Anything Under the Sun: Think Small to Design Websites for Mobile

REBLOG=>SavySeph

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Deciding on picture size is my next task in getting my website to be mobile friendly. In my previous blog on this topic, I figured that reducing the size of navigation menu is a good place to start to design a website to fit mobile device. I used single word for title and double word for subtitle. This seems to work out some of the problem. I figure the next step would be to have a universal width for all pictures. Ideally the picture could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the multiple platforms without losing too much picture quality.

Given the size of webpages, stretching and shrinking a picture is not the real problem. Pictures who are magnify twice or reduce by half are never too shabby when it comes to quality. This should be enough do the trick to fit an image into a website. The bigger concern is manipulated images sometimes take a longer time to load. The 4G phones are great for speed but as the best for the current technology they are a minority user. Most people would have the lower 3G speed on their phones. The loyalist to old phone will still surf with 2G and there are still a number of these mobile surfers out there. These people will favor sites who were sufficiently fast for their devices.

I went window shopping for mobile phones using google and decided that I have 3 categories to please. Based on their minimum screen width, I simply name them mini (80 pixels), midi (321 pixels) and maxi (481). After throwing some math around, I decided that all images on my website will be 240 pixels wide. Shrinking 240 to 80 (the lower end of the mini) is one-third reduction. This will likely cause some problem in loading speed. For the higher end of the mini (320 pixels), the image is stretch less than 50% which is acceptable. For the 481 pixels width, there is no stretching of image. The image with text displayed by the side will be at least half of the screen.

I now had all my pictures resize to 240 pixels width. Going through the pictures one by one had been a tedious exercise. Some of my image were name by their sizes. A cat image, for example, had been named cat330x250. The 330 represent the width and 250 is for the height. I still maintain the old name of the image. It would sound silly but once something is publish it is not advisable to make changes. Keeping the old name will ensure that people who link my pictures will not get a blank image. I actually have three manga pages outstanding. These three cartoons are at least 600 pixels wide. The task will be to break them down to smaller pictures who are 240 pixels wide. The main picture that will adopt the old name while new pictures will carry the old name with a sequential numbering suffix.

Going through image by image can also make you see things from a different angle. I redraw two images. I hope the people who had link the old pictures prefer the new pictures. I had also came up with 5 new pictures. These are for the pages which previously did not have a picture. The remaining task, unless new development crops up, I will drop the navigation menu for the mini users.

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My Comments

This is information for me when I build my website.

Anything Under the Sun: Paedophiles Lurks in Dark Net

REBLOG=>SavySeph

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Hardcore pedophiles can evade detection by hiding their identity using dark net. It is accessible via a browser that masks users' identities by encryption. It has millions of users and thousands of websites. It operates on a network of more than 6,000 computer servers spread around the world that reroute signals to hide users' locations.

Dark net was originally developed by the U.S. military. To help dissidents in China, Russia and Iran evade censorship, it is still partly funded by the U.S. government but pedophiles had abused this facility. A recent British study found that 80 percent of traffic to sites located only on the dark net were related to child pornography.

Hans Guijt and his colleagues at Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a child protection organization, attempted to trap pedophiles. The created digital puppet called Sweetie that looks and sounds like a 10-year-old girl from the Philippines. "In the 10 weeks' time that we were active on the Internet we were hit by more than 20,000 people, 20,000 men mainly, who were trying to get in contact with us to engage us in sexual activities," Guijt told CBS News. He added that they can't be so easily caught because they're using the dark net the CBS News reported on 9 April 2015.

Greg Virgin, a former NSA employee turned cyber security consultant, who's now helping U.S. child protection groups is trouble by this awful realization. "We found one site where users openly advertised the ages of the children they were interested in," Virgin said. "The average youngest age they were seeking for girls was zero years old. And the average age for boys was one."

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My Comments

Pedophiles targeting one-year-old male and less than one-year-old females possess a dangerous curiosity on how children response to sexual stimulus.

Filling Bottles: Which Diet Plans Really Pay Off?

REBLOG=>Sue DaJi - Wrote

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Which weight program pay-off and which ones does not work? Researchers at Johns Hopkins had done the work for you and they published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on 6 April 2015. They reviewed clinical trials on the biggest players in the commercial weight-loss programs, including Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem, Medifast and OPTIFAST, the CBS News reported.

John Hopkins researchers studied 4,200 cases and found only a handful met the requirement of reliability. Diet plans that worked are those which were reinforced by data instituting that participants on average lost more weight after one year than people who were either dieting on their own were. Medical contributor Dr. Holly Phillips told "CBS This Morning" that she is always flabbergasted when asked which plans works. With this research she can now give a scientific answer.

This research will serve as an advice to two-third of the American population who were are obese. Before ditching out hundreds of dollars on packaged meals, nutrition shakes, or counseling sessions, they could consult this research which ones are most effective in the long run. American are expected to spend $2.5 billion on commercial diet plans and services in 2014. Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig were highlighted as those that were effective. Nutrisystem was good but lasted only 3 to 6 months. The "very-low calorie programs" namely; Health Management Resources (HMR), Medifast, and OPTIFAST showed the benefits diminished by the 6-month mark. Atkins helps but not as much as with some competing diet programs. The Ornish diet was excluded because it is primarily focused on heart health rather than weight loss.

Dr. Phillips said the most successful plans had in common: it incorporated social support and teamwork. "The only diets that work are those that you stick with, and if you have some companionship along the way, you're more likely to do it," she said. The Zone diet was not reviewed by the researchers because unlike other weight-loss plans in the study, Zone does not include any behavioral or social support.

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My Comments

This is a useful research. It save two-third of the population of lot of time, effort and money.

Anything Under the Sun: My Mobile-friendly Website

REBLOG>Anything Under the Sun: My Mobile-friendly Website

ss's Original Blog

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Google wrote me a warning letter about 2 weeks ago asking me to make my website more mobile friendly. Google said the increase demand in mobile phone browsing had been tremendous. Well, it is not a warning for doing something that pissed google off. It was actually a concerned notification. Google anticipated that the wave of mobile surfers will get stronger with the passage of time and webmasters were advised to cater to their needs. If I were to take it as a friendly notice I don’t need to do anything. I choose to take it as a stern warning so that I will have to adapt before I get left out.

Heck! I don't have the slightest clue where to start. I hope I could just wave a magic wand with some code and bingo! Fortunately, google is a good place to start looking for those hocus pocus code. Knowing the right keyword to punch into google would help. Next comes the endless list of reading materials on the technology to make your website flexible to multiple devices. Climbing the steep learning curve was no fun. It’s just nothing but reading without having enough knowledge to start doing something.

I concluded that it was about starting small. Fit the small screen then the bigger ones and eventually the desktop. This calls for a re-engineering as my website was catered for desktop size. I have started with reducing the size of my menu. I used single word titles for the menu items to shorten it for mobile size. Sub menu items could use double or triple word titles. Whoopee, I managed nail down some of the problem. For screen smaller than 320 pixels wide, I may have to do away with the menu. I will get around to this but the next step would be resizing all my images. I am going to do a lot of experimenting to find a good size that could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the platform without losing too much picture quality.

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My Comments

I was having problems figuring out the method to build a flexible website to fit all devices. Perhaps you should consider writing a website on 36btips to building a webpage.

Mercury was Painted Black

The planet Mercury reflects much less light compared to our own moon, which is about the same size. This had scientist bewildered for a long time. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brown University and the Planetary Sciences Institute say they may have found the solution. Megan Bruck Syal, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore, said that it was "effectively painted black".

Mercury is the planet that is closest to the sun. Compared to the moon, there is are much more carbon dust flung off from comets close to the sun. The researchers say Mercury is surrounded by 50 times the amount of carbon dust than our moon. For ages scientist believes that microscopic meteorites spawned from carbon-rich comets may have contributed enough dark-hued carbon to reduce the amount of reflected light.

Tests using a big NASA gun made to simulate planetary impacts on a small-scale seem to show the theory is plausible, the authors say. "We show that carbon acts like a stealth darkening agent," said Peter Schultz, a professor emeritus of geological sciences at Brown University. "From the standpoint of spectral analysis, it's like an invisible paint," the CNN reported on 31 March 2015.

Anything Under the Sun: Gambling Requires Skills

REBLOG>Anything Under the Sun: Gambling Requires Skills

SavySeph's Original Blog

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I tried to convince my readers that gambling requires skill. There are tons of researches that would conclude otherwise. In a recent (2012) study Professor Gerhard Meyer, of the University of Bremen's Institute of Psychology and Cognition Research, suggested that poker was chiefly a game of chance. There were 300 participants in Prof Meyer's research. They played 60 hands poker each, on tables of six. The players were classified as 'expert' and 'average' players based on their ability to make money from good, bad and average hands. The research found that 'expert' players lost less money on bad hands, but did no better than 'average' players on mediocre hands - and made slightly less on good ones. Prof Meyer concluded that 'poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play'.

A research studied 456 million hands of poker from a year's worth of online game. In just a few hands the better-performing players fared better half the time. Their success rate gradually increased until they played 1,471 hands. Given that frequency, they could do better at least 75 per cent of the time. Dr Dennie van Dolder, of the University of Nottingham's School of Economics, said the study showed 'skilled players will consistently outperform less skilled players if enough hands...are played.'

Researchers from the University of Nottingham, working with colleagues from Erasmus University Rotterdam and VU University Amsterdam, also noted that players who finished in the top one per cent in the first half of the year were 12 times more likely than others to repeat the feat in the second half. Writer and TV presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, one of Britain's top professional players, has won more than £1.5m - including £400,000 at a single event. Dr van Dolder said, "It's up to legislators to decide whether the role of chance diminishes fast enough for poker to be considered a game of skill," the Daily Mail reported on 25 March 2015.

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Jack Omnitrade's Comments

I guess Professor Gerhard Meyer study did not include a larger sample size (more games). If Professor Meyer went up to 1471 hands would the result had been the same with Dr Dennie van Dolder?

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My Comments

Including more games in the study is giving poker player more chances to prove that skills are vital.

The Great FireWall of China

Today China can be deemed as successful in their massive internet surveillance and content control task. The Great FireWall of China had managed to keep out any content that do not go in tandem with government policies. Although VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks had been used to get around the firewall, recent crackdown by the authorities had shut them down. Roseann Rife, the East Asia research director of Amnesty International, anticipated that the success of the Chinese model will attract buyers from countries like Russia or Egypt.

Back in Jan 1999, MIT Media Lab founder and technology pundit Nicholas Negroponte declared that a "healthy disrespect for authority" was required for any successful Internet industry. A year later, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton announced that "liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem" and that any attempt to control the Internet in China would be "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Things certainly had changed now, the CNN on 25 March 2015.

While Napoleon Bonaparte was wise not to awake the "Sleeping Giant", arrogant Bill Clinton certainly did not learn for it. Where there is a will, there will be ways and China should not be underestimated. With one-third of the world's population, China had more web users than the population of the United States. What they had is human capital and given time they will find a solution.