Neternity

Lessons from Geese

2012-01-11T12:09:00.001-08:00

Lessons from Geese

Fact 1

As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an “uplift” for the birds that follow. By flying in a “V” formation, the whole flock has 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

Lesson

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier, because they are traveling on the thrust of each other.

Fact 2

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

Lesson

If we have as much sense as a goose, we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

Fact 3

When the lead bird tires, it rotates back into the formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

Lesson

It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each others’ skills, capabilities, and unique arrangement of gifts, talents, or resources.

Fact 4

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

Lesson

We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, the production is much greater. The power of encouragement (to stand by one’s heart or core values and to encourage the heart and core values of others) is the quality of honking we seek.

Fact 5

When a goose gets sick, wounded, or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation to catch up with the flock.

Lesson

If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we’re strong.

Note: Lessons from Geese was transcribed from a speech given by Angeles Arien at the 1991 Organizational Development Network. It was based on the work of Milton Olson. It circulated to Outward Bound staff throughout the United States.

“The Invention of Waterloo” by Don Gillmor | The Walrus | January 2012

2012-01-08T19:31:00.001-08:00

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2012.01-cities-the-invention-of-waterloo#.TwpfN3gTQhI.mailto

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Polaroid's Dua Flash Embraces Videographers and Photographers [Photography]

2011-12-10T08:10:00.001-08:00

Polaroid’s Dua Flash Embraces Videographers and Photographers

by Andrew Liszewski, gizmodo.com
October 29th 2011 3:00 PM

Like skiers and snowboarders sharing the same powder, I envision some kind of uneasy truce between those using their DSLRs for still photography, and those using them for videography. I have no basis for the dirty looks and stink eye I imagine them giving each other, but it still warms my heart to see a company like Polaroid trying to bring those two sides together.

Given video recording is a standard feature on every new DSLR these days, their new Dua Flash makes a lot of sense. It's a fully automatic TTL shoe mount flash with bounce, zoom and a swivel head, that adds an extra LED light source on the front so you don't need to keep swapping equipment when you switch from taking photos to shooting video. It doesn't look like it has quite enough oomph to replace the dedicated lighting setups that a lot of professional videographers rely on, but it at least serves as a readily available backup without adding another piece of gear to your kit. And it's currently available in two different models for both Canon and Nikon cameras for $160 to $200. [Steve's Digicams via PetaPixel]

Original Page: http://gizmodo.com/5854534/polaroids-dua-flash-embraces-videographers-and-photographers

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The Story Of The $1.1 Million Facebook Referral And Century 21 Realty's New Social Media Era

2011-10-28T19:58:00.001-07:00

The Story Of The $1.1 Million Facebook Referral And Century 21 Realty's New Social Media Era
FAST COMPANY | OCTOBER 28, 2011
http://pulse.me/s/2CBLv

84% of Realtors are currently using social media. Century 21 is leveraging Facebook to turn those conversations into sales.A ... Read more

occupy ottawa

2011-10-18T13:52:00.001-07:00

chicago

2011-10-15T08:08:00.001-07:00

Leaving on a jet plane

2011-10-12T18:50:00.001-07:00

Article: Brutal Dishonesty « UNCRUNCHED

2011-10-02T20:22:00.001-07:00

Brutal Dishonesty « UNCRUNCHED
http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/01/brutal-dishonesty/

Oct 01 2011

Facebook: Brutal Dishonesty

“Facebook does not track users across the web,” – A Facebook spokesperson on September 25, 2011

and

“Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people.” – Facebook employee on September 25, 2011

“A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain.” – Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011

Whoops

See: HowTo: Setup secure and private Facebook browsing

ThinkGeek :: Original Sock Monkey

2011-09-29T13:58:00.001-07:00

Original Sock Monkey

thinkgeek.com | Nov 30th -0001

Judge us and I shoot wif da lazers

Original Page: https://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/3629/action/2141789/?icpg=leftnav_RandomActionShot

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Article: Terrible News: The Internet May Kill Snow Days [No]

2011-09-09T21:12:00.001-07:00

Terrible News: The Internet May Kill Snow Days [No]
http://gizmodo.com/5803222/schools-might-use-the-internet-to-kill-snow-days

Snow days! Those joyful days when school is canceled because of the snow is the only redeeming quality of growing up in shitty weather. But some schools are stripping that joy away, they’re experimenting with hosting classes online. NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Well, to be honest, I’ve never had the honor to experience a snow day. So all I can go off by is that one crappy movie and what east coasters have told me, which is plenty: having school canceled by snow is a big reason why snow exists. Come on, no school because of weather? Awesome! Running outside to build snowmens and start snowball fights? Sign me up! Who cares if you have to have school tacked on at the end, I’d take free days now and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

But the AP is reporting that there’s a movement where schools from New York to Kansas City to Ohio are pushing for virtual school days when the snow is bad. The idea is to keep students on pace with the curriculum, which I guess is fine but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of standardization in how to do this:

The first experiments with virtual snow days began a few years ago as individual teachers started logging on during poor weather to drill older students. Since then, entire schools and districts have joined in, using websites such as Skype and YouTube to keep students as young as kindergarten studying during storms.

An obvious concern is that some households don’t have access to decent enough internet to actually partake in these virtual classes. The bigger concern is that taking away snow days would be stripping away childhood memories that shape people more than virtual school ever would. Don’t ruin future generations, people! [AP]

Image Credit: Shutterstock/Aleksandar Todorovic

How to make a crafting table

2011-09-09T19:58:00.005-07:00

How to make a crafting table

by Mark Frauenfelder, boingboing.net
November 30th -0001

The multi-talented maker Nick Britsky made this cool crafting table for his multi-talented crafter girlfriend, Lish Dorset.

Original Page: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/30/how-to-make-a-crafting-table.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

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Marvel At Sony’s Microscopic OLED Electronic Viewfinder

2011-09-09T19:58:00.003-07:00

Marvel At Sony’s Microscopic OLED Electronic Viewfinder

by View Author Page, techcrunch.com
August 30th 2011

One of the marquee features of Sony’s new Alpha and NEX cameras, which by the way look excellent, is the new electronic viewfinder. I’ve never been particularly attracted to these things, preferring the mirror-based optical viewfinder on DSLRs or simply the large, bright LCDs on the back of most cameras. But Fujifilm’s X100 (despite its flaws) changed my mind about the usefulness of the EVF, and I’m ready to accept a camera that’s all EVF, all the time. And it helps that Sony’s new screen is a miracle of miniaturization.

Tech-On has obtained some information about the bite-sized OLED panel being used in the new cameras, and seeing the device itself in its tiny glory is a reminder of how advanced our imaging devices have become:

Sony’s previous EVF was 800×600 (I believe) and a traditional LCD. The new one is not only more high-resolution at 1024×768, but it’s an OLED panel instead of backlit LCD, giving it ten times the contrast of its predecessor, according to Sony. The ~2.4 million dots making up the panel are all white diodes with red, green, or blue filters; color diodes are not quite ready for prime time yet.

The display is wholly owned and manufactured by Sony Mobile Display Corp, and it confirms that Sony is deeply into the whole OLED thing. And by combining their display business with Toshiba’s and Hitachi’s, they’re looking like the company to beat for next-generation displays. Right now the world’s most famous displays are probably the iPhone 4 and iPad displays, and if the high-res iPad 3 rumors are correct, that could continue. But the charms of OLEDs are many and various, and Sony knows it. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more impressive tech like this amazing little EVF over the next year or two.

Original Page: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/marvel-at-sonys-microscopic-oled-electronic-viewfinder/

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Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones, and Use Them for Learning

2011-09-09T19:58:00.001-07:00

MediaShift . Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones, and Use Them for Learning

by Audrey Watters, pbs.org
August 29th 2011

Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones, and Use Them for Learning

Tagged: cell phones, learning, pew internet, photography, schools, smartphones, students, technology, videocamera

Last week, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that cell phones have become "near ubiquitous": 83 percent of American adults own one. Over half of all adult mobile phone owners had used their phones at least once to get information they needed right away. And more than a quarter said that they had experienced a situation in the previous month in which they had trouble doing something because they did not have their phones at hand.

The findings of this Pew research -- the reliance of adults on their cell phones -- stands in sharp contrast to the policies of many schools, where cell phones remained banned or restricted. Students likely have these same needs as adults: to get online and find information they need right away. But often students are banned from using their cell phones in schools, something that students themselves list as one of the greatest obstacles they face in using technology in the classroom.

For many schools, these are formal rules, written in school policy or in student handbooks. But as phones become more like extended appendages in everyone's lives, schools are rethinking their policies. MindShift asked teachers how or whether these rules were changing and received some interesting feedback.

SHIFTING POLICIES

Educator Nilda Vargas reported that students can use cell phones to access their online books, while teacher Shekema Silveri replied that although she requires cell phone usage in her class, the school policy against it hasn't changed. "Most teachers are still afraid of cell phones in the classroom because they know little about how to use them as a tool for learning," she wrote on MindShift's Facebook page.

High school teacher Kim Ibarra said that her school has gone from a "no cell phones in school at all -- not even in the hallways or at lunch" policy about four to five years ago, to "cell phone usage in the classroom if the teacher has asked for permission ahead of time with an explanation of what will be done and why it is necessary" about two years ago, to "cell phones can be used in the classroom if the teacher has students using them for educational purposes" last year, and back to the more prohibitive "students may use cell phones in the school only at lunch in a specified area" -- the policy for this upcoming year.

Many teachers noted that written policies don't always mirror informal ones, and that there's a groundswell of those who recognize that cell phones need not be seen solely as distractions or as ways for students to cheat. More educators are realizing that cell phones can enhance learning.

High school teacher Jamie Williams describes his school's policy regarding cell phones:

My high school's policy is cell phones should be off and out of sight. If seen, they are taken and the student is written up. Our handbook says students may use phones with teacher permission. I'm a huge tech nerd and make my students use their phones throughout my class. My biggest gripe is that most students have these great smartphones and barely use the device to a 10th of their potential.

Williams teaches art and technology classes. For his art class, he asks students to use photos they've taken on their cell phones as the basis for paintings they'll create. During tests, Williams allows his students to use both their handwritten notes and those they've saved on their phones. In his video class, most students have phones capable of shooting in high definition, and use them for projects. This year, he's hoping to make a large-scale mosaic of student life created solely from cell phone images.

Williams notes that it's difficult for students to have to go from one class where they're expected to make full use of their phones to another in which the phone has to be off and hidden. He also points to the irony that in a lot of these latter classes, students are "asked to do research on a desktop computer that absolutely has less processing power than the computer in their pocket."

And that's probably one of the most important observations: Many students already carry a powerful computing device in their pockets, while oftentimes much of the technology hardware at schools is woefully out-of-date. By allowing cell phones, schools may find they have equipped students with better devices -- that can work as calculators, cameras, videocameras, books and notebooks, for example -- at no or low cost to the school.

BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE

Cell phones are, of course, just one piece of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program, and this wiki created by Manitoba educator Darren Kuropatwa gives some tips on how to prepare for, and take advantage of, cell phones and other devices brought into the classroom from home.

But the biggest obstacle remains the attitudes of those educators and administrators who still frown on the devices and fear their usage, who confiscate them from students, and who see them as a distraction rather than a powerful tool for learning. It's clear that schools must come up with an acceptable use policy for cell phones in the classroom. But as more adults indicate that they're "lost" without their cell phones, it hardly seems acceptable that we ban students' access to the devices.

Phone photo by Kyle N. on Flickr.

Audrey Watters is an education technology writer, rabble-rouser, and folklorist. She writes for MindShift, O'Reilly Radar, Hack Education, and ReadWriteWeb.

This post originally appeared on KQED's MindShift, which explores the future of learning, covering cultural and tech trends and innovations in education. Follow MindShift on Twitter @mindshiftKQED and on Facebook.

Original Page: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/08/why-schools-should-stop-banning-cell-phones-and-use-them-for-learning241.html

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Smarter Ways to Have School Boards Update Parents

2011-09-04T18:12:00.003-07:00

Smarter Ways to Have School Boards Update Parents

eaves.ca | Aug 29th 2011

Earlier this month the Vancouver School Board (VSB) released an iPhone app that - helpfully - will use push notifications to inform parents about school holidays, parent interviews, and scheduling disruptions such as snow days. The app is okay, it's a little clunky to use, and a lot of the data - such as professional days - while helpful in an app, would be even more helpful as an iCal feed parents could subscribe to in their calendars.

That said, the VSB deserves credit for having the vision of developing an app. Positively, the VSB app team hopes to add new features, such as letting parents know about after school activities like concerts, plays and sporting events.

This is a great innovation and without a doubt, other school boards will want apps of their own. The problem is, this is very likely to lead to an enormous amount of waste and duplication. The last thing citizens want is for every school board to be spending $15-50K developing iPhone apps.

Which leads to a broader opportunity for the Minister of Education.

Were I the Education Minister, I'd have my technology team recreate the specs of the VSB app and propose an RFP for it but under an open source license and using phonegap so it would work on both iPhone and Android. In addition, I'd ensure it could offer reminders - like we do at recollect.net - so that people could get email or text messages without a smart phone at all.

I would then propose the ministry cover %60 percent of the development and yearly upkeep costs. The other 40% would be covered by the school boards interested in joining the project. Thus, assuming the app had a development cost of $40K and a yearly upkeep of $5K, if only one school board signed up it would have to pay $16K for the app (a pretty good deal) and $2K a year in upkeep. But if 5 school districts signed up, each would only pay $3.2K in development costs and $400 dollars a year in upkeep costs. Better still, the more that sign up, the cheaper it gets for each of them. I'd also propose a governance model in which those who contribute money for develop would have the right to elect a sub-group to oversee the feature roadmap.

Since the code would be open source other provinces, school districts and private schools could also use the app (although not participate in the development roadmap), and any improvements they made to the code base would be shared back to the benefit of BC school districts.

Of course by signing up to the app project school boards would be committing to ensure their schools shared up to date notifications about the relevant information - probably a best practice that they should be doing anyways. This process work is where the real work lies. However, a simple webform (included in the price) would cover much of the technical side of that problem. Better still the Ministry of Education could offer its infrastructure for hosting and managing any data the school boards wish to collect and share, further reducing costs and, equally important, ensuring the data was standardized across the participating school boards.

So why should the Ministry of Education care?

First, creating new ways to update parents about important events - like when report cards are issued so that parents know to ask for them - helps improve education outcomes. That should probably reason enough, but there are other reasons as well.

Second, it would allow the ministry, and the school boards, to collect some new data: professional day dates, average number of snow days, frequency of emergency disruptions, number of parents in a district interested in these types of notifications. Over time, this data could reveal important information about educational outcomes and be helpful.

But the real benefit would be in both cost savings and in enabling less well resourced school districts to benefit from technological innovation wealthier school districts will likely pursue if left to their own devices. Given there are 59 english school districts in BC, if even half of them spent 30K developing their own iPhone apps, then almost $1M dollars would be collectively spent on software development. By spending $24K, the ministry ensures that this $1M dollars instead gets spent on teachers, resources and schools. Equally important, less tech savvy or well equipped school districts would be able to participate and benefit.

Of course, if the City of Vancouver school district was smart, they'd open source their app, approach the Ministry of Education and offer it as the basis of such a venture. Doing that wouldn't just make them head of the class, it'd be helping everyone get smarter, faster.

Original Page: http://eaves.ca/2011/08/29/smarter-ways-to-have-school-boards-update-parents/

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Principal’s Map For Parent Involvement | Connected Principals

2011-09-04T18:12:00.001-07:00

Principal’s Map For Parent Involvement

by Chris Wejr, connectedprincipals.com
August 28th 2011

Parent involvement and engagement are areas in which I have been trying to grow as an educator. Through families at my school as well as online, our school has begun to try to be more inviting and to actually listen to the voice of our families. This post was originally posted on The Wejr Board Blog as a guest post by Sheila Steward (@sheilaspeaking). Sheila is one of my mentors on the topic of parent and family engagement in school.

Sheila’s perspectives and advice regarding parent involvement come from a variety of roles and experience in education and working with parents. She is involved in local and provincial parent networks in Ontario, and she supports newcomer families with English language learning. In the past 8 years, she has worked collaboratively with a number of principals and administrators to support parent involvement initiatives, consultations, and activities. She recently presented to principal candidates on school councils and parent involvement.

A Principal’s Map for Parent Involvement* by Sheila Stewart

I think being a principal is an amazing and key role to have in education. I also recognize the work load of principals—from managing the physical space of the school to the responsibilities they have to the school community—staff, students, and families. The responsibility of establishing parent involvement, outreach and communication strategies at the school will rest a large part on the principal as well.

Parent involvement has become a frequent topic of conversation in education lately with the many ways that it is analyzed, interpreted, and deliberated upon. The visions for and expectations of parents in both their involvement in their own child’s education and in the broader context of school and community may also vary from district to district, and from stakeholder group to stakeholder group—each may want something different in what it looks like and in its outcomes.

So…where to start as new to the principal role, or new to a school?

From the system level (Ministry/Depart. of Ed./District/School Boards) the message may be that the kind of parent involvement to foster and focus on is that which increases student learning and/or specific “achievement” outcomes. I am not sure there is a set of clear and certain strategies that can be used and measured, but not all should be at loss because of this and nor should parent involvement be dismissed. I believe that the links with parents and families remain essential to supporting students.

The culture and climate of the school will become apparent quite quickly to a new administrator. This is the context where a principal will need to navigate various avenues that are suitable to the parents and families of the school’s students. It is important for principals to find a style that is appropriate to his or her school community, whether the school is large or small, urban or rural, elementary or secondary. A principal who develops strong relationships with parents and parent groups, will have parents who are more likely to become involved in the school community, and this in turn will have a strong impact on the overall effectiveness and inclusiveness of the school. The principal will be key in modelling and setting the appropriate positive tone and connections with parents.

As long as principals are familiar with their local policies and mandates regarding parent involvement and parent advisory groups, they should be able to create a suitable and flexible plan for the school community. Parents will be diverse in the ways they want to be involved, and the best plan for parent involvement should honour this. Policies and guidelines can be helpful, but there will always be realities to consider.

Before establishing a plan, a principal might want to consider the following:

Get to know the ways parents connect to the school currently (e.g. face to face, formal/informal, electronically, social media).
Take some time before moving forward with new plans—extra time may be needed to build relationships and trust to support changes you may want to make ahead.
Build on what is working well—lead through listening.
Help all stakeholders connect to the broader picture of education, while still maintaining that each student matters and has unique needs.
Create opportunities and spaces to understand and gain clarity about what parents need, what the comfort zones of involvement are currently, and what barriers exist.

A principal might also want to determine the following:

Are parents involved in authentic, engaging ways, or are they receiving mixed messages about the nature or pathway of their involvement?
Have parents been receiving information about the positive things and extra efforts that teachers/staff have been doing to support students and the school? (creates confidence and can inspire further support from parents)
Has the school demonstrated a welcoming approach and honoured the roles and expertise of parents in their child’s life and in the community?

Communication Comes First!

Regardless of the approach or plan, it will be important to establish clear communication plans and strategies—who, when, how, how often, what—between the school/principal and parents/community, between teachers and parents, and also the parent group with each other and the school’s parents. Principals are ultimately responsible for school communications, so they need to be clear and strategic in all the various protocols that may be preferred by both teachers and parents. Steve Reifman also has a great list of suggestions on his blog, “9 reasons to communicate frequently with parents”.

It is also important that the school community is aware of how 2-way communications can occur. This may involve a number of different ways, including electronic communication and/or social media. Opportunity for 2-way communication often IS the parent engagement. All else can flow from there, in a much more proactive and realistic way which may also reduce the need for conflict resolution. On-going input and feedback from parents will also help inform a principal’s decision-making at the school.

Here is what it might look like as you proceed into the school year:

Parents who want to support from home will know that it is valued and will still have access to support and 2-way communication channels.
Parents who wish to help in the classroom and/or communicate with their child’s teacher will know when and how to do that.
Parents who are committed to and interested in the more structured and organized meetings and activities at the school will be valuable and vital for further connections and partnerships with families through shared leadership and outreach.
Parents who attend special events, read the school news and blogs will feel connected and will share the good news with others in the community.
Parents who cannot attend the school as often will know how to communicate with the school or teacher or parent group.

What is it all for?

Clear and understood channels for communication and an inclusive vision of the different way that parents will support kids should enhance the principal’s ability to facilitate partnerships and positive relationships within the school community that will ultimately support student experiences at the school. Through various communication and involvement pathways, all parent participation can be valued. As valued and trusted participants in education, it is more likely that parent involvement will benefit principal leadership, teacher support, and student learning, as well as contribute to an inclusive, vibrant school community.

I hope this framework of ideas is useful and leads to discovering more effective and practical strategies that can be shared further.

*Note: at Kent School, we have a goal of “Family Engagement” (for insight on involvement vs engagement see Larry Ferlazzo’s post here) as we realize that the support systems of many of our students extend beyond the parents. The ideas from Sheila will be applied to our goal.

Thank you to Sheila Stewart for her efforts and thoughts with this post. As always, comments and questions for Sheila and others are appreciated and encouraged. Please see the original post for more comments.

Original Page: http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/4398

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my new computer came with a car attached to it

2011-08-23T14:54:00.001-07:00

8" touch screen, wifi, 2 x usb, sd card, bluetooth

Flying Keymouse II takes to the air • reghardware

2011-08-21T12:53:00.001-07:00

Flying Keymouse II takes to the air

by Bob Dormon, reghardware.com
June 22nd 2011 1:34 PM

Tech gadgets company Brando is making moves with the Wireless Flying Keymouse II that it announced today.

This handheld device, which looks much like a designer TV remote control, features 65 keys and an integrated laser pointer. In use as a mouse, movements in the air position the cursor which are conveyed to its 2.4GHz wireless USB dongle, compatible with Window XP or higher, Mac OS X and Linux.

The wireless range is up to 15m and suggested applications are in the home theatre PC (HTPC) environments. Indeed, its keyboard includes dedicated media controls as well as a full Qwerty layout, which even glows in the dark. You can see the Keymouse II in action, but it remains to be seen if this company promo video will help it fly off the shelves. The Wireless Flying Keymouse II costs $59US and is available from Brando here. ®

See Video:

Original Page: http://www.reghardware.com/2011/06/22/wireless_flying_keymouse_2/

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MusicLites: A Symphony of Light and Sound | GeekBeat.TV

2011-08-21T12:51:00.001-07:00

MusicLites: A Symphony of Light and Sound

by Catherine Faas, geekbeat.tv
June 26th 2011

High-end audio technology innovator Artison and North America’s number one lighting company, Osram Sylvania, have come together to create MusicLites, a wireless speaker and light combination that will take your average light bulb experience from ‘meh’ to mesmerizing.

The pretty speakers fit into any existing ceiling lighting fixtures and shine a warm LED glow while filling your space with high fidelity audio. And you thought “The Clapper” was cool.

With a handful of these, you could equip your entire house with high-quality audio distribution minus the traditional (and wallet-draining) installation.

Specs breakdown:

70 mm high-fidelity loudspeaker offers full-range high performance audio
Proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver has a range between 30-90ft.
Whole house audio distribution without the expense of traditional installation
20W RMS, Class D amplifier with 95% efficiency for lifelike audio

(Via MusicLites)

Original Page: http://geekbeat.tv/musiclites-a-symphony-of-light-and-sound/

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Talking The Talk: Verbally Lets The Speech Disabled Communicate Using The i

2011-08-21T12:49:00.001-07:00

Talking The Talk: Verbally Lets The Speech Disabled Communicate Using The iPad (For Free)

by Rip Empson, techcrunch.com

Intuary, a mobile app startup, recently launched its first app, called Verbally, which is designed to bring speech to those without. Verbally is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solution built for the more than six million people in the U.S. suffering from speech disabilities — caused by Lou Gherig’s Disease, stroke, brain injury, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, autism, and more. The app allows users to tap the words they wish to communicate onto the app’s keyboard, or choose from pre-prepared words or phrases, which are then in turn transmitted into audio phrases.

The app’s founders, Anil, Gautam Godhwani, along with their cousin Ajay, lost their mother (and aunt) to Lou Gehrig’s Disease in February of this year. She had been a music teacher and singer for 40 years, but in late 2009, her voice began to fail. Seeing the tremendous impact the lack of communication had her, they began investigating solutions on the market. While there are a number of solutions currently available, the touchscreen solutions from large corporations, like Dynavox-Mayer Johnson, cost a minimum of $8K and require at least one month of waiting. Obviously, for those suffering from aggressive illnesses, that wait time is unacceptable.

While iPad apps like that made by Proloquo2Go, for example, offer full feature sets and are more reasonably priced at $190, Verbally hopes to offer a user experience that will appeal to literate adults with high cognition — as well as to those without, and thus reach a larger audience. (MyVoice also makes a nifty communication tool that the speech-disabled can use on the iPhone, which is definitely worth checking out.)

As such, the app offers a full keyboard in which to type the speech the user wishes to communicate, as well as a “Core Words Grid”, which offers over 50 essential words, designed to save users with less mobility 50 percent of the taps required to input sentences. There’s also a “Core Phrases Grid, smart text prediction, customizable keyboard layouts, and choices of various male and female voices — all designed to minimize keystrokes and maximize ease, speed, and choice.

Ajay Godhwani, Intuary’s CEO, was previously part of the Senior Management Team at Tallan, a professional services firm, where he was responsible for technology projects of clients like
Walt Disney Company and Best Buy. Gennady Borkhovich, Co-Founder and CTO, has worked at
Lockheed Martin and McGraw-Hill, and Anil and Gautam Godhwani are board members, active advisors, and investors in Intuary. The brothers, along with Peter Weck, launched Simply Hired, a venture-backed job search site.

Verbally has been downloaded 20K+ times since its iTunes launch in March. It’s a great cause, and it’s nice to see entrepreneurs innovating and trying to bring cheap, easy-to-use technology to the disabled.

Original Page: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/talking-the-talk-verbally-lets-the-speech-disabled-communicate-using-the-ipad-for-free/

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iTunes Match Not Laundering Pirated Music, It's Driving A Subscription Futu

2011-08-19T03:29:00.001-07:00

iTunes Match Not Laundering Pirated Music, It's Driving A Subscription Future

by E.B. Boy, fastcompany.com

One of the interesting things about the new iTunes in the Cloud service Apple announced Monday is that it doesn't only include the music that you buy through iTunes. Through an additional service, called iTunes Match, Apple will also sync any music you own (that has a match among the 18 million songs in the iTunes store) to all of your devices.

The knee-jerk reaction from some was to say Apple had effectively created a way for users to pirate songs from wherever and have Apple launder their files, exchanging them for for clean ones. "This puts together a model that allows people to make money off of pirated music," Jeff Price, founder and CEO of digital music hub TuneCore told Mashable.

The service will cost $24.99 a year, and Apple is reportedly doing deals with labels and publishers to sanction this service. What the knee-jerk reaction neglects to consider is that Apple will reportedly pay labels royalty-style installments every time one of their tracks gets moved through the iTunes Match system. And since it appears that Apple is not going to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized tunes, the music industry might finally earn some money on illegally downloaded tunes that were previously pure loss.

But industry executives Fast Company spoke with, who asked not to be named due to the amount of power Apple now wields in their business (and Apple is still cutting deals with some labels), said the amount that gets recouped will be negligible, compared to the size of the losses. More important to them were the insights they'd be getting into which songs consumers liked--information they'd lost access to in the piracy world.

More important still, the executives said, is that iTunes Match will help get people back in the habit of paying for music. Even though, technically, of course, iTunes Match isn't charging consumers for the music per se, just for the syncing. Still, the executives said, after a decade of treating music like it should be free, consumers will now start (or restart, really) to associate costs with the product.

This, the execs said, will be useful for where we're all headed: subscription services. In five or ten years, they said, based on trends they're seeing today, consumers won't be buying individual tracks and albums. Rather, most will simply subscribe to services like Rhapsody and Spotify and get their music that way.

iTunes Match, then, plays a valuable role for the industry. Not because it allows them to recoup much in the way of losses from piracy. But because it gets people back in the habit of paying for music and primes them for the future awaiting us all.

It's no wonder, then, that Rhapsody president Jon Irwin was cool-headed when he spoke to Fast Company following Apple's announcements, which constitute a giant moving into his company's space. "Anytime you've got a company like Apple--they're a great company and they make great products--the awareness it's going to bring to cloud music ... I think that's something we can leverage."

[Image: Flickr user Adam Melancon]

Original Page: http://www.fastcompany.com/1758202/music-executives-itunes-match-is-an-important-stepping-stone-toward-our-collective-subscript

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Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing | ZDNet

2011-08-19T03:27:00.003-07:00

Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing

by Paula Rooney, zdnet.com
May 4th 2011 1:16 AM

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US Edition Home / News & Blogs / Linux and Open Source

Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing

Keep the cloud open — or kill it, Red Hat’s chief exec advised during his opening keynote at the company’s annual summit Tuesday.
“Without open source, clouds wouldn’t exist. Full stop,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat President and CEO, noting that three core principles — collaboration, openness and choice — enabled users such as Google and Amazon [...]

Red Hat Inc., Computing, Cloud, Open Source, Strategy, Management, Paula Rooney

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Keep the cloud open — or kill it, Red Hat’s chief exec advised during his opening keynote at the company’s annual summit Tuesday.

“Without open source, clouds wouldn’t exist. Full stop,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat President and CEO, noting that three core principles — collaboration, openness and choice — enabled users such as Google and Amazon to build the first cloud infrastructure, and adherence to those principles will determine the cloud’s fate.

“The protests in the Middle East succeeded because they did everything out in the open … those same principles will be key success factors in the next generation IT architecture,” Whitehurst added.

The cloud is the first user-driven innovation of its kind, and was enabled by open source software, he said. Most technology innovations are vendor or consortium-driven. said.

“End users came up with it …. and now every vendor is trying to say this is my vision around the cloud,” he noted. “That’s the antithesis of what the cloud is and what it should be. It’s not about one stack but a set of principles that allowed this collective innovation to happen.

He took a swipe at Amazon for developing its own set of hooks. “Clouds have started to develop their own set of APIs. If you’re developing an application on Amazon API, you can’t move that application … you’re stuck there. If clouds are developed that way, it’s kind of like going back to the 80s.”

“Cloud apps need to be written so they can go across multiple clouds,” he said. “As CIOs develop the next generation IT technology architecture, should they demand anything less than that? Collaboration, not coercison. Transparency, not hype. Choice, not lock-in.”

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Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades.

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there is a constant fight...
Unfortunately we live in a monetary economy and not a resource based economy, so there will always be organisations and entities that attempt to hijack the user base. FOSS has come a long way and proves the viability of a merit based open structure of volunteers (even corporation volunteer resources) as opposed to monetary rewards based system. However, the insidious desire to dominate and control will be there as ling as there is money. It is not clear who will win any given battle, but it is ultimately clear who will win the war. vonschutter 05/04/2011 12:32 AM
Why pay more for closed
Why restrict your options to proprietary options? Bizarre, the cost savings from the cloud require we play hardware options against each other, the ability to move requires open systems.
Happily we've been recommending Linux, java EE. Powerful, scaleable and open. Why pay for less?
Richard Flude 05/04/2011 02:29 AM
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
@Richard Flude,
As usual there is a trade-off between open standards and flexibility and proprietary technology and tighter integration with related software stacks. My opinion is the cost becomes a wash. Disparate technologies that are developed by different parties always have to be tweaked and rarely work out of the box. If they are developed by third parties, support is unavailable or comes at a premium ( part of the open source business model). The upside is you can avoid alot of lock-in. Keep in mind open source and proprietary is not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can have open source technologies that have some degree of lock-in because the implementation doesn't adhere to any standard...especially if there aren't any.
Most proprietary solutions work out of the box. Open source advocates, engineers etc...often like to point out that MS infrastructure workers are monkeys because of the ease of implementation. That being said, it's a backhanded complement to MS for creating a system that is easy to admin. However, lock-in is the price you pay for that. Make your choice.

I am not a Microsoft shill, and I like Linux. I understand the value in having open standards for the sake of interoperability. I do however balk at the notion that all software should be free. It devalues the hard work of the developers that create the software. If you are good at something you should be paid for it.
bmonsterman (Edited: 05/04/2011 07:33 AM)
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
test deep@... 05/04/2011 01:58 AM
More stories from Paula Rooney. Please!
nt Dietrich T. Schmitz ~~ Your Linux Advocate 05/04/2011 04:05 AM
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
WX forecast: cloudy with rain, possibility of thunderstorms.
The only parallel I can draw between 80's computing and cloud computing is both leave you with a dumb terminal on your desk and some central computer somewhere that will go up and down based on the whims of the sys admins.
7mgte 05/04/2011 05:53 AM
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
@7mgte I believe the comparison was pointing out that proprietary hooks -- like Amazon's -- are little different from proprietary desktop solutions, or proprietary client-server apps that require specific terminals to work with specific server-based systems.
But I'm hardly the sharpest tool in the shed, so don't take my word for it ... unless I just happen to be right.
jscott69 05/04/2011 07:14 AM
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
@7mgte There is another 90s parallel to consider but only the more ancient of us will make the connection. Remember compiling COM Objects on Wintel platforms?
You created Objects with publicly facing interfaces. You used binary compatibility to ensure you never broke the interface, and ensured backward compatibility. You wrote your consumer code and tightly coupled to the publicly facing interface.

Fast-forward to SOA, WOA, and web interfaces. You see similar problems.
dave_helmut 05/04/2011 10:17 AM
Kill the cloud
The cloud was a bad idea in the first place. It was only inevitable that it would become proprietary, regardless of its origin. I believe it all boils down to trust. A "free" cloud or a proprietary cloud, it makes no difference. There is still a cost, and sometimes huge, when the cloud goes down, and the clouds are going down faster and more severely as time goes by. The weatherman is right... there are thunderstorms coming, and it doesn't look good for the clouds. But going back to the 80's is not the only alternative. The 90's look like a better choice for me. bionicbub (Edited: 05/04/2011 09:17 AM)
"Cloud" versus "Grid"
"The cloud is the first user-driven innovation of its kind"
Oh, c'mon! About 3-4 years ago they were talking about the same thing but calling it "the Grid" -- only it didn't catch on then. Sounds like revisionist history to me.
Rick_R 05/04/2011 09:23 AM
What a load or crap
Without open source, clouds wouldnt exist. Full stop
Maybe we can claim that without closed source, computers wouldn't exist. Full Stop. (hence no need for a cloud!)

So who's this guy trying to fool?
Bill Pharaoh (Edited: 05/04/2011 12:30 PM)
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
If I get to choose... I want to go back to 80s style computing. hiraghm@... 05/04/2011 01:12 PM
Agree in principle
I'd vote for a set of open standards, along the lines of Internet protocols or USB connectors, to keep things interoperable. Everything great has been achieved by interoperability. Further the American Government should recognise that the best way to prevent future anti-competitive behaviour is not to wait until after the event and penalise the miscreants ... but to insist on interoperable standards as a preemptive strike against unlawful actions (likely by the usual suspects). Instead of passing laws in secret to prevent consumers 'stealing' copyright, why not try to keep global corporations on the straight and narrow?
And be transparent, of course.

I'd also vote for a new architecture, more along the lines of Google's network exploitation of commodity items, not the traditional datacentre chock full of vastly expensive proprietary iron running the same old OS's.

Choice, definitely. Otherwise companies like Apple will cut standards like Flash, restrict one's choice of material and charge a 30% tax on what remains.

Back to the 80's? In the 70's IBM had its TSO operating system where graphics terminals connected and used their share of the mainframe's computing power. As Paul Murphy said, the 'last 10 years has been a journey to nowhere' with the x86 architecture (nowhere in computing terms, not consumer usage).

However a good cloud architecture is complex (ask Amazon and LastPass!), but is it not like the design of the Internet ... a suitable project for the American Universities combined? Leaving it in the hands of the current major corporations and US Government seems most unlikely to lead to an efficient and cost-effective result for consumers and businesses.

Leaving it to the media, and regretably ZDNET too, is also unlikely to bring much joy. Like politicians - too many biased views and entrenched interests (despite disclosures). I am sick of reading the PC v MAC flamebait, 'should we go private or public cloud', 'is Apple/Google/ORACLE evil?'. When I look at what Ed Bott and Paul Thurrott wrote about Windows VAIL, and how they would restrict their home server to a single hard disk ... I am outraged. Do they not remember that RAID was invented in 1988/9? How can they do anything but pour scorn and derision on M$ for their incompetence? Not the failings of their engineers, who are perfectly capable of designing a new file system, but a management culture which has painted itself into a corner by one profit-driven technology restriction after another, until it is impossible to move forward within their own contraints!!

We do indeed need to mobilise, otherwise Information Technology will be the first industrial revolution where the existing incumbents did not disappear or were not marginalised, in favour of a more efficient order.

Perhaps Paula would like to start work on her colleagues?
johnfenjackson@... (Edited: 05/06/2011 03:08 AM)
RE: Red Hat CEO: Keep cloud open or go back to 80s-style computing
Open Source is for losers who do not care about being able to get anything done. They spend all day attempting to fix errors in their favorite applications. They have to write drivers for any new hardware or just use older out-of-date hardware. Open Source allows no innovation and promotes no learning. bigjim01@... 06/13/2011 04:05 AM

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ThinkGeek :: U-Socket USB Wallplug

2011-08-19T03:27:00.001-07:00

U-Socket USB Wallplug

thinkgeek.com | Nov 30th -0001

Everything's USB Powered Anyway, right?

Look around you. Chances are pretty good there are at least half a dozen things within arm's reach of you that are plugged into a power outlet. Your laptop, your tablet computer, your phone... even that awesome pair of wireless headphones need to be charged. Everything gets plugged in, though some of the smaller devices have charging interfaces that double for data ports.

Your cellphone, for instance, probably recharges over USB. The manufacturer was kind enough to give you a wall-outlet dongle that converts the 110 volts coming out of your wall outlet into 5 volts of USB power. That's fine, but you'll either lose an outlet with that adapter, or you'll misplace the dongle, and you'll have to plug into your computer, and that's not always convenient.

So some enterprising engineers at Fastmac realized how easy it would be to just build the transformers right into the wall outlets! Put 2 USB ports in the wall plate next to the 110 volt sockets, and you've doubled the versatility of your power line. We just happened to get a hold of a handful of these outlets, and brought them to you because, well, we think they're pretty awesome.

Note that you need to use your considerable brains to install these outlets. Please learn everything you can about replacing wall outlets before even thinking about performing this kind of electrical work. Electricity is dangerous, and you could electrocute yourself, set the house on fire, or ruin your sensitive electronics if you do something wrong. This is srs bznz, so don't cut corners. Tell you what, just do yourself a favor and watch this video. It'll only take a minute. We'll wait.

Once you've followed the instructions, you should be able to enjoy some USB power coming right out of your wall. It's the future, man.

Features

Input voltage: AC 100 to 125V 50/60Hz
Output voltage: USB: DC 5.0V 2100mA (2.1 amps)
Operation temperature: 0 to 35 Degrees Celsius (32 to 95 Degrees Fahrenheit)
Guaranteed to charge all mobile phones that accept USB power, including iPhone 4!

Original Page: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/e81a/#tabs

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Security flaw found in feds' digital radios | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

2011-08-19T03:24:00.001-07:00

Security flaw found in feds' digital radios

by Declan McCullagh, news.cnet.com
August 17th 2011 8:23 AM

Expensive high-tech digital radios used by the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security are designed so poorly that they can be jammed by a $30 children's toy, CNET has learned.

A GirlTech IMME, Mattel's pink instant-messaging device with a miniature keyboard that's marketed to pre-teen girls, can be used to disrupt sensitive radio communications used by every major federal law enforcement agency, a team of security researchers from the University of Pennsylvania is planning to announce tomorrow.

Converting the GirlTech gadget into a jammer may be beyond the ability of a street criminal for now, but that won't last, says associate professor Matt Blaze, who co-authored the paper that will be presented tomorrow at the Usenix Security symposium in San Francisco. CNET obtained a copy of the paper, which will be made publicly available in the afternoon.

"It's going to be someone somewhere creating the Project 25 jamming kit and it'll be something that you download from the Net," Blaze said. "We're not there right now, but we're pretty close."

Project 25, sometimes abbreviated as P25, is the name of the wireless standard used in the radios, which have been widely adopted across the federal government and many state and local police agencies over the last decade. The plan was to boost interoperability, so different agencies would be able to talk to one another, while providing secure encrypted communications.

The radios aren't cheap. A handheld Midland P25 Digital sells for $3,295, and scanners are closer to $450.

But federal agents frequently don't turn encryption on, the researchers found. (Their paper is titled "A Security Analysis of the APCO Project 25 Two-Way Radio System," and the other authors are Sandy Clark, Travis Goodspeed, Perry Metzger, Zachary Wasserman, and Kevin Xu.)

Here's an excerpt:

The traffic we monitored routinely disclosed some of the most sensitive law enforcement information that the government holds, including: Names and locations of criminal investigative targets, including those involved in organized crime... Information relayed by Title III wiretap plants...Plans for forthcoming arrests, raids and other confidential operations...
On some days, particularly weekends and holidays, we would capture less than one minute, while on others, we captured several hours. We monitored sensitive transmissions about operations by agents in every Federal law enforcement agency in the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Most traffic was apparently related to criminal law enforcement, but some of the traffic was clearly related to other sensitive operations, including counter- terrorism investigations and executive protection of high ranking officials...

To intercept the Project 25 radio communications, the researchers used a high-quality receiver that cost about $1,000 and can be purchased off-the-shelf. But, Blaze said, it's possible to do it on the cheap: "You can do everything you need with equipment you can buy at Radio Shack... hobbyist-grade equipment."

Motorola XTS5000 handheld, which uses the Project 25 standard

Blaze said he has contacted the Justice Department and the Defense Department, which also uses Project 25 digital radios. "They are now aware of the problem and are trying to mitigate against it," he said.

Representatives of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), which has championed the Project 25 standard, did not respond to a request for comment this afternoon. Neither did the Telecommunications Industry Association, which maintains the standard.

The University of Pennsylvania researchers did not discover any vulnerabilities in the actual encryption algorithms used in the radios. They also chose not to disclose which agencies were the worst offenders, what cities the monitoring took place in, or what frequencies they found each agency used.

A third vulnerability they found was that each radio contains a unique identifier, akin to a phone number, that is broadcast in unencrypted form. So is the unique ID of the destination radio. That allows an eavesdropper to perform what's known as traffic analysis, meaning tracking who's talking to whom.

The reason jamming is relatively easy is that the Project 25 doesn't use spread spectrum, which puts the would-be jammer at a disadvantage. By contrast, P25 relies on metadata that must be transmitted perfectly for the receiver to make sense of the rest of the communication. A pulse lasting just 1/100th of a second, it turns out, is enough to disrupt the transmission of the metadata.

This isn't the first time that University of Pennsylvania researchers have taken a critical look at Project 25. Many of the same authors published a security analysis last November, which concluded that it's "strikingly vulnerable to a range of attacks."

Original Page: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20090434-281/security-flaw-found-in-feds-digital-radios/?tag=TOCcarouselMain.0

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Cow on the lam for 12 weeks becomes tabloid star

2011-08-19T03:22:00.001-07:00

Cow on the lam for 12 weeks becomes tabloid star

by Andy Eckardt, today.msnbc.msn.com
August 15th 2011

Holy cow! It must be a slow news month in Germany if a runaway animal makes the front page of a top selling German newspaper.

Bovine Yvonne has been keeping animal lovers in Bavaria in a tizzy after she broke through an electric fence on May 24 and has been hiding in a nearby forest ever since.

On Saturday, German tabloid BILD splashed the headline "Save Cow Yvonne" on its cover, set up a Facebook page and posted a $14,000 reward for anyone who can help lead to the cow's capture. Let the cow hunt begin!

Story: Maltese dog missing for year after car crash is headed home

But it may take more than a social media campaign to capture Yvonne. She supposedly has help: Yvonne has been spotted with a herd of deer in the thick southern German woodlands.

"Day and night, we have up to seven people on the search for the cow," said Michael Aufhauser, the founder of Gut Aiderbichl, an animal sanctuary and rescue facility that has taken the lead in the rescue efforts and will board the cow if it's found. "We are even using an infrared camera, two four-wheel drive Jeeps and a quad bike, but no luck so far."

All hands on deck
After local authorities initially issued a shoot-to-kill order, fearing that Yvonne would be a security risk and endanger drivers on a busy nearby road, Aufhauser and his team decided to buy "the cow in absentia" from the local farmer and deployed search dogs, experienced riders on horses and scores of volunteers for the hunt.

"The last time we spotted Yvonne was a week ago at 1 in the morning, but it was too dark to place a tranquilizer dart," Aufhauser said.

Story: Spin doctoring: Vets replace tortoise’s leg with wheel

There is even a Swiss "animal communicator" involved, an augur, who says she has been in contact with Yvonne via a subject from her home in Switzerland.

But, for the rescue team, the most promising approach is the hope for an awakening of family instincts.

"At first, we brought in Waltraud, Yvonne's sister, and placed her at the edge of the woods," Aufhauser said. "Then I got lucky and found her own calf, Friesi, on a farm in Austria, a now full-size ox who had been believed to be dead."

And, this week, Yvonne's supporters are hoping to lure the cow from her forest hideout with the sex appeal of a handsome bull called Ernst. "He is the George Clooney among the former breeding bulls," Aufhauser said.

Several times, Yvonne has been spotted peeking through the trees at her family members under the cover of darkness, but she always managed to evade police, hunters and animal welfare activists.

Summer hole
Germany has had its share of crazy animal tales. Germany's so called "summer hole" stories have focused on "Caiman Sammy," a croc who was spotted in a popular quarry pond causing fear among sunbathers, and "Bruno the Bear," who scared hikers, killed sheep and eventually got shot in the summer of 2006.

This rainy German August started with flashy reports about a poisonous spider that supposedly crawled out of a banana box in a supermarket. The grocery store was shut down for weeks and the spider was never found. But the multi-legged arthropod was probably not cute enough to make front-page headlines.

Video: Baby gorilla saved from poachers

In times of gruesome economic news and reports of violent conflicts in the Middle East, Yvonne's funny escape plot truly has "story of the month" potential.

Sadly, time might be running out for Yvonne. Local authorities have suspended the shoot-to-kill order for only two weeks and banners have been spotted near the woods that read "Kill The Cow."

Fans and supporters across Germany still hope for a happy outcome so that Yvonne can end up at her designated Gut Aiderbichl retirement home instead of reaching the same cruel fate as "Bruno the Bear."

Even so, Bruno became a legend: his body was eventually stuffed and can now be viewed at a Munich museum.

Original Page: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44144391/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/

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“Caoon” DSLR Is Actually An MP3 Player

2011-07-18T20:39:00.001-07:00

“Caoon” DSLR Is Actually An MP3 Player

by Devin Coldewey, crunchgear.com
April 11th 2011

Oh, knockoff devices. You never cease to entertain me. This faux Canon DSLR is actually a little MP3 player; the speaker is in the lens, and it takes USB, SD card, MMC, or 3.5mm in. Yeah, it’s junk, and at $67 it’s pretty expensive junk, but you have to admire the craftsmanship.

Original Page: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/11/caoon-dslr-is-actually-an-mp3-player/

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The History of Email [INFOGRAPHIC]

2011-07-18T20:38:00.001-07:00

The History of Email [INFOGRAPHIC]

by Jolie O'Dell, feeds.mashable.com
June 18th 2011

Email, you’ve come a long way, baby.

In its 40-year tenure as a form of communication, email has run its course from the domain of über nerdy computer scientists to one of the most common ways to keep in touch, both personally and professionally.

Although email as a mode of communication was around for ten years before the term “email” was actually coined, we now count on it in our daily lives. In fact, the use of email has become so pervasive that the Oxford English Dictionary recently added a slew of email acronyms to its official canon.

And finally, just this year, the AP Stylebook, a.k.a. the holy book of all (or most) journalists, amended the spelling of e-mail to email, allowing articles such as this one to save bigtime on hyphens.

SEE ALSO: The History of Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

To give you a timeline of email’s progress through the decades, here’s a commemorative 40th anniversary infographic from email delivery company Reachmail.

Click image to see larger version.

Original Page: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/PZRxDdY1Lnk/

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LeadersDirect - Thought Leadership - LeadersDirect

2011-07-18T20:37:00.001-07:00

Thought Leadership

by Mitch McCrimmo, leadersdirect.com
June 30th 2011

Thought leadership is radically different from traditional top-down leadership.

It can be directed up as well as down or sideways, has nothing to do with position or managing people, is the basis of innovative change and is egalitarian because it can shift rapidly from one person to another. It cannot be monopolized. It has nothing to do with climbing a hierarchy. It changes how people think, hence no action is necessarily implied. Implementation is a separate phase - a managerial undertaking.

Kouzes and Posner base their view of leadership on the metaphor of a journey. Their leaders sell the tickets for the journey AND help followers reach the destination. By contrast, thought leadership merely sells the tickets for the journey, leaving it to others to get to the destination on their own or with the help of managers, coaches, facilitators and catalysts.

If this sounds like leadership cut in half, think about leading by example. It also stops at selling the tickets for the journey. It demonstrates what needs to be done, leaving others to follow without helping them get there. Of course, you could help people get to the destination, but then it wouldn't be leading by example. Thought leadership can be shown by example too, as well as by advocating a better idea. In general, leadership of all kinds can be defined as: showing the way for others either by example or by promoting a better way.

What is thought leadership?

Whenever you advocate a new idea to your colleagues or boss, you show thought leadership. It isn't necessary to have inspirational influencing skills, which is necessary for senior executives because they need to win over the entire organization and beat off their internal competitors for top jobs. Also, to initiate organization-wide change, it helps to be inspirational. But a thought leader can focus on smaller scale changes - ideas for a new product or changes to an existing one. Thought leaders can persuade others using logic, evidence or an actual demonstration of a prototype to win support.

To be a thought leader, you need to immerse yourself in your professional domain and search for new things to say that add value to your organization's objectives. Traditional, top-down leadership depends on personal credibility or character because such leaders are asking people to join them on a difficult journey and they have a great deal of power over their followers. Hence, we need to trust them. The stronger your content, the more content becomes king, and the less powerful your influencing skills need to be.

Thought leaders could actually have weak interpersonal skills and an indifferent character. They could be loners or eccentrics. All that counts is the credibility of their new idea. This is why we can buy innovations offered by odd creative types who we would not entrust to manage any part of an organization. If you can demonstrate the value of your idea and explain it with conviction, you might not need inspirational influencing skills. Think of the stereotypical artist who has no time to socialize or even sleep and can be quite hard to get along with, but if his or her art is highly original, leadership by example will be shown despite the lack of interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.

Thought leadership traits

Thought leadership is based on youthful rebelliousness - the willingness to risk group rejection in the pursuit of a better way of doing things. Hence, thought leadership is not a learned skill. Only the content of your discipline or field is learned. Traditional, top-down leadership is portrayed as a collaborative effort between leaders and followers to achieve shared goals. But thought leadership has a more competitive edge. Thought leaders are saying, essentially, that they know of a better product or way of doing things than anyone else in the team or organization.

Thought leadership ends when the target audience accepts the idea. It may be that you are using hard evidence to persuade others to avoid dumping a current process for a passing fad. In this case, your leadership does not result in any action taken. This enables us to define leadership as the initiation of new directions and categorize the implementation of new ideas as a managerial activity.

This is important because we tend, traditionally, to focus on the PERSON in charge of a group as the leader who may both champion a new direction and implement it. Hence we think that leadership is about managing change. The real value of examining thought leadership is that it helps us to see that there is a critically important distinction between leadership and management. When executives move from championing a new idea to its implementation, therefore, they are switching hats from leadership to management. The bottom line is that leadership is about the initiation of new directions. Implementing them is a managerial undertaking.

Related Lead2xl articles: Creative Class Leadership, The Content of Leadership and Showing Leadership - how you can show leadership. See also Are you a Leader? and Leadership Redefined for a 21st century world.

Original Page: http://www.leadersdirect.com/thought-leadership

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Canada buys Obama's reject Brit choppers for spare parts • The Register

2011-07-18T20:35:00.001-07:00

Canada buys Obama's reject Brit choppers for spare parts

by Lewis Page, theregister.co.uk
June 29th 2011 1:35 PM

Canada has snapped up a rejected fleet of US presidential helicopters, intending to break up the choppers for spare parts to keep its own search-and-rescue aircraft flying. The British forces may wish they had struck such a deal, as they too operate the "Merlin" copter in large numbers - and they too have severe difficulties in getting parts.

The helicopters sold to Canada are the so-called US101 version of the EH101 aircraft developed during the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and Italy by companies which are now grouped as AgustaWestland. The UK forces, after massive delays and cost overruns, eventually received two versions, both known as "Merlin" - a naval submarine-hunting variant and a cargo or troop-carrying one for the RAF. Both types finally reached frontline useability around 2004-2005, but their availability rates have been poor: perhaps due to the fact that the Merlin didn't sell well worldwide and thus parts were at a premium.

However the Merlin did sell to the Bush administration, which was seeking to replace its ageing VH-3 Sea King presidential helicopters operated by the US Marines (the president's chopper becomes "Marine One" when he is aboard, just as his airforce-operated plane becomes "Air Force One"). But the US101 project, managed by Lockheed on behalf of AgustaWestland, soon became mired in cost and time overruns every bit as bad as those which had hit the Royal Navy's HM1.

The plan might well have been doomed from the outset, with requirements calling for 14 VIP seats, hardening against electromagnetic pulse, an executive washroom and communications equivalent to "a flying Oval Office" - a pretty big ask for an aircraft which can only lift four tonnes in its RAF cargo-carrying incarnation*.

The US101 problems became bad enough that each new Marine One copter was projected to cost as much as an Air Force One jumbo jet, and the costs became an issue in the presidential election - with both Mr Obama and his opponent John McCain vying to issue the strongest condemnation of the aircraft. Obama in particular described it as "procurement amok", and unsurprisingly it was axed as soon as he took office.

Now the Canadians, who also operate the EH101 under the name "Cormorant", have snapped up the former presidential fleet of nine aircraft for $164m.

"This package is considered an excellent one-time opportunity for the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces to address long-standing CH-149 Cormorant fleet availability issues related to the availability of spare parts," a Canadian defence spokesman tells the Ottawa Citizen.

Canada has struggled to keep its Cormorants in the air, finding that it needs a fleet of 18 aircraft to do the same work that was formerly done by a smaller number of copters.

Britain has also seen unimpressive availability from its Merlins. No more than four or five have generally been available for use in Iraq and now Afghanistan out of a fleet of 28, despite the hosing-down of maker AgustaWestland with extra support cash. The British forces, with their desperate lack of helicopter lift, may very well be wishing that they'd snapped up President Obama's rejects ahead of the Canadians. ®

Bootnote

*The Royal Navy HM1 also fails to impress in the matter of lifting power, being unable to get airborne vertically or achieve a hover when fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At sea, its carrying ship must steam so as to provide a suitable wind over the deck: ashore a pilot must taxi forward rapidly to get airborne fully loaded. (Helicopters generate more lift when their rotors are beating air which they haven't already churned up, which is why forward motion through the air reduces power requirements.)

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/29/marine_one_merlin_rejects_bought_by_canada/

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Groupon India publishes 300,000 user passwords • The Register

2011-07-03T07:49:00.001-07:00

Groupon India publishes 300,000 user passwords

by Dan Goodin, theregister.co.uk
June 28th 2011 6:58 PM

Groupon subsidiary Sosasta.com accidentally published a database containing the email addresses and clear-text passwords of 300,000 users and the cache was indexed by Google.

The trove of personal data was discovered by Australian security consultant Daniel Grzelak as he plugged a handful of query terms into the search engine, he said Tuesday. He contacted Patrick Gray with security blog Risky Biz, which reported that the SQL database contained the details for 300,000 Sosasta account holders.

A Groupon spokesman confirmed that the digital coupon distributor “was alerted to a security issue” on Thursday night and corrected the problem immediately. The issue was limited to Sosasta, which uses its own servers and network and isn't connected to Groupon's systems in other countries.

“We have begun notifying our subscribers and advising them to change their Sosasta passwords as soon as possible,” the spokesman said in a statement. “We will keep our Indian subscribers fully informed as we learn more.”

At time of writing, there was no advisory on either the Groupon or Sosasta websites, although Sosasta's Facebook page contained a notice that came in the form of a JPG image that couldn't easily be indexed by Google or other search engines. Ah the irony.

According to Risky Biz, Grzelak found the massive cache as he was looking for additions to shouldichangemypassword.com, a side project that indexes email addresses included in more than a dozen high-profile privacy breaches carried out by LulzSec and other hacking groups. The query that hit pay dirt included the terms “filetype:sql” “password” and “gmail.”

“I started scrolling, and scrolling and I couldn't get to the bottom of the file,” Grzelak told Risky Biz. “Then I realised how big it actually was.”

The Groupon statement didn't say why passwords weren't encrypted or why such a sensitive file was publicly available.

The snafu is the latest to expose the folly of using the same password on more than one site, a practice still followed by a shockingly high number of people. If you're one of them, you ought to consider using a password-management program such as Password Safe or KeePass.

The Groupon subsidiary sure isn't the first to carelessly expose data it has promised to keep private, and judging from this Google search, it's probably not the last. ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/28/groupon_india_privacy_breach/

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Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping • The Register

2011-07-03T07:48:00.003-07:00

Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping

by Bill Ray, theregister.co.uk
June 29th 2011 11:41 AM

A new Microsoft patent points towards Skype becoming equipped for lawful interception, which could be important as the service grows up to challenge traditional telcos.

The patent was filed back in 2009, but published* last week and picked up by Computerworld. Titled "Legal Intercept", it covers one way in which a VoIP-based communications system might enable a call to be intercepted and covertly recorded, naming Skype as one of the services to which it could be applied.

Microsoft bought Skype back in May, but only received approval for the deal in June – so hasn't had much time to do anything with the VoIP leader. Skype is hugely successful, with 170 million registered users, but it's been very secretive about its protocols and security, refusing interoperability and asking users to just trust in Skype for their security.

That won't wash in the real world, and neither will denying governments the right to listen in on their citizens. Most of us accept that security forces need to occasionally tap into phone lines, hopefully with suitable judicial oversight, but Skype's apparent reluctance to permit such taps has resulted in rumours of secret deals and government-backed attacks on the cryptography used to protect Skype calls.

The patent describes how client, or network, software can be surreptitiously alerted that incoming and/or outgoing calls are to be monitored for a specific user. Such calls are then copied (packet by packet) to the monitoring server without the user being aware. The patent suggests the interception software could be placed in a NAT or router, but also incorporated into the VoIP client itself.

India has made it clear that Skype risks being kicked out of the country unless it sorts out some sort of lawful intercept capability, and other countries will be quick to follow India's lead. So if Microsoft wants to see Skype spreading around the world then it will need to have just what's described in the Legal Intercept patent.

Citizens aghast that their VoIP calls could be intercepted might be annoyed, but they'd be better off petitioning their governments, rather than raging against the companies trying to obey the law. ®

* That's "published", not "granted" as we earlier stated - our mistake.

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/29/microsoft_skype/

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Lytro: My Thoughts About Shooting First – Focusing Later « Photofocus

2011-07-03T07:48:00.001-07:00

Lytro: My Thoughts About Shooting First – Focusing Later

photofocus.com | Jun 29th 2011

There have literally been hundreds of tweets and emails sent to me about the Lytro technology. Light field camera technology isn’t new. This particular incarnation was developed at Stanford, but I’ve seen other incarnations. That said, it is interesting and it is attracting a great deal of attention. Not just attention – but concern. In fact, this latest announcement from Lytro has caused a great deal of concern in the photo community because the people who think of photography as art are worried. They are worried that the science will make them fungible. In my opinion, that won’t happen any time soon.

Plenoptic imaging will have a place in the future of photography, there’s no doubt about that. It’s initial value is primarily in forensics and entertainment. Law enforcement will use this technology to identify suspects in out of focus photos. The military will use the technology to improve data gathered from airborne spy cameras. Other similar uses will make funding this stuff realistic. But the notion that we’re all going to Walmart to buy a light field camera for our family vacation photos – well that isn’t going to happen any time soon. In my opinion it is just not realistic.

The big reason is the fact that the Lytro camera will require a computer and software to operate. Grandma and Grandpa can be taught how to use an iPhone camera and how to hit the share button on a mobile device pretty easily. But they won’t be sitting down to learn the operation of a stand-alone computer software program that is needed to process plenoptic photography.

I believe that there is and will always be a place for such technology in photography. I am in fact, excited about it. But nothing will replace the photographer’s vision – their eye – their emotion – their heart. In my opinion, it will be at least a decade before technology of this nature will be widely adopted to the point it REPLACES traditional film OR digital photography. Even then, REPLACES is a strong word. It might subplant – subvert or otherwise impact traditional photo methods.

Whether I am right or wrong about the adoption curve, remember that no computer can make a nervous portrait subject feel at ease, or calm an excited groom. No computer can duplicate the beauty of Cartier-Bresson’s vision.

On the other side of the coin, all that matters to me personally is the picture. I don’t care if you use an old film camera, a 3D camera, a digital camera or light field camera to make your images. If I like the picture – I like the picture and to me, nothing is cheating. I realize this isn’t a view shared by all. In fact, I know the purists will scream. That is their right. But why not at least wait until we know what there is to scream about? It’s early days yet and there’s not much likelihood this tech will trickle down to the Walmart anytime soon.

____
This post sponsored by BorrowLenses.com – Renting Canon, Nikon, Olympus & Sony, bodies, lenses and more.

Original Page: http://photofocus.com/2011/06/29/lytro-my-thoughts-about-shooting-first-focusing-later/

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LeapFrog debuts $99 app-ready tablet for primary schoolers | ZDNet

2011-07-03T07:46:00.001-07:00

LeapFrog debuts $99 app-ready tablet for primary schoolers

by Andrew Nusc, zdnet.com
June 30th 2011 7:33 AM

Educational toymaker LeapFrog Enterprises announced on Wednesday a $99 tablet called the “LeapPad,” deliberately positioned as a child’s version of an Apple iPad.

Like its adult counterpart, the LeapPad supports downloadable apps (at $5 each) but also supports $25 game cartridges. It’s intended for children ages 4 to 9.

From a technical perspective, the device as 2 gigabytes of memory, a five-inch (480×272) touchscreen, a built-in camera, video recorder, microphone and “animation studio,” where kids can learn how to animate Disney characters.

It also comes with a child-sized (and hopefully blunt) stylus. It’s available in either green or pink.

It will count more than 100 learning-game cartridges, books, applications and videos by year’s end, the company says, on topics as diverse as phonics skills, mathematics, spelling, geography, world languages, music, creativity, science and “life skills” such as brushing one’s teeth.

The LeapPad will appear on Wal-Mart and Amazon store shelves (U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland; Australia and New Zealand to follow) on August 15.

Andrew J. Nusca is editor of ZDNet and SmartPlanet.

Original Page: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/leapfrog-debuts-99-app-ready-tablet-for-primary-schoolers/51686

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Taco Bell: We haven’t figured out f-commerce, we can’t even give tacos away

2011-07-03T07:45:00.001-07:00

Taco Bell: We haven’t figured out f-commerce, we can’t even give tacos away on Facebook…

by Paul Marsden, socialcommercetoday.com
June 21st 2011

Okay, so here’s a conundrum, if P&G can sell 1000 diapers in under an hour on Facebook, why can’t Taco Bell give tacos away for free on Facebook?

There’s an interesting post over at the Nudge blog reporting that when Taco Bell recently decided to offer its 6 million fans a free taco — no strings attached, only 3% took them up on the offer.

Chief Public Affairs Officer Jonathan Blum of Taco Bell’s parent company Yum! Brands admitted “We haven’t even been able to give away the food, never mind figure out how to sell it online.” (see (long but interesting) Northwestern lecture featuring Jonathan Blum Yum! Brand, and Terry Davenport, Starbucks). Bottom line for Taco Bell – ‘We haven’t figured out how to make the cash register ring with social media’.

What’s going on? You can sell diapers on Facebook, but you can’t give away tacos to Taco fans…

Of course, the P&G f-commerce offer had the convenience of home delivery – whereas to claim the free taco Facebook giveaway, you had traipse over to a Taco Bell restaurant. Rule 1. Make it easy for customers. And you had to kill a tree and print off your free taco voucher. Rule 2. Make it easy for consumers (and allow them to polish their halos (SMS vouchers?)).

But the key difference between the two – we think – was that P&G was shifting special stock – a fan-first exclusive of a new product line, not available anywhere elsewhere – online or offline. Taco Bell, on the other hand, was offering regular 99c tacos available everywhere for everyone.

In other words, the P&G offer had ‘scarcity value’, offering ‘social currency’ – bragging rights for a get-it-first exclusive. We think this get-it-first experience is the true home turf for f-commerce – fan-stores that sell fan-first exclusives. We’d recommend thinking twice about f-commere, if you are just going to sell what’s already available elsewhere.

EXCLUSIVITY may be the key to f-commerce success. Thoughts?

Original Page: http://socialcommercetoday.com/taco-bell-we-havent-figured-out-f-commerce-we-cant-even-give-tacos-away-on-facebook/

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Free concert in LA this weekend, bring your Apple II

2011-06-28T04:14:00.001-07:00

Free concert in LA this weekend, bring your Apple II

by Richard Lawler, engadget.com
June 22nd 2011 9:10 AM
, , Following the only logical path one can take after building a working 15x scale Atari joystick, Jason Torchinsky is pulling together all the Apple IIs that can be had for a quick concert. Those not already entranced by chiptunes will want to give LA neighborhood art space Machine Project a wide berth on Saturday, where participants will use a 16 step sequencer to get something like music out of the system's timer circuit. Those interested in checking it out can check the source link for details, but if you actually have an Apple II laying around (and aren't in the middle of a game of Oregon Trail, that's serious business) you'll want to show up around 6 p.m. to get things arranged.

Original Page: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/22/free-concert-in-la-this-weekend-bring-your-apple-ii/

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Finding Your Camera Lens Sweet Spot — Doug Niedermiller Photography

2011-06-28T04:13:00.003-07:00

Finding Your Camera Lens Sweet Spot

by Doug Niedermiller, dougniedermillerphotography.com
January 8th 2010

So you are looking for a new camera lens or you went out and bought a brand new D-SLR digital camera with the kit lens. Now you want to produce 11 x 14 or 16 x20 or larger sharp prints. You will need a good tripod and know your camera lens sweet spot. The lens sweet spot is the aperture or F-stop setting which produces sharpest image possible.

The lens sweet spot is determined by which F-stop or aperture to get the sharpest image. All lenses have a sweet spot. What we are going to determine is what aperture will produce the sharpest image. A simple rule of thumb is to take the widest aperture and stop it down 2 full f stops or 2 full aperture values ( see chart below). Let’s say you have a lens with a maximum F-stop of F4. That would make the sweet spot of your lens about F8. The problem is this may not be the exact sweet spot for your particular lens. The only way to really know is to test the lens for yourself or you may find it in a lens review article in one of the many photography magazines. The problem is that your lens may not have been tested or at least may not have identified the sweet spot of your lens.

Full F-stop Chart

Your lens may have other F-stops not listed on this chart above.

The chart above gives the corresponding aperture value to F-stop. As each aperture value increases it cuts the light in half. As each aperture values decreases it doubles the light.

So let’s test the lens. The first thing I did was find a test pattern chart to test the lens. I found one at http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/ISO_12233-reschart.pdf You can print it right from the site or downloaded it. Once downloaded you can print the test chart in the best quality your printer will allow you to print. This is what you will need to run this test: your camera and lens; a sturdy tripod; a remote cable release; a board to mount the test chart on; the test chart.

Step 1. Attach the chart on the board with tape so that the chart will not move if there is any wind.

Step 2. Find a bright spot outside and set the board with the chart in the sun.

Step 3. Install your camera on a tripod.

Step 4. Select the camera to aperture priority.

Step 5. Focus your camera on the chart.

Test Chart Location Below

Next, we’ll start with full open. Let’s say at f5.6 and shoot your first picture. Next we’ll shoot a photo at each f-stop, making note of each photo’s f-stop so that when you import them you will know which F-stop corresponds to each photograph. Be sure to use your remote shutter release cable and don’t move the camera through the whole process. Please note that any camera shake or movement will cause an inaccurate test.

After you finish, take your memory card and import into your favorite photo editing software. (I use Adobe Lightroom 2.) Open the photos in your editor and set the magnification to one to one. Use a side by side compare function if available. Now, carefully inspect and compare each photograph to see which one is the sharpest. Once you have determined which photo is the sharpest you have found your lens F-stop sweet spot.

If you are using a zoom lens you may want to repeat these steps for several focal lengths. Let’s say you’re using a 70 to 200 mm lens. First use 70mm then 130mm then 200mm. This will let you find the best F-stop for the sharpest picture at all F-stops.

The chart below shows the tests results I found with the lenses I have.

Conclusion.

One thing that I found when performing these tests is the better the lens quality the harder it is to find the exact sweet spot. These lenses generally had between two and three F-stops with the best sharpness. With some less expensive lens I found it easy to find a single F-stop sweet spot. But it is possible with higher end consumer lenses with ED glass (extra low distortion glass) you can get very sharp images.

Now you know what your lens sweet spot is. Even if you have a less expensive lens, by using this knowledge, you will be able to get very sharp photographs with most lenses. But, we do live in the real world. Sometimes, because of low light conditions, or the need to adjust the depth of field, we may have to adjust our F-stop to our needs. So, if the situation is right to use the sweet spot of your lens, you will find you will get the sharpest pictures possible with your lens.

The Teleconverter

I was not happy with the test results on the Nikon TC-20E II 2X Teleconverter. I have read other reviews of the Nikon brand Teleconverter that come to same conclusion. They also revealed that the Nikon TC-17E II 1.7x and Nikon TC-14E II 1.4x both had superior performance over the TC-20E II 2X Teleconverter.

If you are in the market for a new lens or camera, buy the best lens you can afford. In my opinion, the lens is more important than the camera. Consider this the lens has a life cycle of about 10 or more years and because the camera technology changes so fast, the camera’s life cycle is only 2 to 5 years.

So do your homework before you buy any camera, lens or teleconverter.

Please share your questions or comments below.

Happy sharp shooting.

Doug Niedermiller

Original Page: http://dougniedermillerphotography.com/2010/01/08/finding-your-camera-lens-sweet-spot/

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NCC shores up anti-goose efforts

2011-06-28T04:13:00.001-07:00

NCC shores up anti-goose efforts

cbc.ca | Jun 17th 2011 8:21 PM

Beginning of Story Content

The war on geese, and their droppings, in Ottawa's urban parks has moved to the beaches.

Prompted by complaints from the public and concerns about health, the National Capital Commission began its campaign to curtail the clamorous waterfowl and their ubiquitous excrement in 2009, and has seen a measure of success on its riverside properties.

"We have noticed quite a drop in the numbers," said Mario Fournier, the NCC’s manager of urban lands. "I would say close to 50 per cent."

Techniques ranged from installing fences to block the birds’ access from the river to parks, to planting shrubs and letting the grass grow longer so the birds fear approaching predators, even if there aren't any. Also crucial was posting signs asking people not to feed the animals.

"This year the geese has less gosling, less youth. So this means the future generations will maybe be attracted to go elsewhere," Fournier said.

The commission is hoping its success along the Ottawa River Parkway can be matched at Gatineau Park, where the avian invasion has spread to the beaches.

Fournier said the NCC is introducing the same measures in the park, and will be cleaning excrement daily from the grass. Each goose produces an average of a kilogram of waste a day.

End of Story Content

Back to accessibility links

Original Page: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/06/17/ottawa-ncc-geese-parks.html

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Guide to Grilling: Why You Should Really Own a Smoker

2011-06-10T18:57:00.001-07:00

Guide to Grilling: Why You Should Really Own a Smoker

by Joshua Bousel, feeds.seriouseats.com
May 20th 2011 3:15 PM

Although we've compiled some great tips on how to succeed in kettle smoking, after using my grill for years to smoke meat low-and-slow, I have to say that it wasn't until I graduated to a smoker that I started creating truly worthy barbecue.

So what's the difference, and why do you need a smoker? Here's a breakdown between two racks of baby back ribs, one done on the smoker, one on the grill, on the same day, using the same recipe.

Temperature

The one source of frustration for me when smoking on a kettle is temperature control. A kettle grill needs constant hand-holding, with checks on the temperature almost every 15 minutes to make sure the fire is still burning and running low. In my early, naive years, I was in awe of the pitmasters who could reign in a consistent temperature, showing a true skill in the art of being master of the flames.

Then I bought smoker.

The first time I fired that baby up, she wasn't as steady as she is now after years of smoking, but I habitually checked the temperature every 15 minutes and found that it was staying within a 5 to 10 degree range up or down and required no extra work. I began to trust and feel out my smoker, and am at the point now where I can check it relatively infrequently (about every hour), and feel good about firing it up, adding in a brisket, and hitting the sack if I'm doing an overnight cook—that's pretty impossible with a grill.

As you can see from the graph above, both the smoker and kettle took about the same time to get to the temperature. Once there, the smoker held fairly steady with no additional maintenance besides stirring the coals once. The kettle's temperature, on the other hand, varied widely. I was able to keep it in a good smoking range between 225 and 275°F, though, with one exception (when I opened the air vent and walked away for too long). This required constant fussing with the air vents and adding extra coals to the fire twice while cooking.

Smoke

For each rack of ribs, I used the same amount of smoking wood—three chunks of pecan and three chunks of apple. The results between the two devices were pretty stark.

Not an absolute measure of smoke penetration, but the smoke ring—a pink ring created at the surface of the meat formed when nitrogen dioxide from wood combustion mixes with the natural moisture in the meat and forms nitric acid—was way more defined on the ribs done in the smoker. The kettle ribs had a much lighter smoke ring, and tasted side-by-side, weren't nearly as packed with smoky flavor.

Of course, this is an easily solvable problem in a kettle—just add more wood. Both in the kettle and smoker, finding the right amount of smoke is a game of trial and error, but what this test does show is that smoke is absorbed to a greater extent in the device whose main purpose is to deliver smoke to the food.

The Rib Results

When it comes down to it, As I mentioned before, it wasn't until I got a smoker that I started producing the highest quality barbecue. These ribs brought back memories of the old days next to the grill when the racks just weren't up to snuff.

The ribs from the kettle were good—the meat was juicy, smokey, and fairly tender. I had some friends over to help me eat through the racks. "These are totally serviceable," said one of them about the kettle-done ribs. Now I don't know about you, but "serviceable" doesn't cut it for my barbecue—I want greatness, and the smoker-done ribs earned that title.

They're juicy, smokey, and tender, but to a much greater degree. It was that perfect level of tenderness where the meat easily pulls off the bone then melts in your mouth, and fills it with the smoky flavors. The rub creates an excellent bark too. These ribs were the food of the gods, as proven by how fast they flew off the plate.

OK, I'm Convinced, What Type of Smoker Should I Buy?

I'm happy to see you're ready to shop for a smoker already! The world of smokers gets even trickier than grills, though, with many types out there made by a whole host of companies. That'd really require a separate post to cover all that territory.

I've been satisfied with my Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, which comes in 18.5" and 22.5" models. This water smoker uses charcoal as its main fuel source and has a devout following like none other.

Another popular option is a ceramic cooker, or Kamado, like the Big Green Egg. These heavy beasts will set you back a pretty penny, but excel in both high heat grilling and low-and-slow barbecue due to their thick, ceramic walls. The heat retention also means the coals go longer than in the Weber Smokey Mountain.

You also have all sorts of gas and electric smokers, both of which bring "set-it-and-forget-it" into the realm of barbecue by using heat sources that remain consistent throughout long cooks (although a change of a gas cylinder could be needed). Many of these models offer more cooking area than their charcoal counterparts.

It also seems worth pointing out that inexpensive offset smokers don't look like a good option, from what I've heard. While the cheaper pricetag can make them sound more attractive, the temperature is hard to control and makes for uneven heat in the cooking chamber.

If you're still reading this and don't own a smoker yet, what are you waiting for!??! Memorial Day is just around the corner.

About the author: Joshua Bousel brings you new, tasty condiment each Wednesday and a recipe for weekend grilling every Friday. He also writes about grilling and barbecue on his blog The Meatwave whenever he can be pulled away from his grill.

Tags: barbecue, grilling, Memorial Day, smokers

Original Page: http://feeds.seriouseats.com/~r/seriouseatsfeaturesvideos/~3/MUC7gMZtRzw/guide-to-grilling-why-you-should-really-own-a-smoker.html

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5 Tips For Grilling A Better Burger

2011-06-10T18:56:00.001-07:00

5 Tips For Grilling A Better Burger

by Leslie Kelly, aldenteblog.com
May 20th 2011

A perfect sunshine-y day inspired me to fire up the grill yesterday evening for the first time this season. Actually, the seed was planted in the morning when I got a craving for potato salad. And what goes better with spuds mixed with mayo, mustard, pickles and onions -- the not-so-secret family recipe -- than a big burger?

So, what's the trick to making a super juicy burger at home? The kind you find at upscale restaurants.

A couple of years ago, I spent some time working in kitchens and I learned a few hundred things. I witnessed the making of the best burger I've ever tasted, a thick patty that the cooks made cross-hatch slashes in. They did that to keep the ground beef from expanding as it cooked. (Tip No. 1!)

Before cooking, though, let's prep. Tip 2: I like to go to a butcher who grinds their own beef. If I have the time, I might even grind my own, feeding chuck roast into my Kitchen Aid grinder. I lean toward lean ground beef, not extra lean.

Most people put all sorts of effort into topping burgers, but I believe in focusing on the flavor of the meat. So, some seasoning is in order. In goes salt and pepper, some chopped garlic, a splash of olive oil. One of my favorite burgers of all time includes crispy bacon bits mixed into the meat. (Tip No. 3!)

After patting out the patties, pop them in the freezer for an hour or so. This tip (No. 4), which I picked up while working at a pub, helps the patties hold their shape.

Finally, for Tip 5, when cooking, never press down on the meat with a spatula. You can't have a juicy burger if you squeeze the juice out of your burger.

OK, one last bonus tip: For an extra gooey finish, use shredded cheese on top! I worked in one restaurant where they combined shredded sharp cheddar with butter. A totally decadent treat.

And here's my sister's potato salad recipe to serve alongside those juicy burgers!

Sissy's Potato Salad

2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes

1 cup mayo, preferably homemade

1/4 cup Dijon-style mustard

1 cup dill pickles, chopped

1 cup sweet white or red onion, chopped

4 hard boiled eggs, chopped

splash pickle juice

salt and pepper, to taste

Combine ingredients and let sit for at least a few hours. It's even better the next day.

-- Leslie Kelly

Original Page: http://www.aldenteblog.com/2011/05/5-tips-for-grilling-a-better-burger.html

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iCloud’s the Limit: How iOS 5, Lion Push Apple’s Lock-In Strategy

2011-06-08T22:25:00.001-07:00

Gadget Lab

by Brian X. Chen, wired.com
June 8th 2011

Apple CEO Steve Jobs set off a bomb in Silicon Valley on Monday, and companies all over the world are still assessing the damage.

The new features in iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud that Jobs introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference affect a long list of companies big and small. Some are direct competitors of Apple, but many come from the legions of iOS developers whose apps have helped make the iPhone and iPad popular.

To start with the giants:

The iOS 5 Notifications Center is a direct response to Google’s superior (for now) Android notifications system.
The iOS 5 systemwide Twitter integration flips a middle finger at Microsoft’s Facebook-integrated Windows Phone 7 platform.
Apple’s internet-based iMessage messaging client is a copycat of RIM’s BlackBerry messaging client, and it should inspire millions of iPhone customers to downgrade their text-messaging plans when iOS 5 lands this fall. That will put a dent in carrier profits.

(Let’s not even speculate about the death of SMS from iMessage.)

As for small startups:

The “Read Later” functionality baked into the Safari browser for iOS 5 and Lion seems to render the popular Instapaper app unnecessary. Creator Marco Arment, however — at least for public consumption — is keeping up a brave front that he is “tentatively optimistic” that the new feature “will improve sales dramatically.”
The upgraded Mail app included with OS X Lion (a $30 operating system upgrade) makes the $10 Sparrow mail app look like a raw deal.
And iOS 5’s photo- and document-sharing features, combined with 5 gigabytes of free online storage offered through iCloud, may compel many Dropbox customers to cancel their subscriptions, or downgrade their storage options.

That’s just a few.

“It was like a forest fire cleaning out the brush,” said Phillip Ryu, principal at Tap Tap Tap, developer of the bestselling image-editing app Camera+ for iPhone. It’s worth noting, coincidentally, that Apple’s next iPhone update will also include a built-in photo editor, which competes with the likes of Camera+, too.

Now, here’s why iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion pack such a deadly punch against so many companies: Together, they strengthen Apple’s lock-in strategy with vertical integration. Many consider Apple to be the most vertically integrated company in the world: All Apple hardware and software are designed in-house, and Apple also runs its own digital content store, iTunes, along with the App Store and iBooks store.

The new feature set in iOS 5, iCloud and Lion tightens Apple’s vertical integration of its software ecosystem by amplifying its “lock-in” goal. The vast majority of the new iCloud tools introduced Monday are exclusively for Apple customers, designed to bridge the iOS and Mac operating systems to make the experience more seamless, convenient and irresistible than ever.

The idea behind this strategy is: If you’re an iPhone customer today, how can you resist buying a Mac or an iPad now, and why would you buy a Windows PC or an Android device? And if you’re already plugged into Apple’s “cloud” ecosystem, why use a cross-platform solution like Dropbox or Google Docs to store your media, when the Apple-only experience is bound to be more optimized for you?

Apple’s software news this week was designed to make people feel like crap if they aren’t already Apple customers. If you use Apple’s Pages word processor, your documents sync with Pages on the Mac, iPad and iPhone.

When you create a calendar event on your Mac, that event automatically appears on your iPhone calendar, too. You can also share the event with another Apple device.

If you snap a picture with your iPhone, the PhotoStream feature pushes the photo to iCloud and syncs with the photo folder on your Mac, Apple TV and iPad. (There’s a photo folder for Windows PCs that will work for this, too, but it looks considerably less polished than the Apple PhotoStream.)

And Apple’s lock-in strategy works like this, too: If a lot of your friends have iPhones or iPads and you have neither, you’d feel left out. With iOS 5, they’ll all be able to message each other for free with the iMessage app rather than the traditional rip-off SMS plan offered by Verizon and AT&T. So if you’re lured in, it’d be hard to give up an iPhone or iPad for a competing product, because you’d be leaving an entire network of iMessage chat contacts.

Google can only dream that its own “lock-in” were this tight. It’s halfway there: Google Docs, mail and calendar work well on Android devices. But Android still suffers from the recurring issue of hardware fragmentation. You can’t even be guaranteed to have the same version of Android on one Google-powered handset versus another, much less an Android Honeycomb tablet, nor can you be assured that the apps you’ve downloaded work the same on every Android device.

(Do I even need to bring up Google TV? Why even bother at this point.)

Apple said its big push Monday was “the cloud,” as in, snipping the cord and going truly wireless. But the real story was “lock-in.” Who would ever leave the Apple universe now? It’s up to Apple’s rivals now to find a solid opportunity here to compete with Steve Jobs’ widget.

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Miro: Just Another iTunes Wannabe?

2011-06-08T22:23:00.001-07:00

Miro: Just Another iTunes Wannabe?

by Conor O'Driscoll, mac.appstorm.net
June 8th 2011

iTunes. You can’t live with it, and yet you can’t live without it. Sure, it does its job, but there are a whole lot of features which are unnecessary, and necessary features which haven’t been implemented. It has Ping, a social network used by about 7 people, but no support for AVI videos, a video format loved by millions. Unfortunately for us, there aren’t many decent alternatives.

Miro 4 was released recently, and although Miro was always an iTunes competitor, version 4 has really brought it into its own. The 100% free and open source media library does all of the things you want iTunes to do, and more. But is it worth abandoning iTunes for? Read on to find out.

Getting Started

Miro is not available from the App Store, so you’ll have to download the DMG from their website. At 40MB, half the size of iTunes, it won’t take hours to download. Installation is done by a process we’re all-too-familiar with – simply dragging the app into the Applications folder.

When you first open the app, it’ll ask a few questions to help you make the most of Miro. The first is the language you want Miro to be in. There is a huge list of available languages, but not all of them are fully translated (just Spanish and German at the time of writing), however many more are well on their way. Anyone can volunteer to translate Miro and help make the software as accessible as possible.

You can also quickly import iTunes media and/or all media on your computer, or simply media in a certain folder. This is a handy way of quickly gathering media so you haven’t got to import everything from scratch. That said, the importing process will take a while, especially if you have a large library.

Interface

What instantly strikes you about Miro is its beautiful interface – Every button is pixel perfect and looks wonderful. Designed by Morgan Allan Knutson, it’s obvious that he put a whole lot of time and effort into its design.

Unfortunately, for me, whilst its aesthetics are amazing, the usability of the interface is a little lacking. It would appear that Miro has gone so far out of its way to not be an iTunes clone that it has ignored the good elements of iTunes. For example, in Miro, all of the controls are along the bottom. Users are used to toolbars and buttons being up the top of the window, so this decision doesn’t feel right.

Music

Miro handles your music relatively well – you can play it, and pause it, which is certainly a start. I’m afraid that I’ll have to compare Miro to iTunes most of the time, as that is what most people use. And, really, it just doesn’t compare. iTunes has been handling music all its life, so by now, it really is quite good at it. To me, it feels like Miro has added music functionality at the last minute, and it really hasn’t had time to think about what really makes a great music library.

One major issue of mine is the lack of view options for your music. You can either see your music in a full list with all its details, or in a completely useless view where you see each song with artwork and a few details, with only 4 songs fitting into the window. What’s really missing is the ability to view thumbnails of albums, or at least artists, like iTunes. Until that happens, there is no way I can use the music feature.

Video

This is really where you feel Miro developers put all their effort into. It doesn’t really do anything iTunes doesn’t, except for the fact that it can handle most codecs you throw at it. And if it can’t, Miro Video Converter features are bundled in, so you can convert videos within Miro to make them playable.

Unfortunately, there is one feature which, for me, makes Miro defunct for video is a lack of external remote support. I like to watch movies from a bit of a distance, and using my Apple remote is a must when doing so. That said, you have the option to open a video in QuickTime directly from Miro, but to me, that’s not very different to using Finder.

If MPlayerX managed to incorporate remote functionality, it must be possible, and I hope Miro developers will introduce the feature soon. Until then, I’m sticking to Finder and QuickTime for video.

Online

Sources

Miro has done what iTunes neglected to and brought in a lot of online functionality – It has a built-in torrent client (for legal torrents, of course), and links to sites with legal torrents such as YouTorrent and ClearBits. You can add any torrent source you wish to – It certainly is a nice feature to be able to download a file and have it straight in your library.

Miro has also got built in browser functionality, with a few sections which essentially act as site-specific browsers – YouTube, Hulu, and PBS, along with the afore-mentioned YouTorrent and ClearBits.

You can add any URL you want as a source, so in that way, acts a little like Fluid, only that all the SSBs are kept under one app.

The only problem is that there isn’t an address bar, so if you find something and want to send someone a link, you’ll have to open it up in the browser first.

Stores

Just as iTunes has the much-loved iTunes store, and the App Store, Miro has incorporated support for Amazon’s MP3 store, the Amazon Android Store, and the Google Android Store. With Miro’s support for Android syncing, these are great features.

Personally, I haven’t found any way in which Amazon’s MP3 store betters the iTunes store (unless you count Lady Gaga’s Born This Way for $0.99), but it is certainly a feature which nowadays every media library should have.

Conclusion

I want to love Miro. I really do. It is a wonderful idea in theory – developed by volunteers, designed by volunteers, translated by volunteers, and distributed completely for free. But do I love it? Not quite.

Despite its aesthetic goodness and excellent online functionality, it falls down in a few vital areas which make it unusable as a media library, for me at least. All it needs is a few more viewing options and support for the Apple remote and I’d rate it much higher. The devil really is in the details.

Original Page: http://mac.appstorm.net/reviews/music-reviews/miro-just-another-itunes-wannabe/

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PhotoFast i-FlashDrive does USB on one end, 30-pin dock connector on the ot

2011-06-07T17:47:00.001-07:00

PhotoFast i-FlashDrive does USB on one end, 30-pin dock connector on the other

by Richard Lai, engadget.com
June 4th 2011 9:07 AM
, , Hands-On Apple's iOS devices may lack native memory expansion, but PhotoFast has now come up with solution that just about bests the official camera connection kit. What you're looking at here is the i-FlashDrive, a memory dongle that sports both a USB plug and an Apple 30-pin dock connector, and it comes in three flavors starting from 8GB at $95 up to 32GB at $180. What's more, the drive also works with a free Cupertino-approved app that provides both external and internal file management (for music, photos, movies, and more), contact backup, and native MP3 playback. Want one? Then head over to Taiwan for a mid or late June launch, or watch out for its US debut shortly afterwards. Demo video after the break. PhotoFast i-FlashDrive does USB on one end, dock connector on the other

See Video: http://www.viddler.com/simple/89694320/

Original Page: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/04/photofast-i-flashdrive-does-usb-on-one-end-dock-connector-on-th/

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The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad

2011-06-07T17:11:00.001-07:00

The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad

by Erick Schonfeld, techcrunch.com
June 4th 2011

Last night, Kno quietly released its first digital textbook app for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader.

Kno, whose CEO Osman Rashid previously founded textbook-rental service Chegg, originally developed its own oversized tablet for textbooks. But once the iPad and Android tablets hit the market, the company saw the writing on the touchscreen and bailed on its hardware efforts last April.

At that time, when I spoke to Rashid, he was talking down the iPad because it does not support a stylus, which is the input method the Know software was designed for (although there are styluses that do work with the iPad). Maybe he was just trying to throw me off the trail.

The iPad app allows you to organize your digital textbooks and PDFs by dragging and dropping them into “courses.” Once you open a textbook, you can swipe through the pages or navigate via a filmstrip of thumbnails up top. There is also full text search. Pages can be bookmarked and highlighted. You can also add digital sticky notes which pop out from the margins.

The highlight feature is a nice touch. You can also launch a Web or Wikipedia search based on a highlighted word. There is also a “WTF” feature, which stands for “Words to Friends,” although it could mean the more common acronym since it’s a nit of a head-scratcher. It allows you to send out little study messages to friends on Facebook or Twitter, but doesn’t link back to the text or even make it easy to cut and paste a quote. WTF, indeed.

All in all, though, the Kno textbook app is pretty solid and will compete based on the breadth of its textbook selection and pricing. It certainly beats lugging around a backpack full of books.

Original Page: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/04/kno-ipad/

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Android app brings cookie stealing to unwashed masses • The Register

2011-06-07T17:10:00.001-07:00

Android app brings cookie stealing to unwashed masses

by Dan Goodin, theregister.co.uk
June 3rd 2011 9:49 PM

A developer has released an app for Android handsets that brings website credential stealing over smartphones into the script kiddie realm.

FaceNiff, as the Android app is called, can be used to steal unencrypted cookies on most Wi-Fi networks, giving users a point-and-click interface for stealing sensitive authentication tokens sent over Facebook, Twitter, and other popular websites when users don't bother to use encrypted SSL, or secure sockets layer, connections. The app works even on networks protected by WPA and WPA2 encryption schemes by using a technique known as ARP spoofing to redirect local traffic through the attacker's device. An attacker would have to know the security password, however.

To be sure, FaceNiff doesn't do anything that hasn't been done for decades, and based on a YouTube video and comments on an official support forum, the app seems to have its share of quirks. Programs such as SSLSniff, released years ago by Moxie Marlinspike, contain considerably more powerful capabilities even if they lack a smartphone GUI.

But by making it possible for ordinary Android users to hijack other people's Web 2.0 accounts, FaceNiff has the potential to be something like the smartphone equivalent of Firesheep, a Firefox browser extension that brought new urgency to the decades-old threat of using unencrypted web connections. FaceNiff lacks some of the automated features of Firesheep, but that could change with a few updates to the Android app.

Over the past year or so, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have upgraded a variety of their services to add always-on SSL, which is the only effective way to prevent the theft of authentication tokens. Those protections on several occasions have been found to be far from perfect, but they're a step in the right direction.

And they've been rolled out increasingly thanks to the growing awareness that comes from DIY man-in-the-middle tools like Firesheep. ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/03/android_cookie_stealing_app/

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iTunes To Finally Get Wireless Syncing With iOS 5

2011-06-07T17:09:00.001-07:00

iTunes To Finally Get Wireless Syncing With iOS 5

by Christina Warren, feeds.mashable.com
June 6th 2011

At the WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple announced that users can now sync and backup their iOS devices wirelessly.

Apple has been promising some sort of wireless PC-free syncing solution for quite some time, but the company has now officially confirmed that the new feature will be introduced with iOS 5.

In iOS 5, the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch will automatically find iTunes on a Wi-Fi network and automatically sync and backup apps, contacts and media. This is similar to what Google does with its Android OS, with the exception, of course, that Apple still has an actual program that users can use to monitor backups and programs.

Apple also announced that users who want to be completely PC free can perform cloud backups to the new iCloud service.

Image courtesy of thisismynext.com

Original Page: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/wPg3Hsf706g/

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5 Tips To Separate Personal And Professional Life Online

2011-06-04T18:41:00.001-07:00

5 Tips To Separate Personal And Professional Life Online

by Amber Mac, fastcompany.com
May 20th 2011

"My life and biz is so intertwined in every way that it's hard to make that clean separation on and offline." That's what Candace Alper (@NameYourTuneCDs) said on Twitter when I asked about the importance of separating your personal and business life on Facebook. As an entrepreneur who runs a made-to-order children's CD company, she is comfortable mixing business with pleasure online. Monica Roddey (@MicaR) agrees. She says "my online persona = my 'real life' persona ... what you see is what you get."

I fall into Alper's and Roddey's camp. When I signed up for Facebook years ago, I opened it up to anyone and everyone. Although I now also maintain a fan page, it's still hard for me to refuse friend invites that make their way into my personal account. However, the majority of the responses I received disagreed with this approach. Matt Hall (@mattwiter) writes that "you simply don't combine the two to begin with ... that is a sure mistake." For Kathy Dabrowska (@_katdee), she says "you can't be ON all the time ... you need a place where marketing yourself is not needed."

In theory I agree that separation is a good thing. With more employers lurking on social profiles and more people oversharing online, it just makes sense to keep some things private. However, the reality is that sometimes the tools make it difficult to split up your networks. Here are five tips to help you get closer.

1. Use different networks for different purposes

Jon Lax (@jonlax) uses LinkedIn for business and Facebook for personal. This seems to be a pretty safe and standard approach for a lot of people. After all, LinkedIn just doesn't lend itself to the more personal information that is expected on Facebook. If you do this, it's important to warn people in your professional life who are expecting to be accepted as a Facebook friend. In other words, let them know gently that LinkedIn is where your like to do business.

2. Create a Facebook personal profile AND brand page

Mike Frey is a fan of separation, so he maintains a private account and a company page. This way it's clear that the latter is for professional networking only. To create a public page simply go to the Pages section on Facebook. You have the option to create a page as a Business, Company, Public Figure, Brand, or Community Cause. One thing to note, until you have 25 fans you cannot get a custom URL for your page (an important part of your overall branding).

3. Push your business contacts to Twitter

Maury Estabrooks (@maurye) thinks using Twitter as a professional networking tool and Facebook for personal relationships is ideal. Since Twitter works best as a public forum, this is a solid approach. The only downside to this option is that your tweeting profile lacks the infrastructure to expand on your business information and history, so it's limited as a professional tool.

4. Tweak Facebook privacy settings

Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCat) believes that toying with your settings on the world's number one social network will help you to maintain separation. With these new-ish Facebook options you are able to decide which group of friends sees what. To do this go into your Privacy Settings and adjust the options within "Sharing on Facebook." This way you can adjust who can see what.

5. Take your private life offline altogether

As Chris McLachlin wrote me on Facebook, we have given up a lot of our privacy already. He mentions that everything we share is in the "public domain," so people might as well get used to it or limit what they say. Out of the above tips, I most closely agree with this statement. While I have a personal Facebook account, I never share any photos there that I wouldn't be comfortable showing publicly. I also refuse to broadcast my phone number or address with anyone, and I more or less just assume that privacy settings won't help me that much if someone in my network decides to breach my trust.

Read more Work Smart:

Original Page: http://www.fastcompany.com/1754431/5-tips-to-separate-personal-professional-life-online

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LinkedIn slashes cookie lifespan after research exposes security flaws • Th

2011-06-04T18:40:00.001-07:00

LinkedIn slashes cookie lifespan after research exposes security flaws

by John Leyden, theregister.co.uk
May 24th 2011 12:29 PM

LinkedIn said it would reduce the persistence of cookies it uses to identify users of the business-focused social networking site following the discovery of security issues with the site that create a possible means for fraudsters to hijack profiles.

Security researcher Rishi Narang discovered that LinkedIn session cookies are transmitted over an unsecured HTTP connection even in cases where users follow the option of signing in over a secure (SSL) connection. These cookies remain active for up to a year. Hackers who captured these cookies, perhaps using a tool such as Firesheep to sniff out cookies transmitted over open Wi-Fi connections, would be able to obtain unauthorised access to other users' accounts.

The LEO_AUTH_TOKEN cookie grants access to an associated account irrespective of whether or not users are logged in at the time, Narang warns. These cookies work for up to a year or until a user changes their password and logs in using this new password, generating a fresh authentication token. LinkedIn boasts more than 100 million registered users, a factor that inevitably makes it of interest to miscreants.

In response to the research, LinkedIn reduced the persistence of the authentication cookie from a year to three months. In addition, the business-focused social network is extending plans to support SSL across its site – not just during logins, as explained in a statement below.

Whether you are on LinkedIn or any other site, it’s always a good idea to choose trusted and encrypted Wi-fi networks or VPNs whenever possible. If one isn't available, we already support SSL for logins and other sensitive web pages.
Now, we are accelerating our existing plans to extend that SSL support across the entire site on an opt-in basis. And, we are going to reduce the lifespan of the cookies in question from 12 months to 90 days.

LinkedIn takes the privacy and security of our members seriously, while also looking to deliver a great site experience, and we believe these two changes will allow us to strike that balance.

More details of Narang's research, including sample codes and a two-part video of the exploit in action, can be found in a blog post here. ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/24/linkedin_cookie_vuln/

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Dropbox Drops the Ball on Security?

2011-06-04T18:39:00.003-07:00

Dropbox Drops the Ball on Security?

by David Scott, it.toolbox.com

Oh oh – a report regarding Dropbox and security has me, and many others, concerned. I use Dropbox for personal as well as business considerations.

First, for the uninitiated: Dropbox is a handy, free, enablement that grants users the quick and efficient share of files. In fact it’s almost too easy. Think of it as storage in The Cloud and synchronization of content between authorized bodies.

In most cases, one simply opens Dropbox by double-clicking its icon: It then opens in an Explorer window. On the left is your computer’s directory tree, with Dropbox being open. On the right are folders and files within Dropbox.

Sharing is simple and straightforward – you can drag-and-drop files into Dropbox’s subfolders, and any and all specific people who are in the share network for that folder will have access to that file within seconds. You can also copy-and-paste files.

As in any endeavor, security reigns supreme. In the course of my own consulting, I have to advise clients who are working on sensitive material, laboring within the discipline known as Obligation of Confidentiality: Thus potential for exposures – breaches – simply cannot be tolerated.

So, where does the problem lie? According to Christopher Soghoian, security researcher, University of Indiana Ph.D., and former Federal Trade Commission researcher, Dropbox has made an active deception to users about its level of encryption. According to Mr. Soghoian, Dropbox does encrypt all files, however – because Dropbox is doing the encrypting, the keys for both encrypting and decrypting are also stored. In storing those keys, Dropbox, and by extension its employees, has the ability and means to decrypt files. In this case, because inside employees can reverse this encryption, it marks a violation of best industry practices.

Soghoian writes that the company is not being forthright about this liability, and if all of this is true, this represents a misrepresentation of Dropbox’s service given the diminished security posture.

Mr. Soghoian also writes, "Dropbox has and continues to make deceptive statements to consumers regarding the extent to which it protects and encrypts their data. Dropbox's customers face an increased risk of data breach and identity theft because their data is not encrypted."

Whether true, it is clearly Soghoian’s opinion that Dropbox has infringed Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act through deception.

There is a “work around” of sorts for any potential Dropbox encryption liabilities. Encrypt your files yourself, prior to “drop.” However, be aware that other users who are authorized to share those files must have the means to decrypt on their devices, whether PC, Mac, or mobile.

Stay safe out there.

NP: You Go to my Head, Art Pepper - Jazz24.org

Original Page: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/eculture/dropbox-drops-the-ball-on-security-46203

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Run Hypervisors on Bare Metal Thanks to MokaFive - ReadWriteCloud

2011-06-04T18:39:00.001-07:00

Run Hypervisors on Bare Metal Thanks to MokaFive

by Klint Finley, readwriteweb.com
May 25th 2011 6:01 AM

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the white paper about how Intel Xeon processors help organizations get unprecedented levels of performance.

Today MokaFive announced the release BareMetal, a new hypervisor that runs on, well, bare metal. That is, BareMetal serves as both host OS and hypervisor. It requires only 2GB of RAM and a 64-bit CPU.

This approach has two main benefits: 1) Every machine in the BareMetal fleet can be managed from a single console since the host OS has been cut out. 2) Powerful virtual machines can be run from lower end equipment.

When the product was first announced last year, the company told The Register that it was based on a popular Linux distribution, but wouldn't disclose which one. The company has essentially taken an existing Linux distro and ripped everything out of it that wasn't required to make the hypervisor run.

Citrix also offers a bare metal virtualization platform called XenClient, but it requires a system with Intel vPro in order to run.

BareMetal reminds me of the Mirage kernal, a custom kernal designed for cloud computing. Instead of running a hypervisor on bare metal, Mirage attempts to cut the unnecessary fat out of a virtual stack. If your running a virtual server, do you really need all those hardware drivers?

Which makes me wonder - what if you ran Mirage on the BareMetal hypervisor? Combining these approaches could eventually lead to some very lean systems.

MokaFive, best known for its MokaFive Suite product, has focused on providing solutions for client-side virtualization instead of server-side virtualization. According to The Register, MokaFive licenses technology from VMware, and based its original image packaging system on VMware Player. MokaFive's images, called LivePCs, are compatible with VMware player.

Our previous coverage of the company is here.

Tell us about your road to the cloud and win a MacBook Air with an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor. This month's question:

Original Page: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/05/run-hypervisors-on-bare-metal-thanks-to-mokafive.php

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Silent Film App Can Make You a Techie Charlie Chaplin

2011-05-20T17:59:00.003-07:00

Silent Film App Can Make You a Techie Charlie Chaplin

by Christina Bonnington, wired.com
April 8th 2011

Nothing adds nostalgia to a just-taken iPhone video like retro visual effects and silent film-inspired title cards.

The Silent Film Director app for iPhones can transform any video you take into a ’60s-style home movie or a 1920s-esque silent film, taking that Instagram effect and amping it up a few notches.

The app is available in Standard and Pro versions. With the Standard version, you can record or upload video and render it with a variety of video effects (including Black & White, ’70s Home Video and Sepia), add a soundtrack (default, or your own), and adjust the playing speed and quality of the video. With the Pro version, you get additional advanced features like title cards and transitions, and the ability to mix photos and video with separate effects.

The app is pretty straightforward to use. In Standard Mode, you’re taken to a screen that lets you choose the desired effect, quality, soundtrack and time scale, then you can either make or load a video. If, instead, you click on Pro Mode, you can add a project by clicking on the plus sign in the upper right hand corner, or work on a previously started project.

After naming a new project, you can adjust the same properties as Standard Mode, and click Add to start inserting customizable title cards, editable video clips and photos. You can rearrange and edit each section of your video using the Timeline.

I tried out the Pro version of the app with a video taken of me trying out a remote-controlled mechanical chair at a warehouse robot party (yes, I said warehouse robot party).

See Video:

Although I wish the preloaded music options automatically “finished” with a couple closing piano notes at the end, the app is easy to use and a fun way to spruce up some unexciting video footage … or create your silent film opus.

The Silent Film Director App is currently available for $0.99 in the App Store.

Thanks Alex!

Original Page: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/silent-film-director-app/

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DIY: Adjustable Mic Stand From An IKEA Lamp

2011-05-20T17:59:00.001-07:00

DIY: Adjustable Mic Stand From An IKEA Lamp

by Kyle Thibaut, crunchgear.com
April 8th 2011

Having an adjustable mic stand is essential for home recording or podcasting. Those mics are so sensitive that you really have to place them in the right position. Unfortunately, decent articulating mic stands can be expensive. But, if you’re close enough to an IKEA store to buy an IKEA TERTIAL lamp, then you can make your own. It’s as easy as removing the bulb and head of the lamp and attaching a microphone to the end with a microphone mount.

Head over to IKEA Hackers for the how to.

[via Lifehacker]

Original Page: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/08/diy-adjustabl-mic-stand-from-an-ikea-lamp/

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MTbiggie is a DIY Surface for the masses

2011-05-20T17:58:00.001-07:00

MTbiggie is a DIY Surface for the masses (video)

by Terrence O'Brien, engadget.com
April 11th 2011 8:25 PM

Practical or not, there is no denying the nerd-gasm inducing wow factor of Microsoft's Surface. Of course, Surface is expensive -- like, unless you're a millionaire you're probably not buying one for personal use expensive. There are some DIY solutions out there, but designer and developer Seth Sandler has come up with the cheapest and easiest yet. Built from about $400 worth of material (some of which you probably have lying about your home / apartment / dungeon), the MTbiggie brings big-screen multitouch to the masses. Like the hacker's previous homebrew multitouch device, the MTmini, there's nothing particularly difficult to find here. All you need is a couple of chairs, a mirror, a projector, an infrared webcam (which you can easily hack together with some old film negatives and cardboard), a big sheet of paper and an equally large piece of clear acrylic. Just set it all up according to the instructions in the video below and in no time you be finger painting and playing Angry Birds on a screen that dwarfs your iPad -- and possibly your kitchen table, too.

See Video:

Original Page: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/11/mtbiggie-is-a-diy-surface-for-the-masses/

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Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict • The Registe

2011-05-19T13:04:00.001-07:00

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict

by Cade Metz, theregister.co.uk
April 21st 2011 7:02 PM

A jury has found that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google has infringed a patent held by a small Texas-based company and must pay $5m in damages.

In 2006, Bedrock Computer Technologies sued Google and several other outfits – including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL – claiming they infringed on a patent filed in January 1997. The patent describes "a method and apparatus for performing storage and retrieval...that uses the hashing technique with the external chaining method for collision resolution", and the accusation is that companies infringed by using various versions of the Linux kernel on their servers.

At least some of those sued were using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on the back-end. Google apparently uses its own version of Linux across its famously distributed infrastructure.

Bedrock is based in, yes, eastern Texas, a region famously friendly to patent holders. On April 15, an Eastern District jury found that the patent is valid and that Google has intend infringed. Google uses Linux on employee desktops (the so-called Goobuntu flavor) as well as its back-end servers. And since the suit was filed, the company has also used Linux as the basis for its Android and Chrome OS operating systems.

Asked to comment, a Google spokeswoman said: "Google will continue to defend against attacks like this one on the open source community. The recent explosion in patent litigation is turning the world’s information highway into a toll road, forcing companies to spend millions and millions of dollars defending old, questionable patent claims, and wasting resources that would be much better spent investing in new technologies for users and creating jobs."

According to the jury verdict, Google infringed two claims in the patent. The first claim describes an information storage and retrieval system comprising:

a linked list to store and provide access to records stored in a memory of the system, at least some of the records automatically expiring
a record search means utilizing a search key to access the linked list
the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed
a means – utilizing the record search means – for accessing the linked list and, at the same time, removing at least some of the expired ones of the records in the linked list

The second claim also includes a "means for dynamically determining maximum number for the record search means to remove in the accessed linked list of records". The jury found that Google did not provide by a "preponderance of evidence" that these clams were invalid.

Bedrock has also asked for an injunction preventing Google from infringing on its patent, but the court has yet to rule on this. Red Hat has also intervened in the case, asking the Bedrock patent be ruled invalid. ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/21/texas_jury_says_google_infringed_linux_patent/

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Facebook caught exposing millions of user credentials • The Register

2011-05-19T13:03:00.003-07:00

Facebook caught exposing millions of user credentials

by Dan Goodin, theregister.co.uk
May 10th 2011 7:23 PM

Facebook has leaked access to millions of users' photographs, profiles and other personal information because of a years-old bug that overrides individual privacy settings, researchers from Symantec said.

The flaw, which the researchers estimate has affected hundreds of thousands of applications, exposed user access tokens to advertisers and others. The tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user, such as posting messages to a Facebook wall or sending RSVP replies to invitations. For years, many apps that rely on an older form of user authentication turned over these keys to third parties, giving them the ability to access information users specifically designated as off limits.

The Symantec researchers said Facebook has fixed the underlying bug, but they warned that tokens already exposed may still be widely accessible.

“There is no good way to estimate how many access tokens have already been leaked since the release [of] Facebook applications back in 2007,” Symantec's Nishant Doshi wrote in a blog post published on Tuesday. “We fear a lot of these tokens might still be available in log files of third-party servers or still being actively used by advertisers.”

While many access tokens expire shortly after they're issued, Facebook also supplies offline access tokens that remain valid indefinitely. Facebook users can close this potential security hole by changing their passwords, which immediately revokes all previously issued keys.

The flaw resides in an authentication scheme that predates the roll out of a newer standard known as OAUTH. Facebook apps that rely on the legacy system and use certain commonly used code variables will leak access tokens in URLs that are automatically opened by the application host. The credentials can then be leaked to advertisers or other third parties that embed iframe tags on the host's page.

“The Facebook application is now in a position to inadvertently leak the access tokens to third parties potentially on purpose and unfortunately very commonly by accident,” Doshi wrote. “In particular, this URL, including the access token, is passed to third-party advertisers as part of the referrer field of the HTTP requests.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said there is no evidence the weakness has been exploited in ways that would violate the social network's privacy policy, which steadfastly promises: “We never share your personal information with our advertisers.” Facebook on Tuesday also announced it was permanently retiring the old authentication routine.

Doshi, who was assisted by fellow researcher Candid Wueest, said there's no way to know precisely how many apps or Facebook users were affected by the glitch. They estimate that as of last month, almost 100,000 applications were enabling the leakage and that over the years “hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.”

Facebook over the years has regularly been criticized for compromising the security of its users, which now number more than 500 million. The company has rolled out improvements, such as always-on web encryption, although users still must be savvy enough to turn it on themselves, since the SSL feature isn't enabled by default.

As indicated above, all previously issued access tokens can be cleared by changing your Facebook password. Readers who aren't sure if they're affected might want to err on the side of security and update their password now. ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/10/facebook_user_credentials_leaked/

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Apple to support reps: "Do not attempt to remove malware" | ZDNet

2011-05-19T13:03:00.001-07:00

Apple to support reps: "Do not attempt to remove malware"

by Ed Bott, m.zdnet.com
May 19th 2011 7:00 AM

Apple is actively conducting an internal investigation into the Mac Defender malware attack I wrote about yesterday (here and here). An internal document with a Last Modified date of Monday, May 16, 2011 notes that this is an “Issue/Investigation In Progress.”

The document (shown below) provides specific instructions for support personnel to follow when dealing with a customer who has called AppleCare to request help with this specific attack.

There are two different resolution paths, depending on whether the customer says Mac Defender / Mac Security has or has not been installed.

According to this document, if the caller says he or she has not installed the software, the support rep should “suggest they quit the installer and delete the software immediately.” That is followed by this disclaimer:

AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.

If the software is already installed, support personnel are instructed to make sure all security updates have been installed using Software Update. They are then to direct the customer to the “What is Malware?” Help document using Finder. The final step is clear:

Explain that Apple does not make recommendations for specific software to assist in removing malware. The customer can be directed to the Apple Online Store and the Mac App Store for antivirus software options.

Finally, that is followed by these four bullet points.

Important:

Do not confirm or deny that any such software has been installed.

Do not attempt to remove or uninstall any malware software.

Do not send any escalations or contact Tier 2 for support about removing the software, or provide impact data.

Do not refer customers to the Apple Retail Store. The ARS does not provide any additional support for malware.

Apple has not responded to a request for comment on the ongoing Mac Defender attack or this policy.

How do Apple’s competitors handle Windows malware infections?

Microsoft provides free telephone support for security issues to all customers, regardless of whether the software was purchased at retail or as part of a new PC. Microsoft Support Article 129972 (last updated May 17, 2011) contains these instructions:

How to obtain computer virus and security-related support

For United States and Canada

The computer safety team is available for computer virus and for other security-related support 24 hours a day in the United States and in Canada.

To obtain computer virus and security-related support, follow these steps:

Before you contact a support engineer, make sure that you run updated antivirus software and updated spyware removal software on the infected computer.For more information about how to obtain a free computer safety scan, visit the following Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/(http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/) For more information about antispyware software, visit the following Microsoft Web site:http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/spyware/as.mspx(http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/spyware/as.mspx)

Call 1-866-PCSAFETY or call 1-866-727-2338 to contact security support.

For locations outside North America

To obtain computer virus and security-related support for locations outside North America, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=4

A page at Microsoft’s Security TechCenter includes similar information for security professionals.

Dell directs customers to third-party security software partners for removal. It also offers paid malware removal services for $129 (phone) or $229 (in person). The service uses the tag line “No fix. No fee.”

HP provides a similar paid service. “Virus and spyware removal” are included in the services offered with the HP PC Tune-up Service. It’s available for a one-time fee of $99 or a monthly subscription fee of $10.

Original Page: http://m.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apple-to-support-reps-do-not-attempt-to-remove-malware/3362

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Social networks must police kids' profiles, says EC • The Register

2011-05-18T16:20:00.001-07:00

Social networks must police kids' profiles, says EC

by OUT-LAW.COM, theregister.co.uk
April 21st 2011 7:18 AM

Social network sites must ensure that children's profiles are visible only to the child's friends and cannot be found on a search engine, the European Commission has said.

The Commission adopted its stance after a survey (13-page/198KB PDF) found that an increasing number of children were flouting social network age limits to set up their accounts. The survey was funded by the Commission and published by the EU Kids Online network.

EU Kids Online quizzed 25,000 young people across Europe and found that 38 per cent of children aged between nine and 12 have a social network profile. The figure was 77 per cent for children aged between 13 and 16. Most social networks ban children under the age of 13 from having profiles.

"Growing numbers of children are on social networking sites but many are not taking all necessary steps to protect themselves online. These children are placing themselves in harm's way, vulnerable to stalkers and groomers," Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda said.

"All social networking companies should ... immediately make minors' profiles accessible by default only to their approved list of contacts and out of search engines' reach. And those companies that have not yet signed up to the EU's Safer Networking Principles should do so without delay so as to ensure our children's safety," Kroes said.

The Safer Social Networking Principles (19-page/901KB PDF) are self-regulatory guidelines that social network companies can adopt to meet EU safety standards for protecting minors.

Under the Safer Social Networking Principles, companies agree to provide clear, targeted guidance to allow children to navigate their services safely.

They also agree to limit exposure that children have to age-appropriate content and delete underage users from their service. The companies must also give users the tools to adapt privacy settings, block unwanted contact and report inappropriate content, the Safer Social Networking Principles say.

In 2009, 17 major web firms signed up to adopt the guidelines. The Commission shortly plans to publish an evaluation of how successful the guidelines have been implemented by some of those companies that adopted them.

The EU Kids Online survey found that the number of children using social network sites is growing, with many children falsifying their age to meet age limits on the sites.

"Many providers try to restrict their users to 13-year-olds and above but we can see that this is not effective," one of the report authors, Professor Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said.

The survey also found that 27 per cent of children aged between nine and 16 make their social network profiles open to the public to view. Children aged between nine and 12 were no more likely to restrict access to their profiles than the teenagers surveyed, the report said.

"Children are rather more, not less, likely to post personal information when their profiles are public rather than private or partially private. One fifth of children whose profile is public display their address and/or phone number, twice as many as for those with private profiles. It cannot be determined here whether this is deliberate or is because some children struggle to manage the privacy features of their SNS," the EU Kids Online survey report said.

"Around half of the children who use SNS say that they have included at least one of these three things on their SNS profile; their address, their phone number or the name of their school. By far the most common is the name of their school," the report said.

The report also highlighted the problems children face in changing their privacy settings on SNS.

"Just over half of the 11-12 year olds rising to over three quarters of the 15-16 year olds know how to change the privacy settings on their profile. Children’s ability to manage privacy settings vary somewhat by SNS, suggesting differences in design, none of the SNS stands out as particularly successful in providing settings that children can manage," the report said.

"Given its popularity, it is of concern that almost half of the younger Facebook users, and a quarter of the older Facebook users say they are not able to change their privacy settings. Since not all children can manage privacy settings, it is possible that those whose profiles are set to ‘public’ have not done so on purpose," the report said.

The European Commission's reaction to the survey comes on the same day that Ofcom, the UK's media regulator, reported that children's online activity has increased in the past year.

Ofcom conducted a media literacy survey (107-page/500KB PDF) and found that nearly half of parents think their children, aged between five and 15, know more about the internet than they do.

The survey also found that 41 per cent of parents said their children aged between 12 and 15 have access to the internet in their bedroom, which is a rise from 31 per cent in 2009.

OUT-LAW.COM is part of international law firm Pinsent Masons.

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/21/social_networks_must_restrict_kids_profiles_automatically/

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Seth's Blog: The future of the library

2011-05-18T16:19:00.003-07:00

The future of the library

by Seth Godi, sethgodin.typepad.com
May 16th 2011

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I want paper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

Original Page: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library.html

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Librarians fight for a role in a digital world - The Globe and Mail

2011-05-18T16:19:00.001-07:00

Librarians fight for a role in a digital world

theglobeandmail.com | May 16th 2011

In a time before the internet, children gathered among stacks of books arranged according to letters and numbers taped to their spines. There, a wise person known as a teacher-librarian would guide students’ imaginations to far off places through the pages of atlases, encyclopedias and other rare texts.

Today, many Canadian children have never even seen a school librarian and never will. Nova Scotia has none, and the full-time equivalent of just three are left in all of New Brunswick. At least one school board in Ontario hasn’t had a teacher-librarian in 15 years, and numbers have declined in Alberta and British Columbia as well.

Spring is a hard season for bibliophiles, as school boards across the country set their budgets for next school year. In recent weeks at least two Ontario boards have decided to cut library staff.

Teacher-librarians have been among the first to be sacrificed when boards make cuts, and the digital innovations they help students navigate are now being used as the justification for eliminating their jobs, and Canada is bucking an international trend of investing in school libraries.

People for Education, an Ontario advocacy group, will release a special report on the decline of school libraries on Monday.

The study shows that less than 12 per cent of Ontario elementary schools have a full-time librarian, and small communities, particularly in the north, are most likely to go without. Today, barely half have even a part-time librarian, down from 80 per cent in 1997/98.

The group’s concerns are about more than nostalgia: School libraries and librarians have been linked to several measures of student achievement, including standardized test scores and a love of reading. Most studies have come out of the United States and Australia, but Canadian researchers confirmed in 2006 that these benefits transcend borders and remain strong in a post-internet world.

“It’s not surprising that when you’ve got engaged teacher-librarians, they’re going to engage the students more and the more they engage our children the better they learn,” said Donald Klinger, the Queen’s University professor who led the new study.

What did surprise Prof. Klinger was the strength of the association between students’ performance on standardized tests and the presence of school librarians: His study showed scores were boosted by as much as 8 per cent.

Reasoning that digital records can replace teacher-librarians is backward, according Roger Nevin, a high school librarian in Peterborough, Ont. He said that he and his colleagues are on the front lines explaining the limitations of Wikipedia, protecting online student privacy and preventing cyber-bullying.

“A lot of people don’t realize their kids’ library is very different from when they went to school,” said Mr. Nevin, who is also the president of the Ontario School Librarian Association. “Two-thirds of my job now is dealing with technology.”

The OSLA decided at a recent emergency meeting to begin surveying and counting its membership. Part of the problem is that a lack of research and federal oversight in education gives only glimpses of their dwindling numbers.

“The role of the teacher librarian has not been well understood across the country, and it’s very hard to make a case for a position for which you don’t have very clear guidelines, policies and expectations,” said Dianne Oberg, a professor at the University of Alberta whose research focuses on school libraries.

In April, declining enrolment forced the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board in southern Ontario to make up a projected $8-million to $10-million reduction in provincial funding. Trustees voted to lay off 16 secretaries, several teachers, and nearly all 39 library technicians. At the same time, Peterborough’s Catholic school board, east of Toronto, also said it is cutting library staff.

“We have to get past the old concept, the old tradition of what libraries used to be...” said Cathy Geml, associate director of education for the WECDSB. Books quickly become outdated and inaccurate, and the board is focusing its resources on internet research.

“We have people in various capacities in the secondary schools that are teachers and administrators who could support and teach digital literacy throughout the day.”

But that’s exactly what teacher-librarians are supposed to do, Prof. Oberg said. Since they became a mainstay of public education in the 1960s, teacher-librarians have improved and modernized the classroom.

“It amazes me that we have as a society decided in Canada to pull back on teacher librarians,” said Prof. Oberg. “….While in Europe over the last 10 years, in Norway, in Sweden, in Portugal, Italy, Finland, there have been major national programs for improving school libraries and investing in school libraries as a force for improvement of education.”

Original Page: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/librarians-fight-for-a-role-in-a-digital-world/article2023169/

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Voice mail? That's so last century - Philly.com

2011-05-15T19:01:00.003-07:00

Voice mail? That's so last century

by Daniella Wexler, articles.philly.com
May 16th 2010

The Pew Internet and American Life Project last fall reported that teens were texting five times more often per day than adults. And Nielsen Co. said teens send an average of six texts every hour they're awake. Texting overall jumped 31 percent in 2010, according to CTIA - The Wireless Association.

This may be why an informal survey of 57 people by The Inquirer found a clear generation gap when it comes to voice mail.

More than half of the 35 respondents younger than 35 said they were in no rush to check their voice mail, listening to it only every few hours or days.

Seventy-six percent of those younger than 35 said they favored texts or e-mails, while those older than 55 said they preferred phone calls and voice mail.

"I hate checking voice mails," said one young participant. "Once I accidentally got fired because I missed a voice mail from my boss telling me to come in - got it a week later."

Checking voice mails often requires a separate phone call, which can be a deterrent. Why waste phone plan minutes if you can just return the missed call? IPhones solve the problem by archiving messages so that they can be played back with one touch, but many young people still don't see the point.

Verizon Wireless spokesman Bob Varettoni said his company does not disclose statistics regarding voice-mail usage but noted that text usage had skyrocketed over the last few years, from 9.6 billion texts sent or received by Verizon Wireless customers in the United States during the first quarter of 2006 to 180 billion texts sent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Parents text now, too, if only to keep in touch with their children.

Original Page: http://articles.philly.com/2011-04-22/news/29463387_1_voice-mail-voice-mail-texts-or-e-mails

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Ban on Twitter, Facebook election-night posts draconian

2011-05-15T19:01:00.001-07:00

Ban on Twitter, Facebook election-night posts draconian

by Paula Simons, montrealgazette.com
April 20th 2011

Average Canadians and media outlets who post poll results from the country's East Coast before polls close in B.C. could face fines for "premature transmission" of Elections Canada information.

EDMONTON — Imagine living in a country where the government made it a crime to report on election results, where the state actually imposed a nationwide media blackout to prevent people at one end of the country from knowing how, or whether, people at the other end were voting.

Imagine living in a country where it was illegal for ordinary citizens living in Newfoundland or New Brunswick to post comments about election results on their personal Facebook walls before the polls had closed on Vancouver Island.

Imagine living in a country where you could face a maximum $25,000 fine, or up to five years in prison, for "tweeting" about election results in your region on Twitter without government permission.

It shouldn't be hard. You already live there.

Back in 1938, when radio was king, Canada's election law was amended to include a ban on the "premature transmission" of electoral results across time zones. The idea was to prevent radio broadcasts of election results in Eastern Canada from influencing voter behaviour in the West.

The law, frankly, was always patronizing and paternalistic. There has never been any evidence that voting patterns in the West were, or would be, influenced by results from the East. Even if they were, why should the government deny voters in the West the opportunity to cast their ballots in the most informed way possible?

In 1938 and even 1988, the ban was reasonably enforceable. There were only a handful of national TV and radio broadcasters, and they all followed the law. Newspapers, which couldn't even publish their print editions until the next day, followed the law, too, as a matter of course.

This, though, is 2011, a digital universe in which media consumers expect TV channels and newspaper websites to provide them with live, breaking news in real time. It's a social media universe in which ordinary Canadians are now passionately engaged in talking about politics with people across the country via Twitter and Facebook, where online political and social communities transcend geography.

Yet Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act still prohibits transmitting the results of the vote in any electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the polling stations close in that other electoral district.

That means on May 2, it will be illegal for Postmedia News — or the CBC or Radio-Canada or the Globe and Mail or the National Post or any other national media outlet — to maintain a live website with up-to-date results. At least until after the polls close in B.C.

It will also be illegal for a regional newspaper or broadcaster in Atlantic Canada to put up live web results for their local audience — because then we backwoods westerners might have the temerity to sneak a peak.

It will also be illegal for any citizen, journalist or not, to tweet or blog or post something on a Facebook wall about the election results, until all the polls are shut.

Ordinary citizens aren't immune. In 2000, Elections Canada brought charges against a Vancouver blogger and software designer named Paul Bryan after he dared to publish election results from Atlantic Canada on his small-audience blog. Bryan was fined $1,000. He fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, with major media outlets from across the country joining his battle. It did no good. In 2007, by a vote of 5-4, the court upheld Bryan's conviction, and Section 329.

The four minority judges were passionate in their dissent.

Justice Rosalie Abella, writing for her dissenting colleagues, put it this way: "There is only speculative and unpersuasive evidence to support the government's claim that the information imbalance is of sufficient harm to voter behaviour or perceptions of electoral unfairness that it outweighs any damage done to a fundamental and constitutionally protected right."

The law is even more absurd today, when our country is in the middle of an interactive social media revolution, and when more and more readers get their news not from hard copy "newspapers" but from 24-hour live news sites.

You only have to look back to 2008, when we had our last federal election, to grasp how remarkably our media ecosystem has altered in just 2 1/2 years. Section 329 has been rendered obsolete by new forms of mass communication, forms of media that could hardly have been imagined in 1938.

Realistically, Elections Canada cannot possibly enforce a nationwide ban on premature tweeting or blogging or Facebooking of election results. It's the equivalent of King Canute commanding the sea to go back.

Nonetheless, John Enright, who speaks for Elections Canada, says his agency has no choice but to administer the law as written. Citizens are allowed to phone or text friends, or send private e-mails. But posting to a Facebook wall, to a webpage or to Twitter will be considered a violation.

"The legislation is still on the books, so our role as Elections Canada is to administer the legislation that is before us," says Enright. "If there's a breach of the law, Elections Canada is not going to discriminate between the Mothercorp and Joe Smith down the street."

You have to sympathize, at least a bit, with Elections Canada. Staff there have been given an impossible, ridiculous assignment.

The law may be ridiculous, but Elections Canada bureaucrats didn't write it — and the Harper government didn't fix it, after the 2007 Supreme Court ruling.

Ironically, a decade ago, when blogger Paul Bryan was charged with breaching the act, the National Citizens Coalition was firmly on his side.

"These jackasses at Elections Canada are out of control," said the NCC president, one Stephen Harper, at the time. "The government's law is outdated and just plain wrong."

Harper was right then. Now, his own government's law is even more outdated.

Last week, the CBC and CTV went to court to seek a declaration that Section 329 was unconstitutional, but the court declined to hear their arguments before May 2.

We can only hope that this election will finally prove to the courts that such a news blackout is not only a condescending relic of the 1930s that treats voters like sheep, but also an unenforceable law that criminalizes routine social media conversation and denies Canadians the right to the kind of in-depth, interactive, online news reporting they have come to expect, and undoubtedly deserve.

Original Page: http://www.montrealgazette.com/mobile/iphone/story.html?id=4647769

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Learning To Fly: The Four Stages of Social Business

2011-05-15T18:59:00.001-07:00

Learning To Fly: The Four Stages of Social Business

darmano.typepad.com | Apr 22nd 2011

Time to talk about social business planning again. My mother always told me, you have to "walk before you run" and as it turns out, the same is true for organizations looking to move from social media as a set of un-connected, chaotic collection of skunk work initiatives to a coordinated and purposeful initiative that works through the entire organization. Of course, this will take time—years most likely. But it's inevitable in my estimation. As I've said before—the end game is integration. The above chart is generic—it can be applied to some organizations (especially large ones with a global footprint). If your company wants to learn to fly and integrate a social "layer" into everything you do here are a few thoughts as you plot your own roadmap:

Crawling: People, Process, Procedure
In the initial stage of the evolving your business into one that not only leverages "social media" in one function (such as marketing), an organization must come to the point where it realizes it "has a problem". Then the first stage can begin on the right footing. "Crawling" involves putting in the right infrastructure which includes some organizational re-design. This is when the center of excellence should be formed and where education, standardization and active listening is put in place.

Walking: Managing Your Properties
With some basic infrastructure in place, an organization must now "take stock" of all the social properties which either exist or need to and devise the appropriate strategy to get these properties moving in the right direction. In this stage assets like content are especially important as it's lower risk than really diving in deeply and over-engaging. However, this is also the stage where an organization really defines its engagement strategy across multiple business functions, from employee to customer care to outward marketing and more.

Running: Ecosystem Engagement At Scale
At this stage, an organization has put in the internal and external designs in place and are running multiple social initiatives at a global scale with an established degree of efficiency. Most importantly an organization has evolved into one that can engage with multiple stakeholders to the level that works for its business (regulated industries will have unique challenges here). At the running stage, multiple ecosystems are also connected—for example the process and tools for managing scores of social networks have been formalized.

Flying: Social Innovation & Organizational Integration
Organizations at this stage have not only integrated "social" ito most everything they do—they are using the intelligence to improve their business, create new products and services and can digest data in ways that predict potential future outcomes. Organizations which "fly" have embedded a social mindset into much of what they do and have re-tooled entire business functions. For example, an organization which has completely overhauled its customer service function to work as effectively as it does in channels such as a call center (at scale) are at the flying stage in some degree.

From my experience talking and working with large global brands—very few are even close to flying but most seem to have a desire to get there at some point, understanding that the process will be a long and winding road. I've found this model resonates both at the CMO, CEO and senior management levels. Where do you fall on the spectrum?

Original Page: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2011/04/fly.html

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Bodychecking banned by Ontario hockey body - Ottawa - CBC News

2011-05-15T18:58:00.001-07:00

Bodychecking banned by Ontario hockey body

cbc.ca | May 6th 2011 10:24 AM

Beginning of Story Content

The Ontario Hockey Federation's decision to ban bodychecking will likely draw more players to the game and keep others from dropping out, experts say.

The federation is making the change — which affects players between the ages of six and 21 — in an effort to create a safer environment for new players to develop skills.

"Probably the hottest topic over the course of the winter was concussions and some of the injuries that were occurring in the game," said Tony Martindale, executive director of the Minor Hockey Alliance of Ontario.

"I think the biggest concern is we all have to look at ways of keeping kids in the game longer."

The rule change, which was announced Wednesday, affects house league and select players in most of the province, though Ottawa and Thunder Bay aren't governed by the OHF.

Ottawa house and select leagues are governed by the Ottawa District Hockey Association, while Hockey Northwestern Ontario governs leagues in the Thunder Bay area.

House league includes players of all skill levels while select teams are made up of the top house league players.

York University health professor Alison Macpherson, who was among the first researchers to call for bodychecking to be disallowed in recreational hockey, calls it a great first step.

"I know some parents keep their kids out of hockey, especially out of competitive hockey, because they worry about the injuries that might ensue when kids are allowed to bodycheck," she said Thursday.

Bodychecking debated since 1981

OHF spokesman Phil McKee says parents have been calling on officials to ban bodychecking for years.

"Bodychecking's been a debate at every level for the past 30 years," he said. "It's been discussed since 1981."

Until now parents who wanted their child to play non-contact hockey didn't have many options, said Macpherson.

"There is pretty good scientific evidence that bodychecking, especially under the bantam level (age 13 and 14), leads to injury in youth ice hockey," she said.

A study published last year found kids who were bodychecked were about 2.45 times more likely to suffer an injury than kids who didn't play with body contact and 1.7 times more likely to suffer a concussion, she said.

"Kids are more likely to play if they think they're not going to get hurt," said Macpherson. "Which is great because we have an obesity epidemic."

End of Story Content

Back to accessibility links

Original Page: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/05/06/ont-minor-hockey-bodycheck-ban.html

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Lynx launches social media app

2011-05-08T16:28:00.005-07:00

Lynx launches social media app

by Rosie Baker, marketingweek.co.uk
May 6th 2011

Unilever’s Lynx brand has created an app that aggregates social media content for friends that want to produce a digital record of a get together. .

The Lynx Stream has been developed to aggregate Facebook, Twitter and mobile activity including video and pictures into a combined stream that can be shared via social media the next day.

Users can organise an event and invite friends to participate in the stream. Members can remove or delete content at any point.

Josh Dean, Lynx senior global brand manager says the brand wants to build communities around owned media platforms.

Dean adds: “Unilever is in the business of selling products but also building strong brands. The Lynx Stream is a piece of masterbrand activity - a brand equity driver - it’s not about products.”

The Lynx Stream will also act as a media channel to promote future brand and product campaigns, but Dean maintains that its core function is as a social platform.

The free app launches on iPhone and Android in the UK today (6 May). It was developed by US based agency Razorfish.

The app may be rolled out globally under the Lynx/Axe brand dependent on feedback to the UK pilot.

Unilever doubled its digital investment last year and CMO Keith Weed has previously spoken about mobile as being “exceptionally important” to driving growth for Unilever the business.

The Lynx brand is one of the FMCG company’s most innovative brands in the digital space. It previously used Apple’s iAd platform as its primary media channel for the launch of the Fallen Angels campaign for its new Excite range and an augmented reality experiential campaign using digital billboards to project its “fallen angels” onto the high street.

Original Page: http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/lynx-launches-social-media-app/3026126.article

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Need Some Part Time Work? Use Your iPhone: Tech News and Analysis «

2011-05-08T16:28:00.003-07:00

Need Some Part Time Work? Use Your iPhone

by Ryan Kim, gigaom.com
May 4th 2011 4:00 AM

The iPhone has been quietly taking money out of people’s pockets with its addictive apps. But a new app is looking to put some money back, by turning iPhone users into an on-demand mobile workforce. Gigwalk is launching publicly in the App Store after a six-month beta, offering a way for iPhone users to make up to $1,600 a month doing temporary mobile tasks like collecting and reporting real world data with their phones.

The app allows companies of all sizes to quickly deploy mobile workers that can send back data from the field. Real estate companies can use it to get pictures of properties, product companies can find out if retailers are properly featuring their wares and mapping providers can use it to confirm points of interest or a street name. TomTom, for instance, uses Gigwalk to verify its maps.

Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk, said the iPhone is creating the opportunity to build a purpose-based network where companies can leverage the distribution of all of these phones for business purposes. That in turn can create a new economy that benefits both companies and iPhone users looking for some extra money.

“We’re turning iPhones into a global workforce where businesses can collect real-world data on the ground,” Seidman.

Gigwalk is also announcing a $1.7 million seed round today, with investment from Reid Hoffman of Greylock Discovery Fund, Jeff Clavieer of Softech VC, Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Bill Trenchard of Founder Collective and Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures.

Seidman said Gigwalk — which is available in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Miami — is replacing work that used to go to temp agencies and Craigslist. But the company is not just trying to bring employers and iPhone users together, it’s creating a routing system that uses reputation to deliver jobs to the most proficient nearby Gigwalkers. Gigwalkers can earn anywhere from $3 to $90 or each gig with a $1,600 cap each month. Seidman said Gigwalkers in the beta were often people with seasonal jobs and students.

Seidman said that with its public launch, companies can submit their own gigs without having to coordinate with Gigwalk. He said there are a wide array of applications for this kind of work, giving companies access to a pair of eyes on the street at any time. He expects companies will eventually integrate Gigwalk into their business plans, leaning on its workforce for more and more jobs. Gigwalk wins by taking in a percentage of each job payment.

I think Gigwalk is a cool idea and a logical step for companies already looking to outsource small tasks. Devices like the iPhone are turning into real world sensors that can report back all kinds of data. Why not harness that distributed power and call upon it when you need it? These devices are not just able to capture data but they’re able to report back instantly over wireless networks. It’s a win both for companies needing temporary help and iPhone users looking for a little spending cash. If they’re like me, they could use some more money after all the apps they’ve downloaded.

Original Page: http://gigaom.com/2011/05/04/need-some-part-time-work-use-your-iphone/

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Could this PaperPhone be the future?

2011-05-08T16:28:00.001-07:00

Could this PaperPhone be the future?

by Gloria Si, zdnet.com
May 6th 2011 3:22 AM

Gloria Sin is a New York-based freelance journalist who writes about the tech toys that you can't live without for ZDNet. She has little patience for poorly designed user experiences, and is not afraid of opening the guts of her own machines for repair or hacking her gadgets for new uses.

She has written for FastCompany.com, Popular Science, Olympic News Service; she currently covers the startup scene in the Tri-State area for NYConvergence.com.

Prior to ZDNet, Gloria was the online editor for Dance International, and dabbled in web design and social media consulting. When she is offline, you will find her at an ice rink living out her figure skating dreams. Follow her on Twitter.

Original Page: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/could-this-paperphone-be-the-future/24367

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ICT classes in school should be binned – IT biz body • The Register

2011-05-05T19:13:00.001-07:00

ICT classes in school should be binned – IT biz body

by Lewis Page, theregister.co.uk
April 21st 2011 8:10 AM

Schools should stop teaching ICT lessons in their current form as the subject is failing both pupils and employers, according to trade bod Intellect.

"We believe that ICT in its current form should not be a statutory programme of study," says John Hoggard, Intellect education honcho.

"Takeup of ICT courses is falling – GCSE courses in ICT show a 57 per cent decline in numbers between 2005 and 2010. And the basic ICT skills being generated by the education system are not meeting the needs of pupils or their potential employers. Our member companies tell us that they often have to spend considerable time up-skilling employees as a result of the current ICT teaching," he added.

Intellect and its biz partners believe that the way ahead is to embed basic ICT competency across every subject and teach higher-value computing skills separately. The organisation's response to a recent gov review of the national curriculum says that computing should be a separate subject available to pupils from Key Stage 3 onwards with options to follow a progression path where they learn increasingly more advanced skills. Intellect also says that computing should also be part of the English Baccalaureate.

Intellect's industry partners suggest that apart from advanced computing skills for some and ICT competence for all there is a critical need for general mathematics-based sci/tech knowledge – an area often referred to as STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths).

"STEM skills and a flow of students with those skills are not only crucial to the future success of our business but also to the success of the UK high tech industry," says Tim Hatch of Intel, who is a member of Intellect's education group.

"Intel sees other countries, especially emerging markets, evaluating the skills they need and developing curriculums to match to ensure future growth. It is vital that we develop our advanced computing, STEM and basic ICT skills in the UK to ensure we can compete with these emerging economies and this work needs to begin in our schools."

Intellect argues that interactive and multimedia technology should be used across all lessons, which would help every pupil, no matter what subjects they might later choose to specialise in, to acquire ICT competency. The organisation suggests that tech biz could play a role by supporting training for teachers.

Intellect's document on ICT and computing in schools can be read here (four-page PDF/137KB). ®

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/21/bin_ict_classes/

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Ingenious owner saves Rare Porsche from flood with floating parking spot -

2011-05-05T17:20:00.001-07:00

Ingenious owner saves Rare Porsche from flood with floating parking spot

by GM will bring, jalopnik.com
May 4th 2011 2:00 PM

Matt Hardigree —The owner of what appears to be a rare 964 Porsche 911 saved his car from the floodwaters encroaching his or her property near Louisville, Kentucky with the help of what looks like an inflatable cushion tethered to the house.Update!

April's severe weather wasn't limited to just tornadoes as flooding occurred across large swaths of the country, including in Kentucky along the Ohio River. Given the height of the property above the river, this landowner seems to recognize the threat of flooding. But what of the car?

With a garage on the floor level it looks like this owner went the extra step to make certain his/her pride and joy wasn't destroyed using an inflatable raft tied to the corner of the house (presumably so the 911 doesn't float in the wrong hands).

Exactly what 964 is worth this kind of treatment? Hard to tell from this one aerial shot, but the widebody kit and overall look indicates it could be one of the Porsche America Roadsters, of which only 250 were made. Even if it wasn't, only 702 C2 turbo-look roadsters were ever built.

If anyone knows who owns this car please let us know what it is or if it survived the cresting of the river.

UPDATE: Commenter Estaboga used his Google Earth skills and some information from friends to find the house and points out why the flotation might have been necessary:

I spoke to one of my co-workers who has seen the house firsthand, and he said it sits up a lot higher than what it looks like in the Google Earth image. So one can surmise that the access road through the marina got flooded before he could get the Fly Yellow Cab out, so enter the flotations devices. Well played sir, well played.

Well played, indeed. Another reader also points out that the device in question is an inflatable boat lift. Probably built by Air Dock.

Photo: AP

Original Page: http://jalopnik.com/5798604/ingenious-owner-saves-rare-porsche-from-flood-with-floating-parking-spot

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AT&T’s Suitcase Cell Tower Delivers Extra Coverage in a Pinch

2011-05-02T18:01:00.003-07:00

AT&T’s Suitcase Cell Tower Delivers Extra Coverage in a Pinch

by Christina Bonnington, feeds.wired.com
April 25th 2011

Emergencies and natural disasters are when we need reliable communication most — and that’s often the very time that cell towers get swamped and fail us.

In order to prepare for such situations, AT&T has released the Remote Mobility Zone, a kind of impromptu cell tower in a small package that can be quickly deployed after disaster strikes (or when connecting to regular towers just isn’t happening). They can be set up in any area AT&T normally offers coverage, when the service is disrupted for whatever reason.

First is the “Fly Away,” a portable cell tower packed into a suitcase that government and first responders can use to get cell service back to an area quickly. “Fly Away” incorporates a satellite dish that can be mounted on a car or truck and is powered by a generator or some other outside power source. It takes about half an hour to set up, and can support data services (at sub-broadband speeds) and up to 14 calls at once.

The “Fixed-Site Solution” establishes a mounted dish that can be used as a back-up communications system to support up to 100 simultaneous users.

Finally, “Park and Use” is a government-only integrated car system that provides mobile cell service through roof-mounted satellites. Clients of these services can also subscribe to AT&T WIreless Priority Service to ensure that key personnel have access to the network by prioritizing the traffic that passes through.

Hopefully, such solutions will prevent problems like Verizon experienced during the Northeast’s Snow-pocalypse this year, where the carrier dropped at least 10,000 emergency calls. But if these measures aren’t already in place in an area, it could still take hours or days for first responders to reach the site and set up these services.

The personal cell phone towers cost between $15,000 and $45,000 (plus annual fees) and will be available to corporate and government entities.

Remote Mobility Zone [AT&T via Fast Company]

Original Page: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/NAyOsLuM_9A/

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Geely McCar comes with an electric scooter for people who hate walking

2011-05-02T18:01:00.001-07:00

Geely McCar comes with an electric scooter for people who hate walking

by Dana Wollm, engadget.com
April 25th 2011 1:37 PM
Find the use of your legs inconvenient? Behold the Geely McCar, an ultra compact, two-door car that still manages to tuck an electric scooter in the back. Geely, the Chinese company that now owns Volvo, is hoping you'll use it for everything from golfing to navigating urban sprawl to traversing the Mall of America parking lot (and then escorting yourself to the Cinnabon once you're inside). The car itself comes in two versions: an all-electric one with a 12kWh battery that claims up to 93 miles on a charge, and a hybrid iteration that promises up to 31 miles on just electric power and 373 on a mix of gas and electricity. The scooter, meanwhile, can last up to 18 miles -- and be swapped out for a wheelchair for people with disabilities. Since debuting at the Shanghai Auto Show, there's been no word on whether the McCar will ship stateside, why this arrangement beats packing your own scooter -- or how much McDonald's loathes that name.

Original Page: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/geely-mccar-comes-with-an-electric-scooter-for-people-who-hate-w/

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Facebook

2011-05-02T17:58:00.001-07:00

Facebook & Video Chat App for PlayBook Coming in May

by Stan Schroeder, mashable.com
May 2nd 2011

A native Facebook app and a video chat app for BlackBerry PlayBook are coming in May, RIM has announced.

The Facebook app will offer all the standard Facebook bells and whistles, including viewing and adding friends, managing friend requests, browsing through profiles and interacting with wall posts and photos. Uploading and managing videos and photos should be easy, and if you connect the PlayBook to an HDTV you’ll be able to see them in full 1080p glory. Finally, news feed management and interaction as well as chat will also be included.

Video chat will work on Wi-Fi connected PlayBooks, offering one-click video and voice calls, incoming call notifications, as well as in-app friends list and call log. The app will enable users to switch cameras from front to rear (if you want to show someone what you’re seeing), preview their video image before placing the call, as well as turn audio and video on and off as needed.

Both apps will be showcased this week at the BlackBerry World 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida.

Original Page: http://mashable.com/2011/05/02/facebook-video-chat-playbook/

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Article: Will Tablets Spawn New Use Cases?

2011-04-29T22:12:00.001-07:00

Will Tablets Spawn New Use Cases?
http://gigaom.com/mobile/will-tablets-spawn-new-use-cases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+jkOnTheRun+%28GigaOM%3A+Mobile%29

Mobile

Will Tablets Spawn New Use Cases?

By Dr. Phil Hendrix Apr. 15, 2011, 10:30am PT

Five years ago, which seems like a lifetime in mobile, as part of a survey for a mobile operator we at Institute for Mobile Markets Research (IMMR) asked consumers to rank applications for which they were likely to use smart phones. Among the options, “program your DVR” was ranked near the bottom of a long list of then nascent applications. When our teenage son recently got a new iPad, imagine my surprise, then, when he discovered on the first day that he could use the iPad to program the DVR in our den. While initially impressed, we were less thrilled when from another part of the house he changed the channels on the TV we were watching.

Anticipating how new technologies will be used, especially new form factors such as tablets, is difficult. As the tablet market grows beyond early adopters, tracking actual and expected uses over time will be important. Data from the recent IMMR tablet study with a national sample (n = 1,014) show how individuals expect to use tablets, which in turn influences the various tablet hardware models and features they are apt to purchase.

imgimgimgimg

Article: Eye-Fi launching new 8GB wireless SD card today, kicking out Direct Mode for iOS and Android next week

2011-04-27T18:25:00.003-07:00

Eye-Fi launching new 8GB wireless SD card today, kicking out Direct Mode for iOS and Android next week
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/12/eye-fi-launching-new-8gb-wireless-sd-card-today-kicking-out-dir/

Eye-Fi launching new 8GB wireless SD card today, kicking out Direct Mode for iOS and Android next week

By Sean Hollister posted Apr 12th 2011 3:00AM

imgimgimgimg

Article: Judges Who Are Hungry, Fatigued More Likely to Deny Parole

2011-04-27T18:25:00.001-07:00

Judges Who Are Hungry, Fatigued More Likely to Deny Parole
http://www.good.is/post/judges-who-are-hungry-fatigued-more-likely-to-deny-parole/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+good%2Flbvp+%28GOOD+Main+RSS+Feed%29

Culture

Judges Who Are Hungry, Fatigued More Likely to Deny Parole

Cord Jefferson
Senior Editor

See Gallery

April 12, 2011 • 5:00 am PDT

“Hangry,” a portmanteau of “hungry” and “angry,” is defined by the Urban Dictionary as being “when you are so hungry that your lack of food causes you to become angry, frustrated or both.” Anyone who’s missed lunch during a busy day can probably relate—you’re irritable, tired, and scatterbrained, and the last thing you should be doing is making really important decisions. Unfortunately, according to new science, it turns out some judges are working while hangry—otherwise known as having low blood sugar—and people’s lives are being changed irrevocably because of it.

Columbia Business School associate professor Jonathan Levav recently combed through more than 1,100 parole hearings for inmates from four Israeli prisons. Eight judges presided over the hearings in a 10-month time period.

A parole judge’s day consisted of three sections split up by one morning snack break and one break for lunch. The judges could decide when to take their breaks, but they couldn’t decide in what order they’d hear cases, which was determined arbitrarily according to when a prisoner’s lawyer arrived.

Levav discovered that at the beginning of the day, judges paroled prisoners about 65 percent of the time, a number that then gradually dropped to almost zero until a break. After the food break, the judges immediately began paroling prisoners about 65 percent of the time again.

Amazingly, says Levav, the severity of the crime and time already served didn’t sufficiently correlate to the likelihood of parole. Instead, he hypothesizes that tired judges are simply choosing the easiest option: Denying parole.

“The work shows the consequences of mental fatigue on really important decisions even among excellent decision-makers,” Levav told Nature magazine. “It is really troubling and quite jarring—it looks like the law isn’t exactly the law.”

In other words, if you plan on leading a life of crime, it couldn’t hurt to carry a few Snickers bars around, just in case.

Article: New Study Finds Solar Panels Are "Contagious"

2011-04-27T18:24:00.001-07:00

New Study Finds Solar Panels Are "Contagious"
http://www.good.is/post/new-study-finds-solar-panel-installations-are-contagious/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+good%2Flbvp+%28GOOD+Main+RSS+Feed%29

Environment

New Study Finds Solar Panels Are “Contagious”

Ben Jervey
Contributing Editor, Environment

See Gallery

April 11, 2011 • 4:00 pm PDT

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Article: That AP Class You Took Might Have Been a Fraud

2011-04-27T18:23:00.001-07:00

That AP Class You Took Might Have Been a Fraud
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Education

That AP Class You Took Might Have Been a Fraud

Liz Dwyer
Education Editor

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April 27, 2011 • 7:30 am PDT

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DIY: how to make a digital film cassette - Photofacts

2011-04-25T20:27:00.001-07:00

DIY: how to make a digital film cassette

photofacts.net | Apr 23rd 2011 11:42 PM

Last week we wrote about a digital film cassette you can buy from an Etsy user. In the comments Vincent posted a link to a DIY tutorial to make your own. Inspired by the idea I bought myself a compact USB stick and decided to try it myself. Here you can find my own step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own USB film cassette!

The main reason for trying it myself was the offered capacity of the USB devices. 2 or 4 gigabyte is hardly enough nowadays. Why not make it a 16 gigabyte USB drive? USB Sticks are cheap, you can get a compact Sandisk USB stick for less than 20 Euros (or dollars). I opted for a 16 gigabyte Sandisk Cruzer Blade.

An important aspect to look at when buying a USB stick for this purpose is of course its physical size. It has to fit in a film cassette and therefore it has to be small. The Sandisk Cruzer Blade is just that; very small. I could even have been a bit longer, but it worked out just fine.

I found some old films lying around at home. Among them was an old Ilford black and white film. As the film cassette is something you'll be looking at and showing to others I decided to use this one; it has the best looks.

How To

Below you'll find the steps I did to create my own digital USB film cassette. To be honest, I did ruin two cassettes before I was happy with the end result. So don't start out with your best looking film cassette, but practice first on some other cassettes.

What you need
- Film cassette
- Compact USB stick (like the Sandisk Cruzer Blade)
- Corkscrew or bottle opener
- A pair of pliers
- A pair of scissors
- black tape

Step 1; remove the bottom
The first step is to remove the bottom of the cassette. The bottom is a metal plate that is clamped to the cassette. You can remove it by using the point of the corkscrew to gently pull the edges of the bottom plate. Pull several times on different locations to remove it without damaging it.
As soon as you've removed the bottom you can press on the top part that is sticking out. This way you're pushing all of the contents of the film cassette out. You'll be left with an empty shell. Keep the other parts too, you'll need them later.

Step 2; widen the hole
This is the most tricky part of the process. The hole that is left on the top of the cassette isn't big enough to fit an USB connector through it. You'll have to widen it, but be careful not to damage the rest of the top plate.

I've used a pair of pliers to do this. Make sure that it doesn't make a gap that is too big. Ideally it would be as thick as the USB connector is. Put the pair of pliers in the hole and gently create a gap without damaging the rest. It's wise to make a small gap on both sides so the USB drive will end up nicely in the middle.

Step 3; tape up the USB drive
The Sandisk USB drive I've used is black with red details. When you finish up the digital cassette, you'll notice the red parts when you look into the hole at the top of the cassette. Although not necessary, I'd recommend to do something about this.

A simple solution is to use black tape to hide the red parts with. When you use black, you won't notice the USB drive that embed into the cassette. If you already have an USB drive that has a dark color, you can skip this step.

Step 4; putting it back
Insert the USB drive into the gap you've made by entering it through the open bottom end. Make sure there is enough of the USB connection part sticking out of the film cassette. You'll want to be able to use the drive also.

Remove the film from the plastic reel. You can use the film to make sure the USB drive will stay in its place. Wrap the film tightly around your finger and then put it back into the canister. If you want you can leave the start of the film out, it will be just like an unused film.

Step 5; putting the bottom back
When you've got everything back into the cassette, you can close it up. To finish it off, you can fill up the empty bit below the USB drive with the end of the reel.

Using a pair of scissors you can cut up the reel. Put it into the cassette and lock it with the metal bottom. It might take some work to get the bottom back on perfectly.

Original Page: http://www.photofacts.net/photography/topic/tutorials/diy_how_to_make_a_digital_film_cassette.asp

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Wanted: A Practical Laptop Pedestal

2011-04-25T20:26:00.001-07:00

Wanted: A Practical Laptop Pedestal

by BY Chris Danne, fastcompany.com
April 20th 2011

If the sight of anything flat-packed makes your skin crawl, then you've definitely been the victim of at least one heavier-than-it-looks Ikea bookshelf. But fear not, genteel reader: the A-stand arrives looking like a model car (Ages 4+, we'd say) not a masochistic Sunday afternoon. Made from standard-sized PVC piping and joints, the A-Stand is rugged, practical, and light: perfect for those rough-and-tumble office rats who care secretly about ergonomics. It's so simple, in fact, it'll make you wonder why it took some Danish guy with a PhD to design it. And why it's $70. But hush--it's European. Comes in black, white, and (our favorite) yellow.

Available now from aiaiai.dk for DKK 400 ($70 USD).

Want more WANTED?

Follow FastCompany on Twitter @fastcompany or the author @chrisdannen.

Original Page: http://www.fastcompany.com/1748885/wanted-a-practical-laptop-pedestal

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Use Plasti Dip to Fix Stripped Headphone Wires [Clever Uses]

2011-04-25T20:25:00.001-07:00

Use Plasti Dip to Fix Stripped Headphone Wires

by Alan Henry, lifehacker.com
April 24th 2011

— There's no reason to say goodbye to a good pair of headphones just because the wires are starting to separate from the headphone casing. With a dash of Plasti Dip, a small paintbrush, and a little time, you can seal up your headphone cables like new.

Good headphones don't have to go in the trash just because the headphone cables have started to detach from the headphone body. You also don't have to resort to the old "wrap it up with electrical tape" trick, which may shield the cables but it doesn't actually solve the problem.

Over at Instructables, all it takes to save a good pair of headphones is a can of Plasti Dip, and a little time, and you can re-seal stripped headphone wires with a firm seal that won't break again anytime soon.

Just pour the Plasti Dip into a plastic cup or Tupperware container, and either submerge the part of your headphone wires that's stripped, or use a small paintbrush to brush the liquid plastic around the area where the cable has started to pull away from the headphone assembly and reveal the wire beneath. Smooth it out with a toothpick, and let dry. Re-apply as many coats you think you need.

After a few coats, you should have a thick plastic seal that looks and feels the way your headphones did when they were new. If your headphones are cheaper than the can of Plasti Dip, it may not be worth it, but if you have a particularly nice pair or a pair that you really like, this could be the way to save them if you'd rather repair them. Photo by StumpChunkman.

Original Page: http://lifehacker.com/5795266/use-plasti-dip-to-fix-stripped-headphone-wires

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No, iPhone location tracking isn't harmless and here's why • The Register

2011-04-23T10:05:00.001-07:00

No, iPhone location tracking isn't harmless and here's why

by Dan Goodin, theregister.co.uk
April 22nd 2011 12:51 AM

Analysis It didn't take long for the blogosphere to pooh pooh research presented on Wednesday that detailed a file in Apple iPhones and iPads unknown to the vast majority of its users that stored a long list of their time-stamped locations, sometimes with alarming detail.

On Thursday, a forensics expert who sells software to law enforcement agencies gave a first-hand account why scrutiny of the location-tracking database is crucial. We'll get to that in a moment. But first, let's take a sampling of the rampant naysaying.

The most common criticism was that the contents of the SQLite file, which is stored on the phone and on any computer backups, were wildly imprecise. Blogger and web developer Will Clarke, for instance, used the researchers' freely available software to map the coordinates gathered by his own iPhone during a recent round-trip bike tour he took from Philadelphia to New Jersey. When he compared the results to the actual route, he found that “almost all the points were way off.”

In an interview with The Reg, he said some of the points on the resulting map were as much as 3,000 meters, or almost two miles, away from his true location.

“The data that is exposed basically reveals which city you were in at a given time,” he concluded in a post that called the research “sensational.” “Nothing more specific than that. It can't tell what house you live in, it can't tell what route you jog on, nothing like that.”

He went on to conclude: “Apple is not storing the device's location, it's storing the location of the towers that the device is communicating with.”

Software analyst David “Lefty” Schlesinger found similar inaccuracies when he used the database contents of his iPhone to plot a train ride he took in July from Amsterdam to Den Haag, about 60 kilometers away. He also found that the iPhone file showed he was in Santa Cruz, California, on Christmas Day and traveled as much as 80 miles, when in fact he stayed in the state's Central Valley, some 130 miles away, the entire day.

Like several other bloggers, he also noted huge inconsistencies in the time intervals that locations were logged. Sometimes iPhones and iPads went days without updating the database, and on one occasion went almost two weeks.

The critics make a valid point that the data stored in the consolidated.db file hardly contains a historical record of a user's real-time comings and goings, or a user's every move, as incorrectly suggested in initial coverage from The Register and many other news sites. Researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan readily acknowledge that they have yet to figure out what triggers iDevices to log location details, but it's not unusual for hours or even weeks to occasionally pass between entries.

They said they have noted one or two grossly inaccurate locations logged in the database. One region that seems to regularly pop up in files stored on multiple phones is an area just outside of Las Vegas. Allan said the database extracted from his iPhone and the iPhones of several people he knows logged that Nevada city even though none of the owners were anywhere near it on the date indicated in the corresponding timestamp.

Las Vegas also incorrectly showed up on the iPhones of Clarke and a co-worker of his, suggesting the iOS code that logs locations may be buggy.

“We both have the exact same data point in Vegas, and neither of us have been,” he said.

Warden and Allan said their reverse engineering exercise made it impossible to learn the precise way the logging works, but they insist the conclusion of their research is still correct: The contents of the consolidated.db file stored on every iDevice and on any computer containing a backup of its data contains a “scary amount of detail on our movements.”

“By inspecting it, I can tell what part of downtown San Francisco I'm in, I can see that I'm in a particular neighborhood,” Warden said.

Added Allan: “It's a bit above block level, but it can certainly tell that I'm in north east Manhattan, or south east Manhattan.”

They said the precise latitude and longitude plotted on a map is accurate to about 500 meters in areas where there are many cellphone nodes and as much as 4 kilometers with fewer nodes.

“It really does seem to be dependent on how good your cell coverage is,” Allan said. “If you're in a big city like downtown San Francisco, the positioning is going to be much better. If you're in the middle of London, the positioning is going to be much better. If you're in a rural or semi-rural area, your positions are going to be much rougher.”

They also refuted Clarke's assertion that the latitude and longitude coordinates logged in the database referred to the position of cell towers rather than the Apple devices themselves. Some of the extracted databases they examined plotted literally thousands of unique coordinates in a small part of a single city. It's almost impossible that there could be that many corresponding nodes in such a confined area, they said.

What's more, the geographic locations of cell towers is usually kept secret by the carriers who own them, and there's no clear way an iPhone would be able to detect its longitude and latitude anyway.

“Our current stance is that this is the position of the device,” Allan said. “There has to be now or very soon a big public debate about location data and privacy. This (research) might be something that helps kick that debate off.”

Next page: Cops already tapping consolidated.db predecessor

Original Page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/22/apple_iphone_location_tracking_analysis/

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VMware disrupts with open source PaaS play

2011-04-23T10:04:00.001-07:00

VMware disrupts with open source PaaS play

by Robert Scoble View, scobleizer.com
April 13th 2011

Yesterday I attended VMware’s Cloud Foundry announcements. More on those announcements over at Techmeme. If you’re a developer it’ll be hard to miss what VMware’s doing here. It’s very significant and means a lot to a group of companies, from Amazon, Google, Microsoft on one side and Rackspace and Salesforce on another. We’re all trying to figure out what it means for us, because they now are hosting apps (new competition for Rackspace, which is where I work!)

I’m excited by what VMware’s doing. Why? Because it’s open source. Listen to VMware co-president Tod Nielsen, who tells me what it means.

See Video:

Yes, we’re seeing new competiton, but we expected that when we released our cloud stack to open source (we knew we were empowering our competitors with our own code. How scary!) So, how will Rackspace compete? On service. See, most companies don’t have geeks who know what node.js is. They’ll need a partner to help them get their businesses online and up to date. The hosting and app platforms are quickly turning into commodities so service is one of the areas that will really matter.

Thanks to VMware for inviting me over yesterday, quite interesting announcements!

The rest of this article is reprinted with permission from Rackspace’s Building43:

This week, VMware introduced a major new PaaS called Cloud Foundry. The project is available as open source software, and it provides a platform for building, deploying and running cloud apps.

“The value proposition for Cloud Foundry is it’s the first real open PaaS, or platform as a service,” explains Tod Nielsen, Co-President of the Application Platform Group at VMware. “And by open we mean we’re going to support multiple frameworks—be it Ruby, Java, Node.js—we’re going to support a whole set of services as well as any cloud. By any cloud, we’re actually going to offer to host a service ourselves, we’re going to work with folks like Rackspace and allow you to offer Cloud Foundry as a service that you’ll provide, and there’ll be a behind the firewall version that enterprises can run in their private cloud. Then we have something we call the Micro Cloud, which instantiates Cloud Foundry onto your lap top so developers can write code themselves, and then they can push to whichever cloud option they choose.”

Because the project is open source, it does not restrict developer choices of frameworks, application infrastructure services and deployment clouds. “The challenge with the cloud today…” says Nielsen, “is it feels like the Hotel California—you get into one cloud and then you get trapped and you can’t get out. If the industry is really going to let this paradigm take it to the next level, it’s got to be open. It’s got to provide the flexibility and freedom for developers and corporations to deploy where they want and when they want and move things around as necessary.”

Cloud Foundry aims to allow developers to remove the cost and complexity of configuring infrastructure and runtime environments for their applications and focus on the application logic.

“One of the things that developers complain about today,” explains Nielsen, “is if they’re in a corporation, to actually get an application deployed requires all kinds of work to provision a server, provision a database, provision middleware, make sure it’s all set up, coordinate with the operations team and write IT tickets. We had one developer say, ‘it’s like I spend all my time writing IT tickets’. The value proposition for Cloud Foundry is we want to help you write code, not tickets.”

Original Page: http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/13/vmware-disrupts-with-open-source-paas-play/

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Let’s move tweeting off Twitter

2011-04-23T10:03:00.001-07:00

Let’s move tweeting off Twitter

blogs.law.harvard.edu | Apr 19th 2011

Blogging, emailing and messaging aren’t owned by anybody. Tweeting is owned by Twitter. That’s a problem.

In all fairness, this probably wasn’t the plan when Twitter’s founders started the service. But that’s where they (and we) are now. Twitter has become de facto infrastructure, and that’s bad, because Twitter is failing.

Getting 20,500,000 Google Image search results for “twitter fail” paints a picture that should be convincing enough. (See Danny Sullivan‘s comment below for a correct caveat about this metric.) Twitter’s own search results for “hourly usage limit”+wtf wraps the case. I posted my own frustrations with this the other day. After Eric Leone recommended that I debug things by going to https://twitter.com/settings/connections and turning off anything suspicious, I found the only sure way to trouble-shoot was to turn everything off (there were about twenty other sites/services listed with dependencies on Twitter), and then turn each one back on again, one at a time, to see which one (or ones) were causing the problem. So I turned them all off; and then Twitter made the whole list disappear, so I couldn’t go back and turn any of them on again.

Meanwhile I still get the “hourly usage limit” message, and/or worse:

So Twitter has become borderline-useless for me. Same goes for all the stuff that depended on Twitter that I turned off.

In that same thread Evan Prodromou graciously offered to help set up my own Status.Net server. I’m going for it, soon as I get back from my week here in Santa Barbara.

Meanwhile, I’m also raising a cheer for whatever Dave is doing toward “building a microblog platform without a company in the middle”.

Tweeting without Twitter. I like the sound of that.

Original Page: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2011/04/19/lets-move-tweeting-off-twitter/

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Our planet Earth on 21 April, 2011 - Ottawa edition

2011-04-20T23:32:00.001-07:00

Our planet Earth on 21 April, 2011 via Living Earth HD http://bit.ly/LEarth

With Schools Turning to the Web for K-12 Education, Quality is a Concern

2011-04-20T19:54:00.003-07:00

With Schools Turning to the Web for K-12 Education, Quality is a Concern

by Terrence O'Brien, switched.com
April 8th 2011

Online courses have become an accepted fact of college life. But more and more school districts are turning to Web-based learning for lower grade levels, especially as a way for struggling high school students to make up courses they've failed or missed. The online classes aren't only for those who have fallen behind, though. Due to budget constraints, some schools are using them to offer advanced placement classes and expand elective offerings. For example, Reza Namin, the superintendent of schools in Westbrook, Maine, told the New York Times that, while she couldn't justify paying a Chinese language instructor in the face of a $6.5 million budget deficit, she was able to continue offering the course by turning to the online, non-profit Virtual High School Global Consortium.

The increasing reliance on digital education programs has drawn criticism from teachers and unions who claim the shift towards online learning is purely budgetary and an effort to pay fewer teachers' salaries. The argument could gain particular traction in Idaho, where a recent bill raided a fund used to pay educators to purchase laptops for every student in the state. The U.S. Department of Education has also expressed skepticism, saying there is little "scientific evidence of the effectiveness" of online classes for K-12 students.

Even some proponents of bringing online classes to high schools are leery of employing them for makeup courses, their most popular use. Schools, particularly those in high-poverty areas, are turning to the Web to increase graduation rates and avoid sanctions. But critics claim standards for these classes, often called "click-click credits," are not comparable to those in a real classroom, and students are simply shuttled through to boost graduation rates. Plagiarism is a particularly troublesome issue, as students often Google answers and copy from Wikipedia.

These concerns, however, have not stopped school districts from jumping on the bandwagon. New York City, Chicago, Memphis, Miami and plenty of others have all invested heavily in online education at both the state and local level. Ultimately, online classes will play a role in K-12 education, and it's all but unavoidable. The question is how policy-makers will manage to balance the needs of students, teachers' jobs and budgetary constraints. While online courses may be cheaper than paying additional full-time teachers, that money is wasted if students fail to receive a decent education. Pushing students out the door using "click-click credits" only adds a burden to colleges, who must invest more heavily in remedial courses after flooding the job market with unskilled labor.

Original Page: http://www.switched.com/2011/04/08/schools-turning-to-the-web-for-k-12-education/

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Teachers, students shouldn't be Facebook friends: report

2011-04-20T19:54:00.001-07:00

Teachers, students shouldn't be Facebook friends: report

cbc.ca | Apr 11th 2011 11:42 AM

Beginning of Story Content

Ontario teachers should not be Facebook friends with students or follow them on Twitter, says a report put out by a top regulatory body.

The recommendation comes in an advisory report released Monday by the Ontario College of Teachers outlining social media guidelines to its 230,000 members.

"We're not suggesting [teachers] shouldn't use Facebook, but we are suggesting that the private profile that students have and exchanges between teacher and students are not appropriate," said Michael Salvatori, registrar and CEO of the college.

The report specifically advises teachers not to accept or initiate Facebook friend requests with students and advises them against following students on Twitter.

Salvatori said electronic communication and social media can offer exciting teaching experiences but there are serious risks of misunderstandings or abuse.

Salvatori said the college is advising teachers to instead use official school board Facebook pages to interact with students as opposed to personal pages. He also suggests teachers use their board emails to correspond with students, and to inform parents if they plan on using social media to connect with students.

The report is just the third advisory the college has issued. It comes as teachers grapple with how to interact and educate students online, said Salvatori.

"The frontiers for learning are being extended through digital communication and we want teachers to engage in that," he said. "But we want them to be able to do it while at the same time maintaining that same professional identity and reputation they do in face-to-face interactions."

Some of the report's other recommendations:

Teachers shouldn't exchange private texts, phone numbers or personal photos with students.
Teachers should regularly monitor privacy settings on social media accounts.
Teachers should avoid online criticisms of students, colleagues or employers.

End of Story Content

Back to accessibility links

Original Page: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/04/11/teachers-facebook-students358.html

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Google invests $168m in world's largest solar power tower plant | Environme

2011-04-20T19:52:00.003-07:00

Google invests $168m in world's largest solar power tower plant

guardian.co.uk | Apr 15th 2011

Google's product portfolio has now expanded from search engine power to solar power.

The company has invested $168 million in a Mojave Desert facility that will become the world's largest solar power tower plant. The site is located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California.

According to gizmag, "the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun's rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall."

Construction on this plant started in October 2010. When finished in 2013, the facility is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy.

Solar power tower development, while less advanced than the more common trough systems, may offer higher efficiency and better energy storage capabilities. Parabolic trough systems consist of parabolic mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a Dewar tube running the length of the mirror through which a heat transfer fluid runs that is then used to heat steam in a standard turbine.

Solar power tower systems such as the ISEGS on the other hand focus a large area of sunlight into a single solar receiver on top of a tower to produce steam at high pressure and temperatures of up to 550 ° C (over 1,000° F) to drive a standard turbine and generator. The ISEGS also uses a dry-cooling technology that reduces water consumption by 90 percent and uses 95 percent less water than competing solar thermal technologies. Water is also recirculated during energy before being reused to clean the plant's mirrors.

According to BrightSource Energy, the plant developer, this will be the first large-scale solar power tower plant built in the U.S. in nearly two decades and will single-handedly almost double the amount of commercial solar thermal electricity produced in the U.S. today and nearly equal the amount of total solar installed in the U.S. in 2009 alone.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System

• A 370-megawatt nominal (392 megawatt gross) solar complex using mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers.
• The electricity generated by all three plants is enough to serve more than 140,000 homes in California during the peak hours of the day.
• The complex will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 400,000 tons per year.
• Located in Ivanpah, approximately 50 miles northwest of Needles, California (about five miles from the California-Nevada border) on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
• The complex is comprised of three separate plants to be built in phases between 2010 and 2013, and will use BrightSource Energy's LPT 550 technology.

Original Page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/15/google-solar-mojave-ivanpah

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How to know when it’s time to downsize your car

2011-04-20T19:52:00.001-07:00

How to know when it’s time to downsize your car

news.consumerreports.org | Apr 15th 2011 8:30 AM

With gasoline prices stretching toward $4 a gallon and beyond, many Americans are thinking about trading in big cars for something a little more fuel-efficient. In a recent poll conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, more than twice as many consumers said they’d choose a small car as their next vehicle, as would choose a small, midsize or large SUV; a minivan; or a pickup.

But there’s a lot to consider before you decide to trade in your old gas guzzler:

How much utility are you willing to sacrifice in the quest for mpg? You might save thousands of dollars a year trading your Suburban for a Subaru, but if you can’t fit everybody in to go on vacation, you’ll likely be miserable and want to trade back as soon as gas prices go back down.

How much gas will you really save? Will the new car really get the mpg you want? We’ve found in our testing that real-world overall mpg (combining city and highway mileage) is often considerably less than the EPA highway mileage figure that manufacturers advertise.

Most importantly, will the money you save on gas make up for the increased depreciation on buying a new car? In our previous analysis, we’ve found that downsizing to a new car rarely pays off, unless you’ve owned your car for several years and were planning on buying a new car anyway.

To really understand the financial impact of trading a car for a smaller model requires understanding the factors that go into cost of ownership more broadly.

Consumer Reports calculates owner costs for every vehicle on the market. The factors that go into our owner cost estimates include:

Depreciation (calculated from CR's Auto Price Service data).

Fuel costs (based on 12,000 miles a year, Consumer Reports real-world overall fuel-economy test results, and our estimate of the national average gasoline price of $3.60 a gallon).

Interest on financing (national average rates from 2005 and 2008, applied to 60-month terms).

Insurance costs (derived from quotes and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety data).

Maintenance and repair (based on survey responses from 675,000 Consumer Reports and ConsumerReports.org subscribers).

Sales tax (based on the national average)

Operating expenses, such as fuel, insurance, maintenance, and repair costs slap you in the face every time you write a check. But the other expenditures, known as carrying costs, are more subtle. They slowly erode the value of the car-and your bank account- over time.

By far the largest cost of owning a car is depreciation, the chief carrying cost. Depreciation accounts for almost half the cost of owning a car over the first five years of ownership, with the biggest hit coming in the first few years. That’s why trading in your car early smacks you a double whammy on depreciation. First, you’ve already paid the biggest chunk of depreciation on your old car. Then, you’ll pay the biggest chunk on your new car, as well.

Fuel costs come in a distant second in the bite they take out of your wallet. But even at $4 a gallon, unless you buy a car with dramatically better fuel economy than your old one, the savings over a typical ownership period can be slim. (See our annual fuel savings by mpg chart for examples.)

Our survey respondents said the median fuel economy they got in their current car is 23 mpg. And our tests show that to save even $500 a year over a 23 mpg car, your choices would be limited to hybrids, diesels, and a handful of small cars that get more than 29 mpg overall.

And that’s the other downside of downsizing. Most small cars that get especially good fuel economy sacrifice space for families and versatility for occasional hauling needs.

In general, trading a vehicle that gets very low mileage for one that does somewhat better will yield greater savings than trading a car that gets decent mileage for a first-class fuel miser. That’s because miles per gallon is not a linear measurement. In annual consumption, the difference between going from a 14 mpg SUV to a 19 mpg SUV will save you more fuel-and money-than going from a 23 mpg car to a 29 mpg car.

So, there’s a lot to consider if you’re thinking about downsizing your car. To help, we’ll look at examples of downsizing that do save you money, some that don’t, and provide a list of vehicles that offer the most utility for the money. Through the series, we’ll provide some extreme examples of downsizing, provide the numbers to show how long you should wait before downsizing, and explore whether it makes sense to trade for a higher mpg used car to save on depreciation.

So come along for the ride and we’ll save you some bread. If you have your own downsizing story, please share it with us in the comments below. We look forward to the trip.

Original Page: http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/04/how-to-know-when-its-time-to-downsize-your-car.html

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RV parks offer EV owners respite from the road (and their range anxiety, to

2011-04-19T16:04:00.003-07:00

RV parks offer EV owners respite from the road (and their range anxiety, too)

by Michael Gorman, engadget.com
April 10th 2011 2:37 AM
EVs are pretty great for getting around major metropolitan areas, but many still feel some range anxiety when it comes time to leave the city limits. True, purpose-built charging stations are few and far between at the moment, but there's another charging option for those who enjoy going green and crave the open road: campgrounds. Turns out the 50-amp, 240-volt RV hookups found in such places can do double duty as juice dispensers for the depleted batteries in your Volt, Leaf, or Tesla. All electric powered roadwarriors need is an adapter to plug in, a few bucks to pay for current, and a few hours of free time. It's not as fast as fueling up the old fashioned way, but RV parks provide plenty of perks (swimming pools, lakes, and seniors who love poker, for example) not found at your average filling station. So, who's up for an eco-friendly road trip?

Original Page: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/10/rv-parks-offer-ev-owners-respite-from-the-road-and-their-range/

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Tablet Usage Cannibalizes on TV, According to Google Survey

2011-04-19T16:04:00.001-07:00

Tablet Usage Cannibalizes on TV, According to Google Survey

by Gianluigi Cuccureddu, appmarket.tv
April 11th 2011

A new survey from Google Mobile looked to find out just how popular tablets were up against more traditional forms of computing and entertainment. The iPad is disrupting the TV experience too.

Phandroid:

77% of those surveyed said their PC use dropped after they got their dream tablet, while 43% of that 77% said that their tablet has replaced their desktop and laptop computers as the device they use the most. For the television portion, over a third of those polled said they use their tablet more than they watch TV.

Additionally, 28% of those polled in the survey said the humble tablet was their “primary computer” and a staggering 84% said they used their tablet as a game-playing device.

Additional findings:

• With tablets, "mobile device" seems to mean one that can be carried from the kitchen to the den to the bedroom; 82 percent of participants said they use their slates at home. Only 11 percent said they use them on the go, while the at-work category was chosen by just 7 percent. Also, people seem to be using their tablets more at night (62 percent) and during the week (69 percent). Well more than half of the participants--68 percent--said they spend at least an hour a day communing with their slates (38 percent said more than two hours).

• A tablet was the primary computer for 28 percent of survey participants.

• When asked to "select all the ways you use your tablet," 84 percent of respondents ticked the "playing games" option. That was followed by searching for information (78 percent), e-mailing (74 percent), reading news (61 percent), social-networking (56 percent), checking out music and videos (51 percent), e-booking (46 percent), and shopping online (42 percent). The "other" category was ticked by 19 percent of those who participated.

• In the "print is dead" department, 59 percent of respondents said they use their tablets more than they read conventional, paper-based books. And in the "tablets killed the radio star" category, 52 percent said they surf their slate more often than they turn their dial.

Original Page: http://www.appmarket.tv/news/1145-tablet-usage-cannibalizes-on-tv-according-to-google-survey.html

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Chicago school bans homemade lunches, the latest in national food fight - Y

2011-04-19T16:03:00.001-07:00

Chicago school bans homemade lunches, the latest in national food fight

by Liz Goodwin, news.yahoo.com
April 11th 2011 1:55 PM

Students who attend Chicago's Little Village Academy public school get nothing but nutritional tough love during their lunch period each day. The students can either eat the cafeteria food--or go hungry. Only students with allergies are allowed to bring a homemade lunch to school, the Chicago Tribune reports.

"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," principal Elsa CarmonaÂ told the paper of the years-old policy. "It's about ... the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke."

But students said they would rather bring their own lunch to school in the time-honored tradition of the brown paper bag. "They're afraid that we'll all bring in greasy food instead of healthy food and it won't be as good as what they give us at school," student Yesenia Gutierrez told the paper. "It's really lame."

The story has attracted hundreds of comments so far. One commenter, who says her children attend a different Chicago public school, writes, "I can accept if they want to ban soda, but to tell me I can't send a lunch with my child. ARE YOU KIDDING ME????"

For parents whose kids do not qualify for free or reduced price school lunches, the $2.25 daily cafeteria price can also tally more than a homemade lunch. "We don't spend anywhere close to that on my son's daily intake of a sandwich (lovingly cut into the shape of a Star Wars ship), Goldfish crackers and milk," Northwestern education policy professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach told the paper in an email. She told The Lookout parents at her child's public school would be upset if they tried to ban homemade lunches.

"I think that lots of parents at least at my child's school do think that what they pack is more nutritious [than school lunches]," she said. A Chicago public school teacher started a blog to protest the city's school lunches, and last year the schools tightened their nutrition standards for cafeteria-served school lunches. Every lunch must contain whole grains, only reduced-fat salad dressings and mayonnaise are offered as condiments, and the meals must feature a different vegetable each day. Meal providers also must reduce sodium content by 5 percent annually. About 86 percent of the district's students qualify for free or reduced price school lunches because their families live close to the poverty line.

Change in Chicago's school cafeterias feeds into a larger effort to combat the country's childhood obesity epidemic. About a third of America's kids are overweight or obese, and since children consume at least 30 percent of their calories while in school, making lunches healthier is seen as one way to counter that problem. Poorer kids are also more likely to be obese or overweight than middle class kids, and to consume a bigger proportion of their calories while at school. Forty-four percent of American kids living below the poverty line are obese or overweight, according to a 2010 study published in Health Affairs.

While we haven't been able to track down another school that bans homemade lunches outright, many smaller food battles have been playing out in cafeterias across the country. As principals try to counter obesity in their schools, healthy intentions can come across as overreach, occasionally sparking parent and student anger.

Alabama parents protested a school's rule that barred students from bringing any drinks from home, as ice water was provided at lunch. East Syracuse, New York schools have outlawed cupcakes and other desserts. And schools around the country have kicked out chocolate milk and soda vending machines. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin even showed up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with dozens of cookies to express her disdain for a debate in the state about recommending teachers limit the number of times per month the sugary treats are eaten in classroom birthday celebrations.

Tucson, Arizona's Children's Success Academy allows home-packed lunches--but only if nothing in them contains white flour, refined sugar, or other "processed" foods, the Arizona Republic reported in a story last year. The school has no cafeteria, so some parents told the paper they struggled to find foods to pack that meet the restrictions. Many schools ban fast food or other take-out meals.

Soon, cafeteria offerings across the country will all be healthier, whether students like it or not. Last year's Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, calls for higher nutritional standards to serve the 32 million kids who eat lunch every day at school (most of whom qualify for free or reduced price lunches through a federal government program). For the first time, the USDA will set calorie limits for school lunches, and will recommend they contain more vegetables and whole grains, and less salt, USA Today reports. French fries should be replaced by vegetables and fruit, the guidelines say.

The bill also calls for stricter food safety checks on cafeteria food.

(A student's lunch in Gleed, Washington: AP)

Original Page: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110411/us_yblog_thelookout/chicago-school-bans-homemade-lunches-the-latest-in-national-food-fight

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Taylor, still 'hungry' at 63, hits Carnegie Hall

2011-04-18T10:14:00.001-07:00

Taylor, still 'hungry' at 63, hits Carnegie Hall

by Sms this Page and Email this Page, article.wn.com
April 11th 2011
NEW YORK-James Taylor has filled huge arenas, won five Grammys, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and influenced generations of musicians. His 2010 Troubadour Reunion Tour with Carole King was a major commercial success. Yet every single time he gives a concert, he worries people won't come. "That's always the question," says the 63-year-old singer, songwriter and folk rock icon. "Are people gonna show up? Will they buy tickets?" But there's a silver lining to the worry: "It's kept me hungry," he says. "It's kept me grateful." Now in his fifth decade of performing, Taylor, whose appearance with Zac Brown was a highlight of...

Original Page: http://article.wn.com/view/2011/04/11/Taylor_still_hungry_at_63_hits_Carnegie_Hall_j3/

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Why libraries trump the internet - Holy Kaw!

2011-04-18T10:12:00.003-07:00

Holy Kaw! All the topics that interest us

by Kate Rinsema, holykaw.alltop.com

Why libraries trump the internet

This sign was photographed by Joe Sabia at the public library in Milford, Connecticut and was written by Mark Y. Herring of Winthrop University. Any teacher who has spent weeks reviewing how to identify reliable, appropriate sources just to find themselves reading through hundreds of pages of crap thanks to last minute internet searches will likely be nodding vigorously enough to induce whiplash in a few seconds. You’ve been forewarned.

Full story at Boing Boing.

Yes, there is information in books.

Original Page: http://holykaw.alltop.com/why-libraries-trump-the-internet?tu4=1

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In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1 - SmartPlanet

2011-04-18T10:12:00.001-07:00

In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

by Tyler Falk, smartplanet.com
April 15th 2011

What can cities do with all their vacant properties? The city of Buffalo is trying to sell theirs for a buck.

The Urban Homesteading Program sells vacant property to homesteaders under the conditions that they will begin making immediate improvements and eventually bring the property up to code. Once renovations have been made the homesteader also agrees to live in the property.

WKWB, in Buffalo, reports on one of the most recent sales, the Lyth Cottage, built in 1886:

Newton paid the city a buck for the house and pledged to bring the historic building up to code and live in it for at least five years. This is all part of the “Buffalo Homestead Program” that helps to save distressed, tax foreclosed homes from demolition in the Hamlin Park Historic District on the city’s East Side.

“Lots of people have been pushing Buffalo to where they want it to be so I’m doing nothing new but I’m glad to be a part of it,” Newton said.

Tim Tielman with the Campaign for Greater Buffalo said it would help grow the area.

“What they wanted to do is look at the history here, capture it, use it as a basis for economic development. This is a very successful example,” Tielman said.

It’s definitely a win-win for both the city and the homesteader. The buyer gets a deal on the property and the city not only gets a vacant property off its hands, but it improves the neighborhood, retrofits a historic property, and brings stability to the neighborhood with the buyer agreeing to live there.

Watch the video report from WKBW:

See Video: http://www.wkbw.com/v/?i=119779979

[Via Planetizen]

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1
TAPhilo

04/15/11 | Report as spam

RE: In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

"up to code" = need to have LOTS of money and time to accomplish it.

Reworking even a 20 year old building to meet MODERN standards is a challenge.

It would be worse if they lived in a Hurricane / Tornado / Earthquake zone - the cost would easily double for an old building over what they expect right now to spend.
2
ZazieLavender

04/15/11 | Report as spam

RE: In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

Yeah he got the property cheaply, but he'll spend it's true worth or more in restoring it. XD
3
LostValley@...

04/15/11 | Report as spam

RE: In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

Very good thing for the city, neighborhood and home buyer. Similar plan here, San Jose, CA, but the houses all went to SJSU teachers, a charity group and perhaps 2 to private individuals. In closing I say, "Right on Buffalo."
4
JohnMcGrew@...

04/15/11 | Report as spam

It will be interesting to see how this works in the long run.

I am interested to see how "stable" these neighborhoods remain.

Restoring houses of this nature is mainly a labor of love; there is
little to no economic justification for the expense it takes to bring
such housing up to contemporary code or even livability. You
have to be someone who appreciates the architecture and
limitations that living in such a home demands. There are only so
many people with the desire and disposable resources to enter
into such a venture.

Several years ago, there was a debate in my area about the
number of old homes that were being town down to be replaced
with modern ones. The "preserve everything" crowd lamented
that this was happening, and wished regulation that would have
made doing so difficult, if not economically impossible.

The reality was that there is only so much of a demand for such
homes, since the number of people willing to go to the trouble
and expense of restoring such homes was quite limited. The
surplus of these homes would simply continue to deteriorate,
along with the neighborhoods they were in.
5
colinnwn

04/15/11 | Report as spam

RE: In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

I would imagine they are saying code for a remodel permit, not
the equivalent new construction code. If this is true and the shell
of the home is structurally sound, I don't see how remodeling it,
not luxuriously but reasonably and cost consciously, would be
any more expensive than a new construction.

If you are getting the property for $1, you're basically getting a
newly remodeled home with lots of character for the cost of a new
suburban breadbox. These neighborhoods with historic houses
usually become sought after and expensive after rehabilitation. It
happens all the time down here in Texas, and people usually pay
a lot more for the unremodeled property than $1.
6
luxsphinx@...

04/15/11 | Report as spam

RE: In Buffalo, urban homesteaders save historic property for $1

As a resident of Buffalo, I get a laugh out of this story. This is not going to work for more than a handful of houses, which by themselves will not be able to raise the value of their neighborhoods. There are simply far too many houses in need of massive overhauls, outright demolition, or just do not hold even the potential value for what it will cost. In many cases, the person who buys and restores one of these homes will lose out even more because the neighborhoods will prevent it from ever reaching close to the value the repairs should have achieved.

One friend of mine owns a house in a surprisingly still very nice neighborhood only ten or so blocks from where I live. It is a huge house more than double the size of mine similar nice homes around it, but time had done it's job and repairs were needed. A new roof was just put on before they bought it (for close to $100,000 if memory serves correct). Unfortunately, shortly after they bought it, it reached the wonderful age of being 'historic' and the headaches with the city and Historical Society began.

The society pulled all the permits that had been acquired for work (for fixing the front pillars, a huge cracked concrete porch, etc.). Part of the repairs involved putting on railings around the porch because code and the insurance required it for porches of that height. The society claimed that the home did not originally have any such railings (since they were not required in that era) and that the owners could NOT put them in - either leave it broken or restore it to original. As a result, the costs of repairs went up - since it was now "historic" - and they could not get home insurance without paying excessive fees due to the blatant safety hazards.

This happened with many other things that needed to be repaired on the home, the society simply wouldn't let them fix it unless it was to the original state of the home - which did not match the current city and insurance requirements and cost substantially more. Had they bought the house a little sooner, the house would not have reached the age and status that allowed for such delays.

The point? It may sound like a good deal to pick up a property for a low price and repair it, but the city and other groups create nothing but costly and time consuming bureaucratic hurdles for the new owners and the neighborhoods are already a challenge by themselves. It will only take a couple of people becoming entrenched before others stop even considering the idea.
7
JohnMcGrew@...

04/15/11 | Report as spam

Try asking someone who's actually done it.

I don't see how remodeling it, not luxuriously but reasonably and
cost consciously, would be any more expensive than a new
construction.

It frequently costs as much, if not more to do so. And in the end,
you're still left with an antique house with all of its quaint quirks.
Again, it's more a labor of love instead of a practical endeavour.

Original Page: http://www.smartplanet.com/people/blog/cities/in-buffalo-urban-homesteaders-save-historic-property-for-1/436/

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