Yesterday, we announced your picks for the 2012 Engadget Awards, and today it's our turn. The Editors' Choice selections below cover the same 15 categories you voted on earlier this month, but the results weren't limited to reader-selected finalists. (In other words, it's a favorite gadget free-for-all for this bunch of geeks.) Without further ado, we present our top products of 2012 -- click past the break for the full list.
YEREVAN (Reuters) - Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan promised on Tuesday to make the country secure and stable after cruising to victory in an election which international vote monitors said lacked real competition.
But Sarksyan faces a challenge in his second five-year term to prevent tensions increasing with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that could lead to a new war in the South Caucasus, where pipelines carry Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
Preliminary results showed Sarksyan won 58.6 percent of the votes cast in Monday's election, enough to avoid a second-round run-off. His closest rival, U.S.-born former Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, trailed on nearly 37 percent.
"Armenia chose the path towards a safe Armenia and I am happy and proud of the fact that every resident of Armenia will be on that path," Sarksyan, 58, told celebrating supporters.
International observers said the vote was an improvement on recent elections in the former Soviet republic, including the 2008 presidential ballot in which 10 people were killed.
"However, the limited field of candidates meant that the election was not genuinely competitive," representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a statement.
"The candidates who did run were able to campaign in a free atmosphere and to present their views to voters, but the campaign overall failed to engage the public's interest."
Several of Sarksyan's potential rivals, most notably former President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, decided not to run because they feared the election would be skewed in the president's favor.
A minor candidate was shot and wounded during campaigning, and police received 70 complaints of voting violations. The result was in line with opinion polls, however.
One group, the opposition Heritage Party, alleged some ballots cast for Sarksyan's opponents had been thrown out and said it planned a protest in the capital Yerevan later on Tuesday. It was not clear if other parties would take part.
EXPECTED OUTCOME
Armenians had expected Sarksyan to win and there was little celebrating. "I expect that things will get better in the next five years. And after that of course we will need to change (the president). That's all," said Yerevan resident Roza Atovyan.
Another woman in Yerevan, Elana Akapova, said: "The president has a lot of administrative power. Therefore it's natural that he received the majority of the vote."
The result strengthens Sarksyan's hold on Armenia, which borders Iran, Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, after his Republican Party won a parliamentary election last year.
Sarksyan's promises of economic recovery went down well with voters in the country of 3.2 million, where more than 30 percent live below the poverty line. The average monthly wage is about $300 and unemployment was 16 percent last year.
Armenia is an important potential ally for the West which is trying to ensure Iran does not develop nuclear weapons, although tightening international economic sanctions on its neighbors could affect Armenia's trade and economy.
Sarksyan has outlined no big policy changes and investors and foreign governments are worried by Armenia's fraught relations with Azerbaijan.
FEARS OF NEW CONFLICT
About 30,000 people were killed in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s and Azerbaijan uses its diplomatic and economic muscle to isolate Yerevan. It has vastly increased military spending in the last few years, alarming Yerevan.
Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian-majority enclave inside Azerbaijan, which Armenia-backed rebels wrested from Azeri troops. Firefights along the border still kill troops on both sides and experts say a wider conflict is possible.
Sarksyan has accused Azerbaijan of threatening a new conflict. Azerbaijan denies it is the aggressor and says Armenians should hand back control of the mountainous enclave.
"In terms of domestic policy, we should expect a continuation of deepening ties with the West and the European Union," said Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre think tank in Yerevan.
He ruled out a breakthrough over Nagorno-Karabakh, saying: "Both sides remain too far apart."
Without a shift in regional politics, durable economic growth will be difficult for Armenia while its borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey remain closed. Turkey shut the border in 1993 in solidarity with its ethnic kin in Azerbaijan.
Most regional pipeline projects between growing regional power Turkey and the oil and gas-producing Azerbaijan isolate Armenia, making Yerevan more dependent on ties with its Soviet-era master Moscow, which has a military base on Armenian soil.
(Reporting by Hasmik Mrktchyan and Margarita Antidze; Writing by Timothy Heritage; Editing by Pravin Char)
Congress and the White House so far have refused to make the hard choices necessary on federal spending. There is no long-term budget agreement, and Congress can?t even muster the will to agree on an annual budget.
The only action, unless an 11th-hour agreement decides otherwise before March 1, will be the automatic ?sequestration? cuts in spending.
Sequestration is the one thing our elected officials in Washington could agree on ? but none of them like it. With good reason: It would lop off chunks of the federal budget in meat-ax fashion, using across-the-board cuts undirected by sound policymaking.
The outgoing U.S. secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, is a veteran budget expert in Washington, and in recent days he has vented about the federal government?s abdication of its fiscal responsibility.
?This is no way to govern the United States of America,? he said. ?Not only have they failed to come together around a big plan to reduce the deficit, they have also failed in their basic responsibility to pass appropriations bills that provide the resources and certainty needed to run the government.?
And in congressional testimony, he added: ?Sequester was not designed as a mechanism that was supposed to happen. It was designed to be so nuts that everybody would do everything possible to make sure it didn?t happen.?
As we?ve said many times, the federal government?s fiscal mess is so huge that military spending must be part of any overall strategy to address it. At the same time, the Pentagon should base its spending decisions on a responsible weighing of our defense needs. It should set sound priorities, then stand up to the defenders of the status quo.
Too often, responsible priority-setting is short-circuited by a host of self-serving, nearsighted factors: Congressional pork-barreling. Parochial maneuvering by the individual service branches. Acquisition boondoggles and cost overruns.
Sequestration ? which would cut defense spending by $42 billion this year, on top of $487 billion in 10-year cuts Panetta is already implementing ? worsens the problem because, unlike Panetta?s current plan, it isn?t guided by priority-setting.
Mich?le Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009-12, noted in the Wall Street Journal last week that ?whether or not Congress avoids sequestration by March 1, defense spending will likely be cut by at least 10 percent over the next decade. As 20 percent of the federal budget and 50 percent of discretionary spending, it will be part of any longer-term budget deal.?
Flournoy outlined general ideas that would help keep cutbacks from undermining military effectiveness: a reduction in the military?s civilian work force (over the past decade it increased by more than 100,000); reducing the costs of military health care (it?s increasing annually at 10 percent, compared with 6 percent in the nation overall); and a new round of base closings.
The Pentagon?s acquisition process ? no surprise ? is rife for greater efficiency, she wrote: The Department of Defense ?is still operating with procurement timelines unresponsive to need, perverse incentives for program managers, inadequate numbers of trained acquisition professionals and insufficient dialogue with industry.?
And U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to his credit, continues to prod his colleagues to look at specific weapons systems for reduction or elimination.
Was there a focus on any of this during the recent Senate hearing on the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to succeed Panetta as defense secretary? No. And that?s a poor reflection on the lawmakers presuming to guide national policy.
Meanwhile, the Navy just announced it will be deploying only one, rather than two, aircraft carrier groups to the Persian Gulf due to fiscal constraints. That?s just one of many cutbacks that will be necessary in an era of restrained military spending.
Again, such cutbacks are not necessarily a bad thing. But as long as our elected leaders in Congress and the White House neglect their duties to settle the big budget questions, our military is unduly burdened by that failure of leadership at the top.
OUYA, the company behind the Android gaming console that became a Kickstarter sensation when it raised over $8.5 million on the crowdfunding platform, has announced its release schedule for the much-anticipated device ? Kickstarter backers will get the console in March, online preorders will arrive in April and retailers will begin sales in June, The Wall Street Journal reports.
CEO Julie Uhrman provided details of the launch timings to the paper. The console will sell for about $100 and touch controllers should cost about $50, and it is slated to go on sale on Amazon and at retailers, including Target and Best Buy. OUYA had over 68,000 backers on Kickstarter and has sold additional units through pre-orders.
Part of the excitement around OUYA is the number of third-party partners that have already signed on. The company has already announced deals with XBMC, iHeartRadio, and VEVO, and Uhrman says the system should have as many as 200 titles available. Games are expected to be in all genres. Uhrman highlighted an important partnership with Square Enix to bring Final Fantasy 3 onto the TV through OUYA.
In keeping with the open theme of the console, developers will be free to implement OUYA controllers for use with other devices.
?One of the promises of being open is you can use what we build for other things. But you can create accessories and peripherals for our device as well. At the end of the day, it makes our ecosystem richer,? Uhrman told the Journal.
OUYA?s going to arrive with some looming competition, as the mainstream console makers are gearing up for a new generation of systems. Nintendo has already launched its Wii U console, selling 3 million units in its first quarter. It will also be up against some new entrants, like chipmaker Nvidia, which plans to release a Project Shield console/handheld hybrid later this year.
Contact: Catherine Crawley ccrawley@nimbios.org 865-974-9350 National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS)
Study recommends new tools to improve global mapping of infectious disease
KNOXVILLE, TN Since the mid-nineteenth century, maps have helped elucidate the deadly mysteries of diseases like cholera and yellow fever. Yet today's global mapping of infectious diseases is considerably unreliable and may do little to inform the control of potential outbreaks, according to a new systematic mapping review of all clinically important infectious diseases known to humans.
Of the 355 infectious diseases assessed in the review, 174 showed a strong rationale for mapping and less than 5 percent of those have been mapped reliably. Unreliable mapping makes it difficult to fully understand the geographic scope and threat of disease and therefore make informed policy recommendations for managing it, write the authors of the study, which appears as open access on Feb. 4 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
An online, open-access database, which accompanies the study, provides a quantitative scheme for evaluating the quality of data available for each infectious disease as well as specific mapping recommendations for each disease. Among the recommendations for improving disease cartography are the use of new crowdsourcing techniques to gather data, such as analyzing the content and frequency of Twitter messages about disease. Twitter feeds during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, for example, predicted outbreaks sooner than traditional disease surveillance methods.
"We have shown that novel solutions exist to enable us to use up-to-date data and technology to rapidly improve our geographic knowledge of a wide range of clinically important pathogens," said Katherine Battle, one of the study's co-authors from the University of Oxford.
Unique to the review is the inclusion of how the basic reproduction rate, which is the primary epidemiological number used to determine the degree which a disease can spread through a population, might vary among pathogens.
"There is a clear need for better estimates of the potential growth of infectious diseases that allow spatial variations to be taken into consideration, and this paper is a wonderful contribution to help us meet this need," said Louis Gross, the director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, which sponsored a workshop in 2011 that produced the paper.
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Citation: Hay SI et al. 2012. Global mapping of infectious disease. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Published online 4 February 2013.
The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) brings together researchers from around the world to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to investigate solutions to basic and applied problems in the life sciences. NIMBioS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contact Information:
Catherine Crawley, NIMBioS
Katherine Battle, University of Oxford katherine.battle@zoo.ox.ac.uk
44-1865-281210
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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.
Contact: Catherine Crawley ccrawley@nimbios.org 865-974-9350 National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS)
Study recommends new tools to improve global mapping of infectious disease
KNOXVILLE, TN Since the mid-nineteenth century, maps have helped elucidate the deadly mysteries of diseases like cholera and yellow fever. Yet today's global mapping of infectious diseases is considerably unreliable and may do little to inform the control of potential outbreaks, according to a new systematic mapping review of all clinically important infectious diseases known to humans.
Of the 355 infectious diseases assessed in the review, 174 showed a strong rationale for mapping and less than 5 percent of those have been mapped reliably. Unreliable mapping makes it difficult to fully understand the geographic scope and threat of disease and therefore make informed policy recommendations for managing it, write the authors of the study, which appears as open access on Feb. 4 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
An online, open-access database, which accompanies the study, provides a quantitative scheme for evaluating the quality of data available for each infectious disease as well as specific mapping recommendations for each disease. Among the recommendations for improving disease cartography are the use of new crowdsourcing techniques to gather data, such as analyzing the content and frequency of Twitter messages about disease. Twitter feeds during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, for example, predicted outbreaks sooner than traditional disease surveillance methods.
"We have shown that novel solutions exist to enable us to use up-to-date data and technology to rapidly improve our geographic knowledge of a wide range of clinically important pathogens," said Katherine Battle, one of the study's co-authors from the University of Oxford.
Unique to the review is the inclusion of how the basic reproduction rate, which is the primary epidemiological number used to determine the degree which a disease can spread through a population, might vary among pathogens.
"There is a clear need for better estimates of the potential growth of infectious diseases that allow spatial variations to be taken into consideration, and this paper is a wonderful contribution to help us meet this need," said Louis Gross, the director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, which sponsored a workshop in 2011 that produced the paper.
###
Citation: Hay SI et al. 2012. Global mapping of infectious disease. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Published online 4 February 2013.
The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) brings together researchers from around the world to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to investigate solutions to basic and applied problems in the life sciences. NIMBioS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contact Information:
Catherine Crawley, NIMBioS
Katherine Battle, University of Oxford katherine.battle@zoo.ox.ac.uk
44-1865-281210
[ | 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.
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Public release date: 4-Feb-2013
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