Best Buy to sell its own tablet for $239-$259: source NEW YORK (Reuters) - Best Buy Co Inc is planning to sell its own tablet, the Android-based "Insignia Flex," for $239 to $259, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, pitting the world's largest consumer electronics chain against the likes of Apple and Amazon.com Inc. The Insignia Flex is intended to go toe-to-toe with Amazon's Kindle Fire HD tablet, Google's Nexus 7, and a slew of other Android tablets from Google and Samsung. A smaller and less expensive version of Apple's popular iPad tablet is expected to be unveiled next week. ...
2012-10-16
Softbank $20 billion bit to buy Sprint Nextel
10/16/2012 Analysis: Softbank deal's big on size, small on change NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It's this year's biggest technology acquisition and the largest outbound deal in Japan's history. But game-changing, it is not. Softbank Corp's pricey $20 billion bid to buy control of No. 3 U.S. telecoms company Sprint Nextel Corp marks a bold move by billionaire CEO Masayoshi Son beyond his flagging home market. Some analysts say it hands the U.S. company much-needed firepower to buy peers and build out high-speed networks. But if Son succeeds, Sprint will still struggle to win customers in a market dominated by the twin towers of the U.S. ...
2012-10-15
Nobel Prize in Economic Science (Non price supply and demand, matching theory
Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on matching supply and demand for everything from single men and women to organ donors and their recipients.
The Harvard Business School Baker Library steeple rises past the school's motto and shield in Boston, Massachusetts. Photographer: Kelvin Ma/Bloomberg
Lloyd S. Shapley, posing for a photo in 1980, shares the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Alvin E. Roth for work done on theories of allocations and markets. Source: Mathematisches Institut Oberwolfach
Alvin E. Roth shares the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Lloyd S. Shapley for their work on theories of allocations and markets. Source: Harvard University
“The combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the winner, said in a statement inStockholm today. “This year’s prize is awarded for an outstanding example of economic engineering.”
Shapley, 89, designed theoretical constructs and algorithms to study and compare different matching methods. Roth, 60, built on his work, using experimental economics and market design to solve real-world problems, including matching 20,000 doctors annually with U.S. hospitals during their first year of employment and 90,000 teens with New York City high schools.
Roth, who has been a professor of economics and business administration at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1998, is leaving the school at the end of the year for a new position at Stanford University, where he is currently a visiting professor of economics. Shapley is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Woken Up
“I was sleeping when I got the call,” Roth said by phone to reporters gathered in Stockholm. “My students will pay more attention now. It was expected that Shapley would win; it would have been a great oversight if he hadn’t. I am very honored to share it with him.”
Their work underpins the economics discipline by providing insights into how scarce resources can be allocated, Robert Solow, winner of the Nobel economics prize in 1987, said in a telephone interview.
“I’m glad to hear this,” said Solow, who is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “People who do this kind of basic underlying work often are forgotten.”
The two men’s research focuses on markets that do not use prices to match supply and demand, such as organ donations, said Hubert Fromlet, Professor of International Economics at Linnaeus University and Joenkoeping International Business School in Sweden. Their work “can save lives,” he said in a telephone interview.
Matching Important
“Many of the important things that we do in our lives are matching, from getting into a university, from getting married to getting a job,” Roth told reporters in Stockholm.
He declined to discuss the European debt crisis. “That’s not the kind of economist I am,” he said.
Born June 2, 1923, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shapley earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1948 and his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1953. He worked for Rand Corporation as a research mathematician and taught at Princeton before joining the University of California, Los Angeles in 1981. He is married with two children.
At Princeton, Shapley was for a while a close colleague of John Nash, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 1994 and subject of the 2001 movie “A Beautiful Mind,” according to a biography by the same name by Sylvia Nasar. The book, first published in 1998, devotes one chapter to Shapley, who it says won the Bronze Star in World War II for cracking a Japanese code.
Marriage Stability
In 1962 research with the late David Gale entitled “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” Shapley explained how individuals could be paired together in “stable” matches that would last. It was that work in particular that was cited by the Nobel Prize committee.
“He is one of the towering figures in game theory,” Roger Farmer, chairman of the economics department at UCLA, said in a telephone interview, adding, “I think he’s overwhelmed by the attention.”
In 1988, Roth edited a series of essays honoring Shapley’s work, especially what he called a “remarkable” 1953 paper that suggested it might be possible to evaluate, in a numerical way, decisions in games and other interactions between people.
Roth spent more than two decades at the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh before joining Harvard’s economics department and business school.
Medical Matching
As a professor, Roth had studied medical matching programs since the early 1980s and by 1995 he got the chance to put his ideas into practice: He began work on a new system that could match young doctors to their first jobs as residents, and it was implemented in 1998.
In 2003, Roth helped redesign the system that determined how students were assigned to schools in New York City. That made it more likely they ended up in the schools their parents preferred.
School administrators and union officials praised the result.
Roth’s work “empowered parents to make a choice by ranking up to 12 high schools according to their preference based upon their values -- location, program, family alumni -- and then matching the student’s preference to the schools with available seats,” Marc Sternberg, deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, said in a telephone interview.
Mark Cannizzaro, executive vice president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the union representing those two groups, agreed.
“It has its pros and cons, but I think that since it was instituted, as time has gone on, people have become better informed, and the system is operating much better,” he said via phone in an interview.
Roth has also worked with the school systems in Boston, Denver, New Orleans andWashington.
Kidney Exchange
More recently, he helped set up a nationwide kidney exchange that makes it possible to find more matches than regional networks can.
“A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges,” Roth told a press conference at Stanford, adding, “Exchanges are what economists are good at.”
Born on Dec. 18, 1951, Roth dropped out of his Queens, New York, high school in his junior year and took classes at Columbia University before enrolling full time. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia in New York in 1971 and a master’s degree and doctorate from Stanford University in Stanford, California, in 1973 and 1974. All three degrees were in the field of operations research. He is married with two children.
Speaking to reporters after the Stanford press conference, Roth said he might use the prize money to buy a home in the area now that he is moving there from Harvard.
2011 Prize
Last year’s prize was awarded to U.S. economists Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims for their work in exploring cause and effect in policy. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win when she received the prize together with Oliver Williamson for investigating the limits of markets and how organizations work.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite who died in 1896, and the first prizes were handed out in 1901. The economics award was set up by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
The official name is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The money, 8 million kronor ($1.2 million), a gold medal and a diploma, will be handed out to the laureates at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Today’s announcement of the economics prize marks the final award for this year.
To contact the reporters on this story: Rich Miller in Washington at rmiller28@bloomberg.net; Niklas Magnusson in Hamburg at nmagnusson1@bloomberg.net
2012-10-14
| PayPal plans first job cuts since 2008 financial crisis |
 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - PayPal is planning to cut as much as 3 percent of its workforce as the payments division of eBay Inc looks to streamline its operations under new President David Marcus, a person familiar with the situation said on Friday. The reductions are expected to total between 300 and 400 and be focused in product development, technology and marketing, the person said on condition of anonymity because the plans are not public. PayPal has almost 13,000 employees. The job cuts will be PayPal's first major reductions since the financial crisis in 2008. ... |
| Microsoft debuts Xbox music service to take on Apple |
 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp on Monday announced that Xbox Music, a digital music service to vie with Apple Inc's iTunes and Amazon.com Inc's Cloud Player, will be available for its Xbox game consoles on Tuesday. The service will be expanded to Windows software-based computers and tablets, including the upcoming Surface tablet, from October 26, when Microsoft launches Windows 8. It will be expanded to phones shortly after that. The world's largest software maker has been trying for years to make the household living room an entertainment hub with its Xbox. ... |
Quantum computing -- nobel prize in physics
Nobel physics prize highlights weird world of quantum optics
By Karl Ritter and Louise Nordstrom The Associated Press
updated 10/9/2012 12:54:06 PM ET STOCKHOLM — A French-American duo shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for experiments on quantum particles that have already resulted in ultra-precise clocks and may one day lead to computers many times faster than those in use today.
Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland showed in the 1990s how to observe individual particles while preserving their bizarrequantum properties, something that scientists had struggled to do before.
Michel Euler / AP French physicist Serge Haroche discusses his role in Nobel-winning research during a news conference at the College de France in Paris on Tuesday.
A quantum particle is one that is isolated from everything else. In this situation, an atom or electron or photon takes on strange properties. It can be in two places at once, for example. It behaves in some ways like a wave. But these properties are instantly changed when it interacts with something else, such as when somebody observes it.
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Working separately, the two scientists, both 68, developed "ingenious laboratory methods" that allowed them to manage and measure and control fragile quantum states, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of superfast computer based on quantum physics," the academy said. "The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time."
Background: Nobel-winning physics explained
Haroche is a professor at the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Wineland is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.
The two researchers use opposite approaches to examine, control and count quantum particles, the academy said. Wineland traps ions — electrically charged atoms — and measures them with light. Haroche controls and measures photons, or light particles, by sending atoms through a specially prepared trap.
Haroche said he was out walking with his wife when he got the call from the Nobel judges.
"I was in the street and passing a bench so I was able to sit down," Haroche told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone."It's very overwhelming."
He said his work in the realm of quantum physics could ultimately lead to unimaginably fast computers. "You can do things which are prohibited by the laws of classical physics," he told The Associated Press.
Haroche also said quantum research could help make GPS navigating systems more accurate.
'Got a lot smarter' Wineland told AP he was sleeping when his wife answered the phone at 3:30 a.m. local time in Denver. He was utterly shocked even though his name had come up before. "But actually I hadn't heard anything this time around. It was certainly surprising and kind of overwhelming right now," he said. "I feel like I got a lot smarter overnight."
Wineland took pains to note that many people are working in the field. "First of all, a lot of people have been working on advanced computers and atomic clocks for a long time. It's a bit embarrassing to focus on just two individuals," he said.
Asked how he will celebrate, Wineland said: "I'll probably be pretty worn out by this evening. I'll probably have a glass of wine and fall asleep."
Christopher Monroe, who does similar work at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, said the awarding of the prize to the two men "is not a big surprise to me. ... It was sort of obvious that they were a package."
Monroe said that thanks to the bizarre properties of the quantum world, when he and Wineland worked together in the 1990s, they were able to put a single atom in two places simultaneously.
At that time, it wasn't clear that trapping single atoms could help pave the way to superfast quantum computers, he said. That whole field "justfellintoour laps,'" Monroe said.
In an ordinary computer, information is represented in bits, each of which is either a zero or a one. But in a quantum computer, an individual particle can essentially represent a zero and a one at the same time — that is, until the result is read out. If scientists can make quantum bits, or "qubits," work together, certain kinds of calculations could be done with blazing speed.
One example is prime factorization, the process of discovering which two prime numbers can be multiplied together to producea given number.That has implications for breaking the encryption codes that provide the foundation for today's secure financial transactions. However, quantum encryption could open the way for a new generation of secure communication tools as well.
Quantum computers could radically change people's lives in the way that classical computers did last century, but a full-scale quantum computer is still decades away, the Nobel judges said. "The calculations would be incredibly much faster and exact, and you would be able to use it for areas like meteorology and for measuring the climate of the earth," said Lars Bergstrom, the secretary of the prize committee.
The physics prize was the second of the 2012 Nobel Prizes to be announced, with the medicine prize going Monday to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka. Each award is worth 8 million kronor,orabout $1.2 million.
The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
More about quantum physics:
Millions invested in quantum weirdness Time-twisting test stuck in limbo Information teleported between atoms
AP science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York, Lori Hinnan
2012-10-12
European Union wins Nobel Peace Prize 2012
10/12/2012 European Union wins Nobel Peace Prize OSLO (Reuters) - The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades, a morale boost for the bloc as it struggles to resolve its economic crisis. The award served as a reminder that the EU had largely brought peace to a continent that tore itself apart in two world wars in which tens of millions died. The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace", Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in announcing the award in Oslo. ...
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