• Simpson to join on free transfer when contract runs out• Harry Redknapp says first signing of summer a fine acquisitionHarry Redknapp has made his first summer signing at newly relegated Queens Park Rangers with Danny Simpson joining on a free transfer. A free agent when his contract expires at Newcastle United on 1 July, the 26-year-old right-back
is keen for a fresh start after losing his place to Mathieu Debuchy at St James' Park.Simpson has agreed a three-year deal. "I want to play week in, week out," said the 26-year-old who began his career at Manchester United. "That was the main thing.
Harry wants me playing and he wants me involved."He's
a top manager, and as soon as I spoke to him, I knew this was the right move for me. I've always admired him. He is a great man in the game and I have
a lot of respect for him."From what I've heard from Harry and the staff I've spoken to, along with some of the players who I
know well, they are very determined to put things behind them and start afresh and get back into the Premier League where the club belongs.
I want to play my part in that and do everything I can for the club and the fans. I really think we can go straight back up."Redknapp appeared equally delighted. "Danny's the type we want at the club," said QPR's manager.
"He's a good professional, a good character and a good player who knows his job in the side. He'll be a really fine acquisition.
It's a fantastic piece of business on a free transfer."QPRNewcastle UnitedTransfer windowHarry RedknappLouise Taylorguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Scheduling summer childcare can be stressful and expensive. Superfast internet will now reach 95% of population by 2017 – 1.4m
more homes than originally intended, but two years later than promisedThe government has abandoned its target of rolling out superfast broadband to 90% of the population by 2015, in a move that leaves 5m households waiting a further four years for a basic high-speed internet service.Despite
promising to ignore short-term pressures when setting out infrastructure plans, the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, on Thursday reset the target for bringing rural Britain into the digital age.Superfast internet will now reach 95% of the population by 2017 –
1.4m
more homes than originally intended, but two years later than promised. Labour also claimed that the budget for connecting the most isolated homes had been cut by £50m. Superfast broadband is accessible to nearly two-thirds of the UK currently, but government support is needed to reach the final third in difficult-to-reach parts of the UK where telecoms operators will struggle to make a profit on their investment.The project, first
announced in December 2010, will have taken up to seven years to complete.
For the
final 5%, Alexander said
the government would "work closely with industry to ensure that at least google sniper access to superfast broadband" by 2018, whether through fixed or wireless networks, or 4G mobile phone masts.
The delay means four more years in limbo for
the 5m homes that cannot currently get basic broadband, hampering home working and access to taxpayer-funded services such as BBC iPlayer.The public money spent on broadband is just a fraction of the more than £40bn in taxpayer funds committed to high-speed rail. A total of £1.2bn has been earmarked so far from central and local government budgets, and Alexander has now committed a further £250m.However, this is less than the £300m – from BBC licence fee savings – originally earmarked for the second wave of digital investment in 2010. Labour claimed this meant the original commitment had been cut by £50m, while a government spokeswoman said the remaining money was still in the pot."This is the third time the government has moved the goalposts," said the shadow minister for media and communications Helen Goodman. "They are trying to make it look like a golden fleece, when they've made a pig's ear."The
coalition's record on building Britain's digital infrastructure took a hit earlier this week, when George Osborne's project to spend £150m building high-speed fibre networks in "super-connected cities" was torn up and replaced with a voucher scheme for small businesses.Alexander
gave no update on a widely trailed reorganisation of Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), the team of civil servants charged with commissioning companies to build rural networks. BDUK has been widely criticised for handing all the contracts to BT, while hampering the efforts of smaller broadband companies to invest in community networks.Further delays were caused when the European commission took time to approve the process, amid fears it would simply extend BT's monopoly.There
have been suggestions the BDUK team could be reorganised along the lines of Locog, the 2012 Olympic organising committee, which was set up as a private company, hired staff with private-sector expertise and took advice from business leaders.Locog's
chief executive, Lord Deighton, has been tasked with speeding up the delivery of infrastructure projects.
The report published on Thursday stated that BDUK "will be given greater operational freedom and an enhanced delivery focus, and will be equipped with the commercial skills it needs to deliver a broadband programme that will now extend to at least 2017".Dana
Tobak, managing director of the fibre internet company Hyperoptic, called for a shakeup of the rural broadband process.
She said: "The government's
indication that it will work more closely with industry to innovate in this area is a step in the right direction, but will certainly require looking beyond just the dominant industry players and the same old solutions."BroadbandTelecommunications industryTelecomsInternetDanny AlexanderEconomic policyCSR 2013Juliette Garsideguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Microsoft has already received several vulnerability reports that qualify for monetary rewards as part of the company's bug bounty program launched in June for the preview version of Internet Explorer 11. Schoolgirls face dangers of many forex-growth-bot �Graceland,†which focuses on a Filipino driver trying to do what he must for his family. Newly restored Hitchcock silent films from the 1920 will go on tour in the United States.
Tennis club launches inquiry after Olympic gold medallist uploads footage from Centre Court royal box on to TwitterThose lucky enough to receive an invitation to sit in the royal box on Centre Court may soon receive a gentle reminder not to use their mobile phones, after Mo Farah broke All
England Club rules by doing so on Wednesday.A
spokesman for the club said it was looking into the matter after the
Olympic gold medallist uploaded footage from court on to Twitter on Thursday night after his trip to Wimbledon.He
was seated alongside Sir Bruce Forsyth and Stephen Fry. Wimbledon rules state that phones must be switched off in and around the courts during play.There is unlikely to be any action against Farah, who tweeted that he really enjoyed his trip to the championships on a day of dramatic twists that included Roger Federer's surprise departure.However, it is expected that a way will be found to discreetly remind future visitors of the rules, which are also designed to protect rights-holders, including the BBC.Before
the tournament began
the tennis club's commercial director, Mick Desmond, explained why it would continue to ban the use of phones on court, despite an increasing push to encourage people to use its iPad and mobile applications around the grounds."On the show courts, we have to respect players. We don't want people holding up iPads on Centre Court trying to take photographs," he said. "We also have to respect the rights of our broadcasters – they have exclusive rights on the pictures that come from here, and the
content. We have to respect players and respect our live broadcasters, but at the same time give a digital experience around the grounds."Several
2012 Olympic and Paralympic stars will be invited to sit in the royal box on Saturday.Wimbledon 2013Mo FarahWimbledonTennisTwitterInternetBloggingOwen Gibsonguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds China on Monday stepped up its criticism of the U.S.-led airstrikes against Libya, using the Communist Party's main media organs to say
the military intervention undermines the United Nations charter. JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- A company partly owned by U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill and her husband
has agreed to sell a small airplane that she used for official business and pay more than $287,000 in overdue property taxes, the senator said Monday. �Kunstler,†at Pace University, takes a journey through William Kunstler’s most famous cases, including those of the Chicago Seven, the Attica prison-riots inmates and the American Indian Movement. Okay, it's true, intra-party disputes in Australia don't usually grab headlines up north.
But the news today that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been ousted as leader of the country's Labor Party in
favor of Kevin Rudd is actually pretty interesting — with potentially broader implications for micro niche finder in the years ahead. Read full article >> There's a dirty little secret in the disaster recovery industry, according to Dave Simpson, who tracks the storage market for the 451 Research Group. Usually, customers require less recovery than industry vendors make them believe, he says. But vendors charge customers based on how much data they back up, when in reality it's rare for an organisation to require a complete recovery of all its backed up data. A Jesuit priest who was a popular teacher for 14 years at Georgetown Preparatory School inappropriately touched a student at the prestigious Jesuit-run boys' school in North Bethesda, an investigation by Jesuit authorities found. Despite incessant media attention on the next big thing in new homes, many plan configurations have enduring appeal. Representative Frank Wolf claims NASA is violating 2011 law Some companies can reunite heirs with unclaimed property, like insurance policies and utility deposits.
But it may be cheaper not to lose the assets
in the first place. CANCUN, MEXICO - Delegates from 193 nations agreed Saturday on a new global framework to help developing countries curb their carbon output and cope with the effects of climate change, but they postponed the harder question of precisely how industrialized and major emerging economies will share ... At an
industry screening of the forthcoming comedy “Tropic Thunder,” Tom Cruise brought down the house with his portrayal of a dirty-dancing movie mogul. CANCUN, MEXICO - Delegates from 193 nations agreed Saturday on a new global framework to help developing countries curb their carbon output and cope with the effects of climate change, but they postponed the harder question of precisely how industrialized and major emerging economies will share ...
Current defense spending cannot be defended until it is understood. Natural wood, with its unique grain patterns, is what gives traditional acoustic instruments warm and distinctive sounds, while the power of modern electronic processing provides an unlimited degree of control to manipulate the characteristics of an instrument's sound. Now, a guitar built by a student at MIT's Media Lab promises to provide the best of both worlds.
The Chameleon Guitar — so named for its ability to mimic different instruments — is an electric guitar whose body has a separate central section that is removable. This inserted section, the soundboard, can be switched with one made of a different kind of wood, or with a different structural support system, or with one
made of a different material altogether. Then, the sound generated by the electronic pickups on that board can be manipulated by a computer to produce the effect of a different size or shape of the resonating chamber. Its creator, Media Lab master's student Amit Zoran, explains that each piece
of wood is unique and will behave in a different way when it is part of an instrument and begins to vibrate in response
to the strings attached to it. Computers can't model all the details of that unique responsiveness, he says. So, as he began experimenting with the design of this new instrument, he wondered fat burning furnace happen if you could plug in acoustic information, like we do with digital information on a memory stick?" Under the direction of Media Lab Associate Professor Pattie Maes, and with help from experienced instrument builder Marco Coppiardi, he built the first proof of concept version last summer, with a variety of removable wooden
inserts.
The concept worked, so he went on to build a more polished version with an easier quick-change mechanism for switching the inserts, so that a musician could easily change the sound of the instrument during the course of a concert — providing a variety of sound characteristics, but always leaving the same body, neck and frets so that the instrument always feels the same.
With Coppiardi's help, he selected spruce and cedar for the initial soundboard inserts. This January, he demonstrated the new instrument at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, where it received
an enthusiastic response.
He also demonstrated the earlier version at two electronics conferences last year. The five electronic pickups on the soundboard provide detailed information about the wood's acoustic response to the vibration of the strings.
This information is then processed by the computer to simulate different shapes and sizes of the resonating
chamber. "The original signal is not synthetic, it's acoustic," Zoran says.
"Then we can simulate different shapes, or a bigger instrument." The guitar can even be made to simulate shapes that would be impossible to build physically.
"We can make a guitar
the size of a mountain," he says.
Or the size of a mouse.
Because the actual soundboard is small and inexpensive, compared to the larger size and intricate craftsmanship required to build a whole acoustic instrument, it
will allow for a lot of freedom to experiment, he says.
"It's small, it's cheap, you can take risks," he says. For example, he has a piece of spruce from an old bridge in Vermont, more than 150 years old, that he plans to use to make another soundboard. The wooden beam is too narrow to use to make a whole guitar, but big enough to try out for the Chameleon Guitar.
The individual characteristics of a given piece of wood — what Zoran refers to as the "romantic value" of the material, "is very important for the player," he says, and helps to give an individual instrument a particular, unique sound. Digital processing provides an infinite range of variety. "Now," he says, "it's possible to have the advantages of both."
For now, Zoran is concentrating on developing the guitar as a thesis project for his master's degree, and hopes to continue working on it as his doctoral thesis project. After that, he
says, he hopes it will develop into a commercial product. A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 4, 2009 (download PDF). Filed under: In The News, Special Needs, Bullying A new report, based on 80 surveys, suggests that 60 percent of the forest elephants in Africa were killed between 2002 to 2011.
Get in the
spirit with these top five green