Techno-News Blog

March 31, 2013

Students going online to fill foreign language needs

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By BRIAN JUSTICE, Tullahoma News

High School student interest in foreign languages has waned to the point that Spanish is the only regularly offered curriculum option, but a sophomore will soon be delving into new territory through a satellite program to study Japanese. The Board of Education approved Monday to allow Katie Wilson to take Internet language courses in a dual enrollment program through the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa to count toward high school language credit requirements. Katie’s not the first THS student to take dual enrollment language classes, but she is the first in the school system anyone can recall who opted to study Japanese.

http://www.tullahomanews.com/?p=13392

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14 Technology Concepts Every Teacher Should Know

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by Educators Technology

So you are coming across too many tech terms that it becomes hard for you to draw clear boundaries between what each of them refer to. Well we do share with you this confusion and that is why we deem it important to put forward a list of the major and most popular educational concepts that are technology-related. The list below is a simple attempt to help you better capture the full picture of what all these tech terms are about by providing clear definitions to each one of them.

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/03/14-technology-concepts-every-teacher.htm

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Online language learning startup Babbel nabs $10m from Nokia, Reed Elsevier and others

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by Robin Wauters, the Next Web

If you’d like to learn a new language on the Web, there are actually quite a few options to choose from in this day and age. One that’s been growing like gangbusters, however, is online language learning company Babbel. The Berlin startup is currently present in more than 190 countries and boasts over 15 million users, with its strongest footprint in German-speaking regions. The company aims to expand aggressively in other European countries, the Americas and emerging markets, however, and recently acquired San Francisco-based social language-learning iOS app maker PlaySay to advance those plans.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/26/online-language-learning-startup-babbel-nabs-10m-from-nokia-reed-elsevier-and-others/

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March 30, 2013

Google Is Also Entering The Arm Race With Its Own Smartwatch [Pictures]

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by Dan Rowinski, Read Write

We might look back on 2013 as the year when wearable computing came in vogue. Apple is reportedly working on a smartwatch. Samsung too. The rumor mill now tells us that Google is working on the concept of a smartwatch and has been for some time. According to a report from the Financial Times, Google filed for a patent in 2011 for a concept known as a “smart-watch.” The patent was approved last October, and Google has its Android team working on integration, according to the report.

http://readwrite.com/2013/03/22/google-also-to-enter-arm-race-with-its-own-smartwatch

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Plug and Play for Internet Connections

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By JOHN R. QUAIN, NY Times

The Audiovox Car Connection kit is a device that went on sale at the end of last year, which tracks the car and monitors the driver. No screwdrivers or wrenches are needed for installation. The package includes a matchbox-size device that simply plugs into the OBD-II port, a required feature of vehicles built since 1996. It has a built-in GPS unit and a two-way cellular data connection, so the car is always connected, no smartphone required. Once an account is established and the unit is wirelessly recognized by the Car Connection service, owners can track their car’s movements and receive e-mail or text alerts should the vehicle be driven without their permission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/automobiles/plug-and-play-for-internet-connections.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

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Online Learning: Will Technology Transform Higher Education?

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by Jamie Beckett, Stanford Engineering

“MOOCs could be to higher education what Napster was to the music industry,” said Girod, referring to the music-sharing system that created a seismic shift in how music is purchased and consumed. ”Online technologies have repeatedly enabled an unbundling, which disrupted the respective industries and their traditional business models. Mitchell Stevens, an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford, said the move to online education is driven not by technology but by factors like contracting state budgets, which put pressure on many colleges to reduce costs at the same time they are facing growing scrutiny around performance. “The digital revolution is a match igniting a large terrain of dry ground,’’ he said. One implication of digital educational delivery mechanisms, he said, is that they provide college educators the ability to measure and improve performance.

http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/online-learning-will-technology-transform-higher-education

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March 29, 2013

Micro 3-D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds

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By Prachi Patel, Technology Review

Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,” says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe. While 3-D printing of toys, iPhone covers, and jewelry continues to grab headlines (see “The Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers”), much of 3-D printing’s impact could be at a much smaller scale. Micrometer-scale printing has shown promise for making medical and electronic devices.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511856/micro-3-d-printer-creates-tiny-structures-in-seconds/

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Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire

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By Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

Manufactured sapphire—a material that’s used as transparent armor on military vehicles—could become cheap enough to replace the glass display covers on mobile phones. That could mean smartphone screens that don’t crack when you drop them and can’t be scratched with keys, or even by a concrete sidewalk. Sapphire, a crystalline form of aluminum oxide, probably won’t ever be as cheap as Gorilla Glass, the durable material from Corning that’s used to make screens on iPhones and other smartphones. A Gorilla Glass display costs less than $3, while a sapphire display would cost about $30. But that could fall below $20 in a couple of years

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512411/your-next-smartphone-screen-may-be-made-of-sapphire/

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New 3-D Display Could Let Phones and Tablets Produce Holograms

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By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

A new kind of three-dimensional display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like walking around a real object. The screen is made by modifying a conventional liquid-crystal display (LCD), the same kind of display found in most phones, laptops, tablets, and televisions. Researchers hope these 3-D systems will enable new kinds of user interfaces for portable electronics, gaming, and data visualization. The work, carried out at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, relies on complex physics to make 3-D displays that are as thin as half a millimeter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512716/new-3-d-display-could-let-phones-and-tablets-produce-holograms/

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March 28, 2013

South Korean banks and broadcasters took phish bait in cyberattack

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by Sean Gallagher, ars technica

More details of the cyberattack on multiple banks and media companies in South Korea on Wednesday have emerged, suggesting that at least part of the attack was launched through a phishing campaign against employees of the companies. According to a report from Trend Micro’s security lab, the “wiper” malware that struck at least six different companies was delivered disguised as a document in an e-mail. The attachment was first noticed by e-mail scanners on March 18, the day before the attack was triggered. The e-mail was purportedly from a bank; Trend Micro’s Deep Discovery threat scanning software recognized the message as coming from a host that had been used to distribute malware in the past.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/south-korean-banks-and-broadcasters-took-phish-bait-in-cyber-attack/

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Nvidia plans to turn Ultrabooks into workstations with Grid VCA server

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by Andrew Cunningham, ars technica

One of the announcements embedded in Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s opening keynote for the company’s GPU Technology Conference Tuesday was a brand new server product, something that Nvidia is calling the Grid Visual Computing Appliance, or VCA. The VCA is a buttoned-down, business-focused cousin to the Nvidia Grid cloud gaming server that the company unveiled at CES in January. It’s a 4U rack-mountable box that uses Intel Xeon CPUs and Nvidia’s Grid graphics cards (née VGX), and like the Grid gaming server, it takes the GPU in your computer and puts it into a server room. The VCA serves up 64-bit Windows VMs to users, but unlike most traditional VMs, you’ve theoretically got the same amount of graphical processing power at your disposal as you would in a high-end workstation.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/nvidia-plans-to-turn-ultrabooks-into-workstations-with-grid-vca-server/

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Patent shows Google is, or was, thinking about smart watches

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by Casey Johnston, ars technica

According to the Financial Times, Google may be working on yet another wearable computer in addition to Google Glass: a smart watch similar to the ones Samsung and Apple apparently have in the works. A patent application filed by Google in 2011 describes a watch with a “flip up portion” that includes a top display when open that acts as a supplement to the base of the watch, which presumably also includes a screen. In addition to the flip-up portion, the watch would also include a touchscreen display and a camera as well as the typical mobile device drivers like a processor and “wireless transceiver.” Google makes specific note that the flip-up display would be concealed when the watch is closed.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/patent-shows-google-is-or-was-thinking-about-smart-watches/

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March 27, 2013

LG Is Also Said To Be Building A Smartwatch And Google Glass Competitor, As Is Everyone

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by DARRELL ETHERINGTON, Tech Crunch

If you’re looking for a smartwatch in the next few years, you likely won’t want for choice. A new report pegs LG as developing its own take on the new category, according to The Korea Times on Friday. LG is supposedly working on a smartwatch as well as a product “similar to Internet giant’s Google Glass,” according to the paper’s sources, as part of a strategy to remain competitive long-term. The LG smartwatch is in development alongside the Glass-like product as a “non-commercialized” R&D project, which essentially means it isn’t ready to ship. LG, like Samsung and a number of other handset makers, is no stranger to combining mobile phone technology with watch-based designs.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/lg-is-also-said-to-be-building-a-smartwatch-and-google-glass-competitor-as-is-everyone/

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Big data needs people, leaders and real-time analytics

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by Jordan Novet, GigaOM

Despite the much-discussed power of data, there are roles for people to play in big data projects. Data increasingly influences companies’ decision making processes, but several speakers hit on the notion that people should be involved in big data storage and analysis. It all starts with a human question. Before machines generate answers, employees from many departments should feel empowered to ask good questions of data, said John Sotham, vice president of finance at BuildDirect. Beyond questions, humans need to decide which algorithms to employ and which data to use to answer questions, said Scott Brave, founder and chief technology officer of Baynote. In data science, machine use algorithms to make decisions with clean data for the sake of prediction and optimization, said Sean Gurley, chief technology officer of Quid. But in “data intelligence,” humans “create, change and shape the world we’re in” using small sets of messy data, he explained.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/22/structuredata-2013-recap/

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YouTube reaches one billion monthly users

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by the BBC

YouTube, the video sharing site owned by Google, has announced it has passed one billion regular users. Announcing the milestone on its blog, the site said a recent growth in smartphones had helped boost the numbers visiting the site every month. YouTube’s popularity provides Google with a lucrative channel through which to sell advertising, alongside its core search business. YouTube was launched in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21874329

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March 26, 2013

Whole internet probed for insecure devices

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 by the BBC

A surreptitious scan of the entire internet has revealed millions of printers, webcams and set-top boxes protected only by default passwords. An anonymous researcher used more than 420,000 of these insecure devices to test the security and responsiveness of other gadgets, in a nine-month survey. Using custom-written code, they sent out more than four trillion messages. The net’s current addressing scheme accommodates about 4.2 billion devices. Only 1.3 billion addresses responded.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21875127

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Cyber-Attacks Eclipse Terrorism in Impact, U.S. Leaders Say

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By Robert Lemos, eWeek

The heads of national intelligence and U.S. Cyber Command both warn that cyber-operations have become a primary concern for the nation’s defenders. In comments at separate congressional hearings, the leaders of the U.S. intelligence efforts and of the nation’s quickly growing Cyber Command warned that cyber-operations by nation-states and rogue adversaries have become a major concern for the country, eclipsing the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. In his delivery of the worldwide threat assessment to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence March 12, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led his list of global threats with the current cyber-operations against the nation’s interests, indicating that cyber-attacks and espionage are having more impact today than terrorism or the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Recent attacks on U.S. banks, the destructive virus that deleted data from 30,000 workstations at Saudi Aramco, and the wholesale theft of sensitive data by various nations—chief among them China—had weakened the United States’ technological advantage, Clapper said in his prepared remarks (pdf).

http://www.eweek.com/security/cyber-attacks-eclipse-terrorism-in-impact-us-leaders-say/

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IT Resumes: Keeping Them Truthful

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By Corinne Bernstein, eWeek

On the train the other day, I overheard one rider asking another if it was OK to fib a little—or at least embellish the truth—on a resume. As the train rattled quickly and loudly to my stop, I missed the response, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. Lying on a resume isn’t illegal, but it’s certainly unethical and grounds for dismissal for those who get caught—not to mention embarrassing for the companies that hired them. The tech sector hasn’t been immune to resume scandals. The resume flap last year concerning the credentials of Scott Thompson, ex-CEO of Yahoo, certainly didn’t help the company’s image. How honest are most IT pros about their credentials? Stretching the truth is common, according to a recent survey conducted by TEKsystems. The technology staffing firm found that 63 percent of IT professionals and 77 percent of IT leaders said most IT resumes exaggerate job seekers’ work experience. What’s more, 35 percent of IT leaders and 39 percent of IT pros say most IT resumes contain “outright lies,” the study showed.

http://www.eweek.com/blogs/careers/it-resumes-keeping-them-truthful.html/

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March 25, 2013

Is Microsoft’s Surface Doomed Like Zune?

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By Pedro Hernandez, eWeek

Tepid sales of Microsoft’s tablet have industry watchers wondering if Surface is off to a slow start or if the Surface is a repeat of the ill-fated Zune media player. The last time Microsoft tried to play catch-up with hardware from Apple, it was forced to pull the plug on its Zune player. This time around, analysts fear that the Surface may suffer a similar fate. Bloomberg is reporting that according to sales insiders, Microsoft sold an underwhelming number of Surface Pro tablets since the buzzed-about Windows 8 Pro slate launched Feb. 9. “Microsoft has sold little more than a million of the Surface RT version and about 400,000 Surface Pros since their debuts, according to three people, who asked not to be named because sales haven’t yet been made public,” said the report. To date, Microsoft has sold 1.5 million Surface units (both RT and Pro), far less than the company anticipated. Microsoft reportedly ordered about 3 million Surface RT tablets expecting sales of 2 million during the holidays.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/is-microsofts-surface-doomed-like-zune/

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Fluke Visual TruView Provides Deeper Insight Into Complex Networks

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By Frank.Ohlhorst, eWeek

Visual TruView from Fluke Networks combines network monitoring, troubleshooting, forensics and analysis into a simple-to-use, all-inclusive package. Sustained by complexity and explosive growth, the network beast has become ever harder to tame. Add to that condition the shortage of qualified network experts and it becomes easy to see that maintaining enterprise networks has become an almost impossible task without numerous hardware and software tools to monitor and troubleshoot network performance. But now Visual TruView from Fluke Networks aims to tame the networking beast by combining multiple network management capabilities into a unified platform, which stresses ease of use, while still delivering the big picture of how traffic moves around the network.

http://www.eweek.com/networking/fluke-visual-truview-provides-deeper-insight-into-complex-networks/

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Android Security: 10 Ways to Protect Your Device From Malware, Theft

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By Don Reisinger, eWeek

Android is the world’s most popular smartphone OS, but it’s also the platform that hackers love to attack most. Android security is constantly in a state of flux. Despite Google’s continued claims that its operating system is secure, it’s getting hit hard by malicious hackers around the world who have found countless openings to exploit with malware. Android has become such a magnet for malware that security firm Trend Micro believes that the amount of malware to hit Android this year could top 1 million threats. In other words, the post-PC malware threat is here, and it’s targeting Android.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/android-security-10-ways-to-protect-your-device-from-malware-theft/

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