Information Muncher

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Is Mona Lisa grinning or grimacing?

Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting on poplar wood by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Few works of art have been subject to as much scrutiny, study, mythologizing and parody. It is owned by the French government and hangs in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The painting, a half-length portrait, depicts a woman whose gaze meets the viewer's with an expression often described as enigmatic.

Mona Lisa's smile has triggered much ambiguity. Is she actually grinning or grimacing? Wired magazine provides scientific answers on basis of three theories: 1. Brush strokes, 2. Fields of view, 3. Mental image. For complete story click on the link.

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Friday, March 9, 2007

$100 laptops rejected in India



The Indian HRD ministry has rejected the concept of One laptop per child (OLPC). The authorities say that they don't want to experiment with children in this area. Negroponte of MIT Media Laboratory made a presentation and sought to sell one million of these laptops at $100 each. The other reasons attributed for rejecting the offer was, the HRD feels that it would better utilize the Rs.450 million (cost of buying these laptops) for upgrading the primary and secondary education. You can also read this new form these sources: Slashdot, Times of India

OLPC is a concept brought by the Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Laboratory. OLPC evolved with educating the underprivileged children in developing countries who have little access to school or where there is poor infrastructure. The main OLPC concept emphasis on self learning by the children using these laptops. Recently these one- hundred laptops were handed out to children in Nigerian test school, Galadima. To know more about this technology and current news click here.

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Thursday, March 8, 2007

Porn ads in Yahoo

Couple of days ago I saw porn ads at Yahoomail. I wondered what will happen to the porn ads displayed in Yahoo? Here is the screen shoot of it.


When I Google searched, I came across this page on news.com A short excerpt from the news:

Web giant Yahoo said it will pull adult-related entertainment products and banner advertisements from its site in response to concerns raised by its customers.
Over the next few weeks, Yahoo will pull all pornography-related products from the shopping, auction and classified areas of its site. In addition, the company will stop selling ad banner space to sellers of pornography. What surprised me was the date it was published was April 13, 2001. You can read the full news here.

Now it is March 8th 2007 (the day I'm publishing this post), and yahoo still doesn't stop serving porn ads. Many users around the world have raised objection towards this. In country like India it is a crime to view a pornography, this has raised legal issue.

When I further searched I came a page submitted by Patrick Grote at yald notes on: 04/09/2005 . Where the author accidentally discovers a link to free porn yahoo thumbnail in Yahoo image search. The author had reported to yahoo and got no response. The author asks "what was done to resolve the thumbnail issue?" To read the full story click here.

And another issue, where a picture posted on Yahoo dating service has became a porn ad. Click here to read this story.

What do you feel about the pron ads that are displayed across various Yahoo services? Please share your views.

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Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Open your bookmarks in any browser or computer!

Having problems to open your bookmarks, when you switch over browsers? But not anymore! With Linkagogo it becomes easy to access your bookmark from anywhere. Linkagogo is a free online bookmark tool. You can store all your bookmark and making it possible to access them whether you are in home, office or on the move. You can also share your bookmark and send them over emails and much more. Check out the cool features of this tool!>>

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How to tell Google to filter low paying ads?

The problem with Google adsense is that inappropriate ads appear on blogs and it's frustrating. Users don't like feeling on clicking them either. Another hassle is that low paying ads. Even though there are enough clicks, the adsense revenue doesn't increase because of low paying adsense publishers. Either of these cases compromises your adsense revenue.

There is extremely simple solution to fix up the problem. You can tell Google to block certain URL's from serving ads to your site. You can do this by Google adsense Competitive ad filter. The first requirement to use this ad filter is that you need to have adequate URL's to filter in your hand. But this step is also made easy with Google adsense preview tool. You can download this tool. Browse through the ads, click on the ads and the destination URL of the ad is displayed. You can select and copy this URL's and paste them in competitive ad filter and you are done. It may take around four hours to filter the URL's associated with those ads.
Another important tip is to make sure that you use correct set of keywords including in your posts and even the name of pictures! (It matters!)




Make extra $$$$ by knowing the right Keyword!

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Sunday, March 4, 2007

Grab these essential blog tools!

Here are a few niche Free Essential blog tools to make your blog appealing to readers and gain a broad readership for your blog. Blogger doesn't come with all the features. So it is necessary for bloggers to install additional tools to make blogs running.

The following tools which I'm going to show, will help you to add additional interactive features are listed in quick online tips. These handy tools helps you maintain track backs, replacing the default blogger comments(Haloscan), checking who visits your blog(sitemeter), ping your blog services(pingoat), blogging from your mobile phones(blogger), tracking where the out clicks go(My blog log), catch subscribers by email(feedblitz), creating free copyrights (creative commons).

Digital inspiration comes with a whole set of blogging softwares such as Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 with Sage and BlogThis extension, w.Bloggar 4.0 - Complete Blog Management Tool and so on.

ProBlogger has classified the blog tools into various categories according to their function. The list includes Statistics Packages, News Aggregators and News Sourcing Tools, Email Subscription and Newsletter Services, Blog Poll Tools, Other Tools.

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Vocabulary search can be fun too!

Wordie is a type of online social dictionary that lets to share the words you like or hate, add citations, comments, discuss and vocabulary search and who else have added those words. Best of all subscribe to a word's comment feed, so you keep in touch with what users feel about that word. At Word Source which is similar to Wordie, you can also upload your photos too! As you type the words to get their vocabulary, spelling suggestions comes for your aid. This avoids the annoying phrase "Did you mean?".

Ninjawords is one of its kind, that is fast and simple. This dictionary is very fast and saves your time online. Never again take pain to look at ads stricken page in a typical online dictionary again!

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