No news is bad news
"It used to be that if a hiring manager dug around online and couldn't find anything, it was a good thing. Today, however, if you have no online presence, it could be more of a career killer than if an employer found some digital dirt," writes Rachel Zupek of CareerBuilder.com. "'If you have an established career and no online presence, it is a big red flag for employers,'" says Zack Grossbart, a virtual team coach and author of The One Minute Commute . "'Employers expect to find blogs, forum posts, LinkedIn profiles and many other sources of information about you. If you haven't been mentioned by other people in a professional context, employers will wonder why not.'"
Source: CNN.com
We think the same thing?
"Ever wanted to read minds? Ever wanted to communicate your thoughts without speaking a word?" Murad Ahmed writes in The Times of London. "It may become possible after claims by British scientists that they have created a system that allows 'brain-to-brain communication,' sending messages formed by one person's brain signals through an Internet connection to another person's brain many miles away. Christopher James, who worked with colleagues at the University of Southampton, said that his experiments were 'the first baby steps' toward technologies that would allow people instantly to send thoughts, words and images directly into the minds of others. 'This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can't speak, can't even blink,' Dr. James said. Others have hailed it as the future of the Internet, a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards, telephones or even mouths. A decent broadband connection, however, would be essential." Currently, only a series of zeros and ones can be sent, and it takes about 30 seconds to send four numbers.
A genuine flake
"Kellogg's has developed a high-tech method to stamp out imitation cereals - by branding Corn Flakes with the company logo," The Daily Telegraph reports. "The new technology enables the firm - which makes 67 million boxes of Corn Flakes every year - to burn the famous signature onto individual flakes using lasers. Kellogg's plans to produce a number of one-off trial batches of the branded flakes to test the system. Bosses will then consider inserting a proportion of branded flakes into each box to guarantee the cereal's origins and protect against imitation products."
Choose your noise
"For decades, auto makers have been on a quest to make cars quieter: an auto that purrs, and glides almost silently in traffic," Jim Motavalli reports in The New York Times. "They have finally succeeded. Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren't noisy enough. So safety experts, worried that hybrids pose a threat if pedestrians, children and others can't hear them approaching, want auto makers to supply some digitally enhanced vroom. Indeed, just as cellphones have ring tones, 'car tones' may not be far behind - an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit."
A tumbling toad
"When confronted by a predator, some animals fight, others run while a few hide, hoping not to be noticed," Matt Walker reports for BBC News. "The pebble toad of Venezuela does something altogether different: It curls up like a ball and throws itself down the side of a mountain. By doing so, the tiny creature [just a few centimetres long]bounces down the rocks just like a rubber ball. … The toad is so small and light that the forces of impact are too tiny to cause it any harm."
PM's retirement job
"As a politician, he took on party conservatives and became one of Japan's most popular postwar prime ministers," Justin McCurry reports for The Guardian. "In retirement, Junichiro Koizumi, the silver-haired reformer with an Elvis Presley obsession, is about to confront a very different foe: space monsters. Koizumi, who retired from politics before August's general election, has swapped the soapbox for the studio to lend his voice to Ultraman King, an extraterrestrial TV superhero revered by three generations of Japanese. … 'We considered many people who might be able to play this crucial role,' said a producer at Tsuburaya Productions. 'But we thought that the only person who could really have the presence of Ultraman King, who brings the [Ultraman]clan together, would be Mr. Koizumi, who once led the country.'"
Thought du jour
"All progress is gained through mistakes and their rectification. No good comes fully fashioned, out of God's hand, but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and repeated failures by ourselves. This is the law of individual growth. The same law controls social and political evolution, also. The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress."
- Mohandas Gandhi