Internet Users Growth - Facts And Details

Facebook beats Google as the most commonly typed domain in the address bar

"Facebook.com" is by far the most common URL that people type into the address bar of their internet browser.

People are typing "facebook.com" almost three times more often than "google.com."

The URL statistics were published on July 25 by Christopher Finke, a software engineer and the creator of URL Fixer, a browser add-on that fixes human errors that are typed in the address bar on your internet browser.

Facebook.com is the most popular domain and accounts for 9 percent of all typed domains. Google.com is the second most typed address and accounts for 3.3 percent of all typed domains.

Youtube.com, gmail.com, twitter.com, mail.google.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, amazon.com and reddit.com also feature in the top ten most typed domains according to Finke.

According to website traffic monitoring company Alexa, the top 10 sites on the web by the amount of traffic they receive are, in order: Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Live, Baidu, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN and Tencent.

Finke notes in the comments on his blog that while "All of Facebook's properties (*.facebook.com) combine [to make up] 9.4% [of all typed domains]; all of Google's (*.google.com, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) combine for at least 9.7%."

"The only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia - vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland - aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (Korea - fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China - baidu.com)," reveals Finke.

Not surprisingly, people often make mistakes when entering addresses into their URL bar and end up with all kinds of typos. Frequent variations on the top level domain ".com" include .com\, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, ".com,", .vom, .comn, .com', ".co,", .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom.

"The website that appears to benefit the most from users mistyping a legitimate URL is faceboook.com (count the o's)," says Finke.

Ants Give New Evidence for Interaction Networks

Scientists previously assumed that interaction networks without central control, known as self-directed networks, have universal properties that make them efficient at spreading information. Just think of the local grapevine: Let something slip, and it seems like no time at all before nearly everyone knows.

By observing interactions in ant colonies, University of Arizona researcher Anna Dornhaus and doctoral candidate Benjamin Blonder have uncovered new evidence that challenges the assumption that all interaction networks have the same properties that maximize their efficiency. The National Science Foundation-funded study was published in the Public Library of Science on May 20.

"Many people who have studied interaction networks in the past have found them to be very efficient at transferring resources," said Blonder. "The dominant paradigm has been that most self-organized networks tend to have this universal structure and that one should look for this structure and make predictions based on this structure. Our study challenges that and demonstrates that there are some interaction networks that don't have these properties yet are still clearly functional."

"There are a huge number of systems that are composed of interacting parts, and we really don't have a good sense of how these systems are organized," said Blonder. "Think of a city with many people or the Internet with many computers. You have all these parts doing their own thing and somehow achieving some greater function."

The researchers chose to use ant colonies as models for self-directed networks because they are composed of many individual components -- the ants -- with no apparent central organization and yet are able to function as a colony.

"We think no individual ant has a sense of purpose," said Blonder. "It doesn't go out one day and say: 'I'm going to move this pebble for the greater good of the society.' It has a behavioral program where if it sees a pebble, then it's likely to move it. The reason that contributes to the good of the colony is an evolutionary argument where the ants' behavior is shaped over thousands or millions of generations."

Dornhaus and Blonder studied colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus, an ant species that is common in southern Arizona.

"These ants like to live in little rock crevices such as underneath a rock or in a split in the rock," said Blonder. "The trick is convincing them to go from their nice little home on Mount Lemmon to the lab."

Which raises an interesting question: How does one collect an ant colony?

"It isn't easy," said Blonder. "You get an aspirator, which is a tube with a fine mesh on the end of it so you don't inhale the ants, and you put the tube down in the colony and you suck. And the ants come up and you blow them out into a container to transport them to the lab."

"Of course, once you flip the rock over, the ants are upset. You have to get them before they all run off somewhere. And you also have to get the queen because without the queen the colony will die."

The queen, the mother ultimatum among ants, is the only member of the colony that reproduces. Without her, there would be no new ant workers and the colony would die.

New Robot to Help People to Walk Again

Cognitive skills for a new robot which will help people with damaged limbs to walk again are being developed by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire.

Dr Daniel Polani and a team at the University's School of Computer Science have just received a European grant of €780,800 for the four-year research project Cognitive Control Framework for Robotic Systems (CORBYS) to build the cognitive features of these robots.

"There are already some robots which help people to walk, but the issue is that they need constant attention and monitoring by therapists and they cannot effectively monitor the human," said Dr Polani. "In CORBYS, the aim is to have robots that understand what humans need so that they can operate autonomously."

Dr Polani and his team will contribute in particular to the high-level cognitive control of these robots and their synergy with human behavior. This is based on biologically-inspired principles and methodologies that have been developed at the School of Computer Science over the last years.

"We believe that all organisms optimise information and organize it efficiently in their niche and that this shapes their behaviour -- in a way, it tells them to some extent what to do. We believe it will help our system to take decisions similar to organisms and to better 'read' the intentions of the human it supports," said Dr Polani. "Furthermore, we will use these techniques to balance the lead-taking between robot and human."
Read more New Robot to Help People to Walk Again

Simulating Tomorrow's Accelerators at Near the Speed of Light

As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). BELLA, a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator, is remarkably compact. In just one meter a single BELLA stage will accelerate an electron beam to 10 billion electron volts, a fifth the energy achieved by the two-mile long linear accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

But realizing the promise of laser-plasma accelerators crucially depends on being able to simulate their operation in three-dimensional detail. Until now such simulations have challenged or exceeded even the capabilities of supercomputers.

A team of researchers led by Jean-Luc Vay of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD) has borrowed a page from Einstein to perfect a revolutionary new method for calculating what happens when a laser pulse plows through a plasma in an accelerator like BELLA. Using their "boosted-frame" method, Vay's team has achieved full 3-D simulations of a BELLA stage in just a few hours of supercomputer time, calculations that would have been beyond the state of the art just two years ago.

Not only are the recent BELLA calculations tens of thousands of times faster than conventional methods, they overcome problems that plagued previous attempts to achieve the full capacity of the boosted-frame method, such as violent numerical instabilities. Vay and his colleagues, Cameron Geddes of AFRD, Estelle Cormier-Michel of the Tech-X Corporation in Denver, and David Grote of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, publish their latest findings in the March, 2011 issue of the journal Physics of Plasma Letters.

Space, time, and complexity

The boosted-frame method, first proposed by Vay in 2007, exploits Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to overcome difficulties posed by the huge range of space and time scales in many accelerator systems. Vast discrepancies of scale are what made simulating these systems too costly.

"Most researchers assumed that since the laws of physics are invariable, the huge complexity of these systems must also be invariable," says Vay. "But what are the appropriate units of complexity? It turns out to depend on how you make the measurements."

Laser-plasma wakefield accelerators are particularly challenging: they send a very short laser pulse through a plasma measuring a few centimeters or more, many orders of magnitude longer than the pulse itself (or the even-shorter wavelength of its light). In its wake, like a speedboat on water, the laser pulse creates waves in the plasma. These alternating waves of positively and negatively charged particles set up intense electric fields. Bunches of free electrons, shorter than the laser pulse, "surf" the waves and are accelerated to high energies.

"The most common way to model a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator in a computer is by representing the electromagnetic fields as values on a grid, and the plasma as particles that interact with the fields," explains Geddes, a member of the BELLA science staff who has long worked on laser-plasma acceleration. "Since you have to resolve the finest structures -- the laser wavelength, the electron bunch -- over the relatively enormous length of the plasma, you need a grid with hundreds of millions of cells."

Read more: Simulating Tomorrow's Accelerators at Near the Speed of Light

3-D Films on Your Cell Phone !!

The experts will be presenting their solution from February 14-17 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Halting page loading and postage stamp sized-videos jiggling all over the screen -- those days are gone for good thanks to Smartphones, flat rates and fast data links. Last year, 100 million videos were seen on YouTube with cell phones all over the world.

A survey of the high-tech association BITKOM found that 10 million people surf the Internet with their cell phones in Germany. And there's another hype that is unbroken: 3-D films. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI in Berlin, Germany, have been able to put both of them together so you can experience mobile Internet in three dimensions.

The researchers have come up with a special compression technique for films in especially good high-resolution HD quality. It computes the films down to low data rates while maintaining quality: H.264/AVC. What the H.246/AVC video format is to high-definition films, the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is to 3-D films. Thomas Schierl is a scientist at the HHI, and he explained that "MVC is used to pack together the two images needed for the stereoscopic 3-D effect to measurably reduce the film's bit rate," and this technique can be used to reduce the size of 3-D films as much as 40 percent.

Source: 3-D Films on Your Cell Phone