Somali woman stoned to death for adultery

When Jihadists wage their war, it is often women that suffer most.  Some 5,000 women die in honor killings every year, which Islamic extremists declare imperative.
Last Thursday in Somalia, a young woman was stoned to death after being convicted of engaging in out-of-marriage sex.
Residents of Jamama town, 425km south of Mogadishu in Lower Juba region, said that militants loyal to Al-Shabaab carried out the stoning at the town’s main square in late afternoon.
“Many residents were called to attend the execution of the punishment,” a resident who requested anonymity for own safety told Kulmiye, an independent broadcaster in Mogadishu.

“This type of punishments that are compatible with Sharia will be administered,” said the official

He added that Al-Shabaab officials in the town witnessed the stoning.
“The woman admitted having out-of-marriage sex,” said an Islamist official who talked to the crowd after the stoning was completed.
“This type of punishments that are compatible with Sharia will be administered,” said the official
According to residents, the young woman was picked up from one of the neighbourhoods of the town, but there was no trace of the man partner involved in the alleged offence.
The judicial system of the Al-Shabaab is often criticised by rights groups for lack defence attorneys, proper evidences and harsh punishment, hastily meted out.

Can a child have 3 biological parents; scientists say YES

 Is it possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.

Apple may phase out iPad 2 for iPad Mini

Tablet buyers may see the iPad 2 sink away as the iPad Mini prepares to surface, says Evercore Partners analyst Rob Cihra.
Chira said he thinks Apple could phase out the iPad 2 because the company's vision leads toward "clearer product tiers," according to AppleInsider. Apple is expected to unveil the iPad Mini at a launch event on October 23.

Cihra predicts Apple will sell close to 7 million iPad Mini devices in the current quarter, adding up to total iPad sales of 26 million

Launched in March 2011, the 16GB iPad 2 is currently available through Apple at a price of $399 for the Wi-Fi only version and $529 for the Wi-Fi + 3G edition. In contrast, the new iPad starts at a price of $499 for the 16GB Wi-Fi version and shoots up to $829 for the 64GB model with Wi-Fi and 4G.

Google and Wall Street: an uneasy relationship

 Google's poor earnings figures, released prematurely, have not just shaken Wall Street's faith in the search engine, they have affected its confidence in the technology sector as a whole. Facebook stock fell almost four per cent with investors fearing a decline in online advertising revenue but IBM is down 2.6 per cent as well and Apple's shares fell 1.8 per cent.
There has been talk for a couple of years of a 'tech bubble', with investors fearing that the valuations of technology firms can't be sustained in the long term. But Investors, like the general public at large, don't always understand what technology firms are up to and business models for online companies can be murky.

Larry Page

Google's founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, brought Eric Schmidt in to run the company in 2001 because it was feared that Wall Street would consider them - both in their twenties - too young for the role. Page didn't take over as CEO until 2011

The geeks from Silicon Valley might not always be the best people to reassure Wall Street about this either. Google's founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, brought Eric Schmidt in to run the company in 2001 because it was feared that Wall Street would consider them - both in their twenties - too young for the role. Page didn't take over as CEO until 2011.

The challenge for the company now is bigger than convincing Wall Street: it needs to work out how to stop people leaking away from search

Can an online degree really help you get a job?

Time magazine has a great cover story this week on online education.  As the magazine underscores, online degree programs' reputations have taken a beating, thanks to unscrupulous diploma mills and a lack of respect from HR pros. That perception may finally be changing, but it still pays to be careful.

The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school in the United States, has been around since 1976. It has 328,000 students currently enrolled and an estimated 700,000 alumni. It offers more than 100 degree programs at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. As of 2010 it had more than 8,000 recruiters on staff. But until very recently it had no career-counseling service for its graduating students.
That’s finally changed with the school’s new “Let’s Get to Work” initiative announced late last month: a series of online tools designed to help students figure out early on what jobs might be good for them, what employers in those fields are looking for and what skills students need to get the job. The school says it’s been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it’s probably no coincidence that it was excoriated this summer in a Senate report for doing little to help place its graduates in jobs after school. (The school is facing other problems as well: following a 60% fourth-quarter loss in net income for its parent company Apollo Group Inc., Phoenix announced Oct. 17 that it would close 115 locations — a decision that will affect some 13,000 students.) But with the national unemployment rate hovering near 8%, getting a job is exactly why many adults pursue a degree, online or otherwise. The question is: Can an online degree help you land a job at all?

The newest players in the online-education space have no problem with name recognition. Unlike the University of Phoenix, the prestigious universities behind Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Princeton among them — have ironclad academic reputations

An increasing number of students are hoping that the answer is yes. The growth in online education over the past decade has been nothing short of meteoric: a November 2011 report by the Babson Survey Research Group found that more than 6.1 million students took at least one online class during the fall of 2010, a 10% increase over the previous year and nearly four times the number of students taking online courses a decade ago. While some of these students are enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools that also offer certain courses online, many others take online courses through institutions like the University of Phoenix and ITT Technical Institute, which offer a majority of their degree programs over the Internet.

bindersfullofwomen.com rallies women against Romney

What has politics got to do with technology or vise versa.  You don't need to go too far to find out.  If you watched the second US presidential debate, you must have heard that phrase that has now become a buzzword - 'binders full of women'.

It has now become the catch phrase for everything women that Republican candidate Mitt Romney opposes.  Less than two minutes after Romney made the statement, the internet went ablaze.  The fire is yet to be put off.  Try googling the word 'binders' right now and even before you complete the word, Google helps out with the complete phrase.  That's how magnetic the phrase has become.
Critics say Romney’s now infamous “binder full of women” comment perfectly encapsulates why women prefer President Obama by double digits.
The domain name bindersfullofwomen.com was snapped up less than two minutes after the instantly viral phrase left Mitt Romney's mouth on Tuesday night.
The speed race winner was American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC. The group's biggest funder is hedge fund billionaire George Soros, who made a $1 million donation earlier this year.

Critics say Romney’s now infamous “binder full of women” comment perfectly encapsulates why women prefer President Obama by double digits

"We bought it because we could tell it would be a memorable moment from the debate," said Chris Harris, the PAC's communications director. "We were sort of on standby, knowing that Internet memes like this can solidify within seconds."
By Wednesday morning, the PAC has a Tumblr-powered website running at the domain featuring critical news articles and policy briefs about Romney's stance on women's issues.
Romney's tin-eared line -- referring to job candidates he reviewed while holding office in Massachusetts -- became an Internet sensation in record time. A scathing Facebook page drew more than 250,000 'likes' in less than 12 hours, and #BindersFullOfWomen took off like wildfire on Twitter.

A bra that could detect cancer

 Bras can do miraculous things these days (thank you underwire). But can they detect cancer?

That's the claim for First Warning Systems new bra, equipped with a series of sensors embedded in the cups that pick up temperature changes in breast tissue and, says the Reno, Nev.-based company, provide a thermal fingerprint that can alert doctors to the presence of malignant cells.

According to the company's website, the data generated by the sports bra can predict the presence of breast cancer with 90% specificity and sensitivity. Women wear it for 12 hours to accumulate a stable enough reading of temperature, and the measurements are fed into the company's algorithm that then spits out a result: normal, benign, suspected for breast tissue abnormalities, or probable for breast tissue abnormalities.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Except that the concept of using temperature to detect disease may not be ready for prime time just yet. "Hypothetically, it's conceivable that malignant processes would have a temperature gradient compared to non-malignant tissues," says Dr. Therese Bevers, medical director of the cancer prevention center at the Univ. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "But that gradient may not be very large."

studies have shown it can indicate cancer up to six years before a tumor can be detected by imaging

The idea of using thermograms to ferret out abnormally growing cells is already being used with an imaging device that takes a temperature reading of breast tissue. Tumors need nutrients to grow, and they start to siphon these off from their own blood supply, which they start to build as they amass more and more abnormally growing cells.

All of this metabolic work generates heat, and it's this temperature change that thermograms — and the First Warning bra's sensors — are designed to pick up. But when these profiles, which show "hot" and "cold" spots that are supposed to correlate to cancerous and non-malignant tissue, respectively, are compared to mammogram, MRI and ultrasound tests, their findings don't always match up.

"We see some thermograms come back as abnormal, and we do all kinds of imaging with mammogram, ultrasound and MRI and we follow the women and nothing develops," says Bevers. "And we have women with breast cancers that are not seen on the thermograms.

It's not perfect, and needs to undergo much more rigorous testing to understand what role temperature readings can play in cancer screening."