Techno-News Blog

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY, NY Times

The New York Times Company was a victim of online attacks earlier this week that slowed down The New York Times Web site and limited access to articles and other types of content. According to Danielle Rhoades Ha, a company spokeswoman, the Web site became unavailable to “a small number of users” after a denial-of-service attack, a tactic used by hackers to slow or halt Web traffic by bombarding a host site with requests for information. She added that the company did not “have confirmation on who is responsible for the most recent attacks on nytimes.com.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/business/media/times-site-is-attacked-by-hackers.html

by Drew Olanoff, Techcrunch

It’s been a little over a year since Google started teasing something it called “Project Glass.” The futuristic, wearable computer that would change the way that you interact with the world was nothing more than a series of rumors for months before it was “formally introduced” in April 2012. Not known for hardware and not having a current bonafide physical device that was popular among consumers, many opined that this was Google’s way of begging for attention. It might have been, and it definitely worked. In thirteen months, Glass has gone from Star Trek fantasy to reality. It’s been quite the whirlwind of activity.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/19/google-glass-year-in-review/

by Marten Mickos, GigaOM

It’s not often the software world goes through a revolutionary change. But the advent of the cloud will force software developers to reevaluate – and discard – many of their most basic assumptions. The paradigm hasn’t changed since the advent of software: Applications run, and platforms are what they run on. But the underlying principles of application design and deployment do change every now and then – sometimes drastically, thanks to quantum-leap developments in infrastructure.

http://gigaom.com/2013/05/19/for-developers-the-cloud-means-having-to-rethink-everything-they-know-about-making-software/

by Alex Mansfield, the BBC Radio Science Unit

A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility. It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers. Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling. This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second. Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494#

by the BBC

Scientists in Glasgow have discovered a low-cost way to create 3D images. Their system uses detectors which have a single pixel to sense light instead of the millions of pixels used in the imaging sensors of digital cameras. The detectors can “see” frequencies beyond visible light, which researchers say could open up new uses for 3D imaging in medicine and geography. They said the single-pixel detectors cost “a few pounds” compared to current systems, which cost “thousands”. It is hoped that the system’s ability to senses wavelengths far beyond the capability of digital cameras and its low cost, could make it a valuable tool for a wide range of industries. Researchers said possible uses could range from locating oil to helping doctors find tumours.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22556172#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

By Lucas Laursen, Technology Review

Simpler ways to detect brain damage could save many lives. A helmet that sends a magnetic field through the wearer’s head might someday offer a quick way to reveal whether the brain is swelling or bleeding as the result of an injury. In a prototype of the helmet, a small halo-like coil generates a magnetic field above a person’s head; another coil, just above the ears, detects the magnetic field induced in the volunteer’s brain. Because liquid such as blood affects the magnetic field’s phase, the team behind the device was able to distinguish eight brain-injured patients from 46 healthy volunteers in a pilot study, they report in the journal PLOS One.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514951/cheap-magnetic-helmet-detects-some-kinds-of-brain-damage/

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

At the Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, nurses can see into the lives of some diabetes patients even when they’re not at the clinic. If a specific patient starts acting lethargic, or making lengthy calls to his mom, a green box representing him on an online dashboard turns yellow, then red. Soon, a nurse will call to see if he is still taking his medication.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514756/smartphone-tracker-gives-doctors-remote-viewing-powers/

by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, Huffington Post

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are garnering lots of attention these days. Some see large-scale, web-based classes as the new frontier for colleges and universities, a great leap forward that could revolutionize higher education. Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely and his colleagues at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, on the other hand, see MOOCs as the perfect way to test Dan’s academic funny bone. Will the jokes that work in a traditional college classroom work in a class of say, several thousand online students?  We threw similar questions at the thousands of students subjected to the jokes each week. Using the five-point scale, we asked them how funny and how offensive they found each of Dan’s wisecracks. We also asked them to predict Dan’s own ratings: how funny did their teacher consider each of his own jokes?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-mcgraw-and-joel-warner/a-professor-walks-into-a-_b_3283684.html

By Emma Brown, the Washington Post

Microsoft has donated $1 million to help D.C. teachers redesign their classrooms using a “blended learning” approach that combines online learning with face-to-face instruction. Blended learning has drawn both excitement and skepticism as it has exploded in popularity in recent years. Boosters believe that technology could transform schools and give students a more personalized learning experience, while critics fear that when executed poorly, blended approaches reduce learning to clicks on a computer. The donation will help expand a D.C. program — known as the Education Innovation Fellowship — that exposes teachers to the latest thinking in the field and then encourages them to adapt those ideas into their own classrooms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/microsoft-donates-1-million-to-help-expand-blended-learning-in-dc/2013/05/16/f14f7f76-be58-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

By Don Reisinger, eWeek

Google Fiber is slowly but surely expanding around the United States. And in the process, it’s making companies and consumers think twice about their current services. Google Fiber is a major change agent in the computing world. The service, which rolled out in Kansas City first but now has plans to head to Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, is arguably one of the most exciting developments coming out of the search giant. It is essentially the top-of-the-line Internet service in the United States. And although it’s only available in a few places, Google Fiber has the capability of turning the entire industry on its head.

http://www.eweek.com/networking/google-fiber-matters-10-reasons-why/

By Chris Preimesberger, eWeek

Enterprises are now facing a wide range of cyber-security threats that target their infrastructure, applications, operations and even employees. As more companies put their business information online, there is an enlarging attack surface for hackers looking to access company Websites and IT infrastructure. Disturbingly, most attacks today are carried out automatically using an army of bots that are not targeting specific companies. Hackers instead are trying to reach as many Websites as possible to maximize their botnet ROI, and any company, big or small, is a target. With the rapid evolution of online threats, more cloud-based managed services are becoming a part of the enterprise security strategy. The benefits of mitigating threats at the perimeter, having security experts on your side, and not having to deal with updates, maintenance and other operational aspects are appealing to IT managers—even if they have an in-house security team.

http://www.eweek.com/security/slideshows/how-to-handle-website-attacks-your-security-may-not-see-coming/

by Aarti Shahani, Marketplace

Some of the nation’s most elite professors are taking up a new teaching fad: Massively Open Online Courses. MOOCs rhymes with nukes, and the reach is about the same. These classes streamed on the Internet have millions of students around the world enrolling. They’re free of charge. But when you add up all the work it takes on and off camera to make a MOOC, the cost to professors is pretty high. As Prof. Kevin Werbach can attest, the life of a MOOCs rockstar is not pure glitz.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/education/life-online-professor

By Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Driver cell phone use and crashes due to distracted drivers are vastly underreported, according to a National Safety Council report, entitled “Crashes Involving Cell Phones: Challenges of Collecting and Reporting Reliable Crash Data.” The study, which was funded in part by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and reviewed 180 fatal crashes from 2009 to 2011, also brings up large differences in states’ reporting of fatal crashes due to cell phone distraction. For instance, in 2011, Tennessee reported 93 fatal crashes that involved cell phone use, but New York, a state with a much larger population, reported only one. Texas reported 40, but its neighboring state Louisiana reported none. Even when drivers admitted cell phone use during a fatal crash, the council’s analysis found that in about half these cases, the crash was not coded in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatal Analysis Reporting System. Of these fatal crashes, in 2011, only 52 percent were coded in the national data as involving cell phone use, the study showed. Here’s a look at some state-by-state figures.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/slideshows/mobile-phone-related-fatal-car-crashes-highest-in-tennessee/

By Don Reisinger, eWeek

Google Glass is on the minds of just about every technology nerd out there. The device, which is worn like a pair of glasses, allows users to do everything from snapping photos to recording video. Google Glass is designed to replace cameras, smartphones and perhaps other devices as the primary form of communication and data transmission on an individual’s person. According to Google, it’s the next logical step for wearable technology and will entice quite a few customers to buy it. But what if Google Glass doesn’t actually succeed in attracting customers? As nice as the idea might sound, there are still a number of market barriers that could cause Google Glass to stumble at the starting gates. Google Glass is an ambitious project that while it will win adherents is also making other potential users question whether it is practical. eWEEK examines the factors that could hold back Google Glass. From market factors to Google’s own missteps, it’s possible that Google Glass won’t actually reach the level of success so many think it will.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/slideshows/google-glass-faces-market-barriers-10-factors-that-could-hold-it-back/

by Christina Farr, Venture Beat

Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it? One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning. Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated. The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/14/new-online-course-encourages-students-to-cheat-for-science/

By Ben Waber, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. Can we use data about people to alter physical reality, even in real time, and improve their performance at work or in life? That is the question being asked by a developing field called augmented social reality. Here’s a simple example. A few years ago, with Sandy Pentland’s human dynamics research group at MIT’s Media Lab, I created what I termed an “augmented cubicle.” It had two desks separated by a wall of plexiglass with an actuator-controlled window blind in the middle. Depending on whether we wanted different people to be talking to each other, the blinds would change position at night every few days or weeks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514371/augmenting-social-reality-in-the-workplace/

By Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Google has set plenty of restrictions on the functionality of apps for Glass, the head-mounted display it is now shipping out to early adopters. At the company’s annual developer conference, I/O, which kicks off today, it will show app creators how to break those rules. One conference session will be called “Voiding Your Warranty: Hacking Glass.” But it could be controversial to encourage experimentation with a product that at once has wowed people with its possibilities and spurred uneasy imaginings of a society subject to ubiquitous, user-generated surveillance. Google clearly wants developers to help explore the limits of what Glass can do, and yet Glass is not even on the market yet, and a handful of bars and cafés have already banned the hardware.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514831/treading-carefully-google-encourages-developers-to-hack-glass/

By Charles Choi, Technology Review

Quantum computing took a giant leap forward on the world stage today as NASA and Google, in partnership with a consortium of universities, launched an initiative to investigate how the technology might lead to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. The new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will employ what may be the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two, which a recent study confirmed was much faster than conventional machines at defeating specific problems (see “D-Wave’s Quantum Computer Goes to the Races, Wins”). The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and is expected to be available for government, industrial, and university research later this year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514846/google-and-nasa-launch-quantum-computing-ai-lab/

By Margaret Andrews, Inside Higher Ed

In this corner: MOOC enthusiasts, envisioning how these large, online courses will increase access to higher education, reduce costs, and reinvigorate teaching and learning. In the other corner: MOOC critics, anticipating how MOOCs will eliminate meaningful interaction between faculty and students, reduce the quality of learning, and decimate the professorship. You’ve probably heard by now that Amherst declined to participate in edX and that San Jose State faculty pushed back on plans for another MOOC in their midst. Recently, there is (seemingly) more press about the potential future impact of these large online courses.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/both-sides

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Ed

A world without network, storage and computer barriers could become reality if research and education network Internet2 has its way.  The organization has set a high goal of knocking down these barriers in higher education. As the fields of digital content, video and cloud storage continue to advance, they provide opportunities to recreate an educational experience that has no limits. “We don’t want barriers to be the network, we don’t want barriers to be the storage, we don’t want barriers to be the computer,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2. “If we can share and access the total capacity of higher education, we can live in a barrierless world.”

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Internet2-Seeks-to-Knock-Down-Technology-Barriers.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Ed

Predictive analytics is on the rise in education, being used to pull together student information such as GPAs, majors and course success — all to project how well individual students will do in certain classes. But not to worry; predictive analytics won’t replace instruction. According to education software company Desire2Learn, it will help colleges serve students better.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Predictive-Analytics-is-Not-a-Scary-Machine.html