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Saturday, July 9, 2011

Facebook vs. Google+: Which network comes out on top? (Yahoo! News)

Is Google+ the Facebook killer?

Google+ started hitting the streets in late June, quickly soaking up press and attention everywhere. Folks had been anticipating a social network from Google for a while, especially since Google's Buzz service seemed to lack the full development and attention Google lavishes on the rest of its products. Google+ was immediately hailed as the social network to kill Facebook.

This kind of feedback isn't really a surprise. Facebook has always struggled with privacy issues, PR scandals, and legal battles. These are exactly the kinds of problems that become a recipe for internet disgruntlement, and by comparison, Google is frequently hailed as the "do no evil" white-hat among big companies. It makes sense that so many internet denizens would leap at the opportunity to abandon Facebook in favor of Google+.

But how do the services actually compare? What are the benefits of Google+ versus Facebook? Let's break down some of the biggest differences.

Circles are a big part of Google+

Circles: Controlling the stream
The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is the concept of Circles. Essentially, you categorize and add all of your Google+ friends by placing them into one or more Circles. Each Circle represents a group of people in your life: friends, family, coworkers, schoolmates, and so on. Then, when you look at your friends' posts, you can simply tell Google+ you want to read the posts from a single Circle at a time.

This answers a problem that many folks struggle with in Facebook and Twitter: How do you keep up with all that traffic? Facebook and Twitter both offer limited tools for mitigating the infinite chatter found in a huge diaspora of friends, but Google+ has made the control central to its service.

The people you classify into Circles know you follow them, but they don't know the name of the Circle in which you've placed them. As a result, you control exactly who you see on your inbound Google+ traffic and who you do not.

The downside of Circles is that they involve some work to set up. After all, if you're socially networked with a few hundred people, it's going to take time to neatly classify them all into appropriate groups. Once you get that done, though, Circles are truly a blessing.

A fresh approach to privacy
It's no accident that Tecca provides a guide to finding and setting up your privacy options for Facebook. Finding those options independently on Facebook can be a little frustrating, and they definitely feel incomplete. For example, Facebook has no option to disallow your friends from resharing your content. It's always felt like the social network giant plays a little fast and loose with its users' information, and the experience leaves most veteran Facebookers at least a little wary when it comes to the subject.

Google+ makes controlling your privacy options easy. While your basic Google Profile must be public, you can control virtually every other aspect of your account's public availability. You can control whether other people can see your friends, your posts, and even choose whether your friends can reshare your own posts. Every time you post to Google+, you choose which of your Circles can see that post, so you always control how public your posts will be. Google obviously takes privacy very seriously in its burgeoning social network.

Hangouts make video chat easy

Hangouts get you in the mix
Another huge part of Google+ is its Hangout system. You simply choose to start a Hangout and share that with whichever Circles (or individuals) you wish. Folks click to join you in your Hangout, and you're all instantly put into a video chat conference.

Hangouts are hardly the first video conference system on the internet, but Google's version is smooth, easy to use, and streamlined. It even has a built-in YouTube function that lets you share your favorite videos onscreen with your friends. The Hangout system supplements Google's extant video chat that's part of its Gtalk service.

While Facebook recently introduced video chat in its own messaging system, it's restricted to one-on-one conversations. It seems like Facebook should be able to do very well in this arena, but Google+'s system still seems smoother, bigger, and cleaner.

Where are the apps and games?
One of the fun things about Facebook is its wide variety of apps and games. Sure, it's a nuisance when your friends spam your news feed with invites and game updates, but the ability to play games with friends is a big draw for the social network. As of right now, Google+ has nothing similar. We can probably expect something like these games to hit Google+ eventually, but there's not been any word so far.

In Google's defense, however, Google Docs and its associated suite of apps have proven incredibly powerful over the years. So while Google+ doesn't feature a huge list of games, it wouldn't be accurate to say Google doesn't offer any apps or other utility at all.

Which is better?
Google+ is coming out of the gate incredibly strong. The two places it most lags behind Facebook is in providing social games like FarmVille and of course in existing users. Google+ is still in limited beta, so not everyone can join the network at their whim. If enough people do jump ship from Facebook, though, you may find yourself using Google+ instead of Facebook.

It's very early to say that Google+ will end up being a "Facebook killer," but it certainly seems like a smoother, more trustworthy social media experience than Facebook so far.

Post by Michael Gray

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Florida condo uses DNA matching to sniff out which resident’s dogs are serial poopers (Yahoo! News)

Careless condo residents will pay a hefty fine if their animal dealt the doo-doo

There's nothing that can ruin a good day faster than accidentally stepping in a pile of dog excrement. It's messy, smelly, and downright disgusting. What's more, you can't really blame the dog, as it's the owner's responsibility to make sure the putrid piles are taken care of. That's the thinking behind a new policy at a condominium in Florida, where the problem of wayward poop has gotten so bad, the management is turning to DNA testing to find the culprits.

Using technology normally reserved for catching murderers and determining paternity, the DNA specialists at PooPrints compare samples from the offensive piles against those from the animals registered at the condo. Dog owners will be charged a one-time $200 fee to have their dog's DNA tested and kept on file for future poop comparison. If a resident's dog is identified through its leftovers, the owner can face a fine of up to $1,000.

The condo owners hope that the high-tech approach will promote a clean landscape and encourage residents to be a bit more careful of what they leave lying around. Currently, the condo association spends as much as $12,000 a year on efforts to eradicate the ridiculous amount of dog mess being carelessly ignored by pet owners. It's not clear how much the management is paying to have PooPrints come and test when needed, but a clean living space is likely worth the cost.

[Image credit: Angeloangelo]

Palm Beach Post via Gizmodo

Monday, June 27, 2011

Global Warming or Little Ice Age: Which Will It Be? (LiveScience.com)

Our sun may be on the verge of a relatively long snooze, as researchers have found solar energy output could decrease in the coming decades. Though the dip in solar activity isn't expected to reverse climate change and plunge Earth into a cold snap, similar phenomenon have happened in our planet's history, scientists say.

Some researchers say that changes in sun activity caused the "Little Ice Age" from 1500 to 1800 — during the chilliest part of this cooling trend beginning in 1645, the sun reached its 75-year Maunder Minimum, when astronomers found almost no sunspots. But the connection between solar activity and Earth's climate remains largely mysterious — scientists are not sure how much of a role the Maunder Minimum played in fueling the little ice age.

And despite media claims in recent days that global cooling is imminent, experts don't expect a repeat of the little ice age anytime soon.

"It turns out this would be a very minor impact on the climate, even if we were to return to Maunder Minimum conditions," climate scientist Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, told LiveScience. "That would only lead to a decrease in about 0.2 watts of power per square meter of the Earth's surface — that compared to greenhouse forcing, which is more than 2 watts per meter squared. That's a factor of 10 larger." [The World's Weirdest Weather]

Predicting solar activity

When researchers refer to solar activity, they generally mean the number and intensity of sunspots, which are dark, cool, magnetically twisted areas on the sun that sometimes erupt violently and send streams of charged particles into space. This activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle.

Even while approaching the next peak in the cycle, a typically storm period called solar maximum that's due in late 2013, the sun seems to be entering a decreased solar output phase, new research has suggested, one that might all but eliminate sunspot activity during the next cycle, which hits its maximum again in 2022. The data supporting this come from three separate analyses of sunspot activity, solar jet streams and the magnetic field.

"I'm skeptical of all three pieces of evidence that were presented," said Doug Biesecker, of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, who notes that the data is based on only a few years of observations. "We know the sun doesn't behave exactly the same way all the time, so give the sun a chance to show its normal behavior before we say it's abnormal."

Fewer sunspots would mean lower sun activity in general, the researchers who presented the work believe; and they expect fewer of the suns' intense bright spots called faculae, which ring the sunspots. This decreased brightness would lower the amount of energy that reaches the Earth from the sun. But by how much is an open question.

A new Little Ice Age?

The Little Ice Age that began in the 1500s could have been caused by decreased solar output of just 0.2 percent, previous research by Peter Foukal suggests, though he believes that there were most likely other, earthly factors (including several erupting volcanoes) at play as well.

"If it really were true that the sun were to descend into a period of literally no sunspots for tens of years, there's a possibility that what occurred in the 17th century could occur again," Foukal, of HelioPhysics Inc., told LiveScience. "But we can't be sure there is a causal effect, we can't say for sure why it happened in the 17th century."

Foukal believes that the effect of a solar minimum could help mitigate some of the global warming we are experiencing, though he warns that eventually the minimum will end. "It could mitigate partially if the sun does cool things a little bit, but it's a matter of time before the sun comes back to life again [and] you will roast," Foukal told LiveScience.

Even if the sun has reached a new low point in its cycle, the change in solar output would not be nearly enough to undo even the current warming we've already experienced from increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, Mann said.

Predicting solar output

Researchers have a tough time predicting changes in solar output, though scientists include in their climate simulations the little information they have about solar changes. The known 11-year-cycle is already built into their climate predictions, though it's difficult to know how active any given cycle will be.

A paper published last year by Georg Feulnerand Stefan Rahmstorf (of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters tried to use these models to predict what would happen if the sun did actually enter a new Maunder Minimum starting in 2030. The model found the numbers that agreed with those quoted by Mann — a decrease of 0.2 watts of power per meter, which is the equivalent of 0.2 degree Fahrenheit (0.1 degree Celsius) of cooling.

"The influence of the grand solar minimum is to decrease the effect of the greenhouse gasses by a few tenths of a degree," Mann said about the results of that study. "How much of a player compared to other drivers that we know are important? It's almost down in the noise, it's a blip on the radar screen."

The sun and the Little Ice Age

While admitting that a small decrease in warming could happen, Mann doesn't agree that it could send Earth into another Little Ice Age. "It's ludicrous, there is no scientific support for that whatsoever," Mann said. "The science doesn't even remotely support that conclusion."

Mann believes that the temperature changes during the Little Ice Age were mainly caused by several volcanic eruptions during that time, which changed the temperatures and dynamics of the atmosphere, causing localized cooling.

Changes to the jet stream also affect local temperatures, as it moves cooler air upward across Europe. The jet stream is dependent on ozone levels in the atmosphere, which in turn can be affected by either solar radiation or by volcanic output in the atmosphere. The debate still rages as to how big of an effect each of these factors play.

You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @microbelover. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.