Japan's K Computer Retains TOP500 Crown

Japan's "K Computer" maintained its position atop the newest edition of the TOP500 List of the world's most powerful supercomputers, thanks to a full build-out that makes it four times as powerful as its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, the K Computer it achieved an impressive 10.51 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.
The K Computer is the first supercomputer to achieve a performance level of 10 petaflop/s, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second. In June 2011, the partially built K computer had taken the No. 1 position with a performance of 8.16 petaflop/s. Contrary to many other recent very large systems, it does not utilize graphics processors or other accelerators. The K Computer is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.

Nice thread ^^

Low-Income Families Offered Cheap Broadband & PCs

Cable companies and an e-recycler offer low-cost ways for U.S. families to get online. Many U.S. cable providers will offer broadband service for $9.95 a month and an e-recycler will offer $150 PCs and laptops to low-income families in an effort to bring the benefits of broadband to more people across the country..

New tiny circuit may lead to smaller, more powerful devices
Researchers build 15nm circuit that's only 150 atoms part Computerworld - Researchers have developed one of the smallest electronic circuits, which could pave the way for smaller and more powerful mobile devices.

Scientific teams from McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories said they've built a circuit that has two wires that are separated by the distance of 150 atoms. The circuits are built at a 15 nanometer level. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/922256...LE_nlt_emgtech_2011-12-14

Do All Birds Tweet the Same? pdf

ABSTRACT
Social media services have spread throughout the world in just a
few years. They have become not only a new source of information,
but also new mechanisms for societies world-wide to organize
themselves and communicate. Therefore, social media has a very
strong impact in many aspects – at personal level, in business, and
in politics, among many others. In spite of its fast adoption, little
is known about social media usage in different countries, and
whether patterns of behavior remain the same or not. To provide
deep understanding of differences between countries can be useful
in many ways, e.g.: to improve the design of social media systems
(which features work best for which country?), and influence marketing
and political campaigns. Moreover, this type of analysis can
provide relevant insight into how societies might differ. In this paper
we present a summary of a large-scale analysis of Twitter for
an extended period of time. We analyze in detail various aspects
of social media for the ten countries we identified as most active.
We collected one year’s worth of data and report differences and
similarities in terms of activity, sentiment, use of languages, and
network structure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
on-line social network study of such characteristics.......