I was kind of worried
that this might be the case.
Hang on to your credit
cards and start checking your free credit reports: The latest news
about retail breaches is not good.
Numerous sources are
now reporting that the recent Target and Neiman Marcus data breaches
may be the tip of the cyber heist iceberg, and there are likely more
related breaches that have not yet been announced.
Writing in
BankInfoSecurity, Tracy Kitten reports that banks that issue credit
cards say fraud
patterns may reveal additional breaches at other well-known
brands—possibly a leading hotel company and a restaurant chain.
Banks are often the first ones to detect retail breaches, even before
the merchants themselves realize what is happening.
Another little problem
with the government database.
Darlene Storm reports:
When
it comes to the atrocious state of HealthCare.gov security, white hat
hacker David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, may feel like he’s beating
his head against a stone wall. Kennedy said,
“I don’t understand how we’re still discussing whether the
website is insecure or not. It is; there’s no question about
that.” He added,
“It is insecure – 100 percent.”
Read more on
Computerworld.
Related:
TrustedSec
testimony (pdf) to the House Science, and Technology Committee on
Jan. 16
(Related) Okay Privacy
lawyers, what are you going to do about it?
Dr. Deborah Peel of
Patient Privacy Rights kindly gave me permission to reprint this blog
post:
The
biggest myth about ‘Big Data’ users of the entire nation’s
health information is that personal health data was acquired legally
and ethically.
Just
ask anyone you know if they ever agreed to the hidden use and sale of
sensitive personal information about their minds and bodies by
corporations or “research” businesses for analytics, sales,
research or any other use. The answer is “no”.
Americans
have very strong individual rights to health information privacy, ie
to control the use of their most sensitive personal information. If
US citizens have any “right to privacy”, that right has always
applied to sensitive personal health information. This was very
clear for our paper medical records and is embodied in the
Hippocratic Oath as the requirement to obtain informed consent before
disclosing patient information (with rare exceptions).
The
IPO filing by IMS Health Holdings at the SEC exposed the vast number
of hidden health data sellers and buyers. Buying, aggregating,
and selling the nation’s health data is an “unfair and deceptive”
trade practice.
Does
the public know or expect that IMS (and the 100′s of thousands of
other hidden health data mining companies) buys and aggregates
sensitive “prescription and promotional” records, “electronic
medical records”, “claims data”, and “social media” to
create “comprehensive”, “longitudinal” health records on “400
million” patients? Or that IMS buys “proprietary data sourced
from over 100,000 data suppliers covering over 780,000 data feeds
globally”? Again, the answer is “no”.
Given
the massive hidden theft, sale, and misuse of the nation’s health
information how can any physician, hospital, or health data holder
represent that our personal health data is private, secure, or
confidential?
Read
the IMS IPO filing at:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1595262/000119312514000659/d628679ds1.htm
See? I told you they
had laws in Australia.
New
on LLRX – Researching Australian Law
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 20, 2014
Via LLRX.com
- Researching
Australian Law - Nicholas
Pengelley and Sue
Milne have revised, updated and expanded their guide which covers
a comprehensive range of sources on topics that include: Parliaments
and Laws; Finding Australian Legislation; Courts and Judgments;
Finding Australian Cases; Treaties; Journal Literature; Legal
Encyclopedias; Law Reform; Government Information; Dictionaries;
Directories; Legal Research Guides; Publishers; Current Awareness;
Discussion Lists; and Major Texts.
Unfortunately, this
doesn't surprise me. What I don't get is why a dozen cops were
required to search for evidence of eggs. That is what the search
warrant was after, isn't it? Is it common to issue search warrants
for “egging?” I don't recall that ever happening when I was a
kid.
Justin
Bieber had ‘cookie jars’ full of weed, empty codeine bottles in
house during cop raid: report
Justin
Bieber’s mansion reportedly was stuffed with
drugs and paraphernalia when cops rolled up to serve an
egging-related search warrant last week.
Two large cookie jars
loaded with marijuana sat in plain view of the dozen detectives from
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, an unidentified source
told TMZ.com.
… Luckily for the
Biebs, the deputies were raiding the house for surveillance equipment
and other evidence that could tie him to a recent egging of his
neighbor’s mansion – not drugs.
… Bieber, 19, is
under investigation for allegedly hurling raw eggs at his next-door
neighbor’s house two weeks ago.
The irate neighbor has
claimed he saw the Canadian crooner from his second-floor balcony and
even videotaped some of the verbal exchange.
Neighbor Jeffrey
Schwartz quickly called police and claimed Bieber threw at least 20
eggs at his home, causing about $20,000 worth of damage to his
plaster and stained wood exterior. [Flimsy houses in
California... Bob]
Welcome to the land
where competition is based on the value of the service, not who has
the best Super Bowl Ad. There's a business opportunity here.
Unfortunately, I seem to be the only serious geek in my neighborhood.
Perhaps if I toss in free phone service, free TV, free music, and
free MOOCs? By the way, I clock out at 2.12mbps.
South
Korea set to get 300 Mbps service, one carrier prepping 450 Mbps for
MWC
If you thought your
Verizon or AT&T LTE was fast, South
Korea is about to start laughing at us. In
that country, two providers are preparing a new LTE network that will
outdo anything we’re seeing domestically by a wide margin. At 300
Mbps, LG Uplus is setting a standard, but a 450 Mbps network from
another is said to be shown of at MWC.
I see a future for
“less than Bachelor” skills testing. Take a free MOOC to learn
the skill, then pay to be tested or certified.
One-Quarter
of Adults Hold Educational Credentials Other Than an Academic Degree
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 20, 2014
“The U.S. Census
Bureau reported
that in fall 2012, more than 50 million U.S. adults, or one in
four, had obtained a professional certification, license or
educational certificate apart from a postsecondary degree awarded
by colleges and universities. This is the Census Bureau’s
first-ever report on this topic. Among the adults included in the
report, 12 million had both a professional certification or license
and an educational certificate; 34 million had only a professional
certification or license; and 7 million had only an educational
certificate. “Getting an academic degree is not the only way
for people to develop skills that pay off in the labor market,”
said Stephanie Ewert, a demographer with the Census Bureau’s
Education and Social Stratification Branch and co-author of the
report, Measuring
Alternative Educational Credentials: 2012. “In this report,
we’ve been able to measure for the first time how many people take
another route to a productive career: holding an alternative
educational credential independent of traditional college degrees.
It turns out that millions of people have taken this path,” added
Ewert. These alternative credentials include professional
certifications, licenses and educational certificates. The
fields of these professional certifications and licenses were
wide-ranging and include business/finance management, nursing,
education, cosmetology and culinary arts, among others. The report
shows that, in general, these alternative credentials provide a path
to higher earnings. Among full-time workers, the median monthly
earnings for someone with a professional certification or license
only was $4,167, compared with $3,433 for one with an educational
certificate only; $3,920 for those with both types of credentials;
and $3,110 for people without any alternative credential. “For
people with at least a bachelor’s degree, earnings didn’t really
differ between those with an alternative educational credential and
those without,” said report co-author Robert Kominski,
assistant chief for social characteristics at the Census Bureau.
“But at lower levels of regular education, there is routinely an
earnings premium for a professional certification or license, or an
educational certificate.” Professional certification or license
holders earned more than those without an alternative credential at
each level of education below a bachelor’s. Among people with
some college but no degree or less education, educational certificate
holders earned more than people without an alternative credential.”
Same argument for
providing my students with e-textbooks.
New
on LLRX – Should public libraries give away e-book-friendly tablets
to poor people?
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 20, 2014
Via LLRX.com
- Should
public libraries give away e-book-friendly tablets to poor people?
$38 tablet hints of possibilities - David
Rothman proposes that e-book-capable tablets, especially with
national digital library systems in place, could multiply the number
of books matching students’ precise needs. Paper books could serve
as gateways to E, and then children and parents could digitally
follow their passions to the max, whether for spaceships, basketball,
or knitting. … Learning, independent of income – access to
knowledge regardless of often round-the clock-work schedules for
increasing numbers of parents and young people who are struggling to
get by – this is a cause around which many communities of best
practice can rally.
Why not? If nothing
else, think of how easily a foundation could be poured.
DefenseTech
– Navy Helps Fund 3D Printing of Buildings
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on January 20, 2014
Bryant
Jordan: “Add to guns and prosthetic hands something much bigger
and heavier forming from the nozzle of a 3D printer — buildings
“printed” out of concrete. Partially funded by the Office of
Naval Research and the National Science Foundation Countour Crafting
is trying to develop 3D printed buildings using concrete. Company
founder Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor and director of
Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of
Southern California. Concrete printers would be able to build a
2,500-square-foot building within a single day, according to
Khoshnevis. For the military, that means soldiers deploying to a
remote location with little or no infrastructure could be operating
out of permanent structures pretty soon after a combat engineer unit
arrived with printers and material aboard a C-17.”
Analyze data like the
NSA? But, this might work for my Statistics students.
Doing
Data Science in the Cloud With ScraperWiki
If you’ve got the
mental chops, a flair for programming and storytelling, and an eye
for design, you can do worse than getting into data science. It’s
the new big thing in technology; highly trendy and highly paid, with
data scientists being sought by some of the largest companies in the
world.
ScraperWiki
is a company that has long been associated with the data science
field. For the past few years, this Liverpool based startup has
offered a platform for coders to write tools that get data, clean it
and analyze it in the cloud.
… ScraperWiki
markets itself as a place to get, clean and analyze data, and it
delivers on each of those counts. In its simplest form, it allows
you – the user – a place where you can write code that retrieves
data from a source, tools to convert it into a format that is easy to
analyze, and storage to keep it for later visualization – which you
can also handle with ScraperWiki.
It also comes with a
number of pre-built tools that automate repetitive tasks, including
getting
data from PDFs, which are notoriously difficult to decode. This
is in addition to
Twitter searching and scraping utilities. You don’t need any
software development experience to use these.
For my student toolkit.
Read
Write Think Timeline - A Timeline Tool for Almost All Devices
Read
Write Think offers a bunch of great web, iOS, and Android
applications for students. One of those that I recently learned
about from David
Kapuler is Read
Write Think's Timeline creator. RWT Timeline is available as a
web app (Flash required), as an Android
app, and as an iPad
app. All three versions make it easy for students to create
timelines for any series of events.
To create a timeline
with RWT Timeline students first tap or click along a blank line to
add an event. Events can include dates in any format. Each event
has room for a brief description and an image. Longer descriptions
can be written but they won't appear on the timeline, they'll only
appear in the printed notes about the timeline. Students can drag
and drop events on their timelines to create appropriate spacing
between each event.
(Related) Because too
many is never enough.
Teaching
With ChronoZoom - A Timeline of Almost Everything
A couple of years ago
Microsoft launched an open source timeline tool called ChronoZoom.
At that time ChronoZoom was an impressive interactive timeline of
the history of the world. But that's all it was. Recently, I
learned that ChronoZoom now allows students and teachers to create
their own timelines. Timelines created in ChronoZoom can include
multiple layers so that you can see how events and eras overlap.
Within each section of your a time multiple videos, images, and texts
can be displayed.
The "zoom"
part of the name ChronoZoom comes from the way in which you navigate
the timelines by zooming-in and zooming-out on elements of the
timeline. In that sense ChronoZoom's display will remind some users
of the Prezi
interface.
To paraphrase Forrest
Gump, “Management is as management does!”
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