Diamer-Bhasha affectees provided mobile health unit - The Express Tribune

Unit will serve as a facili­ty for people residi­ng in diffic­ult-to-reach areas. The mobile health unit, comprising a four wheel drive ambulance and all necessary medical instruments, was handed over by Wapda

LAHORE: The Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) has provided a state-of-the-art mobile health unit to affectees of the Diamer-Bhasha Dam Project. The unit will serve as an expanded medical facility to people residing in difficult-to-reach areas adjacent to the project.

The mobile health unit, comprising a four wheel drive ambulance and all necessary medical instruments, was handed over by Wapda Chairman Shakil Durrani to project authorities here at Wapda House today.

Speaking on the occasion, the Chairman said the mobile health unit, in addition to existing health facilities in the area, will prove instrumental in the treatment of ailing individuals in the Diamer district of Gilgit-Baltistan and the Kohistan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Besides providing civic amenities to affectees of the project under a compensation package chalked out in accordance with standards laid down by international donors and financial institutions, Wapda will also upgrade District Headquarters Hospitals at Chilas, Gilgat and Skardu, he added. The chairman expressed satisfaction over the setting up of Wapda medical camps in the project area.

The Diamer-Bhasha Dam Project was formally initiated by the Prime Minister in October last year after the Council of Common Interest unanimously approved the project. For the $12 billion project, the land acquisition process is in progress; while 13 contracts for construction of Wapda offices, colonies, contractors’ camps, roads and infrastructure in the project area have already been awarded.

The Diamer-Bhasha Dam is a multi-purpose project which aims to store water for irrigation, mitigate flooding and generate low-cost environment-friendly hydel power. On completion, the project will store 8.1 million acre feet of water, besides generating 4500 megawatts of electricity. The project will add about 20 billion units of electricity annually to the national grid. Annual benefits of the project have been estimated at about $2.3 billion.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15th, 2012.

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Mobile apps and technology change the way consumers look at cash - Chicago Tribune

If cash is still king, the dethronement has begun.

Tech companies from heavyweights like PayPal to scrappy young startups are tripping over themselves to help you pay bills, transfer funds and manage your investments using websites or mobile apps, with nary a soiled, crumpled dollar bill in sight.

"We are changing the way people think about money," says French-born entrepreneur Marc Rochman. His startup for paying online with gift cards, Openbucks, was one of dozens that presented their latest tech tools at the recent Future of Money & Technology Summit in San Francisco. "You can't squeeze a $20 bill through your smartphone screen, so we digitize it for you."

Mobile payment is a huge business that's about to get even bigger. By this time next year, according to a Juniper Research study, the combined market for all types of mobile payments could reach more than $600 billion worldwide, which would make it twice as large as it was a year ago. That's an awful lot of clicks-to-pay.

Here are three companies that shared their products at the summit:

Want to shop online but hate the idea of getting a credit card billï»? three weeks later? Don't even have a credit card in the first place? Or for privacy reasons, you don't want your purchase to show up on a statement? Openbucks may be your solution.

Rochman calls his 2-year-old Mountain View startupï»? "The Gift Card Payment Network."

"We're like the Visa of the

prepaid market," says Rochman, originally from the city of Lille in northern France. "Like Visa, we connect retailers, including Subway and CVS, with online merchants."

Here's how it works: You buy a prepaid card worth, say $20, when you're having lunch at Subway. When you're ready to pay later for something online at a participating site, including games, you click "Pay with Gift Card" and enter the code on the back. Because it's so simple, says Rochman, it's lightning fast. "You can complete your transaction in five seconds or less.

"It's great for teens who might not have credit cards, or people who want to stay confidential and not spread their credit card information all over the Internet, or people who are concerned about online safety."

Rochman says cards for the VC-funded Openbucks network are available at more than 50,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada and can be spent at thousands of online sites, all listed on the Openbucks website. Retailers are happy, he says, because more than half of the people who buy or reload their gift cards end up making an additional purchase. And he says merchants, who pay a small fee to Openbucks each time a card is redeemed, get an inflow of first-time customers.

Leo Rocco, the fast-talking pitchman behind Gopago, says his payment app is "re-imagining the way consumers and brick-and-mortar businesses use smartphones for mobile commerce." A 34-year-old New Yorker with a mechanical engineering degree, Rocco first got interested in mobile payments one day in 2007 when he went to grab beers at a Giants game just as Barry Bonds stepped up to home plate.

"I was waiting 10 minutes in the concession line and missed his home run," he says. There had to be some way to speed up the process and avoid waiting in a queue, he thought, by using a cellphone to order in advance. Two years later, he started Gopago, now a free download on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. Recently, after an investment by JPMorgan Chase, Rocco says, things took off. "In the past two months, we've signed up 550 merchants in San Francisco alone."

It's easy: Fire up the app, choose a nearby participating merchant, peruse the menu, choose your selection (medium pizza with olives and sausage, a Coke, and a small salad, for example), click to add a gratuity of 15, 18 or 20 percent, then place your order using the credit card you'd previously entered into your profile. A message comes back from the pizzeria, telling you exactly when you can pick up the order.

The transaction moves like a hot knife through butter, with only five or six quick clicks from start to finish. Rocco says the app "gives you, the consumer, VIP service and you own the ordering and payment steps, not some guy running your credit card in the backroom. You're basically getting into a virtual queue, so you can order something at Starbucks as you're walking down the street, then walk right pass the line and your order's waiting for you."

Like other mobile-payment apps, Gopago reduces "friction" in the ordering process. "No more need to use the telephone to order ahead," Rocco says. "Gopago lets you use your smartphone to communicate and in the process, to optimize people's time and make the ordering process more efficient."

Clover is another free app trying to provide iPhone and Android users with that cashless, ï»?lickety-split commercial experience. Billing itself as "the one-tap payment app," Clover promises to "take the pain out of payment."

CEO Bryan Lamkin uses the word "frictionless" a lot, too. The former Adobe (ADBE) executive is all about speed, starting the moment you first get wind of Clover. "It's built to download fast," he says. "Within 60 seconds, you're up and running."

The cool thing about Clover is its ability to send and receive digitized payments to and from other people. It's all smooth as silk: You deposit, say, $25, from a credit card into your Clover account. On a clean and simple home screen, you tap "Pay $" and enter a friend's name, phone number or email address. Enter an amount and short explanation and click Pay. The recipient gets a text or email. They click the URL and if they've downloaded the Clover app, the payment pops into their account.

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Mobile technology may help curb nicotine addiction, new study shows - Chicago Tribune

Quitting smoking is an inside job, but mobile technology may help, say researchers at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh, who recently published a nicotine-addiction study.

Their findings, which used mobile technology and new software to track smokers as they tried to quit, offered insights into why some tobacco smokers quit the habit on the first try while others have to quit repeatedly, or never succeed.

The study, published this month in Prevention Science, "demonstrates the potential for technology to help us figure out the processes involved in withdrawal," said Stephanie Lanza, scientific director of The Methodology Center at Penn State and a lead author on the study.

Researchers tracked 304 participants, all of whom were all long-time smokers and consumed at least a pack a day on average. During the six-week study, subjects used handheld computers and smart phones to reply to surveys sent to them randomly five times a day. They answered questions about their emotional state, urge to smoke and whether they were smoking.

New software helped scientists analyze several variables that fluctuated over time, such as intensity of urge and emotional state. "Without software like this, we would have no idea how to look at these data," said Lanza.

The results of the study, which was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, mirror how tough nicotine addiction is to break, said Lanza, who describes the process of nicotine withdrawal and addiction as a complex stew of biological, social and psychological factors.

One finding was that those smokers who relapsed quickly did not have their cravings drop the way they did in the group that was successful, she said. In the successful group, she said, cravings dropped by half in the first two weeks.

"Our hope is that this kind of software paired with data gathered through mobile devices will give tobacco researchers new information on how to create interventions that are personally tailored, since everyone's withdrawal is different," said Lanza, adding that the technology methods could be used to study other addictions.

"The bright spot to me is that research is shifting to help us understand how to break this addiction," said Lanza.

mjameson@tribune.com or 407-420-5158

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Oslo attack: Breivik used computer wargames to plan attack - The Express Tribune

Once played Modern Warfar­e 17-hours straig­ht, says he used such games to simula­te the police respon­se. Anders Behring Breivik attends the fourth day of proceedings in the courtroom 250 at Oslo's courthouse on April 19, 2012. PHOTO: AFP

OSLO: Norwegian anti-Islamic fanatic Anders Behring Breivik told a court on Thursday that he used computer games to prepare for his attacks, once spending an entire year isolated from society playing a game for hours on end.

Breivik, on trial for massacring 77 people last July, said he spent “lots of time” playing Modern Warfare, a first-person shooting game, and also took an entire year off to play World of Warcraft, a multi-player role-playing game with more than 10 million subscribers.

“I don’t really like those games but it is good if you want to simulate for training purposes,” Breivik said as he discussed Modern Warfare, smiling when asked about the aiming system.

Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo on July 22 and then killed 69, mostly teenagers, at a Labour Party summer youth camp on Utoeya island, in a gun massacre.

Although he pleaded not guilty, he admitted the killings, saying his victims were traitors who supported immigration and multiculturalism, threatening Norwegian ethnic purity.

Breivik, who once played Modern Warfare 17-hours straight on New Year’s Eve 2010/2011, said he used such games to simulate the police response and the best escape strategy.

“I calculated the likelihood of surviving unharmed at less than 5 percent,” he told the court in his third day of testimony, referring to the bomb attack on government headquarters, when he expected to be swarmed by police officers.

“I trained myself to get out of such a situation. That is what I was simulating.”

When he acquired the weapons for the actual attacks, he turned to Norse mythology in naming them.

“The rifle I called Gungnir, which is the name of the magical spear of Odin, which returns after you have thrown it. And the Glock I called Mjoelnir…It is the warrior god Thor’s Hammer,” he said, adding that he marked the weapons with their names in runes.

While playing computer games, Breivik said, he withdrew from his friends, saying personal relationships were not a priority. In 2006, he moved in with his mother to save money and rarely interrupted his game of World of Warcraft, even though his mother became anxious.

“Of course I couldn’t tell her I was going to take a sabbatical because I am going to blow myself up in five years’ time.”

“During that year I played perhaps 16 hours a day. It was a lot. Only playing for an entire year — playing and sleeping, playing and sleeping….It was a dream I had, and I wanted to do this.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, said such computer games could put Breivik in a state of delusion.

“When he went out on Utoeya, possibly at some level still believing he was still paying a computer game and shooting people in real life,” Eriksen told Reuters away from the court proceedings.

“He does not seem to be very successful at distinguishing between the virtual reality of world of Warcraft and other computer games and reality,” he said.

Breivik’s trial, set to last 10 weeks, turns on the question of his sanity and thus whether he can be jailed. He has said that an insanity ruling would be “worse than death”.

One court-appointed team of psychiatrists concluded he was psychotic, while a second team found him to be of sound mind.

On Wednesday he said he should either be executed or acquitted, calling the prospect of a prison sentence “pathetic”. Breivik has insisted he is a commander in a resistance movement but has acknowledged some of his claims were an exaggeration. He spent much of Wednesday defending the claim that it existed at all.

In court, he has Breivik struggled to defend his claim of being ordained into a militant-nationalist group called the Knights Templar in London in 2002 after preliminary contact in 2001, refusing to answer over 100 questions on the topic.

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