BASKING RIDGE, New Jersey, February 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- End-to-End Management Solution Enhances Network Performance; Allows Customers to Focus on Core Business

Verizon Business' managed local area network (LAN) service is now available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to the United States.

Verizon Managed LAN services enable customers to fully or partially outsource the management of their corporate networks. The managed service provides a seamless environment between the corporate headquarters' network and its extended network that connects partners, customers, remote employees and suppliers.

TOKYO, February 12 /PRNewswire/ --

Acrodea brings its OpenKODE implementations to the market; and offers free Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X desktop versions to the developer community.

Acrodea announced the availability of its OpenKODE implementations for immediate use and licensing on February 11th 2008, at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain.

Acrodea has been a key member in the OpenKODE Working Group of the Khronos Group to create the OpenKODE 1.0 Specification - a lightweight operating system and hardware abstraction layer that enables full source code portability of demanding multimedia applications between different mobile platforms and operating systems.

FREMONT, California, February 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- Company delivers 12 percent quarter over quarter revenue growth

ActivIdentity Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTI), a global leader in digital identity assurance, today announced its financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended December 31, 2007.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20051108/SFTU161LOGO)

Revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2007 was US$15.4 million, compared to US$13.8 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, representing quarter-over-quarter revenue growth of 12%.

I asked a friend of mine why she was a good boss. “I was nurturing,” she said. A big study of managers reached essentially the same conclusion: Good managers don’t try to make employees fit a pre-established box, the manager’s preconception about how to do the job. A good manager tries to encourage, to bring out, whatever strengths the employee already has. This wasn’t a philosophy or value judgment, it was what the data showed. The “good” managers were defined as the more productive ones — something like that. (My post about this.)

The reason for the study, as Veblen might say, was the need for it. Most managers failed to act this way. I posted a few days ago about a similar tendency among scientists: When faced with new data, a tendency to focus on what’s wrong with it and ignore what’s right about it. To pay far more attention to limitations than strengths. Here are two examples:

NEW YORK, February 12 /PRNewswire/ --

This year, Nokia headlines with their Internet Services. Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo reinforces the company's vision and embraces the Internet by unveiling a new line up of converged devices and services that promote collaboration and sharing.

(See video from Nokia at: http://media.medialink.com/WebNR.aspx?story=34522)

The new handsets all exhibit different location based and multimedia experiences, from pedestrian navigation to geotagging and movie viewing to video and photo sharing. Nokia sees mapping and navigation as a fundamental platform for the mobile phones of the future. They also reveal the next step towards Ovi, the Internet service environment, by introducing 'Share on Ovi'.

Heterogeneity provides stability, say scientists from the Universities of Fribourg and Bonn, whether this is in a shower, in power grids or even on the stock market.

It's a big reason why the electrical grid does not break. When Al Gore had the brilliant idea to have everyone watching his Live Earth concerts shut off their lights as a symbolic gesture, he had to be reminded that the surge when people turned the lights back on would put a lot of people in danger. The grid could not take it.

In the shower example, showers in youth hostels can be risky when there is not enough hot water for everybody. If only one visitor turns up the hot tap during the early morning shower, everyone else is threatened by an icy gush of water. This unwanted form of hydrotherapy is particularly likely to happen when all the shower taps have the same possible settings, in other words if cold and hot water can be adjusted to exactly the same amount in all showers. But if the water taps in each shower have their individual quirks, the risk of extreme fluctuations is less.

As a book junkie, I love to get and give book recommendations. Here is my Darwin Day recommended books list:

What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr - My favorite brief, single-volume primer on evolution for non-specialists.

A new approach to the cooling of buildings across the developing world that needs nothing but wind and sun to operate has been devised by engineers in India. Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Design, the team explains the concept of a combined solar chimney and wind tower system that can reduce the temperature of incoming appear by 5 degrees Celsius.

Jyotirmay Mathur of the Mechanical Engineering Department, at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology, in Jaipur, together with architect and urban designer Rajeev Kathpalia of Vastu Shilpa Consultants, in Ahmedabad, point out that the development of energy-efficient, and even passive, cooling systems for buildings is essential in the light of environmental pressures and costs. In the past, they point out, building designers had to rely on natural ways and means for maximising comfort inside buildings.

An international team of cosmologists, leaded by a researcher from Paris Observatory, has improved the theoretical pertinence of the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space (PDS) topology to explain some observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In parallel, another international team has analyzed with new techniques the last data obtained by the WMAP satellite and found a topological signal characteristic of the PDS geometry.

The last fifteen years have shown considerable growth in attempts to determine the global shape of the universe, i.e. not only the curvature of space but also its topology. The « concordance » cosmological model which now prevails describes the universe as a « flat » (zero-curvature) infinite space in eternal, accelerated expansion.

From medicine to make-up, plastics to paper - hardly a day goes by when we don't use titanium dioxide.

Now researchers at the University of Leeds have developed a simpler, cheaper and greener method of extracting higher yields of one of this most useful and versatile of minerals.

In powder form titanium dioxide (TiO2) is widely used as an intensely white pigment to brighten everyday products such as paint, paper, plastics, food, medicines, ceramics, cosmetics - and even toothpaste. Its excellent UV ray absorption qualities make it perfect for sunscreen lotions too.