Something in the sky on New Year's Eve happens once in a blue moon

THERE will be a blue moon on Thursday as New Year's Eve revellers welcome in 2010 - the first time since 1990 that a blue moon has coincided with New Year's Eve.


A blue moon - the second full moon in a calendar month - occurs only every 2½ years on average. This month, full moons occur on December 2 and December 31.
An astronomer, David Reneke, from Australasian Science magazine, said it was rare for the event to land on New Year's Eve, and it would not happen again until 2028.

''While everyone's celebrating they should also take a moment and look up into the night sky,'' Mr Reneke said.

But the moon will not turn blue - if anything, Mr Reneke said it could turn red when viewed from cities because of the filter effect of smoke from fireworks.

''It's not impossible that the fireworks will change the colour of the moon,'' he said.
He said the best way to view the blue moon was to get away from the city lights.
The phrase ''blue moon'' has become a metaphor for a rare event. The earliest English record of the expression dates back to a 1528 pamphlet which, in criticising the English clergy, read: ''If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true.'' An alternative interpretation of the phrase suggests that it originates from the other old English meaning of ''belewe'' - which can mean the colour or a ''betrayer''.
Clergy identifies the Lent moon when calculating the dates for Easter. It is also thought that historically when the moon's timing was too early, they named the earlier moon as a ''betrayer moon'' or belewe moon.
However, Mr Reneke said the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 spilled so much dust into the atmosphere that for almost two years afterwards the moon took on a bluish hue.

Bing for iPhone Shows Microsoft Getting Smart About Search

The fact that Microsoft's Bing search engine is now an Apple iPhone app might be a sign of new friendship between Microsoft and Apple. But more than likely, it means Microsoft is getting savvy about where and when to place Bing. The iPhone is one of the most visible of mobile platforms, the App Store is exploding in popularity, and Microsoft is in need of new ways to pump up Bing's profile.
If it's true that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend, Microsoft and Apple might have new reason to be cozying up: they're bolth at odds with Google.

At least one analyst sees it that way, anyway.

"Google is a different animal than it was two or three years ago when it was simply providing a set of services for Apple and the iPhone and now is competing with Apple in the mobile space," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, in an interview with Yahoo NewsFactor. "I think it was wise of Apple to approve this application and wise of Microsoft to get this application out there and to use this as an opportunity to show some differentiation from the type of things Google offers."

The Microsoft Bing app for iPhone includes voice search technology that allows users to speak directions, an address, or searchable location like a restaurant into their iPhone. The Bing app is also useful for suggesting different types of directions -- walking or driving -- as well as providing zoom-out function for one-hand phone use and "clickable hotspots" such as images and movies.

The Bing app is available for free -- it already exists for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones -- and will go head to head with the Google Mobile App, which is Google's established iPhone landing spot. While it would be naive to think a Bing app for iPhone signals something greater in the thawing of Apple-Microsoft relations, rest assured this won't be the last time the two titans find common ground against a common enemy: Google.

Sweden's TeliaSonera Blazes 4G Trail

Sweden's TeliaSonera has implemented 4G mobile networking in Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway. The LTE deployment is ahead of the projected schedule and makes TeliaSonera the first in the world to implement commercially-available 4G wireless.
The initial rollout is only accessible via a Samsung USB dongle, but 4G-capable handsets are expected to become available in 2010. The 4G technology is theoretically capable of data speeds up to 100Mbps. TeliaSonera is advertising the service at speeds ranging from 20Mbps to 80Mbps.

Even on the low end of the TeliaSonera 4G service offerings, the advertised speed is nearly seven times faster than AT&T's 3G network, which has been determined to be the fastest 3G available in the United States. The 80Mbps service is a blazing 22 times faster than the AT&T 3G speeds.

Right now, that blazing speed is all the 4G network has to offer, though. Aside from being significantly faster than existing wireless networks, there is nothing compelling about 4G or LTE. As 4G becomes more mainstream and begins to replace 3G networks around the world, you can expect new applications designed specifically to capitalize on the increased bandwidth.

In the United States, the attention is still focused on 3G bragging rights. Verizon has an entire marketing campaign built around illustrating that it has five times the 3G network coverage as AT&T. Those ads led to legal wrangling between Verizon and AT&T. No sooner was that litigation settled, than Verizon turned around and picked a fight with Sprint over its claim to have the most reliable 3G.

I am not suggesting, though, that U.S. wireless providers aren't also planning for the future of wireless networking. AT&T is reportedly working on doubling 3G speeds, while also developing plans for rolling out 4G. Sprint and Verizon are currently pilot testing 4G networking. Verizon is expected to introduce LTE access in certain markets in 2010.

With the exponential increase in data bandwidth demands resulting from the increase in smartphone usage and users downloading more email, more text messages, surfing the Web, and watching YouTube videos- 4G can't come fast enough.

The advent of unified communications, and the convergence of social networking with traditional forms of communication have blurred the line between computing and mobile handsets. Business professionals armed with advanced smartphones will be able to access network resources, stream presentations, and participate in video conferences from their mobile devices--assuming the wireless bandwidth can meet the capacity necessary for such data-intense tasks.

Just What the World Needs: Google Introduces Goo.gl URL Shortener

Maybe it started as a joke, "What the world needs is another URL shortening service!" said as though we didn't have enough already. Then, someone at Google heard the joke, took it seriously, committed $$$, and out popped Goo.gl.
Yes, another URL shortener, just what the world needs! Put another way: What won't Google do to a) put its name on something and b) gather more information about users?

For now, Goo.gl works only with Google applications, where it shortens URLs for Google's Feedburner and from the Google browser toolbar. The service cannot be accessed directly by users from a browser.

Entering the goo.gl address calls up the following:

"Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends."

Actually, whether the service really is at goo.gl is hard to say, since there is no public user interface--all we see is a Web page that also states the Mom-and-Apple-Pie goals for the service:

"Stability, ensuring that the service has very good uptime; security, protecting users from malware and phishing pages; and speed, fast resolution of short URLs."

The Google Official Blog post that announced the service Monday afternoon offers a tad more detail.

"People share a lot of links online," wrote Googlers Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo, and Devin Mullins. "This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have grown in popularity.

"If you're not familiar with them, URL shorteners basically squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others. With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind - and that's why people use them."

The Google URL Shortener immediately competes with services including TinyURL, Bit.ly, and a host of others. Each generates a unique shortened URL, such as http://bit.ly/5jTKbh when I submitted http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-for-google-toolbar.html (the address for the Google blog post) to the bit.ly service for shortening.

When the user clicks on the shortened URL, the shortening server must resolve the URL, match it to the original and longer URL, and then redirect the browser to that site.

I am not aware of any huge problems with the existing shortening services, but letting Google handle URL shortening for some of its customers' needs probably makes sense.

(Google recently got into the public DNS business as well, another necessary Internet service).

So, while the world doesn't need a new URL shortener, we may someday be happy Google started offering one as the need for such services continues to grow. If nothing else, the goo.gl URLs will be a constant reminder of the company gives us goodies.

BTW--If you are wondering about the domain name: GL is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Greenland, that patch of glaciers (and a little soil) up past Canada on the way to Iceland, which is less icy and more green than Greenland. (The .ly in Bit.ly is the ccTLD for Libya).

Google’s real-time search now live in the U.K.

Google’s newly announced real-time search is now not just limited to the Trends page. It’s now live across searches on Google.co.uk. (I just tried it with “Ethan Beard”, who is director of the Facebook Developer Network and is speaking on stage at Le Web right now.) The search giant announced the new feature on Monday — it pulls in public data from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and uses it to surface content that’s been recently published and shared.

Basically, when users search for something, the most recent news articles and posts on sites like Twitter will be immediately into your results, and those results will be updated immediately as new articles and tweets appear.

•If you do a search for “Obama,” you can see the latest news articles and tweets, and as you look at the page, more updates are added as they are published.
•Google has already added time filters to its different search options, so you can just see results from the past day or hour. Now it’s adding an option called “latest,” highlighting these real-time results, as well as an “update” view showing each addition to the search results as it’s published.
•These real-time results will be available on Android phones and iPhones as well.
Google says it developed “dozens of new technologies” to make this happen, such as a language model that can recognize which updates contain new information, and which are just “weather buoys” automatically repeating information posted by others.

Dubai—A Lesson In Why Transparency Matters

NEW YORK —Dubai's troubles offer a warning of the perils of investing in places where leaders--whether of governments or companies--have limited accountability.

In fact, it raises questions about other investment destinations: China, for example.

One reason why markets continue to be jittery over last week's news of a standstill on property conglomerate Dubai World's debt is the lack of transparency surrounding it. That's a direct function of a closed political system that is not conducive to foreign investment.

The announcement of the restructuring has been handled abysmally. Even with Dubai World divulging long-awaited details Monday, information has been spotty and contradictory. It's still not clear which creditors will be hit, and there are still big questions over how much of a guarantee oil-rich sister emirate Abu Dhabi is willing to give to back up Dubai's debt.

Investors have been left to speculate over political motives. One theory holds that Abu Dhabi ruler Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is withholding his support--despite the financial risks of not doing so--because he's angered by his Dubai counterpart's close ties to Iran. Alternatively, others say that the naturally more conservative Abu Dhabi is simply reluctant to stoke moral hazard by bailing out Dubai's risky property investments.

Either way, because they can't divine what's going on in either of these two billionaire monarchs' heads is the essence of investors' problems. In an information vacuum, many have imagined the worst and have felt compelled to sell their Dubai debt positions, which in turn creates problems for banks with exposures there and, by extension, for global stock and credit markets.

This all stems from the overarching political system in place.

In the absence of democratic institutions, the UAE's sheikhs are not required to explain themselves. And as the majority owners of many of the biggest companies, they face no checks and balances from minority shareholders. Meanwhile, contract law is fraught with the uncertainty of a legal system that's low on judicial independence.

This is why investors are nervous. It's not the lack of money. After all, Abu Dhabi, with a sovereign wealth fund worth anywhere from $300 billion to $900 billion, has plenty of that.

The bigger lesson in all this is that investors need to be doubly careful of investing in countries with closed political systems.

With the spectacular failure of U.S. financial markets last year, it has become fashionable to laud the top-down central planning of countries like China, which was able to more quickly put its giant fiscal stimulus to work this year.

But if and when China faces a crisis, investors will have a more difficult time interpreting the actions of government officials and of the managers of its state-run corporations than they would in more openly governed countries.

To be sure, the Chinese Communist Party functions with more consensus than monarchy like Dubai. And for now, China's capital controls make it nearly impossible for foreigners to make portfolio investments there.

Nonetheless, direct foreign investment in China is soaring, as is broader exposure to its boom via assets in neighboring countries. If nothing else, Dubai's crisis is a reminder that those investments carry political risks that are absent from more transparent markets.


By MICHAEL CASEY