Let Amazon decide for you

Technology companies' innovative spirit is taking them into new territory: devising their own laws on how you use their services and devices | IslamOnline.net

You own your PDF files — unless, or until, they think otherwise. This may come as bad news since, if you are like many, you probably use PDF (Portable Document Format) for saving a variety of file types: text documents, pictures, and scan images, among others. 

In fact, PDF has become so widespread that the ability to display (and even annotate) PDF files has become almost a standard requirement in smart phones and e-book readers, such as Amazon's and Sony's.

PDF, of course, does not think.

For better results, search engines want your intelligence

Search engines are trying to get smarter by enlisting help from their users  | IslamOnline.net

Say you want to know how much salt there is in a pinch of salt. So you head to Google with your query. And, ever the generous, the search engine coughs back more than a million links.

And if you’ve left Google set to its default 10 results per page, you will be in no luck with the salt pinch query. The first link that may resemble an answer comes 11th (a Yahoo Answers page).

But you could also stop by Wolfram Alpha, a newcomer on the search engine scene. There you will get a smaller number of results: a single page that contains in neat tables all the information one would probably hope to know about the pinch of salt.

G8 Not Honoring AIDS Commitments, Says Expert

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – The AIDS community is increasingly concerned that the donor countries are finding in the current financial crisis an excuse to avoid fulfilling their commitments to AIDS treatment and prevention | IslamOnline.net

One reason for concern was the “pathetic silence” of the G8 countries on AIDS when they met in Italy earlier this month. G8 countries “think HIV can wait,” said Julio Montaner, Co-Chair of the International AIDS Society conference, to open today in Cape Town, South Africa.

“We must send a clear message that HIV is not waiting. Any retrenchment in our efforts to provide universal access to anti-retroviral treatment to AIDS, which was repeatedly promised by G8, will cause us to pay a huge toll in the future,” he added.

What Google Wants

Google’s operating system project is probably the search giant’s most forceful attempt to hasten the end of the operating system era | IslamOnline.net

Technology rumor sites, and probably everybody else, were caught off guard. Google, which is the subject of an ever-revolving rumor mill, announced last Tuesday that it’s working on an operating system, dubbed Chrome OS.

And that was a surprise. After all, it’s no secret that Google has been working to elevate the web browser to be the center of users’ interaction with information. Whether you wanted to compose a formal letter or share your photos with family, Google made sure that a web browser (and a Google account) would suffice.

In Iran, Revolutionaries Are Busy Twittering

In Tehran’s summer of rage, Twitter is helping opposition street protesters – and is receiving  their help too | Islamonline.net

Almost all the reports from or about Iran have one thing in common: a mention of Twitter.  Technology-savvy Iranians, especially in Mir Hussein Mousavi camp, used the “micro-blogging” service during the campaign to make the case for their candidate. Then Twitter became more important as opposition supporters took to the streets protesting against what they believed was an undemocratic reelection of President Ahmadinejad, and as the government responded with more restrictions on the freedom of the media. That is when “tweets” from inside Iran be-came a principal source of information on the unfolding events. And opposition leader Mousavi’s Twitter feed became a  must-read for commentators and analysts on Iran.

Rethinking Darwin

It is time for scholars of the Arab and Muslim worlds to revisit Darwin | Islamonline.net

A hundred and fifty years later, Darwin remains a source of troubles in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Darwin’s On The Origin of Species — published in 1859 and translated in full into Arabic in the mid-1870s — has been at the center of a long-running debate, albeit one with varying intensity.

The Darwin controversy is a unique one — and not just because of the powerful evolution theory and its implications. Like most protracted controversies, the one over Darwin in the Arab-Muslim worlds perhaps tells more about the debaters than the subject of the debate. In other words, the intellectual skirmishes over Darwin spanning one hundred and fifty anxious years of the Arab world’s history reflect a cautious evolution of ideas on Darwin’s theory itself, on the definition of scientific theory, on the boundaries of science, and on the bounds of interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the Qur’an.

Biased for Science (or Thus Spoke Obama)

 World Federation of Science Journalists

President Obama was characteristically adroit with language when he declared on March 9th that he would “restore science to its rightful place.” The decision was to undo some of the restrictions on federal funding to stem cell research imposed by Obama’s predecessor in 2001.

To that, half a dozen editorials responded with praise — as did, of course, most in the science community.

That was not how I received the news.