Experts have been promising for decades to put a robot in everyone's home - and finally robots are beginning to make the transition from specialist to everyday use.
Spencer Kelly discovers the similarities between robots used for cleaning and those used by soldiers in Afghanistan for a very different purpose.
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"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."
Many technology experts, industry peers and other admirers have been quick to add their own tributes.
"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
"By building one of the planet's most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.
"By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.
"The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.
"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor.
"Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."
"For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honour. I will miss Steve immensely.
"Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives."
"All of us would be touched every day by products that he was the creative genius behind, so this is very sad news and my condolences go to his family and friends."
"Tonight, America lost a genius who will be remembered with Edison and Einstein, and whose ideas will shape the world for generations to come.
"Again and again over the last four decades, Steve Jobs saw the future and brought it to life long before most people could even see the horizon.
"In New York City's government, everyone from street construction inspectors to NYPD detectives have harnessed Apple's products to do their jobs more efficiently and intuitively."
Steve Jobs is credited with revolutionising the way people listen to music "Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.
"His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed, and the culture he defined.
"Steve was such an 'original,' with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era. Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started."
"He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it."
"VISIONARIES are always called CRAZY in the beginning. A VISIONARY sees things that everybody else says is IMPOSSIBLE, sees a World that People can't invision (sic) - MAC, IPOD, IPAD, IPHONE, ITUNES and PIXAR. I have nothing but Love for Mr. Jobs and Apple, they have always given me and my films L-O-V-E."
"'Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose', as Steve Jobs said in 2005."
"Steve lived the California Dream every day of his life and he changed the world and inspired all of us."
"Thank you for revolutionising the way we listen to music. Your vision will not be forgotten."
Industry colleagues and rivals flocked to pay their compliments for and respect to Steve Jobs, including the founder of Twitter, Dick Costolo, AOL's founder, Steve Case, the chief executive of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, the chief executive of Dell, Michael Dell and the chairman of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger.
Other tributes (via Twitter) included praise for the way Steve Jobs changed the technological landscape:
"Thank you, Steve Jobs, for making technology a delight to use, instead of a necessary evil."
"The world pauses their iPods and rushes to their MacBooks and iPhones to confirm the news."
"3 Apples changed the World, 1st one seduced Eve, 2nd fell on Newton and the 3rd was offered to the World half bitten by Steve Jobs."
Apple fans were invited to share their thoughts, memories and condolences by sending messages to rememberingsteve@apple.com.
And social networking groups were calling for iPhone vigils in public parks across the United States.
The Bush administration issued guidelines yesterday advising physicians and hospitals that under a 2002 law they are obligated to care for fetuses "born alive" naturally or in the process of an abortion, and medical providers could face penalties for withholding treatment.
The law, signed by President Bush nearly three years ago, conferred legal rights on fetuses "at any stage of development." It specifies that a fetus that is breathing, has a beating heart, a pulsating umbilical cord or muscle movement should be considered alive and entitled to protection under federal emergency medical laws and child abuse statutes.
Several physicians interviewed yesterday said that definition appeared overly broad, as muscle twitching can occur after death.
Initially, the Department of Health and Human Services did not see the need to issue guidance on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. But shortly after his confirmation in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said he "received several inquiries on whether" the department was planning to develop regulations.
"As a matter of law and policy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will investigate all circumstances where individuals and entities are reported to be withholding medical care from an infant born alive in potential violation of federal statutes for which we are responsible," Leavitt said in yesterday's press release.
Leavitt's aides refused to say who made the inquiries or whether the government had received any complaints of abuse or neglect involving a just-born or aborted fetus.
"I don't think I'm going to comment on whether we've had any," said Dennis Smith, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency has jurisdiction over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which guarantees medical screening and stabilization for any patient regardless of their ability to pay.
In a telephone briefing with reporters, Smith refused to elaborate on the definition of "alive" or to describe specific cases in which doctors would be legally required to treat a "baby," in his words.
He said the memos sent to state and local officials overseeing hospital regulation and child protection laws were "reminders of the responsibilities of hospitals to protect the rights of all individuals."
David Grimes, a licensed obstetrician/gynecologist who previously worked for the abortion surveillance division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the act and yesterday's instructions were medically unnecessary.
"I don't see this as a big issue; physicians are going to do what's appropriate," said Grimes, who now practices in North Carolina. "It's all rhetoric from persons with political views they want to advance."
He said the act's definition of alive is "silly," given that it implies a fetus miscarried at 14 or 16 weeks "with no chance of survival" would be legally identified as a living person. Most medical experts agree that a fetus delivered before 23 weeks has little chance of survival, he said.
Some anti-abortion leaders, however, said yesterday's clarification is important.
"The 2002 law and today's actions by the agency were both badly needed, because there are those in our society who have convinced themselves that some newborn infants -- particularly those born alive during abortions, or with handicaps -- are not really legal persons," said Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee.
HHS officials distributed news of its decision to advocacy groups before the media briefing.
The most significant impact of the 2002 law, Grimes said, was a record-keeping change. Previously, a miscarriage before viability was classified as a spontaneous abortion. Under the new provision, it is recorded as a live birth followed by a neonatal death, and parents can claim the child as a tax deduction for that year, he said.The shift in media consumption is accelerating - according to the Newspaper Association of America 43.6 percent of all U. S. internet users visit newspaper websites.
Nielsen’s figures for March show that each of the top three news destination on the Web (MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo!News) individually each drew more than half the unique visitors of the entire newspaper industry. Year-over-year, MSNBC grew 9 percent, CNN 4 percent, and Yahoo!News 16 percent.
The majority of PR professionals are aware of this trend and the need to optimize press releases and news content for search – 75 percent are adding keywords to the headline and body of their news content.
But there is much more to optimizing a release for search.
To help PR people understand the optimization process so that they can reach this online audience, PRESSfeed, a content syndication and social media tool, has developed a free toolbar and instruction sheet that puts all the technical information needed, along with tips, tricks and tools for news optimization, in one convenient place.
The toolbar links to an instruction sheet on the PRESSfeed website that has detailed information about how to optimize a press release for maximum search visibility and pick up. It includes how to do keyword research and spot search trends. It also has all the tools and websites needed to do the steps in the instructions.
The toolbar is available as a free download on the PRESSfeed website
Quotes:
“Optimizing news content for search is no longer a choice,” says Sally Falkow, co- developer of PRESSfeed and the new toolbar. “In the last year the number of people who get their news online has passed the number who read newspapers. The majority of those who do go online for news do a search. We developed this toolbar so that PR and marketing people can have easy access to the tools they need to improve their optimizing skills and reach this online audience.”
“We’ve seen an increasing interest in optimizing press releases,” said Melanie Widmann, Search and Social Media Manager for Marketwire. “We’ve had over a thousand people register for the last two webinars that were geared toward informing as well as helping our clients master this skill. This new toolbar makes it easy to both access technical information and includes many useful tools that PR practitioners can use for press release optimization.”
“It’s very timely, and a welcome innovation,” said Dana Todd, CMO of Newsforce. “Companies like PRESSfeed are making it easier for PR professionals to integrate digital strategies into their normal workflow. It’s helpful to have tools that are uniquely aligned with PR goals and tactics, which are often quite different than marketing and sales.”
"The PressFeed toolbar provides an easy, non-obtrusive tool that I use regularly to prepare, submit and track my clients press across the Internet," stated Mark Moline, Managing Partner at IRTH Communications, LLC in Santa Monica, CA. "The clever integration of Google's search, trend and analytics tools; and, press release optimization and key word selection, makes it easy for me to create a compelling press release that will get the placement my clients need."
"Using the tools offered in PressFeed, a recent press release we disseminated on behalf of a client received a response rate unlike anything we had done previously. We received numerous press inquiries, requests for interviews and a tremendous increase in channel views on the client's YouTube channel," added Moline
Statistics
Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Survey:
? 75% of PR and marketing professionals use keyword in the headline and body of the text
? 38% insert meta tags
The Newspaper Association of America first quarter 2009 audience data release:
? 43.6% of the US Internet population get their news online
? First quarter traffic to newspaper Web sites was reported as 73.3 million unique visitors (average per month) by Nielsen
? Each of the top three news destination on the Web (MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo!News) individually each drew more than half the unique visitors of the entire newspaper industry in March 2009. Year-over-year, MSNBC grew 9 percent, CNN 4 percent, and Yahoo!News 16 percent.
Content syndication and?distribution online is getting a shot in the arm from social bookmarking. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
Heidi Cohen, who teaches in New York University's Masters Program in Direct and Interactive Marketing, says in her ClickZ column that what makes social bookmarking?importnat to marketers is that?it's another cost-effective way to augment search marketing efforts, distribute content, and aid branding.
Savvy marketers who want to take advantage of this new trend are often held back by the technical nature of social bookmarks.? If you are a big corporation with a highly trained IT department, it should be no problem .? But what if you are a small to medium business?? Can you sitll apply these new social media tools to your web content?
Luckily?the explosion of consumer generated media has brought with it a slew of easy to use tools that make it really simple to add content yourself and?encourage your readers to add?and share content too.
Some of these tools, like blog platforms, have the social bookmarkiong links built in.. But?as?Cohen points out, in her article, bookmarking is not just for?bloggers.? You should also add the bookmarking links to?your press releases and other good web content, - such as articles and destination information or product specials and updates..
One way to make the most of all these social media tools is to find a system like PRESSfeed that allows you to
add the content to your site syndicate it in an RSS ?feed tag it for Technorati create a tag cloud offer social bookmarking links so that your readers can? tag and share the content.And it's all as simple as working in Word.
Remember that the success of social? bookmarking depends on the quality of your content.? People won't?save and share boring content.? It has to be well researched and well-written.? And it has to?meet the needs of your audience and be something of value they want to pass along to a friend.
Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, marketing, content syndication, RSS feeds,For the first time since it introduced the Food Guide Pyramid in 1992, the federal government yesterday unveiled a makeover of this well-known icon that emphasizes eating a variety of food, including healthful fat, and underscores the importance of physical activity.
Dubbed the Food Guidance System, the new pyramid sports colorful stripes for each food group from tip to base, rather than the horizontal categories of the old version. It also adds a staircase along one side as a reminder for the chronically sedentary American public to be more active to burn more calories.
The USDA released a new food pyramid that breaks food into six bands of color to emphasize variety. Exercise was also introduced as a component of the new guide. Here is the amount of exercise and food intake recommended based on a 2,000 calorie daily diet.
GRAY: Exercise. Adults should be physically active for at least 30 minutes most days of the week, children for 60 minutes. Sixty to 90 minutes of daily physical activity may be needed to prevent weight gain or sustain weight loss.
ORANGE: Grains. Eat 6 ounces of cereals, breads, crackers, rice or pasta, and make half of them whole-grain products. An ounce is about 1 slice of bread, 1 cup of dry breakfast cereal or 1/2 cup of cooked rice, cereal or pasta. Shown as a wide band to show you should eat more of these foods.
GREEN: Vegetables. Eat 2 1/2 cups daily. Eat more dark-green veggies like broccoli and spinach. Eat more orange veggies like carrots or sweet potatoes. Shown as a wide band.
RED: Fruit. Eat 2 cups daily. Choose fresh, frozen, canned or dried fruit, and go easy on fruit juice. Slightly narrower band.
BLUE: Milk. Drink 3 cups a day. Choose lowfat or fat-free milk, yogurt and other milk products. Shown as a wide band.
PURPLE: Meat and beans. Eat 5 1/2 ounces daily. Choose lean protein. Bake, broil or grill lowfat or lean meats and poultry. Vary proteins by choosing more fish, beans, peas, nuts and seeds. Narrower than the red band.
YELLOW: Oils. Limit fats, sugars and salt. Get most of your fat from fish, nuts and vegetable oil. Limit solid fats like butter, margarine, shortening and lard. Limit salt to about a teaspoon each day. Choose food and drinks low in added sugar. Shown as a sliver compared with the other color bands.
? Graphic: The New Food PyramidThe new image is based on the 2005 U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which were released in January to generally wide acclaim for boosting the importance of fruit and vegetables, whole grains and healthful fat, including nuts and olive oil, and for limiting fare with added sugar, saturated fat and trans fatty acids.
Unlike the old pyramid, the new version is interactive and for now, almost entirely a creature of the Web, a fact that drew criticism yesterday.
The Department of Agriculture, which redesigned the pyramid with the international marketing and public relations firm Porter Novelli launched the new icon on the Web site www.mypyramid.gov.
"MyPyramid is about the ability of Americans to personalize their approach when choosing a healthier lifestyle that balances nutrition and exercise," USDA Secretary Mike Johanns said. "Many Americans can dramatically improve their overall health by making modest improvements to their diets and by incorporating regular physical activity into their daily lives."
The site was so overwhelmed with users yesterday -- an estimated 5.4 million per hour, according to the USDA -- that many people were unable to access it.
A companion Web site -- mypyramidtracker.gov, which offers a database of 8,000 foods and 600 types of physical activity -- was also clogged and unavailable for most of the day. It enables users to electronically log on and keep a record of as much as a year's worth of food intake and physical activity on the Web site. Users can analyze their history by the day, the week, the month or the year to see how it stacks up against the guidelines. For those who are reluctant to register with a government site, there is also a "first look" option to check out the MyPyramid Tracker anonymously.
"The fact that almost all the information is on the Web is a lost opportunity, because only the very most motivated people will go to the Web and dig into this information more deeply," said Walter Willett, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The new image had been greatly anticipated since the USDA announced in September 2003 that it would begin revising the Food Guide Pyramid. While waiting for the 2005 Dietary Guidelines to be completed, the department held public hearings to consider other shapes and conducted national opinion surveys. The surveys found that about 80 percent of Americans recognized the old pyramid as a nutritional icon, but few reported using it to guide their food choices.Business owners and marketing folk are looking for the best strategies to help them survive a cooling economy. Cutting budgets is one everyone’s mind , but marketing is one area of the business that needs very clever planning. Cost effective online strategies, such as using news feeds in RSS to stay connected to your customers and stakeholders, could be a big winner in 2009.
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Brands that fail to embrace and engage in online consumer dialog are set be among those most severely affected by an economic downturn, says the Online Shopping and Credit Crunch Survey Report conducted in the UK by E-consultancy, Logan Todd and ImmediateFuture. Some 64% of respondents surveyed said they would reduce their spending generally in view of the deteriorating economic climate, but 56% said that their online spending would not be affected - or would actually increase.
Consumers are turning online to find the best available prices as well as advice, the study found. Search is playing a large part in how they find their data.
One of the most cost effective ways for a business to make product information, special deals, reviews and advice available is to RSS- enable their web content and send it out in news feed. And apart from making the content easily available, RSS feeds can also boost SEO and search visibility.
Although most people think of RSS as an inherent part of blogs, any web content can be syndicated in an RSS feed. In fact, many of the social web applications that facilitate customer dialog run on RSS. Google's SEO starter guide says that exclusive, fresh and relevant content is by far the most important factor in search ranking, so creating excellent content and syndicating it in RSS feeds can reach a wider audience and build back links, another important part of search visibility.
RSS is being used in many industries to open dialog and keep customers, vendors, supporters, donors and other stakeholders notified of current information.
“Since Google changed their search format to Universal Search every business needs to have optimized digital assets in many formats,” says Sally Falkow, President and co-founder of PRESSfeed, a leading RSS and social media tool. “Creating and syndicating this content makes all the difference to your RSS and SEO strategy. Feeds get seen by the search engines and signal them that there is fresh content available.”
