(picture from WebTabLab)

Samsung has certainly had some problems with its Galaxy 10.1 Tab in 2011 due to an aggressive stance from Apple. In a stunning move that shocked the Android community, Apple successfully managed to get the device pulled off the store shelves and banned entirely in Germany. Samsung was forced to go back to the drawing board and make some modifications to the design of the device in order to get it back in stores. While that was a significant battle won for Apple, it seems that they lost the war in Europe today, as a Dutch court has now officially ruled that the Tablet can be sold in the Netherlands and distributed throughout Europe.

To sum up the verdict, the “Gerechthof’s-Gravenhage“ appeals court stated that Samsung Tablets did NOT infringe on iPad related patents, giving them no reason to ban sales in Europe. My translation of that: “Apple, you aren’t the only ones who allowed to build a lightweight and flat tablet that’s shaped like a tablet“.

While this is a great ruling for Android, it unfortunately won’t affect the EU wide preliminary injunction against Samsung Galaxy phones that was issued last year. The decision on that is scheduled to be made in around a week, and will ultimately decide if the devices can be sold throughout Europe. We’ll keep you up to date when a decision is reached on that.

Samsung responded in a statement saying that the court ruling “again demonstrates that Apple’s products simply do not warrant the intellectual property protections it believes.”

Ahh yes..the patent wars…**sigh** It’s good to see Android gaining momentum in the courts. If Android and it’s partners are able to successfully able to fend off these attacks, maybe Apple will at some point consider waving the white flag in it’s aggressive against Android.

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.

So far, Apple has largely embraced the ePub 2 standard for its iBooks platform, though it has added a number of HTML5-based extensions to enable the inclusion of video and audio for some limited interaction. The recently-updated ePub 3 standard obviates the need for these proprietary extensions, which in some cases make iBook-formatted e-books incompatible with other e-reader platforms. Apple is expected to announce support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.

GarageBand for e-books

At the same time, however, authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.

Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.

And Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis agrees that such a move would be very likely. MacInnis previously worked on education projects at Apple before leaving the company in 2009 to pursue his own ideas about creating interactive digital books. Inkling currently offers a variety of digital textbooks with interactive features, including the ability to share notes with classmates and instructors, via an iPad app.

“When you think about what Apple is doing… they are selling tens of thousands of iPads into K-12 institutions,” MacInnis told Ars. “What are they doing with those iPads? They don’t really replace textbooks, because there’s not very much content on offer,” he said.

Don’t expect that content to come directly from Apple, however. “Practically speaking, Apple does not want to get into the content publishing business,” MacInnis said. Like the music and movie industries, Apple has instead built a distribution platform as well as hardware to consume it—but Apple isn’t a record label or production studio.

But what Apple does provide is industry-leading tools for content production, such as Logic or Final Cut Pro, to help create content. The company also produces tools like GarageBand or iMovie that make such production accessible to a much wider audience.

Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.”

Mobile, social learning

Technology-in-education expert Dr. William Rankin also believes digital books will expand with tools that will enable social interactions among textbook users. Rankin, who serves as Director of Educational Innovation of Abilene Christian University and has extensively researched the use of mobile devices in the classroom, was one of three authors of a white paper on the effects of digital convergence on learning titled “Code/X,” published in 2009.

In that document, Rankin and his colleagues laid out their vision for the future of learning, which included an always-on, always-networked digital device called a “Talos.” That device turned out to be very similar to the iPad that Apple announced just six months later.

“What we saw coming was a change in the kinds of places that learning would happen,” Rankin told Ars. Since the device would always be with the student, it would give her access to information anytime and anywhere. “For that, you need a different kind of book.”

Such digital texts would let students interact with information in visual ways, such as 3D models, graphs, and videos. They would also allow students to create links to additional texts, audio, and other supporting materials. Furthermore, students could share those connections with classmates and colleagues.

“What we really believe is important is the role of social networking in a converged learning environment,” Rankin told Ars. “We’re already seeing that in Inkling’s platform, and Kno‘s journaling feature. Future digital texts should allow students to layer all kind of other data, such as pictures, and notes, and then share that with the class or, ideally, anyone.”

Exactly how what Apple announces on Thursday will impact digital publishing isn’t certain, however.

“Think about how meaningful simply authoring and publishing to an iPad will be for K-12,” MacInnis said. “However, it might not be great for molecular biology.”

MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can “kick up dust with the education market,” which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s “GarageBand for e-books.”

“There will be a spectrum of tools and consumers, and we will continue to fit on that spectrum,” MacInnis opined. “I don’t know if the publishing industry will react to it with fear or enthusiasm.”

Steve Jobs’ pet project

We know that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on addressing learning and digital textbooks for some time, according to Walter Issacson’s biography. Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”

According to our sources close to his efforts, however, Jobs’ personal involvement was perhaps more significant that even his biography purports. Jobs worked on this project for several years, and our understanding is that the final outcome was slated to be announced in October 2011 in conjunction with the iPhone 4S. Those plans were postponed at the last minute, perhaps due to Jobs’ imminent death.

Despite the delay, however, ACU’s Rankin believes the time is right for a change to happen in the field. “We’re headed toward a completely digital future at ACU,” he told Ars. “A recent study showed that 82 percent of all higher education students nationwide will come to campus with a smartphone. We need to have resources and tools ready for these mobile, connected students.”

By Kai Kupferschmidt, ScienceNOW

Scientists in northern Europe are scrambling to learn more about a new virus that causes fetal malformations and stillbirths in cattle, sheep, and goats. For now, they don’t have a clue about the virus’s origins or why it’s suddenly causing an outbreak; in order to speed up the process, they want to share the virus and protocols for detecting it with anyone interested in studying the disease or developing diagnostic tools and vaccines.

The virus, provisionally named “Schmallenberg virus” after the German town from which the first positive samples came, was detected in November in dairy cows that had shown signs of infection with fever and a drastic reduction in milk production. Now it has also been detected in sheep and goats, and it has shown up at dozens of farms in neighboring Netherlands and in Belgium as well. According to the European Commission’s Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health, cases have been detected on 20 farms in Germany, 52 in the Netherlands, and 14 in Belgium. Many more suspected cases are being investigated. “A lot of lambs are stillborn or have serious malformations,” Wim van der Poel of the Dutch Central Veterinary Institute in Lelystad says. “This is a serious threat to animal health in Europe.”

“We are taking this very, very seriously,” adds Thomas Mettenleiter, head of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI), the German federal animal health lab located on the island of Riems. The virus appears to be transmitted by midges (Culicoides spp.), and infections likely occurred in summer and autumn of last year, but fetuses that were exposed to the virus in the womb are only now being born. The first cases of lambs with congenital malformations such as hydrancephaly — where parts of the brain are replaced by sacs filled with fluid — and scoliosis (a curved spine) appeared before Christmas. “Now, in some herds 20 percent to 50 percent of lambs show such malformations,” Mettenleiter says. “And most of these animals are born dead.”

Scientists are bracing for many more cases to appear, especially in cattle, because bovine fetuses infected in summer 2011 would be expected to be born in February and March.

Virologists have made some headway since they first announced the detection of the Schmallenberg virus in November. They have been able to isolate the virus and to culture it in insect and hamster cells. Evidence that it’s responsible for the observed symptoms has become stronger with its isolation from brain tissue of affected lambs. “The characteristic malformations, together with the frequent virus detection in brains of malformed animals, clearly support a causal link,” FLI’s Martin Beer says. In a first animal experiment, scientists at FLI also infected three cows with the virus and showed that the virus replicated in them; one developed fever and diarrhea.

FLI researchers have already sequenced the genome of the new pathogen. Comparisons indicate it is a member of a group called the orthobunyaviruses. These viruses consist of three segments called S (short), M (middle), and L (long) and are mainly transmitted by mosquitoes and midges. Although the viruses are best known from Asia, some have been circulating in Europe for decades. Initially, scientists said the virus most closely resembled the Akabane virus, a pathogen that has been found in cattle, buffalo, sheep, camels, dogs, and other species, leading them to call it an “Akabane-like virus.”

Now they say that at least the S segment of Schmallenberg’s genome is most closely related to sequences of a different orthobunyavirus called Shamonda virus. Both Akabane and Shamonda virus belong to the so-called Simbu serogroup and are known to infect ruminants and to be transmitted by midges. But there are few orthobunyavirus sequences available with which to compare the new virus, so scientists are starting to sequence more members of the family. “Orthobunyaviruses have been neglected for a long time, and we just don’t know a lot about them,” says Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany.

A host of questions remains unanswered. Which vector species is transmitting the disease? Can animals infect each other directly? And of course, where did the virus come from? “The problem with orthobunyaviruses is that their segmented genome makes the emergence of new combinations very easy, just like with influenza viruses,” Schmidt-Chanasit says. He points to a recent outbreak of a new orthobunyavirus in Peru. The pathogen, named Iquitos virus, turned out to have combined S and L segments of a known virus called Oropouche and the M segment of a new virus.

Whether the Schmallenberg virus could sicken humans is unknown. At least 30 orthobunyaviruses have been associated with human disease; the Oropouche virus, also a member of the Simbu serogroup, causes a febrile disease often associated with headaches, dizziness, skin rash, and malaise, whereas the Iquitos virus can cause diarrhea, vomiting, and nausea. But these viruses seem to be dependent on midges to infect humans and are not known to be directly transmitted from infected farm animals. Midges are less likely to bite humans than mosquitoes, and there have been no reports of unusual human illnesses from farmers whose livestock is infected.

A risk assessment by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm, issued just before Christmas, concluded that “it is unlikely that this new orthobunyavirus can cause disease in humans, but it cannot be excluded at this stage.” But the experts recommended closely monitoring the health of farmers and vets.

In order not to lose time and to answer the most pressing questions fast, FLI has decided not to file for any patents on Schmallenberg-related discoveries. “Our resources are limited,” Mettenleiter says, “and we are happy to share our knowledge and materials with anyone interested in it for noncommercial or commercial reasons.” The German and Dutch institutes have divided up the work: The Dutch researchers will concentrate on sheep, Van der Poel says, while their German colleagues focus on cattle.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

The battery is good for three years, thats right, three years! Just set the phone on the pad and start typing. Cool.

LG let us know at CES 2011 that it had 4K LCD televisions in the pipeline, but unfortunately they didn’t make it out this year. Expect for that to change in 2012, as the company just announced it’s bringing an 84-inch “ultra definition” (3840×2160) TV to Las Vegas to go along with its 55-inch OLED. It has all of LG’s Cinema 3D and Smart TV features built-in, including support for that upgraded Magic Motion remote and voice control. There’s no official word yet on when we’ll see these on shelves or at what price, but it certainly looks production ready compared to other prototypes that have been displayed over the years. While we don’t have easy sources of 4K-res video content yet, one of the reasons LG is making the jump first is for 3D. Its Cinema 3D tech uses a Film Pattern Retarder (FPR) screen and passive glasses that result in lowered resolution, but with those extra pixels there’s no question about whether viewers are still getting at least an HD picture. So far 4K at home is the domain of Sony and JVC’s high-priced projectors, but we’ll see if any other companies (we’ll check off Toshiba right now) show off upgrades in size and resolution of their HDTVs this year. Check the press release after the break for a few more details

Everyone knows that on a sinking ship, you want to pump water out. But what do you do with a sinking city? In this case, the plan might be to pump water in.

The city of Venice has long been valued for its unique character. Built in a lagoon along the coast of Italy, the scenic city is crisscrossed with canals. Its waterlogged nature draws a steady stream of visitors, but also makes it vulnerable to costly flooding. The region sometimes experiences unusually high tides, locally referred to as “acqua alta.” The phenomenon is caused by winds that drive water to “pile up” on the north end of the long and narrow Adriatic Sea. When that coincides with a high tide, the City of Water gets even wetter, and the water level can rise by 1-2 meters.

Two factors are exacerbating the flooding risk to the city: global sea level rise and subsidence. In short, sea is rising and the city is sinking. Like other cities built on river deltas, the sediment beneath the city is compacting over time. In a natural setting, this compaction would be offset by the deposition of fresh sediment at the surface, but the rivers feeding the lagoon were diverted in the 1500s. As a result, the land surface is sinking, and the salt marshes are suffering for it.

The pumping of shallow groundwater in the mid-1900s also contributed to the problem. Water in the pores between grains of sediment provides pressure that bears some of the load. When pore pressure decreases, or water is removed completely, grains can be packed together more tightly by collapsing the pore spaces. As sediment is compacted, the land surface drops. While the effect was small (less than 15cm), Venice doesn’t have much wiggle room.

A remarkable system of inflatable gates that could close off the lagoon during dangerously high tides, dubbed the MOSE Project, has been in the works for a while now. Funding issues and environmental concerns have plagued the initiative, but it continues to move forward.

Recently, another idea has been discussed. Just as withdrawing groundwater can cause subsidence, injecting water can reverse it. It’s not entirely a two-way street—much of the pore space lost during compaction can’t be recovered—but increased pore pressure can begin to unpack the sediment. Injection was used successfully in Long Beach, California in the late 1950s to halt subsidence caused by oil and gas extraction as well as groundwater usage. After the land surface dropped nearly 30 feet, injection stabilized the subsidence and a slight rebound in land surface elevation (a little over 30cm) was even seen in some spots. Early research indicated that a similar amount of uplift could be achieved in Venice, which could make a big difference for a city on the edge. The precision of those predictions was limited, however, by the lack of detailed knowledge about the layers of sediment beneath the city.

A new paper, published in Water Resources Research, adds that information and uses it to show that the idea really could work in Venice. Without boreholes around the city to provide observations of the stratigraphy, researchers have relied on data gathered by seismic surveys. Like the familiar sonar systems used by submarines, seismic surveys require a (much more powerful) signal to be generated so its return can be analyzed as it bounces off sediment in the subsurface. That’s been difficult to pull off around Venice, though, as the lagoon is too shallow for large boats to be used. And, attempts to use potent air and water guns as seismic signal sources caused problems by kicking up large amounts of sediment.

Back in the 1980s, though, oil and gas companies hadn’t yet been banned from using explosives in settings like this. The Italian National Research Council acquired a large amount of old, raw seismic data from an Italian oil company, and the researchers were able to use it to construct a high-quality, three-dimensional model of the stratigraphy below Venice. This allowed them to confirm the presence of a continuous layer of impermeable clay below which injected water could increase pore pressure, rather than simply bubble up to the surface. It also allowed them to determine the thickness and extent of the various layers proposed to be used for the injection.

The group simulated the effects of 12 injection wells in a ring around the city. The results showed that, after 10 years of continuous seawater injection (a total of almost 150 million cubic meters of water), the city could be lifted 25-30 centimeters. That would greatly cut down on the frequency with which the MOSE floodgate system would have to be activated each year. That, in turn, decreases operational and maintenance costs, and reduces the ecological impact of the system. In addition, the uplift around the city would benefit the slowly-drowning salt marshes in the lagoon.

The study also shows that by varying the pumping rates at each of the 12 wells, a very uniform uplift can be maintained across the city. If some areas of the city rise faster than others, buildings could be damaged—a result that would be counterproductive to the entire enterprise. With careful management, the researchers say that the difference in uplift between two points 100 meters apart would be less than 1 millimeter.

While it may initially sound far-fetched, this could become part of Venice’s plan to mitigate flooding issues, which will only worsen in coming decades. Battling “acqua alta” would be much easier if the city had the high ground.

Speaking this morning, Woz told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme that a counterculture ethos was vital for creativity and it had a continuing influence on Apple. And a counterculture ethos meant letting people wear what they want to, he said.

Apple could never have happened in a formal culture of Singapore, said Wozniak:

Look at societies like Singapore where bad behaviour is not tolerated and can get you extreme punishments: Where are the creative people? Where are the great artists, where are the great musicians, where are the great writers?

All the creative elements seem to disappear. Though, of course, everybody is educated and has a good job and nice pay and a car.

Thinking for yourself is creativity and that’s goes right down to what we were talking about dress, the clothing that you wear – you wear what you want to wear.

In the four-minute interview, Woz also fingered nationalism, the emphasis on school pride and college sports teams as anti-creative forces. Instead, he praised the college drop-outs at Facebook and Yahoo!

However, despite saying that he had always been too close to Steve Jobs to evaluate him properly, Woz did concede that the former CEO of Apple wasn’t always a countercultural hero.

I think he’s got a lot of liberal counterculture thinking but then Apple does a lot of very conservative things, we control things and have very little tolerance. For example, if an engineer tells a friend something then he’s fired.

Microsoft’s answer to the QR Code came out of beta in May 2010, and since then has resolutely failed to set the world on fire.

With the addition of NFC the original Microsoft Tag is described as something which will raise curiosity, while QR Codes provide functionality and NFC shows the way of the future.

This world ain’t big enough for the both of us, so I’ll just curl up over here if that’s OK with you

The world probably isn’t big enough for multiple 2D bar codes, and Microsoft reckons “there is increasing frustration among consumers over not knowing which reader to use for which code”, though given the scarcity of Microsoft Tags (we’ve never seen one in the wild) the confusion isn’t that bad.

“Microsoft Tag delivers the freedom for brands to select the recognition format most appropriate for their customers, and grants customers a single app to launch those experiences,” a Redmond rep told NFC World.

So Microsoft has extended its platform to use QR Codes like everyone else, and added support for URLs embedded in NFC tags too. Redmond will still host a redirection server (so the encoded URL points to Microsoft, who forwards the request while accumulating usage statistics). Microsoft’s own Tag format is now relegated to something which can be used to “Raise Curiosity”, presumably from people thinking “what’s that thing which looks like a QR Code but isn’t?” QR Codes are recommended for general use, and NFC as the path to the future.

NFC has to be the future as the proximity-radio technology isn’t yet supported by the Windows Phone platform. Handset support for NFC is still limited to a handful of handsets running Android and Symbian (and the Samsung Tocco NFC, of course) but even Microsoft can see the writing on the wall, and it’s not a proprietary 2D barcode up there.

To get around the government’s immigration choke-hold, the much-discussed startup plans to sail foreign innovators 12 miles off the Northern California shore, into international waters. Once there, governed only by loosely enforced maritime treatises, these entrepreneurs can ply their trade without worrying about worker visas or various other immigration regulations. And they can live in San Francisco. Ferries will shuttle them back and forth.

This is more than just an idea. Big-name venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel just sunk some cash into the Blueseed crusade, and on Tuesday, the company released detailed mockups of its floating incubator (see the above image gallery, given exclusively to Wired).

Gabriel Jack, an immigration attorney at law firm MJ Law in Silicon Valley, tells Wired the notion is legally sound — though he points out that workers on the floating incubator will need valid visitor visas, which can be good for up to 10 years. “There’s nothing in the [visa] law that says how often you can visit the United States. If they make it clear that they work in international waters and are using a visitor visa to stay on land,” he says. “I don’t see how the immigration department can do anything about it legally.”

But there’s more to deal with here than just the law. Last week, Wired sat down with the Blueseed’s three founders to get the low-down on its plan to take the TechCrunch set on an eternal boat ride.