Boot up: Apple's Steve Jobs tribute, Google chief on Siri, and more

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A woman uses her iPhone to do a Steve Jobs memorial. Photograph: Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Android chief says your phone should not be your assistant >> AllThingsD
Rubin unleashed (on Siri): "I don't believe that your phone should be an assistant. Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone."

Remembering Steve Jobs >> Apple
A live page of tributes to the Apple co-founder.

Groupon seeks offering near $12 billion valuation >> NYTimes.com

"Groupon, the daily deal site, is considering an offering valued at close to $12 billion as it prepares for an investor road show next week, according to two people with knowledge of the situation." But if enough people come in then you can get it cheaper?

MediaFuturist: The future of media: re-boot and enjoy.

"Soon, most of the world's Internet traffic will be generated by a huge variety of mobile devices instead of computers, and 'the other 3 billion' users aka consumers in the BRIC countries are coming online at a very fast pace. Remember: 10% more broadband and / or wireless equates to 1% growth in GDP - but also a 1000% percent increase in disruption:) "Give it another 3-5 years and it's very likely that almost 5 billion people will be connected with fast and very cheap (if not free) mobile devices - and they will not 'consume' media and so-called content in the same way that we did when renting a movie still meant getting a piece of plastic that embodied it, or becoming a faithful and constant visitor to the quite beautiful but nevertheless super-walled iTunes garden." People will want access rather than files, he argues.

Currys slashes PlayBook prices to £250 >> PC Pro

"Another tablet's price has been slashed, with Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook now £150 cheaper at one major retailer. Currys and PC World have announced £150 off all models of the PlayBook, with the low end 16GB version dropping from £399.99 to £249.99. "'It looks like they need to get units moving, and it will be interesting to see if this is only PC World and Currys or comes from RIM,' said Geoff Blaber, director of devices and software platforms at analyst firm CSS insight." It comes from RIM. It also comes straight off RIM's bottom line. Its financials are going to be woeful next quarter. (Our local Currys had one on display. Then it didn't. And none replaced it.)

Where Did Cached Pages Go On Google?

"Since Google launched the new instant previews just about a month ago, the question we have seen come up from searchers time and time again is 'where did the cached page go?' "Yes, Google has moved the 'cached' and 'similar' links from near the display URL in the search results and to the instant preview section." Phew.

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Life expectancy mapped by local authority - who lives longest (and shortest)?

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Where do people live longest in the UK - and where has life expectancy actually gone down? The latest data is out from the ONS. Click on the map to see how each local authority compares - and use the dropdown to see the figures for women and change.

Some key data:
• Life expectancy was highest in Kensington and Chelsea and lowest in Glasgow City
• At age 65 the average increase in local areas was one year for men and 0.9 years for women
• The gap between the local areas with the highest and lowest life expectancies increased between 2004–06 and 2008–10

• Download the data behind this map
• By health areas

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Samsung Nexus Prime to get UK launch 'within weeks'

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The Samsung Nexus Prime smartphone will launch in the UK this week. Photograph: Lee Jin-Man/AP

Samsung and Google are to launch the Nexus Prime phone to showcase the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, "Ice Cream Sandwich", in Hong Kong late on Tuesday night.

The phone is expected to be released in the UK within the next four weeks, in time for Christmas.

The launch had been scheduled for Monday last week, but Google and Samsung postponed it following the death of Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and former chief executive.

As a flagship device, the phone will run the standard version of the new Android update, rather than having Samsung's G-Wiz Touch-Wiz system running on top of it. Engadget suggests that it will have a high-definition display, dual-core 1.5GHz processor and a screen size of up to 4.6in.

Like the Nexus S, the Samsung device which showcased Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", the previous major phone version, there won't be physical buttons for key on-screen functions.

Samsung and Apple are neck and neck, having both supplanted Finland's Nokia to ship more than 20m smartphone handsets per quarter in the three months to June. Analysts are still waiting for third-quarter figures from Samsung; Apple will announce figures at its quarterly results on Tuesday night.

Samsung is expected to have supplanted Nokia as the largest mobile company in terms of handset shipments when it finalises its third-quarter results through its sales of "feature phones" which don't have third-party app capabilities.

The Google chief executive, Larry Page, said at the company's earnings call last week that 190m Android devices have been activated since its inception. He also said that the mobile business was on an equivalent run rate to being a $2.5bn business.

However, he did not specify how much of that comes through mobile advertising and app sales on Android; testimony given by a Google executive to the US Congress that two-thirds of mobile search comes from devices running Apple's iOS software.

Ice Cream Sandwich, which is version 4.0 of Android, is intended to be a cross-platform offering that unites the 2.0 branch, devised for mobile phones, and the 3.0 branch for tablets which was first released earlier this year on Motorola's showcase Xoom tablet. That should mean that app developers can target all sizes of screen in a single package.

Samsung's UK press office did not have any information about the timing of the launch or any other details at the time of publication.

Update: Android Central says it has the specifications. Notable points include 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 3.0, and the following:

• Display: AMOLED HD: 4.65 inches Resolution 720 x1280) Maximum number of simultaneous colors
• Main Display: 16,777,216 color touch screen: capacitive (multi-touch),
• Main camera: 5 megapixel CMOS camera with LED flash
• Video recording 1080pHD (1920 * 1080)
• Front camera: 1.3 million pixels CMOS
• GPS
• NFC
• Micro USB 2.0

For the full list, see the site.

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For ever Egypt - a northern temple to industry is at serious risk

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Jaw-dropping - and just a step from the flourishing Round Foundry complex of Leeds' mills.

The threat to British industry's greatest monuments raised by English Heritage is dramatically illustrated by the partial collapse of Temple Mill in Leeds, a vast Egyptian-style monument which became world-famous within months of its completion in 1840.

Launched with a temperance tea for 2000 flax-spinners, whose facilities in the huge building included private bathrooms – cold water free, hot a penny – the building was an attempt at more enlightened employment practices and featured as such in Disraeli's novel Sybil.

Lauded by everyone from Pevsner to Sir John Betjeman, the mill has been listed Grade 1 for more than 30 years, placing it in the top 2.5 percent of the UK's built heritage. It figures both on the English Heritage 'red alert' list and in the top ten Victorian buildings at risk published earlier this month by the Victorian Society.

Salt's Mill in Saltaire, now the centre of a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Alamy

There is incredulity in Leeds that the city's most famous industrial monument can have reached such a parlous state that one of its 18 beautifully carved lotus pillars has collapsed, bringing down with it a section of equally ornate wall. But the lethal effects of neglect on a vast but delicate structure, which depended on constant use and maintenance, has combined with the bite of the recession on over-optimistic developers.

For all its massiveness, the mill depends on a web of tie-bars which anchor an exceptionally heavy roof of 60 saucer-shaped brick domes, each crowned by a cone of glass, to the Egyptian walls. Inspired by the Pharoanic temple of the falcon god Horus at Edfu, the system included a meadow of grass to preserve moist temperatures for the flax, which was grazed monthly in summer by imported sheep.

The fracture of a tie-bar led to the pillar collapse and left the mill like a 'wobbly table' on its forest of slender iron pillars, also adorned with lotus leaves, which double as drainpipes. Further damage is certain if other ties fail.

Stonework is also broken on the ornate gatekeeper's lodge, an extra adornment which survived when the original chimney, an obelisk inspired by Cleopatra's Needle, became structurally unsound and was demolished in the 19th century. English Heritage lists the building's condition laconically as 'very bad'.

The developers Arndale Properties have begun repair work and use of parts of the building as a cultural centre on the lines of Salt's Mill in neighbouring Bradford, an even vaster leviathan whose collection of David Hockney paintings and World Heritage Site status has been one of northern England's greatest heritage successes. Temple Mill's neighbouring, and flourishing, Round Foundry complex is a model too. But progress has been slow since the last major occupier, a mail order warehouse, moved out in 2004. The clock for crucial and ever-more expensive repairs is ticking.

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Will free BlackBerry apps make it better? You betcha | Hadley Freeman

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Had some email problems last week? Here, play some Texas Hold'em poker this week. Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian

'It is the distant future, the year 2000/We are robots/The world is quite different ever since/The robotic uprising of the late 90s." Despite coming a mere decade plus VAT later than Bret and Jermaine of the Flight of the Conchords predicted, it has been hard to view certain events over the past few weeks as anything other than final confirmation that mankind has conceded all power to the robots. I can't quite bring myself to deal with the excitement some people seem to feel about Siri, which, as far as I can ascertain, is some kind of disease that makes people think it's OK to ask their iPhone the meaning of life and expect an answer.

Instead, I shall focus on the panic last week that apparently gripped the whole of Great Britain when, for a whole handful of days, one's BlackBerry didn't work and so one wasn't able to access one's spam at a moment's notice. Oh, the agonised wails of 140 characters or less that speckled Twitter! I was actually quite surprised when I arrived back in Britain this week not to find some apocalyptic wasteland peopled only by barely clothed skeletons crawling on the ground, clutching their pitifully useless black handsets, while Viggo Mortensen marched grimly onwards, determined to reach that BlackBerry HQ and have his vengeance.

In all honesty, the furore somewhat mystified me. Surely to complain about not being able to receive emails is tantamount to complaining about not being able to work that day. Um, boo hoo?

Anyway, BlackBerry has wisely adopted the prostrate apology pose this week and has announced that, to aid its customers' recovery from post- traumatic stress disorder, it will give them some free apps. Now, this is the kind of compensatory culture I can get down with. Ladies and gentlemen, could you not see that email offer of penile enlargement as soon as it arrived in your inbox last week? Here, play some Texas Hold'em poker this week! I believe this is what is called crap for old rope.

As compensations go, this one's easy to mock, which is clearly why I am doing so, but perhaps this is how one should view life in general. There are so many depressing developments in the world that, at best, maybe half of them are misguided apologies for something else. To whit: "So Britain, you're on the verge of an economic disaster? Never mind, Steps are number one!" "So America, your government is broken and you're in an inextricable decline? Don't worry, The Only Way is Essex is coming to your screens!"

"So Democrats, feeling a bit disillusioned with that whole hopeychangey thing? Well, now that it's the other side that looks likely to have the candidate with the 'difficult religion' issue with the Mormon Mitt Romney, you're the party that has the grass-roots movement in the form of Occupy Wall Street, and President Obama has already spent more than $87m in operating costs for his campaign, which is as much as all of the Republican candidates have raised so far, put together, it looks like you're the new Republicans. Congratulations! Would you like to play some Texas Hold'em poker?"

So long, New York Times, it was nice to know you while we did. Perhaps you have not heard but the eminence grise of newspapers is teetering on the verge of a spectacular collapse. Jill Abramson, the paper's sparkling new executive editor and its first female one in its 160 years of existence, has been profiled in possibly the only eminence griser than the newspaper, The New Yorker. Despite being published only on Monday, this interview has already attracted a huge amount of attention in New York. Not for its descriptions of sexism that existed at the paper only decades ago, nor for the odds Abramson has had to overcome, not least when she was nearly crushed under a truck just four years ago – but for her promise to treat the journalists in the same way that she treats her beloved dog, Scout: "'In one's relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism,' she says," the New Yorker reports.

Abramson has never been a closeted dog lover. Not only is her forthcoming book entitled The Puppy Diaries but her portrait photograph alongside this interview is of her standing proudly alongside the aforementioned Scout, patting his head with a proud little smile.

Yet as a fellow crazy dog lady – a term some mystifyingly see as an insult – I cannot but view Abramson's editorial strategy as worrying. Treating one's underlings similarly to the way one treats one's dog is, undoubtedly well-meaning and compassionate. But I know – and, judging from Abramson's dog-o-philia, she knows, too – that although one might enter into this relationship with high dreams of you being a stern master, an establisher of boundaries and a commander of respect, the end result is actually the dog being the boss of you, you talking to it in complete sentences in public, every item in your wardrobe being matted with dog hair and a general air of chaos. So fare thee well, New York Times, we'll remember you with the dignity you once commanded. And if you must wee in the flat, please wee on yourself.

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Rejecting these riot appeals is no deterrent | Alan Travis

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Lord Judge 'not only appears to be sentencing Sutcliffe-Keenan and Blackshaw for the August riots as a whole but also for using “sinister” modern technology'. Photograph: Tim Rooke / Rex Features

For the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, the decision by the court of appeal to uphold the draconian four-year sentences on the Facebook "rioters" is "very simple" – such severe sentences are needed to punish and deter.

Indeed, in rejecting the appeals from Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw, both in their early 20s, the court of appeal judges appear to be loading the blame for the "utterly shocking and wholly inexcusable" level of lawlessness seen during the riots on to their shoulders.

"The imposition of severe sentences, intended to provide both punishment and deterrence, must follow," said Judge. "It is very simple. Those who deliberately participate in disturbances of this magnitude, causing injury and damage and fear to even the most stout-hearted of citizens … must be punished accordingly and the sentences should be designed to deter others."

He appears to be arguing that the four-year sentences are justified – despite the fact that no one but the police turned up to their non-existent riots in Northwich and Warrington – because of the "country-wide mayhem" that did take place elsewhere.

Surely it is right that somebody who shouts fire in a crowded theatre should be convicted of spreading fear and panic. But shouldn't a judge be more lenient in cases where the audience almost completely ignores the shouter than in cases where 15 people are severely injured in the subsequent stampede?

Worse than that, Judge not only appears to be sentencing Sutcliffe-Keenan and Blackshaw for the August riots as a whole but also for using "sinister" modern technology to encourage others to take part in the riots.

Judge said it was wrong to suggest that their crimes were minor because they hadn't gone door-to-door encouraging people to riot. He said it was a "sinister feature" of these cases that modern technology certainly assisted rioters in other places.

In doing so he has made clear that the decision to uphold these draconian sentences was not based on the facts of the actual case before him. Indeed his references in his judgment to "stout-hearted citizens" and general "ghastliness" suggest that he may not yet be fully up to speed on some of the nuances of the digital age. It seems as though for these judges Facebook and instant messaging are themselves in the dock.

But this decision also sends out the message that deterrent sentences can work. Judge chairs the sentencing council whose guidelines clearly state that the sentence must fit the particular circumstances of the crime. They spell out in very great complexity how sentences must be tailored to the seriousness of each offence. Deterrent sentencing, even if it is ever justified, does not have a great track record. Passing 10-year sentences on single mothers from developing countries who are pressed into acting as drug mules has yet to curb the international drugs trade.

The two men in this case appear to have acted stupidly rather than violently. A exceptionally heavy prison sentence inside an overcrowded prison is more likely to turn them into career criminals than a proportionate sentence.

Even Daily Mail commentators have acknowledged that the original sentences in these cases were excessive and made clear that they expected them to be reduced on appeal. But I guess for Judge and his colleagues they no doubt are just a bunch of weak-kneed liberals.

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Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure

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It remains unclear whether the brain differences are a cause or effect of being well connected on Facebook. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

The brains of people with large numbers of Facebook friends are different from those of people with fewer online connections, say neuroscientists.

The researchers at University College London found that users with the greatest number of friends on the social networking site had more grey matter in brain regions linked to social skills. The finding suggests that either social networking changes these brain regions, or that people born with these kinds of brains behave differently on websites like Facebook.

In August, Baroness Susan Greenfield, former director of the Royal Institution, made the controversial suggestion that greater use of digital technology might be responsible for increases in the number of people diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders. The researchers said their work did not directly answer such questions but helped show how future studies could be designed to do so.

"Social networks are ubiquitous in human society," said study leader Prof Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, whose study was published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"A key question for debate in contemporary societies with online social networks is do people use them in the same way or are they enabling a completely different type of communication and interaction that was never before possible?" said Rees. "People get worried about whether that is in some way affecting or changing our brains or the ways we interact with the world."

He said it was impossible to tell whether the findings meant some people's brains are hard-wired for social networking or whether having a large number of friends on Facebook changes brain structure. "What we're attempting to do is get an empirical handle using the types of data we can generate to try and start that process rolling."

Prof Rees added that future brain scan studies looking at changes to brain structures over time might help unravel whether the brain changes were a cause or effect of having more online social links.

His team carried out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans on 165 volunteers who also answered questions about how many Facebook and "real-world" friends they had. They identified three brain regions in which grey matter density was greatest in those with the most Facebook friends, but was not linked to the number of real-world friends they had: the superior temporal sulcus and the middle temporal gyrus, which have previously been associated with the ability to perceive social cues from facial expressions, and the entorhinal cortex, which is linked to memory for things like faces and names.

The density of grey matter in another brain region, the amygdala, correlated with numbers of both real-world and Facebook acquaintances.

Comparing different primate species, researchers have previously demonstrated a correlation between the volume of the neocortex, the part of the brain largely responsible for higher functions like language and thought, and social group size.

Anthropologist Prof Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford, has proposed that the number of people with whom humans can maintain stable relationships is limited by the size of our neocortex to an average of around 150. The concept later became known as "Dunbar's number".

He recently led research showing correlations between the size of real-world social groups and the density of grey matter in similar brain regions to those identified in the new study.

"It has been demonstrated that across primate species there is a relationship between neocortex volume generally and frontal neocortex volume in particular and social group size," said Prof Dunbar. "This work and our study are some of the first attempts to show this holds within species as well as between species.

"The interesting question left unanswered is whether this is set in stone and those bits of your brain are hard-wired and determined by your genes, or whether if you bring people up in the right kind of social environment, those bits of the brain grow and therefore the number of people they can maintain as friends in adulthood increases."

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