Techno-News Blog

by the BBC

Twitter has unveiled a new music app which will recommend tracks based on who you follow on the social network. Songs can be played directly in the app via services such as Rdio, Spotify and iTunes. The software displays songs your friends are currently listening to – as well as suggestions from artists. It follows moves by other social networks such as Facebook to incorporate music recommendations into their services. Last year, Spotify announced its own “follow” system, but the functionality is yet to be rolled out to users on mobile.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22199692#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by the BBC

The US House of Representatives has passed the controversial Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act. Cispa is designed to help combat cyberthreats by making it easier for law enforcers to get at web data. This is the second time Cispa has been passed by the House. Senators threw out the first draft, saying it did not do enough to protect privacy. Cispa could fail again in the Senate after threats from President Obama to veto it over privacy concerns. A substantial majority of politicians in the House backed the bill. The law is passing through the US legislative system as American federal agencies warn that malicious hackers, motivated by money or acting on behalf of foreign governments, such as China, are one of the biggest threats facing the nation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22213379#

By Helen Bushby, BBC

Fourteen pilot shows – including Alpha House and Zombieland – are to be put to the public vote on Lovefilm and Amazon.com. Viewers can submit feedback influencing which shows get made into full series. The 14 shows are made by independent production companies and produced by Amazon Studios, the film and series production arm of Amazon. “This is the first time Amazon Studios has done this,” said Simon Morris, Lovefilm’s chief marketing officer. Eight adult comedies and six children’s animation series will be put to the public vote. The shows will be aired on Amazon’s pay subscription services – Amazon Prime in the US, and Lovefilm in the UK – but Morris told the BBC they would be available to everyone and not just subscribers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22152989#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by Malcolm Frank, GigaOM

Reinvention and resilience are key to the success of any business. Look no further than the implosions of Borders Books, BlockBuster, Kodak, or any of dozens of other once seemingly impregnable or too-big-to-fail companies that have tanked in the past decade, to remind us that companies that fail to notice and adjust to change – and to see opportunities to innovate – are effectively digging their own graves. So, amid today’s accelerating technological change and the resulting hyper-connectedness, how do we recognize when our own company is vulnerable – when we’re facing our own Kodak moment? I’ve pulled together the seven major disruptive forces that have overturned and redefined the way business is done today.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/20/the-google-skype-linkedin-amazon-facebook-effect/

by Phil Fasano, GigaOM

Americans spend more than any other country on healthcare, and yet experience the worst medical outcomes of any developed nation. Investment and innovation in healthcare is an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs that will benefit everyone.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/20/information-technology-has-revolutionalized-financial-services-so-why-is-healthcare-so-far-behind/

By RANDALL STROSS, NY Times

Computer science researchers have been trying to build systems that summon online workers on demand and produce immediate results. Much initial work has focused on completing tasks for people with disabilities, because that is where the need is great. For example, a blind person may need to identify the contents of a can from a kitchen cupboard right now, not later. A deaf college student may want to follow the give-and-take of a seminar discussion as it unfolds in the classroom, and not wait to read a transcript the next day. VizWiz, a free iPhone app developed by Jeffrey P. Bigham of the University of Rochester and colleagues in its Human Computer Interaction program, gives real-time help to blind users. VizWiz users take a photograph as best as they can — it may take several tries before the desired object is properly framed — and then record one question about it (“What is on the label of the can?”). Besides needing help identifying food labels, they may want to know the denomination of paper currency, say, or whether a baby’s head shows signs of a rash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/apps-help-find-online-workers-quickly.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

By Susan Young, Technology Review

One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project, say researchers in the company’s Emerging Technology Lab, is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices. In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513861/samsung-demos-a-tablet-controlled-by-your-brain/

By Jessica Leber, Technology Review

All over the Web, ads are getting more personal. They follow you from one site to the next and know your browsing history. But are such ads really effective? The answer may not be as obvious as digital marketers assume. “There’s been a focus on trying to identify the customers likely to purchase a product. But that’s distinct from which customers will be influenced by advertising,” says Catherine Tucker, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor who gave a keynote address at an international data mining conference in February. In the rush to use ever-more data about people, Tucker says, ads are too often shown to those who have already decided whether to buy or not buy the product, or who have bought it already. “What we may be doing is wasting a lot of money.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512921/web-ads-that-know-too-much/

By David Talbot, Technology Review

Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center. New research suggests that data centers could significantly cut their electricity usage simply by storing fewer copies of files, especially videos. For now the work is theoretical, but over the next year, researchers at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and MIT plan to test the idea, with an eye to eventually commercializing the technology. It could be implemented as software within existing facilities. “This approach is a very promising way to improve the efficiency of data centers,” says Emina Soljanin, a researcher at Bell Labs who participated in the work. “It is not a panacea, but it is significant, and there is no particular reason that it couldn’t be commercialized fairly quickly.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513656/a-smarter-algorithm-could-cut-energy-use-in-data-centers-by-35-percent/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The FBI could use software to help identify suspects, and more advanced techniques are around the corner. The FBI appealed to the public last week for help identifying two men shown in pixilated photos and video footage who are suspected of involvement in Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston. Experts say the FBI could have used images from the scene of Monday’s bombing—together with facial recognition software—to search through identity databases. The approach is likely to become more common in the future as new technology makes using facial recognition on surveillance and bystander imagery more reliable. Deploying facial recognition software in the Boston investigation isn’t straightforward because the images available are very different from the evenly lit, frontal, passport-style photos stored in law enforcement databases.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513901/how-facial-recognition-tech-could-help-trace-terrorism-suspects/

By Lisa Singleton-Rickman, The TimesDaily

Alabama educators have long known that online classes provide experience and preparation students need for life after high school, either for college or the workforce. But the state has never done much more than suggest schools implement them in the curriculum, until now. Under the state’s new diploma requirements, which go into effect this fall and begin with incoming ninth-graders, there’s a required college and career preparedness course that incorporates computer applications. Though Alabama schools have discretion as to how to implement that part of the career preparedness course, online classes will likely become more commonplace, according to Alabama Department of Education officials.

http://timesdaily.com/stories/Online-classes-likely-to-become-more-common,204816

by Amy Scott, Marketplace

What if you could get a degree from a college with no classes, no instructors and no grades? It sounds like an ad on late-night TV. Recently, the online College for America got a big boost from the federal government. Its students will be able to receive federal student aid. “What that really means, is that for the first time federal financial aid dollars will support actual learning as opposed to how long somebody sat at a desk,” says Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, the nonprofit school that created College for America. Instead of racking up a certain number of credit hours for an associate degree, students at College for America have to master 120 “competencies,” from quantitative reasoning to writing and communication.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/no-classes-needed-southern-new-hampshire-university-emphasizes-skills

by FREDERIC LARDINOIS, Tech Crunch

Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. This methodology, however, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system. Bing, Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response, “actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft doe not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/19/bing-questions-study-that-claimed-it-delivers-5x-more-malware-than-google-says-it-blocks-94-of-clicks-to-malicious-sites/

by Mike Isaac, All Things D

As e-commerce has grown more competitive with the rise of startups like Square, micro-payments companies like Stripe and independent stores like Etsy, John Donahoe has had his work cut out for him. But the CEO has done well during his tenure at eBay thus far, kickstarting the company out of a period of stalled growth, spurring the Marketplace and PayPal payments businesses and continuing to see consecutive quarterly growth. To keep this up, Donahoe is singing the same tune as the rest of the industry: Focus on mobile and target international markets. We caught up with him for a bit this week, where he expanded on eBay’s ambitions.

http://allthingsd.com/20130419/mobile-and-global-ten-minutes-with-ebay-ceo-john-donahoe/

by Christiana Cobb, San Jose State Spartan

Students who neglect to complete or “opt out” of the Student Opinion Teaching Effectiveness teacher evaluations will have their grades withheld for two weeks. An email sent to students informed of changes to the Student Opinion Teaching Effectiveness, teacher evaluation policy, moving the paper evaluations filled out in class at the end of the semester, to an online version for students to fill out on their own time. Elizabeth Guzman, a senior behavioral science major, said she thinks the online teacher evaluations will be easier than the paper forms, but she thinks it is the professor’s responsibility to encourage students to fill out the form.

http://spartandaily.com/103129/online-evaluations-could-hold-grades-captive-if-not-filled-out

by Jeffrey Roth, Interactyx

Do we have an e-Learning revolution on our hands? It may be a little heavy-handed to call the current trends to leverage online technology to enhance learning and training programs a ‘revolution’. But, there are strong indicators that we can evaluate today to see that e-Learning tactics are continuing to grow. That growth looks like it will continue.  The real revolution is how it is effecting organizations and everyday people due to increased adoption and the reduction of the total costs of e-Learning systems, like learning management systems (LMSs), which allow for more solutions to be readily available. According to the folks over at Certifyme.net who put together the infographic below, the 2013 statistics on e-learning usage is quite impressive.

http://interactyx.com/social-learning-blog/2013-e-learning-revolution-infographic/

By Melissa Simon, Daily Sundial

Assemblyman Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) proposed a new bill suggesting a fourth university system in California, which would be called the New University of California. The new system, as explained in AB 1306, would be an addition to the three systems already in place: University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges (CCC). The New University of California, according to the text of the bill, will not provide instruction “and the mission of the university shall be limited to issuing college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing the examinations administered by the university.”

http://sundial.csun.edu/2013/04/proposed-fourth-university-would-give-degrees-without-classes/

by Ellis Booker, Information Week

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, recognized older students as online learning harbinger. Schools aren’t the only ones grappling with big questions about online learning, flipped classrooms, assessment analytics and open-source alternatives to commercial products. Traditional publishers are making changes, too. Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, was early to embrace the digital future, according to observers. The company says more than half of its revenues last year came from digital products and service.  “We’ve organized internally around three A’s — achievement, access and affordability,” Todd Hitchcock, senior VP of online solutions and business development at Pearson, told InformationWeek in a phone interview.
http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/education-giant-pearson-adapts-to-digita/240153068

by Pooja Thakkar, Technology-Digital

The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; It is here and envelops the physical classrooms already. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. started offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The Secretary of Education in the next president’s office will need an entire department dedicated to this phenomenon.

http://www.technology-digital.com/web20/-the-point-at

by Marketwire

Echo360, the market leading active and distance learning solution, announced the acquisition of ThinkBinder, a social collaboration tool that enables crowdsourced learning and online study groups. Students at Echo360 institutions will be able to share their notes, insights and ideas with their peers, improving the learning experience with knowledge gleaned from fellow students. ThinkBinder will be included in current Echo360 technology, complementing the existing lecture capture and student engagement features, and results in industry’s only comprehensive active learning solution. Research indicates that the use of social media tools like Twitter(R) outside the classroom can positively influence student learning outcomes(1). ThinkBinder allows educators to take advantage of today’s social media environment to improve the learning experience. Students and instructors form invitation-only online study groups for courses. They can collaborate and complete group projects with familiar social tools like discussion feeds, collaborative whiteboards, file management, and text/video chat in a private cloud solution.

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130416-905217.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

BY AARON LEWIS, Yale Daily News

Yale faculty may have postponed their vote on the grading overhaul to November, but students concerned about grading policies may have something bigger to worry about: artificial intelligence software that could be used to evaluate their essays. EdX — an education nonprofit founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — has just introduced a free online tool that automates the essay grading process. EdX president Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, told The New York Times he believes his software will give professors more free time and allow students to receive helpful instant feedback. The software first analyzes 100 of a professor’s already graded essays, then uses machine-learning techniques to grade future papers on its own.

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/04/16/robot-essay-graders-a-growing-possibility/