Image at http://sfima.blogspot.com/2011/08/linkedin-pulls-facebook-with-user-data.html
Retweeted from several messages that I received:
In case you don’t know it, without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions.
Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. The network now allows advertisers to use pictures and names of other users in their network of connections who have recommended or followed that brand.
I want to thank you for your interest in these articles, for the numerous emails, “likes” and your encouraging comments on this blog and different other social media platforms where the links to this blog are being published.
As this year comes to a close we wish that the new year will bring us new hope for better times, peace and freedom.
Have a joyful festive season, forget technology for a moment and make some time for family and friends and enjoy good company also in the real world — and not only on Social Media.
A water filled bottle brings light into a windowless slum dwelling. Illac Diaz (left). Image source: AFP; as pictured in the article of the Basler Zeitung
As recently reported in our local newspaper in Basel (Plastikflaschen für den Klimaschutz – News Wissen: Technik – bazonline.ch) philanthropist Illac Diaz from the Philippines is using simple low-tech discarded plastic bottles filled with water to bring light into the windowless dwellings of the poor. During daytime such a bottle can illuminate a dark room with the brightness equal to a 55 W incandescent bulb.
Diaz received positive feedback from UNO: Compared to a normal bulb his plastic bottle saves 17 kg CO2 per year.
Diaz was not the original inventor of this applied science technology, it was first used by the Brazilian Alfredo Moser some 10 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Deus in machina. A semiautonomous robot can be controlled with the brain waves of paralyzed patients. Credit: José del R. Millán. From Science Now
“They’re not quite psychic yet, but machines are getting better at reading your mind. Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot. Scientists hope the technology will give “locked in” patients—those too disabled to communicate with the outside world—the ability to interact with others and even give the illusion of being physically present, or “telepresent,” with friends and family.
A few days ago, “four Wave Gliders—self propelled robots, each about the size of a dolphin—left San Francisco for a journey that combined will total 60,000 kilometers. Built by Liquid Robotics, the robots will travel together to Hawaii, then split into pairs, one pair heading to Japan, the other to Australia. Waves will power their propulsion systems and the sun will power the sensors that will be measuring things like water salinity, temperature, clarity, and oxygen content; collecting weather data, and gathering information on wave features and currents. It’s not going to be an easy journey—the little robots will face rough weather and have to dodge big ships” reports Tekla Perry in IEEE Spectrum–Automaton. Read the rest of this entry »
In many previous postings I have been pondering on the importance of Social Media for business and how it will change our cooperation. Today I would like to discuss our dependence on such technologies:
I still remember the days in the mid-80′s when email addresses were written with exclamation marks and you had to know the path through the servers for the mail to arrive. E-mail was a “nice to have” gadget and nobody entrusted important information to it. All the “real” company and external information came per paper mail.
These days passed more quickly than I anticipated. It was in the late 90′s when a pharmaceutical company in my town had to send the employees home after an email outage. It had taken a mere 10 years for email to become an indispensable business tool.
If Facebook or Twitter would be down today there might not be a big stir in the business community except for the guys from the marketing department but in a few years a Social Media outage could very well bring business to a grinding halt.
Certainly if a blog site would go down we would feel the pain. Maybe not immediately but after a day or two. A Twitter outage could very well lead to more severe withdrawal symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »
Corey Eridon has some advice on mistakes to avoid and she warns not to be sloppy about Social Media. She writes in her blog on hubspot.com:
“What makes the following social media mistakes particularly sloppy is that they cost little time and no money to fix, have tremendous returns, and as such are huge misses to your overall social media strategy. Stop being sloppy, and make sure you’re not making any of these 10 social media mistakes (+1 for good luck).” Read the rest of this entry »
Now that we learned to make the occasional backup of the files on our computers using external hard disks and — the audacious ones among us — using cloud services (BTW: check out Wuala for backup. Files get encrypted on your machine and will be packet-distributed to their storage computers. Like DropBox, just safer) here comes the next backup pattern: Backing up your Social Media.
For many years our focus has been on making things faster and faster. Computer chips are doubling their speed about every 18 months (Moore’s Law). But in our faster and faster spinning world we rarely focus on really long-lasting or long-term projects. One of them is John Cage‘s piece for Organ, the other one that impressed me is the 10’000-year clock.
Organ in Halberstadt with the three pipes currently being played (Image via Wikipedia)
is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of one of the longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken. It was originally written in 1987 for organ.
The actual performance commenced in the St. Burchardi church on September 5, 2001 with a pause lasting until February 5, 2003. The first chord was played from then until July 5, 2005. The most recent new chord from the organ was a three-note chord, A above middle C, C above middle C and the F# above that (A4-C5-F#5), which began on January 5, 2006 and concluded on July 5, 2008. This sonority can currently be heard on a website devoted to the Halberstadt event.
St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt (Image via Wikipedia)
QR code above urinal at the Volta exhibition during the Armory Art Show March 2011 (Picture taken by the author. Click to enlarge)
We can observe more and more adoption of QR codes and their pervasiveness. In Asia you find these codes anywhere in the meantime and they allow quick responses usually by use of a smart phone’s QR reader.
I have seen them above urinals (in the mens’ room at the Volta Exhibit during the Armory Art Show in NYC last March, see right–the codel leads to a web page from collectors for collectors) as well as on city walls, in art and many other places.
In Florida there is now a bus line where you can get the schedule by pointing your smart phone to a plaque at the bus stop.
Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship will strengthen consumer rights and protection in the cloud . (Image at www.experian.it)
As reported in Silicon.de, in Experian.it and in other sources, the European Commission is planning to release a new directive on data protection, which will affect the Cloud Computing industry. Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenships is planning to update the Data Protection Directive. The Data Protection Directive was first introduced in 1995, and a lot of new challenges for personal Data Protection have appeared, from social networks to cloud computing and the current digitalization of public data assets.
Experian reports: The process to update the Directive has just started. Over 160 responses were collected to a public consultation that lasted until December 2009. These responses were crafted by citizens, businesses and other organizations and public authorities. The objective of this public consultation is to gather “views on the new challenges for personal data protection, in particular in the light of new technologies and globalisation”, and what steps should be taken to overcome those challenges. Now Reding plans to present a first draft of the legislation by autumn this year.
Mobile phones as doctors? This vision will be tested, starting in a few months. Photo Credit: X-Prize Foundation. From the article quoted.
Star Trek’s Dr. “Bones” McCoy made no bones about the state of 20th Century medicine — invasive, primitive, “Dark Ages,” were a few of his pejorative terms for modern medicine. In the 23rd century, Bones and other starship crew members used hand-held devices called “tricorders” that instantaneously diagnosed people’s injuries or sicknesses — and healed them as well. “It’s a wonder anyone made it out of the 20th century alive,” he once sniffed.
Early next year, the X Prize Foundation — noted for competitions to in private space travel and moon probes — announced it will be launching a $10-million-prize competition to any team that can design the first functioning tricorder, that “will enable consumers in any location to quickly and effectively assess health conditions, determine if they need professional help and answer the question, ‘What do I do next?’” Quotes from the first article cited below. Read the rest of this entry »
The Open Source Business Foundation e.V., the European network for the Open Source Industry, just launched an “Open Cloud Business Initiative” (OCBI). The goal of the OCBI is to promote the principle of openness, which is responsible for the success of the Open Source Software movement, in the area of the cloud: the future lies in the Open Cloud – especially in a business context.
The Open Source Business Foundation eV (OSBF) lays out the following six principles under their “Open Cloud Future Initiative”: Read the rest of this entry »
“Be careful the next time you scan a QR code, because it might just cost you money and wreak havoc on your smartphone.
“That’s the warning from Kaspersky Lab, which has noticed the first instance of QR code tampering. The incident took place in Russia last month and hoodwinked consumers who thought they were downloading an Android app called Jimm. The code actually contained malware that sent SMS codes to a premium rate number that charged for each message.”
Monitoring Your Health -- image from the quoted article
Just read a very interesting article on “ambient health monitoring”. Joseph M. Smith wrote in IEEE Spectrum an article on Wireless Health Care. Here a few passages from the article:
“Imagine a world in which your medicine cabinet notices that you are due for a prescription refill and calls it in. A sensor implanted under your skin detects a fluid buildup in your lungs and alerts your doctor, who decides your heart medication needs an adjustment and contacts the pharmacist to change your dosage.
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