Techno-News Blog

April 23, 2013

Q&A: Extending (And Ending) Support for Windows XP

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By J.D. BIERSDORFER, Gadgetwise

Q.

What is “extended support” for Microsoft Windows XP and do I need to worry when it’s supposed to stop next year?

A.

Microsoft has a defined period of time for things like help-line calls, warranty claims and security updates for the hardware and software it sells. This period of time is called the Support Lifecycle Policy and is supposed to give customers a firm idea of how long they can expect Microsoft to provide services for a product before the company considers it obsolete. Microsoft’s current policy states that its Windows operating systems will each receive a total of 10 years of support. The first five of those years are “mainstream,” in which that version of Windows still has all the telephone support options available (including some free help by phone along with paid technical-support calls), security updates and some development work for requested features and design improvements.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/qa-extending-and-ending-support-for-windows-xp/

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Cloud keeps looking good for IBM, and flash storage could help in the months ahead

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by Jordan Novet, GigaOM

Despite gains in cloud computing revenue, IBM did not meet Wall Street’s expectations of the legacy technology vendor. Flash storage could help bring more revenue later this year. IBM reported $23.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter of the year, down more than 5 percent year over year, and $3.03 billion in net income, down 1.1 percent. Analysts had been expecting more than $24 billion in revenue. The company said cloud-computing revenue was up more than 70 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2013, following an 80 percent revenue gain in the previous quarter.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/18/cloud-keeps-looking-good-for-ibm-and-flash-storage-could-help-in-the-months-ahead/

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How Teachers Are Integrating Technology Into The Common CoreHow Teachers Are Integrating Technology Into The Common Core

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by Fred Sitkins, Edudemic

Schools across the globe are disrupting the traditional educational model through the incorporation of technology into instruction. I can’t help thinking about how perfect the timing of this technological revolution is as it correlates perfectly with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The switch to the Common Core occurring at the same time as this wave of educational technology is as perfect as the combination of Twitter and your PLN. They fit together perfectly!

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/integrating-technology-into-the-common-core/

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April 22, 2013

Intel’s Dubious Plan to Take Over TV

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By Jessica Leber, Technology Review

When Intel lifted the veil from its stealthy media division in February, many outsiders scratched their heads. Why was the chip manufacturer, which has tried and failed to sell consumer products before, trying to launch a TV service, one of the trickiest consumer markets of all? Computer companies including Apple (see “Apple’s Next Innovation”), Google (see “When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?”), and Microsoft have wrestled for years with how to become Internet TV providers. They see a massive “pay TV” market ripe for Silicon Valley-style disruption. Today’s TV interfaces are exceedingly complicated, and content packages are bloated with channels that most subscribers don’t watch. Furthermore, there are new business opportunities in the progressively more social and mobile nature of TV-watching that tech companies are well-positioned to exploit.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513601/intels-dubious-plan-to-take-over-tv/

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Bitcoin Isn’t the Only Cryptocurrency in Town

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick. In recent weeks, the digital currency Bitcoin has soared and then dipped in value, along the way attracting more public attention than ever before and speculation as to whether it could become an established and widely accepted way to pay for goods and services. But Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency out there. Several others are also surging in popularity and value, and they claim to offer technical improvements that make them better suited to mainstream use.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513661/bitcoin-isnt-the-only-cryptocurrency-in-town/

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Turning on Turnitin

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by Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed

Software to detect student plagiarism is faced with renewed criticism from the faculty members who may confront more plagiarism than do most of their colleagues – college writing professors. Members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed a resolution at their annual convention last month to denounce plagiarism detection services, including products like Turnitin. According to the resolution, “plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/16/writing-professors-question-plagiarism-detection-software

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April 21, 2013

Live In A Crowded Place? Your Wi-Fi Is Fast But Your Cell Service Is Slow [Infographic]

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by Nick Statt, ReadWrite

When it comes to Wi-Fi and mobile broadband service, population makes a big difference. According to a new report from WeFi, a mobile broadband solution and network management company, the higher the population a state has, the better that state’s Wi-Fi speeds – but the slower the cellular broadband speeds. (Ironically, states with very low population densities also suffer from slow cellular speeds – probably for completely different reasons.) The infographic here lays out the report’s conclusions on who in the U.S. gets the fastest and slowest Wi-Fi and mobile broadband speeds – and exactly what they use all that bandwidth to do.

http://readwrite.com/2013/04/13/live-in-a-crowded-place-your-wi-fi-is-fast-but-your-cell-service-is-slow-infographic

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Does a Tele-Robot Operator Need a Visa and W-2?

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by Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Experts gathered this week at Stanford’s Law School to discuss the robot revolution.  As robotics software and hardware is commercialized, companies will face some interesting new condundrums, which may give them pause before adopting technologies ranging from workplace telepresence robots and robotic surgical tools, to driverless cars and commercial drones. But make no mistake, it will be the lawyers just as often as the technologists guiding purchasing decisions, and a hundred legal experts gathered at a conference at Stanford’s Law School yesterday to mull over wide-ranging legal questions posed by the robots marching over the commercial horizon.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513571/does-a-tele-robot-operator-need-a-visa-and-w-2/

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Online Learning Helps Undergraduates Get Better Grades

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by Adi Gaskell, Technorati

It’s been hard to ignore the publicity generated by online learning over the past year.  Sites such as Coursera and Khan Academy have proved enormously popular with users from around the world.  Khan Academy for instance has had over 150 million views of its online maths tutorials. Does such popularity transfer over to the grades students receive in actual degrees though?  San Jose University believes they do. 

http://technorati.com/social-media/article/online-learning-helps-undergraduates-get-better/

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April 20, 2013

How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:19 am

by Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing. This data is under lock and key no more. Under pressure to seek new revenue streams (see “AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation”), a growing number of mobile carriers are now carefully mining, packaging, and repurposing their subscriber data to create powerful statistics about how people are moving about in the real world.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513016/how-wireless-carriers-are-monetizing-your-movements/

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What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme. For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424091/what-bitcoin-is-and-why-it-matters/

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Time-Saving Writing Apps For Students

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by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

For anyone who has ever had to write a paper, you know that getting the ideas down when they come to you is important. And for those of us who are (ahem) procrastinators (*looks away innocently*) getting the ideas down and the writing done when you’re inspired is key. For those of us who were educated in the dark ages before smartphones and tablets, if you wanted to write on the go you were pretty much out of luck. Now, there are a host of options for organizing your writing and writing on the go with different apps and web tools.

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/writing-apps-for-students/

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April 19, 2013

Buttons That Feel Clickable

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:26 am

By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

Transparent, shape-changing plastics could make touch screens and keyboards that stimulate users’ sense of touch.  A very thin keyboard that uses shape-changing polymers to replicate the feel and sound of chunky, clicking buttons could be in laptops and ultrabooks next year. Strategic Polymers Sciences, the San Francisco-based company that developed the keyboard, is working on transparent coatings that would enable this feature in touch screens.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513221/a-flexible-keyboard-with-buttons-that-feel-clickable/

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Wireless Micro LEDs Control Mouse Behavior

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By Susan Young, Technology Review

A microscopic light-emitting diode device that controls the activity of neurons has given researchers wireless control over animal behavior. The tiny device, tested in mice, causes less damage than other methods used to deliver light into the brain, report researchers in Thursday’s issue of Science, and it does not tether mice to a light source, enabling scientists to study behaviors more naturally than is normally possible. Many groups of neuroscientists have turned to light-based control of neurons to study the neuronal basis of behavior. To control the brain cells, researchers use optogenetics, a method for genetically modifying neurons that allows them to be activated or silenced with flashes of light.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513446/wireless-micro-leds-control-mouse-behavior/

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The 10 Best Web Tools For Flipped Classrooms

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by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

While flipping the classroom is still one of the hottest trends in education, it’s got nothing on time-saving and downright useful apps and web tools. In an effort to provide a quick look at some of the best web tools for flipped classrooms, I thought it would be useful to poll the @Edudemic Twitter followers. Including the tweets, I also got emails from friends, colleagues, and administrators from around the world. One thing stood out to me: there were a lot of repeats! Many folks who have tried the flipped classroom model or are currently deploying it have leveraged a lot of the same web tools.

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/web-tools-for-flipped-classrooms/

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April 18, 2013

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities

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By David Roberts, Grist

Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground. That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.

http://grist.org/article/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/

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The Technion: Israel’s Hard Drive

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By DANNA HARMAN, NY Times

“This university consumes you, and you don’t get a break if you have a job, or even if you start your own company.” He adds with a grin: “You still have to pass advanced integral algebra.” But if the Technion refuses to coddle its charges — about 9,000 undergraduates and 3,800 graduate students — Intel, I.B.M., Microsoft and Yahoo and the like make up for it. All have set up offices along a direct bus route from student housing, recruit heavily from the student body and offer working hours that take those advanced integral algebra exams into account. Much as Silicon Valley popped up around Stanford, and Route 128 came to symbolize high technology because of its proximity to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so the Technion has transformed the sleepy northern city of Haifa into a buzzy high-tech center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/inside-the-technion-israels-premier-technological-institute-and-cornells-global-partner.html

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Beyond The Bitcoin Bubble

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by Jon Evans, TechCrunch

Ever tried to exchange Colombian pesos in Guatemala, or Tanzanian shillings in Zambia? I have, and believe me, it’s a Kafkaesque nightmare. Now imagine living in the developing world and trying to sell goods or services internationally. Talk about a pain point. Until Bitcoin. I believe it’s Bitcoin’s successors — whether that be Ripple/OpenCoin, or the anonymous Bitcoin bolt-on ZeroCoin, or something else still being dreamed up — that will truly change the world. But not the First World. We don’t much need Bitcoin and its descendants, at least not yet. In the developing world, though, crippled by weak currencies and byzantine payment infrastructures, a simple, seamless, frictionless, reliable international peer-to-peer payments system could be a huge, huge deal. But not until the volatility diminishes…which is to say, not until the hype here fades away. Here’s hoping that’s soon.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble/

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April 17, 2013

How technology is slowly developing its sense of smell

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by David Meyer, GigaOM

It’s easy to be sniffy about the concept of sending odors through the internet, but researchers are nonetheless hard at work on folding the sense of smell into the digital repertoire. The first world congress of the Digital Olfaction Society (tagline: “The Smell of Digital”), the stated goal of which is to “digitize, transmit, reproduce and recapture smells, flavors and fragrances” was recently held. You know that perennial April Fool’s joke about sending odors through the internet, most recently spun up by Google? The thing is, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out in the wake of Google’s gag this year, there really are serious efforts underway to make the digital capture and production of aromas a reality. The conference was small, but the participants spanned the disciplines of computer science, biochemistry, engineering, smart clothing design and perfume retail.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/13/how-technology-is-slowly-developing-its-sense-of-smell/

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Udemy adds revenue stream with private online learning sites for companies

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by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Ambitious individuals who want to bulk up on new skills can turn to online learning site Udemy for lessons on everything from web development and programming to accounting and entrepreneurship. And it might not be long before their employers start picking up the tab. Online learning site Udemy is launching a corporate training option that enables companies to create private online learning sites for their employees.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/12/udemy-adds-revenue-stream-with-private-online-learning-sites-for-companies/

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Freed From Its Cage, the Gentler Robot

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By ANNE EISENBERG, NY Times

Factory robots are usually caged off from humans on the assembly line lest the machines’ powerful steel arms deliver an accidental, bone-crunching right hook. But now, gentler industrial robots, designed to work and play well with others, are coming out from behind their protective fences to work shoulder-to-shoulder with people. It’s an advance made possible by sophisticated algorithms and improvements in sensing technologies like computer vision. The key to these new robots is the ability to respond more flexibly, anticipating and adjusting to what humans want.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/robots-and-humans-learning-to-work-together.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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