My Green Corner

Maternal and child under-nutrition has grave consequences rather than been confined to infant health and the mortality rate. Occurrence of Maternal and child under nutrition is highly prevalent in countries with abundant low and middle-income populations. Such a situation in these countries results in to the substantial increase in mortality and overall burden.

Scientists in an international collaboration project performed specific analysis of the five different studies that were conducted on considerably large populations in these countries. This study results analysis included various parameters including the nutrition, health and human capital in developing and middle-income countries.

Scientists could observe that the overall impact of malnourishment in young mothers and their babies has extensive and far-reaching consequences going even beyond the common parameters of infant health and mortality.

Scientists also conducted a thorough review of the previous studies made in this regard and the new data analysis related to the communities in countries including Brazil, Guatemala, India, the Philippines and South Africa. The researchers were able to demonstrate the documentary evidences supporting their new finding that under nutrition was strongly associated with indicator parameters like shorter adult height, less schooling, and reduced economic productivity. It was also observed that the poorer life outcomes had more tendency of getting passed on generally from one generation to the next. This was significantly reflected with the offspring of undernourished mothers who also displayed low birth weight.

Researchers analyzed the adult ‘Body Mass Index (BMI)’ and height data and found that the lower birth weight and under-nutrition in early childhood were increasingly becoming the great risk factors for high glucose concentrations, blood pressure and coronary heart disease during the later years of life. Scientists also suggested that the “malnutrition suffered in the womb and as an infant could not be reversed simply by access to more food at a later stage in life”. Taking a conclusive view on the vulnerable situation of under nutrition and the importance of healthy, well nourished dietary patterns in the early childhood, Professor Caroline Fall, at the “MRC Epidemiology Resource Center” in Southampton remarked that particularly the children who remain malnourished in the first two years of their life and gain weight with faster rate in their subsequent years during the adolescent age are actually at the greatest risk of chronic diseases related to nutrition. This is mainly because of the rate of metabolism of their bodies. The metabolic rate gets largely adjusted during the early development stage. Under nourished children were found to be ill-equipped for coping up with many such health problems in the later years of life. However, the “rapid height gain in the first 2 years of life is not associated with adverse health consequences in later life”, says Caroline Fall.

An interesting large-scale trial is also being carried out among the young women in Mumbai. This trial has engaged the young women at an early stage, before they become pregnant, and providing them with a daily dietary supplement in the form of a “samosa” with high micro-nutrition contents.

Study results also revealed that mother and child under-nutrition leads to permanent physical and mental impairment with harmful future generations’ impacts. Populations adversely affected by stunting and the negative health and life impacts of under-nutrition in early life will not be capable of grasping opportunities to get rid of poverty.

“Perl”, a dynamic scripting language, introduced a new and improved version, the first in over five years.  This is the first update since 2002 to the “practical extraction and report language”. “Perl 5.10″ adds both new language features and an improved Perl interpreter, according to community site Perl Buzz.

“Perl” is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications.

“Perl” has a long 20-year history now and during all these years it gained massive popularity by assimilating the syntax from many predecessors, making it really easy to use for anyone already versed in ‘sed’, ‘awk’, ‘grep’, ‘csh’, ‘C/C++’, ‘Lisp’, and so on.

Perl’s syntactical flexibility sometimes makes perl scripts challenging to read. On the other hand, the languages like ‘python’ with its rigid syntax structure have arguably gained ground in recent times over ‘Perl’, for applications that are developed collaboratively.

In addition to that, scripting languages specially-made for use on the Web, like’ PHP’ and ‘Ruby’, have eroded some of perl’s once formidable share of the dynamic Web server scripting scene.

One of the most attractive feature of the ‘Perl 5.10′ is the new ‘or’ operator, //, which is a “defined or” construct.

For example, the following statements are syntactically equivalent:

$foo // $bar

defined $foo ? $foo : $bar

An expert would definitely identify that the first line is much more compact and more readable. This clearly means that it is “$foo defined”. Therefore, an equal sign also can be placed like;

$bar //= $foo;

It is almost the same as writing;

$bar = $foo unless defined $bar;

Another praiseworthy new feature of this programming language is its “smart match operator”. ‘Perl Foundation’ described this as “a new kind of comparison, the specifics of which are contextual based on the inputs to the operator”.

This remarkable “smart match operator” appears to be aiming at making Perl’s relatively strong typing easier to work with. The “~~” operator apparently guesses the type from context, allowing lazy comparisons.

Of this new feature, ‘ Perl Buzz’ comments, “The result is that all comparisons now just do The Right Thing, a hallmark of Perl programming”.

For instance, to find if scalar $needle is in array @haystack, it would now require to apply the ” ~~ operator”;

if ( $needle ~~ @haystack ) …

‘Perl 5.10′ has a specific support for the named “regex statements”. Programmers will now be in a position to avoid the hard to decipher dreaded lines of $1 $2 etc. It will be easier to understand what’s going on in complex ‘regex scripts’ such as the ‘Markdown’.

Perl guru Ricardo Signes highlighted  its new language features  that include  a ‘switch statement’ said to go “far beyond” those found in C, C++ or Java and Regex improvements which is a “Named captures” aimed at reducing the need for positional captures along with Recursive patterns said to be useful in parsing.

All new features can be upgraded without breaking the existing scripts simply because these features have been turned off by default. It has been enabled for progressive upgrading the scripts with the “use” syntax.

Scott Gilbertson explains this in a better way. He advises to add the line use feature ’switch’; prior to a block of code where you’d like to take advantage of the new switch statement in Perl 5.10 and then turn it off after upgrading that block of code using the statement no feature ’switch’;. New features can be enabled by name or as a collective group using the statement use feature ‘: 5.10′.

Apart from this ‘switch statement’ there is also a new ‘say statement’ “which acts like print() but adds a newline character and a state feature, which enables a new class of variables with very explicit scope control” says Scott Gilbertson.

‘Perl’ is an interpreted language instead of being just a compiled language. This unique characteristics of ‘Perl’, makes it a human-readable code that can easily be interpreted a ‘Perl Interpreter’.

“With the 5.10 release, the interpreter gains speed, while shedding weight”, ‘Perl Buzz’ claims. Other interpreter improvements include ‘Relocatable installation’ for more file system flexibility, more portable Source code, and fixing of many small bugs.

‘Perl 5.10′ has several other interesting improvements including a faster interpreter with a smaller memory footprint, and better error messages. Many experts in programming have found that “Perl 5.10’s new features are definitely worth the upgrade and a must have for anyone who uses Perl on a daily basis”.

Google is planning for the addition of a new technology to its top popular ‘AdSense Program’ sometime during the month of February this year. This technology will facilitate detecting “Domain Kitting”, a common practice among many of the domain marketers and domain registrants. Internet experts across the world have expressed their concern over the practice that is causing problems in many ways.

Numerous Internet marketers and domain registrants are making huge profits in the domain registration space business presently. This tremendous potential of this business has attracted many of the miss-users who find it as a good ‘get rich quick’ idea.

‘Domain kiting’ is extremely common and popular among the domain registrants across the globe. It is a practice to play with the standard five-day grace period at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated domain. This five-day grace period actually helps the registrants who mistyped domain names they acquired from being stuck with the wrong domain. Basic intention of this facility is to protect the interests of the genuine domain registrants.

The miss-utilization of the beneficial ‘Domain Kitting’ facility is growing at a much faster speed among the people who want to earn money by playing below the margin lines. Registrants repeatedly delete a domain name during the grace period and re-register it without ever paying for it. They perform this ‘registration-deletion-registration ‘operations many times during the grace period of five days. Repeating this again and again in order to make profits and generate good money from the number of advertisement hits the successful domains get, has now become an epidemic almost. It is becoming an irritant for all those who have genuine business interests and want to have a fair website for conducting their business operations.

Such types of successful domains become capable of generating considerable amount of online advertising revenue. The reason behind this revenue generation is simple. All such type of successful domains actually remains active in all the search engines, such as Google for a period of five days at least. This ‘five-day life of a particular domain helps the registrants to makes millions from partners that taste domains with ‘AdSense for Domains’. Expert domainers and registrants who have sufficient expertise in all these popular techniques know the nuts and bolts of this game.

This game of ‘Domain Kitting” spoils the chances of fair deal and transparency for the genuine business owners. The honest registrants who intend to make use of a particular domain name for the legitimate business reasons do not get the desired domain names because these are already tied up with the ‘kitting’. Such a situation not only affects the genuine business interests of many of the business owners but also affects the concurrent business interests of the advertisers, search engines, and lastly the viewers. Imagine the millions of dollars that goes as shear waste as it does not serve the basic purpose of advertising. It never serves the reader or the viewer because it never reaches to them. All advertisements are lost in between on such types of ‘five-dayer- domains’ and the add-revenue drops in wrong pockets. This type of “Kitting” is therefore completely unethical from the fair business point of view.

According to an announcement made by Google, on February 11 this year, the company will install a system for preventing registrants from making ad-revenue from kitted domains using ‘AdSense’ for Domains. Google however, will not disclose the details of this new addition. The exact reasons of not disclosing the details are however not available but it seems that Google intends to maintain a definite level of secrecy in the interests of itself and the domain registrants across the world. This secrecy would perhaps save the system from cyber criminals including hackers.

Google claims that it has always discouraged the practice of ‘Domain Kitting’. “If we determine that a domain is being kited, we will not allow Google ads to appear on the site”, said the official spokesperson of Google. The company anticipates that such a policy in place would make positive impacts both on the users as well as the domain purchasers around the globe. It is clear from this stand of Google that it is taking care of the business interests of its advertisers also.

Quashing the ‘kitting’ business has some business interests of Google involved. There might be some lawsuits filed in near future against the vendors who enable the ‘Domain Kitting’. The company’s objectives regarding this infringement of genuine domain registrant’s interests, if obstructed by any person or vendor by the means of breaching the code of conduct would land up in legal battle.

One should not misunderstand the two related concepts here. Domain Kitting ‘as a matter of fact is quite different from the ‘Domain Tasting’, though seems to be similar. “Tasting” is actually a facility given to a prospective purchaser to ‘taste’ the domain for five days and then buy the domain, according to Danny Sullivan.

Google has clarified that it is not targeting the “Domain Tasting.” But the industry specialists observe that the new system from Google will definitely affect the ‘tasting’ also. The tasters who are earning huge profits and think that this is a perfectly legitimate business process will also create a backlash for Google, many experts feel.

It is going to be the beginning of a new phase in domain business sector. It will also be worthwhile to watch the turns and rounds that the Google and the ill-motive domain game players would be going through in times to come.

Yong Guan’s laboratory may be the driving engine for the future marketing safeguards for internet advertisers. With his five long formulas deriving various variants and constants would be the future guidelines for all those who are looking eagerly to make a fortune with internet marketing and advertizing business.Yong Guan’s formulas contain all bad news for present and future cyber criminals. Yong Guan and his team of students at the ‘Iowa state University’ are working on the development of  technologies for fighting the cyber crimes and making shopping more secure for common people around the world.

Yong Guan is Litton Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in collaboration with the ‘Iowa State University Research Foundation’ has also applied for a patent on this new technology that detects frauds.

“Click Fraud”, the new technology of Yong Guan, deals with the problem of false drives and campaigns for hitting the advertisements that are posted on millions of websites. Yong Guan says,” The invention will help online advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo reduce click fraud”.

Guan’s research is expected to facilitate millions of the computer and internet users across the globe. Most of these users do not have enough time and expertise to protect their machines from the growing frauds. They often do not have enough access to the recent security technologies and safeguard measures.

Security issues have multiple faces and the researchers are fighting on this front to solve the complex puzzles for past several decades.”And 30 years later we’re still working on them”, says Yong Guan.

Cyber crimes have many aspects and they are changing constantly. During the late nineties it used to be the hackers attacking computer systems. Since then things have taken a different track now. Trade and commerce is now becoming more online oriented and this online money transaction has attracted the cyber criminals for adopting new and advanced techniques for making frauds. To address the problem, Guan and his co-researchers are working on multiple projects in order to make computing more secure and hold cyber criminals accountable:

Yong Guan is on the verge of developing new technology and techniques that will extract the criminal evidences directly from the computers, network hardware, cell phones and other electronic devices. Guan has three projects in his hands right now. Each of these projects has a specific focus;

•  Network attack attribution to help investigators find the real origins of cyber   criminals and attackers.
•  Click fraud detection to protect Internet advertising.
•  Auction fraud technology to quickly identify the people and their accomplices who run bogus Internet auctions.

These projects on which Yong Guan is working, also aim to improvise the security and working of the wireless communication networks.

The first project has an objective of finding out how a new secure network coding model can be generated and protected from attacks during its transmitting the network traffic. The conventional system used to send each individual message hop by hop until it reached its destination.

The new technology has made it differently now. It is based on network coding and cooperative relaying schemes. With this new set up the system sends and combines all messages in different groups. Guan said it’s like loading up a freight train and sending big loads down the line together. It’s a way to increase capacity and save energy. But this also becomes more vulnerable as putting all that network traffic together makes it easier for attackers to hit more targets with a single attack.

The second project of Young Guan intends to develop an exclusively location-based security system that would help almost all existing wireless technology. That means a person would have to be working in a specific place prior to having an access to documents over a wireless network. Such a system in place would be immensely useful for the government employees who are generally required handle the classified documents over wireless connections. Guan’s security system would only allow those documents to be viewed in designated secure rooms.

Yong Guan’s third project will help secure wired and wireless multicasts over the Internet. This will help in protecting and managing multiple lists of Internet accounts. For a software company it would serve many potential purposes. Such a company, for instance, would be able to limit the delivery of security patches to paying customers. Webcasters would also be benefiting with this technology. It will help them manage and limit access to their content.

Yong Guan is also making attempts to develop techniques for protecting the individual’s identity on the internet. Such technology will be immensely helpful for the internet users. Guan intends to develop a set of secure applications. One application, for instance will protect the individual’s medical record using online pharmacies while the other set of application will be preserving the identity of people who are taking part in some online voting system.

Yong Guan is definitely going to trouble the criminals. His technologies would detect the criminals and their bogus accomplices who intend to run bogus internet auctions on the internet. Future may be witnessing major developments and these technologies could develop as a tool that can be used in the courts also.

Yong Guan and his associates are spending long hours with cross-hatched lines on their laboratory whiteboard, struggling with their analyses, calculations and formula. They are sure working for all of us and we must thank them for their sincere efforts and wish them good luck.

Developers got good news last week. Launch of a new beta tool facilitating developers with integrated software as a service platform with application development environment by Salesforce.com created rippling waves.The company named this beta tool as “Force.com Development-as-a-Service”. Several features have been included with these tools like a metadata application programming interface for accessing database schema, user interface code, and business logic on the Salesforce.com platform.

Ariel Kelman, Senior Director of Salesforce.com’s  platform product marketing says that the developers can also download from Salesforce.com “an application that enables development and deployment of software from an Eclipse-based integrated development environment”. “Eclipse”  is one of the popular open source development frameworks that the developers commonly use.

Developers can now set up ‘sandboxes’ on the Salesforce.com  platform. These sandboxes are completely on the same lines of the “SaaS Application”. The ‘sandboxes’ will now help developers in building the codes and testing the codes in these ‘sandboxes prior to moving the code for the production line.

Lastly, the Salesforce.com  has also configured an API that is readily available for integrating the development process within ‘source code control management systems’, like the ‘Perforce Software Products’ or the ‘IBM’s Rational software’.

Application of the Salesforce.com  tool will also facilitate the developers in storing definitions of applications in their systems for sharing and collaboration with other developers. In order to facilitate the online collaboration among the developers, code of Salesforce.com share also supports Google’s online repository called Google Code.

This new launch by the Salesforce.com now reflects how Salesforce.com is adding more sophisticated development tools to its platform. The company also facilitates its customers and users along with the subscribers with an extended flexibility to tailor the company’s hosted customer relationship management and sales force automation software.

Salesforce.com also launched its Apex development platform during last summer. This development platform comprised a programming language and online development tools.

As a matter of fact, the enhanced flexibility in the application development is more favorable to the large corporations with an IT staff available to build on top of Salesforce.com’s core services.

The company was enjoying a good name among the ‘small and medium sized businesses (SMBs)’ for a long time as a provider of online services for small and medium-sized businesses. It has climbed up the ladder now and serving the needs of larger businesses as well. “Dell“, the major computer manufacturing giant, joined the club as an esteemed customer last year. Another large company that is already having business with the Salesforce.com is the “Cisco Systems”.

Marc Benioff, the Chief Executive of the Salesforce.com predicted in the month of November last year that the company would expectedly achieve the $1 billion in annual revenues within a year. However, there is a stiff competition ahead.

Microsoft has also launched a new version of its CRM software, CRM 4.0, in the month of December last year. This CRM software of Microsoft provides the company and its hosting partners with the extended ability to host CRM in much higher volumes. This will in turn put a big challenge before Salesforce.com. Microsoft  has among its future plans to launch its new and much improved  ‘SaaS’ version, called “CRM Live”, sometime during the first half of the current year.

Developers and experts will definitely find this service as one of the more beneficial option with much extended features. Salesforce.com’s  new ‘Force.com Development-as-a-Service’ is in developer preview and awaits developers to have a look in to at the company’s developer site.  The company intends to make the tools available in the markets for general applications for the customers sometime this year only.