A look at RIM’s much-delayed BlackBerry 10

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion says it’s now testing its much-delayed BlackBerry 10 smartphones with 50 wireless carriers around the world. RIM calls it a key step.

RIM previously announced delays to its upcoming BlackBerry 10 system, which the company considers crucial to its future. It’s expected in the first quarter of next year, rather than late this year. The delay means the phones will miss the holiday shopping season and come months after the expected launch of a new iPhone. The delay could make it even harder for RIM to regain market share lost to Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating software.

Here’s a look at developments surrounding the BlackBerry 10 in recent months:

Oct. 18, 2011: RIM unveils a new operating system, combining existing BlackBerry elements with RIM’s previously announced QNX operating system for phones and tablet computers. RIM gives few details and offers no timetable, though analysts have come to expect it in early 2012.

Dec. 6: RIM says “BlackBerry 10″ will be the new name for its next-generation system after the company loses a trademark ruling on its previous name, BBX.

Dec. 15: RIM says new phones running BlackBerry 10 won’t be out until late 2012. The company says the phones will need a highly integrated chipset that won’t be available until mid-2012, so the company can now expect the new phones to ship late in the year.

May 1: RIM unveils a newly designed smartphone prototype powered by BlackBerry 10. The prototype BlackBerry has a touch screen, but no physical keyboard like most BlackBerry models. No update is given on the new system’s launch date.

May 2: Company stresses that while the prototype has no physical keyboard, RIM will continue to make some models with one.

June 21: Company says the first BlackBerry device running BlackBerry 10 will not have a physical keyboard, only a touch-screen one. Ones with hard keyboards will eventually be made, but the company declines to say when.

June 28: RIM says it’s delaying the launch of BlackBerry 10 yet again, to the first quarter of next year. CEO Thorsten Heins says RIM’s top priority is a successful launch of the new BlackBerrys. He adds, “I will not deliver a product to the market that is not ready to meet the needs of our customers. There will be no compromise on this issue.”

July 10: At its annual shareholders meeting, Heins asks disgruntled investors for patience as it develops BlackBerry 10. He says the product’s quality is more important than rushing out the software, and he argues that some telecom carriers prefer a 2013 launch because next-generation wireless networks will be more widely operational by then.

Aug. 23: RIM says it has begun showing its new BlackBerry smartphones to wireless carriers around the world, but it remains “months and months” away from starting to sell them. The company says feedback from those carriers has been positive, and it will begin to discuss product launches and other business aspects with the carriers soon.

Sept. 25: Heins promises to restore the BlackBerry phone’s stature as a trailblazing device even as many investors fret about its potential demise. Heins speaks at a conference for mobile applications developers to rally support for BlackBerry 10.

Wednesday: BlackBerry maker Research In Motion says its BlackBerry 10 smartphones are now being tested by 50 wireless carriers around the world. The company calls it a key step.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ivermectin hair lotion found effective against lice

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A single 10-minute hair application of a drug used in oral form since the 1980s to control river blindness and other parasitic diseases eliminated head lice in nearly three of four children in a new study.

The lotion contains ivermectin and is sold under the brand name Sklice by Sanofi Pasteur, which paid for the study. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration used the results to approve topical ivermectin lotion in February.

“The advantage of it is, it’s a one-application, one-shot treatment,” lead author Dr. David Pariser of Eastern Virginia Medical School, in Norfolk, told Reuters Health.

The treatment “sounds like it has promise in a population itching to get rid of lice,” said Dr. Hannah Chow of Loyola University Health System in Illinois, who was not connected with the study.

“Knowing how difficult it is to completely remove all lice despite due diligence with treatment and nit picking, ivermectin has potential to reduce the spread of lice, thus reducing parental anxiety, missed school and work, and social embarrassment,” she said.

Hundreds of people worldwide suffer from head lice, which feed off blood and lay up to 300 eggs, which are the nits, during a month-long lifespan.

The cost of treating infestations – including the value of lost school days and parents forced to be out of work – is estimated at $ 1 billion a year in the United States. There’s also been concern about resistance to other insecticide treatments.

Using a lotion with 0.5 percent ivermectin, the researchers found that after 14 days it had worked in 73.8 percent of 141 volunteers – most of whom were children younger than 12. In comparison, 17.6 percent of the 148 kids (and a handful of adults) whose hair was treated with a drug-free form of the lotion were louse-free after two weeks.

Lotions were applied to dry hair and then rinsed out after 10 minutes. The immediate success rate, judged the day after the lotion application, was 94.9 percent in the test group and 31.5 percent in the control group.

“It gets the kids back to school and the parents back to work,” said Pariser.

The study, involving children in 11 states, did not compare the ivermectin to any other treatment.

However, in a previous study that did test other drugs as well, Pariser and his colleagues note that ivermectin showed a similar one-day success rate of 92.4 percent while malathion, an insecticide sometimes used to treat lice, cleared 82.4 percent of patients after one day.

“A topical drug formulation is indeed welcome and is expected to have less risk of systemic adverse events,” Dr. Oliver Chosidow of Henri-Mondor Hospital in Creteil, France, and Bruno Giraudeau of University Francois-Rabelais in Tours, France, said in an editorial published with the new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But they advised that more-established techniques, such as treatments with permethrin or pyrethrin, or even malathion in cases of resistance, should be tried before using ivermectin.

“Ivermectin should be the last choice, whether topical (for still-infested persons) or oral (especially for mass treatment),” they said.

Interviewed by Reuters Health by phone and e-mail, Chow speculated that more than one application of ivermectin lotion might be necessary because the treatment didn’t work in all cases.

“Knowing that new lice could re-hatch in seven to 10 days if ivermectin didn’t completely kill all nymphs, live lice and newly laid nits, I wonder if a second application will be recommended,” she said. “I would still advocate nit picking at this point.”

“If you do this, think about retreating and continue to be very vigilant,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Yor2zt New England Journal of Medicine, online October 31, 2012.

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Jobs Numbers Will Come Out on Friday, ‘as Scheduled’

11 a.m., Oct. 31, 2012 — The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed to me on Oct. 31 that it will release the monthly jobs report on schedule this Friday. That takes the wind out of the sails of conspiracy theorists, who speculated that the administration might use Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to delay a bad jobs number that would hurt President Barack Obama’s chances of reelection. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, channeling his inner Jack Welch, had earlier tweeted: “Labor Dept says may release latest Unemployment figures until after election. Par for course. Why release something might hurt Obama elect?”

I called the BLS a little before 10 a.m. on Wednesday to find out whether the number would or would not be delayed because of Sandy. The receptionist said all calls were being referred to a spokesman at the U.S. Labor Dept., the BLS’s parent agency. When I got an answering machine at that number, I went back to Gary Steinberg, a spokesman for BLS, who—after checking with his boss for several minutes—came on the line and said: “The employment situation will be released, as scheduled, on Friday.”

The report on the October employment situation could have a huge impact on an extremely tight election because the economy’s continued weakness—and what to do about it—has been the most important issue in the campaign.

Now that the jobs report is definitely coming out, conspiracy theorists will have to pivot to attacking the numbers themselves, as former General Electric (GE) Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch did a month ago.

—Peter  Coy

Businessweek.com — Top News

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George Clooney is distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Aunt Rosemary was not George Clooney‘s only famous relative. You can add a certain Civil War American president to the Oscar-winning actor’s family tree.

Politics has apparently run in the activist actor’s blood for centuries, as website Ancestry.com on Thursday revealed that the “Ocean’s 11″ star is distantly related to President Abraham Lincoln.

According to Ancestry.com, Clooney is the half-first cousin five times removed from Lincoln, the 16th president. The genealogy website breaks down the connection, explaining the “half” means that two of their ancestors were half-siblings – Lincoln’s mother Nancy Hanks was the half-sister of Clooney’s 4th great-grandmother Mary Ann Sparrow.

Hanks and Sparrow shared the same mother, Lucy Hanks, but had different fathers. Lucy Hanks was Lincoln’s maternal grandmother as well as the 5th great-grandmother of Clooney.

Clooney’s aunt was singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, who died in 2002.

Clooney, long noted for his political activism, is a major Hollywood backer of President Barack Obama. He hosted a Democratic Party fundraiser at his Los Angeles home in March that raised $ 15 million.

Lincoln, a Republican, is considered one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States. He led the country through the Civil War and is credited with the abolition of slavery, which officially became law in 1865 after his assassination.

He is the subject of an upcoming Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, which is to open in the United States next week.

Ancestry.com is offering free access to more than 20,000 documents showcasing Lincoln’s life, his family tree and the most pivotal moments of his presidential career. The details can be found at www.ancestry.com/lincoln.

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Chris Michaud and Jackie Frank)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian warplanes bombed rebel targets with renewed intensity on Tuesday after the end of a widely ignored four-day truce between President Bashar al-Assad‘s forces and insurgents.

State television said “terrorists” had assassinated an air force general, Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khalidi, in a Damascus suburb, the latest of several rebel attacks on senior officials.

In July, a bomb killed four of Assad‘s aides, including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and the defense minister.

Air strikes hit eastern suburbs of Damascus, outlying areas in the central city of Homs, and the northern rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan on the Damascus-Aleppo highway, activists said.

Rebels have been attacking army bases in al-Hamdaniya and Wadi al-Deif, on the outskirts of Maarat al-Numan.

Some activists said 28 civilians had been killed in Maarat al-Numan and released video footage of men retrieving a toddler’s body from a flattened building. The men cursed Assad as they dragged the dead girl, wearing a colorful overall, from the debris. The footage could not be independently verified.

The military has shelled and bombed Maarat al-Numan, 300 km (190 miles) north of Damascus, since rebels took it last month.

“The rebels have evacuated their positions inside Maarat al-Numaan since the air raids began. They are mostly on the frontline south of the town,” activist Mohammed Kanaan said.

Maarat al-Numan and other Sunni towns in northwestern Idlib province are mostly hostile to Assad’s ruling system, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Two rebels were killed and 10 wounded in an air strike on al-Mubarkiyeh, 6 km (4 miles) south of Homs, where rebels have besieged a compound guarding a tank maintenance facility.

Opposition sources said the facility had been used to shell Sunni villages near the Lebanese border.

“WE’LL FIX IT”

The army also fired mortar bombs into the Damascus district of Hammouria, killing at least eight people, activists said.

One video showed a young girl in Hammouria with a large shrapnel wound in her forehead sitting dazed while a doctor said: “Don’t worry dear, we’ll fix it for you.”

Syria’s military, stretched thin by the struggle to keep control, has increasingly used air power against opposition areas, including those in the main cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Insurgents lack effective anti-aircraft weapons.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has said he will pursue his peace efforts despite the failure of his appeal for a pause in fighting for the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.

But it is unclear how he can find any compromise acceptable to Assad, who seems determined to keep power whatever the cost, and mostly Sunni Muslim rebels equally intent on toppling him.

Big powers and Middle Eastern countries are divided over how to end the 19-month-old conflict which has cost an estimated 32,000 dead, making it one of the bloodiest of Arab revolts that have ousted entrenched leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The United Nations said it had sent a convoy of 18 trucks with food and other aid to Homs during the “ceasefire”, but had been unable to unload supplies in the Old City due to fighting.

“We were trying to take advantage of positive signs we saw at the end of last week. The truce lasted more or less four hours so there was not much opportunity for us after all,” said Jens Laerke, a U.N. spokesman in Geneva.

The prime minister of the Gulf state of Qatar told al-Jazeera television late on Monday that Syria’s conflict was not a civil war but “a war of annihilation licensed firstly by the Syrian government and secondly by the international community”.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said some of those responsible were on the U.N. Security Council, alluding to Russia and China which have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad.

He said that the West was also not doing enough to stop the violence and that the United States would be in “paralysis” for two or three weeks during its presidential election.

(Additional reporting by Raissa Kasolowsky in Abu Dhabi and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Hurricane Sandy wallops Internet commerce just as hard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – From Fab.com to Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc, e-commerce companies scrambled on Tuesday to get goods to buyers on time after Hurricane Sandy tore a swathe of destruction across the U.S. northeast.

The storm — which severed power to warehouses and offices, ripped up rails and roads and shuttered airports — challenged the notion that Internet retailers might benefit from problems at store chains exposed to the elements.

Fab.com, a fast-growing design e-commerce start-up based in New York City, handled unusually strong volumes on Monday as people hunkered down at home. Then the problems began.

Fab operates out of two warehouses in hard-hit New Jersey, one self-owned and another run by warehouse company Dotcom Distribution. With both lacking power as of mid-afternoon, no packages were making it out the door on Tuesday.

“The biggest impact to us right now is that our warehouses have no power,” said Jason Goldberg, founder and chief executive of Fab.com. “We’re doing everything humanly possible to send packages as quickly as possible.”

Retailers from New York to Washington are starting to re-open and re-staff in the aftermath of Monday’s destruction. But many of Fab.com’s fellow Internet retailers were still struggling to fill orders, handle customer service and keep websites running ahead of the crucial holiday season.

Those efforts are geared at ensuring buyers do not wait too long for their products — and averting a damaging backlash against their sites and reputation.

Amazon.com warned merchants on Tuesday that use its shipping service, Fulfillment by Amazon, that Sandy might impact the handling of orders. Third-party sellers on its marketplace that handle their own shipping were instructed to contact shoppers directly about their orders.

It advised them to temporarily deactivate online listings should they be unable to meet usual shipping standards.

“Because the Internet is an opaque purchasing method, customers don’t always understand where their product is coming from or if they are going to be affected,” said Eric Heller, head of Marketplace Ignition, which helps online retailers sell through websites such as Amazon.com. “We’re encouraging sellers to proactively reach out to buyers that may be affected.”

RECOVERY PLANS

EBay pursued a similar tactic, emailing shoppers who purchased items from merchants that may have been impacted by the storm in recent days, asking for patience. It recommended that affected eBay Store-subscribers put their pages in “vacation mode” to control purchasing and show shoppers that their operation has been temporarily disrupted, a spokeswoman said.

And Gilt Groupe, which runs a popular high-end fashion website, expects delivery times to take one to three days longer than normal, said Kevin Ryan, founder and CEO of the company.

Beyond logistics tangles, loss of power and telecommunications have hurt Internet firms that rely on telephone and Web-based customer service in the absence of store staff.

Fab.com’s offices a block from New York’s Hudson River were blacked out and closed until further notice. About a third of employees lacked power as of Tuesday afternoon. A dozen camped out at Goldberg’s home working on recovery plans and preparing the company’s online holiday stores for their Thursday launch.

Gilt’s offices in New York have been difficult to access, so the company has not been able to run its usual photoshoots for a few days, Ryan said.

“We will need to get back in soon or there will not be any new sales up,” he said. “I think we will get back in by Thursday and everything will be OK.”

Others like online eyeglasses start-up Warby Parker, in the SoHo district of New York City, sought temporary solutions to a loss of power and Web access. It found a temporary office that it will start using on Wednesday to handle customer inquiries.

“We’ve been scrambling to get our systems up and running,” said co-founder Dave Gilboa.

(Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Editing by Edwin Chan and Chris Gallagher)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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How women can identify heart disease

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Living standards ‘may stagnate’

30 October 2012 Last updated at 20:01 ET

Millions of poor and middle-income households may be bypassed by any economic recovery, a think tank says.

The Resolution Foundation argues that their living standards could stagnate for the next 10 years, ending no higher in 2020 than they were in 2000.

The think tank blames this prospect on the demise of administrative and manufacturing jobs in the UK economy.

It warns that high unemployment will continue to depress wages and calls for state subsidies to boost employment.

“On current trends the outlook for the bottom half of the working population is bleak even once growth returns,” the Foundation says.

“This stagnation of living standards can be averted if action is taken.

“Success in boosting low pay, raising skills, and increasing female employment could see a typical middle income family better off by £1,600 (after inflation) a year by 2020,” the think tank adds.

The UK economy pulled out of recession, again, in the third quarter of this year.

But the economy’s annual output is still no higher than it was at the start of 2007, shortly before the start of the credit crunch, international banking crisis, and the consequent international recession.

‘Too little debate’

Continue reading the main story

Ministers will agree with some of the Commission’s answers, and reject others. But they will likely admit that it highlights some very important questions about the future shape of the economy”

End Quote

UK unemployment rose sharply and since the middle of 2009, the official unemployment rate has been hovering around the 8% level.

As a recent analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed, the combined effect of the recession – mainly high unemployment, stagnating wages and rising prices – has slashed living standards.

The ONS said that income per head, taking inflation into account, had fallen by more than 13% since the start of 2008.

To stop the benefits of any economic recovery simply being concentrated on the wealthier half of the population, the Resolution Foundation suggests a series of measures to redistribute income and wealth.

These include:

• more state subsidies for cheap childcare


• cutting the national insurance contributions paid by workers aged 55 or over


• ensuring that the government’s forthcoming Universal Credit system is as generous to second earners in a family as it will be to first earners


• switching child tax credit from parents of older children to those with younger ones


• reducing council tax bills for cheap properties by increasing the tax on expensive ones

Clive Cowdery, chairman of the Resolution Foundation, said: “There remains far too little debate about whether growth will benefit the broad majority of people.

“This wil not happen automatically but… things can be done to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared by all.”

BBC News – Business

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Cuba’s 2nd city without power, water after Sandy

HAVANA (AP) — Residents of Cuba‘s second-largest city of Santiago remained without power or running water Monday, four days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall as the island’s deadliest storm in seven years, ripping rooftops from homes and toppling power lines.

Across the Caribbean, the storm’s death toll rose to 69, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was “severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.”

Yolanda Tabio, a native of Santiago, said she had never seen anything like it in all her 64 years: Broken hotel and shop windows, trees blown over onto houses, people picking through piles of debris for a scrap of anything to cover their homes. On Sunday, she sought solace in faith.

“The Mass was packed. Everyone crying,” said Tabio, whose house had no electricity, intermittent phone service and only murky water coming out of the tap on Monday. “I think it will take five to ten years to recover. … But we’re alive.”

Sandy came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba. It is the island’s deadliest storm since 2005′s Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $ 2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

“It really shocked me to see all that has been destroyed and to know that for many people, it’s the effort of a whole lifetime,” said Maria Caridad Lopez, a media relations officer at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Santiago. “And it disappears in just three hours.”

Lopez said several churches in the area collapsed and nearly all suffered at least minor damage. That included the Santiago cathedral as well as one of the holiest sites in Cuba, the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre. Sandy’s winds blew out its stained glass windows and damaged its massive doors.

“It’s indescribable,” said Berta Serguera, an 82-year-old retiree whose home withstood the tempest but whose patio and garden did not. “The trees have been shredded as if with a saw. My mango only has a few branches left, and they look like they were shaved.”

On Monday, sound trucks cruised the streets urging people to boil drinking water to prevent infectious disease. Soldiers worked to remove rubble and downed trees from the streets. Authorities set up radios and TVs in public spaces to keep people up to date on relief efforts, distributed chlorine to sterilize water and prioritized electrical service to strategic uses such as hospitals and bakeries.

Enrique Berdion, a 45-year-old doctor who lives in central Santiago, said his small apartment building did not suffer major damage but he had been without electricity, water or gas for days.

“This was something I’ve never seen, something extremely intense, that left Santiago destroyed. Most homes have no roofs. The winds razed the parks, toppled all the trees,” Berdion said by phone. “I think it will take years to recover.”

Raul Castro, who toured Cuba’s hardest-hit regions on Sunday, warned of a long road to recovery.

Granma said the president called on the country to urgently implement “temporary solutions,” and “undoubtedly the definitive solution will take years of work.”

Venezuela sent nearly 650 of tons of aid, including nonperishable food, potable water and heavy machinery both to Cuba and to nearby Haiti, which was not directly in the storm’s path but suffered flash floods across much of the country’s south.

Across the Caribbean, work crews were repairing downed power lines and cracked water pipes and making their way into rural communities marooned by impassable roads. The images were similar from eastern Jamaica to the northern Bahamas: Trees ripped from the ground, buildings swamped by floodwaters and houses missing roofs.

Fixing soggy homes may be a much quicker task than repairing the financial damage, and island governments were still assessing Sandy’s economic impact on farms, housing and infrastructure.

In tourism-dependent countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials said popular resorts sustained only superficial damage, mostly to landscaping.

Haiti, where even minor storms can send water gushing down hills denuded of trees, listed a death toll of 52 as of Monday and officials said it could still rise. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has described the storm as a “disaster of major proportions.”

In Jamaica, where Sandy made landfall first on Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane, people coped with lingering water and power outages with mostly good humor.

“Well, we mostly made it out all right. I thought it was going to be rougher, like it turned out for other places,” laborer Reginald Miller said as he waited for a minibus at a sunbaked Kingston intersection.

In parts of the Bahamas, the ocean surged into coastal buildings and deposited up to six feet of seawater. Sandy was blamed for two deaths on the archipelago off Florida’s east coast, including a British bank executive who fell off his roof while trying to fix a window shutter and an elderly man found dead beneath overturned furniture in his flooded, low-lying home.

___

Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, and Jeff Todd in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

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Peter Orsi is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Facebook, Twitter abuzz with hurricane chatter

Whether you call it Frankenstorm, Stormpocalypse or simply Hurricane Sandy, the giant weather system barreling into the East Coast is a favorite topic of conversation on social media from Facebook to Twitter. As people post updates to friends and family, relay emergency information and lighten the mood with humor, it’s clear that discussing natural disasters on social media has become as much a part of the experience as stocking up on bread and batteries.

As of Monday afternoon, the hashtag “Sandy” had 233,000 photos posted on Instagram, the mobile photo-sharing service owned by Facebook. “Hurricanesandy,” meanwhile, had 100,000 photos and “Frankenstorm” had 20,000 and growing.

As they waited for the storm to hit over the weekend, people posted photos of hurricane-preparedness supplies ranging from canned goods to board games and bottles of wine. Empty grocery store shelves where bread should have been also showed up on Facebook and Instagram.

“There are now 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag “Sandy” – most are images of people prepping for the storm and images of scenes outdoors, said Instagram CEO Kevin Systorm in an emailed statement. “I think this demonstrates how Instagram is quickly becoming a useful tool to see the world as it happens – especially for important world events like this.”

By Monday, dispatches about storm preparations gave way to messages of anticipation and real-time updates. Among U.S. users, the terms “Sandy”, “Hurricane Sandy” and “Hurricane” were the most-used terms on Facebook, followed by “stay safe” and “be safe.” In fact, all of the top 10 most-mentioned phrases on Facebook related to the storm in some way among U.S. users, the company said. “Power,” ”cold,” ”my friends” and “prayers” were also in the top 10.

To gauge how much its users are talking about a particular topic, Facebook uses a measurement tool it calls the “talk meter,” which ranks terms around a topic or event on a scale of 1 to 10. Tops that generate the most buzz receive a 10. As of Friday afternoon, Sandy-related chatter was at 7.12, the company said. In comparison, the San Francisco Giants World Series win on Sunday night measured at 6.71 on Facebook.

On Twitter, Frankenstorm, FEMA — for Federal Emergency Management Agency — and New Jersey were among the top trending topics in the United States. Forecasters expected the hurricane’s center to come ashore in southern New Jersey Monday evening.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley reminded his more than 53,000 Twitter followers to “ALWAYS BE CHARGING.” Millions of East Coasters could experience electric power and landline telephone outages. As a result, power-hungry smart phones, laptops and tablet computers may become only way to communicate.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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