How Facebook Is Replacing Ad Agencies With Robots - Business ...

REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: turning his back on creatives?

Facebook served $4.3 billion worth of ads last year, a staggering sum. It's forecast to sell about $5.5 billion in ads in 2013, too.

We're all used to seeing ads all over Facebook, inside our news feed and down the right-hand side of the page. Facebook is working furiously to find more ways to make ads work better inside its ecosystem.

Many of those ads, however, are untouched by ad agency art directors or "creative" staffers of any kind.

And a vast number, from Facebook's larger e-commerce advertisers ? think Amazon or Fab.com ? are generated automatically by computers. Advertisers can't even choose their own typeface: the text comes in one typeface only, in black or blue.

These ads aren't "created" by humans in any meaningful sense.

If you're a creative director ? or a copywriter or an art director ? at an ad agency, this ought to make you think. Even digital ad agencies, which employ armies of interactive ad designers, should take pause for thought.

Never has there been such a gigantic volume of advertising displayed in which professional agency creative types have had so little involvement.

Google, of course, started this. Its text-based search ads and associated products now generate $46 billion a year.

In the agency business, those ads are largely regarded as replacements for the old classified ads that used to appear in newspapers. Agencies rarely handled those (although the Bernard Hodes Group, a talent recruitment ad agency, still writes tons of them).

Facebook's ads, however, are competitors to web display ads.

Traditionally, digital ad agencies have employed teams of people to design web banners as thoughtfully as possible. A lot of design jobs that used to be about making magazine and TV ads were destroyed in favor of digital advertising jobs.

On Facebook, however, these jobs are often not needed by major advertisers.

If you're an e-commerce site selling shoes, you want to serve ads that target people who have previously displayed an interest in, say, red high-heels. Rather than serve an ad for your brand ? "Buy shoes here!" ? it's better to serve an ad featuring a pair of red heels specifically like the one the user was browsing for. The problem is that any shoe seller sells thousands of shoes, and it's impossible to create from scratch an ad for every single SKU.

So Facebook media buying companies ? like TBG Digital or Turn or Triggit or Nanigans ? simply load up tens of thousands of product images into a database, and when a relevant user appears in Facebook an ad is generated, automatically, based on the characteristics of that user.

It's called "retargeting" (because you're retargeting someone who previously displayed an interest elsewhere on the web). And it's fantastically efficient. The ads are monitored for performance, so any subjective notions of "taste" or "beauty" or "style" or whatever go out the window ? the client just wants the best-performing ads. There's no need for a guy with trendy glasses who lives in a loft in Williamsburg, N.Y., to mull over the concepts for hours before the ad is served.

Creatives employed to make TV ads, for instance, should be very, very afraid.

Facebook is gunning for TV ad dollars by trying to convince clients that its ads perform better and are more trackable than commercials. That's where the money is, after all.

They should also be prepared for change. Online advertising laid waste to a huge number of boutique ad agencies that handled small, local clients who did print, radio, and local TV advertising. Facebook's programmatic ads don't necessarily require a creative director to direct them either. Might their jobs be destroyed?

"Destroy," of course, is a harsh term.

There are plenty of new creative jobs being generated by Facebook. The company has a Facebook Studio project which highlights the way advertisers can get more creative on Facebook. It also has a creative council, which draws in senior staff from various agencies.

Larger advertisers employ teams of creative people to maintain their pages and create Page Post ads ? the viral items they're hoping you'll "like" the most. Many of those items require a lot of photography and skillful writing.

But note that these new teams are often not springing up inside traditional ad agencies. They're often in-house social media teams at clients, or within the ranks of Facebook's Preferred Marketing Developers ? new companies with access to Facebook's API ? not agencies.

Advertisers will sometimes use agencies to launch campaigns that run on Facebook, but the real money is in "always on" advertising ? and that requires auto-ad generation.

The creative tasks ? shooting photos that can be used in multiple formats, creating logos that can be pieced into Facebook ads ? aren't so much about creating ads any more as they are about creating assets that can be assembled into ads later, if need be.

By robots. Not humans.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-is-replacing-ad-agencies-with-robots-2013-3

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Factory images posted for 4.2.2 Verizon Galaxy Nexus and 4.2.1 Sprint Galaxy Nexus

Like a trail of breadcrumbs, Nexus factory images are your safe way back

Google has posted a pair of new factory images on the Google Developers site today, allowing folks using a Verizon Galaxy Nexus to have access to the 4.2.2 software, and folks with the Sprint version to grab a copy of the 4.2.1 files. These images are a must have if you like to do any sort of tinkering to your Nexus, as they allow you to restore everything to the stock state with a simple fastboot flash.

It's also a testament to just how hard Google works with partners to get licensing issues sorted so they can post the bits that aren't open source. We take this sort of thing for granted, but I'm sure we shouldn't.

If you have either of these Nexus phones, follow the link below and download your safe way back. Here's hoping you never need them, but thank goodness they're there.

Source: Google Developers

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/2o0xPcXPqzQ/story01.htm

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Researchers find novel way plants pass traits to next generation

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

New research explains how certain traits can pass down from one generation to the next ? at least in plants ? without following the accepted rules of genetics.

Scientists have shown that an enzyme in corn responsible for reading information from DNA can prompt unexpected changes in gene activity ? an example of epigenetics.

Epigenetics refers to modifications in the genome that don't directly affect DNA sequences. Though some evidence has suggested that epigenetic changes can bypass DNA's influence to carry on from one generation to the next, this is the first study to show that this epigenetic heritability can be subject to selective breeding.

Researchers bred 10 generations of corn and found that one particular gene's activity persisted from one generation to the next whether the enzyme was functioning or not ? meaning typical genetic behavior was not required for the gene's trait to come through.

And that, the scientists determined, was because the enzyme targets a tiny piece of DNA ? previously thought of as "junk DNA" ? that had jumped from one area of the genome to another, giving that little fragment power to unexpectedly turn on the gene.

The gene in question affects pigmentation in the corn plant. As a result of these experiments, the researchers were able to change yellow kernel corn to a blue kernel variety by compromising the activity of the enzyme in each male parent.

"This is the first example where somebody has been able to take an epigenetic source of variation and, through selective breeding, move it from an inactive state to an active state," said Jay Hollick, associate professor of molecular genetics at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study. "The gene changes its expression in an epigenetic fashion and it doesn't follow standard inheritance behaviors. Those two factors alone have pretty profound implications not only for breeding but also for evolution."

The study appears online in the journal The Plant Cell.

Plant breeders tend to expect to generate desired traits according to what is known as Mendelian principles of inheritance: Offspring receive one copy of genes from each parental plant, and the characteristics of the alleles, or alternative forms of genes, help predict which traits will show up in the next plant generation.

However, epigenetic variations that change the predictability of gene behavior have complicated those expectations.

"The breeding community searches for novel traits that will have commercial interest and they really don't care what the basis is as long as they can capture it and breed it. Epigenetic heritability throws a kink in the expectations, but our findings also provide an opportunity ? if they recognize the variation they're looking for is the result of epigenetics, they could use that to their advantage," said Hollick, also an investigator in Ohio State's centers for RNA Biology and Applied Plant Sciences.

"Just by knowing that this allele behaves in this epigenetic fashion, I can breed plants that either have full coloration or no coloration or anything in between, because I am manipulating epigenetic variation and not genetic variation. And color, of course, is only one trait that could be affected."

With a longtime specialization in the molecular basis for unexpected gene activity in plants, Hollick had zeroed in on an enzyme called RNA polymerase IV (Pol IV). Multiple types of RNA polymerases are responsible for setting gene expression in motion in all cells, and Pol IV is an enigmatic RNA polymerase that is known in plants to produce small RNA molecules.

Pol IV has puzzled scientists because despite its strong conservation in all plants, it appears to have no discernible impact on the development of Arabidopsis, a common model organism in plant biology. For example, when it is deleted from these plants, they show no signs of distress.

In corn, however, Hollick's lab had discovered previously that the absence of Pol IV creates clear problems in the plants, such as growing seeds in the tassel.

Hollick and colleagues observed that plants deficient in Pol IV also showed pigmentation in kernels of ears expected not to make any color at all ? meaning they were expected to be yellow.

"Since we knew the misplaced tassel-seed trait was due to misexpression of a gene, we hypothesized that this pigment trait might be due to a pigment regulator being expressed in a tissue where it normally is never expressed. Molecular analysis showed that that was in fact the case," Hollick said.

The researchers selected dark kernels and light kernels from multiple generations of plants and crossed the plants derived form these different kernel classes to create additional new generations of corn.

"We found that the ears developed from those plants had even more darkly colored kernels and fewer lightly colored kernels. We could segregate the extreme types and cross them together and get this continued intensification of the pigmentation over many generations," he said. "We generated more progeny that had increasing amounts of pigment. This is taking a gene that is genetically null, that doesn't have any function in this part of the plant, and turning it from a complete null to a completely dominant form that produces full coloration.

"Essentially we were breeding a novel trait, but not by selecting for any particular gene. We were just continually altering the epigenetic status of one of the two parental genomes every time."

This led the scientists to question why the affected alleles of the pigmentation gene would behave in this way. An investigation of the affected alleles revealed the nearby presence of a transposon, or transposable element: a tiny piece of DNA that has leapt from one area of the genome to another.

Because the sequence of some small RNA fragments that come from Pol IV's activity are identical to the sequence of these transposons, the finding made sense to the scientists.

"Now that we know that Pol IV is involved in regulating transposons, it's not surprising that genes that are near transposons are now regulated by Pol IV," Hollick said.

###

Ohio State University: http://researchnews.osu.edu

Thanks to Ohio State University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127473/Researchers_find_novel_way_plants_pass_traits_to_next_generation

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Hayden Panettiere Secretly Engaged To Wladimir Klitschko!

Hayden Panettiere Secretly Engaged To Wladimir Klitschko!

They just rekindled their romance several months ago, but Hayden Panettiere and her boxer boyfriend Wladimir Klitschko are engaged! The 23-year-old “Nashville” star and the 37-year-old Ukrainian heavyweight professional boxer are reportedly set for a wedding this summer. An insider close to the couple said, “Very few people know, and she isn’t wearing her ring ...

Hayden Panettiere Secretly Engaged To Wladimir Klitschko! Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/03/hayden-panettiere-secretly-engaged-to-wladimir-klitschko/

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Venezuela investigats Chavez cancer poisoning claim

By Andrew Cawthorne

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will set up a formal inquiry into claims that deceased President Hugo Chavez's cancer was the result of poisoning by his enemies abroad, the government said.

Foes of the government view the accusation as a typical Chavez-style conspiracy theory intended to feed fears of "imperialist" threats to Venezuela's socialist system and distract people from daily problems.

Acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to open an investigation into the claims, first raised by Chavez after he was diagnosed with the disease in 2011.

"We will seek the truth," Maduro told regional TV network Telesur. "We have the intuition that our commander Chavez was poisoned by dark forces that wanted him out of the way."

Foreign scientists will be invited to join a state committee to probe the accusation, he said.

Maduro, 50, is Chavez's handpicked successor and is running as the government's candidate in a snap presidential election on April 14 that was triggered by the president's death last week.

He is trying to keep voters' attention firmly focused on Chavez to benefit from the outpouring of grief among his millions of supporters. The opposition is centering its campaign on portraying Maduro, a former bus driver, as an incompetent who, they say, is exploiting Chavez's demise.

"Let's take the president (Chavez) away from the political debate, out of respect for his memory, his family, his supporters," opposition candidate Henrique Capriles' campaign chief Henri Falcon told reporters.

Polls from before Chavez's death gave Maduro a lead over Capriles of more than 10 percentage points. Capriles lost to Chavez by 11 percentage points in October.

Capriles has tried to jump-start his campaign with accusations that Maduro and other senior officials lied about the details of Chavez's illness, hiding the gravity of his condition from Venezuelans.

That sparked a torrent of attacks, with senior government officials using words like "Nazi" and "fascist" to describe Capriles, who has Jewish ancestors.

In a televised message, Information Minister Ernesto Villegas read a letter to the "sick opposition" from the late president's daughter, Maria Gabriela Chavez, who has at times been viewed as a possible future successor.

"Stop playing with the pain of a nation and a devastated family," she wrote. "It is unfair, inhuman, unacceptable that they now say we were lying about the date of his (death) ... Focus on politics, don't play dirty."

Capriles was quick to respond with a flurry of tweets.

"Never, in all these years, have I offended the president or his family. If one word has been taken thus by his family, I'm sorry," he wrote on Twitter.

"I don't offend families as they have mine. They have even called me a Nazi, when my great-grandparents were murdered in a Nazi concentration camp," he added, referring to the government.

ACCUSATIONS FLYING

In an increasingly acrimonious campaign, both sides on Tuesday accused each other of planning violence.

The opposition displayed photos circulating on the Internet showing an assault rifle and a pistol being held up to a TV screen that was broadcasting Capriles' face.

They also said there were indications of plans to attack Capriles when he was scheduled to register his candidacy on Monday. In the end, aides went instead.

Government spokesmen repeated accusations that opposition activists planned to disrupt Maduro's campaign.

Trying to discredit Capriles, they waved photos of a plush New York apartment they said belonged to him, and displayed copies of university documents that they said showed he never completed a law degree.

Capriles, a 40-year-old, business-friendly regional governor running for the opposition's Democratic Unity coalition, is trying to disassociate Maduro from Chavez in voters' minds.

"He's attacking Nicolas Maduro, saying Nicolas is not Chavez," senior Socialist Party official and Maduro's campaign chief Jorge Rodriguez said.

"Of course Nicolas isn't Chavez. But he is his faithful, responsible, revolutionary son. All these insults and vilification are going to be turned into votes for us," he said.

Tuesday was the last day of official mourning for Chavez, although ceremonies appear set to continue. His embalmed body was to be taken in procession to a military museum on Friday.

Millions have filed past Chavez's coffin to pay homage to a man who was adored by many of the poor for his humble roots and welfare policies, but was also hated by many people for his authoritarian style and bullying of opponents.

Though Maduro has spoken about combating crime and extending development programs in the slums, he has mostly used his frequent appearances on state TV to talk about Chavez.

The 58-year-old president was diagnosed with cancer in his pelvic region in June 2011 and underwent four surgeries before dying of what sources said was metastasis in the lungs.

Maduro said it was too early to specifically point a finger over Chavez's cancer, but noted that the United States had laboratories with experience in producing diseases.

"He had a cancer that broke all norms," Maduro told Telesur. "Everything seems to indicate that they (enemies) affected his health using the most advanced techniques."

Maduro has compared his suspicions over Chavez's death with allegations that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004 from poisoning by Israeli agents.

The case echoes Chavez's long campaign to convince the world that his idol and Venezuela's independence hero Simon Bolivar died of poisoning by his enemies in Colombia in 1830.

OPPOSITION'S UPHILL FIGHT

The National Assembly was to debate this week a proposal by pro-government legislators to hold a referendum - possibly also on April 14 - on whether he should be buried at the ornate National Pantheon building in Caracas.

Opponents are outraged at the prospect of a referendum stoking the emotion around Chavez at the same time as the presidential vote.

Besides the wave of sympathy for Chavez, the opposition faces a well-financed state apparatus, institutions packed with government supporters, and problems within its own rank-and-file, still demoralized over October's presidential election defeat and a mauling at gubernatorial polls in December.

At stake in the election is the future of Chavez's leftist "revolution," the continuation of Venezuelan oil subsidies and other aid crucial to the economies of left-wing allies around Latin America, from Cuba to Bolivia.

The OPEC nation boasts the world's largest oil reserves.

Though there are hopes for a post-Chavez rapprochement between Venezuela and the United States, a diplomatic spat worsened on Monday when Washington expelled two Venezuelan diplomats in a tit-for-tat retaliation.

(Additional reporting by Marianna Parraga, Simon Gardner, Pablo Garibian and Enrique Andres Pretel; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Stacey Joyce)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/venezuela-probe-chavez-cancer-poisoning-accusation-010128851.html

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The #Bachelor Sean Lowe Finale Recap - #YourTopTweets ...

A finale can be ?exciting? or it can be ?three hours,? but it can?t be both #Bachelor

Chris Harrison is a sadist. #Bachelor

Chris Harrison is the definition of a third wheel #Bachelor

Calling the 3 hour #bachelor finale ?historic? seems a bit much. The wall coming down was historic. 3 hrs of bachelor is just tedious.

The #Bachelor sends the message that you should meet your spouse on TV. Call me old-fashioned, but the place to do that is the Internet.

The loser of #bachelor should be punished. Make her watch them get married-front row

I can smell the desperation through the screen. #bachelor

I always cry during #Bachelor. Of course, I always cry when I hear ?the touch, the feel? of cotton? commercial jingle, so maybe it?s me.

No Chris? Only the fat chicks are on the edge of their seats #bachelor

Is it just my TV or does everyone on the #Bachelor have huge hands?

?I have a hard time talking about serious things? ? girl who thinks she?s ready for marriage #bachelor

It?s no fun with #Bachelor without my cousin. Bitter women who?ve been divorced twice just bring that extra zing to the proceedings!

Every Monday night when I go to bed I have nightmares where I?m chased by white teeth and giant tubes of body glitter. Thank you #Bachelor

Headlines Tomorrow: Tierra?s expecting Sean?s sparkle baby #Bachelor

Even Neil Lane doesn?t have a ring that compares to Tierra?s sparkle #bachelor

The #Bachelor makes me wish I still smoked weed.

Catherine?s eyebrows and Sean?s mom?s eyebrows are the most compatible #Bachelor

Lindsay shows the same amount of enthusiasm over everything. ?OH MY GOD, I love Sean!? ?OH MY GOD, we?re having corn dogs!? #bachelor

Is Lindsay drunk? Only drunk girls and pre-schoolers act like that. #Bachelor

Lindsay is like my knock-off shoes. They look good but you know inside it?s all sawdust and water-paste. #Bachelor come on!

Lindsay is a substitute teacher? something as necessary to the world as a bisexual #Bachelor

Does Sean realize if he picks Lindsey that means he is also picking Lindsey?s voice? #Bachelor #princessprobz

Oh Lindsay, in what world does baby talk get you anywhere?? oh yeah, this world. #Bachelor

Lindsey is a horny midget. #Bachelor

Wow Sean?s dad is asking some good questions. Can he be the next #Bachelor?

Get Sean?s dad his own talk show?stat. I feel he could lead me to living my best life. #Bachelor

Praying for your son?s marriage and then having him find his wife on the Bachelor must be crazy holy. #Bachelor #cleverbachelor

Now Sean?s mom is crying? Geez, what do they pay these people? If my mom was on #Bachelor she?d make the producers cry

Sean?s mom says, ?it?s not like you have to propose,? Sean?s contract begs to differ. #Bachelor

Sean?s mom needs to realize that when ABC gives you a $10,000 Neil Lane ring and says ?Propose, monkey!?, you do it. #sixpacksean #bachelor

If a girl ever says she doesn?t know what she?d do if she lost you, run ? that bitch is crazy! #sixpacksean #bachelor

Lindsay is sending up some stupid wish lantern. Chris Harrison does that every season? but still no talk show #bachelor

Geez more lanterns? If I had a joint for every lantern I?ve seen this season? well, I?d just be really stoned, that?s all #Bachelor

If you were sending up a wish lantern on the #Bachelor wouldn?t one of your wishes be to win? #AndAnSTDFreeLife

At least Lindsay didn?t give him a macrame photo of her dog. #AlwaysAnUpside #Bachelor

thery?re in a sack riding an elephant? there?s one for the grandkids. #Bachelor

?I?m excited for our future? and I smell like an elephant.? #Bachelor

ABC needs to get it together. Quit making these poor girls walk over wooden bridges in high heals. You?re asking for a lawsuit. #bachelor

I hate Lindsay?s dress so much that I want to set it on fire. #Bachelor

oh dear Lindsay: you should not wear a halter, particularly made of heavy fabric, if you have no boobs. #sorry #hadtobesaid #bachelor

First out of the truck? Lindsay! Do you still have the receipt for that Pier One Love Lantern? #bachelor

Good.. he?s not gonna propose to her. I hate that little door stop. #Bachelor

I wait ten weeks just to see the #Bachelor runner-up get the hook in close-up!

You can?t tell a girl you love her then dump her #bachelor

If they made Lindsay leave on an elephant while she cried, I?d promise ABC to watch this show for eternity! #Bachelor

Calling someone an ?incredible person? is another way of saying ?I?m not in love with you.? #bachelor

?Well, I?m gonna go? is the most hilarious thing Lindsay could say in such an awkward, wince-worthy moment. Why do they do this? #bachelor

Lindsay should get a ?Runner Up? ring. Something made of teflon. #Bachelor

Catherine will love him long time #bachelor

Nothing screams ROMANCE like proposing in the middle of a rice paddy that smells like that elephants shit! #bachelor #love

CATHERINES NOSE IS FLARING OUT OF CONTROL! #bachelor

#bachelor Oh dear? Catherine?s nostrils are trying to escape!

Wow? that lady?s nostris are doing the Harlem Shake! #Bachelor

I?m watching The #Bachelor for the first time ever. It is a bad show.

Chalk one up for the Asians!! #bachelor

Wish hot men would propose to me with an elephant after months of unnecessary drama D: #TheBachelor #Bachelor #love #foreveralone

Congrats to Catherine! My condolences to feminism. #Bachelor

Source: http://tvfoodanddrink.com/2013/03/bachelor-sean-lowe-finale-recap-march11-2013/

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Black smoke signals inconclusive vote

By Barry Moody and Catherine Hornby

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Cardinals in secret conclave failed twice on Wednesday morning to elect a new pope, as black smoke over the Sistine Chapel showed ballots on the first full day of voting were inconclusive.

After an inconclusive first vote on Tuesday night, the 115 cardinal electors should hold another two ballots later on Wednesday after praying for inspiration from God for a choice that can lead the Roman Catholic Church out of crisis.

Having spent the night closeted in a nearby guesthouse, the cardinals attended Mass in the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace and returned to the Renaissance splendor of the Sistine Chapel to hold the two morning ballots.

They face a tough task in finding one of their number capable of facing a string of scandals and internal strife which are thought to have contributed to Pope Benedict's decision in February to become the first pontiff in 600 years to resign.

A chimney above the chapel, where the cardinals are meeting beneath Michelangelo's luminous fresco of the Last Judgment, will signal a decision with white smoke. More black smoke will indicate no choice has been made.

With several leading candidates, or "papabili", the cardinals are unlikely to reach a decision on who will lead the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics before Wednesday afternoon, with many experts forecasting white smoke to emerge on Thursday.

"A new pope by tomorrow," was the headline in Wednesday's La Stampa newspaper after days of feverish speculation about the most likely new pontiff in Italian media.

Only one man since the start of the 20th century, Pius XII in 1939, was elected within three ballots, with seven ballots on average required over the last nine conclaves. Benedict was clear frontrunner in 2005 and elected after only four ballots.

Pilgrims and tourists began arriving in St Peter's Square early in the morning despite heavy rain, hoping to get a glimpse of history by watching for white smoke from the chapel chimney.

When the new pope is elected the bells of St. Peter's will also ring.

"It's a wonderful time, a historical moment," said Monsignor Ronny Jenkins, General Secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who was among hundreds waiting under umbrellas in the square outside the huge church. "It's very unique.

"It's an incredible moment, but we want the rain to go away," he added with a laugh.

CARDINALS SHUT INSIDE CHAPEL

The cardinals were shut inside late on Tuesday afternoon for the first time, after a day of religious pomp and prayer to prepare for the task. As expected, black smoke emerged after their first vote, about two hours after they began the conclave.

The initial vote was seen as a way of filtering the choice down to frontrunners for discussions among the supporters of the various papabili in the following days.

No hint is expected to emerge before the pope is chosen. The Vatican has taken precautions, including electronic jamming devices, to prevent any leaks from inside the conclave.

The new pope will take up a burden that Benedict declared in February was beyond his physical capabilities.

The Church is reeling from a child abuse scandal and the "Vatileaks" case in which Benedict's butler revealed documents alleging corruption and in-fighting inside the Curia, or central bureaucracy. It has also been shaken by rivalry from other churches, the advance of secularism, especially in its European heartland, and problems in the running of the Vatican bank.

The former head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, is attending the conclave despite calls for him to stay away because of a sex abuse scandal that led to his censure by his successor Archbishop Jose Gomez in January. He was stripped of all public and administrative duties as punishment.

On Tuesday, lawyers for the victims in four sex abuse cases said the diocese, Mahony and an ex-priest had agreed to pay nearly $10 million to settle the cases. Mahony was accused of helping a confessed pedophile priest escape prosecution.

CARDINAL FRONTRUNNERS

Frontrunners at the conclave include Italy's Angelo Scola - who would return the papacy to traditional Italian hands after 35 years of the German Benedict XVI and Polish John Paul II - and Brazilian Odilo Scherer - who would be the first non-European pope since Syrian-born Gregory III, nearly 1,300 years ago.

In preparatory meetings before the conclave, the cardinals seemed divided between those who believe the new pontiff must be a strong manager to get the dysfunctional bureaucracy under control and others who are looking more for a proven pastoral figure to revitalize their faith across the globe.

Milan Archbishop Scola, who has managed two big Italian dioceses without being part of the Vatican's central administration, could be well-placed to understand the Curia's Byzantine politics and introduce swift reform.

Scherer is said to be the Curia's favored candidate and would satisfy those who want a non-European, reflecting the future of a Church shifting towards the developing world.

A host of other candidates from numerous nations have also been mentioned as potential popes - including U.S. cardinals Timothy Dolan and Sean O'Malley, Canada's Marc Ouellet and Argentina's Leonardo Sandri.

All the prelates meeting in the Sistine Chapel were appointed by either Benedict XVI or John Paul II, and the next pontiff will almost certainly pursue their fierce defense of traditional moral teachings.

On Tuesday they retired to a Vatican guesthouse, where more elaborate precautions have been taken to avoid leaks. This will be their home throughout the conclave.

Some cardinals speculated this week that it might take four to five days to pick the new pontiff because of the difficulty of the task and the number of strong candidates.

(Additional reporting by Naomi O'Leary, Philip Pullella, Crispian Balmer and Tom Heneghan; Editing by Keith Weir)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cardinals-begin-voting-earnest-pope-face-church-crisis-000110012.html

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Iran blocks use of tool to get around Internet filter

Yeganeh Torbati , Reuters ? ? ? 1 hr.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most "virtual private networks", a tool that many Iranians use to get around an extensive government Internet filter, Iranian media quoted an official as saying on Sunday.

A widespread government Internet filter prevents Iranians from accessing many sites on the official grounds they are offensive or criminal.

Many Iranians evade the filter through use of VPN software, which provides encrypted links directly to private networks based abroad, and can allow a computer to behave as if it is based in another country.

But authorities have now blocked "illegal" VPN access, an Iranian legislator told the Mehr news agency on Sunday. Iranian web users confirmed that VPNs were blocked.

"Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked," said Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee, according to Mehr. "Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used."

Iran is holding a presidential election in June, its first since 2009, when a disputed result led to the worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Protesters used services like Facebook to communicate during those "Green Movement" demonstrations, and the government has taken steps to curb access to the Internet in the last few months, apparently determined to prevent a repeat this time.

An Internet user named Mohamad from the Iranian city of Isfahan confirmed that VPNs had been blocked.

"VPNs are cut off. They've shut all the ports," he said in a Facebook message, adding that he was using another form of software to access the service without a VPN. He said Skype and Viber, Internet services used to make telephone calls, had also been blocked.

In January, Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi, secretary of Iran's Supreme Cyberspace Council, told Mehr that Internet users would soon be able to purchase registered VPN connections and that other VPNs were illegal. Financial institutions and other organizations might need to use VPNs for security reasons, which would be a legal use, Behabadi said.

The government's move to block VPN access may also have inadvertently cut off access to widely used sites such as Yahoo and Google, Sobhani-Fard told Mehr on Sunday, adding that parliament would study the issue more this week.

Amin Sabeti, a UK-based researcher on Iranian media and the web, said foreign companies such as airlines and banks had had problems using VPNs in Iran.

Through government-registered VPNs, Sabeti said, authorities could be able to monitor traffic more easily.

Deteriorate
Millions of Iranians experienced disruption to email and Internet access ahead of parliamentary elections last year.

"As the June election approaches ... Iran's Internet connectivity, and the accessibility of uncensored information, continues to deteriorate," said a report on Iran's Internet infrastructure published in March by the UK-based group Small Media, which researches Internet use in Iran.

"Prominent Persian-language websites and other online services have been filtered one by one, and communications with external platforms is becoming progressively more difficult."

Iranian authorities banned Google's email service for a week last year but reopened access after complaints from officials. They have also announced plans to switch citizens onto a domestic Internet network which would be largely isolated from the World Wide Web.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/iran-blocks-use-tool-get-around-internet-filter-1C8792930

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The Yeshiva World Eichler: We Will Remain Loyal to Yishuvim ...

Eichler: We Will Remain Loyal to Yishuvim Despite Bennett

(Sunday, March 10th, 2013)

When asked if the chareidim will take revenge against the settlers for Bayit Yehudi?s union with Yesh Atid, MK (Yahadut Hatorah) Yisrael Eichler told Channel 99 on Sunday 28 Adar 5773 ?No this will not occur but we will stand behind them. Despite Bennett?s actions we will stand behind the settlers when they ask to vote about giving away their homes. From a humanistic point of view we must support them and stand behind them and then their tzibur will question what happened? Why did Bennett treat them this way??

Eichler explained that despite?s Bennett?s actions he cannot see turning his back on the residents of the yishuvim when it is known to all that Yair Lapid will not do the same.

(YWN ? Israel Desk, Jerusalem)

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Source: http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/?p=160275

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What you 'like' on Facebook can be revealing

FILE - In this Dec. 13, 2011 file photo, a sign with Facebook's "Like" logo is posted at Facebook headquarters near the office for the company's User Operations Safety Team in Menlo Park, Calif. A study by researchers at Cambridge, published Monday, March 11, 2013 in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, has found that clicking the social network's friendly blue "like" buttons may reveal more about people than they realize. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 13, 2011 file photo, a sign with Facebook's "Like" logo is posted at Facebook headquarters near the office for the company's User Operations Safety Team in Menlo Park, Calif. A study by researchers at Cambridge, published Monday, March 11, 2013 in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, has found that clicking the social network's friendly blue "like" buttons may reveal more about people than they realize. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

LONDON (AP) ? Clicking those friendly blue "like" buttons strewn across the Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga.

It could out you as gay.

It might reveal how you vote.

It might even suggest that you're an unmarried introvert with a high IQ and a weakness for nicotine.

That's the conclusion of a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers reported analyzing the likes of more than 58,000 American Facebook users to make guesses about their personalities and behavior, and even whether they drank, smoked, or did drugs.

Cambridge University researcher David Stillwell, one of the study's authors, said the results may come as a surprise.

"Your likes may be saying more about you than you realize," he said.

Facebook launched its like button in 2009, and the small thumbs-up symbol has since become ubiquitous on the social network and common across the rest of the Web as well. Facebook said last year that roughly 2.7 billion new likes pour out onto the Internet every day ? endorsing everything from pop stars to soda pop. That means an ever-expanding pool of data available to marketers, managers, and just about anyone else interested in users' inner lives, especially those who aren't careful about their privacy settings.

Stillwell and his colleagues scooped up a bucketful of that data in the way that many advertisers do ? through apps. Millions of Facebook users have surveyed their own personal traits using applications including a program called myPersonality. Stillwell, as owner of the app, has received revenue from it, but declined to say how much.

The study zeroed in on the 58,466 U.S. test takers who had also volunteered access to their likes.

When researchers crunched the "like" data and compared their results to answers given in the personality test, patterns emerged in nearly every direction. Since the study involved people who volunteered access to their data, it's unclear if the trends would apply to all Facebook users.

The study found that Facebook likes were linked to sexual orientation, gender, age, ethnicity, IQ, religion, politics and cigarette, drug, or alcohol use. The likes also mapped to relationship status, number of Facebook friends, as well as half a dozen different personality traits.

Some likes were more revealing than others. Researchers could guess whether users identified themselves as black or white 95 percent of the time. That success rate dropped to a still impressive 88 percent when trying to guess whether a male user was homosexual, and to 85 percent when telling Democrats from Republicans. Identifying drug users was far trickier ? researchers got that right only 65 percent of the time, a result scientists generally describe as poor. Predicting whether a user was respectively a child of divorce was even dicier. With a 60 percent success rate, researchers were doing just slightly better than random guesses.

The linkages ranged from the self-evident to the surreal.

Men who liked TV song-and-dance sensation "Glee" were more likely to be gay. Men who liked professional wrestling were more likely to be straight. Drinking game aficionados were generally more outgoing than, say, fans of fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. People who preferred pop diva Jennifer Lopez usually gathered more Facebook friends than those who favored the heavy metal sound of Iron Maiden.

Among the more poignant insights was the apparent preoccupation of children of divorce with relationship issues. For example, those who expressed support for statements such as "Never Apologize For What You Feel It's Like Saying Sorry For Being Real" or "I'm The Type Of Girl Who Can Be So Hurt But Still Look At You & Smile" were slightly more likely to have seen their parents split before their 21st birthday.

Some of the patterns were difficult to understand: The link between curly fries and high IQ scores was particularly baffling.

Jennifer Golbeck, a University of Maryland computer scientist who wasn't involved in the study but has done similar work, endorsed its methodology, calling it smart and straightforward and describing its results as "awesome."

But she warned of what the work showed about privacy on Facebook.

"You may not want people to know your sexual orientation or may not want people to know about your drug use," she said. "Even if you think you're keeping your information private, we can learn a lot about you."

Facebook said the study fell in line with years of research and was not particularly surprising.

"The prediction of personal attributes based on publicly accessible information, such as ZIP codes, choice of profession, or even preferred music, has been explored in the past," Facebook's Frederic Wolens said in a written statement.

Wolens said that Facebook users could change the privacy settings on their likes to put them beyond the reach of researchers, advertisers or nearly anyone else. But he declined to say how many users did so.

For the unknown number of users whose preferences are public, Stillwell had this advice: Look before you like.

The like button is "quite a seductive thing," he said. "It's all around the Web, it's all around Facebook. And it's so easy."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2013-03-11-Britain-Facebook%20Likes/id-e78a85f140054b93a2807aa8300f5956

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Island Catholic News Article printed last year. ? Victoria Human ...

History of the Victoria Human Exchange Society

Twenty years ago, a homeless man by the name of Larry Baker died under the Johnson Street Bridge. In a gathering following this tragedy on Valentine?s Day, 1992, a service was held in Larry?s memory?and the seeds for an idea were sown.

This idea became the Victoria Human Exchange Society, a registered charity run 100% by volunteers (including those who used to be homeless themselves) working not just to tackle the issue of homelessness, but to eliminate the loneliness, isolation, and sense of hopelessness that comes along in such a time of crisis and vulnerability.

The idea was a partnership?a network of support and sharing between those that need help, and those who wish to support them:

?What was heard from the people who were Larry?s friends was that when one is homeless, one loses one?s individual identity; one is labeled and segregated from the rest of the human race. Gifts are lost; people are depressed and turn to drugs and alcohol for consolation and to drown their hopelessness and helplessness. The request was that someone start treating people who are homeless as human beings with personal identity and gifts to share.?
? VHES History of the Society

Now in its twentieth year, the society has proven time and again that it is one of the most effective and lowest-cost solutions to the homeless problem, having assisted hundreds of people in need?and yet, is facing desperate times itself. As a completely charitable organization run by volunteers, the funding battle begins year after year, and the society?s goal is threatened by a lack of the support it relies on: the cycle and exchange of gifts.

The name of the society comes from the writing of Thomas Merton: ?Every meeting of persons is an exchange of life?s gifts.? This sense of exchange is the key to the society?s goals: the sharing of identity and gifts, and the acknowledgment that these people undergoing hard times are still worthy of unconditional respect, and have within themselves the ability to work through their problems, grow, and change.

?It is the absence of human contact that is often the deepest pain felt by homeless people. They can go for days with no one speaking to them, much less ask the simplest of questions, ?How are you?? We fear the answers . . . because we might have to act on them.?
? Sister Maureen, in an article by Colman McCarthy

The society believes that when people find themselves in a crisis such as having lost a job, a home, a family, or are trying to recover from addiction or illness, what they need more than intervention is a family of friends: people who will listen, support, assist, and understand.

And so, the society has set out to:

? provide and support shelters and family-type emergency housing;
? provide advocacy and support to low-income persons who are working to solve their own legal, health, educational, employment and social problems;
? include impoverished persons in the decision-making capacity of the
Society, and to support initiatives which they themselves identify, thus enabling the growth of self-esteem and self-direction.

To this end, the society rents houses from sympathetic landlords to provide short-term accommodation for those in crisis. It currently operates eight houses: three in Victoria, two in Sidney, two on Salt Spring Island, and one in Nanaimo?all named after people who have contributed to the success of the movement over its twenty-year history.

Rather than administer or control the houses, the society ?facilitates a dignified and ordered living environment.? These safe houses are free of drugs and drinking?everyone in the houses must be clean?and form a network where those in need can find a roof over their head as they move toward obtaining permanent housing. They also provide a sense of companionship, understanding, and trust, the acknowlegement that they are not alone in their plight, and there are others both in their position and outside of it hoping that they will succeed.

And, it is clear they have. Over these twenty years, VHES has helped provide a stable, caring environment where hundreds of people besieged by homelessness, illness, and addiction have been able to overcome their issues and move on:

?In my time of greatest need, this society came to my rescue. My life has improved dramatically as a result of the continuing efforts of Patricia Fitzgerald, the Society?s Facilitator here on Saltspring Island. I am working again and free from the problems which so plagued me, thanks to her.?
? Gordan C., former resident

?A NEW START is what the Victoria Human Exchange Society has provided for me?a safe place to live and an opportunity to get some help . . . But most of all the VHES has given me the chance to be there for others who are struggling with life.?
? Derrick N., former resident

?I would just like to sincerely thank the ladies of the Human Exchange Society for providing a positive atmosphere for me to continue my life. Thank you.?
? Paul W., former resident

The society provides what is, in many cases, a neglected set of needs in the process of healing, and rehabilitation: friendship, companionship, trust, and appreciation. The acknowledgement that, no matter the circumstances, all humans have gifts that must be allowed to flourish, and it is through the exchange of these gifts that we all become better people.

Among the society?s list of specific activities in 1992 and ongoing were:
? the facilitation of milestone celebrations and arranging social activities which build a network of friends;
? supporting places of healing and rehabilitation in the Gulf Island where street people who are alcoholics can remove themselves from their drinking network;
? assisting unemployed homeless persons to find employment and improve their standard of living and self image;
? providing advocacy to persons dealing with the legal system and those who have specific health problems or social & personal needs;
? educating persons who are substance abusers on its effects on the user and unborn children;
? many more initiatives specifically aimed at supporting, respecting, and appreciating the life of each person they work with.

Between the Society?s eight homes across Victoria, Sidney, Salt Spring, and Nanaimo, as well as the generalized efforts brought forth by all volunteers, the various members of the Victoria Human Exchange Society have worked tirelessly over the years and remained dedicated to their goal of, in their own words, ?a partnership of human beings?all with gifts, weaknesses and addictions?supporting one another and growing together towards a healthier community.?

However, despite its successes, keeping the project running takes more resources than are often available. The society receives no government funding, relying on donations and the hard work of volunteers to continue to expand?or even to keep providing what is currently offered. There is a waitlist of people wanting to become part of the program, and plenty of opportunity to open more houses, but no funding with which to do so. This has stretched the program to the point where one of the much-valued women?s houses may be closed, giving the women that live there little choice but to face the possibility of returning to the streets.

VHES, working together with other groups in Victoria, has led the way in identifying and compassionately addressing the human needs of the homeless: listening to their stories, following their suggestions, and supporting their own efforts to get back on their feet?and it is through the compassion of others and the willingness to give and receive that they have been able to do so.

For further information on the Victoria Human Exchange Society, their website (http://www.humanx.org/) contains their missions statement, as well as newsletters released every three months that detail the lives and progress of people living in each of the homes:

?We presently have a woman who has gone back to school, after years of living a harsh lifestyle; and, I am proud to say?she is in the top 3 in her class.?

?I run into past residents, or receive phone calls from them; and, it always does my heart good to see the positive changes in them and to hear how their lives have changed for the better.?
? Linda, from the Edith Gulland House

The VHES also has a Facebook page. Contributions, donations, and volunteers are always welcome?and, indeed, the key to the society?s continuing success.

?As our first occupant Art Rosette hoped: may the spirit of the Human Exchange spread throughout the world so that no-one is left with only a tree under a bridge.?

Victoria Human Exchange Society
Box 8534
Victoria BC
V8W 3S1

Source: http://humanx.org/2013/03/island-catholic-news-article-printed-last-year/

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Banks Borrow Way Too Much

Should be better control banks' borrowing? Above, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in 2012.

Photo by Kena Betancur/Reuters

A company looking to make an investment needs money, and it can get the money in one of two ways. It can finance the investment with debt by borrowing money from a bank or bond markets, or it can use equity by either selling shares of stock or recycling operating profits that could have been used to pay dividends instead.

Debt financing has two advantages over equity financing. One is that interest payments are tax deductible. The other is that the lender gets the same amount of money back no matter how well the investment turns out, so the firm and its owners get to hog a larger share of the upside. The downside to debt, of course, is that if the investment works out poorly, you still have to pay the loan and interest back, and you might go bankrupt. The more debt you have, the bigger your risk of going bust. Since people don?t want to lend money to a company that?s likely to go bust, companies normally try to be moderate in their use of debt. Some companies?Apple, for example?don?t carry any debt at all.

Banks are different. They?re legally required to hold some cash reserves in case depositors want to make withdrawals, but beyond that they largely kick profits out to shareholders as dividends rather than use them to finance investment. Instead, investments are overwhelming financed with debt. They play, in Louis Brandeis? memorable phrase, with other people?s money. Most simply, they accumulate low-interest short-term loans in the form of bank deposits and recycle the money into higher-rate longer-term loans like mortgages. Modern banks also have more complicated ways of borrowing (money market funds, interbank loans) and spend a fair amount of their time investing in complicated securities trading.??

Borrowing in order to lend or invest is the core of banking, but while 19^th-century banks regularly raised around half of the funds from equity, recently adopted international rules proposing that banks finance no more than 97 percent of their investment with debt are being treated by the industry as the end of the world as they know it. An excellent new book, The Bankers? New Clothes by Anat Admati of Stanford Business School and Martin Hellwig of the Max Plank Institute, argues that these debt levels rather than the more discussed topics of excessive gambling or ?too big to fail? are the real problem with modern finance. And their argument is attracting praise not just from left-wing figures like Simon Johnson but also from conservatives like John Cochrane writing in the Wall Street Journal.

The case, in essence, is that banks are not so much too big to fail as too likely to fail, prompting disastrous financial crises.

Regulatory efforts?like the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul?thus far have focused on improving supervision of what banks are up to and trying to restrain them from engaging in excessively risky speculation. Proposals to go further typically focus on trying to shrink banks, divide their lines of business, or restrict what kinds of investments they can undertake. Admati and Hellwig say instead we should make them fund a much larger share of investment?20 to 30 percent?with equity. Speculative losses that would bankrupt a financial institution with 3 percent equity would simply push a bank with 20 to 30 percent equity into the danger zone, where it would be banned from paying dividends or engaging in share buybacks until retained profits have gotten it out of danger. A bank that phenomenally screwed up and fell below 20 percent would face sterner discipline while still having a nonzero equity cushion.

Conventional wisdom both in the industry and among the regulatory establishment is that this would be economy-killing madness leading to huge increases in borrowing costs. Brookings Institution fellow Douglas Elliott, in one of the milder critiques, says borrowing costs would rise by about 2 percentage points. Today?s 4 percent mortgage, in other words, would cost 6 percent in an Admati-Hellwig world.

The authors? partially persuasive reply is that this involves confusing social costs with private costs. Bankers like to say that debt is cheap and equity expensive, but if debt is so cheap why don?t other kinds of firms rely on it to the extent that financiers do? The reason is that for normal companies, debt stops being cheap once they?ve already borrowed a lot. Heavy debt makes bankruptcy more likely, so investors demand higher interest rates. Banks escape this because their creditors have explicit (think Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and implicit (think AIG or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) guarantees and because past experience with liquidating financial firms in bankruptcy (think Lehman Brothers) have been very unhappy. Debt?s cheap, in other words, because it?s subsidized?meaning heavily indebted banks represent a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the financial industry.

Less convincing is the authors? claim that imposing stricter capital regulation would have no costs. They analogize their proposal to rules preventing firms from engaging in excessive pollution but fail to explore the analogy deeply enough. Just because such rules make society better off overall doesn?t change the fact that specific people?not just fat cats but ordinary workers and even whole communities?can suffer huge economic losses as a result of stricter environmental rules. In particular, while letting factories pollute willy-nilly is a bad idea, it does get you cheaper manufactured goods.

By the same token, some of the benefit of society?s bank subsidies accrues to customers. Rolling back the subsidies with dramatically tougher capital requirements really would make some kinds of loans scarcer.

On the other hand, the idea that this would be an economy-killer lacks any real basis. The Federal Reserve sets economy-wide interest rates through monetary policy and could offset the overall macroeconomic impact of tighter lending standards. The difference is that some kinds of borrowing?by consumers and small businesses from banks?would get more expensive, while it would get cheaper for large firms and governments to borrow in bond markets. That?s not a free lunch, and in the short-term at least it might make some people pretty unhappy. But it?s not an unattractive vision either. The aughts? experiment in substituting cheap consumer credit for rising incomes didn?t have a happy outcome, and while nobody likes to stand up for big business, the fact is that large-firm investment activity is an important driver of long-term productivity. Forcing banks to borrow less, in other words, wouldn?t just mean a safer financial sector: It?d give a different shape to the real economy. Yet far from undermining the case for stricter capital requirements, this arguably strengthens it. The provision of implicit subsidies to bank debt distorts the overall economy, and tough rules to limit borrowing are an appealing way to get back on track.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=4698c9f2251a8dac20d4c77acd5edb9f

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U of T engineering breakthrough promises significantly more efficient solar cells

Public release date: 7-Mar-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Terry Lavender
terry.lavender@utoronto.ca
416-978-4498
University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

TORONTO, ON March 7, 2013: A new technique developed by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nano Letters.

The paper, "Jointly-tuned plasmonic-excitonic photovoltaics using nanoshells," describes a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics, a technology which already promises inexpensive, more efficient solar cell technology. Quantum dot photovoltaics offers the potential for low-cost, large-area solar power however these devices are not yet highly efficient in the infrared portion of the sun's spectrum, which is responsible for half of the sun's power that reaches the Earth.

The solution? Spectrally tuned, solution-processed plasmonic nanoparticles. These particles, the researchers say, provide unprecedented control over light's propagation and absorption.

The new technique developed by Sargent's group shows a possible 35 per cent increase in the technology's efficiency in the near-infrared spectral region, says co-author Dr. Susanna Thon. Overall, this could translate to an 11 per cent solar power conversion efficiency increase, she says, making quantum dot photovoltaics even more attractive as an alternative to current solar cell technologies.

"There are two advantages to colloidal quantum dots," Thon says. "First, they're much cheaper, so they reduce the cost of electricity generation measured in cost per watt of power. But the main advantage is that by simply changing the size of the quantum dot, you can change its light-absorption spectrum. Changing the size is very easy, and this size-tunability is a property shared by plasmonic materials: by changing the size of the plasmonic particles, we were able to overlap the absorption and scattering spectra of these two key classes of nanomaterials."

Sargent's group achieved the increased efficiency by embedding gold nanoshells directly into the quantum dot absorber film. Though gold is not usually thought of as an economical material, other, lower-cost metals can be used to implement the same concept proved by Thon and her co-workers.

She says the current research provides a proof of principle. "People have tried to do similar work but the problem has always been that the metal they use also absorbs some light and doesn't contribute to the photocurrent - so it's just lost light."

More work needs to be done, she adds. "We want to achieve more optimization, and we're also interested in looking at cheaper metals to build a better cell. We'd also like to better target where photons are absorbed in the cell this is important photovoltaics because you want to absorb as many photons as you can as close to the charge collecting electrode as you possibly can."

The research is also important because it shows the potential of tuning nanomaterial properties to achieve a certain goal, says Paul Weiss, Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

"This work is a great example of fulfilling the promise of nanoscience and nanotechnology," Weiss says. "By developing the means to tune the properties of nanomaterials, Sargent and his co-workers have been able to make significant improvements in an important device function, namely capturing a broader range of the solar spectrum more effectively."

###

For more information, please contact:

Terry Lavender
Communications & Media Relations Strategist
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto
terry.lavender@utoronto.ca
Tel: 416-978-4498

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 7-Mar-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Terry Lavender
terry.lavender@utoronto.ca
416-978-4498
University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

TORONTO, ON March 7, 2013: A new technique developed by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nano Letters.

The paper, "Jointly-tuned plasmonic-excitonic photovoltaics using nanoshells," describes a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics, a technology which already promises inexpensive, more efficient solar cell technology. Quantum dot photovoltaics offers the potential for low-cost, large-area solar power however these devices are not yet highly efficient in the infrared portion of the sun's spectrum, which is responsible for half of the sun's power that reaches the Earth.

The solution? Spectrally tuned, solution-processed plasmonic nanoparticles. These particles, the researchers say, provide unprecedented control over light's propagation and absorption.

The new technique developed by Sargent's group shows a possible 35 per cent increase in the technology's efficiency in the near-infrared spectral region, says co-author Dr. Susanna Thon. Overall, this could translate to an 11 per cent solar power conversion efficiency increase, she says, making quantum dot photovoltaics even more attractive as an alternative to current solar cell technologies.

"There are two advantages to colloidal quantum dots," Thon says. "First, they're much cheaper, so they reduce the cost of electricity generation measured in cost per watt of power. But the main advantage is that by simply changing the size of the quantum dot, you can change its light-absorption spectrum. Changing the size is very easy, and this size-tunability is a property shared by plasmonic materials: by changing the size of the plasmonic particles, we were able to overlap the absorption and scattering spectra of these two key classes of nanomaterials."

Sargent's group achieved the increased efficiency by embedding gold nanoshells directly into the quantum dot absorber film. Though gold is not usually thought of as an economical material, other, lower-cost metals can be used to implement the same concept proved by Thon and her co-workers.

She says the current research provides a proof of principle. "People have tried to do similar work but the problem has always been that the metal they use also absorbs some light and doesn't contribute to the photocurrent - so it's just lost light."

More work needs to be done, she adds. "We want to achieve more optimization, and we're also interested in looking at cheaper metals to build a better cell. We'd also like to better target where photons are absorbed in the cell this is important photovoltaics because you want to absorb as many photons as you can as close to the charge collecting electrode as you possibly can."

The research is also important because it shows the potential of tuning nanomaterial properties to achieve a certain goal, says Paul Weiss, Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

"This work is a great example of fulfilling the promise of nanoscience and nanotechnology," Weiss says. "By developing the means to tune the properties of nanomaterials, Sargent and his co-workers have been able to make significant improvements in an important device function, namely capturing a broader range of the solar spectrum more effectively."

###

For more information, please contact:

Terry Lavender
Communications & Media Relations Strategist
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto
terry.lavender@utoronto.ca
Tel: 416-978-4498

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uotf-uot030713.php

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