Phase 4 will introduce the all new Media capabilities and tie up some loose ends. We are still planning on releasing Pole Sabz 2.0 on schedule. A list of features and changes will be posted on the site once we are close to the completion of the project.

Nearly three-quarters (72.4 percent) of the teens who responded to a national survey said they drank at least one glass of water a day over the preceding seven days, Nancy Brener of the CDC and colleagues reported in the June 17 issue of Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.

Among the 11,429 survey respondents, 42 percent had at least one glass of milk a day, and 30.2 percent drank 100 percent fruit juice.

“These are healthful beverages, and milk and 100 percent fruit juice are sources of key nutrients,” Brener and colleagues wrote…

Attorney General George Jepsen said in a letter to Facebook earlier this week that the world’s No. 1 Internet social network appeared to have overlooked consumer privacy by analyzing the faces in photographs posted on the website and cataloging the recognition.

“Consumers must be made aware that the digital images of their faces are being coupled by Facebook technology to the personal information in their Facebook profiles,” Jepsen wrote in the letter released by his office on Thursday.

“The potential uses of facial recognition on this scale remain unclear but concerning,” the letter said.

The letter follows Facebook’s broad deployment of its “Tag Suggestions” technology, which scans users’ uploaded photos, comparing faces in the photos with previously uploaded photos to see if it can match people to the photos.

If a match is found, Facebook alerts the person uploading the photos and invites them to “tag,” or identify, the person in the photo.

“We have been in contact with Attorney General Jepsen’s office and are eager to provide clarification about tag suggestions and answer any questions he may have,” a spokesman for Facebook told Reuters…

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

International Business Machines Corp., more commonly known as IBM, turned 100 years old on Thursday.

Surviving a century is impressive for a human being; it’s astonishing for a tech company that got its start a mere three years after the Ford Model T began production.

IBM dates back to June 16, 1911, when three small companies — which made scales, a tabulating machine, punch-clocks for work and a recording device, among other gadgets — merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. The name IBM came along in 1924.

At the helm in the early years was Thomas Watson Sr., an exacting businessman who lent the company his slogan — “Think” — which he originally adopted as a sales manager at National Cash Register Co, according to the IBM website.

In the beginning, IBM also produced meat and cheese slicers, along with machines that read data stored on punch cards — forerunners of the computer. By the 1930s, IBM punch cards were keeping track of millions of Americans for the newly minted Social Security program.

The company boomed in the years following World War II, focusing on mainframe computers, which powered whole offices. It introduced the floppy disk in 1971, developed the bar code and was at the forefront of personal computing.

IBM stumbled in 1981, when it introduced a personal computer but decided not to buy the software that powered the machine — made by a fledgling company called Microsoft.

In the last decade, the company has focused on providing technology services to companies. It also built the Watson computer that beat human rivals Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the TV trivia show “Jeopardy!”

IBM is due to surpass $100 billion in annual sales this year and currently ranks 18th on the Forbes 500 list of top American companies. …

Demonstrations were staged in the towns of Homs, Hama, several suburbs of Damascus and the eastern town of Deir al-Zour, among other places, signaling that weeks of brutality have failed to dent the resilience of the protest movement.

Late Thursday, the government made an attempt to appease the opposition by announcing the resignation of the powerful tycoon identified by many Syrians as a symbol of their government’s corruption and nepotism.

Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin and childhood friend, is relinquishing control over his business interests, Syrian state media reported. The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said he would sell his shares in Syrian companies and donate his wealth to charity. Makhlouf was motivated by a desire to create jobs and aid the economy, the news agency said…

Reports in Ankara said Turkey‘s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was planning to create a buffer zone to prevent its instability spilling into Turkish territory.

Activists say at least 10 of the deaths on Friday occurred in the northwestern province of Idlib. State-run news reports say an armed group in the provincial city of Maaret al-Numan attacked security forces and set several government buildings on fire.

The news report said gunmen were trying to “repeat the scenario” of Jisr al-Shughour. On Monday, the government said “armed gangs” in the northern region near the Turkish border had killed 120 security personnel.

Military forces have moved into Jisr al-Shughour.  Most of the town’s residents reportedly fled after the government promised a military response to the attack.

Meanwhile, witnesses and activists say security forces shot and killed anti-government protesters in several cities on Friday. They say the forces used live ammunition on demonstrators in Damascus and in the southern flashpoint Daraa region…

Facebook has enabled facial recognition technology, without your permission.

While this feature makes tagging easier than Facebook had intended, it has caused a storm of controversy and warning among security experts and Facebook users.

After I got to my hotel I decided to scout around the downtown area to find places to hangout and eat for the next few days that I was going to be there. I looked up a couple places and had them marked on my phone to go to and find out where they are exactly.

My luck both places were out of business. By then I had already walked a good distance from the hotel to just go back so I decided to look up some other place on my phone. The closest fast food place that I could find on Yelp was too far of walking distance and I was just too tired and didn’t have the patience to go to a restaurant.

Fortunately Atlanta’s streets are full of cops just walking around so I ended up asking one of them if he knew of a fast food kind of place that I could go and eat. This guy not only gave me wrong directions by the time I got there I realized he gave me directions to a building that had Quiznos advertising and not a place to go and eat.

I had already lost my bearings and my phone was having a difficult time to get a lock on my position because of bad weather. As I was looking at the map to find out where I am and how to get back to the hotel a guy walked up to me and asked me if I was lost. I know you are not supposed to tell a stranger that you are lost and all of that but I was just too tired and hungry to think rationally so I told him what had happened.

I told him which hotel I was staying at and that I was just trying to find some places to eat nearby. He said he would help me find some places to eat and how to get back to my hotel. As I was following him around and talking to him I realized he knew more about Atlanta than anyone else I had talked to up to that point. He told me that the recession had hit them hard and they were suffering from a very high unemployment rate.

He was giving me a tour of the downtown area and seemed to know everything about every street corner which is when I started to realize that he was actually a homeless. He didn’t smell or even look like a homeless person but I just had to know if he was or not since he simply knew too much about the life in the streets.

He said that he lost his job a while back and wasn’t able to find a job since so he had been forced to live in the streets. I told him that he was just too clean for a homeless and not jaded like those who were forced to live in the streets. He said that he tries to stay at the shelter as much as he can and he showed me his little shower bag and told me he tries his hardest to stay clean cut so he can find a job.

This man clearly didn’t want to live in the streets but at the same time he wasn’t full of anger, hatred or regret. He was friendly, caring and full of life. He told me that he didn’t blame anyone for what had happened to him and simply accepted it as part of his life. He said he feels liberated and able to do much more than he was able to do before.

I was very intrigued by this man and realized that he knew and understood more about life that I could ever hope for. He showed me a few places to eat on the way back and finally get back to my hotel. I tried to give him some money but he kept on refusing it. I finally convinced him by saying that if it wasn’t because of him I would have had to pay for a taxi to get back to my hotel. This way he could stay a few more nights at the shelter since it apparently costs money to stay at the shelter.

It’s not every day that you get to see people like him; people that have been knocked down by their circumstances but refuse to give up; people that know the true meaning of life and willing to fight for it without losing their humanity. I am not going to be idealistic and say I wished everyone was like him. I am just going to say if there were a few more people like him then I would feel better about the world I am living in. I really hope that he can find a job soon and rebuild his life.

Out of all the unusual experiences that I have had this was one of the best and totally made the trip to Atlanta worth it.

PETA has long warned that having students dissect animals in the classroom has the unintended consequence of teaching kids disrespect for living beings, and a recent prank involving a dead cat appears to bolster our case. A senior at John Jay High School in San Antonio stole a dead cat from the school’s dissection laboratory and placed the body on another student’s car. The victim in turn placed the cat on the first student’s car, and a third student reported the incident to PETA. After we sent an urgent letter to the principal asking him to investigate, he suspended both of the students involved and a spokesperson called the prank “cruel and immature.”…