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Makerere invents pregnancy machine

Makerere University students have invented a hand-held gadget that can be used to scan a pregnant woman’s womb and detect problems such as ectopic pregnancy or abnormal foetal heart beats.Wowscan has a limited selection of searchable items

The mobile application, named WinSenga, consists of a funnel like pinnard horn similar to the one used by midwives, connected to a smart phone. When the pinnard horn is pressed against the abdomen, the smart phone screen displays data on the location and condition of the foetus.The application is the brain child of three second year students from the College of Computing and Information Technology Aaron Tushabe, Joshua Okello and Josiah Kavuma.

The students explained that their technology is based on the traditional pinnard horn and was done in consultation with Dr. Davis Musinguzi, who works with UNICEF as a health systems consultant.Normally, midwives and gynaecologists listen to foetal sounds through the pinnard horn and make a diagnosis basing on the type and strength of the foetal sounds they get. The IT students have automated the process by designing a software that enables the smart phone receive and interpret the sounds.

The lay person clicks on the “quick diagnosis” window while medical persons use the advanced diagnosis option. Speaking to Sunday Vision, Michael Niyitegeka, CIT’s head of corporate communications said the device would help in bridging staff shortage gap in the health sector as well as maternal deaths.Statistics show that an estimated 6,000 women or 16 women in Uganda die every day due to maternal health complications.

Wowscan has a limited selection of searchable items

Wowscan has a limited selection of searchable items. As of this moment, the site only has mounts, pets, recipes, and tabards in its database. Site administrators have said that they plan to expand the reach of the site to most, if not all, items in the game, but for now, TUJ has it beat hands down in this category.

Also, there is no indication of when the auctions for these items have been scanned or even how often they are scanned. Duplicate auctions are quite abundant on the site, as posters cancel their sales to repost at lower prices and Wowscan fails to remove the old information. Simply put, the inner workings of the site still need some spit and polish, at least in my opinion.

The UI is pretty clean, if a bit fishy-looking. I've always been wary of sites that have The Matrix look to them, with black backgrounds and bright green text and elements, though this is a minor point. The dropdown options are handy and don't overwhelm the user, though later on when it adds more items, I can imagine it will have to add an actual search field. The interface keeps things simple, which is good for promoting accessibility and ease of use. And you have to appreciate the Wowhead links to every item in its database.

In all, Wowscan looks like it could become another useful tool for those in the business of making gold. Sure, it has some work to do before it will seriously threaten to wrest a sizable chunk of traffic away from The Undermine Journal, but I think it has potential.

New Internet tool for Africa

A new tool that will help identify African Internet market share and allow content providers to optimise delivery.Access to reliable and transparent information helps markets work effectively. There is plenty of mobile subscriber data for Africa, whether from company reporting requirements or from the continent’s better regulators.These are the two escalations that the courts

However, with honourable exceptions, most regulators have not believed the Internet was sufficiently important to warrant tracking its subscribers. Now as Africa’s Internet steps into the limelight, it becomes important to know more Russell Southwood talks this week to Julien Coulon of Cedexis, who have just launched a tool that might contribute to solving this problem and be useful for optimising content delivery for telcos and media companies.

Cedexis’ product was launched by ex-Akami veterans and it polls a wide range of websites by putting a piece of Java script on the site. This enables Cedexis to do two things: firstly, as a free service called Radar, to be able to identify the origin of traffic to the site and secondly, as a pay-for service called Open Mix, to look at the performance of the infrastructure delivering the content, to allow load balancing.As Coulon told us: “It’s a way for content site owners to see how their ISPs and cloud providers are performing and using this information, to optimise delivery for their users. In this way, you can load balance between 2-3 data centres to give users a much better experience. It answers which are the providers that respond in the fastest time.”

The service has 250 international content providers whose websites provide 25,000 data points per second:”This allows us to offer our clients real-time routing changes. We are able to improve by 17 times the speed with which a page loads for the user. Packet loss can be as high as 21% and this increases time to download. It shows the content provider how they perform and how to accelerate their website for users.”

These are the two escalations that the courts

These are the two escalations that the courts, the music industry and the ISPs are unable to factor into their actions.The courts are attempting to make narrow judgments within the confines of the law, and are rightly unwilling to simply hand over a carte blanche power to the rights holders to block any site in any fashion.

The ISPs, similarly, do not want to be dragged into becoming the self-financing implementation tool of the entertainment industry’s wild goose chase in search of technological fixes. The copyright industry itself seems to believe that repeatedly pursuing the same set of litigatory strategies will solve their structural problems.In Turkey, YouTube has been banned, intermittently, for more than five years. It remains one of the 10 most popular sites in the country. The blocking has meant headaches for ISPs, and those wishing to use the service, but has trained a population of millions in how to use censorship circumvention software. YouTube remains. Anti-Ataturk propaganda remains online; Richard Dawkins, gay Turks and Kurdish separatism remain.

Five years from now, the Pirate Bay may be gone, but its users will still be sharing, and the copyright industry’s problems with that will remain. All that will be new will be the fragile, unaccountable and global mechanism to punch websites offline.

Western politicians will be unable to wag their fingers at Turkey when their courts are doing as much blocking in their own states. Indeed, they may themselves begin looking for what sites they would like to see vanish from the web. What begins with the Pirate Bay will not end with the Pirate Bay.

Panel approves slots license for Maryland site

A Maryland commission approved a slot machine license Thursday for a casino at the Rocky Gap Lodge and Golf Resort in western Maryland.Meanwhile, the owners of what will be the state's largest casino in Anne Arundel County set a June 6 opening date.U.S. Must Join Other Nations Banning Sex-Selection Abortion

The unanimous vote for the western Maryland site by the states Video Lottery Facility Location Commission moved the state a step closer to fulfilling its initial casino gambling plan that was envisioned more than four years ago only to be held up by the recession's impact on developing five casinos.

The license was awarded to Evitts Resort LLC. Lakes Maryland Development LLC, the parent company of Evitts, has agreed to buy out its business partner, Addy Entertainment LLC. Lakes Maryland Development is owned by Lakes Entertainment, which is based in Minnetonka, Minn.The plan calls for 850 slot machines, with anticipated growth to 1,000 machines in the second year of operation. The site which is the fourth to be licensed in Maryland, had the additional hurdle of being located at a remote lodge that has struggled for years.

I think it's struggled for a number of reasons, but I think that the addition of slots at that facility will add a lot of destination travel to the facility," said Don Fry, the commission's chairman. Having a private-sector owner make a large investment there will likely help it prosper, he said.