Salt had a big night yesterday when two of the books we produced in 2011 were honoured at the National Book Awards ceremony in Kuala Lumpur.

Forever Green: A Sustainable Future with Deramakot – on the Sabah Forestry Department’s groundbreaking work establishing the Deramakot forest reserve – bagged the Best Luxury Book Award in the Nature Heritage Category. The Department sent representatives from its office in Sandakan to accept the award, and was generous enough to invite Salters to the event to participate in the celebrations.

Salt sent a two-person team to Sandakan to cover the groundwork for the book, including interviews with Department officials and photography within the Deramakot reserve. At one point Salt’s photographer for the project, Ham A. Bakar, and writer Jaswinder Kaur Kler found themselves running at top speed down a hill as they fled a swarm of bees but both, fortunately, made a good escape. Back in KL, the book was put together by designer Jimmy Chin, while our senior account manager Chin Wai Leng ushered it through the printing process.

Another book that Salt had the honour of being involved in, A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, also won for being Malaysia’s bestselling book for 2011. Salt’s own Rose Ismail, Fatimah Abu Bakar, Sharon Nelson and Shareem Amry assisted Tun Mahathir in the research and editing process, which took several years to complete. Tun M, looking as dapper as ever, was on hand to personally accept the award.

It was a stellar way to kick off the year of the dragon…look out for us next year!

More good news is that the book will soon be available for sale in Singapore at Select bookstores. We will keep you updated on this, so keep an eye on this blog, our Facebook page, and Twitter account for more information!

From blog.bufferapp.com

A week ago the BBC Magazine published an article exploring some predictions made by American civil engineer John Watkins in 1900. Most of Watkins’s predictions were astoundingly accurate (notably digital colour photography, mobile phones, television, and free university education), while a few others were perhaps a little ambitious (phasing out C, X, and Q from the English language, for example. And no more mosquitoes or flies).

Inspired by this, BBC Magazine asked its readers for their predictions of the future, which resulted in a list of 20 that are most likely to happen by 2112. By and large, the predictions centered on the integration of man and machine, significant political advancements, and major changes in the environment. A few of them include: the ability to communicate through thought transmission, Antarctica being “open for business”, a singular world currency, and ‘space elevators’ for space travel.

In the spirit of futurism, we’d like to hear your predictions for mankind over the next 100 years. Will biology and technology really combine? Will the environment be badly affected by climate change? Will nuclear power eventually take off in Malaysia? Tell us what you see in our future.

Personally, I’m hoping for flying cars – KL traffic will then become a pleasantly distant memory.

From socialnetworkinglibrarian.com

There is much more to the internet than Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter, but do we really know what else is out there, and how it can help us?

Enter the A to Z guide to social media marketing buzzwords, featuring 120 terms you must know. The list includes the basics of social media like ‘avatar’, ‘blog’, ‘comment’, and ‘forums’, but it also explores the meanings and purposes of other techniques and websites that we don’t typically use, such as:

AddThis – AddThis is a social bookmarking service that provides a code users can put on their websites so that when people visit that site, they have the option to share via Facebook, Twitter, etc. Its analytics service can show you which pages are trending, where people are interacting with your brand, and what they’re saying about your content on Twitter.

Digg – Digg is a social news website that allows members to submit and vote for articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of the site and subsequently are seen by the largest portion of the site’s membership, as well as other visitors.

Eventbrite – Eventbrite is a provider of online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects a fee per ticket.

Joomla- Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that enables users to build websites and online applications.

Klout – Klout is a measure of social influence. The service allows users to connect various social accounts such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc., and then provides every user with his or her Klout score. The score is out of 100–the higher the score, the more influence you have on the social world.

Have a look at the original article for more terms to learn!

From unicef.org/malaysia

To kick off the new year, UNICEF is drawing attention to the plight of children with no access to education. Their ongoing collaboration with a number of local and international partners aim to achieve the Education for All goals, which upholds the rights of all children to an education, and thus improve their lives beyond the classroom. Currently, there are 93 million children across the world who have no access to education.

Expanding from the success of the Schools for Africa initiative, UNICEF has created Schools for Asia that operates in Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Timor-Leste and Vietnam, again with the focus on under priviledged children who (for varying reasons) are unable to get an education.

Closer to home, UNICEF recently worked in partnership with the Malaysian Government to bring education to the undocumented children in Kampung Numbak, Sabah. It is estimated that there are about 44,000 undocumented children in Malaysia who can’t go to school.

For more information on how to get involved with UNICEF in their mission to send these children to school, click here.

One such illustration, aptly titled ‘Dencity‘ (below), shows population densities on a world map using circles and colours. Larger, darker circles show areas with fewer people, while smaller, brighter circles highlight crowded cities. Areas with larger populations show more circles and are therefore more detailed, while sparsely populated areas are more vaguely defined.

From fathom.info/dencity

China and India are most obviously the the two brightest countries on the map, with most of South East Asia also appearing in yellow. While countries like Australia, Canada, Russia, and Greenland are almost shapeless because of their mostly harsh and barren terrains.

We’ve worked with UDA and Sime Darby to create commemorative books, and we helped Rita Sim with publishing her project Unmistakably Chinese, Genuinely Malaysian. In April we turned six, and also launched our Salt Media School online. To celebrate our birthday we also ran a movie title competition, which we hope you had as much fun participating in it as we did organising it.

We’ve had some Salters leave us – Ham and Shaz; and new ones join – Flavia and Tamm. And to top off the year we watched and celebrated as Dayang and Afzal got married.

It’s been an exciting 2011 – it’s kept us on our toes and running around, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Wishing you a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year! We hope 2012 brings you lots of adventure, good health, and lots of wonderful opportunities!

A way to produce extra electricity, reduce your air conditioning and lighting costs – all driven by the glass in your windows

DESLEY BLANCH: As the summer temperatures rise, so do the costs of air-conditioning our buildings and our cars.

But what if we could generate electricity through our buildings’ windows or from the glass in our cars?

That’s a thought that’s progressed to reality in Western Australia where the new type of glass is being developed commercially by a Perth company along with researchers from Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University.

Photovoltaic glass which simply means it gets electricity from light is intended to reduce air conditioning and lighting costs as well as produce extra electricity.

Tropiglas as it is called does this with a film as thin as a human hair sandwiched between two sheets of glass and according to its inventors it also has the ability to selectively remove the UV and infrared radiation while allowing the natural light to pass through.

VICTOR ROSENBERG : A square metre of a solar panel produces about 140 watts. We produce 50, but on a big building of 20, 30, 40 storeys, the maximum you’d get on the roof of a building is probably 50 solar panels, whereas you could get anything from 20, 30, 40,000 square metres of glass. In fact we would become like power plants and that’s what we’re hoping to become.

DESLEY BLANCH: Victor Rosenberg is the founder of Tropiglas Technologies while Professor Kamal Alameh and his team at the Electron Science Research Institute are researching, developing and testing the glass. To convert light to electricity, Tropiglas harvests energy in the clear glass panel using nano-engineered coatings, micro-particles and specifically engineered opticals.

PROFESSOR KAMAL ALAMEH : The first one is a spectrally-selective nano-engineered coatings, which pass the visible light through but lock the UV and infrared radiations within glass panels.

Second, we use micro-particles that minimally interact with the visible light but convert UV radiation to lower wave lengths and scatter at the same time the infrared light for better routing towards the edge of the glass panels.

The third structure is an infrared specific micro-engineered optical structure that passes the visible light through and deflects the infrared radiation and route them through multiple reflections between the glass surfaces to the edges for collection by photovoltaic cells.

At the moment we generating 50 watts per square metre from the glass, but remember that this is a world record because we’re only capturing the infrared and UV light, not actually touching the visible light.

Now we believe that we can attain within a couple of years around 100 watt per square metre and this is a very good efficiency if we only considering the infrared light which is about 20 to 22 per cent conversion efficiency.

DESLEY BLANCH : What are the best efficiencies science can get from photovoltaics? For example, photovoltaic solar panels can only reach an efficiency of between 15 and 20 per cent I think and it is extremely unlikely that their efficiencies will reach anything like 50 per cent.

PROFESSOR KAMAL ALAMEH : Depending on the materials used to form the solar cells, for example single PN junction crystalline silicon solar cells they have at the moment an efficiency of between 16 to 20 per cent but theoretically they can attain a maximum efficiency of 38 per cent.

Now as multi-junction solar cells based on Gallium Arsenide materials and other materials — they are being developed commercially now worldwide — and these can obtain at the moment a conversion efficiency of around 40 to 45 per cent.

Now theoretically also if you use multiple junction solar cells we can attain a conversion efficiency of 86 per cent. This is only a theoretical limit and then there are a lot of Research and Development activities that are being carried out to attain or to reach this limit.

Now our Tropiglas products that we are developing at the moment, if we have these efficiencies available we would be able to generate up to 400 watts per square metre when these solar cells become available.

DESLEY BLANCH : Vic Rosenberg predicts a market for Tropiglas in the automobile industry where they use just under a billion square metres of glass and vast amounts of fuel to power air conditioning.

VICTOR ROSENBERG : The volume of fuel for example in America is 27 billion litres of fuel that’s used just to cool the cabins of motor cars, which is 10 per cent of the oil it’s enormous. In the new hybrid electric vehicles, this will actually be more than 100 per cent, so we will definitely be adding value to it.

DESLEY BLANCH : He predicts by using energy efficient glass the need for air conditioning is vastly reduced.

VICTOR ROSENBERG : Our technology works even if it’s a cloudy day because there’s infrared radiation in no matter what the weather is. But on just an ordinary cloudy day, I believe that you would only need your fan to work and you wouldn’t need your air conditioner to work.

DESLEY BLANCH : But the biggest industry of all is building construction, where approximately four billion square metres of glass is used. Retrofitting of energy efficient glass windows in buildings older than 20 years is steadily being introduced in the Western world. And it was only two weeks ago the technology was introduced to venture capitalists and industry investors.

VICTOR ROSENBERG : I’ve received quite a bit of interest from two American companies, one large French producer. I’ve even received interest from some Australian companies in renewable energy. So the interest is starting to pick up and we will then start to be looking for quite a fair amount of investment to finish off the project by the end of next year.

Around about next September, we hope to have a pilot plant running and hopefully before the end of next year we should have licences in place to distribute or use our technology globally.

DESLEY BLANCH : So for Victor Rosenberg and the creators of Tropiglas, the summer sun can’t get hot enough fast enough.

Not with chemo or radio-therapies but by using the body’s own immune bodyguards

DESLEY BLANCH: Imagine fighting cancer with our own antibodies — with those ones that work naturally to keep cancer at bay in our bodies — by maxing up their concentrations and sending them back in to attack those cancerous tumours. It’s some of the most exciting cancer-fighting science in existence and an emerging biotech company in Melbourne Australia is doing just that.

The company Patrys is now moving its technology from theory to practice. Overseeing it all is the company’s CEO and Managing Director Dr Marie Roskrow.

The technology is an alternative to developing another new toxic compound to fight cancer. For years now cancer has been treated with highly toxic drugs with major side effects and with limited improvements made to them over the time. With the Patrys method they are exploring new treatment paradigms.

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Patrys is a little bit different in their approach in the fact that we’re making use of something as you mentioned at the beginning that the body naturally produces. We’ve taken advantage of the fact that the human body produces proteins which are called antibodies that naturally fight cancer in our bodies.

And what we’ve been able to do is actually to isolate those antibodies or those proteins from the human body, then to basically produce those antibodies in large amounts in a cell factory with the anticipation that we’ll infuse patients with cancer with these type of antibodies. So they are completely natural, they haven’t been synthesized unnaturally, and it’s just making use of something that we know the body has made very efficiently.

DESLEY BLANCH: And this process is quite different from many other cancer treatments in development. So is this the main reason that yours is different?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Yes that is the main reason, and most other treatments, in fact all other treatments in development or on the market have been made with a different approach. As far as we can ascertain we’re the only company in the world that’s using or making use of these natural human antibodies.

DESLEY BLANCH: So what are the advantages of this difference?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Because the body’s producing them themselves and the way that we’ve actually screened and isolated these antibodies, we’ve only picked out those antibodies that bind and kill cancer with very high efficiency. But the difference is that none of them bind normal tissue.

So with our screening process, which is part of our core technology, any antibodies that were found for example to bind cancer but also bind normal tissue, we have not taken those forward in development because obviously they would also give side effects.

So the ones that we’ve chosen to develop and the ones we’re moving into clinical trial, are basically those that bind and kill cancer efficiently but do not bind to normal tissue. And therefore we anticipate that we will not be seeing significant side effects with our drugs.

DESLEY BLANCH: Two of the very important aspects of all of this technology is doing exactly what you’ve just said, identifying the best antibodies for fighting cancer, then you’ve got to produce them in large enough amounts to precisely target cancer tissues with minimum damage on the side. How did you manage to get it up to that speed, ‘maxing’ them up as I call it?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Well this has been actually a very long and a very difficult process, and it’s taken Patrys quite a number of years and we’ve spent a lot of money doing this. And it turned out actually to be a lot more difficult than I think anybody really envisaged. But we’ve overcome a lot of those hurdles now and we’re able to produce them in large amounts.

We grow these antibodies in a cell line and those cells are mass produced in something analogous to a cell factory. And once the antibody is produced by the cells, we’re able to purify it and make it suitable for human delivery.

DESLEY BLANCH: Well those 12 years were the hard yard years of research I guess, and which of course this brings you to your next step and that’s for Patrys to produce some good clinical data and prove that the technology can match this hype, so what results so far?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: We’ve actually got one product called SM6 that’s in the clinic right now here in Australia. It’s a clinical trial involving patients with a specific type of melanoma or skin cancer, and this is a phase one clinical trial which means it’s the first phase of clinical development. And really, the aim of the phase one clinical trial is it’s a safety trial. Obviously all drugs go through the same standard procedures with respect to types of clinical trial, and always the first thing that one has to show is that your drug is safe in the human body.

So at the moment we’re in this phase one clinical trial. We’ve almost finished, we anticipate that we’ll have finished the melanoma study by the end of this year or January of next year, and clearly that’s a significant step forward for a small company like ourselves.

DESLEY BLANCH: Your technology’s relevant for the treatments of stomach cancer where a lot of our listeners are listening in Asia there’s disproportionately high levels in those countries in Asia and the Pacific. And in populations worldwide who trace their ancestry back to these regions. So tell us about your clinical data on one of those antibodies of yours for that cancer treatment.

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Yes we have an antibody called SC1, and this was the first antibody that came out of our technology platform several years ago. Our technology was founded at the University of Wurzburg, which is in Germany, and this was the first antibody that was put into clinical trial in Wurzburg. So it was a clinical trial involving patients with gastric or with stomach cancer, which as you say has a very high incidence in Asia.

We’ve been following those treated patients over basically now ten years and the bottom line is that patients that we treated with a single dose of that antibody, if you compare those patients to others that did not receive our antibody, it’s been shown that the antibody confers significant survival advantage. And obviously that was an early stage trial.

From the data that we’ve generated so far, it looks as if this SC1 antibody it’s very specific for stomach cancer, and it seems to be highly efficacious and produces significant survival advantage.

Because that antibody as you say is more relevant to the Asian community and Asian countries and not so relevant here in Australia, 2012 we anticipate looking for a licensing partner to take that product from us and further develop that in probably Japan or South Korea.

DESLEY BLANCH: It’s interesting because yours is an emerging technology company, you’re developing all of this technology and you’ve got maybe a dozen unique lead products, and with some of those you’re investigating yourself as you say, and others you’re licensing out to other partners. You’ve just been successful in raising three-point-four million dollars only very currently, so what are your plans for the future?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Well we’re focussing on just a few of our products. Obviously we don’t have the manpower or the resources unfortunately to develop all of them in parallel.

We’re focussing on our lead antibody SM6 that’s the one that is in malignant melanoma at the moment. With the three-point-four million dollars that we’ve now raised, the priority really is to put that antibody, that SAM-6 into a second clinical trial. And that’s going to be in a particular type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma, which is a very aggressive blood cancer that attacks the bones, has a very poor prognosis and there’s a significant unmet medical need obviously for those patients.

So part of the money that we raise will be going towards running a clinical trial in that blood cancer.

Secondary, we will be focussing on another antibody of ours called LM1. This will be to a minor degree. That product is still in the pre-clinical development, so it’s not quite ready for the clinic yet, but we will be spending some of our new money pushing that forward to get that ready in the future for the clinic.

The stomach cancer product, we’ll be looking for an out-licensing partner next year, and then the rest of the money that we raised will obviously be used to run the company and to further the development of some of our very early stage antibodies.

DESLEY BLANCH: Well it’s a novel technology, it’s using these natural human antibodies, which is now starting to deliver on its promise with a long road ahead I guess in gaining regulatory approval. Can I ask you what your guesstimate is for commercial products?

DR MARIE ROSKROW: Well it would be a very big guesstimate, as I say we’re only in the first stages of clinical development now, but that’s all going very well.

From here we’ve got to go through extensive Phase 2 and Phase 2B-testing, and then through Phase 3. So typically antibodies that are in Phase 1 now still take several years before they get to the market.

But certainly in oncology or in cancer, if you have a product that does make it all the way through to the market, then you can be assured that you’re going to have a very significant seller on your hands. And most new oncology drugs on the market today are close to if not billion dollar sellers.

DESLEY BLANCH: Dr Marie Roskrow is CEO and Managing Director of Patrys, a company that was formed 10 to 12 years ago when assets out of Columbia University in the United States were amalgamated with the technology from the laboratories of the University of Wurzburg in Germany. The company was floated on Australia’s public stock exchange in July 2007.

From blog.games.com

It seems Alec Baldwin isn’t the only person that has a social gaming fixation – a survey from PopCap Games (the good people responsible for Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, and Feeding Frenzy) revealed that 118.5 million social gamers in the UK and US play social games at least once a week, an increase of 71% from their 2010 survey.

More impressive stats from this report show that the average age of social gamers has gone down from 43 to 39; more people (31 million to be exact) are willing to use real-world money to buy virtual currency; and that FarmVille and Bejeweled Blitz continue to be two of the most popular games, followed by Mafia Wars.

Personally, I don’t play games on social networks – the idea of an application having access to all my limited personal details on Facebook doesn’t appeal to me (because, you know, Facebook is the pinnacle of privacy). But what about other Malaysians? Do the findings in this report represent social gaming in Malaysia? Tell us what you think.