry with the end of the rally at Ratchaprasong and the surrender of their leaders.

The provinces that are also under curfew are; Nakhon Pathom, Chon Buri, Nonthaburi, Samut Prakan, Pathum Thani, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Khon Kaen, Udon Thani, Chaiyaphum, Nakhon Ratchasima, Si Sa Ket, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Nan, Lampang, Nakhon Sawan, Kalasin, Mukdahan, Nong Bua Lamphu, Roi Et, Sakhon Nakhon, Ubon Ratchathani

In terms of tourist attractions and destinations popular with South Asians, the curfews affect the following places:

- Bangkok - Entire city
- Nakhon Pathom - Entire province including Rose Garden Riverside
- Chon Buri - Entire city of Pattaya, Si Racha (Sriracha Tiger Zoo)
- Samut Prakan - Entire province including Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm, Ancient
- City, accommodation around Suvarnabhumi Airport. During the curfew, visitors must arrive at the airport before 21.00 hrs. and depart only after 05.00 hrs.
- Pathum Thani - Entire province including Dream World
- Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya - Entire province including Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya
- Historical Park,
- Bang Pa-in Summer Palace
- Chiang Mai - Entire province
- Chiang Rai - Entire province
- Nakhon Ratchasima - Entire province including Khao Yai National Park and nearby wineries.

Source: Travel

IFS Research Grants

IFS is a NGO (non-governmental organisation) founded in 1972. Funding comes from governmental and non-governmental sources, as well as national and international organisations. The annual budget is approximately USD 5 million. IFS has 135 Affiliated Organisations in 86 countries, of which three-quarters are in developing countries and one-quarter in industrial countries. IFS has an international Board of Trustees. The IFS Secretariat is located in Stockholm, Sweden. An eligible candidate for an IFS Research grant is a citizen of a developing country.

Readmore: Scholarship




CIPE-Youth Essay Contest

The Center for International Private Enterprise invites young people to share their ideas on how to create opportunities for youth to strengthen democracy and the private sector in their own countries.
Who can participate: Students and young professionals aged 18-30.
Contest Deadline: June 18, 2010
Winners Announced: Fall 2010
Essay Length: 2,000 - 3,000 word

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Scholarship

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MANGALORE, India – Eight people escaped the crash of an Indian jetliner with 166 people on board that overshot a hilltop runway in southern India and plunged over a cliff, officials said. At least some of the survivors managed to jump from the wreckage just before it burst into flames.

Firefighters struggled to reach the twisted, smoking wreckage of the Boeing 737-800, which was scattered along the hillside of thick grass and trees just outside Mangalore's Bajpe airport.

But after the first few minutes, there were no more survivors to be found around what remained of the Air India Express flight from Dubai to this port city. Instead, scores of burned bodies were pulled from the blackened tangle of aircraft cables, twisted metal, charred trees and mud at the crash site. Many of the dead were strapped into their seats, their bodies burned beyond recognition.

Air India, the country's national carrier, runs inexpensive flights under the Air India Express banner to Dubai and other Middle Eastern destinations where millions of Indians are employed.

Relatives of the victims, who had been waiting at the airport for the plane's arrival, stood near the wreckage weeping.

More: News

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In a seemingly never-ending string of damaging disclosures about its users' privacy concerns, Facebook has reportedly been releasing user data to ad companies that hadn't even asked for the info.

Facebook isn't alone this time: rival social-media site MySpace has also been called out in Friday's Wall Street Journal report by Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro — together with the content-sharing sites Livejournal and Digg.

The report says that the companies have delivered user data to major online advertising companies such as Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo!'s Right Media, despite explicit pledges to protect such information. The released material includes user names and ID numbers, together with data that could be used to accumulate a host of additional information on individual users, such as where they live, their names, occupations, incomes and places of employment.

As Steel and Vascellaro write:


"Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names."

Representatives of both DoubleClick and Right Media told the Journal reporters that they were unaware they were receiving such data — and stressed that they hadn't tried to make use of any of it.

After the Journal contacted Facebook, the company announced a change in software to prevent transmission of the identifying code, the Journal said. MySpace announced that it's in the process of adopting the same user protections. Digg, Livejournal and other sites named in the report are apparently holding off on enhancing privacy safegaurds because they don't require users to register with real names.

Still, the report is another black eye for Facebook, which has already caused such an uproar that four U.S. senators — not exactly your typical Web activists — entered the fray over the company's user privacy standards. Meanwhile, Facebook is generating plenty of bad PR all by itself, with an executive's backlash-provoking Q&A at the New York Times and recent reports that users who posted comments critical of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have seen their profiles mysteriously deleted.

These episodes may well explain the company's other piece of bad news this week: a poll disclosing that 60 percent of Facebook users have considered deleting their accounts because of qualms about the site's privacy policy.

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.