Twitter toes the line

The redesign of the microblogging site reflects the changing user profile of social networks—but the look is very similar to that of its competitors
In February, for the first time in Twitter’s history, chief executive officer Dick Costolo acknowledged that Twitter needed to reach a larger and more varied audience. “By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background, we can increase high-quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find the service as indispensable as our existing core users do,” Costolo announced at a meeting with investors.
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The aim, he explained, was to create more visually engaging content. This was reflected in the announcement on changes in a user’s profile page on Twitter’s official blog (Blog.twitter.com) a week ago. The new profile allows for a huge, rectangular cover photo, a profile picture, with the capability to pin a tweet to the top, checking the favourite tweets of a user, or showing the most retweeted tweet in a bigger, easier-to-read font. The visual design changes also give the user the power to upload multiple pictures in a single tweet, making it all the more obvious that Twitter believes going visual is the way to survive the social networking game. The design of the Twitter profile page, however, now looks eerily similar to the Facebook and Google+ profiles.

Going mainstream

According to a November report by Business Insider Intelligence, a research service from business news website Business Insider, Facebook is the dominant social networking platform with 1.23 billion users worldwide, with YouTube following closely at one billion users. Twitter has a mere 241 million users worldwide, not even close to the two “mass” social networks.

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Pinch and swipe

Looking for a tablet? Here is how you can go the touch-screen way with devices that cost less than Rs. 15,000

Touch screens have transformed the way we browse the Internet and entertain ourselves. In fact, now we don’t click and type, but pinch, zoom and swipe. It has been almost a year since the first tablet was launched in India in November 2010. And by the look of it the craze for tablets is just on the rise.

However, not all of us can afford the swanky top-of-the-line versions. If you can’t imagine buying the iPad 2, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom or HTC Flyer right now, but still want to experience how a tablet works, you need not wait any more. To help you make the right choice, we waded through the Android-based affordable tablets out there to bring you six we think you can try out.

iBall Slide

The Slide is a 1 GHz, Android 2.3 tablet with a bright 7-inch capacitive display.

It comes with 8 GB storage that can be extended up to 32 GB with an SD memory card. To cut costs, iBall has gone with only one front-facing camera, and no rear camera. As a result, it has a good 2 MP camera for videoconference calls, and it also comes with an HDMI out, mini USB and SD card slots. The device supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but lacks built-in 3G.

Upside: The iBall Slide has a USB port with which you can connect it to your PC or attach extra memory, keyboard, data dongle, etc., making it easy to connect and work on. The HDMI allows you to connect it to your TV to watch videos easily. It also comes with 8 GB internal memory built in, so the majority of users will not need to buy more storage.

Downside: There’s no rear camera and no SIM card support for data connectivity. Connecting to 3G requires a USB data dongle, an added expense of around Rs. 2,500. Audio quality on the iBall is terrible.

Money matters: Rs. 13,995 *

*Prices are subject to variations.

Continue reading “Pinch and swipe”

The slow killer called sitting

Studies suggest that even if you exercise for 30 minutes daily, you are prone to heart disease and spinal problems if you spend a large part of your day sitting. By Shweta Taneja

Rakesh Mehta, a 32-year-old business manager with a consultancy, spends most of his workday attending meetings, taking calls and writing instructions through emails, all sitting in his office. Once at home, he watches TV before going to bed. In a day, he spends around 8 hours sleeping, 2 hours standing or walking from one place to another, about half-an-hour exercising and the remaining 13-odd hours sitting.

Don’t be surprised if your own calculations throw up similar results. Like Mehta, most of us belong to a generation of sitters, thanks to technology’s little conveniences. “Most of us spend almost 95% of our waking hours sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, US, in an email interview. He labels today’s generation as “active couch potatoes”, and those who manage the required 30 minutes of exercise everyday as “exercising couch potatoes”. His papers, published in journals such as Diabetes (2007) and Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports (2008), show how excessive sitting time is harmful to cardiovascular and metabolic effects. This can lead to lifestyle diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, and some cancers, irrespective of the time you spend exercising.

Hamilton’s research, which is supported by a growing body of research into a concept called inactivity physiology, is trying to establish a link between disease and sedentary behaviour or prolonged sitting. “It’s a new way of thinking about physical inactivity or our sedentary lifestyle,” says Hamilton.

According to a study of 8,800 adults published in January in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, for every 60 minutes you sit watching TV daily, you may increase your risk of early death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. Inactivity just doesn’t suit humans, according to Hamilton. “The enzyme LPL (lipoprotein lipase), which usually acts like a vacuum cleaner and sucks up the bad fat in your blood and converts it into muscle, shuts down when you are sitting or lounging,” he explains. It’s like our body’s good workers go idle when we are sitting, so more fat stays in the blood and starts getting deposited in the belly fat and other organs. “When you are inactive for a prolonged period, your muscles become placid and lose their tautness. You also tend to gain weight, especially in the midriff area,” says Sanjay Mehrotra, senior consultant cardiologist, Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Bangalore. The fat which gets collected in the central part of your body, starts behaving like an endocrine gland, he says. It secretes hormones which lead to an increase in artery-damaging fat in the blood, causing obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

Back problems

Other than the heart, your back, spine, shoulders and hips develop problems due to prolonged sitting. “Your spine is made to stand. When you sit for longer hours, to be in a perfect posture with a straight back, you need very strong back muscles,” says Shiv Kanwat, consultant, physiotherapy, Moolchand Orthopaedics Hospital, New Delhi, who gets many patients who are in their early 20s and mid-30s with neck, lower back or shoulder complaints. And since most people do not have very strong back muscles, they tend to slouch after long hours of sitting, leading to the lower back slouching forward and shoulders drooping. Over time, this leads to pain in the shoulders, neck and lower back.

Computer table too low?

The problem is multiplied because ergonomics is not something most Indian firms include in their priority list. Bhavna Popat, 28, developed lower back pain after just a couple of years of working in a call centre. “The chair at my office was the problem; it was just too straight,” she says. Though her chair was changed later, it was too late to save her back. “The ergonomics in most companies are pathetic,” says Bipin Walia, senior consultant, neurosurgery and head neuro spine surgery, Max Hospital, New Delhi. “If you are sitting at a desk for 8 hours, a bad chair and badly placed computer can do a lot of damage to your spine.” Such repetitive stress injuries (RSI) affect muscles, tendons and nerves of the neck, upper and lower back, chest, shoulders, arms and hands.

Deepak Sharan, medical director, RECOUP Neuromusculoskeletal Rehabilitation Centre, Bangalore, says, “Early symptoms of RSI, which most of us tend to ignore, are discomfort, stiffness, clumsiness, tingling, headaches and a constant need to stretch or massage one’s arms.”

A research study published in October in the International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology on ergonomics-related health problems in people in Indian IT and IT services companies, found that 42% of the 650respondents felt “pain or aching in wrists, forearms, elbows, neck, or the back followed by discomfort”. Almost 50% of them felt that the reason for this was “sitting in the same posture for continuous long hours”. Not surprisingly, almost 72.5% of the respondents felt that their company had not taken notice of their problems and nothing was being done to improve the ergonomics at work. Bad ergonomic conditions lead not only to health problems but also loss of employee productivity. Dr Sharan, who runs programmes on ergonomics in companies such as Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Wipro, says he has received positive feedback from the employees after the programme. “Rather than investing in expensive gyms, employers should invest in well-designed chairs and workstations to improve productivity,” he says.

Mumbai-based fitness expert Leena Mogre has started a special fitness course aimed at what she calls “professional sitters”, or people who live life at a right angle position. “Your spine is always bending forward, which leads to your core, abs and lower back becoming very weak,” she says. Her exercises help strengthen these areas, she says.

Get up and gossip

The good news is that if you lead even a normally active life, you can undo all these sitting-related injuries. According to a study published in Diabetes Care in 2007 in Australia, constant light-intensity activity is good for your body. So even a little activity such as taking a coffee break (without having coffee) or taking a short walk during lunch break can protect your heart. “The idea is to slow the process down and the way is to remain active physically,” says Dr Mehrotra. “Walking increases your metabolic rate, burns some calories and keeps your heart pumping.”

Taking a break has an additional benefit of giving your back a break, says Dr Kanwat. “Your joints need to constantly move.” Walk for 1-2 minutes every 20 minutes of sitting, catch up on some gossip by the coffee machine and you should be all right.

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Why non-gamers should rejoice

Get off the couch, jump, shout and wave your hands about. Playing games is fun and easy says Shweta Taneja

Preview | Kinect for XBOX 360

Every time I try to play a video game, I give up in 5 minutes flat. I thought most video games required gruelling Six Sigma skills, a deeper understanding about matters such as which blue button to press from 21 and lightning-fast reflexes. Long story short, I’m not a gamer—but Microsoft’s futuristic new Kinect or the Xbox 360 briefly made me one.

I attended a trial preview of the Kinect, a hands-free technology for Microsoft’s gaming console, the Xbox 360. I was asked to stand before a small, shiny, sleek, black device placed under a 40-inch LCD television. An invisible sensor scanned me and then the Kinect evangelist smiled and asked me to play.

My mind flashed familiar warning signals.

For those who don’t know it yet, Kinect is an exploration of what a hands-free technology can do to gaming. For one, it has no buttons. All it has at the front are three eyes. These are the three cameras: an X-ray sensor which scans you skeletally, an RGB (red, green and blue) camera, and a depth sensor to track your movement. Then there’s a microphone that allows you to control the Xbox 360 with your voice (2001: A Space Odyssey style). Between them, the idea is to make your gaming avatar on the screen copy your body movements exactly on to the game. The cameras also enable easy logging into your account through your face (yes, it recognizes you) or your voice.

The game I played was River Rush, part of a package of games called Kinect Adventures. It’s a simple game requiring jumping over rocks and bushes as you are going downstream on a raft. The great part was that I didn’t need to learn whether the yellow or red button will make me jump. I simply jumped or crouched in unison with the stranger next to me, who like me had been invited to try out the Kinect. For a no-gamer like me, adapting to its motion and tracking was quite easy. In 10 minutes of game play, I had done four things—made friends with a complete stranger, had a blast playing a new game, got myself some cardio, and a cheer from the audience. As a bonus point, I got to see myself in action on the screen as the Kinect had been clicking pictures of me playing, jumping, diving and crouching all the while.

Like Nintendo’s Wii before it, Kinect is aimed at “casual gamers”—people who have sedentary, busy jobs and want to connect with their children or find a fun way to get fit. It’s meant for friends who want to hang out, jump, dance and do it all with a glass of beer in one hand (not to be used while playing) and then post their goofy pictures on their social networks.

This is the reason why most of the games it offers are like going on a joyride or visiting an amusement park. Kinectimals is a cutesy game which lets you choose a pet animal and well, pet it so that it coos to you. Though it’s obviously targeted at kids, its graphics and sounds bring a smile on even the most hardened of cynics (do check out the tiger cub, if you don’t believe me). Dance Central teaches you dance moves of different dancing styles. It’s especially made for people who have three left feet. The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout is a fitness game for people who want to exercise using the guidance of a game. Imagine an onscreen tutor who guides and corrects you when you do a wrong yoga pose.

The box is capable of tracking up to six people (height, weight can vary) and be active for two. In fact, when I tried it, it was more fun to play it with someone—even a stranger—and a group to cheer you on.

One of the major drawbacks is the space it needs for you to play—anything between 6-8ft from your device and empty space around it is essential. If you have couches, tables, books or other people in this space, the device tends to become confused. Another issue is a half a second lag in the response of your onscreen avatar. The lag becomes more, the faster you move. The reason is that your movements trigger pre-animated actions for your avatar.

In spite of these teething problems, this controller-free gaming experience makes gaming easy, fun and adaptable.

The product is expected to be in India in December and will be priced approximately at Rs9,990 for the Kinect, and Rs22,990 for a new 4 GB Xbox 360 with Kinect.

Check out the complete story here

The (Anti) Salt March

Excessive salt intake can cause cardiovascular diseases and is especially harmful for those who have a sedentary lifestyle. It’s time to go easy on that pinch

Shweta Taneja

Kanwal Batra, 50, a Delhi-based businessman, was in a dilemma when his naturopathy doctor told him to avoid salt till the eczema eruptions on his body were controlled. “I didn’t know how to react. Salt is a basic taste, how can one leave it?” was his initial reaction. The first few weeks of a salt-less diet were tough. “I couldn’t swallow the food. It had no taste!”

Later, he was surprised by the taste of vegetables such as gourd and spinach. “All of them had natural levels of salt in them. In palak (spinach), for example, the salt content is high and soon enough it tasted fine when cooked without salt,” he says. In fact, he now feels that adding salt actually kills the intrinsic flavour in vegetables.

One level teaspoon of salt or 5g provides about 2,300mg of sodium. Most Indians consume more than this amount. “Usually Indians have around 8.5g of salt per day, which is much higher than the 5g recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO),” says K. Damayanti, a scientist at the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad. Sodium and chloride, both available in salt, help to keep the level of fluids in the body balanced. Chloride is not too harmful to the body, but an overdose of sodium has been directly linked to an increase in blood pressure (hypertension) and cardiovascular diseases.

According to Dr Damayanti, “sedentary workers”, or people with desk jobs, need no more than 5g of salt per day. “This amount of salt gives 2,000mg of sodium to the body, which is more than enough for healthy Indian adults working in offices,” she says. The number changes, according to her, if you are sweating too much—either due to the environment or physical exercise. “For people working in rural areas in heat conditions or for athletes, 7-8g of salt every day is more than enough.”

According to a study conducted by WHO, higher salt intake (about 7-10g) leads to a 23% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of cardiovascular diseases.

“When we eat more salt than the body needs, it gets accumulated in every cell in our body. This is similar to toxic waste,” explains Ramesh Hotchandani, consultant in nephrology at Moolchand Medcity, New Delhi. “The effect of this on your cells is similar to what happens when salt is sprinkled on to vegetables or fruits. They wilt because the salt draws out their water. The same thing happens inside your body to your organs and cells,” adds Vijaya Venkat, founder and director of the Health Awareness Centre in Mumbai, which has been doing research on nutrition for the last 20 years and helps people adopt healthier lifestyles.

Usually our body is efficient and can get rid of this toxic waste. Drinking a lot of water helps rid the body of excess salt accumulation. “The salts accumulated in the body come out in the form of urine and sweat,” says Dr Hotchandani. In the long term, a habit of excessive salt intake causes blood pressure to rise, leading to hypertension and eventually, to heart-related problems. “Your body retains water within its system to neutralize the salt’s acidic effect,” explains Venkat. “An ounce of salt can hold three quarts of water within the system. This increases the pressure in your arteries, leading to an increase in blood pressure.”

BLOCK HIDDEN SOURCES

Stop excess salt from entering your body on the sly

Kick the salt shaker

Table salt contains the highest levels of sodium. Once it’s off the table, you will resist the tendency to sprinkle salt on cooked food as well as fresh ones such as curd, salads and fruits.

Limit use while cooking

“Don’t use more than 2-3g of salt in your daily cooking,” says Taru Agarwal, researcher, Nutri-Health Systems, in Delhi. “Start by reducing salt in cooking and in recipes to half the amount,” says nutritionist Ishi Khosla, Whole Foods, Delhi. To keep a measure, create a 3g pouch for your daily needs. “Use salt only from this pouch, whether in cooked or uncooked food,” says Ramesh Hotchandani, consultant in nephrology at Moolchand Medcity, New Delhi, who uses this technique to help hypertensive patients limit their intake of salt content. Sprinkle salt on food after it is cooked. You will find you are using less salt if you cook this way.

Avoid processed foods and condiments

Today, almost all processed foods contain salt; the question is how much. “Considering that we consume salt in everything from baby food to invisible additives found in all processed food, our ‘disguised’ consumption of salt is really very high,” says Vijaya Venkat, founder and director of the Health Awareness Centre in Mumbai. Processed foods such as bread, chips, ‘khakra’, ‘papad’, breakfast cereals, salty snacks, ready-to-eat meals, canned soups, biscuits, salted butter, cheese—all have high salt and sodium content. A tablespoon of regular ketchup, for example, has a whopping 160-190mg of sodium.

Avoid processed foods wherever you can and replace them with easy-to-make recipes using raw food materials. Make your own sauces using your favourite salt substitute or herb/spice blend. “Use low salt soy sauce diluted with lemon juice,” suggests Khosla. Balsamic vinegar or olive oil are also good replacements. Anything that has been pickled, packed in brine or canned contains a high amount of sodium. Avoid it.

Use spices instead of salt

Salt is a kind of flavour that our taste buds have got used to. Condition yourself to enjoy other flavours such as spices, lemon, lime, vinegar, or salt-free seasoning blends of herbs such as oregano, basil, dill, rosemary or thyme. Garlic is another strong flavour that can replace the need for salt with practice. Fresh lime, mango, tamarind, ‘kokum’, celery and seaweed can be used as substitute condiments instead of salt, suggests Venkat.

Also see properties of various types of salt, here