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শুক্রবার, ২ আগস্ট, ২০১৩

Microsoft launches beta for community driven Xbox Enforcement United progra

Microsoft launches beta for community driven Xbox Enforcement United program
by John Callaham

Microsoft clearly wants to give its many Xbox Live members more of a say in how the online service is managed and policed, especially in terms of player conduct. Today, the company announced it has launched a beta for its newly revealed, and community driven, Xbox Enforcement United program.

In a post on the Xbox Wire website,? Glenn Kaleta, the director of Microsoft's Xbox Live Policy and Enforcement, offered up a summary of what the community members who are chosen for the Xbox Enforcement United program will do in cooperation with Microsoft's own Xbox Live enforcement team:?

Members who join the Enforcement United beta will participate by providing their opinions on whether particular content, initially Gamertags, violate the Xbox Live Code of Conduct. These decisions from participants feed into an algorithm our team developed. That algorithm takes several factors into account like how many participants believe there had been a violation and how reliably those individual members? historical decisions aligned with the general consensus. The system can then determine whether or not to apply an enforcement action like requiring a Gamertag change, or if the complaint should be escalated for one of our enforcers to review more closely.

While the program will center just on GamerTag enforcement, Kaleta seems to hint that it could expand to other areas of Xbox Live later. The beta program is currently available for qualified Xbox Live Ambassadors to sign up for, and it will be expanded to more Xbox Live members in the coming months.

Microsoft has already announced that the upcoming Xbox One console will include a Player Reputation score for Xbox Live members that will be based on player input, with the idea to label gamers who display poor sportsmanship while online with a red "Avoid Me" score.

In related news, Microsoft also announced the beta for another new program,?Xbox Community Level?that's designed to offer rewards to particularly helpful?Xbox Live Ambassadors and?Xbox Enforcement United members. Users will gain XP through their actions and "level up" so they can receive "loot" like Xbox Live Arcade games, avatar items and more.

Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft

Source: http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1168265-microsoft-launches-beta-for-community-driven-xbox-enforcement-united-program/

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$25 for $50 worth of protective gear from Speck for your iPhone, iPad, Galaxy and more

Groupon is running a special which gets buyers $50 worth of gear from Speck for just $25. To maximize your discount you?re going to want to get your order as close to $50 as possible. That will yield a discount of 50%. Speck offers protective / stylish cases for the iPhone 5, iPad, iPod Touch, Samsung Galaxy, and even Mac laptops. Groupon deal expires in 6 days or when supplies are exhausted. Limit 1 per customer, but you can purchase a second as a ?gift.?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/9to5macToys/~3/C07NFoV3AZw/

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বৃহস্পতিবার, ১ আগস্ট, ২০১৩

Out-of-control oil leaks at Canadian tar sands site

Ah, the beautiful wilds of western Canada. Rivers, mountains, forests? and out-of-control oil leaks that have already spurted thousands of barrels of toxic bitumen into the environment.

The leaks were caused by an underground blowout at a tar sand project in north-east Alberta run by Canadian Natural Resources that had been certified safe by government regulators. One of the firm's scientists has been reported saying that they are mystified as to what went wrong or how to stop the leak. The company hasn't disclosed how fast the leaks are progressing.

Since May, there have been leaks through surface fissures at four of the firm's sites in the area, killing wildlife and raising questions about how well the safety of tar sands operations can be assessed. The company extracts bitumen by injecting steam into the tar sands at high pressure to melt the bitumen and push it to the surface.

Chris Severson-Baker of the Pembina Institute in Edmonton, Alberta, estimates that the method, known as cyclic steam stimulation, accounts for about 30 per cent of tar sands extraction. There's nothing inherently risky about cyclic steam stimulation, he says, making these leaks all the more worrisome. "If there are cases like this, it shows things are not as predictable as we might like," says Severson-Baker.

In January, Canada's Energy Resources Conservation Board revealed that some 5700 barrels of bitumen had leaked from well sites run by Canadian Natural Resources four years ago. But investigations by the company and regulator couldn't determine what had gone wrong. They suggested that the geology of the area was weaker than they had thought and couldn't contain the pressure from the steam.

The spill could fuel opposition to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from this and similar sites. Opponents worry that the pipeline itself has a high risk of leaking, and that increased extraction will exacerbate carbon emissions. US president Barack Obama has said that he will only give the project the green light if it doesn't add to carbon emissions, and on Saturday he questioned the economic benefits of the pipeline.

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Nfl Jerseys Paypal ---region Attack Will Likely Be Key Into Green These Kinds Of Packers

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Source: forum.bf3blog.com --- Tuesday, July 30, 2013
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Source: http://forum.bf3blog.com/threads/nfl-jerseys-paypal-region-attack-will-likely-be-key-into-green-these-kinds-of-packers.65161/

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বুধবার, ৩১ জুলাই, ২০১৩

ADP: Economy created 200,000 private-sector jobs in July

ADP's count of new private-sector jobs

It's that time of the month again. Come Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce its seasonally adjusted count of jobs added to the U.S. economy in July. Or, actually, how many were added between about June 13 and July 12 since the bureau closes its data collection at mid-month for its report.

Two days before that report appears, however, in conjunction with Moody's Analytics, Automated Data Processing, a "human capital management" company, releases its own seasonally adjusted survey of jobs added or shed in the private sector. And even though it fails time and again to come up with a count that meshes closely with those of the BLS, economists and other analysts eagerly await the results each month. Today's ADP seasonally adjusted count for July? 200,000 new private jobs. That compares with the revised count of 198,000 private jobs added in June, originally reported as 188,000.

One valuable element of the ADP report is that it breaks down jobs gains or losses by the size of the company.

? Small businesses
? ?? 1-19 employees: 51,000
? ?? 20-49 employees: 31,000

? Medium businesses
? ?? 50-499 employees: 60,000

? Large businesses
? ? 500-999 employees: 7,000
? ? 1,000+ employees: 50,000

By sector:

? Construction: 22,000
? Manufacturing: -5,000
? Trade/transportation/utilities: 45,000
? Financial activities: 4,000
? Professional/business services: 49,000

Unlike the ADP report, the BLS survey covers both private- and public-sector jobs. The consensus of a small group of experts surveyed by Bloomberg is that the BLS will report Friday that, seasonally adjusted, 175,000 new jobs were added July. But for the past four-plus years, the consensus has been wrong about as often as the ADP report has.

For some time now, the BLS report itself has come under considerable criticism, including from the former chief of the bureau from 2008-2012, Keith Hall. He first made his criticisms publicly known last October.

More analysis of the job report can be read below the fold.

It's not a conspiracy, as former GM CEO Jack Welch would have it, nor BLS statisticians distorting the numbers themselves. Rather it is, as I?and other critics with far better credentials?have said for several years, a question of emphasis, of formula and of the bureau's presentation. All that encourages media outlets to focus on two numbers, the headline numbers, pretty much to the exclusion of the wealth of other data included in the BLS report. Those two are the number of payroll jobs businesses report they have created (again, seasonally adjusted by formula) and the unemployment rate.

But as we critics have repeatedly noted, and Keith Hall now concedes, the numbers are tallied in such a way that it's too easy for one to be considered employed and too hard to be considered unemployed. For instance, if you report to the BLS surveyors that you worked one hour a week, you are counted as employed. If you still want a job but you've been turned down so many times you've given up looking for more than a year, you aren't counted at all. You're considered out of the labor force altogether. And that skews the headline numbers.

Simply stated, if there are 1,000 people in the labor force and 100 of them aren't working, the unemployment rate is 10 percent (100 ? 1,000 = 0.10). But if 50 of those 1,000 job seekers stop looking for work out of frustration, they are considered no longer in the labor force, which now clocks in at 950. The unemployment rate thus falls to 5.3 percent (50 ? 950 = 0.53).

A rate that falls from 10 percent to 5.3 percent makes for a good headline. But it doesn't make for a good economy if those 50 drop-outs still want a job but are too discouraged by rejections to keep looking for one.

And that, as Keith Hall said in an interview with the New York Post earlier this month, is what's been happening over the past several years. Just as many critics have been saying for years. We've seen a steep drop since the Great Recession begain in the "labor-force participation rate," which is the proportion of the population that is in the labor force, and the "employment-population ratio," which is the proportion of the population that is employed.

Result: The count of the jobless is "artificially low," perhaps 3 percentage points too low, according to Hall. Since the official unemployment rate is currently 7.6 percent, Hall puts the "real" rate at 10.6 percent. Stated another way, instead of 11.8 million being unemployed, 16.5 million are.

Add in those who work part-time jobs even though they want full-time jobs, and underemployment plus unemployment ratchets up the numbers to at least 23 million and probably closer to 25 million.

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/31/1227871/-ADP-Economy-created-200-000-private-sector-jobs-in-July

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How Nature Is Inspiring a New Breed of Robotic Design

Some of our greatest inventors have looked to nature for inspiration. So it's no coincidence that the earliest known designs for what would eventually become the modern airplane were all based on birds. Or why we may one day have nearly indestructible armor inspired by seahorses. This type of design, called biomimicry, is what's driving such rapid advancements in the field of robotics, among many other disciplines. Here's the best animal aping science has come up with yet.

Chillingo Launches Iron Force for iPhone and iPad

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