Karnataka hosts nanotech conference

St Aloysius College is organising an international workshop on Applications on Nanotechnology to Energy, Environment and Biotechnology from 14 to 16 December 2010, writes Magalorean.

The workshop will be inaugurated on 14th by Dr VS Acharya, the minister for Higher Education, at the government of Karnataka.

More than 100 delegates consisting of researchers, teachers, representatives from industry, PG students of physical and biological sciences from many universities and colleges from all over the country have registered so far.

Global businesses appear to be woefully unprepared for the security risks posed by emerging technologies such as cloud computing and social networking, according to the latest research from consultancy Ernst & Young, says V3.co.uk.

The firm's 13th annual Global Information Security Survey found that, despite the rapid spread of such technologies, just 10% of companies think security teams should examine new and emerging IT trends as a priority.

However, nearly two thirds recognise that a significant increase in the use of external service providers, as well as business adoption of new technologies, will provide an increased risk. "Technology advances have provided an increasingly mobile workforce with seemingly endless ways to connect and interact with colleagues, customers and clients," says Ernst & Young director Seamus Reilly.

A group of Slovenian and British researchers have used something called 'sentiment analysis' to identify emotional content, states New Scientist.

The team's algorithms look for features such as keywords, emoticons, and subtle linguistic markers such as misspellings, and use the results to calculate a 'happiness score' for each post. They have found that long conversation threads are overwhelmingly more emotionally negative than short ones, with happiness scores decreasing logarithmically with the number of messages. Moreover, long conversations almost always start with negative comments.

"If you want a long chat, don't start by saying 'I love this!' at least not online," says Mike Thelwall, head of the Statistical Cybermetrics research group in Wolverhampton, UK.