8 things Alexa can't yet do

More useful features are in the speaker's future, thanks to third-party add-ons called Skills and a growing list of native integrations that Amazon has added.

That said, there is still plenty Alexa can't do -- things that, at times, seem like no-brainers.

Custom alarms

It only makes sense that a connected speaker like Alexa would come equipped with some killer alarm features. However, that isn't the case.

Until recently, if you wanted an alarm to wake you on a daily basis, you would have to tell Alexa when you wanted an alarm to sound each and every day. Recurring alarms weren't possible until just over a month ago. Now you can edit existing alarms in the Alexa app to recur weekly, on weekdays or on weekends. Or you can create new recurring alarms by speaking, "Alexa, set an alarm for 7:00 a.m. every weekday."

Seeing as Alexa's primary function is being a speaker, you would imagine some of its music features would be available as alarm sounds. Sadly, that's not possible without a workaround that involves streaming the alarm sound from your mobile device via Bluetooth.

Actions on IFTTT

Thanks to IFTTT integration, Alexa now works with dozens of smart-home devices, can be used to create tasks in Todoist, or to trigger multiple recipes with a single phrase.

The shortfall of Alexa's IFTTT integration is the lack of any actions whatsoever. Alexa can only be used as a trigger in IFTTT. That means I can't, for example, complete a task in Todoist and have Alexa play a song. Or as editor Ry Crist suggested, you can't have Alexa play sound bites, such as a dog barking, when motion is detected or a door opens in the middle of the night.

String commands

If you want Alexa to do more than one thing, you can't tell it everything you want it to do at once. For instance, saying, "Alexa turn on the lights, play the Evening Chill playlist on Spotify, and turn the temperature up," won't work as intended.

Currently, you must divide every command into its own statement:

• "Alexa, turn on the lights."
• "Alexa, play Evening Chill playlist on Spotify."
• "Alexa, turn the temperature up."

The only workaround for chaining multiple actions to a single Alexa command is by creating several IFTTT recipes with the same trigger phrase or a Yonomi routine.

Notifications

Alexa offers virtually nothing in the way of notifications, audio nor visual. With the ability to read top headlines to you in your Flash Briefing, the next logical step -- privacy concerns aside -- would be to have Alexa read messages from your inbox or incoming text messages, or to speak the name of the person calling you.

Amazon package tracking

You can order certain products from Amazon using Alexa, such as eligible items you've purchased before or top Amazon products. You cannot, however, ask Alexa for a status update on your recent orders.

Instead, you'll have to rely on the Amazon app, your own package tracking app, or smart lights to do that for you.

Custom trigger names or voices

Alexa devices have only three words that will wake them: Alexa, Amazon or the name of the device (Echo, Dot or Tap). If you want a truly customized wake word, you're sadly out of luck.

And if you're anything but a native English speaker, or you aren't fond of a female voice for Alexa, there are currently no options for customizing either of those settings.

Swearing

If you use the "Simon says" command, Alexa will repeat anything you say. Even if you speak a number of expletives, Alexa will repeat your words, only the swearing will be bleeped out. Some people might wish she did otherwise.

 

Voice memos or send audio messages

It's no secret that Alexa is always listening. And every time you speak a command, that audio snippet is recorded, saved and transcribed. Every audio file Alexa records is saved to your Amazon account.
You can open the Alexa application and listen to the recordings of some of your recent commands. But possibly one of the most bizarre missing features is a voice-memo function. The least it could do is allow you to export your own voice commands from within the app, but that's not currently possible.

It would also be nice to leave voice memos for your significant other or roommate, or send audio snippets to other Alexa users. For example:

• "Alexa, leave a message for Jack. [Wait for beep.] Don't forget to grab bread from the grocery store."
• "Alexa, send a message to Alex. [Wait for beep.] Do you have plans for tonight?"

This of course, would require better friend or contact management from Alexa, as well as voice recognition, which brings me to my final point.

Musical training gives Stanford engineers a creative lift

Stanford engineers can get scholarships to study music and other arts.  | REUTERS/Jo Yong-Hak

The thank-you letters began arriving not long after Persis Drell became dean of Stanford Engineering. One or two at first, then more trickled in from graduate and undergraduate students alike. But they were not about algorithms or nanoparticles or systems. They were about music.

“These beautiful letters were from engineering students whose music lessons were paid for by the School of Engineering,” Drell says. “And they were just so wonderful and full of sincere joy. I was just very taken by them.”

The letters were inspired by the Engineers in the Arts Scholarship, which provides partial funding for music lessons for declared engineering students who apply. There is no need requirement but award levels for undergraduates may vary depending on their financial aid profile.

The program was started by former Dean James Gibbons, a jazz trombonist, who presided over Stanford Engineering from 1984 to 1996. It continued quietly over the many years until those thank-you notes delighted Drell, a physicist by training and cellist by avocation.

“I’m an amateur. I’ll never perform anywhere, but it enriches my life in incredibly important ways,” says Drell, who has discovered since becoming dean that many of her Stanford Engineering colleagues share her passion for music. For instance, Drell has played with David Miller (clarinet) and Tom Lee (violin), both members of the electrical engineering faculty. Computer programming professor emeritus Don Knuth regularly plays the pipe organ he has installed at his home. Chemical engineering professor emeritus Channing Robertson is known to coax melodies from the piano. And the list goes on

Nor is the symbiosis between music and engineering merely a Stanford phenomenon. At universities and corporations across the world, countless engineers are dedicated musical amateurs, and many bands and orchestras feature professionals who studied engineering. For instance, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, benefactor of the engineering building that bears his name, is a well-known lover of guitar.

“A program like Engineers in the Arts is the perfect exemplification of what being a Stanford engineer is all about,” Drell says. “Despite perception as single-minded techies, we are actually people of broad interests and talents and we bring those interests into our work as engineers. I think music actually makes us better engineers.”
Prelude to a program

The Engineers in the Arts Scholarship traces its roots to Gibbons, who grew up in Texarkana, Texas, “probably best known in music circles as the home of Scott Joplin,” the ragtime composer and pianist, he says with a smile. He recalls learning how to play trombone from a book he was given by his older brother, himself a trombonist in the U.S. Navy Band during World War II. Gibbons played in his high school band and at dance clubs, but when it came time for college, he was offered a fateful choice: Take a full ride music scholarship at Louisiana State University, or study engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Engineering won, but even at Northwestern, Gibbons earned money by playing clubs around Chicago. Eventually the opportunities of solid-state electronics triumphed and music became a pleasurable hobby. In the late 1950s Gibbons, who received his PhD at Stanford, returned to campus to work part time at the pioneering firm Shockley Semiconductor and also create a lab where faculty and graduate students could do research in semiconductor physics and technology.

But music continued to enliven his teaching. “For many years, as my undergraduates drifted into class, I would play from the composer or performer whose birthday was closest to the date of the lecture,” he recalls. “I started class with a few remarks about the artist and students loved it.”

Not long after Gibbons became dean, the Music Department sought his help. Several of the “first chair” or lead players in the Symphony and Wind Ensemble were engineers, and the Music Department wanted all of their first chair players to take lessons. Gibbons decided to raise the money for this specialized instruction but took the whole idea one step further by making arts training available to any Stanford engineering student who wanted it.

“We called it Engineers in the Arts because it wasn’t just music lessons, but included studio arts, too,” he remembers.

For a benefactor, Gibbons turned to Peter Bing, who, with his wife, would later endow Bing Concert Hall on the Stanford campus. Soon, a $25,000 fund was in place; half funded by the Dean of the School of Engineering, the other half by Bing.

The program, now in its 31st year, endures to this day. That explains why so many students write to Drell — as they had to Gibbons and to former Deans John Hennessy and Jim Plummer before her — with heartfelt gratitude for encouraging and furthering their musical studies.
Scratching the itch

Daniel Borup is among the students who have taken advantage of the program. A doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, Borup uses his scholarship to take classical voice lessons. He likes that music and engineering are both very systematic. He finds the notes of the musical scale to be a sort of engineering parameter.

“Like the laws of physics and thermodynamics to the engineer, as a musician you have to work with the boundaries of the musical notes to create something new,” Borup says, adding of his love of music: “I will always sing and I will always be grateful to the deans for allowing me to continue to develop as a singer through Engineers in the Arts.”

Zach Yellin-Flaherty is another beneficiary of the program. A recently graduated computer science co-term, he came to Stanford having already learned to play piano and used the program to shift his focus to the guitar.

“I find coding and music to be different aspects of the same thing. It’s all about creativity,” he says. “Music might not be quite as logical as engineering, but both involve making connections and tying things together in interesting and inventive ways. They scratch the same itch.”

Yellin-Flaherty took guitar lessons from Rick Vandivier, a lecturer in jazz guitar at the Department of Music who studied at the Berklee School of Music, in Boston. In a career that has spanned 30 years, Vandivier has played with notables such as David Grisman, Mose Allison and Dr. Lonnie Smith, as well as with the San José Symphony Orchestra and the American Musical Theatre of San Jose.

“It was great to take lessons from someone of Rick’s caliber while I completed my education,” Yellin-Flaherty says, adding: “I hope to continue to play to grow as a musician while building a career as an engineer, but it will take balance.”

Wireless tech means safer drones, smarter homes and password-free WiFi

We’ve all been there, impatiently twiddling our thumbs while trying to locate a WiFi signal. But what if, instead, the WiFi could locate us?

According to researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), it could mean safer drones, smarter homes, and password-free WiFi.

In a new paper, a research team led by Professor Dina Katabi present a system called Chronos that enables a single WiFi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters, without any external sensors.

A new wireless technology developed by MIT researchers could mean safer drones, smarter homes, and password-free WiFi. The team developed a system that enables a single WiFi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters, without any external sensors. They demonstrated the system in an apartment and a cafe, while also showing off a drone that maintains a safe distance from its user with a margin of error of about 4 centimeters.

Video: MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The group demonstrated Chronos in an apartment and a cafe, while also showing off a drone that maintains a safe distance from its user with a margin of error of about four centimeters.

“From developing drones that are safer for people to be around, to tracking where family members are in your house, Chronos could open up new avenues for using WiFi in robotics, home automation and more,” says PhD student Deepak Vasisht, who is first author on the paper alongside Katabi and former PhD student Swarun Kumar, who is now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Designing a system that enables one WiFi node to locate another is an important step for wireless technology.”

Experiments conducted in a two-bedroom apartment with four occupants show that Chronos can correctly identify which room a resident is in 94 percent of the time. For the cafe demo, the system was 97 percent accurate in distinguishing in-store customers from out-of-store intruders - meaning it could be used by small businesses to prevent non-customers from stealing their WiFi. (32 percent of Americans have copped to this cyber-crime.)

Chronos locates users by calculating the “time-of-flight” that it takes for data to travel from the user to an access point. The system is 20 times more accurate than existing systems, computing time-of-flight with an average error of 0.47 nanoseconds, or half than one-billionth of a second.

Vasisht presented the paper at this month’s USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '16).

How it works
Existing localization methods have required four or five WiFi access points. This is because today’s WiFi devices don’t have wide enough bandwidth to measure time-of-flight, and so researchers have only been able to determine someone’s position by triangulating multiple angles relative to the person.

What Chronos adds is the ability to calculate not just the angle, but the actual distance from a user to an access point, as determined by multiplying the time-of-flight by the speed of light.

“Knowing both the distance and the angle allows you to compute the user’s position using just one access point,” says Vasisht. “This is encouraging news for the many small businesses and consumers that don’t have the luxury of owning several access points.”

Exploiting the fact that WiFi lets you hop on different frequency channels, the team programmed the system to jump from channel to channel, gathering many different measurements of the distance between access points and the user. Chronos then automatically “stitches” together these measurements to determine the distance.

“By devising a method to rapidly hop across these channels that span almost one gigahertz of bandwidth, Chronos can measure time-of-flight with sub-nanosecond accuracy, emulating with commercial WiFi what has previously needed an expensive ultra-wideband radio,” says Venkat Padmanabhan. a principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. “This is an impressive breakthrough and promises to be a key enabler for applications such as high-accuracy indoor localization.”

That said, getting an accurate time-of-flight with this method still isn’t easy, due to three sets of delays that happen during the transfer.

First, when you wirelessly send a piece of web data, there is a delay in detecting the presence of the “packet” that is hard to distinguish from the actual time-of-flight. To account for it, the team exploits the fact that WiFi uses an encoding method that transmits bits of packets on several even smaller frequencies.

Secondly, if you’re indoors the WiFi signals can bounce off walls and furniture, meaning that the receiver gets several copies of the signal that each experience different times-of-flight. To identify the actual direct path, researchers developed a mechanism to algorithmically determine the delays experienced by all of these copies. From there, they can identify the path with the smallest time-of-flight as the direct path.

Lastly, the team’s channel-hopping approach leads to one other complication: every time Chronos hops to a new band, the hardware resets, adding a delay known as a “phase offset.” To address this the team used the fact that in WiFi, you get an acknowledgement back for each data packet that your phone sends. The team uses these acknowledgements to intelligently cancel out the phase offsets.

The success of Chronos suggests that WiFi-based positioning could help for other situations where there are limited or inaccessible sensors, like finding lost devices or controlling large fleets of drones.

“Imagine having a system like this at home that can continuously adapt the heating and cooling depending on number of people in the home and where they are” says Katabi. “Eliminating the need for cooperation between WiFi routers opens up many exciting new applications for localization.”

Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities?

For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University have been conducting a study to determine whether tablet computers loaded with literacy applications could improve the reading preparedness of young children living in economically disadvantaged communities.

At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference this week, they presented the results of the first three deployments of their system. In all three cases, study participants’ performance on standardized tests of reading preparedness indicated that the tablet use was effective.

The trials examined a range of educational environments. One was set in a pair of rural Ethiopian villages with no schools and no written culture; one was set in a suburban South African school with a student-to-teacher ratio of 60 to 1; and one was set in a rural U.S. school with predominantly low-income students.

In the African deployments, students who used the tablets fared much better on the tests than those who didn’t, and in the U.S. deployment, the students’ scores improved dramatically after four months of using the tablets. "The whole premise of our project is to harness the best science and innovation to bring education to the world’s most underresourced children," says Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and first author on the new paper. "There’s a lot of innovation happening if you happen to be reasonably affluent — meaning you have regular access to an Internet-connected computer or mobile device, so you can get online and access Khan Academy. There’s a lot of innovation happening if you’re around eight years old and can type and move a mouse around. But there’s relatively little innovation happening with the early-childhood-learning age group, and there’s a ton of science saying that that’s where you get tremendous bang for your buck. You’ve got to intervene as early as possible."

Breazeal is joined on the paper by Maryanne Wolf and Stephanie Gottwald, who are, respectively, the director and assistant director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts; Tinsley Galyean, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and executive director of Curious Learning, a nonprofit organization the researchers created to develop and deploy their system; and Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University.

Self-starting

The concentration on early literacy reflects Wolf’s theory, popularized in her book "Proust and the Squid," that the capacity to read, unlike the capacity to process spoken language, is not hard-coded into our genes. Consequently, early training is essential to establishing the neurological machinery on which the very capacity for literacy depends.

The researchers’ system consists of an inexpensive tablet computer using Google’s Android operating system. Wolf and Gottwald combed through the literacy and early-childhood apps available for Android devices to identify several hundred that met their quality criteria and addressed a broad enough range of skills to lay a foundation for early reading education. The researchers also developed their own interface for the tablets, which grants users access only to approved educational apps. Across the three deployments, the tablets were issued to children ranging in age from 4 to 11.

"When we do these deployments, we purposely don’t tell the kids how to use the tablets or instruct them about any of the content,dz Breazeal says. DzOur argument is, if you’re going to be able to scale this to reach 100 million kids, you can’t bring people in to coach kids what to do. You just make the tablets available, and they need to figure everything out from then on out. And what we find is, the kids do it. When we first did Ethiopia, we had all these protocols and subprotocols. What if it’s a week and they haven’t turned them on? What if it’s three weeks and they haven’t turned them on? Within minutes, the kids turn them on. By the end of the day, they’ve literally explored every app on the tablet."

Results

The Ethiopian trial, which the researchers conducted in collaboration with the One Laptop per Child program, involved children aged 4 to 11 who had no prior exposure to spoken English or any written language. After a year using the tablets, children were tested on their understanding of roughly 20 spoken English words, taken at random from apps loaded on the tablets. More than half of the students knew at least half the words, and all the students knew at least four.

When presented with strings of Roman letters in a random order, 90 percent could identify at least 10 of them, and all the children could supply the sounds corresponding to at least two of them. Perhaps most important, 35 percent of the children could recognize at least one English word by sight. These figures roughly accord with those of children entering kindergarten in the U.S.

In the South African trial, rising second graders who had been issued tablets the year before were able to sound out four times as many words as those who hadn’t, and in the U.S. trial, which involved only 4-year-olds and lasted only four months, half-day preschool students were able to supply the sounds corresponding to nearly six times as many letters as they had been before the trial.

Since the trials reported in the new paper, Curious Learning has launched new trials in Uganda, Bangladesh, India, and the U.S. In all, 2,000 children have had the opportunity to use the tablets.

Currently, the team is concentrating on analyzing data collected from the trials. Which apps do the children spend most time with? Which apps’ use correlates best with literacy outcomes? Curious Learning is also looking for partners to help launch larger pilot programs, with 5,000 to 10,000 children.

"There’s a core scientific question, which is understanding what the nature of this child-driven, curiosity-driven learning looks like," Breazeal says. "We need to understand how they learn, which is a fundamentally social process, where they explore the tablet together, they discover things through that exploration, and then they talk-talk-talk-talk, and they share those ideas. So it’s a profoundly social, peer-to-peer-based learning process. We have to have create a technology and an experience that supports that process."

Team wins prize for bringing rentable refrigeration to India’s food supply chain

A team of MIT and Harvard University students won the first-ever MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize on Thursday night for an idea to make India’s temperature-controlled supply chain for food — or “  cold chain”  — more affordable.

The team, GoMango, is developing smart, modular, refrigerated shipping boxes that can be rented out individually to cutcosts and save billions of dollars in spoiled perishable goods in India. This innovation earned GoMango the first-place prize of $12,000 at the competition, which was organized by the student-run MIT Food and Agriculture Club to support early-stage ventures focusing on food and agriculture sustainability.

For the competition, six finalist teams pitched ideas to a panel of judges from academia and industry, and a capacity crowd, in the Samberg Conference Center. A team of MIT students, Safi Organics, earned the $8,000 second-place prize, and a team of MIT and Harvard University students, Ricult, won a $5,000 third-place prize. Other inventions included edible eating utensils, nanosensors for plants, and robotic hay compactors.

Competition co-sponsors were MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel W orld Water and Food Security Lab (J-W AFS) and Rabobank, one of the largest banks in the world that caters specifically to food and agribusiness clients.

Keynote speaker was Brent Overcash, who directs Emerging Technologies for the Food + Future coLAB, a collaboration between Target, the consulting firm IDEO, and the MIT Media Lab.

Rentable cold chain

In GoMango’s pitch, team member and MIT alumnus Naren Tallapragada ’13, now a PhD student at Harvard University, said refrigerated trucks are rare in India, because they’re too expensive for producers and wholesalers to rent or own. By some estimates, there are as many refrigerated trucks in Boston as there are in the whole country of India.

With shipping routes sometimes spanning hundreds of miles in very hot temperatures, nearly 40 percent of India’s fruit and vegetables spoil before reaching customers, Tallapragada said: “This means hundreds of millions of people are malnourished [and] billions of dollars are wasted.” 

To address the issue, GoMango invented refrigerated boxes that can be collapsed, and stored in partnering cold-storage warehouses. Food producers and wholesalers can rent exactly as many boxes as needed and stack them on traditional dry trucks, which cost roughly $100 less than refrigerated trucks.

Boxes are stuffed with packs filled with innovative phase-change materials, much like giant ice packs. They’re kept frozen until packed with food — such as fruits and vegetables and meats and fish — and liquefy throughout a trip to keep contents cool for up to three days. Each box also connects to the Internet to track location, temperature, humidity, and payment information.

“We think that we can have a great social impact by getting more food to market, affordably and in an environmentally friendly way, thereby doing our part to keep the developing world healthier, wealthier, and a cleaner place,” Tallapragada said. 

GoMango’s prize money will go toward developing commercial prototypes to pilot in India in the coming months. Other presenting team members were Francesco W iedemann, a visiting researcher in the Changing Places group at the MIT Media Lab, and Juan Carrascosa, an MIT Sloan School of Management student.

Advancing food-systems innovation

The prize competition is another in a growing list of MIT initiatives — including J-W AFS, which was launched in 2014 — that caters to students interested in food and agribusiness entrepreneurship, said MIT Food and Agriculture Club President Sarah Nolet, an student in MIT Sloan and fellow in the System Design and Management Program.

“There’s so much interest around food systems innovation, around changing the food systems, and even just understanding it, and there hasn’t been a good place to go to explore that,”   Nolet said. “  With J-WAFS, the Food and Agriculture Club, and now this prize, we’re giving people who are interested some place to hang their hats, get involved, and join our community.” 

The competition started last fall, with a generator event that brought together more than 100 student entrepreneurs to meet and form teams. Dozens of teams then submitted ideas and were winnowed down to nine finalist teams  that were matched with mentors from academia and industry. Mentors worked with the teams for three months to help them develop the final business plan submissions and presentations. 

Judges and organizers then chose six teams to compete on Thursday. The other three competing teams were: Plantae.io, which is developing nanosensors to put on plants to monitor their wellbeing; Food W are, which is developing edible eating utensils; and Iron Goat, which is developing a robotic hay compactor that boosts hay yields.  

In his welcoming remarks, J-W AFS Director John H. Lienhard V, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of W ater and Food, said the prize competition furthers MIT’s longtime mission of promoting agricultural innovation. He pointed to the inscription along the ceiling of MIT’s Lobby 7 that reads: “Established for Advancement and Development of Science its Application to Industry the Arts Agriculture and Commerce.” 

“Our focus on agriculture is literally carved in stone,”  Lienhard said. “The prize tonight continues that tradition, and expands and amplifies [innovation] in food and agribusiness.”

Higher coal use in Asia could increase water stres

Coal burning, despite recent signs of having peaked in China and pledges made at the Paris Climate talks in December, remains the primary source of electric power in Asia. In both China and India, it’s responsible for the lion’s share of human-made sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions, which drive up concentrations of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere. These aerosols not only endanger public health in the region but also contribute to local and global climate change. 

Just how much climate change will depend on Asia’s energy choices in the years and decades to come. At one extreme, economic growth and energy demand in China, India, and other fast-growing Asian nations would lead to rapid increases in coal use, resulting in more significant climate impacts; at the other, Asia would gradually lessen these impacts by shifting from coal to cleaner burning fuels such as natural gas, and low-carbon energy technologies such as wind turbines and photovoltaics. Now a new study in the Journal of Climate assesses the climate’s likely response to aerosol emissions at both extremes, resulting in likely lower and upper bounds for the impact of Asian aerosols on regional surface temperature and rainfall.

According to the study, a high coal-use future — in which today’s emissions of sulfur dioxide and black carbon aerosols from Asia’s industry, energy, and domestic sectors are set to twice their year-2000 values from 2030 to 2100 — would entail significant local and global climate impacts.

The increased aerosol levels would have a large cooling effect throughout the Northern Hemisphere, partially offsetting warming from greenhouse gas emissions (including increased carbon dioxide emissions associated with coal burning, which the study did not model). Significant cooling would also be felt especially in South and East Asia.

“Much of these results are related to the impact of sulfates on clouds, which lowers surface temperatures indirectly by increasing the clouds’ reflectivity,” explains study co-author Chien Wang, a senior research scientist in the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. These aerosols may also lower surface temperatures by reflecting sunlight skyward.

But as they help offset warming, the aerosols would also weaken several major monsoon systems, suppressing precipitation over vast land masses.

“For the high-emissions scenario, we found reductions in rainfall across much of Asia, especially East Asia (including China) and South Asia (including India), and a remote effect leading to a possible increase in rainfall in Australia as well as a suppression of rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa,” says Benjamin Grandey, a research scientist in Wang’s research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. “We see more reductions in rainfall than increases, especially in regions already struggling with water resources.”

To assess climate impacts of the two scenarios, the researchers used a coupled atmosphere-ocean configuration of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) that uses the fifth version of the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM5). Unlike many previous studies, their modeling framework included a three-dimensional, dynamic representation of the oceans that enables more accurate projections of climate responses to aerosols.

The study was funded primarily by the National Research Foundation of Singapore through the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, with additional support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and A*STAR Computational Resource Centre of Singapore.

Learn Web Hosting

You have your new business all established now and you're ready to take the next step and set up a website to tell the online world that you are here and you have something to offer. You found a catchy domain name to call your own , and now ... What to do? Well, the answer is that you need to find web hosting for the site you are going to build. So what does that mean and how do you know what type of web hosting you need ? First let's start with the basics .

Everything is web hosting anyway?

In simple terms , web hosting is renting space on a web server. A website is not just a domain name , it is a collection of files linked together by HTML code to display text and graphics on a computer. For everyone to see this collection of files you 've created, it must be installed on a computer somewhere that has access to the internet. Not just any computer will do, of course . A web server is configured with a special computer program that allows it to receive requests from the internet for the website files it has stored on it and to send those files over the Internet to the computer applicant can show . It looks much like a waiter in a restaurant taking your order and bringing the food you ask the kitchen , hence the name "server" .

To ensure that your files can be accessed by Internet users worldwide , a web server provides other important services as well . First and foremost is the ability to create email addresses based on your domain name and to send and receive emails with them. The Web server also has different types installed on that allow your website to run software programs , create and manage databases , video display , and many other features that you might find useful . Almost any type of computer can function as a web server, but the software is on it making a server.

When you purchase hosting , the monthly fee you pay goes to the maintenance and continuous upgrading of hardware and server software , the cost of maintaining online 24 hours a day , 7 days a week in a secure data center with a powerful and fast internet connection, and pay for the expertise of the people who do all the work . It is quite possible to transform your own home or office computer into a web server if you really want to do , but in most cases it is much cheaper to pay someone else dedicated to provide this service more reliable way is to try to do it yourself .

What types of web hosting are they?

Shared Hosting - Most websites are not huge affairs with hundreds of pages and thousands of files and graphics, and they are targeted to a specific audience , so they will not get as many visitors as the large general sites like Yahoo! that cater to everyone who uses the Internet . As such , the average website therefore will not require all the resources of an entire web server to run . Web servers are designed to be able to manage dozens or hundreds of sites at once because they are powerful machines .

Shared hosting is simply the concept of hosting more than one website on a particular server. More than 95 % of all websites on the Internet are running in a shared hosting environment. Because server resources can be distributed among the clients hosted on it , so can the costs of operating the server, and the universally shared is cheaper than any other type accommodation. Shared hosting packages are generally designed so that each client is assigned a certain amount of each resource , with different payment levels representing different amounts of resources such as disk space, bandwidth , email addresses , and so on . Shared hosting is also known as virtual hosting.

Dedicated Hosting - If you have a large powerful website that attracts many visitors and tend to monopolize the resources , then you may want to have a web server all to yourself . Some companies also prefer the added security of not having to share the server with anyone else who could do something accidentally or intentionally crashing. Rent use of an entire server is known as dedicated hosting. The web hosting company still owns the machine and the responsibility for maintenance of hardware and software web hosting , but you have more control over the configuration and use of the server. There is also such a thing as semi-dedicated hosting , in which a web server is divided into only a very small number of customers, such as 2-4 , with solid partitions between each to prevent them from interfering with the other. Since the hosting company is still responsible for the maintenance of the server, this type of hosting is also known as managed hosting . For obvious reasons , dedicated hosting always costs more than shared hosting .

Server Co -Location - If you really want complete control over all aspects of your Web server, you might very well choose to buy one and maintain it yourself if you have sufficient knowledge . However , chances are that you do not have the means to keep your server completely safe from power outages, roof leaks , thieves, unwary employees and other risks and keep on Internet broadband fast at any time. You need a data center to provide these services for you. Co -location is the rental of physical security, continuous electrical power and a fast and reliable Internet connection to a server you have. The data center is not responsible for any hardware or software of a collocated server , you are servicing. This can be a cheaper alternative to dedicated hosting if you have the expertise and time to turn yourself a necessary alternative web server .

Some hosts offer UNIX hosting and Windows hosting. What is the difference ?

The terms UNIX hosting and Windows hosting refer to the operating system ( OS) running on the server. Of course the operating system is the software that allows the computer to operate and manage all other hardware and software that are installed . Chances are good that you are reading this on a computer running a version of Windows operating system, the world's most popular operating system for personal computers and business . Other operating systems are growing in popularity of Macintosh and various Linux versions . However, the operating system you use on your computer is not relevant to the type of accommodation you choose. Here are some key features of UNIX and Windows :

Unix Hosting

Most Web servers in the world today run on one of the many variants of UNIX . The UNIX operating system was originally developed by universities for servers and networks, and many different versions have been written by programmers around the world under the open- source protocol , which means that the code of the operating system is openly available for programmers to customize and make improvements. Linux and BSD are the most popular forms of UNIX and come in many varieties, such as Red Hat Linux, Debian, SuSE , and FreeBSD. Most of these different versions (and much of the software that runs on them ) can be obtained for free , making UNIX hosting cheaper for a web host that other operating systems and allows them to offer price lower. UNIX platforms hosting are generally considered stable, secure , fast and powerful . Most web programming applications can be performed by software that is available for UNIX platform. "UNIX hosting" has become a generic term for any platform that is derived from the original UNIX.

Windows hosting

Microsoft has developed its own operating system for servers as a special version of its Windows operating system , Windows Server 2003. It is a commercial product that requires the operator to purchase a license , which increases the cost of running the host and usually results in higher hosting prices. Windows is designed to be user friendly , but it is generally considered to be less powerful and secure than UNIX for operating in a network environment. ASP , ASP.NET and ColdFusion are scripting languages ​​that can not be run on a Windows server , as well as programs for Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server databases. These are popular for certain web programming applications , and if you plan to use to build your site , you 'll need to find a Windows host.

What are some of the words I need to know when I choose a web host ?

Disk space or storage - Because your website is a collection of files available on the Internet for viewing, they must be stored somewhere for retrieval and take up space . Each server has a limited amount of memory on the hard drive to divide and provide hosting customers. Typically , this space is divided into different levels of packages so that the more you pay , the more space you are allowed to store images , web pages , videos and any other files that you want on the hard drive the web server. If your site gets larger than the space you have given, you will need to buy more disk space from the host.

Bandwidth or Data Transfer - Whenever you visit a website and view a page , you can transfer a copy of the files that make up this page on the Internet from the web server on your computer. If the page you are viewing consists of an HTML file that is 3KB in size and three pictures of 47KB , 100KB and 250KB , then you just used 400KB of bandwidth or data transfer , because c ' is the total amount of data that you have downloaded from the web server to view this page. Bandwidth is a commodity like disk space that the host has to buy his Internet service provider , so it is too divided and delivered to customers in specific quantities. Amounts of bandwidth are usually measured in gigabytes ( GB) , because if only one copy of your files must be stored on the server, thousands, even millions of copies can be downloaded for consultation. If your site is viewed times the amount of bandwidth you are allowed can manage your site can be disabled until the next billing period starts , or you can simply be billed for the excess amount used , according to the policies your home . You can always buy more bandwidth that increases your site traffic web.

Uptime - In an ideal world, every Web server is operational and offer your web pages in the world 24 hours a day , 7 days a week , forever . However , Web servers are computers, and like any other computer, things happen for them to fail , or they become old and obsolete and require maintenance and repair . When a host gives you an uptime guarantee of 99%, they say that the web server will be operational for 99 % of the billing period. If they fail to meet this guarantee , most hosts will reimburse some of your money depending on the amount of excess downtime they experienced.

Traffic statistics - statistics programs traffic websites trying to track visitors to your website. They can track the number of times your site is visited , how many visitors were unique and how to return more than once , the pages were the most popular , where visitors came to your site from , what search terms they used in search engines , and many other types of information that may be helpful in marketing your website to a target audience . These statistics can be displayed in tables , charts and tables per hour, day , week, month or year. Some statistics programs are better than others and offer more types of data , better displays, easier navigation and other useful features. Most web hosts now offer some sort of traffic statistics software with hosting packages .

CGI Scripts - Many web hosts offer a variety of free CGI scripts with their packages. These are things like gold hit counters , books, and other programs as messaging , message boards that allow your website to perform functions commonly sought . You can use those to your host offers or you can download and run custom CGI scripts written by yourself or someone else to perform various tasks such as driving a customer information for investigation or processing produce an automatic bid prices . Most CGI scripts are written in common programming languages ​​such as Perl , PHP or ASP .

You could spend a lot of time trying to learn everything there is to know about web hosting, but if you 've read this far , then you should be armed with the basic knowledge you need to understand what different web hosts offer . Your next task is to understand what you need and go out and find a host that wants to give it to you at a great price !

What Web Hosting and How does it work?

Web hosting is the practice of the business of providing space and bandwidth on a high-powered computer server that is connected to the Internet at high speed. The accommodation maintain large computer networks web servers in a high-power known as a data center physical location companies. These servers are connected to a very fast Internet connection, and generally redundant. Data centers are the primary and backup power, a fast Internet connection, and a staff of security monitoring.

Web hosting companies provide a share of disk space and bandwidth available to a customer for a monthly fee. Once the client is signed, they can upload files to their personal space on the web server and the information is visible to anyone interested on the Internet. The monthly charges for the web hosting company charges is much less than it would cost to run a server on your own home or a data center running. This is why these companies exist. They take care of all the hardware, software and other technical needs for you.

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Types of accommodation

There are many different types of accommodation on offer, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each type of accommodation has a different purpose.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of accommodation. Shared hosting is a portion of disk space and bandwidth provided to you by the web hosting company on a high-powered server. There are many other hosted on this server websites and the hosting company is likely to have a fairly large number of servers in a data center wide. Server resources are shared by many other sites that are assigned to this computer.

Shared web hosting is the best form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and do not have more than a few thousands of daily visitors to your site.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller web hosting is a popular solution at low cost to start your own web hosting company. There are two types of reseller hosting, private label and reseller services.

The MDD is the best type of reseller plan because it allows you to keep full control over the websites of your customers. Private-label scheme allows the dealer to keep the full monthly payment of web-hosting customer, but the dealer must pay a monthly fee for the largest hosting company for the reseller space. Most accommodation is a private-label reseller can sell, the more profit for them. Private label hosting allows you to host many more sites if you use shared hosting for everyone. This is a great solution for someone who has many sites they need to host a place to save money.

The dealer service plans resell the regular web hosting plans of a large web hosting company, but you get a reduced price to provide customers and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan does not allow control over the websites of clients and you do not keep some of the potential monthly income.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated Web Hosting is the most efficient and economical solution hosting a busy without resorting to buying your own equipment and pay hundreds of dollars per month for a fast connection to the Internet website. The dedicated hosting consists of single server with anyone else hosting on this computer. This allows for more configuration options. Anyone who has a busy find dedicated hosting site is the necessary choice.

Web Hosting Considerations

Wonder about all the other information contained in the web hosting plans? In this section, I will explain the most important considerations in choosing a good web host.

Price

The price of web hosting services is one of the most important. There are many hosting companies out there with cheap hosting packages, but they may be lacking in other areas. Do not let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some out there hosting companies that have great prices and other characteristics are just as good. The price can be one of the most important features of a web hosting plan decisions, but there is much more to consider in choosing a quality web host.

Disk Space / Storage Space

Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a web host gives you to store your files on the Web. The hosting companies these days have plans with disk space is measured primarily in terms of gigabytes, but some still offer plans in the megabytes of storage space. Depending on your needs storage of files, you may need more or less. In general, the more disk space available, the better.

Bandwidth / Transfer data tape

The amount of available bandwidth can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plane. In general, the more bandwidth a hosting company offers the better. This means you can support more traffic to your website as your business grows. Beware of web hosting that offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited companies. While many of them are legitimate offers, there are some out there who are overselling their bandwidth in the hope that the average user will not use much.

Customer Support

In any business, it is very important to provide exceptional customer service. Web hosting is no exception to this. Many hosting companies are available all day and night if you have a problem with your website, but there are some that are only available specific hours of the day. If your site goes down the middle of the night when they are not available, which means loss of income for a company. You must ensure that the web host you choose is always available for support.

Money back

Most web hosting companies provide a money back guarantee of thirty days. Some even provide a long, but be wary of those who offer no money back guarantee. I would not buy web hosting services from a company that does not offer at least a money back guarantee of 30 days, unless they have been proven to be a leader in the industry and have a excellent reputation.

Operating system

An operating system is software that controls the interaction between the user of the computer and the physical hardware of the machine. A large majority of all websites on the Internet run on the Linux operating system. Linux is generally much more stable than Windows. Stability is essential in the management of a website. For this reason, I prefer to host my web sites on the Linux operating system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can only meet, but there are always alternatives to these requirements.

Protection

A good web hosting company will have a regular schedule to back up data on all Web servers. In most cases, the data is saved, the better. At the very least, a web hosting company should save the files of the web site every day.

Panel

The control panel is the point of contact the administrator of the website will be between the host server and their own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a control panel interface well organized and easy to use. My favorite control panel is cPanel, which is one of the main panels of web hosting control there today. Plesk is another good, and many companies will create their own control panel that you can use. Most web hosting companies provide a link to a demo of the control panel they use with their hosting plans. The control panel used is a matter of preference, but it should be user friendly.

Email

Email is an essential part of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will give you more e-mail addresses and more space to contain e-mail you will ever need. What you need to watch out for is companies that have decided to be a little more strict on their email accounts and only offer a small number or a small amount of space message.

Uptime

Availability is a term used to describe how often the average Web site hosted by a company is available online. Expect any company to provide 100% availability exact. This is possible due to things such as hardware, software, and power outages. A vast majority of companies are very good with availability, and not guaranteed. It is always a good idea to be aware of the uptimes posted by the company. If it is not at least 99.5%, it is probably not worth hosting with this company.

Statistics

As a webmaster, it is good to know how many visitors you had, where they come from, how long they stay on your site, and how much bandwidth they use. This information is collected by the web server and is placed in a log file. A statistical software reads this data and provide useful information to the webmaster. The information gathered from these logs can be very useful in improving service to viewers of the website.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is a way to get online quickly and downloading files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies will allow their customers to access their web hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is very useful and a great feature to have when you pay for a web hosting account.

Scripting

Since the beginning of the World Wide Web, many scripting languages ​​were created and evolved in dynamic and interactive environment we enjoy today. A scripting language is a way to add functionality to a website, whether it be to calculate numbers or to load information from an external database. Scripting languages ​​have made electronic commerce possible. Some of these languages ​​include PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, VBScript, JavaScript, and Perl. I will not go into the details of these in this article for reasons of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to look for in a web server for them.

Databases

A database is a place to store data that can be used in a variety of ways. The databases are used on the Internet for applications such as shopping carts, message boards and product catalogs. Other databases on the web hosting provider allows you to create, most applications that you can deploy on your web server. The databases are used by the most advanced web master, but the information is available online if you are interested.

Conclusions

Web hosting can be a very difficult decision with thousands of hosting companies out there. It is essential to find a plan that meets your needs and have a good hosting company.

Computer and Keyboard Recycling

Everyone knows that this is a good thing to do to recycle. If you recycle you keep the earth and reusing materials instead of throwing them in a landfill due to laziness or ignorance. Did you know that there are special companies that are made for the recycling of electronic items in particular?

Electronic items most commonly recycled all the computers and keyboards. Just an article, you can contribute greatly to making the world a better place to live. There are so many different metals and plastics involved in the manufacture of electronic products that are harmful to the environment and taking them out of the picture, we can actually reverse the destruction of the earth rather than help to go forward.

Recycling your keyboard and the computer is easy. All you have to do is call a recycler near you that takes electronics and you just give them a time and place to pick it up. You can also drop if you do not want to come pick it up, but it's just an easy solution for you if you have no obligations.

When they take your items, they will be separated from each other in all different categories depending on the material. Plastics, each type of metal, glass and other information into pieces will be sold separately.

If you insist on an old computer because you're afraid of the information out, you need not worry about that at all. All places of electronics recycling sworn never to touch the hard drives or other equipment that contain confidential information. They will tell you their privacy policies that will allow you to feel relaxed while allowing them to manage your property and exclusive.

They will take your information and have safely appropriately. This means that after they pick you, they will give you a tracking number. You will be able to see where your item is at all times and they will even notify you when it is destroyed. It is guaranteed to be destroyed within 48 hours of collection. This means that all data elements are thrown into a shredder and are sure to be irreparable or even recognizable to this question.

A Beginner's Guide to Avoiding Viruses

I've been invaded by a virus! "Getting means getting sick and no one in their right mind wants to be sick a virus. Well, now that computers have become our close friends, it's a shock to learn that foreign bodies too can invade with malicious intent. No, your computer does not get a runny nose or diarrhea. This is a disease that prevents your friend functioning properly, sick in bed, unable. 

Well in nature viruses occur from a power outside of our control. But with computers it's different, humans, mean or ignorant humans are creating these viruses. Why? Usually these are disgruntled people who want to cause havoc on others or companies they believe have hurt for them. In all cases, we must be aware and willing to deal with these debilitating scourges.

There are several approaches to protecting your computer. First, there is the step of awareness. Be aware of how the virus is transmitted. You can catch them from a disk, but in most cases this is because of your messaging system. Check your email address carefully. Be very wary of anything that has an attachment. Make sure it is from and see the title of the e-mail, is this something you expected? Even if it is someone you know, be careful that their computer may be infected and the virus being transmitted without their knowledge.  

Then read the cover message, you can not catch the disease without actually opening the message. Look at the name of the attachment, remember viruses are written to entice you. Beware of free and generally all the people you do not know, as well as messages that sound irrelevant usual style of your contact offers. Delete them immediately. Delete, delete, delete. This will ensure a low risk of infection. You can even send the message to the sender without opening it to ensure it is valid.  

Now for the heavy protection: Virus scanning and anti-virus software, and spares are readily available and used. Some are free, others are obtained for a very low cost. Most software manufacturers offer subscriptions for updating services, which automatically download protection latest viruses.  

There are two main types of virus scanning software: one searches through your entire computer files looking for recognizable viral signatures, the other scans your incoming and outgoing e-mails. Alerts show you when a file should be removed or repaired. If you do get a virus that no software can repair you can send a copy of it to a company like Symantec who will be happy to develop a cure for it.  

The main message here is not too worried about your good friend Mrs. PC getting sick or ill. Humans are above the case and they seem much better suited to fixing their technology they are beating the viruses that attack our physical bodies. If only we could beat a human virus and illness as easily as we solve the problem of the computer disease.