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16 December, 2013
13 December, 2013
11 December, 2013
10 December, 2013
President Barack Obama kicked off Computer Science Education Week on Monday with a simple message: “Don’t just play on your phone. Program it.” “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” Obama said in a YouTube video. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.”
Design by Victorian firm Slash judged best plan for rebirth of Royal Adelaide Hospital site. "The jury was impressed by the depth and breadth of research Slash and Phillips/Pilkington Architects took into the social and physical history and condition of the RAH site," she said. "The winner's scheme offers a vision for an evolving, dynamic civic place and it offers a high degree of economic viability. "Their proposal presented a sustainable proposition by minimising energy and waste.
08 December, 2013
An Australian surveillance executive whose firm was contracted by several clients to sweep for hidden mobile interceptors and other spying devices in Australia and Asia has found dozens of them. Les Goldsmith, chief executive of ESD Group, told Fairfax Media his company found about 20 physical bugs when conducting sweeps in Australian business and local government offices, and another 68 in Asia between 2005 and 2011. The firm found 47 bugs in Papua New Guinea, ten in Singapore, three in the Philippines, five in Thailand, two in India and one in Fiji in several searches.
07 December, 2013
04 December, 2013
Another online drug marketplace bit the dust over the weekend and another massive Bitcoin heist shook the deep web. Sheep Marketplace, one of the two most prominent Silk Road competitors, went down on Saturday in the US. A message posted briefly on the site on Saturday claimed that one of Sheep Marketplace's vendors exploited a security flaw and stole 5400 Bitcoin (BTC), or $6.3 million at its current value. The heist could be even larger than that, though; it may have involved up to 96000 BTC ($112.1 million), which would be by far the largest Bitcoin theft given that Bitcoin's value is currently at an all-time high.
Spotify, the world's most popular music streaming service, has revealed how much an artist makes from each song listened to in an effort to fight criticism it shortchanges musicians. if a hit by a US singer is listened to one million times, the artists will receive about $US1500, Spotify said.
Labels:
Intellectual Property,
Sustainability
A WEBSITE to be launched in Queensland today will house the world's first specialist language MOOC. Dubbed the Massive Open Online English Course, the site features more than 50 free lessons developed by 15 Queensland colleges and universities. Its creators expect the offerings to double by mid-next year as institutions join up from interstate, and hopefully overseas. MOOEC is the brainchild of non-profit agency International Education Services, which created Australia's first MOOC - a course for education agents - in 2005
AUSTRALIAN teenagers' reading and maths skills have fallen so far in a decade that nearly half lack basic maths skills and a third are practically illiterate. The dumbing down of a generation of Australian teenagers is exposed in the latest global report card on 15-year-olds' academic performance. Migrant children trumped Australian-born kids while girls dragged down the national performance in maths, the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, released in Paris last night, reveals.
03 December, 2013
27 November, 2013
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting US news organisations and journalists, United States officials say.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical
WIFI is one of the great inventions of the digital age and for Australia's CSIRO, the flow of millions of dollars in royalties from the WiFi project finally has come to a close. CSIRO yesterday confirmed that all 19 international patents in the WiFi family had expired by November 24, 21 years after the first patent was filed in 1992.
26 November, 2013
SOUTH Australia's teachers of the future will have to study longer than students in any other state in a radical shake-up of university standards aimed at improving the quality of education in our schools. From 2020, all new teachers will need to have a Master degree qualification and have studied for at least five years - as long as a double degree in law and commerce.
Labels:
Education
25 November, 2013
THE most ambitious effort to drag US schools into the digital age is in danger of being derailed by hacker students, disgruntled teachers and tens of millions of dollars in unforeseen costs. Within days, however, more than 300 teenagers from three of the first high schools to receive the iPads found a way to bypass pre-installed security measures. Instead of studying, they were accessing social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
RESEARCHERS are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean. The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning. In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other. The goal is to recreate what we call common sense - the ability to learn things without being specifically taught.
21 November, 2013
In a move that will be hailed both as in the interest of preparing children for the workforce and as a commercial creep into the school yard, Microsoft has won the right to be featured in the Queensland's high school curriculum. From next year, students in 275 high schools will be able to gain credit toward their leaving certificates for completing units from the Microsoft IT Academy’s suite of 400 online courses. However, the vocational skills delivered by vendor courses should not be confused with the “deeper computational thinking” needed to pursue careers in computer science and engineering,
For the first time this summer cricket fans watching matches on mobile devices will have to pay data streaming fees, because the sport no longer has a mobile network broadcasting partner. Watching for one hour at a download speed of three megabits per second would use up 1.3 gigabytes of data. But watching for one hour at much slower speeds, and therefore a lower quality, would use about a tenth of that, or 150 megabytes of data.
Labels:
ICT Capability
Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical,
History,
Privacy,
Sustainability
20 November, 2013
The U.S. government believes that some scary people are using bitcoin. But here’s another scary prospect: If the government goes overboard with a hard-line approach on bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies, it may merely push them overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of its control.
Not a month goes by without security researchers finding new malicious apps on Google Play. According to BitDefender, more than one percent of 420,000+ analyzed apps offered on Google’s official Android store are repackaged versions of legitimate apps. In the long run, their existence hurts the users, the legitimate developers, and Google’s reputation in general.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
research
Australians making the most of E3 visa opportunities in the US. Australians dreaming of working in the technology sector in the US have the country’s immigration policy firmly on their side. Visa restrictions for Australians seeking work are now so loose that American companies cannot seem to hire enough Australian talent.
Labels:
ICT Career,
Intercultural Understanding
Optus has started a fixed wireless broadband trial in four capital cities to see whether a reliable 4G signal can replace fixed broadband connections in urban areas. Optus expects the fixed wireless service would be priced similarly to its other fixed products and offer download speeds of about 12 megabits per second, which was comparable to a fast ADSL connection.
Labels:
ICT Capability
19 November, 2013
18 November, 2013
Telstra has followed in the footsteps of one of its biggest competitors and launched an entirely new low-cost broadband brand. Called Belong, the ISP offers plan significantly cheaper than its parent, but is it actually cheap enough to compete with the rest of the market?
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking
15 November, 2013
Why Facebook Would Pay $3 Billion for Snapchat. for teens, much of the value in Snapchat is precisely its distance from Facebook: If you’re friends with your parents and relatives on Facebook, you don’t want to share your most candid pictures there. Snapchat is a safe space away from the judgmental eyes on Facebook
13 November, 2013
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is not just a museum of hardware, but also of software. The Museum has made public such gems as the source code for MacPaint, Photoshop, and APL, and now code from the Apple II. As their site reports: 'With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use.
Labels:
Education,
History,
Intellectual Property
Nokia shows us how quickly a dominant tech company can fall from market grace. Ollila had been surrounded by "sycophants who had no competence to address software challenges". Nokia kept developing its Symbian operating system but was slow to introduce touchscreen capability.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
History
12 November, 2013
A computer security firm has uncovered data it says belongs to 152 million Adobe user accounts, suggesting that a breach reported a month ago is far bigger than Adobe has so far disclosed and is one of the largest on record. LastPass, a password security firm, said it found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on an underground website frequented by cyber criminals.
08 November, 2013
Australian Bitcoin bank hacked: $1m+ stolen. The alleged hacking incident happened on October 26, with the service’s operator, known only as ‘‘Tradefortress’’, saying hackers have stolen all 4100 Bitcoins held by the wallet service, or $1.3 million at time of writing. It wasn’t until this week that he decided to notify customers.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
AUSTRALIA'S video game industry body has slammed a decision to review the MA15+ rating given to 12 games in Australia, which could cost more than $300,000 and cause nationwide recalls. The games, all of which have been classified in Australia this year, include Gears of War: Judgment, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, The Walking Dead, and Borderlands 2: Add-on Content Pack.
A VIRTUAL high school will be established for students living in rural areas in NSW to ensure they are offered the same wide range of subjects up to year 12 that are available to city students. The virtual school will operate alongside bricks and mortar schools as an adjunct to existing classrooms rather than replacing regular schooling, and will also offer selective classes for bright kids.
06 November, 2013
04 November, 2013
Android 4.4 KitKat: The most significant Android update in years (better cross device support). Beginning with this release, Android will have streamlined support for devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. Google is implementing developer features like Dalvik JIT code cache tuning, kernel samepage merging, and swap to zRAM to make apps more responsive in a resource-constrained environment. Android itself will also aggressively protect memory to keep things running smoothly. This means more inexpensive phones could launch with fully updated software and stay up to date longer.
Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson gained fame for his research showing that true expertise requires about 10,000 hours of practice, a notion popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers." But an often-overlooked finding from the same study is equally important: True expertise requires teachers who give "constructive, even painful, feedback," as Dr. Ericsson put it in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. He assessed research on top performers in fields ranging from violin performance to surgery to computer programming to chess. And he found that all of them "deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance."
SCREEN Australia will fund to the tune of $200,000 new online content for YouTube in Google's first move into local content. The announcement today of the Skip Ahead program to support local online content creators comes days after two television network bosses accused Google of gaming the tax system. The co-funding of the $400,000 You-Tube program by the federal agency is sure to spark controversy because Google pays minimal tax in Australia and is not bound by any of the media regulation or local content requirements covering broadcast and print media companies.
02 November, 2013
Snowden said he would like to testify before the US Congress about National Security Agency surveillance, and may be willing to help German officials investigate alleged US spying in Germany too, Hans-Christian Stroebele, a politician with Germany's opposition Greens, told a press conference.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
01 November, 2013
By year-end, most airline passengers will be able to use their tablets, e-readers and other gadgets during all stages of flight, the culmination of a decadeslong process that brings the flying experience further into the digital age. The Federal Aviation Administration's decision, its first big shift on electronic devices since it restricted their use in flight in 1966, caps years of debate over whether electronic emissions from devices can interfere with cockpit instruments.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
History,
research
31 October, 2013
With the change of Federal government, NBN Co has been forced to rethink its plans after the Coalition vowed to scale back the national fibre rollout. Details of the one and three-year construction areas have now been stripped from the official NBN rollout map, only leaving areas where the service is already available or building has commenced. Further coverage details are available via the unofficial myNBN.info website.
Labels:
Ethical,
Sustainability
30 October, 2013
The biggest barrier, though, is likely to be commercial adoption. It’s impossible to ignore the market’s direction towards thinner, lighter, cheaper, and thus more-integrated devices. Apple’s latest Retina MacBook Pros are probably the least-upgradeable PCs ever devised, and yet they seem to be doing just fine commercially.
Labels:
Sustainability
Under the proposal from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, consumer internet speeds would be tested to provide a snapshot on the present state of Australia's broadband services. The ACCC says the monitoring system would allow customers to better gauge the quality of broadband services before moving into an area or joining an internet service provider.
26 October, 2013
24 October, 2013
23 October, 2013
20 October, 2013
Vancouver’s Gary Fung built isoHunt.com 10 years ago, when he was still an engineering student. It soon became one of the top places to find links to torrent files on the Internet. Not long after that, the lawsuits came. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Canadian Recording Industry Association filed copyright violation suits against Fung, and he spent the next seven years fighting them in court. His argument was predicated on the fact that he was not distributing copyrighted material, merely providing a search tool where people could find links to torrents of all kinds, illicit and legitimate (but mostly illicit). If that makes him guilty, argued Fung, then so is Google, since you can use their engine to find torrent files as well. The MPAA argued “inducement”: though isoHunt wasn’t providing bootlegged files directly, it was encouraging and enabling others to do so, which, they argued, counts as infringement. The U.S.Courts agreed, and Fung’s fight is now over. He has agreed to pay the Hollywood studios $110 million, and isoHunt is to be shut down.
If you're reading this from a MacBook Air sold between June 2012 and June 2013, with 64 or 128 GB of storage, you might want to back up your data quick. Apple has found that a number of these notebooks suffer from faulty flash storage
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/your-macbook-air-may-have-critical-flash-flaw-heres-how-8C11422533
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking
17 October, 2013
16 October, 2013
Amy Jollymore explores the life of the worlds first programmer: 'When I heard that Ada Lovelace Day was coming, I questioned myself, "What do I actually know about Ada Lovelace?" The sum total of my knowledge: Ada was the first woman programmer and the Department of Defense honored her contributions to computation in 1979 by naming its common programming language Ada.
Labels:
History,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
12 October, 2013
11 October, 2013
10 October, 2013
James Forshaw, who heads vulnerability research at UK consulting firm Context Information Security, won Microsoft's first $US100,000 ($106,000) bounty for identifying a new "exploitation technique" in Windows, which will allow it to develop defences against an entire class of attacks, the company said.
08 October, 2013
Nearly 600 jobs at ANZ Bank in Melbourne have been saved following a campaign by staff to stop call centres' work from moving off shore. ANZ met with the Finance Sector Union on Tuesday to confirm that no jobs would be sent offshore.
07 October, 2013
06 October, 2013
And until now, her identity has remained a mystery. But the voice behind the American Siri, Apple's first voice-activated "virtual assistant", has finally been revealed, reports CNN. Her name is Susan Bennett. She's a voiceover artist from suburban Atlanta who's been working in the industry since the 1970s.
Labels:
Women in IT
05 October, 2013
02 October, 2013
01 October, 2013
Students Find Ways To Hack School-Issued iPads Within A Week. "They were bound to fail," says Renee Hobbs, who runs the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island. She's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. "Children are growing up today [with] the iPad used as a device for entertainment. So when the iPad comes into the classroom, then there's a shift in everybody's thinking." Hobbs says this isn't the first time educators have tried to co-opt things that lots of people use for fun. "Back in the 1930s, there was a big initiative to use radio in education," says Hobbs. "It was the original distance education." But, Hobbs says, that all fizzled out.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
History
A Liberal Party source confirmed the software might not be installed on handsets purchased separately from telcos, such as from online discount stores; however, they said parents usually bought their children's phones and could opt for handsets with the filtering software. A lack of knowledge and information by parents and teachers about the measures available to protect children was a key factor to overcome
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Education,
Social
30 September, 2013
GUMALA Aboriginal Corporation's systems had limited reporting capabilities and restricted functionality in its member-facing applications. Gumala is one of Australia's largest indigenous corporations. Case Study: Gumala PROBLEM: Rapid growth saw technology requirements outstrip the capacity of existing systems. PROCESS: Microsoft Dynamics CRM ``out-of-the-box'' software was teamed with NEC's business analysis and integration services. RESULT: Streamlined business processes and full transaction and system activity auditing.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Indigenous
In Australia, which has recently moved to have a single nationwide public school curriculum, educators from Sydney to Perth have digital access to the same lesson plans, tests, and all other classroom materials. Thousands of the country’s teachers have been given early access to a private network built by Declara called the Scootle Community. It’s a social network that will eventually link all 280,000 teachers in Australia and allow them to form groups around topics. (Declara Co-Founder Ramona Pierson's Comeback Odyssey)
29 September, 2013
It is now 30 years since I launched the campaign for freedom in computing, that is, for software to be free or “libre” (we use that word to emphasize that we’re talking about freedom, not price). Some proprietary programs, such as Photoshop, are very expensive; others, such as Flash Player, are available gratis — either way, they subject their users to someone else’s power.
28 September, 2013
26 September, 2013
23 September, 2013
Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his biggest regret is missing the boat on smartphones — but he says the software giant should not admit defeat just yet. "I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren't able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone," Ballmer said in a conference with analysts.
Labels:
History
22 September, 2013
Yamauchi made an astute early assessment of the video games market. This was that, despite ever more powerful games consoles, sales would be principally driven not by high-quality graphics or complexity, but by the quality of the gameplay on offer. Hiroshi Yamauchi, who has died aged 85, transformed his family's Japanese playing-card company into a powerful global force in the video game market, enthralling players over several decades with devices such as the Game Boy and characters including Super Mario and Donkey Kong.
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Game,
History
21 September, 2013
"Grand Theft Auto V" has crossed the $1 billion sales mark after three days in stores, a rate faster than any other video game, film or other entertainment product has ever managed. The latest installment of GTA, a cultural phenomenon that has sparked a national debate on adult content and violence.
19 September, 2013
World’s Biggest Programming Contests Get Bigger. TopCoder, the company that runs the world’s most popular computer programming contests, has been acquired. The decade-old company is now part of Appirio, an outfit that helps businesses use and build technology, with a particular focus on cloud computing.
Labels:
ICT Career,
Social
18 September, 2013
GAME developers left out of work after some of Australia's biggest studios closed their doors have poured into the growing independent scene. The unrelentingly high Australian dollar spelt the end of many developers over recent years including Team Bondi, which made the critically acclaimed L.A. Noire, THQ Australia, Pandemic Studios and more recently SEGA Studios Australia. Sydney-based Leigh Harris - who started Flat Earth Games with his brother Rohan after leaving Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games - said the big developers in Australia had all but vanished, prompting some talented folk to seek work overseas.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career
17 September, 2013
15 September, 2013
14 September, 2013
The nerd factor blamed for drop in IT hopefuls. Last year, 3334 year 12 students studied information processes and technology, which is just a third of the cohort of 10 years earlier. Over the same period, the number of students taking software design and development dropped from 3730 to 1829. the latest GradStats report, which found the median starting salary for ICT graduates last year was $52,500, putting it above professions like accounting and vet science and alongside law.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
13 September, 2013
Optus will roll out a second type of 4G network across four capital cities on Friday that it claims can deliver faster video streams and more consistent data download speeds. The new "4G Plus" network is the only mobile broadband network in Australia to use "time division" technology - known as TD-LTE - and follows a Canberra-based trial that started in May. The 4G networks currently operated by Telstra, Vodafone and Optus all use "frequency division" (FD-LTE) technology.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research
12 September, 2013
10 September, 2013
Lawyers next for tech-driven outsourcing. In Australia this week as the keynote speaker at the annual LawTech Summit in Noosa, Queensland, Mr Kowalski says computers themselves will take over much of the brain work that keeps lawyers in jobs. The information and communications technologies sector has experienced a similar phenomenon over the past 10 years. Companies have sent programming and support work to developing countries, a move Australians ICT professionals say has destroyed career opportunities for local graduates and mid-career workers.
09 September, 2013
The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system.
05 September, 2013
Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) Technology Honda R&D has successfully demonstrated the ability of a car equipped with Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology to detect a pedestrian with a DSRC enabled smartphone. This vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) technology uses cooperative communication between an individual's smartphone and nearby vehicles and provides auditory and visual warnings to both the pedestrian and drivers. The system is designed to mitigate the potential for a collision between the vehicle and pedestrian.
Samsung Galaxy Gear: Android-powered smartwatch arrives later this month. The Gear is a smartwatch, a wrist-worn touch-screen timepiece that talks to your phone, so you don't have to be forever fetching your phone from purse or pocket. It sits on your wrist and happily controls your music, tracks your exercise, installs your favourite apps -- it even makes phone calls.
04 September, 2013
Rotich explained that her nonprofit tech company, Ushahidi [Swahili for "testimony"], wanted to tackle the problem of connectivity in Africa and created a rugged portable device with a battery that could work for up to eight hours between charges, and switch between ethernet, WiFi, 3G and, if lucky, 4G.
03 September, 2013
02 September, 2013
30 August, 2013
Two human brains have been connected via the internet in an experiment which researchers compared to a Vulcan ''mind meld'' from Star Trek. From his laboratory at the University of Washington, Rajesh Rao said he was able to control the hand movements of a colleague on the other side of campus using his thoughts. A cap filled with electrodes picked up signals from Professor Rao's brain and transmitted them via the internet to a magnetic coil on Andrea Stocco's head.
29 August, 2013
BitTorrent Sync For iPhone Now Available To Download. BitTorrent Sync is specifically designed to handle large files. File transfers are encrypted. Your information is never stored on a server in the cloud and your data is protected by private keys.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Privacy
New Zealand bans software patents. "The patents system doesn't work for software, because it is almost impossible for genuine technology companies to create new software without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents that exist, often for very obvious work," Matthews said. "Today's historic legislation will support our innovative technology industry, and sends a clear message to the rest of the world that New Zealand won't tolerate the vexatious practice of 'patent trolls'."
28 August, 2013
Hill himself explained that he believes there are five different types of jailbreak users; average users, fanboys/girls, developers, security researchers and jailbreak creators. OpenJailbreak.org is aimed at the last three, as well as anyone who wants to learn more about how jailbreaks are created from the ground up.
27 August, 2013
A Brisbane-based print publisher has developed an app that has the potential to transform an industry already revolutionised by Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Liquid State is a design application that converts print-ready content to mobile and tablet layouts with just five clicks, avoiding lengthy production processes that can be costly to multi-platform publishers.
APPLE has released a free office suite for the cloud that will revolutionise the use of iPads for writing, spread sheet work and presentations on the go. In a response to offerings already in market by Apple and Google, Apple has included Beta cloud versions of its Pages, Numbers and Keynote app as part of its iCloud.com website cloud service.
26 August, 2013
23 August, 2013
22 August, 2013
21 August, 2013
20 August, 2013
19 August, 2013
16 August, 2013
Following the much publicised electrocution cases in China and elsewhere, Apple last week announced a USB power adaptor takeback program. The program (now including Australia) was devised for anyone with an unofficial USB adaptor for iOS devices to exchange it for an Apple built-in unit at a cut-rate price of US$10.
15 August, 2013
According to the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, Chinese is a Class III language—the most difficult to master—and requires 2,200 hours of rigorous study to gain general proficiency. Luckily for procrastinators with tickets already booked to Beijing, a new design-focused learning system called Chineasy can teach students basic literacy in a matter of days. (Graphic cue cards)
While the Leap’s cameras seem to only use infrared light (provided by three infrared LEDs inside the unit), the Haptix can use ambient light and infrared. Ambient light enables the capturing of much more detail, which is a boon for accuracy, but it requires “a few tricks” for the computer vision algorithm to handle that much data in real time.
13 August, 2013
12 August, 2013
11 August, 2013
08 August, 2013
Apple has finally run out of big cats by which to name its Mac operating system, OS X. Currently we are riding Snow Leopard, version 10.8.4. In September or thereabouts, we expect to be surfing on Apple's new wave, OS X 10.9, named Mavericks after California's famous surf beach.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
History
MANUFACTURING heavyweight Siemens has confirmed it will move to the new Tonsley Park industry hub, creating 15 jobs and giving itself room for future expansion. The former Mitsubishi site has been taken over by the State Government and is planned to become an advanced manufacturing cluster for businesses, educational facilities and houses.
Labels:
ICT Career,
Sustainability
07 August, 2013
06 August, 2013
05 August, 2013
the Obama administration overruled an import ban on older iPhone and iPad models issued by the International Trade Commission at Samsung’s request earlier this year. The action allows Apple to continue imports of AT&T models of the iPhone 4, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Ethical,
Intellectual Property
01 August, 2013
The Obama administration on Wednesday released formerly classified documents outlining a once-secret program of the National Security Agency that is collecting records of all domestic phone calls, as a newly leaked NSA document surfaced showing how the agency spies on Web browsing and other Internet activity abroad. Simultaneously, The Guardian published a still-classified 32-page presentation leaked by Snowden that describes the NSA's XKeyscore program, which mines Internet browsing information that the agency is apparently vacuuming up at 150 network sites around the world.
31 July, 2013
30 July, 2013
After analysing 133 submissions, the committee found a 50 per cent difference in the cost of professional software bought in the US and in Australia. RECOMMENDED COVERAGE IT price inquiry Australians pay 50pc more for tech It said Adobe software products showed an average difference of 42 per cent, Microsoft 66 per cent and Autodesk 51 per cent. In a comparison of 50 hardware products, Australian prices were 46 per cent more expensive on average than those charged in the US. The committee report was less critical about prices of Apple devices in Australia, with prices for Apple products much closer to parity – the majority of Apple’s iPad, iMac and Macbook lines were generally 10 to 15 per cent more expensive in Australia,
29 July, 2013
The committee found that Australians on average paid 50 to 100 per cent more than US consumers and makes sweeping recommendations that include the repeal of a section of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, and the lifting of parallel importing restrictions under copyright law if necessary.
Labels:
Ethical,
History,
Intellectual Property
26 July, 2013
25 July, 2013
21 July, 2013
Students who don't own or can't afford a laptop, iPad or other digital devices could be disadvantaged at school, some teachers say, as the federally funded free laptop program comes to a close. It will not be compulsory for students to own a device and it will be the responsibility of school principals to ensure students have equitable access to technology.
20 July, 2013
19 July, 2013
18 July, 2013
12 July, 2013
Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency’s ICT Workforce Study suggests the IT workforce needs to expand from the bottom up, if Australia is to benefit from technological innovation. The report recommends enhancing the quality of ICT teaching in schools and developing an online ICT module for secondary students.
10 July, 2013
VODAFONE today launched its brand new 4G mobile phone network boasting speeds that are 15 times faster than current 3G speeds and is expected to be faster its competitors, based on trial results. According to Vodafone its unique 2 x 20MHz contiguous spectrum holding means that it is one of the first networks to offer speeds up to 100Mbps,
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Numeracy,
research
09 July, 2013
A DECLINE in undergraduates studying information technology and a skills shortage, rather than the overuse of 457 visas, was the issue facing the IT industry, The Australian Computer Society said yesterday. Safeguarding local jobs through legislation is a complex issue. Should firms decide not to proceed with 457 visa applications, corporations have the option to outsource jobs offshore, especially those requiring less skills or experience that can be treated as commodities. International companies also can transfer jobs to a branch in another country rather than bring workers to Australia.
08 July, 2013
06 July, 2013
05 July, 2013
BlueBox security, a mobile security company which claims it has discovered a flaw in the operating system of almost all Google phones and tablets (which runs on the operating system Android) that allows hackers to modify its code in a way that "turns any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan" virus.
04 July, 2013
New programming language makes turning GPUs into supercomputers a snap. CPUs and GPUs are both important for modern computing, with each being better suited for different tasks. Most CPUs have several cores capable of running a few processing threads. It runs each thread very fast, then moves on to the next one. A GPU typically has a large number of slower processing cores (sometimes called stream processors) which can run more simultaneous threads. We would say that GPU computing is inherently more parallel than the CPU variety.
03 July, 2013
02 July, 2013
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.
Electric cars don’t solve the automobile’s environmental problems. Focusing only on greenhouse gases, however important, misses much of the (bigger) picture. Most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle’s entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard. Do electric cars simply move pollution from upper-middle-class communities in Beverly Hills and Virginia Beach to poor communities in the backwaters of West Virginia and the nation’s industrial exurbs? Are electric cars a sleight of hand that allows peace of mind for those who are already comfortable at the expense of intensifying asthma, heart problems, and radiation risks among the poor and politically disconnected?
Ouya console runs on a version of Android's 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system and is powered in part by Nvidia's Tegra 3 chipset — hardware and software that's previously only been used for smartphones and tablets. Compared to the 3.2 gigahertz (GHz) found in today's aging PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, the Ouya's 1.7 GHz central processing unit pales in comparison.
01 July, 2013
29 June, 2013
27 June, 2013
26 June, 2013
Udemy, launched in 2010, reports that its top 10 instructors have generated more than $US5 million in revenue so far. Many others are taking in sums that would be unheard of for a high school teacher and impressive for a university professor. A class on IT certifications and training has earned its teacher $US260,000 in a little less than two years. One on video, animation, and multimedia has brought in nearly $US150,000 in the same period.
25 June, 2013
In a clever bit of self-promotion, the do-it-yourself repair evangelists at iFixit announced this morning that they will be giving away 1,776 free "iPhone liberation kits" that will allow Apple customers access to the innards of their devices by replacing the difficult-to-remove pentalobe screws with standard Phillips screws.
24 June, 2013
23 June, 2013
21 June, 2013
20 June, 2013
Nissan letter to customers says in part: "It has been established that the current engine control module (ECM) software version may cause the vehicle's engine to stall under certain conditions. There is a possibility of the vehicle's engine stalling when driven between 10km/h and 60km/h where there is no accelerator input."
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
The disastrous $180 million Victorian school intranet could be scrapped at the end of the month prompting fears that months of student work and reports would be lost. Mr Dixon said the Ultranet had already cost Victorian taxpayers at least $180 million – three times its original budget – despite being used by only 4 per cent of the intended 1.5 million teachers, parents and students.
19 June, 2013
HFT is a form of super-fast software-driven trading underpinned by sophisticated algorithms that allow trades to be executed in microseconds, profiting from small changes in share prices. In May 2010 the so-called 'Flash Crash', when the Dow Jones Industrial dropped by almost 1000 points in half an hour, was blamed on automated HFT-style trading. As a result, the US Securities and Exchange Commission rolled out rules to pause trading when there were significant swings in share prices in a short period.
Windows RT-hasn't been the most popular Microsoft product, but the tech giant is looking to remedy this by slashing the price of its Surface RT tablet for schools and colleges. The offer, which will reportedly run until August 31, 2013, will sell Surface RTs (without keyboards) to schools for only $199. The Surface RT retails for $499.
Labels:
Education,
History,
ICT Capability
German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.
18 June, 2013
The technology behind Facebook. Among web coders like Zuckerberg, PHP was all the rage in 2003. It gave them a means of building and re-building web software at a particularly fast pace, taking a shortcut around more complicated languages like C++ or Java. But as the months, then the years, passed, PHP’s knack for rapid-fire development would become particularly important to Facebook and The Hacker Way, the philosophy of constant iteration that drives Zuckerberg and his entire company. Facebook engineers like to change things, and change them quickly. PHP lets them do that.
17 June, 2013
14 June, 2013
iOS 7 Beta vs Windows Phone 8 – The Striking Similarities. Apple is often quick to throw around accusations of copyright infringement and theft of intellectual property. Steve Jobs, after all, once said that Android was a stolen product, and he was willing to go to lengths of thermonuclear war to right such a wrong. But as you will notice from the video below, the shoe is now arguably on the other foot, and it would seem Apple is now the one taking design tips from rivals in the industry.
13 June, 2013
From inventing his own card and board games from the age of five, to a theatre degree, a masters in education, jobs making games at Atari and Microsoft, and a move to Australia to teach gaming to university students, American born Matt Ford has been around the traps and remains an eternal optimist when it comes to the future of computer programing and game design. “There are so many free tools available like Flash, Unity, Blender (for 3D artists), Unreal, The Source Engine and StarCraft editor. If a student is really interested, show them these programs and they can start making games now,” Matt encouraged. “A class needs to be self directed,” Matt explained. “By using Flash or Unity – which are great free gaming tools available over the internet – it gets students started in making their own games or applications.
12 June, 2013
Groceries Could Be Amazon’s Next Killer App — If It Can Solve the Math
travelling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem asks a seemingly simple question: given a certain number of deliveries and delivery trucks, what route allows each truck to travel the shortest distance?
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/amazon-groceries/
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/amazon-groceries/
The Department of Defence is buying a $2.2 million supercomputer to help with research for the Future Submarine program. ''The system will be used to undertake computational fluid dynamic studies to increase knowledge and assist the evaluation of technical risks associated with the hydrodynamic performance of future Australian navy platforms,''
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Numeracy,
research
The NSA’s Prism leak could fundamentally change or break the entire internet. This leak is a colossal embarrassment for the United States. Every time the UN-backed ITU has raised the issue of a more global approach to internet governance, the United States has fired back with both barrels and a tactical nuke. Last December, the House of Representatives passed S. Con Res 50 by a vote of 397-0. The opening paragraph of that resolution declared it vital that the internet “remain stable, secure, and free from government control” and stated that the structure of internet governance “has profound implications for competition and trade, democratization, free expression, and access to information.”
11 June, 2013
Federal police are obtaining Australians' phone and internet records without warrants nearly 1000 times a week, it has emerged as controversy rages over a vast US surveillance program. Revelations in a recent Senate estimates hearing include efforts by the Australian Federal Police to access Facebook and Google data of the kind gathered under the US National Security Agency's controversial PRISM program.
09 June, 2013
Un unlikely book will break the all-time record for Kickstarter’s most successful publishing project: a comedic choose-your-own-adventure-style novel by popular webcartoonist Ryan North that transforms Shakespeare’s Hamlet into an interactive story where readers can actually choose whether to be — or not to be. It’s a quirky idea that couldn’t get any traction at book publishing houses, but as a crowdsourced, collaborative online project, To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure has earned over $425,000 $580,000 in less than a month.
08 June, 2013
07 June, 2013
Is Nokia’s 41MP PureView camera finally coming to Windows Phone? full-res photos clock in at around 10MB each, which is really too big for sharing, there’s a second mode that provides 7:1 oversampling to create a very-high-fidelity 5MP image. (Oversampling is where the input from a number of pixels is averaged/combined to create a single superpixel).
Labels:
Asia Connection,
research
Angry Scrabble devotees worldwide are refusing to play their beloved word game after the Facebook version came out with an update - which erased high scores, deleted player contact lists, introduced ads at the end of each turn and changed other key features.
Labels:
Ethical,
Game,
Social,
Sustainability
06 June, 2013
CASINOS in the US are forbidding gamblers from wearing Google Glass, the tiny eyeglasses-mounted device capable of shooting photos, filming video and surfing the internet. Regulators say the gadgets could be used to cheat at card games.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical,
Privacy,
Sustainability
05 June, 2013
At Hack Reactor: Apprenticeships trump degrees.Education is two parts motivation, one part content. Learn to learn. TWELVE INSANELY PRODUCTIVE WEEKS
100% of the graduates are now working as software engineers, at an average salary of $85,000. They work at companies that turn away college graduates every day.
project-based curriculum, builds toward your code portfolio.
http://hackreactor.com/
project-based curriculum, builds toward your code portfolio.
http://hackreactor.com/
04 June, 2013
Security researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a malicious USB charger that can inject persistent, undetectable malware onto your iPhone, iPad, or other current-gen iOS device. This USB charger, called Mactans, takes less than a minute to compromise a device once it has been plugged in.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Privacy,
research
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has unveiled a new code of conduct that forbids cellphone companies from charging customers fees to break their contracts after two years and makes it easier to unlock cellphones. Those are two of the biggest takeaways from a new code of conduct that the broadcast regulator unveiled on Monday and will come into effect for contracts signed after Dec. 2, 2013.
Labels:
Ethical
ONLINE game maker Zynga says it is cutting 520 jobs, about 18 per cent of its workforce, and closing several offices. The San Francisco company is shedding costs in the face of a decline in the number of users of its games, which include Farmville and Words With Friends.
Labels:
Game,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career
MOBILE phone pioneer Motorola says it's opening a manufacturing facility that will produce the first smartphone ever assembled in the US - its new flagship device, Moto X. Research firm iSuppli estimates that the components of Samsung's latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, cost $US229, while the assembly cost $US8.
03 June, 2013
In 2007 Rudd spun his education revolution into a broadband revolution, promising to spend $1 billion to provide a computer with high-speed internet access for every student in years 9 to 12. Microsoft Word and OneNote work OK, but Vignando says bundled multimedia applications like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and video-editing tool Premier Elements run at a crawl. Students needing to do more than basic text editing often give up and seek out faster (desktop) computers elsewhere.
Many schools will ask students to bring their own smartphones, tablets and laptops from home as a federal government program which gave every student in years 9 to 12 access to a computer expires at the end of this month. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/byo-laptop-to-school-as-funds-dry-up-20130601-2nig2.html#ixzz2V6gM8S9GMany schools will ask students to bring their own smartphones, tablets and laptops from home as a federal government program which gave every student in years 9 to 12 access to a computer expires at the end of this month.
01 June, 2013
The White House is hosting a hackathon dedicated to government data. It happens this weekend, and it’s just one of the 93 hackathons organized across the U.S. as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, a.k.a. June 1. During the two-day event, participants will work to build software applications that solve problems proposed by local, state and federal government organizations. The data sets and challenges were provided by 22 government organizations in total, including the White House, NASA, and the Peace Corps.
DRM for e-books: Repeating history, not learning from it. Listeners hated DRM because it restricted their ability to enjoy the music they paid for. Towards the end of the last decade businesses began to realize that DRM could be a headache for them as well, so eventually they wised up. By the end of 2011 all the major music stores were DRM free.
Memory gaffe leaves Aussie bank accounts open to theft. The client-side flaws allowed a custom malware tool to pull passwords, account numbers and access credentials from the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank, Macquarie Bank, St George Bank and Bendigo Bank.
30 May, 2013
Why ‘additive manufacturing’ isn’t expected to take over large scale industrial production any time soon
- agonizingly slow operation
- niche applications only
- extremely low throughput per station
- hard to scale
- mostly small items only
- unsuited to volume production
- still in its earliest stages of development
- mostly plastic-only products
- limited range of fabrication materials
- mostly low precision output
- mostly fragile, low durability products
- mostly single fabrication material products
- mostly only for products with no moving parts
- mostly low quality surface finish
- highest spec 3D printers (fastest, most flexible, finest detail) still dramatically lower throughput than conventional production line equivalents
- cheapest 3D printers can make small, decorative knick-knacks, but not much else
- just fun to watch
- best for educational and hobby use
- just cheap toys for making cheaper toys
- just a designer’s fantasy about cutting out the middleman
- a great solution still looking for truly applicable problems
- serious cost issues on almost all large-scale applications
- unresolved technical problems on most fronts
- only really suitable for DIY or small startup usage
- only serious design role is prototyping
- only serious production role is for making molds
- suited to the desktop or garage, not factory operation
- CNC and robotics were also predicted to take over everything in manufacturing decades ago, but are still only niche
29 May, 2013
Advice to students wanting to get into the ICT industry: You are rarely going to get an opportunity to have your current employer pay for you to learn things, so learn them on your own and be in a position to leverage the skills when a new project comes along. But if you have a passion for technology, you’ll already be doing it, and enjoying it without needing me to tell you to. That’s why passionate people have a leg up.
28 May, 2013
Microsoft: Cloud Will Quadruple Power of Xbox One. "the Xbox One is ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360, so we're effectively 40 times greater than the Xbox 360 in terms of processing capabilities [using the cloud],
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability,
research
Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Jewish Lore. The latest experiment involves more than 100 linked computers located in a basement room at Tel Aviv University here, cooled by standup fans. They are analyzing 500 visual cues for each of 157,514 fragments, to check a total of 12,405,251,341 possible pairings.
27 May, 2013
24 May, 2013
A new piece of Android malware has been discovered that can intercept your incoming text messages and forward them on to criminals. Once installed, the trojan can be used to steal sensitive messages for blackmailing purposes or more directly, codes which are used to confirm online banking transactions.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Privacy,
research
23 May, 2013
People with autism have a neural development disorder that often undermines their ability to communicate and interact socially, and their brains process information very differently to people who are not autistic, leading to repetitive and restricted behaviour. But in the world of computers the tendencies they often display such as an obsession for detail and an ability to analyse long sets of data very accurately can translate into highly useful and marketable skills.
3D PRINTERS FOR PEACE contest
We are challenging the 3D printing community to design things that advance the cause of peace. This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Ghandi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.
- low-cost medical devices
- tools to help pull people out of poverty
- designs that can reduce racial conflict
- objects to improve energy efficiency or renewable energy sources to reduce wars over oil
- tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure
- things that boost sustainable economic development (e.g. designs for appropriate technology in the developing world to reduce scarcity)
http://www.mtu.edu/materials/printersforpeace/
22 May, 2013
21 May, 2013
If people who sit at their computers for tens of hours each week zapping virtual monsters are hard-core gamers, then massive open online courses have led to a similarly obsessed breed of online student: the hard-core learner. Nearly 100 students using Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, have completed 20 or more courses.
Should we let wunderkinds drop out of high school? After all, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college (and David Karp never finished highschool). I could see how much of the work he was doing at school wasn't relevant to what he wanted to learn," she said. "He always wanted to learn more than what the schools wanted to teach him. At times it was very frustrating. I was fortunate to find people that were able to teach him more, but he has gone beyond what high school could ever give him."
The tech community may be different from other industries. Degrees are not necessarily seen as a hallmark of achievement and programmers are judged on their ability to type lines of code. You are what you create.
What also sets the field apart is that computer programming is not taught at every high school, and even when it is, the most talented students often either "surpass the curriculum or feel it's not relevant to them", said Danielle Strachman, program director for the Thiel Fellowship. "They want to move at their own pace."
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/should-we-let-wunderkinds-drop-out-of-high-school-20130521-2jxsi.html
What also sets the field apart is that computer programming is not taught at every high school, and even when it is, the most talented students often either "surpass the curriculum or feel it's not relevant to them", said Danielle Strachman, program director for the Thiel Fellowship. "They want to move at their own pace."
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/should-we-let-wunderkinds-drop-out-of-high-school-20130521-2jxsi.html
The Tax Office has spent $5.2 million to enable Apple Mac users to lodge their tax returns online this year. For 15 years, the Australian Tax Office has failed to provide Mac users with the same ability as Windows users to file their tax return online. "But to be honest, I think that they probably should have spent that money on a web-based system"
20 May, 2013
19 May, 2013
Mayor Bloomberg’s advice to ‘so-so’ students is to skip college and become a plumber. His argument is that they won’t waste time, would have a nice income and could avoid student loan debt. Plus, this is one profession that can’t be outsourced. nother benefit: Plumbers don’t have to worry about their jobs being outsourced or handled by computers. “It’s hard to farm that out ... and it’s hard to automate that,” he said.
Are gadgets making us dumber? Two new studies suggest they might be. One found that people who are interrupted by technology score 20 percent lower on a standard cognition test. A second demonstrated that some students, even when on their best behavior, can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.
17 May, 2013
Three members of the hacktivist group LulzSec have been sentenced to a total of six years in prison. Members Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam had been charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Intellectual Property,
Privacy
15 May, 2013
Mozilla has just dropped Firefox 21 for Windows, OS X, Linux and Android. Significant changes can one expect upon downloading and installing Firefox 21? Well first and foremost, there are now three Do Not Track options: “Do Track,” “Do Not Track,” and “no preference.” Also bundled into the release is an all-new startup suggestion system allowing users to help streamline the app startup time
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Privacy
A group of security researchers in Germany found some suspicious traffic on their web servers after a Skype instant messaging session. After a single experiment, they concluded that Microsoft is snooping on its customers. But a closer look at the facts suggests that this is a well-documented security feature at work.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Privacy,
research
According to Budget 2013 papers, the government will achieve savings of $4.5m over three years by not proceeding with mandatory filtering legislation, a move announced in November. The plan would have forced ISPs to filter web pages that contain refused classification-rated content based on a government blacklist. Instead, major internet service providers will be required to block child abuse websites on Interpol's 'worst of' child abuse list, in accordance with their obligations under the Telecommunications Act 1997
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Education,
Ethical,
History,
ICT Capability,
Privacy,
research,
Sustainability
14 May, 2013
Samsung says it has successfully tested super-fast 5G wireless technology that would eventually allow users to download an entire movie in a matter of seconds. The South Korean electronics giant said the test had resulted in data transmission of more than one gigabit per second (Gbps) over a distance of two kilometres.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
ICT Capability,
research
13 May, 2013
The Indian government's cyber watchdog is investigating how security at two companies that are part of the country's vast IT services industry was breached in a global ATM heist that saw $45 million stolen from two banks in the Middle East.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Privacy
12 May, 2013
10 May, 2013
09 May, 2013
Star Trek in the 1960s offered audiences fictional technology, some of which decades later is becoming reality. "Communicators" are today's mobile phones; touch-screen "pads" resemble iPads; "phasers" are Tasers; "the universal language translators", an Android app. Telepresence has been adopted in robotics and videoconferencing. All we're waiting for is the tricorder.
08 May, 2013
07 May, 2013
Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards [Kickstarter]
06 May, 2013
03 May, 2013
02 May, 2013
E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) League has admitted to embedding Bitcoin mining code inside league’s client software. What began as an April fool’s day joke, the code ended up mining as many as 29 Bitcoins worth over $3700 for ESEA league in a span of two weeks.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Game,
Privacy
01 May, 2013
THE slowdown in Australia's manufacturing industry worsened in April, with activity in the sector contracting at the fastest rate in four years. Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said the high Australian dollar, unit labour costs and energy prices were hurting the sector.
Labels:
ICT Career,
Sustainability
30 April, 2013
Pendulum swings back: Chinese manufacturing costs to equal US by 2015. But The swing towards China has also reduced the number of skilled domestic manufacturing workers in both the US and Australia over the past decade, making a move to re-shore manufacturing a risky one.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
History,
ICT Career,
research,
Sustainability
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