Global Warming is an International Issue

Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or surface changed, or when the Sun’s energy varied. But in the past century, another force has started to influence Earth’s climate: humanity!

The average facade temperature of the globe has augmented more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900 and the speed of warming has been almost three folds the century long average since 1970. This increase in earth’s average temperature is called Global warming. More or less all specialists studying the climate record of the earth have the same opinion now that human actions, mainly the discharge of green house gases from smokestacks, vehicles, and burning forests, are perhaps the leading power driving the fashion.

The gases append to the planet's normal greenhouse effect, permitting sunlight in, but stopping some of the ensuing heat from radiating back to space. Based on the study on past climate shifts, notes of current situations, and computer simulations, many climate scientists say that lacking of big curbs in greenhouse gas discharges, the 21st century might see temperatures rise of about 3 to 8 degrees, climate patterns piercingly shift, ice sheets contract and seas rise several feet. With the probable exemption of one more world war, a huge asteroid, or a fatal plague, global warming may be the only most danger to our planet earth.

As said, the major cause of global warming is the emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide etc into the atmosphere. The major source of carbon dioxide is the power plants. These power plants emit large amounts of carbon dioxide produced from burning of fossil fuels for the purpose of electricity generation. About twenty percent of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere comes from burning of gasoline in the engines of the vehicles. This is true for most of the developed countries. Buildings, both commercial and residential represent a larger source of global warming pollution than cars and trucks.

Building of these structures require a lot of fuel to be burnt which emits a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as effectual as CO2 at entrapping heat in the atmosphere. Methane is obtained from resources such as rice paddies, bovine flatulence, bacteria in bogs and fossil fuel manufacture. When fields are flooded, anaerobic situation build up and the organic matter in the soil decays, releasing methane to the atmosphere. The main sources of nitrous oxide include nylon and nitric acid production, cars with catalytic converters, the use of fertilizers in agriculture and the burning of organic matter. Another cause of global warming is deforestation that is caused by cutting and burning of forests for the purpose of residence and industrialization.

You Can Help Fight Global Warming

Many efforts are being made by various nations to cut down the rate of global warming. One such effort is the Kyoto agreement that has been made between various nations to reduce the emissions of various green house gases. Also many non-profit organizations are working for the cause. Al Gore was one of the foremost U.S. politicians to heave an alarm about the hazards of global warming. He has produced a significantly acclaimed documentary movie called "An Inconvenient Truth," and written a book that archives his advice that Earth is dashing toward an immensely warmer future. Al Gore, the former vice president of United States has given various speeches to raise an awareness of global warming. He has warned people about the ill effects of Global warming and its remedies.

But an interesting side of the global warming episode is that there are people who do not consider global warming as something that is creating a problem. Skeptics of global warming think that global warming is not an ecological trouble. According to the global warming skeptics, the recent enhancement in the earth's average temperature is no reason for alarm. According to them earth's coastlines and polar ice caps are not at a risk of vanishing. Global warming skeptics consider that the weather models used to establish global warming and to forecast its impacts are distorted. According to the models, if calculations are made the last few decades must have been much worse as compared to actually happened to be. Most of the global warming skeptics believe that the global warming is not actually occurring. They stress on the fact the climatic conditions vary because of volcanism, the obliquity cycle, changes in solar output, and internal variability. Also the warming can be due to the variation in cloud cover, which in turn is responsible for the temperatures on the earth. The variations are also a result of cosmic ray flux that is modulated by the solar magnetic cycles.

Ultimately, global warming will impact life on Earth in many ways, but the extent of the change is largely up to us. Scientists have shown that human emissions of greenhouse gases are pushing global temperatures up, and many aspects of climate are responding to the warming in the way that scientists predicted they would. This offers hope. Since people are causing global warming, people can mitigate global warming, if they act in time. Greenhouse gases are long-lived, so the planet will continue to warm and changes will continue to happen far into the future, but the degree to which global warming changes life on Earth depends on our decisions now.

Cell phone Usage Damages Memory!

A research team from Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheba, Israel, found that talking on a cellular phone harms the mental abilities of the user. This research may serve as a warning against one of the gadgets most of us use daily. 

The influence of cellular phones on brain functions and general health has been widely researched in recent years. Most of the experiments try to understand whether electromagnetic radiation is cancerous or not. Researchers from Ben Gurion University and Soreq Research Center for Nuclear Energy have decided to take a closer look at the effect mobile phones have on people's cognitive functions.
 
          The participants in the experiment were 48 right-handed men. Cell phones were attached to both their ears and the participants were put through several tests which engaged their memory and required the use of both hands simultaneously. In the course of the experiment the subjects were presented with three consecutive squares, each containing a face image in one of eight specific locations. The subjects then had to tell whether a fourth face image presented had appeared among the previous three. If it was, the subject had to press a button with his right hand and if it wasn't, he had to press another button with his left. During the experiment one third of the participants were subjected to a working phone on the right side of their head, one third to a working phone on the left side, and one third to no working phone at all. The subjects had not taken part in phone conversations and did not know which one of the phones (if any) was active during the experiment.
 
          When right-handed subjects were exposed to a cellular phone near the left side of their heads, the resulting effect was greatest. Their reaction time on the task became longer in comparison to those subjects who had a phone working near the left side of their heads and also to those that had no working phone at all. It is notable that the results were more robust during the first ten minutes of the experiment (the first two trials) than the rest of the experiment.
 
          Dr. Ronen Hareuveni, head of the electromagnetic radiation department at Soreq’s research center for nuclear energy, said that while the mobile phones that were used in the experiment were producing maximum electromagnetic radiation, which is not likely to happen for long periods of time in day-to-day life, the results were clear even after a relatively short exposure. The reaction time lengthening found in the experiment was especially significant in subjects who had a working phone close to the left hemisphere of their brain.

          While it is clearly dangerous to draw drastic conclusions based on the results of a single experiment; such results should not be ignored and placed on a shelf either. The scientists say that further research, with greater number of subjects and various experimental designs, should be conducted in order to give us a clearer picture of the mobile phones' influence on memory and other mental functions.

Top 5 Google Killers - That Didn't

INTRODUCTION

Whenever a product establishes itself as the dominant force in its particular market, people will be on the lookout for the next product or organization to push it off the top of the heap. It's the classic David versus Goliath story -- even if the Goliath is a product everyone likes. In the technology industry, it's not unusual for journalists and bloggers to refer to the upcoming product as a killer.

The technology blogosphere is filled with discussions about various killers. There are Apple iPhone killers -- the Palm Pre and HTC G1 both made that list. Then there are the various operating systems said to be Windows killers. But there's one Web Goliath that seems to collect more Davids than any other: Google.

Google began as a project headed by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their goal was to create the most powerful, accurate and comprehensive search engine on the Web. Their hard work paid off -- today, many people refer to the act of performing a Web search as "googling."

As the company grows, so too do the aspirations of the people behind Google. The company's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It's telling that the mission doesn't specify online information -- Google's mission extends beyond the boundaries of the Web.

But Google isn't the only search engine game in town. Several companies and developers have created Web search tools. Some have even admitted to setting their sights on Google. Others say they're just trying to create a product that works well. And a few claim that their work isn't meant to compete with Google at all. We'll look at five Web products that journalists have described as Google killers.

5. WIKIA SEARCH

The Web 2.0 era has introduced dozens of new terms and phrases into the technology industry. One of the terms that has had a huge impact on the way people use the Web is wiki. A wiki is a site that uses a special kind of software that makes it easy for people to create and edit collaborative Web pages.

The most famous wiki on the Web is Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia is Jimmy Wales. Wales saw the success of collaborative work on the Web -- often called crowdsourcing -- and decided to apply that approach to search. That's how Wikia Search was born.

Wales hoped to create a search engine that harnessed the power of collaboration to produce the best, most relevant search results on the Web. Ideally, the collaborative process would be transparent and it would be hard for companies to game the system. Any registered user would be able to see who had made changes to search results pages and intervene if necessary.

In March 2009, Wales announced that his company was discontinuing the Wikia Search project indefinitely. The economic recession had hit the tech industry hard. As a result, there just wasn't enough money in the budget to support the development of Wikia Search. But we may still see the search engine resurface in the future.

4. CUIL

In the summer of 2008, a new search engine emerged onto the scene and began to make headlines. Headed by Web veterans -- including former Google employees -- this new search engine seemed poised to take on Google in a head-to-head competition. The engine's name was Cuil -- pronounced "cool."

The launch of Cuil wasn't exactly an example of smooth sailing. Rafe Needleman of CNET said that it launched in a "blaze of glory" followed by a collapse in a "ball of flames" [source: CNET]. The problem was that, despite claims that Cuil would search far more sites than Google or Microsoft, results came back incomplete or just plain wrong.

Cuil takes a different approach to searching and ranking Web sites. Google's strategy is to search sites for keywords and then rank the sites based upon popularity. The more popular a Web site is, the higher it will rank on a Google results page. The philosophy behind this approach is pretty simple: If a lot of people link to a page, it must be pretty good.

Cuil attempts to rank pages not based upon popularity but by relevance. The search engine crawls through Web pages looking for keywords and searches for context. It looks not just for the phrase or word you search for but also the rest of the content on the page. Theoretically, you should receive results that are most relevant to your query.

The problem was that Cuil didn't quite live up to user expectations when it launched. And while Cuil is still around, it hasn't been able to wrest away the search engine crown from Google.

3. WOLFRAM/ALPHA

Sometimes tech journalists will call a new service a Google killer even when it's not a search engine. That's the case with Wolfram/Alpha. It's easy to confuse Wolfram/Alpha with a search engine. It has a field into which you type a query and it searches its database for answers. But that's where the similarity ends.

Search engines provide users links to Web sites that presumably hold information the user wants. Wolfram/Alpha consults an enormous database to bring data directly to the user. You won't receive a list of links when you execute a query on Wolfram/Alpha. Instead, you'll be greeted with charts and graphs populated with data related to the keywords you entered.

This makes Wolfram/Alpha a very powerful research tool. Wolfram/Alpha employees vet all the information included in the database. They pull data from established and accepted resources. You can use Wolfram/Alpha to compare two subjects within the same category. Want to see if a Big Mac is healthier than a Whopper? Use Wolfram/Alpha to compare the nutritional information.

Because Wolfram/Alpha pulls back data rather than links, it's not in direct competition with Google. You should use Wolfram/Alpha if you need to know information about a specific concept. You should use Google if you want to read the latest news on the subject, find a product review or just browse.

2. BING

Out of all of Google's potential rivals, one stands above all others: Microsoft. The software giant has a long history of dominating the computer marketplace. Almost everyone who has ever used a computer is familiar with the Windows operating system. Then there's Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software that's very popular in the corporate world. As Google tries to edge into Microsoft's territory with products like Google Docs, Microsoft is doing the same thing to Google through search.

Microsoft has offered Web search engines under several names. The latest incarnation is called Bing. Bing has a snazzy interface and a simple navigation menu. You can search for Web site results, images, video, news and more. While Google search offers similar services, Bing's presentation has more style.

Microsoft has included other features within its search engine, too. Need to find a cheap airline fare? You can use Bing to search for ticket prices and the status of flights. Want to find out how many calories you consumed when you wolfed down that hot dog? You can use Bing to find out.

Bing enjoyed a big spike in user activity shortly after it debuted. Journalists remarked on the search result quality, particularly for images and videos. But later reports suggested that Bing's surge in popularity was short-lived. It appears that users just need search to be "good enough" without any of the bells and whistles you find in Bing. Could Bing bounce back and take Google's search throne.

1. TWITTER SEARCH

Last on our list is Twitter Search. Twitter is the messaging service that spans across cell phones and the Web. Users can send messages of up to 140 characters in length to a network of followers. They can also reply to messages publicly or send direct messages to their correspondent. Twitter messages -- or tweets -- show up in a user's Twitter account chronologically. In general, newer tweets are at the top of the list. But there are dozens of different applications for computers and phones that can arrange tweets in different ways.

One of the more useful Twitter applications is Twitter Search. Type a keyword into Twitter Search right from the Twitter home page and you'll see the most recent public tweets that contain that keyword. You can take the pulse of the Twitter audience instantly. A quick glance at the time stamp on each tweet tells you if the topic you're searching for is generating a lot of interest or is dead in the water.

Twitter users have adapted their behaviors to make Twitter Search more useful. For example, the hashtag is a way to designate a term in your tweet. It consists of a # symbol followed by a keyword. Why use a hashtag? By searching for a term with a hashtag on it, you're more likely to pull up tweets that are relevant to your interests. Otherwise, you'll get a search results page containing every tweet that includes your keyword. If the keyword is a common term, you may have to sort through dozens of irrelevant messages before you find one that applies to your search.

Is Twitter Search a threat to Google? Well, it gives the user an instant glance at topics of interest. And Twitter Search results update as you plow through them, while Google search results take more time to update. But Twitter limits messages to 140 characters in length. Most of the time, you'll find more helpful information using Google. Exceptions include breaking news or tweets that contain links to sites that Google has yet to index.

There are lots of useful search engine tools on the Internet. Some of them even rival Google -- there might even be a few that are arguably better at returning searches than Google. But it looks like it's going to take more than a good search results page to topple this Goliath.