Makers and sellers of consumer-electronics devices have begun releasing their earnings reports for the latest quarter. Here's a look at selected companies that report unit sales on phones, tablet computers and other devices.
Some companies including Samsung Electronics Co. do not release data on unit sales.
? Oct. 18: Microsoft Corp. says it shipped 1.7 million Xbox 360 consoles during the latest quarter, down 26 percent from 2.3 million a year earlier.
Nokia Corp. says sales of smartphones dropped 63 percent to 6.3 million in the quarter, from 16.8 million a year earlier, while volume sales of cellphones fell 22 percent to 83 million from 107 million a year earlier. Sales of its flagship Lumia phones ? its first Windows-based devices launched a year ago ? dropped to 2.9 million units from 4 million in the previous quarter. Nokia didn't say when and where the new Lumia 920 and 820 will be launched, except that it will be in "selective" markets during the current quarter.
Coming up:
? Wednesday: AT&T Inc., Nintendo Co.
? Thursday: Apple Inc.
? Oct. 30: TomTom
? Oct. 31: Garmin Ltd.
? Nov. 1: Sony Corp.
? Nov. 20: Hewlett-Packard Co.
? Dec. 20: Research In Motion Ltd.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/consumer-electronics-makers-faring-230649861.html
rick santorum ozzie guillen castro comments phish gluten free diet barry zito mac virus santorum drops out
If you are not a vertebrate paleontologist, or play one on TV, what do you think vertebrate paleontologists do?
If your paleo diet depends entirely on mainstream media, you may be excused if you think that all paleontologists do is dig fossils and announce discoveries of new species. Sure, a few new fossils were presented at the meeting, and they were interesting. But that was not the centerpiece of the meeting, or topic of most conversations. It is not what you find any more, but what you do with what you find once you found it. Digging it up is just the first step, the interesting science happens later.
Likewise, ?did birds evolve out of dinosaurs?? has been answered more than a decade or so ago. And the answer is: birds are dinosaurs, the only surviving, living dinosaur lineage. Much more interesting is the current work on details of the origin of flight and feathers.
Then, there are machines. Machines that grind teeth against each other to mimic chewing, to see how different kinds of chewing affect the tooth wear, thus enabling us to learn more about the diet of extinct animals. Machines that plop claws into mud to analyze how track fossils are shaped. Different kinds of microscopes that can be used to analyze fine structures of bones, teeth and egg-shells. X-rays, and CAT-scans, and high-speed video. And of course, computers.
Eggs. Lots of work on eggs, embryos and development. Especially interesting, to me, was the work by MSU students whose China Paleontology Expedition was documented on our Expeditions blog, using microscopy to explore fine structure of egg shells, then using that structure to figure out relationships between different kinds of extinct animals, including dinosaurs, turtles, etc., and learning some new things about evolution of eggs.
If you want to figure out from fossil record if extinct horse species at a particular locality were under strong or weak selection for a particular level of performance, you compare the anatomies of a bunch of tightly selected modern horses (eventers) and a bunch of protected, semi-wild horses where selection is now relaxed (mustangs).
If you want to know how extinct reptiles, mosasaurs and dinosaurs moved, you put a bunch of different species of alligators and crocodyles in a tunnel, motivate them to run as fast as they can, film them and analyze the videos:
And if you are interested in origin and evolution of flight, you take an X-ray video of a guinea fowl during flight, then scare it to force it to turn in mid-air. And you discover stuff about anatomy and function of living birds that it never occurred to zoologists, veterinarians or poultry scientists to ask, yet it may be useful knowledge to them as well:
Species.
I was pleasantly surprised by how evenly different groups of animals were represented. I expected much more primates, especially those fossils interesting for human evolution, but there were not that many talks and posters about them ? I guess those folks go to their own meetings.
Perhaps it is only my own biased perception, but it seemed to me that fish people are somewhat a world of their own ? unless it?s an absolutely terrifying shark or bone-plated fish with enormous jaws, I did not detect much interest in fish work by researchers who study more terrestrial organisms. Which is a pity ? I saw some interesting posters about fish. Or, if we think phylogenetically, everyone was interested in fish:
One of the beauties of paleontology is that the rewards are mainly intrinsic. It is hard to find a job, and if you snag one, it?s unlikely to be at Harvard. No matter how much of a superstar you become, you cannot just hire an army of students, postdocs and technicians to do the work for you while you sit in the office writing grant proposals or travel around the world giving talks ? you still have to go out in the field, suffer the heat and dust, and wield the hammer, then come back to the lab and do some manual work yourself. You can become famous, but are unlikely to get rich. No patents, no Nobel Prizes. And importantly, the findings are unlikely to directly affect lives or livelihoods of millions of people (as in medicine, for example), which allows one to follow one?s curiosities wherever they may lead.
Thus, paleontologists are a really fun bunch to be around. They are not secretive about their work, instead they want to tell you everything about it. No fear of scooping, as this is a small, tightly knit community where everyone knows what the others are doing, where they are digging, etc. I asked a bunch of people ?Where will this work be published?? and in nine out of ten cases the answer was PLOS ONE (and in one case ?PLOS ONE, or perhaps PeerJ?). Only once I heard ?so, so sorry, but this will be behind a paywall, ugh?. Openess rules.
I am not much of a star-seeker or fanboy. And I did not really have much to ask of the big stars of the field. I think, in any field, the most interesting work is done by junior researchers and students, and what they say (and the enthusiasm by which they say it) may be more revealing about the future of a field. Which is why I focused on the posters.
One more observation. It appeared to me that the sex-ratio of the meeting was roughly fifty-fifty. But the age distribution was different between the sexes. Males were of all ages. Most veterans are male. Females were mostly younger, usually students. As I have not been to a SPV meeting before and cannot observe trends over time ? this is just a snap-shot ? I cannot make a good explanation for this. It can mean two things. First, a traditionally male-dominated field is getting a healthy influx of women, and what we see if a transitional period toward equity. Second possibility, there are always young women entering the field, but they exit from the leaky pipeline around the postdoc/job transition, leaving only men to achive seniority in the field. Perhaps long-time members of the society can chime in, in the comments, about this.
But what I was most careful about was always asking people what is and what is not OK for me to blog about. There is still so much misunderstanding about the way publishing works these days, and especially about the notorious Ingelfinger Rule (see this Embargo Watch post specifically about SPV policy, and Tony?s post about the utter illogic of not making the meeting?s abstracts public, which is also why I cannot link to individual abstracts in this and future posts). People don?t seem to understand it, and assume much harsher rule than it really is. Much of the communication stuff they are afraid of doing is actually perfectly acceptable (and not considered as ?prior publication?) by the major publishers like Nature, Science and PLOS.
Society meetings used to be semi-private events. They certainly felt private. A bunch of friends and colleagues get together, exchange data, results, ideas, have a beer and assume nobody else will know anything about it. If there is media at the event, it is carefully corralled away and spoon-fed information under harsh embargo rules.
No, your paper in a journal is not the only ?publication? of your work.
Just like science, publishing is not a singular event ? one piece, one date, one time. It is a continuous work and continuous conversation. It is not a single paper-bound broadcast by just one lab. It is a discussion between a number of players, continuously, in various venues, and in different forms and formats. My bugging SVP (several tweets, a blog post, an email, and saying it out loud during the media workshop, especially about the availability of free wifi as an essential element of a modern conference) are not bugging, not angry criticism ? they are intended to help the society move faster into modern media times. Those things help publication, in all of the forms I noted above ? researchers? presentations, livetweeting/blogging, traditional media coverage, everything. And publishers are quickly adapting to the new world as well, gradually diminishing the scope of Ingelfinger Rule, hopefully to abandon it entirely in the near future. And as a result, science will do better. Don?t we all want that?
Yesterday, 06:27 AM
He works at the Pentagon as a Public Affairs officer. Retired from the Navy in 1998 after 22 years, it took a lot of convincing on my part to get him to cruise. 
Or as I have been known to say, you have nobody to blame but yourself! 
)
?
)
