Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Improve Collaborative Editing Of Office Files With Dropbox & Project Harmony

Monday, January 12th, 2015

Improve Collaborative Editing Of #Office Files With Dropbox & Project Harmony http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/improve-collaborative-editing-office-files-dropbox-project-harmony Interesting alternative to #Google Docs

How My Mom Got Hacked – NYTimes.com

Saturday, January 10th, 2015

How My Mom Got Hacked http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/how-my-mom-got-hacked.html The Cryptowall #crime business, complete w/ customer support & #Bitcoin payment suggestions

Smartphone Photography Evolves With Camera Apps and Related Tools

Saturday, December 27th, 2014

Recommends Manual for $2

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/technology/personaltech/smartphone-photography-evolves-with-camera-apps-and-related-tools.html

The Human Element In Lab Informatics | October 20, 2014 Issue – Vol. 92 Issue 42 | Chemical & Engineering News

Sunday, December 14th, 2014

The Human Element In Lab Informatics
http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i42/Human-Element-Lab-Informatics.html Conservative view of the value of digitization. Maybe keep your paper notebook!

The Slippery Slope of Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com

Thursday, December 11th, 2014

The Slippery Slope of Silicon Valley
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/style/uber-facebook-and-others-bedeviled-by-moral-issues.html #Tech world Yin-&-yang – eg for $GOOG, amazing free services v #privacy concerns

How 3-D Printing Is Changing Medicine

Monday, December 8th, 2014

How 3D Printing Is Changing Medicine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/print-thyself Common in orthodontics (@Invisalign) & some surgeries. Printable organs next?

Also, 3D printing is now available from Amazon & Staples, viz:http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8323871011

Twitter “Exhaust” Reveals Patterns of Unemployment | MIT Technology Review

Monday, December 1st, 2014

Social media fingerprints of unemployment, from detecting network components in tweet mining arxiv.org/abs/1411.3140 +
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532746/twitter-exhaust-reveals-patterns-of-unemployment

Lots of press for an arxiv paper, viz:
Twitter “Exhaust” Reveals Patterns of Unemployment | MIT Technology Review

QT:{{”

So the team analysed the rate at which messages were exchanged between regions using a standard community detection algorithm. This revealed 340 independent areas of economic activity, which largely coincide with other measures of geographic and economic distribution. “This result shows that the mobility detected from geolocated tweets and the communities obtained are a good description of economical areas,” they say.

Finally, they looked at the unemployment figures in each of these regions and then mined their database for correlations with twitter activity.

“}}

The Programmer’s Price

Monday, December 1st, 2014

Programmer’s Price
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/programmers-price@10xmgmt: Talent agency for the developer stack, UI guru to datascientist, even a bioinformatician

American Chronicles NYer NOVEMBER 24, 2014 ISSUE
Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent.
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE

QT:{{”
Solomon leaned back in his chair and flipped through a mental Rolodex of his clients. “I definitely have some ideas,” he said, after a minute. “The first person who comes to mind, he’s also a
bioinformatician.” He rattled off a dazzling list of accomplishments: the developer does work for the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, where he is attempting to attack complicated biological problems using crowdsourcing, and had created Twitter tools capable of influencing elections. Solomon thought that he might be interested in AuthorBee’s use of Twitter. “He knows the Twitter A.P.I. in his sleep.”

And, like actual rock stars, rock-star developers come in a range of personality types. Guvench had briefed me at the coffee shop: front-end guys—designers and user-interface engineers—make products that interact with what he referred to as “normal” people. As a result, “they’re sort of hip,” he said. “Especially designers—they dress nicely.” The further you get down the “stack,” Guvench explained, “the more . . .” He paused. “ ‘Neckbeard’ is the word that comes to mind.” Back-end engineers, like data scientists and system administrators, “are the most brilliant people,” he said. “They may not be the most fun to talk to at a party, but they’re really fucking good at talking to computers.” Of course, he added, the stereotype doesn’t apply to his clients.
“}}

Lego car becomes an avatar for a worm

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

#Lego car becomes an avatar for a worm http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/27/lego-car-becomes-an-avatar-for-a-worm Powered by adapting nematode neural #connectome for sound, instead of food

QT:{{"
Remember the OpenWorm project, in which researchers reproduced the
genome of a nematode worm digitally and made it wiggle around on a
screen? If you take the "brain" of that worm and use it to power a
robotic car, you end up with researcher Timothy Busbice’sWormBot. He
mapped the software into a Lego Mindstorms EV3 bot, then trained it to
follow sound the way a nematode follows food. When he whistles to
"call" the bot, it heads toward him and even stops and reverses if it
detects an obstacle (using the EV3’s sonar) — even though it was
programmed to do none of those things.

"}}

Duffel Blog : NSA Intercepted Children’s Letters To Santa

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

#NSA Intercepted Children’s Letters To Santa http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/nsa-letters-to-santa N Pole address is non-US & OK for snooping HT @peterwsinger @DuffelBlog