BillPin Acquires Obopay's BillMonk Bill-Splitting Service

After some years of languishing, BillMonk’s service and user base will be taken over by a young Singapore startup, BillPin, which provides a similar bill-splitting service. Just over six months old, BillPin pitches itself as a “Mint for groups” and offers a way for people to track how much money they owe each other. It has plenty of competitors in the bill-splitting space, including?Splitwise, Billsup, Spotme, Divvyit, Splitmybill.ie;?scooping up BillMonk’s user base might provide it a firm leg up in the fight for user acquisition. BillMonk was founded in 2005 and was acquired by Indian mobile money provider Obopay in 2007. It’s one of the older players in the space, and seems to have suffered from neglect for a few years. Some of its competitors have tried to capitalize on that. Splitwise launched a campaign to bring BillMonk users onboard last year. BillPin launched a similar service?in October last year. BillPin’s co-founder, Darius Cheung (whose previous startup, tenCube WaveSecure, was acquired by McAfee in 2010), acknowledged the older firm’s state of neglect.?”Not much improvement was added to BillMonk at all over the past seven years, and in fact BillMonk has suffered significant down time in the last six months or so,” he said. Of the migration service BillPin created, he said: “It was launched to catch BillMonk users who were frustrated with its downtime, but we didn’t know then we were going to inherit its entire user base.” Still, BillMonk continued to add users over its lifetime, and steadily at that, he said. As a result, bringing BillMonk’s user base onboard will give BillPin “easily 50 times” more users. He wouldn’t say how many that is, but according to reports, BillPin has a small base of 5,000 or so users. He made it clear that this move was an acquisition of the larger service’s user base, but none of BillMonk’s engineers will come over from Obopay. BillPin has five employees in Singapore and one in India. It’s bootstrapped so far, but Cheung is currently hoping to raise an angel round. Obopay started in 2005, and provides technology to corporate clients like Nokia and Societe Generale, and telcos like Warid Telecom in Uganda to allow them to offer their own branded mobile money-transfer services. It was started in Bangalore, and now has its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. It has Bangalore and Mumbai offices.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70B3UrF_2gg/

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Rising temperature difference between hemispheres could dramatically shift rainfall patterns in tropics

Apr. 2, 2013 ? One often ignored consequence of global climate change is that the Northern Hemisphere is becoming warmer than the Southern Hemisphere, which could significantly alter tropical precipitation patterns, according to a new study by climatologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, Seattle.

Such a shift could increase or decrease seasonal rainfall in areas such as the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia, leaving some areas wetter and some drier than today.

"A key finding is a tendency to shift tropical rainfall northward, which could mean increases in monsoon weather systems in Asia or shifts of the wet season from south to north in Africa and South America," said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew R. Friedman, who led the analysis.

"Tropical rainfall likes the warmer hemisphere," summed up John Chiang, UC Berkeley associate professor of geography and a member of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center. "As a result, tropical rainfall cares a lot about the temperature difference between the two hemispheres."

Chiang and Friedman, along with University of Washington colleagues Dargan M. W. Frierson and graduate student Yen-Ting Hwang, report their findings in a paper now accepted by the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society. It will appear in an upcoming issue.

Generally, rainfall patterns fall into bands at specific latitudes, such as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The researchers say that a warmer northern hemisphere causes atmospheric overturning to weaken in the north and strengthen in the south, shifting rain bands northward.

The regions most affected by this shift are likely to be on the bands' north and south edges, Frierson said.

"It really is these borderline regions that will be most affected, which, not coincidentally, are some of the most vulnerable places: areas like the Sahel where rainfall is variable from year to year and the people tend to be dependent on subsistence agriculture," said Frierson, associate professor of atmospheric sciences. "We are making major climate changes to the planet and to expect that rainfall patterns would stay the same is very na?ve."

20th century rainfall patterns

Many discussions of climate change focus on long-term trends in the average global temperature. The UC Berkeley and University of Washington researchers went a step further to determine how the temperature difference between the two hemispheres changed over the last century and how that may have affected tropical rainfall patterns.

Using more than 100 years of data and model simulations, they compared the yearly average temperature difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres with rainfall throughout the 20th century and noticed that abrupt changes coincided with rainfall disruptions in the equatorial tropics.

The largest was a drop of about one-quarter degree Celsius (about one-half degree Fahrenheit) in the temperature difference in the late 1960s, which coincided with a 30-year drought in the African Sahel that caused famines and increased desertification across North Africa, as well as decreases in the monsoons in East Asia and India.

"If what we see in the last century is true, even small changes in the temperature difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres could cause measureable changes in tropical rainfall," Chiang said.

This bodes ill for the future, he said. The team found that most computer models simulating past and future climate predict a steadily rising interhemispheric temperature difference through the end of the century. Even if humans begin to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, the models predict about a 1 degree Celsius (2? F) increase in this difference by 2099.

While the average temperature of Earth is increasing as a result of dramatic increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, Earth is not warming uniformly. In particular, the greater amount of land mass in the north warms up faster than the ocean-dominated south, Chiang said. He and his colleagues argue that climate scientists should not only focus on the rising global mean temperature, but also the regional patterns of global warming. As their study shows, the interhemispheric temperature difference has an apparent impact on atmospheric circulation and rainfall in the tropics.

"Global mean temperature is great for detecting climate change, but it is not terribly useful if you want to know what is happening to rainfall over California, for example," Chiang said. "We think this simple index, interhemispheric temperature, is very relevant on a hemispheric and perhaps regional level. It provides a different perspective on climate change and also highlights the effect of aerosols on weather patterns."

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California, Berkeley. The original article was written by Robert Sanders.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Andrew R. Friedman, Yen-Ting Hwang, John C. H. Chiang, Dargan M. W. Frierson. Interhemispheric temperature asymmetry over the 20th century and in future projections. Journal of Climate, 2013; 130201075338004 DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00525.1

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/JKt_Psihi0A/130402162559.htm

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The origins of?April Fair??dates back to 25 August??1846??when two entrepreneurs settled in the city,??Narciso Bonaplata??(Catalan) and??Jos? Mar?a de Ybarra??(Basque) who proposed to the??City Council??to authorize the days 19, 20 and April 21 to organize a annual fair.?Permission was granted after a "give and take" with the mayor of Montelirio Conde, who had pointed out to them the existence of two other fairs in neighboring countries, the livestock in??Mairena del Alcor??(the Fair is the oldest in Andalusia , from 1441) and that of Sanlucar la Mayor, which was created by Ferdinand IV, the second oldest fair in the province.??In March??1847??, Queen Elizabeth II granted the privilege in Seville to celebrate his fair one month after the livestock, lasting three days.

Dance and have fun this is the main feature of the???Feria de Abril?in Seville where the girls dance the flamenco and spend magical moments with your friends or familiari.ascoltando good music with beautiful classical guitars.

Food and drink is one of the main pleasures enjoyed by visitors to the Fair.?All the houses and stalls offering a wide range of dishes that allow the public to satisfy their hunger or thirst, at any time of the day.

Undoubtedly, the first major meeting of the gastronomic fair is the "Night of the??fish??. "?This dinner, recently added to the traditional uses of the city, is limited only to members of the stalls and is held on Monday to strengthen the friendship between them.??E this event usually takes place around midnight.?The main course, as the name indicates, is fried fish.?It is customary to serve a selection of fresh fish, like pijotas, anchovy, hake, plaice, squid and marinade.

The houses are so call them stalls have??the floor and walls of wood and covered with a tarpaulin.?The houses vary in terms of type and size.?There are numerous models?and the application to open the new is so high that you are thinking of finding a new location for the weekday in a not too distant future.

The "pony car" is the only means of transport allowed the Real de la Feria, and it always has been and always should be, except for vehicles necessary to the health, care and public safety, which can be motorized.

Since the beginning of its existence, during the Feria everyone did show off the most beautiful cars on the roads in Spain, often are competing with each other, with their horses and their noble drivers, each dress with special ornaments and agghindando also horses with bows, bells and rattles.

In these days takes place in Seville Feria de Abril (April Fair) of?

Source: http://howtotravelwell.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-seville-there-is-feria-de-abril.html

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Sex among young adolescents is rare, study finds | MinnPost

Despite public perception, sexual activity among young adolescents ? those 13 or younger ? is rare in the United States, according to a study published Monday by researchers from the Guttmacher Institute in New York.

Using data from a nationally representative U.S. survey taken during the years 2006-2010 of people born between 1984 and 1993, the researchers found that less than 1 percent of women reported being 11 years old or younger when they first had sex (defined as heterosexual vaginal intercourse). Another 1 percent said they had been 12 years old, and 2 percent said they had been 13 years old at the time they became sexually active.

The percentages were only slightly higher among the male respondents: 2 percent said they had had sex by their 12^th birthday, and 5 percent said they had done so by their 13^th.

"Policymakers and the media often sensationalize teen sexual behavior, suggesting that adolescents as young as 10 or 11 are increasingly sexually active," said the study?s lead author, Lawrence Finer, in a prepared statement. "But the data just don't support that concern. Rather, we are seeing teens waiting longer to have sex, using contraceptives more frequently when they start having sex, and being less likely to become pregnant than their peers of past decades."

?A different public health concern?

Sadly, the survey also found that among young girls, sex is usually nonconsensual. Some 62 percent of the surveyed women who had sex by their 10^th birthday and 50 percent of those who had sex by their 11^th birthday reported that the sex was coerced. (The survey data on males did not include this information.)

Pregnancies among pre-teens are ?exceedingly rare,? Finer and his co-author, Jesse M. Philbin, note, and thus ?arguably represent a different public health concern than the broader issue of pregnancies to older teens.?

Yet the Obama administration used health concerns about sexually active pre-teens as a key reason for overturning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration?s 2011 recommendation to make Plan B, the so-called morning after birth control pill, available over-the-counter to girls and women of all ages.

?About 10 percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age,? said Health and Human Resources Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement announcing that Plan B would be available without a doctor?s prescription only to women aged 17 and older.

Such comments ?imply that their speakers believe there is a substantial level of sexual activity among 10- and 11-year-old girls,? write Finer and Philbin.

Other findings

Using data from other surveys of people born as early as 1939, Finer and Philibin shattered another myth about teenage sexuality in the U.S. ? that it was rare among past generations. They found instead that the median age for first sexual encounter has never fallen beneath age 17 at any time over the past 50 years.

The study also confirms what other recent reports have found: Today?s teens are more likely to delay sex than those of more recent generations.

Here are some other findings from the study:

• Most middle-teens are not sexually active. Some 19 percent of the women surveyed and 22 percent of the men reported being sexually active at age 15. Those percentages increased to 32 percent and 35 percent at age 16.
• About 26 percent of the survey respondents ? both women and men ? said they had not had sex by their 20^th birthday.
• A substantial proportion of young women use contraception during the first month of becoming sexually active: 82 percent of 16-year-olds, for example, and 85 percent of 17- to 18-year-olds. That number is much smaller for pre-teens, however: around 50 percent.
• Among girls aged 13 and younger, most pregnancies end in abortion. Among girls aged 14 and older, pregnancies are more likely to end in birth than abortion.

?Teaching young adolescents about contraceptive methods and prescribing or offering methods before they are likely to become sexually active is prudent,? conclude Finer and Philbin. ?Knowledge of and access to contraception at an earlier age would help those adolescents who initiate sex early, and would likely increase contraceptive use among older teens as well.?

A challenging task

Persuading Americans ? and, more importantly, perhaps, their political leaders ? to expand access to contraception is, of course, a challenging task. As Finer and Philbin note in their study, 54 percent of Americans surveyed in 2007 said that teens should not be allowed access to contraception until the ages of 16 to 19.

And 6 percent said teens shouldn?t have access to birth control at all.

The study appears in the May issue of the journal Pediatrics. Unfortunately, it?s behind a paywall, despite being funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Source: http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/04/sex-among-young-adolescents-rare-study-finds

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Schumer: Gang of 8 Has 'Substantive Agreement' on Immigration Issues

WASHINGTON - Sen. Chuck Schumer said today that while there is not a final deal on immigration legislation just yet, the bi-partisan "Gang of Eight" senators working on immigration reform has reached a "substantive agreement" on the major components of an immigration plan.

"It is not a done deal. We have to draft the legislation. We have to have the group of eight sign off on the specific language, but we have substantive agreement on all the major pieces now between the eight of us," Schumer said in an interview with ABC News Sunday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made a similar statement today and said that he expects the parameters of the plan to be revealed next week.

"I think we've got a deal. We've got to write the legislation, but 2013, I hope, will be the year that we pass bipartisan immigration reform," Graham said on CNN's "State of the Union." "It's got to be written off. We haven't signed off. There are a few details yet. But conceptually, we have an agreement between business and labor, between ourselves that has to be drafted. It will be rolled out next week."

On Friday, business and labor leaders came to an agreement on a visa program for low-skilled immigrant workers, a major turning point in the debate on immigration reform.

In what the AFL-CIO described as the "W-Visa" program, 20,000 visas would be available for low-skilled workers beginning in April of 2015. The number of available visas would increase gradually in the following years but would never go above 200,000 or dip below 20,000 in any given year. Only 15,000 visas would be allocated to construction jobs each year.

"The fact that business and labor have come to an agreement overcomes the last major substantive hurdle we've had in our negotiations," Schumer told ABC News.

But the deal on a guest worker program does not mean the senate group's plan is finalized, because the Gang of Eight still has to hammer out details including border security and the path to citizenship and write the actual legislation.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., one of the members of the bipartisan group working on immigration, said today that reports of a final deal being reached are "premature," and he called for more hearings and discussion on the topic of immigration so that a "healthy public debate" is conducted.

"Arriving at a final product will require it to be properly submitted for the American people's consideration, through the other 92 senators from 43 states that weren't part of this initial drafting process," Rubio said in a statement. "In order to succeed, this process cannot be rushed or done in secret."

ABC News' Carlos Boettcher contributed to this report.

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/schumer-gang-8-substantive-agreement-immigration-issues-230408180--abc-news-politics.html

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There's A Reason That No One in Publishing Bought Goodreads ...

Several dozen editorials have been written in the 2 days since Amazon announced plans to buy Goodreads, but one in particular caught my eye today.

James McQuivey, writing over at Forbes, laments over the fact that no one in publishing bought Goodreads:

I have an important question to ask, one that I am stealing from author?Nick Harkaway?(@Harkaway) who wrote this on Twitter the morning after:

The point isn?t that Amazon bought GoodReads. The point is why GoodReads wasn?t snapped up by a publisher years ago.

The obvious reason is that based on the rumors of a purchase price in the ?low eight-figures? as some are confidently whispering, most publishers weren?t really in a position to buy Goodreads. Unless they had seen this coming and had bought it many years ago. Let?s say back in 2010, when I first urged one of the Big Five (are there five now?) publishers to buy it. It was a riskier proposal back then, I?ll admit, and one that I couldn?t put a price tag on, so I won?t claim that I pushed hard or that the publisher was foolish not to take my advice.

He?s possibly correct about publishers not being able to afford the rumored $150 million that Amazon paid for Goodreads, but they probably could have afforded it when it was smaller.

It?s funny that he should mention 2010. That was the year that 3 major publishers got together and announced a new site that would give them a direct digital connection to readers. That site launched earlier this year, after over 2 years in development.

It?s called Bookish, and it does give Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster a direct connection to readers. But the connection it offers is so very, very different from Goodreads that the differences tell us quite a bit about these publishers? priorities.

Frankly, these publishers would probably not have bought Goodreads even if it had been up for sale and even if they had the funds. It does not do what they want.

Note: I am only going to critique the 3 publishers behind Bookish and not everyone in publishing. Some, like Macmillan (see the postscript), have a clue.

So how are the 2 sites different?

The first and most important difference is that Goodreads was launched not with the goal of forming connections. The goal was to build a community of (first) readers and then authors and to a lesser degree publishers.

Edit: Let me correct myself. As Google+ has shown us you cannot set out to create a community. Instead you give users a reason to come to a site and stay.

Goodreads was launched to encourage readers to show up and be bookish. The community formed around them.

Bookish, on the other hand, was launched in order to provide Hachette, S&S, and Penguin with ?direct digital customer relationships?. The publishers got to build it from the ground up, and the manner in which it functions says a lot about the type of??direct digital customer relationships? these publishers want
to have.

The thing is, they don?t actually want a relationship ? not the relationship that?James McQuivey (and I) think that publishers could benefit from.

The word relationship implies that there is more than one party speaking, and that is not the point of Bookish. This site exists to be little more than yet another marketing channel for publishers.

I have spent time on Bookish since it launched (including an hour today), and I frankly cannot see how I (as a user) can contribute. I can write a review, yes, but I can?t build a virtual bookshelf of books I own, I can?t communicate with other users, nor can I do anything that would benefit me and not the publishers.

Most importantly, I cannot even leave a comment on the blog posts on Bookish. That, folks, is an example of just how completely the communication flows in exactly one direction.

The internet offers many vast opportunities for collaboration, and Bookish flushes them down the drain. This could not be more different from Goodreads, which uses almost every chance to encourage users to participate, add content, and build value for each other.

To be fair, Bookish never pretended to be anything other than a one-way street. It was pretty obvious from the launch press release that the publishers were going to use it to sell books and that all the communication would flow one way. I have no problem with this, but if Bookish is really these publishers? idea of a ?direct digital customer relationship? then their thought process is stuck in the last century ? some time in the 1950s by my estimation.

These publishers don?t want to hear from readers. They want readers to listen passively while the publishers control the message.

And that, more than anything, is why these 3 publishers probably would have passed on Goodreads if it had been offered to them.

?

P.S. In creating Bookish these 3 publishers only invested in what would benefit them, and that is probably why Goodreads will succeed while Bookish flounders ? unless Bookish goes through a radical change in focus.

P.P.S. Giving out book recommendations is the only reason for Bookish to exist, but it is just one of a dozen features that Goodreads uses to draw in readers. And it is that dozen other related features that both draw in users and combine to make Goodreads? book recommendations richer and more valuable than what Bookish can offer. There is a synergy in the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of active members writing reviews, rating books, and creating unique connections that cannot be replicated by the single channel, one way communication offered by Bookish.

I suppose some might say that the comparisons between Goodreads and Bookish are irrelevant because the sites serve very different purposes. This is not true. These 3 publishers could have used Goodreads for the same purpose as Bookish (to sell books) ? only Goodreads would have done a better job.

P.P.P.S. Macmillan stands as an counterpoint to the 3 publishers behind Bookish. This publisher supports Tor.com, the SF community and blog. Tor.com is an example of how to a publisher can have a relationship with readers.

Source: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/03/30/theres-a-reason-that-no-one-in-publishing-bought-goodreads/

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Bronz zoo gorilla Pattycake dies at 40

NEW YORK (AP) ? Pattycake, the first gorilla born in New York City, has died at the Bronx Zoo. She was 40 years old and suffering from chronic cardiac problems.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the zoo, made the announcement on Sunday and said a necropsy would be performed to determine the cause of death. It said Pattycake surpassed the median life span for gorillas in zoos, which is 37 years old.

"Millions of children in New York City grew up with Pattycake at the Bronx Zoo," said Jim Breheny, director of the Bronx Zoo and WCS Executive Vice President and General Director of Zoos & Aquarium. "Pattycake was a very special animal and her presence will be deeply missed."

Pattycake was born at the Central Park Zoo on Sept. 3, 1972 and lived there with her parents Kongo and Lulu. She made news at 5 months old when she suffered a broken arm. In 1983, she went to live at the Bronx Zoo. Two books were written about her.

She had 10 infants while at the zoo, including twins born in 1995. Her offspring live in zoos in Boston, Buffalo, N.Y., Detroit, Louisville, Omaha, Neb., and Utah.

The Wildlife Conservation Society said Pattycake was the 31st oldest gorilla of 338 living in North American zoos.

Also on Yahoo! News:

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pattycake-gorilla-nycs-bronx-zoo-dies-40-071338268.html

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