Monday, February 19, 2018

Now I can insult anyone and the evidence deletes itself?
Obliviate is a new app from MakeUseOf that lets you send self-destructing messages. It’s great for sharing secret messages with friends that you don’t want sticking around on their phone, among other use cases.
Download: obliviate for Android and iOS.
… The app lets you set a timer between 5 and 180 seconds for how long your messages will last. Once the recipient opens it, the message will disappear after a set time. And if you change your mind, you can immediately obliviate messages and bypass the timer.
Best of all, the obliviate is free and has no ads; never will. Plus, you cannot take screenshots in the app or copy the content of the messages (this feature is currently available on Android only, coming soon on iOS). This prevents others from recording messages you intended to be private.
… Coming soon, obliviate hopes to add encryption, support for audio, pictures, and videos, custom notification sounds, and more! We hope you enjoy the app.




Interesting that the parents accept this.
AP reports:
A private school in east Georgia intends to start drug-testing its oldest students.
The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reports that Brookstone School in Columbus recently announced that the drug-testing of students in grades 8-12 will be voluntary next school year — and then mandatory in succeeding years.
Read more on Ledger-Enquirer.
And yes, of course they can get away with doing that as a precondition of acceptance or attendance. They’re a private school. But here’s the thing: parents are waiving their children’s privacy rights. Now I know a lot of parents are just fine with that because they want to know if their child is using drugs. And somewhere, I’m guessing, this school actually/hopefully has a written policy about what happens with the results, for how long they are retained, and with whom they might be shared. And what is the testing facility’s privacy policy? Will they be sent the students’ names as identifiers or just numbers/IDs? And who might they share results with and under what circumstances?
Much to think about here….




Another “Business Continuity” angle for my students to discuss.
Most KFCs in UK remain closed because of chicken shortage
The fast food chain KFC has been forced to temporarily close most of its UK outlets after problems with a new delivery contract led to a chicken shortage.
… The chicken delivery problem is so severe that the company cannot say when operations will be back to normal. But it said it was working “flat out” to resolve the crisis.
… In a statement it blamed the chicken shortage on a contract with delivery company DHL.




An interesting tool. Now, how do we apply it?
Perform Text Analysis with IBM Watson and Google Docs
Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon have made it easier for developers to add human cognitive capabilities (also known as artificial intelligence) within their own applications. You need not be a machine learning expert to build a computer program that can recognize objects in photographs, or one that transforms human speech to text or even a chatbot that converses with people in natural language.




Perhaps a metaphor for the Trump Administration?


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