utorak, 27. prosinca 2011.

Twitter followers

A man is being sued for keeping Twitter followers that he attracted while working for a US mobile news website. Noah Kravitz tweeted for Phonedog as @Phonedog_Noah, but later changed his username when he left the company - taking 17,000 followers with him. The company is now seeking damages of $2.50 (£1.60) per user, per month - a total of $370,000. Mr Kravitz said his former employer had given him permission to continue using the account after he left. He told the New York Times that Phonedog had allowed him to make the account personal as long as he agreed to "tweet on their behalf from time to time". The 17,000 followers, which have since risen to 22,000, had been built up by Mr Kravitz during his four years at the company where he worked as a blogger. However, eight months later the company filed a lawsuit claiming that the account's followers were a customer list, and that it had invested "substantial" resources into building it. In a written statement, it said: "The costs and resources invested by Phonedog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of Phonedog Media. "Companies will now be developing careful ways of deciding if they want to tweet with a conjoined account," said Barbara Cookson, an intellectual property lawyer in the UK. "For ordinary businesses it's quite difficult to gain a following without a strong personality. You have to have a very strong brand for it to work." Ms Cookson argued it is hard to pinpoint a financial value to Twitter followers as it is unclear why they follow a particular account. It's arguable as to whether a Twitter follower list is comparable to a mailing list. "If Phonedog has been using it to run offers, it perhaps is a mailing list that has value." However, intellectual property solicitor Leigh Ellis said Phonedog are likely to have a strong case as the original account featured the company's name. "Let me put it this way, I'd prefer to be on Phonedog's side," he told the BBC. "If you're a follower, who are you following? You might be following Noah, but it's PhonedogNoah. There's a very good argument that the reputation accrued is to the company, rather than the individual."

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

One of the researchers at work on Ngozumpa is Ulyana Horodyskyj, from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US. She is setting up remote cameras to monitor the surface, or supraglacial, pools of water that dot the length of Ngozumpa. Some are small; some are big - the size of several football fields. Already, she has been able to establish just how dynamic these water features can be as they drain and fill in rapid time. The volumes involved can be prodigious. In one event, her cameras spied a supraglacial lake losing more than 100,000 cubic metres of water in just two days. Within five days, the lake had recovered half the volume, fed by waters from higher up the glacier. "Say I came the week before and the week after a lake drained - it would seem like nothing had happened because the lake level would appear to be the same," Ms Horodyskyj told BBC News. The CIRES researcher wants to understand the part these supraglacial lakes play in the erosion of Ngozumpa.
Setting up cameras (Ulyana N. Horodyskyj) Horodyskyj is placing cameras on the cliffs to monitor the water features on the glacier below. Debris-covered glaciers don't melt in the same way as clean glaciers. The rock covering, depending on its depth, will insulate the ice from solar radiation. But remove it - as happens in these fluctuating lakes - and the rate of melting will increase. "The melt rate below the debris covering is about 2cm per day, but on these walls it's 4cm per day. As the lake drains, it exposes the walls which can then calve." Ms Horodyskyj's assumption is that many of the lakes on Ngozumpa's surface are directly connected; and as one of them drains, it's likely that another lake at lower elevation is filling. However, the routes taken by the plumbing system are not always obvious. He's been climbing through the vast channels cut by flowing water inside Ngozumpa. Some of these "ice pipes" open up into spectacular caverns. "It's widely recognised that the glaciers in this region are melting down as a result of global warming, but what hasn't been realised is that they're also being eaten away from the inside as well," he says. Dr Benn visits the conduits after the melt season, after the water has stopped flowing. It would be too dangerous to get inside them at the height of summer. It would seem the channels control where some surface pools and lakes form. It is as if the conduits are the templates. "They're lines of weakness. As the glacier melts down, the roofs of the tunnels fall in and bare ice is exposed," explained Dr Benn. "The rock debris on the surface would normally slow down melting, but the existence of these weaknesses inside Ngozumpa opens it up and makes it melt far faster than would otherwise be the case."
Advertisement. One of his students, Sarah Thompson, is concentrating her study on the end story - the snout of the glacier. This is where the water sent down Ngozumpa is gathering, in the rapidly growing Spillway Lake. At this point the glacier is stagnant; it is not moving. Again, the exposed ice walls that line Spillway Lake calve into the water, raising its level. "We've got quite a short time period - the past 10 years - but it's an exponential growth in area," Ms Thompson says of Spillway's size. "And when we look at other similar lakes in the region, Spillway is on the same sort of trajectory to their development." The Swansea University researcher added: "The expansion is way beyond what you would expect from the rates of ice melting, ablation and even calving. "We need to understand at an early stage the processing rates so that we can predict ahead of time what is likely to happen and, if needs be, go in and mitigate all of this before it becomes such a significant hazard. "In my work, we've been trying to identify where there might be weak points in the moraine dam, and we believe we've identified a few areas where in future you might want to take action." Spillway is not expected to burst out anytime soon. It could be two decades or more before a 6km-long body of water is built up. But the difficulty of working in the region and bringing heavy equipment into the area means a long-term strategy for managing the lake's evolution is essential.

The South Korean polar research

An icebreaker vessel has reached a leaking Russian boat with 32 crew members aboard off the coast of Antarctica, New Zealand officials said. The South Korean polar research vessel reached the 48-meter boat, called Sparta, in Ross Sea, according to a statement from Maritime New Zealand. On Tuesday, the Rescue Coordination Centre of New Zealand said "very good progress" was being made to repair the damaged shell plating on Sparta, which sustained a 30-centimeter (1-foot) hole in the side more than a week ago. A cement box will be secured to the inside of the shell plating, which will make the vessel seaworthy, according to Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator Mike Roberts. Roberts said crew from both ships will attempt to weld a "doubler plate" on the external plating of the ship and another plate inside. Officials said the South Korean vessel, called Araon, is expected to stay with the Sparta during repairs before escorting the Sparta to an ice-free area of open ocean. Both vessels are expected to leave their current location at midnight New Zealand time on Wednesday, the statement said. Roberts said the Araon began transferring fuel from the Sparta to change the Sparta's alignment in an attempt to elevate the damaged area from the water. The affected part was 1.5 (4.9 feet) meters below sea before the fuel transfer, officials said. By Tuesday, a second hole was discovered in the Sparta, "but this has only caused localized flooding in a small, contained space in this area," Roberts said. "It should not affect her making safe passage. This second hole can also not be repaired at her current location."

The economic data

Most of us have an idea of what we want to buy in the January sales - and maybe have budgeted the money in our holiday spending. I know I want to pick up a pair of jeans and some new brogue shoes. I would also like to buy a new espresso maker and maybe some towels. Christmas has been and gone and now in its wake we see a last-minute rush to sell before the end of the year. In the post-Christmas retailing blizzard the shoppers are there and some of them are even spending….. sales are expected to be up by up to 5% on last year’s. In London the shops were exceptionally busy with some stores seeing record numbers. When I went into the Gap store and saw them selling sweaters for £10 ($15), I realized that this was going to be a much harder time for the retailers - desperate to get rid of inventory, raise revenue and try to re-balance what has been a lackluster holiday season. Some won’t make any money at all. Or the horror scenario is that once the initial big-ticket savings have gone, the shoppers will evaporate too. The economic data in the U.S. suggests that the consumers still have some life in them yet. Consumer confidence numbers out this morning put the index at its highest level for eight months. Apparently the spate of improving employment and retailing news in the run up to Christmas has had an effect - Americans are starting to feel better about the situation. It would be seriously dangerous to overstate these developments because it is so very early in the trend. There is still a great deal of uncomfortable news coming out. Just this morning, Sears Kmart, the retailer, announced it was closing 120 stores to save money and focus on more profitable outlets. That will be a reminder that things are still far from normal.

utorak, 29. studenoga 2011.

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