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12 May, 2015
Programming languages don’t die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms.
08 May, 2015
After several years of speculation — really since the thing first hit Kickstarter in 2012 — Oculus VR has finally announced a consumer version of its Oculus Rift PC-based virtual reality headset. The first units will begin shipping to buyers in the first quarter of 2016, with preorders starting “later this year.”
The advantages of using a NFC, or for that matter any kind of RFID technology, are that you don’t need to implant any batteries — all the power is included in the device that interrogates the chip. In Seth’s case, that device is a nearby Android phone. The pretext for his first major demo is a hacking scenario where his NFC sends a message to the phone that contains a link to a Web page that downloads a file. If the file is then installed, an app then connects to a remote server and allows control of the device.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability
06 May, 2015
While it seems like software developers have taken over the world, one arena where they’re still relatively rare is politics. As I wrote last year, for example, it’s still hard to find people in the U.S. Congress who have backgrounds as programmers. However, it turns out that at least one country in the world, Singapore, has a former programmer as a prime minister, and he’s actually shared some code to demonstrate his chops.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
ICT Capability
03 May, 2015
Nearly half of the jobs in Australia are at high risk of "digital disruption" in the next 20 years, and our education system is not equipping students with the skills needed to adapt, a new report warns. PricewaterhouseCoopers chief executive Luke Sayers is calling for a national summit on the issue, saying universities need to start producing far more people literate in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects (STEM) to help the workforce adapt to a rapidly changing global economy.
02 May, 2015
30 April, 2015
Even now, some trends are evident. Advances in disruptive technologies like mobile computing, the Cloud, big data/analytics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, social media, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are driving the changes and these will continue to be areas of huge opportunity.
one of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents said the US National Security Agency had hacked into Huawei’s email archive and internal communications. In an interview with The Australian, Huawei Enterprise Solutions Architect Paul Cooney said Huawei and its Australian clients had moved on to forge positive business relationships. This had seen Huawei build key national 4G infrastructure for Optus and Vodafone.
28 April, 2015
09 April, 2015
Online copyright infringers could find themselves dragged to court after the country’s biggest telecommunications companies agreed to implement a “three-strikes” warning scheme to crack down on copyright pirates. Telcos including Telstra, Optus, iiNet and Vodafone have agreed to implement the new scheme
Labels:
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Privacy
With 1.7 million participants spending 10 million hours online and 1.1 billion “participant-logged events”, the creators of edX, the massive open online course platform created by Harvard and MIT, have learned a thing or two since they launched their first courses in 2012.
Labels:
Education,
Intercultural Understanding,
research
08 April, 2015
07 April, 2015
02 April, 2015
AN OLD AVIATORS’ joke goes like this: In the future, airline cockpit crews will consist of one pilot and a dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog, the dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches any of the controls. Today, we’re just about there. Autonomous unmanned aircraft have been flying for a long time now, fighting our wars and patrolling our borders. On paper, at least, we already have the technology to take the humans out of the cockpit and prevent tragedies like last week’s Germanwings crash in the French Alps
01 April, 2015
CHILDREN who play video games in moderation are less aggressive, more sociable, have fewer emotional problems and do better at school than their peers, research by the University of Oxford suggests. Those playing video games for more than three hours a day, however, are hyperactive, get into fights and switch off at school, no matter what the type of game.
30 March, 2015
Super Mario 64 is still an amazing game, but nearly 20 years after it first launched on the Nintendo 64, it looks pretty dated. But with a little love, it can look amazing. Computer science student Erik Roystan Ross recently decided to remake the first level of the game while experimenting with the Unity game engine
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
History
Content ID is an automated system created by YouTube. It lets copyright owners identify and automatically take action against uploads containing their content. If a match is found—regardless of context—the copyright holder decides whether that video is blocked, muted (in the case of song used as background music in an original video), or monetized with ads of its choosing.
Labels:
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Sustainability
26 March, 2015
24 March, 2015
22 March, 2015
The goal of ATRIAS isn't just to create a walking robot, but to create one that is better at reacting and recovering from unexpected obstacles. As you can see from the video below, ATRIAS holds its own against a barrage of dodge balls, failing only when its emergency shut-off button is accidentally struck by a ball. With a little more engineering, it seems easy to imagine ATRIAS making one heck of a goalie some day.
21 March, 2015
On March 19, the second day of the Hewlett-Packard Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) sponsored Pwn2Own hacking challenge at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, B.C., security researchers were able to successfully exploit Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Career,
research,
Sustainability
Marketers—or anyone who’s inspired to snoop—simply insert a transparent 1×1 image into an email. When that email is opened, the image pings the server it originated from with information like the time, your location, and the device you’re using. It’s a read receipt on steroids that you never signed up for.
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/ugly-mail/
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
The illusion is one of Apple’s latest innovations: the Taptic Engine. Relying on a technique pioneered in research labs 20 years ago, it uses an electromagnetic motor to trick your fingers into feeling things that aren’t actually there. The motor’s precisely tuned oscillation makes it feel like you’re depressing a mechanical button, when you’re really just mashing your finger against a stationary piece of glass.
Labels:
History,
Intellectual Property
20 March, 2015
18 March, 2015
17 March, 2015
We launched it more than 20 years ago, using the venerable — but simple to master — PageMaker program, dreamed up by online design pioneer Paul Brainerd and later acquired by Adobe. Adobe beefed up PageMaker with many new and more sophisticated features, and renamed it InDesign.
Labels:
Graphic Design,
History,
Sustainability
16 March, 2015
WHEN THE US Embassy in Beijing started tweeting data from an air-quality monitor, no one could have anticipated its far-reaching consequences: It triggered profound change in China’s environmental policy, advanced air-quality science in some of the world’s most polluted cities, and prompted similar efforts in neighboring countries.
Yihao Zhang at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and a few pals who have created an algorithm that clones facial expressions and pastes them onto other faces. The work raises the prospect of accurately reproducing facial movements and expressions on avatars, cartoon characters and more or less any face.
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability,
research
14 March, 2015
Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com. job searching akamai Akamai CSO takes a creative approach to finding security pros Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai, doesn't try to hire perfect candidates. Here’s why. READ NOW Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration.
Labels:
History
Online censorship is rife. In many countries, notably China, citizens are prevented from accessing certain websites at the behest of their government. To help provide access to information and unbiased news, freedom of information organization Reporters Without Borders has set up mirrors to nine censored websites so they can be accessed from 11 countries that blocked them.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game released in 2011 by Square Enix, and developed by Eidos Montréal and Nixxes for the PC version. It uses a modified version of the Crystal engine made by Crystal Dynamics and was one of the earliest games to support DirectX 11. It featured great graphics at the time (still looks good!), and it was as beautiful as light-weight: even low-budget video cards could run the game smoothly. I was curious about the rendering process, so I spent a few hours reverse-engineering the game, playing with Renderdoc. Here are the results of my investigation.
Labels:
3D,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability,
research
13 March, 2015
A verdict saying Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke copied Marvin Gaye’s music to create their hit song “Blurred Lines” could ripple across the music industry, potentially changing how artists work and opening the door to new copyright claims. An eight-person jury determined Tuesday that Williams and Thicke copied elements of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up” and ordered the pair to pay nearly $7.4 million to the late R&B legend’s three children.
Labels:
Intellectual Property
12 March, 2015
AS MOORE’S LAW has packed more and more transistors onto a single memory chip, scientists have fretted for years that electric charges that “leak” out from those tiny components might cause unpredictable errors in neighboring semiconductors. But now a team of Google researchers has demonstrated a more unexpected problem with that electromagnetic leakage: hackers can use it to purposefully corrupt portions of some laptops’ memory, and even to bypass the security protections of those computers.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
research
11 March, 2015
Why It’s Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry
https://medium.com/matter/why-it-s-almost-impossible-to-teach-a-robot-to-do-your-laundry-2a4a3efb3775
08 March, 2015
07 March, 2015
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the 30-year-old Facebook CEO revealed what he looks for in a prospective employee. And the answer is simple. "I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person," Mr Zuckerberg told the audience.
Labels:
Personal / Social Capability
Telstra has become the first Australian telco to offer its subscribers similar access that law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have to their private phone metadata, backflipping on its previous position of refusing them access to it. Starting April 1, Telstra will give their customers access to a limited set of their "metadata" for a fee — information about who they've called, the time, location and duration. It does not include the content of a communication, such as the detail of what you said or wrote in an email or SMS.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
06 March, 2015
Samsung’s Galaxy S6, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, looks like a really nice upgrade from the disappointing Galaxy S5 — which apart from a screen and camera resolution bump and some software refinements, was basically a GS4, and missed sales projections by up to 40 percent as a result.
01 March, 2015
23 February, 2015
ISPs will hand pirates over to the movie houses, potentially without a court fight, under Australia's proposed piracy code. As of September 1, Australian internet service providers will be forced to send warning notices to alleged movie pirates, under a draft Copyright Notice Scheme industry code unveiled on Friday.
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