Monday, June 24, 2013

Apple hires former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to boost environmental efforts

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Apple hires EPA veteran Lisa Jackson to boost its environmental efforts

We're used to Apple's CEO teasing product strategies at D Conferences, but not staffing changes. And yet, here we are: Tim Cook has revealed at D11 that former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is joining Apple to coordinate the firm's drive toward eco-friendliness. While there are few specifics at this stage, including Jackson's title, we know that she'll report directly to Cook. There's certainly no shortage of tasks for her to handle: along with Apple's shift toward renewable energy sources, she also has to worry about the environmental impact of the products themselves.

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Tim Cook talks about 'the future of iOS / OS X' Ive, Cue have been working on

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Tim Cook talks about 'the future of iOS OS X' Ive, Cue have been working on

During an interview tonight at the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a few references to what we can expect at his company's WWDC 2013 event in a few weeks. As expected, he mentioned we'll see the future of iOS and OS X revealed there, and directly referenced the recent management shakeup. Craig Federighi is running both teams, and Cook mentioned designer Jony Ive has been "really key" to this version of iOS. He left it up to interviewer Kara Swisher to decide if the changes made are as dramatic as have been reported, stating only that collaboration has been enhanced, with an "amped up" intersection of hardware, software and services.

Another name dropped is that of Eddy Cue, who is busy heading up work on services since Scott Forstall's departure. We'll have to wait until WWDC to find out the fruits of the various executives' labor but Cook did leave us with this to chew on: "The whole concept was to tighten the groups even more, so we could spend more time finding magic in intersections. Seven months later, give or take, I think it has been an incredibly great change."

Follow along with our D11 liveblog right here.

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Watch Tilda Swinton’s Hair Blow in the Cannes Wind

During the Cannes Film Festival's Only Lovers Left Alive photo call on Saturday, Tilda Swinton's hair was blown around in the cool, surfside breeze. Her artfully cropped cut, which usually has a tousled flair to it, got kicked up to Andy Warhol's mussed-up heights. If only her stylist had used a bit more mousse or even a dollop of Bumble and bumble's mold-able gel, then maybe the actress would've had a better time enduring the elements. But even without the product, this look obviously still works for Tilda. Because nothing is weird on her.


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MediaTek unveils quad-core MT8125 processor for budget tablets

MediaTek Introduces New Quad-Core Application Processor for Fast-Growing Tablet Market

The new Application Processor completes MediaTek's multi-core processor product portfolio, delivering a significant difference in computing and multimedia performance

HSINCHU, Taiwan, May 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, today announced the availability of the new quad-core application processor -- MT8125 designed for the fast growing global tablet markets. The new tablet platform is an extension of the company's highly successful quad-core portfolio. It integrates a power-efficient quad-core Cortex™- A7 CPU subsystem with speed up to 1.5GHz, PowerVR™ Series5XT Graphics that delivers compelling multimedia features and sophisticated user experiences. To simplify product design and speed time-to-market, the MT8125 supports 3G HSPA+, 2G EDGE and Wi-Fi versions, all of which are pin-to-pin compatible, allowing device manufacturers to easily expand their portfolios with a full range of tablets by leveraging the existing or planned design requiring no additional rework.

Inheriting MediaTek's technology breakthrough of quad-core SoC platform and high-end multimedia capabilities, the MT8125 incorporates premium multimedia features, supporting up to Full HD 1080p video playback and recording, 13MP camera with integrated ISP and Full HD (1920 x 1200) displays. The new tablet SoC also delivers ground breaking visual quality powered by the leading picture quality technology -- MiraVision™, derived from MediaTek's extensive experience in the Digital TV market.

The MT8125 includes full support for MediaTek's leading 4-in-1 connectivity combo that converges Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM, bringing highly integrated, best-in-class wireless technologies and expanded functionality to high-performance multimedia tablets. The MT8125 also provides support for Wi-Fi certified Miracast™ which makes multimedia content sharing between devices easier.

"During the last two years, application processors used in tablets have taken a fast evolution from single-core 1GHz to quad cores, clocking over 1.5GHz. Competition will force chipset vendors to maintain pace -- by implementing more advanced features while reducing the system cost by increasing the level of integration*," said Gartner Research Director Roger Sheng.

"MediaTek's team has worked closely with Lenovo to integrate their solutions into our design process, helping us accelerate the development and introduction of new, innovative tablets. In turn, this allows us to fulfill our commitment to delivering the outstanding user experience our customers demand. The tablet market is moving fast, and Lenovo aims to be at the forefront of tablet innovation. MediaTek helps us do that," commented Wayne Chen , vice president and head of mobile business unit for Lenovo.

"We're confident that our comprehensive reference designs will be the industry benchmark, particularly benefiting the mid-to-high-end tablet market. It is an innovative, cost-effective and definitely faster time-to-market solution," said Joe Chen , GM of Home Entertainment Business Unit, MediaTek. "By taking advantage of our strengths in the multimedia field, mobile communications and multi-screen technologies, we offer a complete multi-core processor family for smartphones and tablets, enabling a significant difference in performance and power efficiency - all while ensuring seamless streaming performance across the array of devices when users are consuming entertainment and information."

The MediaTek quad core tablet SoC is now being widely adopted by MediaTek's global customers including Lenovo IdeaTab S6000 series.

*Source: Gartner report "Competitive Landscape: Application Processor Providers for Tablets, Worldwide" Roger Sheng , Amy Teng , Mark Hung 19 April 2013


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Microsoft and GlacierWorks team up to bring Everest to your screen

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Microsoft and GlacierWorks team up to bring Everest to your screen

GlacierWorks, founded by renowned mountaineer David Breashears, has joined forces with Internet Explorer to put the world's highest peak at your fingertips with Everest: Rivers of Ice. The exploration platform works in any browser, but it's specifically optimized for IE 10's touch-based technology. In addition to bringing the Himalayas to your screen, Microsoft is using the project to show off the potentiality of its Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) interface, cooked up by the the teams at Microsoft Research in both India and Redmond. Using RIN, developers can design nonlinear narratives that weave together different types of multimedia, like multitouch interactive maps with embedded video, gigapixel panoramas and data visualizations. GlacierWorks' project incorporates all of these, as it allows you to explore Everest's valleys while learning about glacier activity and climate change in the Himalayas. If a trip to Nepal is out of your budget, you can watch a preview in the video after the break.

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Reproductive Coercion: When Men Sabotage Birth Control

Lindsay Clark, M.D., couldn't figure out why her patients were getting pregnant. An obstetrics and gynecology resident in Rhode Island, she was treating women who very recently had been pregnant, or had come to her with the opposite intent. “I wondered why women were getting pregnant so soon after they came to me for birth control counseling,” she told the Cut. “I became interested in the idea that women might not have as much control over their birth control as they think.”

Surveying 641 women who received routine ob-gyn care at Providence’s Women and Infants Hospital, Clark found that 16 percent had received unwelcome pressure to get pregnant. Their boyfriends and partners made it hard for them to use birth control — poking holes in condoms or hiding their pills — or threatened to leave or harm them if they didn’t get pregnant.

If you don’t hear much these days about the stereotypical gold digger who lies about being on the pill to ensnare a man into marriage or eighteen years of child support payments, that may be because doctors are now being told to look for just the opposite: The woman whose partner sabotages her birth control. She’s not so hard to find.

Early this year, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued a committee recommendation urging ob-gyns to screen patients for these behaviors, collectively known as reproductive coercion. Whether women were in for an annual exam, a pregnancy test, or a second trimester visit, it recommended asking questions like, “Does your partner support your decision about when or if you want to become pregnant?”

The ACOG’s strategy reflects a growing body of research that identifies reproductive coercion as a unique form of domestic or intimate partner violence, and offers an explanation for the high rates of unintended pregnancies among women in abusive relationships. Increasingly, birth-control sabotage is viewed as a tool not for baby-crazed female stalkers, but for a class of predominantly male abusers who want to exercise control over their partner’s body, make her dependent upon them, or secure a long-term presence in her life.

One of the subject’s leading experts, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh's chief of adolescent medicine Elizabeth E. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., began looking into the phenomenon less than a decade ago, after seeing a 15-year-old patient who said her boyfriend only used condoms some of the time. Rather than asking whether the boyfriend refused her request to use condoms, she assumed the patient needed to be educated about birth control. Two weeks later, the girl was in the emergency room with a severe head injury. “Personally, it was incredibly destabilizing,” Miller recalled. “It was like, ‘How could I have missed this?” Later, she interviewed girls who were known to have been in violent relationships for a 2007 paper on the topic. “A quarter of them said, ‘He was trying to get me pregnant.'”

In Miller’s 2010 study, one of the largest on reproductive coercion to date, 15 percent of 1,300 women who visited federal- and state-subsidized California family-planning clinics had their birth control sabotaged. One in five had been urged by a boyfriend not to use birth control, or told by a boyfriend he would leave her if she wouldn’t get pregnant. A larger portion of respondents, 35 percent, who reported intimate partner violence (IPV) also reported birth-control sabotage.

Because Miller’s study examined low-income-friendly clinics — and because domestic violence disproportionately affects low-income women — some have conjectured that reproductive coercion is a classed issue. But Dr. Clark’s survey, which looked at a general population of patients, with and without private insurance, suggests birth-control sabotage and pregnancy coercion happen at a similar rate across socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. In her study, the single highest risk factor for reproductive coercion was being unmarried and sexually active.

Miller’s co-author Rebecca Levenson, a senior policy analyst for Futures Without Violence, said she expects more and diverse women will come forward as information about reproductive coercion spreads and women recognize it as a kind of abuse. “Naming something is powerful,” she said. But first, she hopes the research will inform the many doctors who are in a position to directly intervene and reduce the reproductive harm facing IPV victims — be it an unwanted pregnancy, an expensive abortion, or the unhappy extension of a bad relationship — but don’t know to ask. Harm-reduction strategies range from offering birth control or emergency contraceptives in plain packaging to switching women to a stealthier method, like Depo Provera hormone shots or an IUD with the strings clipped.

Levenson described a 17-year-old she interviewed whose boyfriend claimed the condom broke six times in a row before she sought out Depo Provera for herself. This was before reproductive coercion was widely discussed, she said, but “Imagine how powerful it would be if when she went to the clinic the clinician would say, ‘Hey, you’ve come in for emergency contraceptive three times. Are you at all worried about that?’”

When Futures Without Violence took their findings to Eve Espey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of New Mexico and an author of the ACOG’s committee opinion, she was “totally embarrassed,” she said. “I’ve always asked patients about intimate partner violence, but I had not asked specifically about reproductive coercion,” she told the Cut. “I was amazed that a seasoned ob-gyn like I am was not aware of that as an entity.”

Once she became aware, she wasn’t surprised how common it was among her patients. In addition to the IUD and the shot, in some cases Espey recommends patients switch to a non-hormonal IUD because “there are some men who count the days of women’s periods,” which can be fewer if she’s on hormonal birth control. “When people have power and control needs, they will seek the information,” she explained.

Citing the high rate of response to her survey, Dr. Clark told the Cut that patients are equally quick to identify reproductive coercion once aware of its existence. “In my practice, they say, ‘Oh, I’ve never really thought about it like that, but, yeah, I do get pressure,'” she said. “Women want to talk about it.” Finally, they will have someone with whom they can.


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Best Bet: MINKPINK Darkness Dress

For most of the country, the next few days are shaping up to comprise the first real heat wave of the season. While the initial burst of warmth is welcome, by day four you're probably scrambling for the lightest, airiest options in your closet. This easy-to-wear sundress from MINKPINK fits the bill for even the hottest of days. Skimpy enough to let your skin breathe and featuring a flattering sweetheart neckline, throw it on when you require the least amount of fabric skimming your skin. And should you require more coverage for the office, try it with a black blazer or cardigan for a work-friendly solution.

MINKPINK Darkness sundress, $80 at Shopbop


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