Thursday, April 30, 2015

No one at Apple has a tattoo? Perhaps this was inevitable as computers and people “converge.”
Why The Apple Watch Doesn't Like Tattoos
The Apple Watch looks like no friend to fans of the body arts. The device lost some of its shine when several buyers reported problems using their new wearable on heavily tattooed arms.
Apparently, dark body ink seems to interfere with the gadget's sensors, producing inaccurate readings in some cases or completely stifling some features, like alerts, in others.
Anecdotal though they may be, evidence of the problems keeps mounting. Given the way the photoplethysmographic sensors work, and the fact that the watch relies on them for key functions, Apple should have foreseen some of these issues. Instead, it's trying to delve into it after the fact, investigating the problems. (Though it hasn't offered any official comment yet.) While we wait, here's some insight into the matter.




Perspective. Ah, so that's what's happening.
Facebook Is Eating the Internet
Facebook, it seems, is unstoppable. The social publishing site, just 11 years old, is now the dominant force in American media. It drives a quarter of all web traffic. In turn, Facebook sucks up a huge portion of ad revenue—the money that keeps news organizations running—and holds an enormous captive audience.
We already know, from a Pew poll last year, that nearly half of the adults who use the Internet report getting their news from Facebook alone. Now consider some of the latest numbers from Pew, in its annual State of the Media report, which came out on Wednesday:
As in previous years, just five companies generate the majority (61 percent) of digital ad revenue: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.
• Facebook more than doubled digital ad revenue over the course of two years. It made $5 billion in ad money last year. That represents 10 percent of all digital ad revenue.
• Facebook is getting a quarter of all display ad revenue and more than a third (37 percent) of display ads on mobile.


(Related) Another view of the same report.
Pew: Mobile driving most news traffic
Most of the top news outlets are getting the majority of their web traffic from mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, according to a Pew Research report released Wednesday.
Pew’s State of the New Media report found 39 of the top 50 news websites have a greater percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices than desktop computers.




Is this enough to make Windows phones more attractive?
Windows 'open' for Apple and Android
Microsoft is releasing software tools that make it easier to run popular Apple and Android apps on Windows mobile devices.
By changing a "few percent", Apple app makers should be able to run code on Windows 10 mobile devices, it said.
And many Android apps should run with no changes.
Experts said the move was an "imperfect solution" to Microsoft's problems persuading people to use Windows mobile.




For my gaming students. (Digest Item 4)
Embed Classic MS-DOS Games in Tweets
You can now embed classic MS-DOS games in Tweets, with anyone following you able to play the titles directly from within Twitter. To prove this works, I embedded The Oregon Trail in one of my own tweets, before promptly getting sidetracked actually playing it.
This is all possible thanks to the collection of classic MS-DOS games preserved for posterity by The Internet Archive. Titles offered up to play through an emulator include Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, SimCity, Street Fighter II, Bust-A-Move, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.




An article for my Data Management and Business Intelligence students.
A Leader’s Guide to Data Analytics
In recent years, data science has become an essential business tool. With access to incredible amounts of data—thanks to advanced computing and the “Internet of things”—companies are now able to measure every aspect of their operations in granular detail. But many business leaders, overwhelmed by this constant blizzard of metrics, are hesitant to get involved in what they see as a technical process.
... Too often, Zettelmeyer says, managers collect data without knowing how they will use it. “You have to think about the generation of data as a strategic imperative,” he says. In other words, analytics is not a separate business practice; it has to be integrated into the business plan itself. Whatever a company chooses to measure, the results will only be useful if the data collection is done with purpose.


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