TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran was the first country in the region in terms of scientific achievements and scientific articles authoring last year, Iranian Vice-President for Science and Technology Nasrin Soltankhah announced.
 
Speaking to the Islamic republic news agency on Monday, Soltankhah announced that according to Scopus, the acclaimed ISI Web of Science, Iran published over 33,000 scientific articles in 2011.

As per the information released from ISI Web of Knowledge Iranian researchers published 18,600 articles in 2010, she added, adding Iran ranked 12th in terms of nano technologies and scientific achievements across the globe.

The remarks by Soltankhah came a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at the West for using scientific capabilities to dominate the world nations, and stressed that the Iranian nation’s progress in science and technology will serve the interests of human society.

Iran has made huge achievements in various fields of science and technology, from nuclear knowledge to stem cell and Nano technology.

In a most recent case, Iranian Health Minister Marziyeh Vahid Dastjerdi announced in September that the country would soon start production of 15 types of anti-cancer drugs.

“15 types of monoclonal anti-body drugs are being synthesized with the help of the Scientific Department of the Presidential Office, using hi-tech technology,” Vahid Dastjerdi said.

Far be it from me to rain on the party but..

• The population of Iran is over 75 million. So 33,000 scientific articles published equates to approximately 44 per 100,000 of population. Israel’s output in 2009 was approximately 189 per 100,000, and on an upward trend.
• Analyze this:

Click to enlarge

[source: The Global Innovation Index 2011]

And I could go on and on, but even Israel’s harshest critics would have to recognize our scientific contribution to the world far outstrips anything from Iran.

I would just add that I’m glad to see the Iranian Health Minister announce Iran will soon start production of 15 types of anti-cancer drugs. It’s just their main cancer fighting strategy I have a big problem with.

ISRAELIS have one more reason to be proud of themselves — one of their cities was singled out for a rare honor. The Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail last week selected the “most creative cities” of the world.

Leaning on the Global Creativity Index, devised at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the newspaper looked at the three Ts (technology, talent and tolerance) that have made cities shine.

The Globe and Mail even went a step further, in choosing “cities that are best positioned to nurture their creative edge into the future.”

Alongside with London, Sydney, Stockholm and Shanghai, Tel Aviv made it to the top of this prestigious list.

Here are some of the reasons the people of The Globe and Mail chose Tel Aviv as one of the cities that not only excel today, but will probably continue to do so tomorrow.

“The entire population of Israel may number only 7 million – smaller than New York City – but this Middle Eastern state spends more of its GDP on research and development than any other nation.”

…Add to this the leadership qualities gained by many Israeli entrepreneurs during military service, and you get a “Start-up Nation,” like the title of the book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, explaining Israel’s economic miracle. Is this the only reason for the success of Tel Aviv?

Steve Brearton of the Globe and Mail is not sure. However, “What we do know is that while Tel Aviv is small, it’s one giant innovation engine.”

Gil Hirsch, who splits his time between Tel Aviv and California, explained to Andrew Braithwaite of The Globe and Mail how you form start-ups in Israel: “A bunch of guys meet up, usually over beer; one of them comes up with an idea, everybody gets excited and, minutes later, there’s a company.”

This is exactly how, together with three friends, he had founded Face.com, a company whose site was quickly integrated by Facebook.

“There’s also no fear of failure here,” added Hirsch. “Just a fear of not trying.”

Even Tel Aviv’s notorious traffic jams can’t stop the surge of creativity, especially since Israeli software engineer Ehud Shabtai invented Waze, a GPS navigator that gets inputs of real-time local traffic conditions from other drivers.

And of course let’s not forget that Tel Aviv has proven irresistible to even the anti-Israel crowd.

The Kindle Touch is distinct from something like an iPad because it has the eInk display. This is not a display that lights up or glows, it is completely passive. That means you can’t read it in the dark but need some light shining on the page, just like a real book. It also means that the device is not blasting light into your eyes directly.

Anyway you can read more about these products on the Amazon site. I’m just giving you two nice pictures that you can use as Disk Icons if you’re on a Mac. I did this before from some Crucial SSDs.

To set your own nice disk icons on your Mac, the easiest way is to use a little piece of freeware called “Set Icon”. I’ve attached suitable png images of the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire to this post. Download those png files (click on them, they’re big) and use the Set Icon program to drop them on your device.

Update by Brian of London: there’s also another way involving a right click on the video itself, scroll down for details.

Here’s what you do:

Old Embed Code: Add &start=n, where n is the time in seconds into the video from which you want it to start.

New Embed Code: Add #t=n, where n is the time in seconds into the video from which you want it to start.

Example: To start this video from 10 minutes and 25 seconds in, you would first calculate the time in seconds:

10 minutes and 25 seconds = (10×60) + 25 = 625 seconds

and then use the following embed code.

Old Embed Code

<object width=”420″ height=”315″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/xo79vPW3lkE?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&start=625“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/xo79vPW3lkE?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&start=625” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”420″ height=”315″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

New Embed Code

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/xo79vPW3lkE#t=625” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here’s the result:

Don’t thank me, I’m a giver

Brian of London adds: if you have more recent versions of the Adobe Flash player installed (you should have the latest one because anything else will be wide open to all sorts of security problems) you can right click on any playing YouTube video and see the following menu. Just choose “Copy video URL at current time” and away you go. If you’re on more recent versions of WordPress or other popular blogging tools you can often paste this URL straight into your blog.

Don’t thank me either!

New feature: Brian of London’s Tech Talk!

Every now and then my inner geek is given full rein and I have a burning urge to blog some tech.

I’ve just finished upgrading my MacBook Pro with a new Crucial M4 256gb SSD. I tried to do the same operation a couple of months ago when this particular drive had just come out but the surgery was unsuccessful with the patient reporting frequent episodes of 20 second freezes and other stuttering problems. That was all with version 0001 of the firmware for the drive.

A month or two later and firmware 0002 has been released and this time I can report a healthy MacBook Pro running faster and smoother than ever before.

Swapping drives on a Mac is pretty easy: first I put the new drive in an external case (Firewire is always best with Macs) and used SuperDuper to copy from my internal drive to the external one. After that it’s a quick job to undo 10 screws and take off the bottom of the computer. Two more screws hold the drive down and then 4 little lugs are screwed into the old drive and need to be moved to the new one. My friends over at iFixit have the best online instructions for doing this.

The final step of the surgery is done in post-op recovery. It’s giving a pukka disk icon to the new drive. I consider this step to be essential!

The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to use a little piece of freeware called “Set Icon”. I’ve attached suitable png images of both the Crucial M4 and C300 drives: download these, use Set Icon and you’ll have great looking icons on your desktop.

Let me know in the comments how you feel about non-Israel tech blogging appearing here from time to time (boy am I opening myself up with that statement!)

AP Photo/Hatem Moussa

The first electronic driving license to be issued in Gaza was presented to the strip’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday by Gaza’s Ministry of Transportation.

A delegation from the ministry, led by transportation minister Osama Al-Isawy, introduced Haniyeh to the new style of license and how it is used.

Non-paper licenses had already been introduced in the West Bank.

Haniyeh praised the efforts of the Gaza ministry in serving Palestinian citizens, and expressed hope that it will continue the good pace of its work.

We are supposedly a smart people. Surely we can work out a way to utilize the electronic signal emitted by his driving license. Say, by helping to locate him and then conducting a marriage ceremony between him and one of our Hellfire missiles.

If only there was a serpent in the grass, this story would have everything needed for a biblical blockbuster.

In the beginning Man created the mainframes and PCs

Now the computers were formless and empty and hard to use and kept crashing a lot.

And Jobs said, “Let there be a small, but not too small, a bit bigger than a phone, computer thing with a touch screen” and there was the iPad™. And Jobs looked at it (and so did 500,000 other people in the first week), and saw that it was good.

And then a few dozen, maybe even a hundred, Israelis bought the things in America and flew back to Israel with them. Very soon after release, therefore, they started arriving in Israel. A few got through, some less than honest people, probably just carried them through the airport and “forgot” to declare them and pay the necessary 16%VAT. Other more honest people declared they had them, like Eve, immediately regretted their Apple.

The Ministry of Communications in Israel has (fairly arbitrarily) declared that this computer is different from all other computers. The first article about this was in Haaretz, but then the whole fiasco went world wide. By now 100′s of articles have been written about Israel banning the iPad supposedly because it’s WiFi meets US standards rather than European. One of the better articles is in the Wall Street Journal and is pretty much correct in the facts.

As I import a few hundred American specification Laptops per week into Israel this took me rather by surprise. As the youngest kid might ask naively at Passover dinner: “why is this slate different from all other slates?”

The tech blogs have covered this in huge detail and it really is a classic example of out of touch government agencies knowing not what they do. Some are linking this with the fact that Shimon Peres’s son owns the sole Apple import license but even I don’t think this is too likely. The whole system for bringing computer equipment containing radios into Israel is, to put it mildly, a big mess. The iPad has exactly the same WiFi/Bluetooth/FM chip as the iPod Touch and various other Apple laptops which are available here. Legitimate importers ask for permission to bring a particular type of chip, get a certificate and then declare on the import papers that such and such a computer has this type of WiFi for which permission is granted.

So to say that the WiFi doesn’t meet European standards is odd. Especially when it’s easy enough to download a document from Apple’s website giving all the European approvals for the iPad. Here are a couple of  extracs:

As for me, my own iPad arrived in Israel legally declared travelling piggy back with a large number of other laptops and was either missed by customs or allowed through despite the ban. Of course VAT was paid for it.

What a fuss and this is really just a classic example of how Israel’s modern dynamic private sector is matched by an out of date, over burdensome socialist derived bureaucracy trying to justify it’s existence. Israel is likely to be a hot bed of development for the iPad as it has proved to be for the iPhone and the forward thinking Web 2.0 ideas that marry mobile computing and always on internet connections. Blocking Israel’s web developers from legitimately owning an iPad before the official importer can bring them is a bone headed move.

We will wait to see if anybody from the press manages to point out pages 4 and 5 of the iPad Product Information Guide to the Ministry of Communications here. It seems pretty clear to me that when Apple do start shipping the iPad to the UK, Germany and France, they’ve got all the right permissions in place to do it.

CNN’s US election night stunt, in which reporter Jessica Yellin and rapper will.i.am appeared on set as three-dimensional “holograms”, was little more than smoke and mirrors, physics experts say.

In what was billed as a world-first, Yellin appeared to be beamed from Chicago into the network’s New York studio for an interview with anchor Wolf Blitzer. But, in fact, Blitzer was looking at little more than a red mark on the floor.

Blitzer made every attempt to hide the fact that the hologram was fake, saying “Jessica, you’re a terrific hologram” and that he liked the hologram because “we can have a more intimate conversation”.

Yellin likened herself to a character from Star Wars, saying, “It’s like I follow in the tradition of Princess Leia.”

A second “hologram” interview was aired between another anchor, Anderson Cooper, and will.i.am, who, like Yellin, was in Chicago for President-elect Barack Obama’s election night celebrations.

“It looks exactly like in Star Trek when they would beam people down, that’s what it looks like right here,” Cooper said.

But Hans Jurgen Kreuzer, theoretical physics professor and holography expert at Dalhousie University, told CBC news in Canada that the so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides – in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent – reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

A real hologram would have meant the images were projected into space, which did not occur as Blitzer and Cooper could not see their interview subjects.

It’s good to know that CNN cannot be honest about anything.

Update: I almost missed this:

To perform its stunt, CNN used technology from Vizrt, based in Norway, and SportVu, based in Israel.

Answer: When it leads to this:

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are f****** you” (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who – enraged – called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, with a knife on his chest, Ramazan tried to escape. Emine was still trying to finish him on the door, but he managed to take the knife out of his chest and attacked back, wounding her. Ramazan finally escaped, and was caught by the police, but Emine bleed to dead as the family waited for an ambulance to cross Ankara’s hellish traffic to reach their home.

Confused by all the events, he later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it’s not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing “serious problems” when it comes to certain “delicate words” in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Of course, you can’t blame this all on the technology. After all, it seems that Emine and her family may have also been a dot short of a good localization.

So to speak.