NSA will likely vacuum
up these calls too.
Shaun Walker reports:
Athletes
and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February
will face some of the most invasive and systematic spying and
surveillance in the history of the Games, documents shared with the
Guardian show.
Russia’s
powerful FSB security service plans to ensure that no communication
by competitors or spectators goes unmonitored during the event,
according to a dossier compiled by a team of Russian investigative
journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games.
Read more on The
Guardian.
Sometimes labor is
faster to respond to new technologies than creating new monitoring
tech. On the other hand, it beats unemployment insurance.
AFP reports:
China
is employing two million people to keep tabs on people’s Internet
use, according to state media, in a rare glimpse into the secret
world of Beijing’s vast online surveillance operation.
Many
of the employees are simply performing keyword searches to monitor
the tens of millions of messages being posted daily on popular social
media and microblogging sites, the Beijing News said.
The
exact number of people employed to trawl through the Internet in a
bid to prevent social unrest and limit criticism of the ruling
Community party has long been the subject of speculation.
Read more on France24
Know the players...
Who
Is Fighting On Your Behalf Against The NSA And For Privacy?
Mozilla
The non-profit backs the website StopWatching.us
Always amusing to read
economic forecasts.
NYT
Op-Ed – When Wealth Disappears
Stephen
D. King, chief economist at HSBC: “We
are reaching end times for Western affluence. Between
2000 and 2007, ahead of the Great Recession, the United States
economy grew at a meager average of about 2.4 percent a year — a
full percentage point below the 3.4 percent average of the 1980s and
1990s. From 2007 to 2012, annual growth amounted to just 0.8
percent. In Europe, as is well known, the situation is even worse.
Both sides of the North Atlantic have already succumbed to a
Japan-style “lost decade.” ..The underlying reason for the
stagnation is that a half-century of remarkable one-off developments
in the industrialized world will not be repeated. First was the
unleashing of global trade, after a period of protectionism and
isolationism between the world wars, enabling manufacturing to take
off across Western Europe, North America and East Asia. A boom that
great is unlikely to be repeated in advanced economies. Second,
financial innovations that first appeared in the 1920s, notably
consumer credit, spread in the postwar decades. Post-crisis, the
pace of such borrowing is muted, and likely to stay that way. Third,
social safety nets became widespread, reducing the need for
households to save for unforeseen emergencies. Those nets are
fraying now, meaning that consumers will have to save more for ever
longer periods of retirement. Fourth, reduced discrimination flooded
the labor market with the pent-up human capital of women. Women now
make up a majority of the American labor force; that proportion can
rise only a little bit more, if at all.”
One of the great
business/economic thinkers...
Why
do we turn to nonprofits, NGOs and governments to solve society's
biggest problems? Michael Porter admits he's biased, as a business
school professor, but he wants you to hear his case for letting
business try to solve massive problems like climate change and access
to water. Why? Because when business solves a
problem, it makes a profit -- which lets that solution grow.
Michael E. Porter wrote
the books on modern competitive strategy for business. Now he is
thinking deeply about the intersection between society and corporate
interests
Perspective
Google
logs record 21.5M URL takedown requests in September
For my students
Education
Pays 2013
Education Pays 2013: The Benefits of Higher
Education for Individuals and Society “documents the ways in
which both individuals and society as a whole benefit from increased
levels of education. The report examines differences in the earnings
and employment patterns of U.S. adults with different levels of
education. It compares health-related behaviors, reliance on public
assistance programs, civic participation, and indicators of the
well-being of the next generation. Financial benefits are easier to
document than nonpecuniary benefits, but the latter may be as
important to students themselves, as well as to the society in which
they participate. In addition to the financial and nonpecuniary
benefits of higher education, Education Pays 2013 examines
the increases and the persistent disparities across demographic
groups in college participation and completion.”
Use metadata and social
networks just like the NSA!
– Identify millions
of unknown callers before you even answer the call with Contactive’s
Universal Caller ID! It collects information from your social
media networks, publicly available sources, and Contactive’s Global
Directory to show who’s calling before you even answer the
call.
Now that's an App I
never would have believed possible.
– Driving on under
inflated tires can increase your car’s fuel consumption and puts
both driver and passengers in unnecessary risk. TireCheck enables
drivers to check their tire pressure in a fun and contactless manner,
simply by using their iOS device. Use Tirecheck and start saving
immediately.
Download
this app and check your tire pressure with your smartphone by simply
photographing your tires!
For my stew-dents
Five
Visual Dictionaries and Thesauri for Students
Like all teachers I
have found that the right visual aids can make all the difference
between students understanding a term or walking away shaking their
heads. This pattern is carries over to learning new vocabulary words
and or seeing the connections between similar words. Here are five
visual dictionaries and thesauri that can help your students learn
new vocabulary words.
Got
Brainy is a site that I've used since it launched a few years
ago. Got Brainy features two sections; Brainy Flix and Brainy Pics.
Brainy Pics is comprised of images that demonstrate the meaning of a
word. Most of the pictures are submitted by students. Brainy Flix
is comprised of short videos that illustrate the meaning of words.
Just like with Brainy Pics, most of the videos are submitted by
students.
Snappy
Words is a free visual dictionary and thesaurus. Enter any word
or phrase into the Snappy Words search box and it will create a web
of related words, phrases, and definitions. Hover your cursor over
any word or phrase in the web to read its definition. Click and drag
any node to explore other branches of the web. Double click on a
node and it will generate new web branches.
Image
Dictionary is a Chrome extension that enables users to
right-click on a word and quickly find an image that is
representative of that word. To use the Image Dictionary extension
just highlight a word on a webpage, right-click, and select "image
search." The images that are shown come from Wikipedia. Image
Dictionary could be a handy little extension to use when you want to
quickly find an image to represent a plant, animal, or perhaps a
broad topic.
Word
Sense is a neat little service that is one part dictionary and
one part thesaurus. When you enter a word into Word Sense it will
show you the definition(s) for the word as well as the connections to
associated and similar words. You can see any of the definitions of
the connected words by simply clicking on them to pop-up a
definition.
Visuwords
uses a web design to show users the definitions of words and the
connections between words. To use Visuwords just type a word into
the search box and Visuwords will generate a web of related words.
Place your cursor over any of the words and the definition appears.
Use the color-coded key to understand the connections between the
words in any web
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