How a social website for the super-rich could make Prince Harry's Vegas affair look like small beer

How a social website for the super-rich could make Prince Harry's Vegas affair look like small beer - With news emerging that there may have been video footage taken of Harry’s naked frolics – and that he has been active on Facebook under the pseudonym Spike Wells – this story may have some more unexpected twists. But if it does disappear into the stuff of embarrassing memory, fear not: it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to foresee a string of highly entertaining scandals heading our way, courtesy of a Swedish count by the name of Erik Wachtmeister.

It all started some years ago, when the Count was hunting boar on the Bismarck clan’s estate in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany. In the moments of quietude between having “50 animals coming at you”, he recalls, he was struck by a “good idea”: an invitation-only social network, catering for millionaires and the ennobled.

Prince Harry might be ill advised to join bestofallworlds.com

The logic went like this. As a self-proclaimed member of the international jet set, Wachtmeister found himself “running into the same people who all know each other” on the well-worn glitterati circuit. Rather than have to share Facebook with hoi polloi, it made sense – to him, at least – to mirror this milieu online, with an exclusive social-network-site-cum-private–members’-club. Fast forward to the present day: bestofallworlds.com has just been launched, and already boasts more than 25,000 users. According to Wachtmeister, this number includes billionaires and members of various royal families.

Now, here’s a simple equation. Take Prince Harry – or Spike Wells – and his circle, who, as Celia Walden attests, are possessed by a “semi-scatological humour” in which the ability to take off one’s clothes is seen as a comic asset, like “walking around with a whoopee cushion permanently at your disposal”. Add Aidan Burley, the Conservative MP who, like the Prince in his younger days, has a penchant for Nazi fancy-dress parties. Add the members of the Bullingdon Club, and the super-injunction clique of Zac Goldsmith et al, as well as a small army of major and minor celebrities. Multiply by bestofallworlds.com, an exclusive social network which offers the illusion of privacy. Divide by Wikileaks and the community of international computer hackers. Equals?

From a political point of view, all of this points to a central point of friction within the modern Tory party. On the one hand, Conservatism offers the electorate a fundamentally meritocratic ideology, one which allows a grocer’s daughter from Grantham to take the highest office in the land, and which, as the welfare reform agenda and bonfire of red tape attests, is alive and kicking today. On the other, Tories are seen as synonymous with inherited aristocratic privilege, which goes against the grain of that meritocracy.

With self-made men such as William Hague and Ken Clarke on one side, and emblems of inherited wealth such as David Cameron and Zac Goldsmith on the other, the Tory brand will always be conflicted. If bestofallworlds.com takes off in Britain, it may have the potential to highlight the excesses of high-Tory misbehaviour above the successes of its grassroots; this may prove a game changer when the country goes to the polls in 2015.

And butlers all across the land say in unison, “is it really wise to join bestofallworlds.com, sir?” ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Pakistani girl sets new world record in O levels

Pakistani girl sets new world record in O levels - A Pakistani girl has become the youngest student in the world to have passed the British Ordinary Level (O’Level) examination.

Sitara Brooj Akbar, at the age of 11, passed six O’level subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

11 eleven years old Sitara Akbar set new world record in O levels and also holds the title of the youngest Pakistani candidate in IELTS. – Photo courtesy of British Council of Pakistan.

In addition to this honour, Sitara also holds the title of being the youngest Pakistani candidate of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and successfully attained seven bands out of nine, scoring 7.5 in the testing system.

The little genius from Chiniot (Punjab) has been making headlines across local media but is yet to receive any recognition from the Government of Pakistan.

“We don’t need any sort of monetary aid from the government, we just want the government to recognise that Sitara has made a shining example for Pakistan on the international stage and she is the daughter of Pakistan,” Sitara’s father Ali Akbar told Dawn.com.

Ali Akbar added that the British Council has declared and recognised Sitara’s feat as the world’s youngest student to have passed O’level exams. However, she has only been declared the youngest IELTS candidate in Pakistan, and not across the world, as the British Council is yet to confirm her feat globally.

Speaking to Dawn.com, Sitara’s mother mentioned that her daughter is a great fan of Dr Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s sole Nobel laurete and aims to become a top researcher in the field of biochemistry. ( dawn.com )

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The Addiction Habit Do we really need rehab centers for people who spend too much time shopping or using the Internet?

The Addiction Habit. Do we really need rehab centers for people who spend too much time shopping or using the Internet?.

Like a compulsive crack user desperately sucking on a broken pipe, we can't get enough of addiction. We got hooked on the concept a few centuries back, originally to describe the compulsive intake of alcohol and, later, the excessive use of drugs like heroin and cocaine.

Now it seems like we're using it every chance we can get—applying the concept to any behavior that seems troublesome or ill-advised. Take overuse of technology, for example: Over the summer, a flurry of media reports touted the services of the RESTART clinic in Washington state—apparently the first "Internet addiction" recovery center in the United States. For $15,000, you can enroll in a 45-day course designed to rid you of a dangerous or unhealthy fascination with, say, the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. So-called Internet addiction is just one of many new behavioral addictions to break into the mainstream: there's also shopping addiction, sex addiction, eating addiction, love addiction, and others.

Is this man addicted to sex?This creeping medicalization of everyday life means that almost any problem of excess can now be portrayed as an individual falling foul of a major mental illness. While drug addiction is a serious concern and a well-researched condition, many of the new behavioral addictions lack even the most basic foundations of scientific reliability. In light of Tiger Woods' extramarital trysts, "sex addiction" has been widely touted by the global media despite the fact it lacks official recognition and scientific support.

Perhaps the most widely publicized of these new diagnoses, Internet addiction, is flawed even on its own terms: A 2009 study published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior revealed that it has been classified in numerous, inconsistent ways in published research. Most studies of the "disorder" rely on self-selecting samples of college computer users and are otherwise subject to significant bias.

Despite the scientific implausibility of the same disease—addiction—underlying both damaging heroin use and overenthusiasm for World of Warcraft, the concept has run wild in the popular imagination. Our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.

You might assume that we've always known about addiction, but it's a relatively recent idea—and one that has almost always been championed by people with a political and moral agenda. The modern concept was invented in the 18^th century by physician Benjamin Rush, who, with his fellow temperance campaigners, promoted it as an explanation for, and warning against, the dangers of the demon drink. In this early formulation, the booze itself caused a "disease of the will."

Later, the theory of "degeneracy" became popular among medical men with the assumption that mental illness could be explained by an inherited tendency to be mentally defective and socially disadvantaged. The devastating effects of alcohol on supposedly inferior native people led colony psychiatrists in the 19^th century to conclude that the two conditions—drunkenness and degeneracy—went hand in hand.

Slowly the concept of addiction began to shift from poisonous drugs to a biological weakness among certain people. Addicts were to be pitied but not blamed. "Degeneration," along with eugenics, died a long-overdue death in the 1950s, but the idea that addiction is a vulnerability that exists before someone has even taken his first hit lives on. It seems to have reached its pinnacle in 2004, when a report from the World Health Organization called substance dependence "as much a disorder of the brain as any other neurological or psychiatric illness."

This reframing of addiction carries its own risks. We know that describing a problem solely from a medical perspective changes how we understand it, which may explain why addiction has become such a popular label for human troubles. Recent work by psychologist Meredith Young and colleagues at McMaster University in Canada has shown that if we replace a common name for an illness with a medical term—pharyngitis for sore throat, e.g.—people tend to perceive the illness as being more serious.

Several other studies have found that when mental disorders are described solely in biological terms, those with the diagnosis are perceived as having less control over their actions. This approach aims to be sympathetic to sufferers—but it may come at the cost of portraying the miserable as slaves to their damaged brains.

The idea that all these behavioral problems can be reduced to brain chemistry is also linked to a vacuous piece of pseudo-neuroscience. According to many popular discussions of the topic, dopamine equals addiction. That fallacy is often touted by mental health professionals as a substantive explanation when it is nothing of the sort. The popular myth goes something like this: Dopamine levels increase when we do something pleasurable, and this is what causes the addiction. When anyone wants to convince you that something should really count as an addiction, they'll quote the fact that it "raises dopamine levels."

The myth does have some basis in fact: We know that dopamine is involved in pleasure and desire, and that drug addiction causes long-term changes to the dopamine system that likely weaken our impulse control and draw our attention to reminders of drugs and drug-taking. There are subtle but important differences between these two statements, though. The former refers to an instant reaction to any pleasurable activity, while the latter indicates a possibly permanent change in how the brain reacts to the world owing to the use of substances which artificially alter it.

There's no direct one-to-one relationship between dopamine and addiction, and knowing that this particular brain chemical is released during an activity predicts nothing about how problematic the activity might be. As the dopamine system starts working when we encounter anything pleasurable, the popular myth would suggest everything we like could be addictive: reading books, scratching an itch, building model steamships out of matchsticks, whatever floats your boat. A recent article on extended and unresolved grieving for the New York Times cited a study on how dopamine is released when affected people looked at a picture of their late family member, suggesting that even thoughts of the deceased could be addictive.

The fact that the dopamine fallacy is used to prop up our dubious assumptions rather than test them can be seen in how some pleasurable, repetitive, and likely dopamine-fueled behaviors are never described as an addiction. A study by psychologists Kirk Wakefield and Daniel Wann found that while most sports fans are well-adjusted, others are preoccupied with their fandom, excessively motivated to follow their team, and abusive in response to outcomes on the field.

What's more, sports fandom has a clear and well-researched link to violence, social disorder, and alcohol abuse. But despite the fact that following a sports team could have serious personal and social consequences, and seems to fulfill all the criteria for a diagnosis of behavioral addiction, it is never considered as such. Being a fan of an online computer game, however, can get you placed in an expensive private clinic for "addiction therapy."

Currently, we are concerned about young people using the Internet, eating too much, spending irresponsibly, and being promiscuous, and these worries are being expressed in the language of addiction. The medical terminology helps us to believe we're avoiding moralization or blame, and popular science has given us a sound bite of pseudo-neurology to support our prejudices.

For these problems, addiction is little more than a fig leaf for a realistic understanding that would address why people return to unhelpful ways of coping with isolation, stress, and depression. Instead, we prefer to rely on a trite and unhelpful catch-all label that prevents people from getting appropriate help for their difficulties. We need to break the addiction habit, before it breaks us. ( slate.com )

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Can we really be addicted to the internet?

Can we really be addicted to the internet?. The news that China’s parents are resorting to electro-shock therapy in an attempt to ‘cure’ their children of internet addiction is nothing short of terrifying.

According to The Sunday Times: “Chinese teenagers hooked on the internet are being subjected to electro-shock therapy at a clinic that claims they will be “reborn” free of the obsession.”

What strikes me most about this report is not the draconian treatment of these teenagers (which is frightening to say the least) but that: “An official study two years ago claimed that almost 10% of the nation’s young people were “addicted to the web”.” While I’m willing to accept that “the country has more than 300m internet users”, I find it hard to believe that such a high proportion of Chinese youngsters are genuinely addicted to the internet.

Historically, there has been little consensus over what constitutes internet addiction. Although there is a healthy body of academic research which sets out to understand it, differences in criteria have made it difficult to present a definitive picture.

For me the idea of being addicted to the internet is conceptually flawed. The internet is not a homogenous ‘place’; computers and the internet facilitate a multitude of activities and behaviours. If an individual is addicted to anything, it’s these activities and not the act of being online. People are addicted to gambling with or without the internet. It makes gambling easier but take the computer away and they’ll be back to the bookies. The same stands for addiction to pornography and gaming. In this sense, the term ‘internet addiction’ is almost too generic to be meaningful.

In the book, Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications, Professor Mark Griffiths, a specialist in gambling and technological addictions and Laura Widyanto from Nottingham Trent University assert that: “if internet addiction does indeed exist, it affects only a relatively small percentage of the online population.”

So assuming that it is possible to be addicted to ‘being online’ how then is internet addiction identified?

Contrary to popular opinion, the amount of time someone spends online is not an indicator of internet addiction. According to Griffiths, for someone to be considered an internet addict they must show evidence of all seven components of what is known as a “technological addiction”.

Technological addictions in turn feature the core components of chemical addictions (drugs, alcohol etc). These components include: salience (the internet becomes the most important thing in someone’s life); mood modification (using the internet literally makes someone high); withdrawal (when people stop they experience shakes, moodiness or irritability); conflict (with friends, family etc); tolerance (the need to use the internet more and more to achieve former mood modifying effects) and relapse (repeat reversions to earlier patterns of use).

Although it’s possible that individuals who use the internet may experience one or another of these components, only evidence of all seven constitutes an addiction and this, at present, is incredibly rare.

There is also a very clear distinction between healthy but excessive use of the internet and actual internet addiction. For most of us high levels of computer and internet usage now constitute a normal part of life. Indeed, the recent rise in internet enabled mobile devices means that we no longer have to ‘go online’ for long periods of time any more. The internet is not something other or separate; it is embedded in our everyday lives.

As the division between our lives on and offline continues to blur, how much longer can the notion of internet addiction endure? For the sake of China’s youth, let’s hope the answer is not long. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Forget polar bears, worry about humans

Forget polar bears, worry about humans. WHEN I was a postdoc, I was often short of money and used to earn a little extra cash by telling fortunes using a pack of 15th-century tarot cards. Like other practitioners, I was always praying that one card would not appear. It shows a grinning skeleton carrying a giant scythe standing above a field littered with severed heads. It is card number 13, Death, and few customers reward you generously after they encounter it.

Although I know the card well, I was still surprised when an image of it popped into my mind out on the Arctic seas, in the middle of a large field of broken ice floes some 1200 kilometres from the North Pole. I was in a ship that was cruising slowly off the long, low, snow-streaked island of Svenskeøya on the eastern side of Svalbard, researching a book about the Arctic.

In the far distance, a female polar bear was watching us. It was a mark of her great self-confidence that she immediately decided that our 100-metre-long ship might be worth hunting. She intercepted us quickly and tried to climb on board.

The side of the ship proved a little too high, so after half an hour of nibbling the ship's bow and scratching its sides, she tried a different strategy. She lay down on the edge of a nearby ice floe, gave a long yawn, folded her paws under her chin and apparently fell asleep. There was just something suspicious about her cocked ears.

Patient "still hunting" at the edge of an ice floe is the polar bear's number one technique for catching seals. A bear may sit or stand like this for an hour or more, utterly still but alert, until a seal surfaces for air. Then there is a flurry of bloody action. Knowing this, I was not much inclined to climb down onto the ice to take a close-up photograph, beautiful though she was.

Not long ago, tourists on ships passing through this region would amuse themselves by shooting polar bears. But since the 1970s, the Norwegian government has been protecting bears here with such seriousness that locals joke: "You are better off shooting a man than a bear - the authorities will investigate you less thoroughly."

That security no doubt helped give this female the swagger to hunt a large ship. Even so, she eventually grew bored, stood up and strolled off out to sea across a vast patchwork of broken ice floes, some not much bigger than herself. Her exit left me feeling sad. I already knew from the work of the US Geological Survey (USGS) that her grand-cubs may well be the last polar bears to live here. In 2008, the USGS combined models of the future state of the Arctic ice with what was known about the life of bears. Polar bears are utterly dependent on ice as a platform to hunt seals. As the Arctic summer ice disappears, the hunting period is growing shorter and breeding success is falling. Sometimes these days there is too much water to swim back to land and bears drown.

The bleak conclusion of one USGS model was "extirpation by 2050" for the bears of Svalbard. A few areas did better, but only in the frozen channels among the northerly Canadian islands might bears survive as rulers of the ice until the end of the century. These are grim forecasts but they are also conservative because they are based on models that aren't keeping up with the terrible speed of the ice's collapse.

In the far north, the biggest and fastest change to our planet ever caused by human activity is under way. As the Earth warms, more and more of the frozen Arctic seas are melting away. Each winter, the ice grows until it covers an area more than one and a half times as great as the US. In summer, that ice used to melt to half the winter area. Now, after a catastrophic collapse in 2007, close to two-thirds of the ice is vanishing. Compared with a decade earlier, the Arctic is losing an extra area of ice each summer six times as large as California. Estimates of when the ice will completely disappear each summer now range from 2013 to 2050.

Other charismatic Arctic beasts will also struggle. After the bear, the narwhal is most at risk. Off the coast of northern Greenland in 2008 I had the good fortune to see narwhal surface among the ice. For a brief moment, three improbably long spiral horns broke through the water and waved above the sea like magic wands. One animal twisted around and, for a second, his grey, wet body glistened in the low sunlight. Then all three dived and were gone.

Under threat, too, will be the walrus, so recently recovered from mass commercial hunting, the white beluga whale and the bowhead whale, which is still only slowly gaining numbers after centuries of slaughter. All use ice to rest, hide or feed.

Hearing this, you might think it is obvious why the image of Death came to my mind. But it is not so simple. Although I always found it hard to reassure anxious customers, the real meaning of the card is transformation. A death is an ending and a new beginning, and that is what I was seeing as I travelled round the Arctic.

A great transformation is under way. The change from ice to water is an end for many familiar creatures but, in a wider sense, it is not an end. The Arctic is being reborn as a sea that is more similar to southerly seas. Whales, fish, birds and plankton that are more at home in warmer waters are already invading the Arctic. Off the coast of Alaska, for example, pollock are moving north, bringing also the salmon that feed on them. This is the beginning of a new Arctic ecosystem that is forming as the old Arctic dies. As yet, we cannot see the exact shape of the new world, or how many of its older inhabitants will hang on in remote, icier spots. But we can guess who will be its new ruler, the top predator which will topple the polar bear from its throne.

We cannot see the exact shape of the new Arctic but we can guess its new ruler

Already, in the far north, I have seen pods of killer whales. These animals have a tail fin that makes it hard for them to surface where there is much thick ice. The disappearance of the ice is increasingly exposing the beluga, narwhal and bowhead to this ferocious predator. In some parts of the Arctic, beluga whale, known as the canary of the sea for their constant chattering, have fallen silent. Killer whales are close and are listening out for prey.

In purely biological terms, the new Arctic will be more productive than the old, because there is more water, open to sunlight for longer, with more plankton growing in it, and more food supports more life. The first signs are already there. After the sudden collapse of the sea ice in 2007, a satellite-borne sensor, measuring the water's "greenness", showed that the total productivity of the Arctic seas leapt by 40 per cent. That is a big increase.

Louis Fortier, a marine biologist at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, explained it like this: "If you look at it simply from the point of view of biological productivity, that will increase as the ice disappears. It's just that the life there, the specialists which we are all fond of, like the polar bear, the walrus and some other species which we have in our unconscious mind, are going to get into trouble."

Is there comfort in knowing that polar bears hunting on ice will be replaced by killer whales swimming in a warmer, more productive sea? For me, the answer is "not much", but it will be the consequence of what we have done to Earth. And looking at the changes to the Arctic as a transformation does lead to a larger thought. For too long, too many fruitless efforts to combat climate change have been billed as "Saving the Planet". Right now, in the last week or two before the climate negotiations at Copenhagen, there are few signs of dramatic action. Perhaps that is because the message is wrong. As the changes in the Arctic show, the planet continues. Species come and species go. The planet does not need saving, even from us.

Species come, species go. The planet does not need saving, even from us

Far better that the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is portrayed as simple self-interest; that we focus on the coming losses of agricultural production, the droughts, the mass migrations and political instability that will follow rapid climate change. Political will might be better stiffened by listening to generals rather than to environmentalists. As a former head of the US Central Command, Anthony Zinni, explained, if we don't pay the price to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, "we will pay the price later in military terms".

Then we might turn again to the far north, not to worry about bears, but in fear of the Arctic's revenge (New Scientist, 28 March, p 32). For millions of years, the brilliant white ice around the North Pole has reflected the summer sunlight back into space, helping cool the planet. As the ice turns sea dark and soaks up the sun, global warming will really take off. Already the signs are there: in areas where the sea ice has gone, summer temperatures are between 3 °C and 5 °C higher than the average of the previous 20 years.

As the differences in temperature between the Arctic and the equator lessen, the weather and rain patterns all over the northern hemisphere are altering. As the new Arctic sea heats up, a pool of warm air is spreading across the nearby lands. Shrubs and trees are creeping north across the tundra. Dark vegetation soaks up more heat and the warming gains pace. Methane is bubbling from tundra lakes and shallow shelf seas as the permafrost at their bottoms thaws and micro-organisms digest their carbon.

Elsewhere, the top layer of permafrost is rotting away. It contains enough carbon to more than double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, taking us back to an era when temperatures were more than 7 °C higher than they are now.

Of course, the carbon will not be released all at once. Instead, the Arctic will favour a long, slow revenge, spread over hundreds of years. As well as this, with the same painful slowness, the melting ice caps will make sea levels rise perhaps a metre this century and then every century for a thousand years. Once these changes really get going, they will be unstoppable.

If these thoughts don't make people wake up, then we really are in deep trouble. As it happens, there's a tarot card for those who can't change, which was just as unpopular as Death with my customers. It is number 15: "blind abandonment to self-destructive materialism".

Its symbol is the Devil.

( newscientist.com )

READ MORE - Forget polar bears, worry about humans

Mobile botnets show their disruptive potential

Mobile botnets show their disruptive potential. DENIAL-of-services (DoS) attacks are a common tactic used by "black hats" intent on bringing down a high-profile website, one owned by a bank or political party, say. But what if these hackers now have cellphone networks in their sights?

In a standard DoS attack, a network of infected PCs, a "botnet", would swamp a server with so many requests to view a web page that it would be unable to handle legitimate requests. Now Patrick Traynor of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues have shown how a cellphone network could be the vehicle for an attack that would cut off calls for millions of users.

Traynor and his team used software that simulates a cellular network's Home Location Register (HLR) - a massive database that stores the details of every SIM card an operator issues and would typically contain details on up to 5 million subscribers. Traynor found that a botnet of fewer than 12,000 infected cellphones could disrupt 93 per cent of traffic - voice calls and SMS messages - to a hypothetical HLR of 1 million subscribers. In a real-life attack the owners of infected handsets would be unaware that their phone was part of a botnot.

"Phones have evolved so quickly - we've gone from just the ability to make phone calls to many of the things that desktop computers can do," says Traynor. "As utility comes to this platform, we have to expect that malicious behaviour is going to follow pretty quickly."

Indeed, the first phone botnet is believed to have been assembled earlier this year after an SMS worm called "Sexy Space" cascaded across cellphone networks. Users who clicked on a link in the message had software installed on their handset that was capable of communicating with a central server, making it possible for their phone to be controlled remotely by a third party.

The first phone botnet was assembled earlier this year after an SMS worm hit cellphone networks

"These threats are certainly feasible. Whether they will be implemented by an attacker remains to be seen," says Zulfikar Ramzan of network security company Symantec. Ramzan points out that while smartphones are powerful, they are still not as attractive a target as PCs, which can be hijacked to send large amounts of spam or host malicious websites. He argues that while a mobile botnet might be used to bring down part of a cellular network, it's not clear how profitable such an attack would be. ( newscientist.com )

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Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution

Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution. CELLPHONES could soon be used to fight noise pollution - an irony that won't be lost on those driven to distraction by mobile phones' ringtones.

In a bid to make cities quieter, the European Union requires member states to create noise maps of their urban areas once every five years. Rather than deploying costly sensors all over a city, the maps are often created using computer models that predict how various sources of noise, such as airports and railway stations, affect the areas around them.

Nicolas Maisonneuve of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, France, says that those maps are not an accurate reflection of residents' exposure to noise. To get a more precise picture, Maisonneuve's team has developed NoiseTube, a downloadable software app which uses people's smartphones to monitor noise pollution. "The goal was to turn the mobile phone into an environmental sensor," says Maisonneuve.

The app records any sound picked up by the phone's microphone, along with its the GPS location. Users can label the data with extra information, such as the source of the noise, before it is transmitted to NoiseTube's server.

There the sample is tagged with the name of the street and the city it was recorded in and converted into a format that can be used with Google Earth. Software on the server checks against weather information, and rejects data that might have been distorted by high winds, for instance. Locations that have been subjected to sustained levels of noise are labelled as dangerous. The data is then added to a file, which can be downloaded from the NoiseTube website and displayed using Google Earth.

Currently the software works on only a handful of Sony Ericsson and Nokia smartphones as it has to be calibrated by Maisonneuve's team to work with the microphone on any given model. "We are currently working on a method to automatically calibrate microphones," he says.

The project is drawing interest from various agencies around the world. "NoiseTube could provide an extra tool to noise experts and decision makers in environmental noise management," says Andrea Iacoponi of ARPAT, an environmental protection agency based in Pisa, Italy. "It can be used to improve the accuracy of European Directive strategic noise maps."

Amrit Kaur of the Awaaz Foundation, a non-governmental organisation based in Mumbai, India, that is fighting noise pollution in the city, agrees. "NoiseTube has empowered us to offer citizens a real tool to bring a change in their living conditions," she says. ( newscientist.com )

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