Microsoft's Health-y Patent Appetite
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 03, @11:27AM
"This week's USPTO patent application disclosures included a trifecta of scary health-related 'inventions' from Microsoft. For starters, Microsoft envisions seeing Kids' Personal Health Records Fed Into Video Games, where they can be used to 'regulate and/or prescribe an individual's behavior while playing electronic games.' Next up is Centralized Healthcare Data Management, which describes how employees' health habits can be 'monitored, tracked or otherwise discovered' so employers can 'incentivize a user for an act or penalize for an omission to act.' Finally, there's Wearing Health on Your Sleeve, which describes a sort of high-tech Scarlet Letter designed to tip off 'doctors, potential dates, etc.' about your unhealthy behavior by converting information — 'number of visits to the gym, workout activities, frequency of workouts, heart rate readings, blood pressure statistics, food consumption, vitamin intake, etc.' — into a visual form so that others can see the data 'on mechanisms such as a mood ring, watch, badge, on a website etc.'"
It's obscure papers like these that allow my Ethical Hackers to flourish!
http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/07/02/facial-recognition-camouflage/
How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology
The day when you’ll be able to hold up your phone and identify a stranger through a viewfinder is getting closer.
Google’s Goggles, a mobile app for visual search, has a facial recognition version unreleased to the public, while Israeli startup Face.com’s technology can tag people’s faces in Facebook photos. Facebook even released a basic version of face detection last night, although it doesn’t have recognition.
So in a world where technology chips away at our ability to remain anonymous, how does one reclaim some semblance of control?
It turns out there’s actually a pretty simple way around the facial recognition technology available in the market today, according to Adam Harvey, a graduate student at NYU’s ITP (the same program that produced Foursquare chief executive Dennis Crowley and that Twitter’s location guru Raffi Krikorian taught at).
If you change the contrast in certain parts of your face — either through a watermark or by wearing a strategically-placed sticker or facepaint, recognition technology can’t identify that your face is a human face.
… Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s.
Our next President?
Sign of the Apocaplypse: Lady Gaga Heads for 10 Million Facebook Fan Record
Glam pop singer Lady Gaga is on the brink of becoming the first living person to have 10 million fans on a single social networking site, having already overtaken President Obama on Facebook, a British group that measures online popularity said on Friday.
Simple is better than nothing.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/youtube-video-editor/
How to Use the New YouTube Video Editor
YouTube has had ways to editor your video for some time now, but it would probably be a stretch to call those features an actual video editor. They were more of a supplement, making it possible to add annotation and other notes to your video. If you needed to cut or change your video you had to use your own video editor, such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
Now, that has changed. YouTube has released the first version of the YouTube Video Editor. This editor honestly doesn’t have a huge amount of functionality, but it does let you accomplish a few things which you couldn’t previously accomplish on YouTube.
A way to move beyond the Biblical Typing Method (seek and ye shall find)
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/senselang-online-typing-tutor
Sense-Lang: Online Typing Tutor With Multi Language Support
Today many jobs require typing with the computer’s keyboard. Being able to type fast and accurately can save a lot of time on the job. While there are many typing tutor programs out there, tools that are absolutely free and cover multiple languages are rare. Sense-Lang is one of these rare tools.
Similar tools: TypingLessons-Online, PowerTyping, Typeracer, TypingWeb, 10-Fast-Fingers and Keybr.
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