Who’s On Google+ : Innovators & Early Adopters, also Bangladeshis

Who’s on Google+?

According to Experian Hitwise, the social network has seen an accelerated lifecycle transition as innovators make way for early adopters and mainstream users, just six weeks into the launch of the network.

Initially, young singles and recent college graduates, or “Colleges and Cafés”, had taken to Google+, their usage peaking at three weeks. Now, as these innovators decrease their frequency of visits, “Status Seeking Singles”, the early adopters continue to make up a large part of the userbase, along with “Kids and Cabernet”, described as prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs. According to Experian, this “Kids and Cabernet” group is the first sign of Google+ adoption by mainstream users.

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Mobile Users Get Smarter (Phones)! Apple & Android Rise, Nokia Falls

According to a recent report by Gartner Inc., sales of smartphones were up 74% year-on-year, accounting for 25% of overall sales of mobile devices in Q2, 2011, up from 17% in Q2, 2010.

Having led smartphone sales over the last five years, Nokia is set to lose its top spot as the largest seller of smartphone in Q3, 2011, according to Gartner. These are in terms of smartphone sales to end users. In terms of shipments to vendors, Nokia has already lost the top spot to Apple (and the 2nd place Samsung), according to research firms Strategy Analytics and IDC Research.

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And the Song (of Freedom) Plays On: Salud, Tareque Masud

Tareque Masud (তারেক মাসুদ), the brilliant Bangladeshi independent film director, is no more.

He died on 13 August, 2011 in a road accident on the Dhaka-Aricha highway, at Joka of Ghior upazilla in Manikganj district, while returning to Dhaka from Manikganj, having visited a shooting spot for his latest project “Kagojer Phool”. ATN News CEO, eminent media personality Ashfaque (Mishuk) Munier, son of 1971 martyred intellectual Munier Chowdhury, and teacher of video communication at the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism of the University of Dhaka, and three others also died in the fatal road accident as the microbus carrying them collided head-on with an oncoming bus.

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How Algorithms Shape our World

A brilliant speech from TEDtalks by Kevin Slavin, on how increasingly more efficient and complicated algorithms are running our world and our lives; and the detachment of human considerations from their impacts on nature and life.

I Can Do Science, Me!

Now you can do your bit for science. You can put your idle computing power to good use by being part of Internet-connected distributed processing systems that run on volunteered home computers and harness their processing power to conduct large-scale analyses of data.

Recently, the Large Hadron Collider team at Centre for European Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the LHC@home 2.0 project, to tap into the collective computing power of the public to help simulate particle physics experiments. Among other pursuits, the project could help find an immensely important particle, the Higgs boson.

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