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06 March, 2017
“We always look to apps that can be part of popular culture. We believe that young women are the early adopters of popular culture, so one of the things we saw was that when we met the company, it was dominated in its usage by young woman, by high school girls,” he told CNN. “And whenever we see that, and we’ve seen it before, whether it was MySpace or Facebook or Instagram, that is a good predictor of what’s going to become popular culture in the future.”
01 March, 2017
The Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition, a report which provides a technology forecast for educational institutions, suggests virtual reality (VR) will be adopted by classrooms within two to three years. Even though virtual reality has started to take off in sectors like news making, gaming and digital marketing, the education sector does not seem to have the range of great experiences that VR can offer. While there are no doubt other benefits to using this technology, I think that VR technologies will have a positive impact in the areas of inspiring wonder and curiosity, developing new creative skills and offering authentic “learn by doing” experiences. Judging from the work that is being done in education around VR though, I feel that the most powerful learning experiences are those that foster community and collaboration, and empower the user to empathise.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability
A new provision is being inserted into the AANA Code of Ethics requiring advertising and marketing communication to be "clearly distinguishable as such to the relevant audience". Influencers must ensure any paid content is marked and cannot "camouflage the fact that it is advertising". The practice of businesses working with influencers has come under increasing scrutiny, with Media Watch investigating influencers such as chef Matt Moran, who was paid to send tweets recommending Kangaroo Island and failed to disclose the payment. More recently author and entrepreneur Zoe Foster Blake was criticised for posting a photo to Instagram of her fridge filled with YouFoodz products that she received for free.
Black Sage’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and spent a year enhancing their system so that it can now not only track drones but also bring them safely to the ground using radio-frequency-jamming technology. There is only one small hitch: Like almost every drone-interdiction technology in development, frequency jammers run afoul of several US laws, most of which were passed when people hadn’t dreamed of owning their own unmanned aircraft. Romero and Lamm’s solution to the mock terror in the stadium—a solution that they have shown can reliably counter the threats drones pose to targets as varied as prisons, airports, and arenas—is illegal here, which leaves the future of Black Sage’s technology, like the future of drones themselves, very much up in the air.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability
Last Friday, Google quietly announced that E2EMail, an extension for Chrome that would seamlessly encrypt and decrypt Gmail messages, was no longer a Google effort. Instead, the company has invited the outside developer community to adopt the project’s open-source code. Google was careful to emphasize in a blog post describing the change that it hasn’t given up work on its email encryption tool. But cryptographers and members of the privacy community see the move as confirmation that Google has officially backburnered a critical privacy and security initiative.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Privacy
27 February, 2017
While South Australia’s declining manufacturing sector is costing the state jobs, the crash repair industry is desperately trying to fill positions. The Motor Trade Association of South Australia’s chief executive, Paul Unerkov, said there was a lack of apprentices entering the industry. “Rapid automotive technology changes mean people coming into the industry, either from another trade or through an apprenticeship, require higher levels of literacy and numeracy, a strong work ethic and an ability to grasp technical concepts to successfully work in modern workshops.”
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
Literacy,
Numeracy
24 February, 2017
TIKITU DE JAGER, a coder living in Greece, wanted to learn to program in iOS. So, like a lot of us do when we want to pick up a new skill, he started watching lessons online. At the outset everything was new, so he’d watch carefully and take notes. But as De Jager’s knowledge grew, he wanted to zip past familiar material. That’s when he started speeding up the videos. Now De Jager races along at 2X speed, slowing down only when he hits challenging stuff.
Labels:
Education
But for those suffering nostalgia for the ideal of secure, high-wage manufacturing in the rust belt – it's not going to happen. On one hand, manufacturing automation is not about to be reversed, while on the other, the US has lost the capability to feed, run and maintain many modern factories. The most commonly-given reason for Trump's "bringing the jobs back" chant being a lie is that most of the jobs weren't "stolen" by China and Mexico in the first place and they therefore can't be "brought back". There have been various studies attempting to allocate responsibility between automation and cheap foreign labour. The highest score I've seen for automation's role is a massive 85 per cent, as summarised by the Financial Times:
START-ups with a great idea but which lack a technical founder on their team have found a new home in Adelaide’s Moonshine Laboratory. Spun out of Adelaide marketing agency The Distillery, Moonshine has already welcomed two start-ups into the fold and has another in talks. Distillery principal Jason Neave said the aim was to fill a niche in Adelaide, which had a suite of start-up accelerators and support programs, but not one for companies that did not have a technical co-founder — think a programmer or computer scientist capable of building the product.
20 February, 2017
CSC Australia wins State Government contract, pledges 400 new jobs and Holden worker retraining. The new contract will also provide reskilling and job offers for up to 30 Holden workers, as the Elizabeth factory prepares for closure in October and the supply chain also shuts down.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Sustainability
14 February, 2017
It’s Siri for lawyers and accountants. Ask “Ailira” a question about Australian tax law and she will scan through millions of uploaded documents and use her artificial intelligence nous to deliver an answer. “Your tax agents will probably be gone within five years,” said a confident Mr Cartland, who added that their demise was already happening with the Australian Taxation Office pushing to automate tax returns, technology issues not withstanding.
13 February, 2017
The sale of so-called "fully loaded Kodi boxes" has been called a "top priority" by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact). The five traders were arrested in early morning raids. Fact said it believed the suspects had made in the region of £250,000 selling the devices online. Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Intellectual Property
09 February, 2017
Nintendo's engineers have embraced Unreal Engine Shigeru Miyamoto says that his engineers have ‘mastered’ the Unreal Engine.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/07/nintendos-engineers-have-embraced-unreal-engine/
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
08 February, 2017
What do Donald Trump, Nick Xenophon, Pauline Hanson and 83 per cent of Australians have in common? In a survey covering dozens of hot-button issues put to a representative sample of Australian voters, a desire to rely less on imports and to manufacture more at home stood out as the number one thing most people agreed on.
31 January, 2017
25 January, 2017
It’s not often that civil liberties advocates—along with other advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and Doctors Without Borders—find themselves on the same side of an issue as President Trump. But digital privacy and rights groups roundly criticized the TPP for restricting the freedom of information and lambasted what they say was the lack of transparency in the drafting of the deal. “The TPP would have been a bad deal for digital rights, so we welcome its demise,” says Jeremy Malcolm, senior global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver’s vision problems.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Robotics
20 January, 2017
13 January, 2017
Game-playing AI has found solutions to some versions of poker. But heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold’em represents an especially complex challenge with 10160 possible plays at different stages of the game (possibly more than the number of atoms in the universe). Such complexity exists because this two-player version of poker allows for unrestricted bet sizes. To deal with such a game, many AI rely on a technique called counterfactual regret minimization (CFR). Typical CFR algorithms try to solve games such as poker through several steps at each decision point. First, they come up with counterfactual values representing different game outcomes. Second, they apply a regret minimization approach to see which strategy leads to the best outcome. And third, they typically average the most recent strategy with all past strategies.
12 January, 2017
ATLASSIAN CO-FOUNDER MIKE Cannon-Brookes describes Trello as a simple online application. But simple doesn’t have to mean cheap: His company just agreed to acquire the web-based project management app for $425 million—a ridiculous-sounding amount of money that may well be worth paying. “Simple products can be deceptive in their simplicity,” Cannon-Brookes says.
Labels:
ICT Capability
09 January, 2017
Our team at USC has conducted the largest analyses1 of STEM depictions in motion pictures to date. We examined 129 G-, PG-, and PG-13-rated top-grossing films from 2006 to 2011. Only 26 females with STEM jobs were depicted on screen across 5,839 speaking characters. Of those 26 females, consider the following disturbing trends: Only three were African-American—two in life or physical sciences, one engineer. Only one woman was depicted as a mathematician. She was white, shown in a low-cut, tight-fitting Santa suit, and was shown estimating the production time for toys on the North Pole’s assembly line. This problem goes beyond American films. In a follow-up study, we assessed 120 movies released between 2010 and 2013 in 10 top international film markets. Out of 5,799 characters, 121 held a STEM job. Of these characters, only 14 were female and there were no mathematicians. No females in STEM were African-American.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
05 January, 2017
Lego A/S pulled back the curtains Wednesday on an update to its classic building toy at the CES tech confab in Las Vegas. Dubbed Lego Boost, the new kits bring brick creations to life with simple motors and sensors while teaching the basics of programming. Unlike Lego’s more-complex Mindstorms systems, which are used in schools to teach robotics, the Boost system was designed for children as young as age 7, and feels closer to the classic brick experience.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability
Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent. One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer,” starting by January 2017.
A new French law establishing workers’ “right to disconnect” goes into effect today. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails. The goals of the law include making sure employees are fairly paid for work, and preventing burnout by protecting private time.
02 January, 2017
01 January, 2017
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
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