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27 December, 2016
The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, which has important "symbolic value," according to the authorities. In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat.
Australians could have their private phone and email records used against them in civil litigation cases, with the federal government considering relaxing data retention laws. Critics say it would pave the way for phone and email records to be mined for material to be used in legal action following marriage breakdowns and business disputes.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Privacy
I put the question to Telstra and was told the key is to ring the call centre and ask them to "submit a request for a service qualification test", if the cable is in your street and you believe you should be able to access it. Even if Telstra runs copper to your home, the cable access maps aren't updated after it's laid in your street so they don't acknowledge the existence of new dwellings.
21 December, 2016
As programming, computing and technology skills become part of the essential skill sets for school leavers, demand for teaching in these areas is taking off. But the Department of Education has closed the MacICT Innovation Centre, its unique 15-year-old joint venture with Macquarie University that has been a pioneer in the area.
18 December, 2016
Two Bit Circus, a technology entertainment company cofounded by a son of video-game pioneer Nolan Bushnell, has been arguing for some time that the push for STEM in education is missing something. Brent Bushnell has used technology to make art throughout his career. He says that to really draw talented young people into science and engineering careers, STEM needs an “A” for “Art,” turning it into STEAM.
13 December, 2016
More than half of NSW year 9 students would fail at the first hurdle to get their HSC based on this year's NAPLAN results, new statistics from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority have revealed. It follows the surprise announcement in July by NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli that students would be required to meet a minimum literacy and numeracy standard to receive their HSC.
12 December, 2016
iPhone users finally have access to a sophisticated virtual and mixed reality solution with Occipital releasing a mixed reality headset called Bridge. Designed for iPhone 7, 6 and 6s, the Bridge headset not only lets you experience virtual reality driven from an iPhone loaded inside.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability
09 December, 2016
Software that takes over dangerous and offcourse drones will come to market next month. Perth and US Maryland based Department 13 says it is readying its Mesmer technology which can detect dangerous drones, for example drones transporting weapons and drugs, identify and force them to land. It says the technology is suited to national security, defence and commercial applications. But the company says it’s not seeking to shoot down drones, which is a safety problem itself. Instead D13 sought to make drones land safely. “We believe that making drones fall from the sky is a bad thing,” Mr Hunter says.
Microsoft closed its roughly $US26 billion ($34.86bn) deal to buy professional-networking site LinkedIn, cementing the largest acquisition in the tech giant’s history. The marriage of the two firms, announced in June, is a bet that the social network can reinvigorate Microsoft’s software offerings despite recent struggles by both companies. The closure of the deal was announced by Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella in a LinkedIn post. Mr. Nadella hopes the deal will open new horizons for Microsoft’s Office suite as well as LinkedIn, both of which have saturated their markets, and bolster Microsoft’s revenue and competitive position. Microsoft said it would work on integrating LinkedIn into some of its key offerings, such as adding aspects of the LinkedIn network to Microsoft Outlook and the Office suite, which includes Word and PowerPoint.
Labels:
History
What’s the most important rule in VR? Never make your users sick. In this exploration, we’ll review the essentials of avoiding nausea, positive ergonomics, and spatial layouts for user safety and comfort. The Oculus Best Practices, Designing for Google Cardboard, and other resources cover this issue in great detail, but no guide to VR design and development would be complete without it.
Labels:
3D,
Cybersafety,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability
Computer science careers are colourful! That was one of the key takeaways from the 70 respondents. “I didn’t know [computer scientists] can use software to save lives and eradicate diseases like Ebola,” says one student. And while health may be one career option, the beauty of CS + X – where “X” stands for any interest or passion – is that you can substitute “X” with practically anything. While the interdisciplinary nature of CS + X can present great opportunities, it’s also a challenge. Inspiring students to pursue a career in computer science by combining it with another interest of theirs (i.e. law, design or languages) may be a way to spark their passion for STEM. However, it will also be a challenge for schools and educators to stay up-to-date with career options, and to define a concrete way of integrating CS + X into the curriculum. Of those educators surveyed, 29% see a lack of resources as the major hurdle – an equal proportion point to the difficulty of staying up-to-date with technological trends and developments. Students, however, are still turning to teachers and career counsellors as primary sources of information when making future careers decisions. Educating our educators in STEM careers, therefore, should be a major objective if we’re to provide clarity to students.
07 December, 2016
Australian high school students are up to two school years behind their peers in the world's best performing countries, a major global test of student achievement has revealed. The results of the OECD's latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), released globally on Tuesday night, revealed that not only are the science, reading and maths problem-solving skills of Australian 15-year-olds sliding backwards relative to their international peers, but their skills are declining in real terms.
Now, however, Trump has brought two business leaders to the table who are perfectly positioned to help him navigate the country’s digitally driven economic future: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and General Motors CEO Mary Barra. The two tech leaders are joining Trump’s so-called Strategic and Policy Forum, a coalition of business executives who will advise the new president on economic issues and job creation.
The Social Medwork is an independent global online-platform, with the latest approved therapeutics from overseas for patients suffering from serious diseases such as Cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s etc. A social enterprise, we speed-up the system to get you the latest medicines that are not yet available in your country, but recently have been approved and are available elsewhere in the world.
01 December, 2016
"There is something [about Instagram] that is deeper than photography, deeper than art. Before the written word, before the printing press, before books, we always communicated in a visual manner. I joke that emojis are just futuristic versions of hieroglyphics. "Instagram is the next-generation communication platform. So of course you can communicate wonderful things like a beautiful sunset, like a great latte, but you can also communicate very serious things such as the destruction of Aleppo." "If you walk through the National Gallery halls, what do you see? Portrait after portrait. Self-portraits have been around forever. It just so happens now that everybody's an artist and everybody has the ability to capture a self-portrait at any moment."
http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/instagrams-kevin-systrom-the-man-who-became-a-billionaire--from-selfies-20161127-gsyqok.html
30 November, 2016
29 November, 2016
Is there a role for specialist speech dictation software such as Dragon Dictation, now we have Siri, Google Now and Cortana? Voice dictation isn’t as easy as many believe. When you write, you have the luxury to mull over sentences, rearrange words and clauses and clarify your thoughts as you go. For effective voice dictation, you need to crystallise sentences in your head first before dictating, if you want to avoid rearranging text afterwards.
28 November, 2016
New Mod Successfully Brings 'Doom 3' to Virtual Reality. SweViver walks and runs about naturally using only the Vive controller's touchpad, and he says multiple times that the "perfect" 90 frames per second keeps him from suffering motion sickness. Beyond that, the video shows him jumping and using the mod's impressive hand-tracking to handle his gun and flashlight separately as they float before him in place of the controllers in his hands. At one point, he even whips out virtual fists that let him pummel things with the controllers' left and right triggers.
Labels:
3D,
Game,
ICT Capability
Stripe was founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison, two 20-something Irish brothers who left before graduating from their respective colleges, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Stripe quickly developed an enthusiastic following among Silicon Valley start-up software developers, who say Stripe’s tools make it easy to start an online account, add a small bit of code, and accept credit and debit cards on the web or inside a mobile app — bypassing lengthy agreements with banks and traditional payments providers.
Telstra is set to outsource almost 50 jobs to IBM as part of an ongoing process to streamline its technical workforce. According to the CWU, Telstra has also specified a “lack of innovation” as a reason that underpins the offshoring. It’s a claim that the CWU rejects saying that the problem might lie “more with management than employees.”
Labels:
Asia Connection,
ICT Career,
Sustainability
25 November, 2016
A new type of battery that lasts for days with only a few seconds' charge has been created by researchers at the University of Central Florida. "If they were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week," said Professor Nitin Choudhary, one of the researchers behind the new technology. To date supercapacitors weren't used to make batteries as they'd have to be much larger than those currently available. But the Florida researchers have overcome this hurdle by making their supercapacitors with tiny wires that are a nanometre thick. Coated with a high energy shell, the core of the wires is highly conductive to allow for superfast charging.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research
Amazon is making good on its promise to ban “incentivized” reviews from its website, according to a new analysis of over 32,000 products and around 65 million reviews. The ban was meant to address the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews that had been plaguing the retailer’s site, leading to products with higher ratings than they would otherwise deserve.
Labels:
Ethical,
Sustainability
24 November, 2016
Would you like to time travel to the Woodstock concert and be able to roam around just like it was August 1969? Or roam around Madison Square Garden in New York with John Lennon and Elton John performing as in 1974? Shared reality site AltSpaceVR is making this possible with music, comedy and other events it hosts in virtual reality. When you put on a VR headset and attend an AltSpaceVR event, you are represented by an avatar that can be moved around. The people you are talking with or moving among appear directly in front of you as avatars in the VR space, but in reality they live across the globe.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
ICT Capability,
Social
23 November, 2016
Building Blocks: A Deep Dive Into Leap Motion Interactive Design. 3 Kinds of Interactions Designing for hands in VR starts with thinking about the real world and our expectations. In the real world, we never think twice about using our hands to control objects. We instinctively know how. The “physical” design of UI elements in VR should build on these expectations and guide the user in using the interface. There are three types of interactions, ranging from easy to difficult to learn: spectrum Direct interactions follow the rules of the physical world. They occur in response to the ergonomics and affordances of specific objects. As a result, they are grounded and specific, making them easy to distinguish from other types of hand movements. Once the user understands that these interactions are available, there is little or no extra learning required. (For example, pushing an on/off button in virtual reality.) Metaphorical interactions are partially abstract but still relate in some way to the real world. For example, pinching the corners of an object and stretching it out. They occupy a middle ground between direct and abstract interactions. Abstract interactions are totally separate from the real world and have their own logic, which must be learned. Some are already familiar, inherited from desktop and mobile operating systems, while others will be completely new. Abstract interactions should be designed with our ideas about the world in mind. While these ideas may vary widely from person to person, it’s important to understand their impact on meaning to the user. (For example, pointing at oneself when referring to another person would feel strange.) Immersion and Flow As human beings, we crave immersion and “flow,” a sense of exhilaration when our bodies or minds are stretched to their limits. It’s the feeling of being “in the zone” on the sports field, or becoming immersed in a game. Time stands still and we feel transported into a higher level of reality. Creating the potential for flow is a complex challenge in game design. For it to be sustained, the player’s skills must meet proportionately complex challenges in a dynamic system. Challenges build as the player’s skill level grows. Too challenging? The game becomes frustrating and players will rage-quit. Not challenging enough? The game is boring and players move on. But when we push our skills to meet each rising challenge, we achieve flow. flow-channel To design for flow, start with simple physical interactions that don’t require much physical or mental effort. From there, build on the user’s understanding and elevate to more challenging interactions.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
Graphic Design,
Social
21 November, 2016
It’s true that automation can and often does eliminate jobs, but very often they are jobs that Vinnie Mirchandani, author of Silicon Collar: An Optimistic Perspective on Humans, Machines, and Jobs, refers to as 3D jobs, an acronym for “dull, dirty, and dangerous”. In short, there are jobs that my father did that my kids just won’t. So automation plays a vital role in the march of progress.
18 November, 2016
Linq is different because Stereolabs can do room-scale without beacons In addition to its unusual approach to mixed reality, Linq has an ace up its sleeve. Stereolabs’ experience with depth-mapping using its popular Zed camera allows it to implement accurate room-scale VR experiences without external beacons.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
research
Microsoft’s move to embrace Linux is undoubtedly driven by changing macroeconomic conditions around the PC business. For decades, as the dominant server and consumer operating system, Microsoft had very little reason to play nice with others or work to emphasize interoperability. The explosion of the mobile market and the company’s complete failure to penetrate it has left it little option but to seek other types of collaboration and cross-platform support. Building products that work seamlessly across both Linux and Windows is one way for Redmond to ensure it remains relevant across the data center and server markets.
17 November, 2016
Twitter, facing pressure for not doing enough to curb abusive behaviour on its platform, says it will upgrade some features to better combat cyber-bullying. The company said on Tuesday it would expand the “mute” option to allow users to block tweets based on keywords, phrases and the content of conversations from a user’s notifications.
11 November, 2016
Strict discipline and pressure to perform? Or a child-centred, individual approach? The debate over the relative benefits of Eastern and Western styles of school education has been kicked off again by two new studies which find evidence that strict discipline in the classroom produces better academic outcomes and a stronger work ethic in students, in results that could have implications for Australia's sliding academic performance internationally.
Ever since USB debuted, it’s been billed as a simple solution to the complex problem of ensuring device compatibility. While the tendency of USB devices to form quantum superpositions was a problem for nearly two decades, the latest USB-C standard promised to end this, with a single, reversible cable. While it’s a great idea, some problems have emerged thanks to the different types of cables that can all use the USB-C standard.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
09 November, 2016
Samsung has taken out a full-page advert in multiple US newspapers to apologise for the faulty Note 7 phone, which has now been subject to a worldwide recall. The advert in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, is signed by Samsung’s North America chief executive, Gregory Lee. It offers an apology for falling short on the company’s ambition to “offer best-in-class safety and quality.
In a scathing critique, the Free Software Foundation is urging the U.S. Government to drop the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions which protect DRM. The foundation argues that DRM is a violation of users' rights, which under the guise of copyright protection is used to harm, control and spy on people.
The report found that 70% of secondary schools in Britain have installed monitoring systems, across more than 800,000 school-owned devices and near to 1,500 privately-owned devices. Big Brother Watch calls for educators to find a balance between safeguarding and pupil privacy. ‘Ensuring teachers are able to teach, encourage and inspire rather than spend their lessons monitoring student’s computer screens for signs of inappropriate behaviour is critical.’
Up to 4 million Australians can soon start using Apple Pay following a deal between Apple and a body representing smaller banks and credit unions. Customers with debit and credit accounts held with 31 financial bodies will be able to use Apple Pay to make retail payments from their iPhone following a deal with payments provider Cuscal.
08 November, 2016
The thrill of roaming a huge warehouse in virtual reality playing games will come to the US from this month with Melbourne’s Zero Latency confirming its first American centre in Orlando, Florida. Founder Tim Ruse says Zero Latency will partner with US-based Main Event Entertainment to operate a 200 square metre (2153 square feet) centre at Pointe Orlando bowling-anchored entertainment centre. Three experiences will be available: a shorter, more intense version of the Zombie Shooter game played in Melbourne will debut at launch, while a space exploring shooter game and puzzle game will come later.
Australian ed-tech start-up Mathspace has landed an exclusive deal with the world’s largest global publisher Pearson, in a partnership that will see the Mathspace platform introduced to millions of students across the US. Mr Jebara describes his app as the world’s first step-by-step adaptive learning technology for maths education, tailoring maths programs in real time based on a student’s strengths and weaknesses. The company’s main competitor, Mathletics, uses multiple- choice answers whereas Mathspace’s platform helps students line by line. According to Mr Jebara, working out and understanding the concept is more useful for a student than picking the right answer.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Numeracy
Australian students' slide in the international benchmarks for reading and numeracy may not be the fault of the students, the teachers, or even the school system, says Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg. He argues there is a key factor being overlooked, a shift so profound and complete we've almost forgotten life without it: the rise of the smartphone.
04 November, 2016
MyRepublic will launch its service on November 15 and, unlike its competition, enters the fixed broadband market with one plan at one price. According to the company, its aim is to deliver the fastest possible speed, up to 100 megabits per second, and unlimited data on existing broadband infrastructure at a single price point of $60.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
ICT Capability
03 November, 2016
For over 45 years, we’ve been using function keys,” Apple’s head of marketing said from the stage in Cupertino. “Or, really, for the last who-knows-how-many years, we haven’t been using them.” So for its new MacBook Pro, Apple killed them—deleted them, in keyboard-speak. In place of the 14 individual keys that sat atop your keyboard, there’s now a lone, skinny, OLED bar—a thin strip of touchscreen that Apple calls the Touch Bar.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
History
It’s not the first time the US has showed off its LOCUST program, where LOCUST means “low-cost UAV Swarm Technology”. There’s no official suggestion that the LOCUST drones will be used as attack weapons. They are after all small. But the autonomous technology shows the unfolding era of artificial intelligence applied to weaponry.
28 October, 2016
But this year, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand — literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits "may be" combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools. The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change earlier this year. The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow you around on the web may now be customised to you based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
IBM’s chief engineer has revealed the simple trick that could have avoided the national online Census fail altogether. IBM Australia managing senior engineer Michael Shallcross said turning the router “off and on again could have detected the problem earlier, which could have avoided the 40-hour shutdown.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability
Apple has announced restyled MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar feature that redefines how we interact with notebooks. In an event overnight in Cupertino, it unwrapped new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros that replace the function keys across the top of the keyboard with a totally configurable touch strip that can display keys with variable icons that automatically display context sensitive choices.
When I first learnt coding in the late 1960s it was a long, tedious process. I was at a school which luckily had an “in” with the Victorian Education Department and Monash University to use Minitran, a cutdown version of the widely used Fortran programming language used for general scientific applications.
Labels:
Education,
History,
ICT Capability
27 October, 2016
24 October, 2016
HSC: Maths teachers in revolt over proposed new syllabu. Dr Pender is one of several prominent mathematicians who have signed a letter demanding the board withdraw the draft syllabuses. Another signatory is the principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Jenny Allum. He said the proposed changes to assessment, which would include an increase in the number of take-home projects, would cheapen mathematics in the eyes of most students. "HSC courses with projects already have huge problems with plagiarism, with assignments being traded on the web, and assignments being completed by tutors or parents."
18 October, 2016
Augmented reality, that other revolutionary visual experience, is about to be unleashed in Australia, but it is expensive and oriented more to commercial use. Microsoft’s HoloLens headset comes to Australia late next month. Pre-orders are open: $4369 for the development edition and $7269 for the commercial suite. They can be ordered from the Microsoft Store.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability
Hyper Anna has secured a $1.25 million investment from Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure and AirTree Ventures, to support further development of its natural language-driven data analytics solution. The funds will be used to grow the business and help launch in the US in 2017. Led by co-founders and data scientists Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng and Kent Tian, Hyper Anna is working on technology that allows people to interact with any collection of data they wish from any device they choose
17 October, 2016
16 October, 2016
Early this year, analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research predicted that the tech world was going to see big layoffs in 2016—some 330,000 in all at major tech companies. At the time, these numbers seemed way over the top. Then IBM started slashing jobs in March—and continued to wield the ax over and over as the year progressed. Yahoo began layoffs of some 15 percent of its employees in February. Intel announced in April that it would lay off 12,000 this year.
Labels:
ICT Career
14 October, 2016
In 2010, when Google began mulling a withdrawal from China, foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said in a press conference that “China’s internet is open,” adding that the government “welcomes international internet corporations to do business in China in accordance with law.” Via a mixture of algorithms and workers, domestic internet companies collaborate with the government to curb online dissent and censor certain keywords, and they share private user data with authorities when asked. Meanwhile, China’s Great Firewall blocks consumer access to many overseas sites, including Facebook and Google, as they currently don’t censor content at the scope the Chinese government demands.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Ethical,
Intercultural Understanding,
Privacy
Fujitsu’s head of manufacturing, Toshio Hirose, says that the company is working on evolving a new model for manufacturing where people and robots grow together every day. “Fujitsu has production sites that combine expertise in both hardware, such as sensors and cloud systems, and software such as production control solutions and AI. We also have human resources to support the sites and we are using the total capabilities amassed from all of these assets to drive next-generation manufacturing,” says Hirose.
11 October, 2016
Internationally recognised UniSA experts in bilingual, multilingual and intercultural education will play a key role in South Australia’s first Chinese bilingual school. UniSA’s Research Centre for Languages and Cultures is developing the language and content curriculum for William Light R-12 School’s bilingual program, which introduces Mandarin Chinese to students, building up towards the curriculum being offered half in Chinese and half in English.
Labels:
Education,
Intercultural Understanding
10 October, 2016
This slow-building approach is at odds with some aspects of public education. It’s not uncommon for districts to require that each class period address a discrete objective, and teachers are expected to measure whether students learned it at the end of the period. The authors of Common Core math and NGSS don’t see their disciplines fitting into that structure. “One insight we got is that there’s almost no mathematics worth learning that breaks into lesson-size pieces,” Daro said. “You have a three- or four-week sequence and treat it with coherence. It’s about systems and structures, not small facts and small methods. It’s about how it all works together.” Schweingruber agrees. “Some of these ideas in science are hard to get quickly,” she said. “It took humans hundreds of years, so why would kids figure them out quickly?”
09 October, 2016
THEY might be operating drones, trading Bitcoins, designing virtual reality worlds or creating artificial intelligence systems. And by the 2030s, many of today’s high school students will be doing jobs that nobody has even thought of yet. A new program for secondary students will take them into high tech workplaces to explore the skills they will need for jobs likely to be on offer in 15 years’ time. The Australian Science and Mathematics School will combine with employment planning company Workforce BluePrint to pilot the 21st Century Capabilities and Careers program.
It was never going to last: three major streaming services, launched within three months, in a market as tiny as Australia. Last year, small player Ezyflix closed. Then Quickflix went into voluntary administration in April. Now, the streaming wars have produced their first major casualty, with Presto due to shut in January 2017.
Labels:
Sustainability
07 October, 2016
Australia is among more than 40 countries to have issued a declaration laying out principles for the export and use of armed drones, to ensure they don’t cause instability or help terrorism and organised crime. US allies such as Britain, Germany and Australia signed the declaration released by the US State Department. France, Israel, Brazil, Russia and China, among other countries, did not sign the Joint Declaration for the Export and Subsequent Use of Armed or Strike-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
Robotics,
Social
04 October, 2016
03 October, 2016
“[Google’s G Suite] is still much smaller than Microsoft Office, and the Microsoft Office suite is still far more capable overall,” Dawson says. “If you need more advanced functionality, it’s quite likely that the G Suite won’t do the trick for you.” Dawson points out that while coworkers might start off using Google Docs to collaborate on writing, say, a press release, it’s Microsoft that still has the advanced templates and formatting functionalities required when it comes time to actually send it out.
In a paper they released earlier this month titled “Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs,” a team of computer scientists at Cornell Tech, the Swiss institute EPFL in Lausanne, and the University of North Carolina detail how they were able to reverse engineer machine learning-trained AIs based only on sending them queries and analyzing the responses. By training their own AI with the target AI’s output, they found they could produce software that was able to predict with near-100% accuracy the responses of the AI they’d cloned, sometimes after a few thousand or even just hundreds of queries.
30 September, 2016
28 September, 2016
Skype’s first employee, Taavet Hinrikus from the tiny country of Estonia, has shifted from disrupting communications to international money transfers with his billion-dollar start-up TransferWise, and says Australia is the perfect market. TransferWise offers international money transfers five to 10 times cheaper than the banks, and Hinrikus says he came up with the idea during his time at Skype, where he was being paid in euros despite working in Britain. He had to convert the euros every time he was paid.
When it comes to users’ privacy, messaging apps can vary widely — a fact that came to a head when Alphabet’s Google released its new Allo app. The messenger performs novel tricks like suggesting what to say next, but it does it by analysing the contents of users’ messages. Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, called the app “Google Surveillance” in a tweet, and some security experts recommended skipping the download, which was released last week.
27 September, 2016
His misguided political donation could have serious impacts on Oculus and Facebook. On Thursday, it was revealed that Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, had funded the efforts of Nimble America, a pro-Donald Trump nonprofit. Yesterday, Luckey confirmed that he had made a $10,000 donation to the group, while seeming to walk back any support for Trump himself, saying he would be voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Luckey also denied that he was responsible for some Reddit posts attributed to him by the Daily Beast. Meanwhile, several Oculus Rift game developers have said they will distance themselves from the platform because of Luckey’s political involvement
26 September, 2016
The technology that repelled the hackers was a style of software programming known as formal verification. Unlike most computer code, which is written informally and evaluated based mainly on whether it works, formally verified software reads like a mathematical proof: Each statement follows logically from the preceding one. An entire program can be tested with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems.
23 September, 2016
ere’s how to enter Recovery mode on iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus now that Apple has replaced the mechanical Home button with a capacitive one. The introduction of the iPhone 7 along with its capacitive Home / Touch ID button may have gone well down with the average device owner, but it hasn’t exactly settled in well with those who have reason to put their phones into DFU or Recovery mode. After all, the Home button was an integral part of both of those processes. We’ve already showed you how to enter DFU mode on iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, so now, it takes perfect sense to show you the Recovery mode process as well. But first, let us see what’s the difference between DFU mode and Recovery mode.
Labels:
ICT Capability
A teenage hacker has found a way to circumvent the phone’s security and restrictions, jailbreaking a brand new iPhone 7 running iOS 10, effectively taking full control of it and allowing him to install apps not approved by Apple. The 19-year-old hacker, who’s known online as qwertyoruiop but whose real name is Luca Todesco, took advantage of a series of bugs he found and exploited—and all it took him, he said, was just 24 hours.
Today, SolidRun announces an Intel Braswell-based MicroSoM. Unlike the ARM-powered Raspberry Pi, this is x86 compatible, meaning it can run full Windows 10. Plus, if you install a Linux distro, there will be far more packages available, such as Google Chrome, which is not available for Pi. Heck, it can probably serve as a respectable desktop. Even though it costs more than the Raspberry Pi, is it a better deal?
Labels:
ICT Capability
21 September, 2016
Education is not exempt either. Established educational institutions are being rattled by new players like General Assembly and Lynda.com, which are avoiding the looming hold major universities have over potential paying students and instead are thriving by addressing specific needs for new skills or accelerated training. On the flip side, the universities, TAFEs and schools that are embracing more tech-driven ways of teaching and learning are future-proofing themselves against more agile start-ups and are expanding their pool of student candidates to include those learning online or remotely. In each of these industries, we’re seeing innovation stem from a focus on what the customer wants. It’s not rocket science, and it can come from any person or business as long as the right drivers are behind the decision-making and product design.
“Factory floors, supply chain, trucking, everything is becoming a data source and can be analysed.” The end result of this level of connectivity is greater efficiency and, according to Dr Vogels, almost every company is becoming a software and analytics company. That trend implies a greater dependence on the cloud, which is music to the ears of Dr Vogels, the key architect of Amazon Web Services.
Labels:
ICT Capability
16 September, 2016
the Blackbird. The electric car doesn’t look like any ride you’ve seen during a commercial break. Instead of a roof on top, it’s got a pile of spinning lasers and cameras. It’s covered in white triangles. It has just one seat. But it can take on the form of a nearly infinite number of cars. If you see an Audi, various Mercedes, an Aston Martin, a Corvette, a Mustang, even a Chevy Sonic, on TV—you might be looking at the Blackbird, under a digital disguise.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Graphic Design
Hacker George Hotz is gearing up to launch his automotive AI start-up's first official product. In December, the 26-year-old—known for infiltrating Apple's iPhone and Sony's PlayStation 3—moved on to bigger things: turning a 2016 Acura ILX into an autonomous vehicle. According to Bloomberg, Hotz outfitted the car with a laser-based radar (lidar) system, a camera, a 21.5-inch screen, a "tangle of electronics," and a joystick attached to a wooden board.
15 September, 2016
To help meet demand, online educator Udacity is joining Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Chinese ridesharing behemoth Didi, and Otto, the autonomous truck outfit that Uber recently bought. They’re launching a 27-week course that promises to turn anyone with $2,400 and basic coding experience into a deep learning engineer.
14 September, 2016
07 September, 2016
At the heart of the Chinese classroom is the teacher’s unshakeable belief that all children are capable of learning anything if that learning is presented in the right way. The idea works on the basis that understanding is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution, and that difficulty is pleasurable.
05 September, 2016
NBN Co is looking to juice up its copper infrastructure with the company working with technology partner Nokia to trial XG-FAST over the copper network. XG-FAST is the latest iteration of Nokia’s G.fast technology that allows the delivery of multi-gigabit speeds over copper.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research
FOR THE FIRST time since even before Facebook acquired it in a whopping $19 billion acquisition two years ago, WhatsApp has changed its terms of service. This time, you’ll want to read them very closely. Under the new user agreement, WhatsApp will share the phone numbers of people using the service with Facebook, along with analytics such as what devices and operating systems are being used. Previously, no information passed between the two, a stance more in line with WhatsApp’s original sales pitch as a privacy oasis.
Artificial intelligence used to be something that featured in science fiction films. Now, it's writing the scripts. Following the debut in June of Sunspring, a hilariously disjointed short film written entirely by AI, a feature-length movie has been written by AI – with human input – in an effort to nail the formula for box office success.
Girl Geek Academy has launched what it says is the world’s first hackathon for girls aged 5 to 8, Miss Makes Code. The hackathon, led by Girl Geek Academy CEO Sarah Moran, will see over 70 young girls learn deep algorithmic thinking and creative problem solving through practical hands-on tasks.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Literacy,
Numeracy,
Social,
Women in IT
27 August, 2016
25 August, 2016
Nowadays, watching other people play videogames is a multi-million-dollar industry called Let’s Plays. They dominate YouTube’s top earner charts and have formed the broad template for streaming live gameplay on the website Twitch, which Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014.
Labels:
Game,
Personal / Social Capability,
Social
Code.org’s new login approach to student privacy We recently announced the bulk-deletion of email addresses associated with our Code Studio learning platform student accounts. We are able to do this because we designed our login to allow a student to use their email address to create their account, without ever storing the actual email address.
12 August, 2016
10 August, 2016
09 August, 2016
Census officials desperately hope that Australians complete their forms fully and accurately following an outcry over privacy and security that risks diminishing public trust. The fear is eventual massive identity theft by hackers, with the census also going online for the first time. Central to concern is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) decision to match census records against that held by government agencies, and to store names and addresses for up to four years.
08 August, 2016
28 July, 2016
23 July, 2016
05 July, 2016
Zuckerberg said in December that he intended to put 99 per cent of his Facebook shares into a new philanthropy project focusing on human potential and equality. Advertisement The creation of the Class C shares would allow Zuckerberg to sell the non-voting stock, but keep the voting Class A and Class B shares that would let him retain control of Facebook.
04 July, 2016
The safest jobs need a human touch The jobs most at risk of computerisation are those that include routine, repeatable tasks or transactions that can be handled online — roles which can be performed by people such as telemarketers, accountants, lawyers, retail sales and real-estate agents. The skills and professions that are safe from automation are those that are highly skilled and creative or require a human touch — roles filled by nurses, baristas, beauticians, physical therapists, dentists, personal trainers and firefighters, among others.
01 July, 2016
Tesla said that the vehicle was on a divided highway with autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake wasn’t applied,” Tesla said. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer hitting the windshield of the Model S.
29 June, 2016
Driverless cars pose a quandary when it comes to safety. These autonomous vehicles are programmed with a set of safety rules, and it is not hard to construct a scenario in which those rules come into conflict with each other. Suppose a driverless car must either hit a pedestrian or swerve in such a way that it crashes and harms its passengers. What should it be instructed to do?
Primary school students have won a competition using the video game Minecraft to help the State Government design real-life national parks. A class of grade three and four students from Linden Park Primary School has won the Create Your Perfect National Park Minecraft competition, which asked students to use the internationally acclaimed “sandbox” video game Minecraft to design their ideal national park.
THIS WEEK, CHINA’S Sunway TaihuLight officially became the fastest supercomputer in the world. The previous champ? Also from China. What used to be an arms race for supercomputing primacy among technological nations has turned into a blowout. The Sunway TaihuLight is indeed a monster: theoretical peak performance of 125 petaflops, 10,649,600 cores, and 1.31 petabytes of primary memory
Labels:
History,
ICT Capability
Google’s artificial intelligence researchers are starting to have to code around their own code, writing patches that limit a robot’s abilities so that it continues to develop down the path desired by the researchers — not by the robot itself. It’s the beginning of a long-term trend in robotics and AI in general: once we’ve put in all this work to increase the insight of an artificial intelligence, how can we make sure that insight will only be applied in the ways we would like?
22 June, 2016
20 June, 2016
So Long, Flash (And Everything Else) Apple’s crusade against Flash dates back to 2010, when Steve Job famously penned an open letter banishing it from the iPhone. Since then, plenty of others co-signed. Facebook’s security chief called for a Flash end-of-life date last summer, and Google has taken multiple steps to limit its viability on Chrome. Even Adobe has lately distanced itself from its most notorious product.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
History
16 June, 2016
My Big Idea is an ambitious program to let ordinary Australians shape the nation they want, by suggesting and voting on ideas tackling specific challenges facing the nation — such as housing affordability, caring for the elderly and disadvantaged, job opportunities and a lack of honesty and accountability. The best ideas will be developed by the program’s prestigious university and corporate partners, to be made real.
Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference brings together app developers from all walks of life, and the youngest to make the trip to San Francisco this year was Anvitha Vijay, a grade four student from Mount View Primary School in Melbourne. Anvitha, now nine, began coding at the age of seven. She wanted to make an app that would help her younger sister – then two – to identify animals. Two years later Smartkins Animals, an educational app aimed at kids aged five and under, made it into Apple's App Store. The iOS app was good enough to win her one of 350 Apple scholarships for young coders to attend WWDC. She was one of eight in Australia.
Is the keyboard dying? While it’s foolhardy to predict its demise, it’s safe to say our QWERTY friend has a more limited tenure. Once humankind is confident that voice recognition is accurate and a computer does exactly what you ask it, there’s no going back to using a keyboard 24/7. Not only will Apple’s personal assistant, Siri, come to the Mac but the company’s 13 million developers also will be able integrate Siri into their apps for iPhone and iPad, Apple has said at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
History,
ICT Capability,
research
01 June, 2016
Apple says that 84 per cent of its users are on iOS 9, its latest software release. By contrast, Android Marshmallow, which has been out since October, is only on eight per cent of Android devices. The need to get more phones updated quicker isn't just a question of getting the newest features. Sure it sucks for developers who want to build for the latest and greatest version of Android, but the more pressing problem was laid bare last year surrounding the Stagefright bug, which let hackers infect Android phones with a malicious text. If you were on a Nexus phone running stock Android, you received critical security updates protecting against the flaw almost instantly. But if you were on any other Android phone, you were left exposed for months.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Sustainability
26 May, 2016
Ex-McDonald's CEO suggests replacing employees with robots amid protests. “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry – it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,”
17 May, 2016
11 May, 2016
15 April, 2016
13 April, 2016
A question yet to be addressed is whether the march of technology, under the guise of making our lives easier, freer, more connected, is actually beginning to wipe out secure livelihoods for the masses, and concentrating wealth in a new tech elite. It would not need to be this way, Rushkoff argues. His answer is to shift the digital economy away from extractive models to distributive ones. The cycle couriers could own the takeaway food despatch platform, say. "I'm all for disruption. Let's disrupt Facebook's monopoly of social networks, or Google's monopoly on search. Let's disrupt Uber's extractive monopoly platform with a driver-owned app that does the same thing." That really would be a sharing economy.
11 April, 2016
“If you have people transcribe conversational speech over the telephone, the error rate is around 4 percent,” says Xuedong Huang, a senior scientist at Microsoft, whose Project Oxford has provided a public API for budding voice recognition entrepreneurs to play with. “If you put all the systems together—IBM and Google and Microsoft and all the best combined—amazingly the error rate will be around 8 percent.” Huang also estimates commercially available systems are probably closer to 12 percent. “This is not as good as humans,” Huang admits, “but it’s the best the speech community can do. It’s about as twice as bad as humans.”
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
research
06 April, 2016
05 April, 2016
Microsoft announced that it would acquire Xamarin, a company that makes tools that help coders build applications that can run on multiple systems, including those made by Microsoft’s rivals, namely Android and iOS. But developers got a dose of good news today at the company’s Build conference: Microsoft isn’t raising prices. In fact, just the opposite: It’s making Xamarin’s platform free for all users of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio coding tool, including those who use the free “community” edition of the product. The Mac version of Xamarin will be free as well, all of which is a far cry from the $999 Xamarin previously charged for its business edition.
IBM won the contract to design and deliver a whole-of-government payroll system in 2007, but its rollout was plagued by delays and budget blowouts. When it did go live, the system failed spectacularly, resulting in thousands of health workers left on the lurch with their pay. The cost to taxpayers has been estimated by KPMG at $1.2bn and the debacle has been described as possibly the worst public administration failure in Australia.In last year’s Supreme Court hearing, lawyers for IBM said failures with the scheme were because the government was “not able to define and stick to a scope”
Labels:
Ethical,
ICT Capability
03 April, 2016
31 March, 2016
Artificial intelligence could be used by doctors to diagnose heart failure following a breakthrough trial hosted by Silicon Valley crowdsourcing company Kaggle, the American National Institute of Health and consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
research
29 March, 2016
Code Club Australia, the local arm of a global initiative delivering coding skills to kids, has hit a major milestone with more than 15,000 young Australians now part of the program. The Code Club initiative — backed in Australia by Telstra — has opened its 500th branch at Glebe Library in Sydney
Labels:
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability
28 March, 2016
holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see, hear, and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in the same physical space. Communicating and interacting with remote users becomes as natural as face-to-face communication.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
research,
Social
22 March, 2016
The government’s potential solution raises its own questions: if investigators figure out a way to hack into the device without Apple’s help, are they obligated to show Apple the security flaw they used to get inside? Attorneys for Apple, which almost assuredly would then patch such a flaw, said they would demand the government share their methods if they successfully get inside the phone.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Privacy,
Sustainability
A new start-up from the former managing director of JPMorgan Asia Pacific promises to better educate investors on how to tackle the vagaries of the stockmarket through a game in which they can earn real cash. Stockfans, the brainchild of JPMorgan and AIG luminary Bobby Bhatia, launched in Australia last week at the University of Melbourne and has already garnered 2000 sign-ups with minimal promotion.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
Social
18 March, 2016
Is Algebra Necessary? A definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above. And if there is a shortage of STEM graduates, an equally crucial issue is how many available positions there are for men and women with these skills. A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
ICT Career
A Palestinian school teacher and former refugee beat Australia's Richard Johnson to a $US1 million ($1.3 million) global education award on Sunday to applause from world leaders. Pope Francis announced the winner in a video message to the ceremony. Prince William, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Vice-President Joe Biden and former US president Bill Clinton also recorded messages for the ceremony. "You learn how to be social through games as well as learn the joy of life," Pope Francis said.
One of the world's most influential education experts, Andreas Schleicher, has criticised the Australian education system for falling behind global standards. "[Australia] more or less defines teachers by the number of hours that [they] teach in front of students," he said. "That is part of the problem."
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
research
11 March, 2016
06 March, 2016
23 February, 2016
Valve dropped a bomb on us today in the form of a new hardware performance test that gamers can use to determine if they are ready for the SteamVR revolution. The aptly named "SteamVR Performance Test" is a free title available through Steam that any user can download and run to get a report card on their installed hardware. No VR headset required!
Labels:
3D,
Game,
Graphic Design
14 January, 2016
Harvey has copped a barrage of criticism for making the mistake of misreading his cue card, and declaring Miss Colombia had won the title, when in fact it was Miss Philippines. Digital analysts, brand strategists, designers and art directors are now debating whether its design could have been the catalyst for the on-air blunder. “If we simply move the “Miss Universe 2015” section closer to the related items, we are well on our way to saving Steve.”
Labels:
Graphic Design
12 January, 2016
Nearly 200 experts, companies and civil society groups from more than 40 countries — including Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Australian Privacy Foundation and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights — are asking governments around the world to support strong encryption and reject proposals that would undermine the digital security it provides.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
Robin Potanin, the head of the Adelaide campus of the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, said South Australia was helping students from regional Australia and the rest of the world get the education needed to succeed in the design business.
http://indaily.com.au/business/2016/01/12/adelaide-gaming-design-school-sets-sights-on-world-target/
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
09 January, 2016
Humans are slamming into driverless cars and exposing a key flaw
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/humans-are-slamming-into-driverless-cars-and-exposing-a-key-flaw-20151222-gltebr.touch.touch.touch.html
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