Not ðat I can þink of anyþiŋ more uſeleß ðan tryiŋ to replicate paper in an electronic ſcreen.
Nate the greatest writes "Remember last year when Apple received a patent on the faux page curl in iBooks? Lots of people laughed at the idea that Apple could patent the page turn, but not Samsung. The gadget maker has just filed for their own page turn patent. The paperwork explains in great detail what the page turn looks like, how the software would work, and what on screen gestures could be used to turn the page."
Update: Stocks are up big on today’s employment report. In fact, Americans worked less in April than in March: multiply the increase in payrolls by the decline in hours worked, and the total number of working hours fell. Almost all the increase in employment was in retail, hospitality and temp agencies, and probably reflects employers spreading the work around a larger number of workers working fewer hours in order to save on health benefits.
Just after Obama’s re-election we heard Republican leaders explain that Obama had just gotten lucky — the economy was in the recovery phase of a normal business cycle, and Obama caught the right wave. As the stock market rallied through the first four months of 2013 and regained its old peak, the story seemed credible — until a couple of weeks ago, that is.
We’ve had one depressing economic report after another. Employment is barely growing, according to the ADP survey, which showed just 119,000 new jobs created in April and 118,000 in May. The April purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing fell sharply from 54.6 to 52.1 (50 is dead in the water).
The Shadow Government Statistics website calculates the true unemployment rate — the proportion of the working-age population that can work but doesn’t — at 23%. That includes so-called “long-term discouraged workers” not included in the labor force. Even the government’s own broad measure of unemployment still stands at almost 15%, twice the pre-crisis level.
On a GDP basis, the economy grew at an 0.8% rate in the fourth quarter of 2012 and at a 2.5% in the first quarter. That’s just 1.5% without counting inventories. Investment in industrial equipment actually fell during the quarter. It’s an economy that is flying barely above stall speed.
No, Obama didn’t win re-election because the vote happened to occur at the cusp of a normal business cycle recovery. The economy really is that bad. So is Obama. Sadly, so was the Republican ticket.
Why is the economy so bad? According to the usual chatter, it’s because payroll taxes went up and took $140 billion out of personal income during the first quarter. But another big category of personal income — receipts on assets — fell by $125 billion, a hit to personal income almost as big as payroll taxes. And almost all of that was due to lower dividends. It turns out that companies are paying a lot less cash out to stockholders. The S&P 500 dividend per share fell from about $9 to about $8 during the first quarter, and the GDP data indicate that drop occurred throughout the corporate world.
Another sign of economic weakness is that the sales of S&P 500 companies fell by 5% during the quarter. Profits per share, though, were higher. How is the stock market managing to levitate above a busted economy, where the sales growth of top companies can’t even keep up with nominal GDP? Part of the reason is leverage.
I know you are all focused on the new E-P5 launch but there is a camera that uses exactly the same sensor form the E-M5 and E-P5 and sells for $429 with lens(!). It’s the Olympus E-PM2 at Amazon (Click here), Adorama (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here). If you click on these links you will also notice that the kit version is actually cheaper than the body only! That’s the best quality-price rate you can get right now on a Micro Four Thirds camera. Sorry dear European colluegues, we still have to pay a bit less than 500 Euro to grab it (prices here on Slidoo eBay).
If you don’t care about getting the latest sensor generation than you may check out the E-P3 with kit lens thats ells for $379 at Amazon (Click here).
An anonymous reader writes with this tidbit from PC World about Sabam's latest demand for copyright levies: "Sabam, the Belgian association of authors, composers and publishers, has sued the country's three biggest ISPs, saying that they should be paying copyright levies for offering access to copyright protected materials online. Sabam wants the court to rule that Internet access providers Belgacom, Telenet and Voo should pay 3.4 percent of their turnover in copyright fees, because they profit from offering high speed Internet connections that give users easy access to copyright protected materials, the collecting organization said in a news release Tuesday." Sabam has previously demanded money from truckers for listening to the radio, and wanted to charge libraries royalties for reading to children.
The makers of the FinFisher spyware, used by repressive governments around the world, have been disguising their trojans as the Firefox browser. Mozilla wants them to stop trading on the organisation's trustworthy reputation
harrymcc writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie." 242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.
tdog17 writes "Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands. Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation 'Who Has Your Back?' report. Apple, AT&T and Yahoo ranked near the bottom, each scoring just one star. 'While we are pleased by the strides these companies have made over the past couple years, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Amazon holds huge quantities of information as part of its cloud computing services and retail operations, yet does not promise to inform users when their data is sought by the government, produce annual transparency reports, or publish a law enforcement guide. Facebook has yet to publish a transparency report. Yahoo! has a public record of standing up for user privacy in courts, but it hasn't earned recognition in any of our other categories. Apple and AT&T are members of the Digital Due Process coalition, but don’t observe any of the other best practices we’re measuring. ... We remain disappointed by the overall poor showing of ISPs like AT&T and Verizon in our best practice categories.'"
The AXLE Consortium are pleased to announce the start of the AXLE database research project, funded by European Union under FP7 grant.
axleproject.eu
The objectives of the AXLE project are to greatly improve the speed and quality of decision making on real-world data sets. AXLE aims to make these improvements generally available through high quality open source implementations via the PostgreSQL database and Orange data visualisation and data mining tools.
Areas of research will include data analysis algorithms for Big Data, advanced hardware architectures, data visualisation and security.
Target environments are real-world data in the 10-100 TB range.
"Real world data needs good security too, so we'll be making sure we have high grade security that works well even with high performance requirements", says Simon Riggs, CTO of 2ndQuadrant and Principal Investigator for the AXLE project. "We're very happy that the European Union has recognised the potential of the PostgreSQL database to provide effective database analytics for a broad range of business, research and public services."
First deliverables from the project will be submitted to PostgreSQL version 9.4, available in 2014 and will continue in later releases.
Project updates will be available regularly here as work continues.
symbolset writes "The Wall Street Journal and others are reporting that longtime telecomm lobbyist Tom Wheeler will be nominated to head the Federal Communications Commission. According to the LA Times: 'Wheeler is a former president of the National Cable Television Assn. and the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Assn. Despite his close ties to industries he will soon regulate, some media watchdogs are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. "As someone who has known Tom for years, I believe that he will be an independent, proactive chairman," said Gigi B. Sohn, president and chief executive of Public Knowledge, adding that she has "no doubt that Tom will have an open door and an open mind, and that ultimately his decisions will be based on what he genuinely believes is best for the public interest, not any particular industry."'"
Now projects can go from Microsoft Project to Project Open and back again in the latest release of the Project Open enterprise project management package. There's also mobile phone support and Active Directory and SharePoint integration
There will still be upvote/downvote arrows, comment counts, and orangered envelopes—features that can be evil, but are useful for moderation, sorting, discussion &c. But there will be no imaginary Internet points to manipulate your psychology and keep you hooked. If you choose your sub-reddits well, reddit can even be productive!
This was inspired by how Slashdot, the pioneer in user moderation, used to hide the numeric value of people’s karma, “because otherwise it becomes a videogame”.
I ſeem to remember ðey have been tryiŋ ðat ſince ðe beginniŋ of ðe millennium…
jrepin writes "The government of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura has begun the switch to open source of it desktop PCs. The government expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated this year, the region's CIO Theodomir Cayetano announced on 18 April. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save 30 million euro per year. Extremadura in 2012 completed the inventory of all the software applications and computers used by its civil servants. It also tailored a Linux distribution, Sysgobex, to meet the majority of requirements of government tasks. It has already migrated to open source some 150 PCs at several ministries, including those for Development, Culture and Employment."
vinces99 writes "Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas."
kodiaktau writes "The UK govt passed the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which effectively makes so-called 'orphaned' content posted on social media sites public domain. Corporations now only need to have made a "diligent search" to find the owner of the content before use. From the article: 'The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", by placing the work into what's known as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organization - millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.'"
A group of sex education ‘experts’ has suggested that pupils should be taught in school about pornography, on the grounds that it is not ‘all bad’ and can even be ‘helpful’ to them.
I strive and manage to avoid errors most of the time, but given the amount of writing I do, not 100% of the time. The chance for slipups increases when many examples are involved and I focus on the same material for an extended period of time. Luckily, there is usually some reader who stays awake while reading it and notifies me. This is what happened with the 2NF example in my normalization paper. This is the bad news.
The good news is that this is an opportunity to provide those who purchased the paper with a correction, while at the same time give those who have not, what I consider the right way to think of further normalization advanced in the paper. (The paper has been
revised accordingly; revised copies will be delivered upon request).
Strudelkugel writes in with a story about how big data is being used to recruit workers. "When the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn't bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough. 'The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,' says Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild since late last year. That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way."
hypnosec writes "Google has released the kernel source code of Google Glass publicly just a couple of days after the wearable gadget was rooted by Jay Freeman. Releasing the source code, Google has noted that the location is just temporary and it would be moving to a permanent location soon saying: 'This is unlikely to be the permanent home for the kernel source, it should be pushed into git next to all other android kernel source releases relatively soon'"
ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are
carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative
action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a
vote in Michigan that banned it, and will soon rule on whether the University
of Texas’s race-conscious admissions policies are lawful. The question in both
cases is as simple as it is divisive: should government be colour-blind?
America is one of many countries where the state gives a
leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to
different standards. The details vary. In some countries, the policy applies
only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or
admission to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to
take account of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. But
the effects are strikingly similar around the world (see article).
Vejam os números, precisa dizer mais alguma coisa?? E viva a ideologia do PT (e das ultra-esquerdas + pseudo-esquerdas) que pretende DEMOLIR a educação de qualidade em Pindorama !
An anonymous reader writes "Jen Andre, software engineer and co-founder of Threat Stack, writes about the problem of password breaches in the wake of the LivingSocial hack. She notes that the problem here is longstanding — it's easy for LivingSocial to force password resets, but impossible to get users to create different passwords for each site they visit. We've tried education, and it's failed. Andre suggests a different approach: building out better auditing infrastructure. 'We, as an industry, need a standard for auditing that allows us to reliably track and record authentication events. Since authentication events are relatively similar across any application, I think this could be accomplished easily with a simple JSON-based common protocol and webhooks. ... [It] could even be a hosted service that learns based on my login behaviors and only alerts me when it thinks a login entry is suspicious— kind of how Gmail will alert if I am logging in from a strange location. Because these audit entries are stored on a third-party box, if a certain web application is compromised, it won't have access to alter its audit log history since it lives somewhere else.'"
symbolset writes "Outbound Intel CEO Paul Otellini created quite a stir when mentioning that touchscreen laptops would reach a $200 price point. CNET is now reporting in an interview with Intel chief product officer Dadi Perlmutter that these touchscreen laptops will run Android on Intel Atom processors at first. 'Whether Windows 8 PCs hit that price largely depends on Microsoft, he said. "We have a good technology that enables a very cost-effective price point," Perlmutter said. The price of Windows 8 laptops "depends on how Microsoft prices Windows 8. It may be a slightly higher price point." ... Perlmutter didn't specify what the Android notebooks will look like, but it's probable they'll be convertible-type devices. He also noted that he expects the PC market to pick up in the back half of the year and heading into 2014 as new devices become available."
An anonymous reader writes "An article at MIT's Technology Review makes the case that the complexity of the design tools behind 3-D printing are what's holding it back from widespread adoption. Many of the devices are indeed prohibitively expensive, but the inability for your average person — or even your average tech hobbyist — to pick it up and start experimenting is an even bigger obstacle. 'That means software innovation could be more important to 3-D printing than gradual improvements in the underlying technology for shaping objects. That technology is already 30 years old and is widely used in industry to create prototypes, molds, and, in some cases, parts for airplanes. ... Although additive manufacturing allows for designs that can't be made easily in any other way — such as complex shapes with internal cavities — so far, companies have mostly used 3-D printing to create prototypes or models of familiar products.'"
An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports on an internet piracy case from Finland, which saw four men found guilty and fined €45,000. During the trial, the defense attorney took note of inconsistencies in log files used as evidence against the men. An investigator for international recording industry organization IFPI revealed after questioning that the files had been tampered with. He said an MPAA executive was present when the evidence gathering took place, and altered the files to hide the identity of 'one of their spies.' 'No one from the MPAA informed the defense that the edits had been made and the tampering was revealed at the worst possible time – during the trial. This resulted in the prosecutor ordering a police investigation into the changes that had been made. "Police then proceeded by comparing the 'work copy' that the IFPI investigator produced with the material that police and the defending counsels had received. Police found out that the material had differences in over 10 files," Hietanen reveals.'"
Lauren Weinstein writes "Are you ready for the imagery war — the war against personal photography and capturing of video? You'd better be. 'In some cities, like New York, the surveillance-industrial complex has its fangs deeply into government for the big bucks. It's there we heard the Police Commissioner — just hours ago, really — claim that "privacy is off the table." And of course, there's the rise of wearable cameras and microphones by law enforcement, generally bringing praise from people who assume they will reduce police misconduct, but also dangerously ignoring a host of critical questions. Will officers be able to choose when the video is running? How will the video be protected from tampering? How long will it be archived? Can it be demanded by courts? ... All of this and more is the gung-ho, government surveillance side of the equation. But what about the personal photography and video side? What of individual or corporate use of these technologies in public and private spaces? Will the same politicians promoting government surveillance in all its glory take a similar stance toward nongovernmental applications? Writing already on the wall suggests not. Inklings of the battles to come are already visible, if you know where to look."
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576662-governments-should-be-colour-blind-time-scrap-affirmative-action
www.cienciabrasil.blogspot.com 
www.cienciabrasil.blogspot.com 
