Minister pulls for extortion

It was none but a minister who before a parliamentary sub-committee yesterday demanded extortion be made legal to stop rampant corruption in the transport sector.

Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan, who heads Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation, made the mind-boggling demand before the committee yesterday. Transport leaders led by him did not stop there; they placed a 17-point demand before the committee, in which they chalked-out how the “legal toll collection” would be made from buses, trucks, auto-rickshaws and labours working in the sector.

In defence of their demands, Shajahan Khan and Khandaker Enayet Ullah, a top transport owners' leader, yesterday said illegal money collection would stop on the country's roads once “toll collection” was legalised.

The controversial minister became the talk of the country last year when he suggested that professional drivers did not need education.

The parliamentary sub-committee, chaired by M Israfil Alam, yesterday at the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban held the meeting with top leaders of transport labours and owners to find ways to stop raging extortion in the sector. The committee had its first meeting on October 13 last year.

After the first meeting, the sub-committee told reporters that transport workers' leaders, especially a minister-led labour organisation, were running an extortion regime and the minister's organisation was having the largest piece of the pie.

“It collects at least Tk 51 crore a year in the name of raising funds for workers' welfare,” after the October meeting Israfil told reporters quoting other transport leaders.

The committee chief had said the committee findings were only the tip of the iceberg and they were yet to get the full picture.

He had said the rampant “toll collection” results in transport fare hikes by 40 to 200 percent. The people end up paying high fares and also increased prices for all commodities, he said .

According to the sub-committee, more than 23 lakh workers are employed in the transport industry that has over 5 lakh buses. There are 7,490 workers' unions, 510 workers' organisations and 412 bus owners' associations.

Yesterday at the meeting of the committee, Shajahan Khan, Enayet Ullah and others demanded fixing a minimum charge which labours and owners would pay to run their respective bodies.

They said labours and owners organisations of light vehicles and auto rickshaws should be allowed to charge each vehicle Tk 20 a day to run their organisations.

Truck owners and labours organisations should be allowed to collect Tk 20 a day from each member as organisation running cost, said the recommendation placed before the committee.

They also recommended that each bus and truck pay Tk 20 on ferries to meet expenses of labours working there.

At the goods loading and unloading points, every truck would have to pay Tk 10. Trucks would have to pay Tk 10 at the beginning and conclusion of every travel.

Leaders of labours and bus-truck owners recommended that every inter-district bus and truck pay Tk 20 each to labours and owners union.

The leaders want payment of Tk 20 for each vehicle requisitioned for the labours' and owners' union and to compensate the vehicle's owners and meet daily expenses of the respective labours.

Shajahan Khan, labour leaders and Enayet Ullah-led transport owners' leaders yesterday also recommended formation of a committee comprising all stakeholders to implement policies on running their organisations and different bus terminals.

The committee yesterday did not make any observation regarding the 17-point demand that was placed before it.

Megh reeling from trauma

"Are you a policeman? “ Megh asked this correspondent.

The five-year-old looked hesitant and curious when he saw this reporter at their living room yesterday. After a while, he stepped forward and started talking to this correspondent.

Before asking the question, Mahir Sarowar Megh, the only son of journalist couple Sagar Sarowar and Mehrun Runi, took the notebook of this correspondent and sketched a number of things including a revolver.

"They [the killers] threatened to shoot me. They had a bullet [gun]," he said, pointing the revolver he drew.

He then abruptly changed the topic and started talking about something else.

"They set fire and ate my egg."

Overcome by fear and trauma, Megh has apparently lost his balance: he says things relevant to the incident and also things that are not relevant.

"Obviously he is shell-shocked and we are not discussing anything in front of him,” said Roman, one of Runi's brothers.

Megh is refusing to eat since the incident, he added.

Thirty-six hours after the incident, Sagar and Runi's West Rajabazar residence, where the couple was killed, wore a dark, gloomy look yesterday afternoon.

“Do you know they've killed my father and mother?” Megh said, very feebly.

Asked where he slept on the night, he said, “I slept at mimmis [he calls his mother mimmy] room.”

Showing a photo of his father wearing a black suit, he said he has a similar suit.

When asked if there were "one or three people" in their house that night, he said two.

"They hit in papa's leg and papa fell down. Blood was welling out," he said.

Nokia cuts 4,000 jobs in struggle to win smartphone market

World-leading mobile phone maker Nokia will cut 4,000 jobs at its smartphone manufacturing facilities in Finland, Hungary and Mexico by the end of 2012, it said on Wednesday.

"The expected headcount impact by country is 2,300 in Komarom (Hungary), 700 in Reynosa (Mexico) and 1,000 in Salo (Finland)," company spokesman James Etheridge told AFP.

The job cuts follow a review of smartphone operations announced in September 2011, when the company warned jobs may be cut at the plants in question.

The factories in Komarom, Reynosa and Salo will in the future focus on software-heavy smartphone customisation, while manufacturing will shift to Asia to shorten the time it takes for products to get to market, the company said in a statement.

"But these planned changes are all about speed and responsiveness and ultimately, our competitiveness," Etheridge said.

Nokia's shares edged up 0.05 percent on Wednesday to 3.89 euros while the Helsinki market added 1.4 percent overall.

The job cuts come as Nokia struggles to secure a foothold in the fiercely competitive smartphone market, with its newly-launched flagship line Lumia failing to correct falling sales in its overall smartphone business.

Nokia's comeback fight comes amid a dynamic and differentiated market, with many players offering consumers a variety of options, said Horace Dedieu of the Helsinki-based mobile industry blog Asymco.

"My initial impression is that it's a good product, but, right now, being good isn't enough," Dedieu told Finnish state broadcaster YLE about the Lumia.

In its 2011 full-year earnings report released two weeks ago, Nokia said it had sold "well over one million" Lumia phones since their launch in October in Europe, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

However, others have noted that while the Lumia has received good grades from users, not enough are buying the new smartphone.

The phone's fledgling reputation has also already been tainted by reports of returns due to battery life problems.

Apple's iPhone hot but Android handsets on fire

An outbreak of iPhone fever made Apple the hottest smartphone maker worldwide at the end of 2011 but handsets powered by Google's Android software were shaping up as true winners in the market.

Worldwide shipments of smartphones soared 54.7 percent in the final three months of 2011 from the same period a year earlier, with California-based Apple making the most popular models, according to an IDC report released Monday.

Smartphone makers shipped 157.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 102 million in the same period the prior year, IDC reported.

A total of 491.4 million smartphones were shipped during the year, up a "strong 61.3 percent" from the 304.7 million units in 2010, according to IDC.

Apple had a 23.5 percent share of the global smartphone market, followed by Samsung and Nokia with 22.8 percent and 12.4 percent respectively.

"So-called 'hero' devices, such as Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and Apple's iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

"But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google's hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently."

While Apple tightly controls iPhone hardware and software, Google makes the Android mobile device operating system available free to smartphone manufacturers who have been building it into ranks of handsets.

Android and iPhone smartphones accounted for slightly more than 90 percent of US smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, industry-tracker NPD Group reported on Monday.

Android commanded 48 percent of the market compared to Apple's 43 percent, according to NPD.

NPD figures indicated that Android handsets were more popular with first-time smartphone buyers in the United States, with its share of that market at 57 percent compared to Apple's 34 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Hacker releases Symantec source code

A hacker released the source code for antivirus firm Symantec's pcAnywhere utility on Tuesday, raising fears that others could find security holes in the product and attempt takeovers of customer computers.

The release followed failed email negotiations over a $50,000 payout to the hacker calling himself YamaTough to destroy the code.

The email thread was published on Monday, but the hacker and the company said their participation had been a ruse. YamaTough said he was always going to publish the code, while Symantec said law enforcement had been directing its side of the talks.

The negotiations also might have bought Symantec time while it issued fixes to the pcAnywhere program, which allows customers to access their desktop machines from another location.

"Symantec was prepared for the code to be posted at some point and has developed and distributed a series of patches since January 23rd to protect our users against known vulnerabilities," said company spokesman Cris Paden.

Mysterious Sounds Reported Around the World

Ever wished parenting could be just a tad more civilized? A little less filled with yogurt stains and 2 a.m. wails, perhaps?

A new book has a solution: parenting a la Francais. American mom and Paris resident Pamela Druckerman makes her case in Bringing up Bebe, which comes out Feb. 7.

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Druckerman, an American and former Wall Street Journal reporter, has raised her three children in Paris. Curious as to how French babies slept through the night and toddlers sat politely at the table, she set out to investigate. The book details her findings, most of which stand in direct contradiction to last year's hot momtini-hour topic: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. For example:

When your 3-year-old screams for snack, American parents tend to throw the nearest tube of squeezable applesauce at her as quickly as possible. Not so in France, where parents delay gratification. "I'm now convinced that the secret of why French kids rarely whine or collapse into tantrums - or at least do so less than American kids - is that they've developed the internal resources to cope with frustration," Druckerman writes.

When a 6-week-old cries, American parents usually sprint to offer comfort. In France, parents pause first.

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"French parents believe it's their job to gently teach babies to sleep well," Druckerman writes. "They don't view being up half the night with an eight-month-old as a sign of parental commitment. They view it as a sign that the child has a sleep problem and that his family is wildly out of balance."

When American women take a break from their kids, it's often a guilt-ridden hour with cell phone at the ready. French women think it's unhealthy to spend all their time with their kids. "Children -- even babies and toddlers - get to cultivate their inner lives without a mother's constant interference," Druckerman writes.

BLOG: Robot Baby Teaches Parenting Skills

According to a Good Morning America poll, however, not all Americans are buying it: 76 percent said they preferred the hands-on, American style.

Photo: French actress Catherine Deneuve with her son Christian Vadim just a few days after his birth in 1963. Credit: Corbis

Mind-Reading May Be Reality Soon

By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to “hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.

"If someone was completely paralyzed, or if a patient had locked-in syndrome with no movement, but the brain was still active and we could understand it well enough, we could develop devices to take advantage of that and restore communication," said Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's still very early," he added. "And a lot of work still needs to be done."

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how our brains manage to process audible sounds and extract abstract meaning from words and sentences. As part of that effort, lots of work on animals has helped narrow in on the brain regions involved in hearing and responding to sounds.

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To see how those findings might be applicable in people, Pasley and colleagues enlisted the help of 15 patients with epilepsy or brain tumors who had electrodes attached to the surface of their brains in order to map out the source of their seizures. With electrodes in place, participants listened to about 50 different speech sounds in the form of sentences and words, both real and fake, such as "jazz," "peace," "Waldo," "fook' and "nim."

After mapping out the brain's electrical responses to each sound, the research team found that they could predict which of two sounds from the study set the brain was responding to, and they could do it with about 90 percent accuracy

LG Optimus Sol (LG E730)

The "Sol" in the phone's name means "Sun". In order to make the Optimus Sol visible in sunny conditions, the handset has what LG call an "Ultra AMOLED" display. This 3.8" 800 x 480 pixel panel is the latest iteration of AMOLED technology, and since LG have a strong reputation in display technologies then there's a good chance that it will be every bit as good as they say.

Unlike the not very popular Optimus 3D, the Optimus Sol does seem to address a real market. If you try to use a standard TFT LCD display outdoors then the ambient light does wash it out and make it difficult to read, but even AMOLED displays suffer somewhat when the sun is really bright. Electronic paper displays, such as those found in the Amazon Kindle and Motorola FONE work very well in sunlight, but they are useless in the dark. AMOLED based displays seem to offer the best compromise in these situations.

One side effect of the different technologies is the different power drain characteristics. TFT displays always draw the same amount of power from the battery, no matter what is displayed. AMOLED screens draw more power from the battery when they are brighter and much less when darker, so LG are shipping the Optimus Sol with a specially designed dark UI to maximise battery life.Display aside, this is a fairly typical upper midrange Android smartphone with a 1GHz single core CPU and 512Mb of RAM, a 5 megapixel primary camera plus a VGA video calling camera, WiFi 802.11 b, g and n connectivity plus 3.5G, DLNA, a media player, FM radio, Bluetooth, GPS, a microSD slot (with 2GB in the box) and all the usual Android features. An NFC variant should also be available, although NFC is not installed as standard. The operating system is Android 2.3 with LG's own Optimus UI on top.

nlike the previous PRADA phones, the LG PRADA 3 (we will call it that for the sake of simplicity) is a fully featured smartphone with a technical specification than can rival some of the best in its class.

The LG PRADA 3 is an Android 2.3 smartphone with a bright 4.3" 480 x 800 pixel display, an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and a dual-core dual-channel 1GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM.

The high-end technical specifications are combined with a carefully designed handset that is very much in line with PRADA's design philosophy, plus a unique and very understated user interface that looks distinctly different from other Android devices.

At just 8.5mm thick, the PRADA 3 is a very slim device and some clever trickery by the designers actually makes it appear much thinner. The back of the handset has PRADA's Saffiano pattern on it, and the overall design is quite pleasing although fundamentally this is just another black slabby smartphone.

Samsung Star 3 and Star 3 DUOS

The Star 3 is not a million miles away from last year's Star II or Galaxy Y in terms of features. It's worth pointing out that the Star II though that currently retails for about €80 SIM-free, a lot cheaper than the €120 the Galaxy Y goes for, so we can expect the Star 3 to be under €100 too.

The display is a 3" 240 x 320 pixel panel, on the back is a basic 3.2 megapixel camera. The Star 3 lacks 3G support, but it does come with WiFi and EDGE data instead. There's no GPS and the Star 3 isn't a smartphone, although it does support a range of social media and internet applications.