In the Atlantic yesterday, Adam Grant, professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, wrote about our increasing interest and understanding of emotional…
AT&T has fired a rather specific shot at one of its competitors on the brink of the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week. The company is offering $450 in credit to T-Mobile customers who switch to AT&T. AT&T announced that T-Mobile…
If time travelers from the future are living among us, is there a way we can detect their presence in a reliable, scientific way?
Raw Story talked to Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University who attempted to answer that question by searching for time travelers using the Internet.
As Nemiroff and one of his graduate students, Teresa Wilson, note in "Searching the Internet for evidence of time travel," travel into the future is a commonplace occurrence -- you are doing it as you read these words. Even accelerated time travel into the future is "on firm scientific footing," as demonstrated by "the twin paradox."
Time travel to the past is "controversial, at best, and impossible according to conventional views of the laws of physics." But both Special and General Relativity allow for the possibility, however impractical, of traveling into the past, and it is conceivable that our contemporary "conventional views of the laws of physics" may be contravened at some point in the future, thereby allowing for someone from the future to travel into their past, which would be our present.
Nemiroff and Wilson set out to search "for digital signatures that time travelers potentially left on the Internet." In particular, they sought "content that should not have been known at the time it was posted," and they referred to such information as "prescient."
They were going to scour the Internet via Google for "prescient web content," but found that Google's ad program made searching for such content almost impossible, as "the appearance of recent advertisements on older news stories" created an unwieldy number of false-positives. Facebook was also considered, but the site's infamously execrable search functionality made it a poor candidate.
In the end, the database they chose to use was Twitter.
Raw Story asked Dr. Nemiroff why he believed travelers from the future would use Twitter. "Twitter is an echo of what's going on in society," he said, "so I'd ask you, 'Why do you think a traveler wouldn't use Twitter?'"
"Besides," he continued, "it wouldn't have to be the traveler himself who used Twitter. Someone could have overheard him say something prescient, and put that on Twitter in a way that would be magnified through conversation."
He also told Raw Story that they used Twitter "because you have to look where it's light. It's like the man who lost his keys and is searching for them under a streetlamp. When someone asks him why he's looking there, he says, 'I can't see where it's dark.' You have to go where the information is."
Once they decided to use Twitter as their database, they needed search terms that were both unique and of historical importance. Dr. Nemiroff said that he didn't want to choose a "one-hit wonder, which could be popular now but forgotten in twenty years," so he and Wilson decided on "Comet ISON" and "Pope Francis." Any mention of "Comet ISON" before September 12, 2012 or "Pope Francis" before March 16, 2013 would be considered prescient information.
Disappointingly, "[n]o clearly prescient content involving 'Comet ISON,' '#cometison,' 'Pope Francis,' or 'popefrancis' was found from any Twitter tweet -- ever."
One potentially prescient mention of "Pope Francis" was found on a blog linked to in a tweet, but Nemiroff and Wilson "deemed the post overtly speculative and not prescient," as it generally discussed the possibility of a South American pope and listed "Francis" as one name among many he might take.
The pair also attempted to actively court time travelers to reveal their presence by responding to a September 2013 request to include, in a tweet from the month previous, the hashtag "#ICanChangeThePast2" or "#ICannotChangeThePast2."
They had exhaustively searched Twitter in August 2013 for evidence of either tag and found none, meaning that when they repeated the search after making their request in September 2013, the person or persons responding would have to have traveled back to August in order to leave the tweet with those hashtags. "Unfortunately," they concluded, "as of this writing, no prescient tweets...were received."
Nemiroff told Raw Story that he hopes that other researchers -- preferably ones with back-end access to Google or Facebook databases -- continue this line of inquiry. "We didn't prove that time travelers aren't here," he said, "only that we couldn't find them."
He also appreciated the fact that anyone with Internet access can check his results or duplicate his experiment. He stopped short of calling it a "crowd-sourced" search for time travelers from the future, but did say that he "hopes others will pick up where we left off."
[Image via BBC One]
The official website of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist organization based in Mississippi, was defaced by "Anonymous" hackers on Friday afternoon.
The home page of the website, nationalist.org, was replaced with a message condemning fascism and white power groups. The rest of the website appeared to be functioning normally.
"Greetings, fellow Anons and Citizens of the world. It has come to our attention that Fascists and white power groups across the world are causing the spread of hate and ignorance," the message read. "A spectre is haunting the Earth, the spectre of Facism [sic].
"For long, we have seen the damage caused by the ideology of white supremacy. We have seen, and participated in, many decades of resistance to white supremacy. We, and others, will never stop fighting fascism and racism wherever it rears its head."
The Nationalist Movement has held multiple marches on Martin Luther King Jr. Day throughout the years to protest the federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader.
The group won a legal battle in 1992 when the Supreme Court ruled local governments could not impose fees to prevent them from holding demonstrations on public property.
Mobile communications mean knowledge-based workers will not have to work at desks in offices, says Nicola Millard
When the American broadcaster Walter Cronkite made a program about the office of the future in 1967, he forecast the end of commuting thanks to a desk at home laden with screens for making video calls, checking the news and tracking stock prices. There was even a closed circuit television system for monitoring activity in the other rooms – on Cronkite's screen, women in pinafores were making the bed.
Over the past 40 years, the idea of home-working has been more of an ambition than a reality for most people. More than half of us still work in a traditional office at a fixed desk. But Dr Nicola Millard, a futurologist working for BT whose full-time job is to gaze ahead at how our lives are likely to change, believes the reinvention of work is finally under way.
Millard, who has a degree in psychology and a PhD in computer science, has worked for BT for 23 years in research and customer service, helping to design systems for call-center workers, before being appointed as the group's futurologist.
She, however, prefers to describe herself as a "soonologist" because her job is to advise BT and its big corporate clients on how working life will evolve over the next five years – and she reckons we have reached a point at which the majority of people in "knowledge-based" roles can now do their jobs with little more than a phone, a computer and an internet connection. Work, she says, can now be a state of mind, rather than a place. "There is no reason why knowledge workers shouldn't all be working flexibly in five years' time," she says. Millard reckons the wide availability of highly portable computers, from smartphones to tablets and laptops, means that rather than sitting at Cronkite's formal "computerized communications console" watching maids making beds, professionals will more likely be on their bed, working in their pyjamas.
Millard's favorite place to hunker down and get productive is at what she calls the "coffice" – which could be a coffee shop, hotel lobby or airport lounge: places where the background noise provides a buzz but there are no colleagues to cause a distraction.
"My four criteria for working are that I need good coffee, I need good cake, I need great connectivity – the Wi-Fi wings to fly me into the cloud – and I need company. But I don't necessarily work in the office if I want to concentrate. I will go to the office if I want to socialize about work."
Millard's office is BT's research laboratory at Adastral Park in Suffolk, a pioneering centre for technology and telecommunications, where a scale model of BT's global network is used to test the broadband kit developed by the group and its partners.
About 10% of BT's employees work from home, a fact that helps well over 90% of mothers at the company return to their jobs after maternity leave. However, 73% of BT staff are set up to work from anywhere, with laptop access to their company files.
Much of Millard's work is about the future of offices and business meetings, and although we are now more mobile, video calling and conference calling have made traveling to meetings less of an imperative. BT, she says, has adapted Dolby surround-sound technology for conference calls and is currently researching its effectiveness.
High definition microphones and multiple speakers give participants audio cues that can help replace the visual ones we usually rely on, such as facial expressions and hand gestures.
Modulations in the tone of voice and breathing are picked up, background sound is also transmitted, helping to distinguish one speaker from another, and voices are arranged in a virtual circle around the listener, with sound transmitted from left, right or straight ahead.
Office use is changing, and with it the design of our workplaces. One solution gaining popularity, she says, is the "activity based office", which is zoned by need. There can be presentation rooms, areas for socialising, pods for solo work, larger rooms for brainstorming and even police-style incident rooms where bid proposals are written by specially assembled teams.
Collaboration and cross-fertilization, she says, can be promoted by assigning staff a locker instead of a desk.
In Sydney, some offices these days have concentric circles of activities, with quiet rooms by the windows, areas for making phone calls further in and zones for presentations, eating and drinking at the center, creating a hub of activity at the heart of the collective space.
Millard, who describes herself as a collector of offices, says: "The office is a collaboration tool and should be designed for collaboration. The open plan office is a product of the 1970s when we thought that by forcing everyone together, by breathing the same air, we would collaborate. But that's not how it works."
Technology, of course, also has its drawbacks. The average person is interrupted every three minutes during their working day, according to the London Business School, and our plethora of gadgets have made for more disruptions.
Interrupted tasks have been found to take twice as long to finish and contain twice as many errors as uninterrupted efforts: it can take between 12 and 20 minutes to resume a complex task after being interrupted.
Our ability to multitask has not evolved alongside the computer chip, says Millard; the constant switching between tasks required by technology is tiring and damages productivity.
For her, the worst distraction is email, which she calls a "time vampire" and only checks twice a day. For urgent communication, she uses text messages. "We have these devices that are constantly on and constantly on us. I describe them as screaming three-year-olds. They are always demanding our attention and we are infinitely distractable as human beings."
In future, working without assigned desks will help create private time for tasks that require high levels of quiet and concentration, but that could generate problems finding colleagues. Here again, technology is the solution.
Tagging employees, for example with RFID (Radio-frequency indentification) technology in staff ID cards, allows employers to track workers.
Staff could also broadcast their arrival in the building to their social network, or check in at a particular desk using a code.
But that might be a Big Brother step too far for some.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
In the future, every major celebrity will have a crypto-currency named after him or her. Bitcoin, the world’s most popular crypto-currency, is based on an open-source protocol; and because it’s peer-to-peer without a central server or bank, it’…
["Kanye West" via Saffandi on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed]
The Syrian Electronic Army hacker group set its sights on Skype's social media accounts Wednesday to accuse Microsoft of spying on user data.
Microsoft-owned Skype's Twitter account displayed the message: "Don't use Microsoft emails(hotmail,outlook),They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments.More details soon #SEA."
It was posted around 1030 GMT but was removed less than two hours later.
Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment.
The SEA account belongs to the Syrian Electronic Army, which backs the Damascus government.
In a posting on its own Twitter account, the SEA said "You can thank Microsoft for monitoring your accounts/emails using this details," and listed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's contact information.
The group has previously hacked accounts of The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and other media organizations.
The SEA's latest attack appears to be linked to documents released by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, which revealed the PRISM surveillance program.
PRISM is said to give the NSA and FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world's top Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.
The program apparently allowed the NSA to spy on audio and video calls using so-called secret backdoors. Skype has denied the existence of such access.
Tech blogs said that at one point, the Skype blog had the headline: "Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!"
Skype's Twitter account was also said to have posted the message: "Stop spying on people! via Syrian Electronic Army."
But links provided by the SEA's Twitter account to Skype's blog and Facebook account did not work, and no SEA message appeared on those sites around 0030 GMT, having apparently been removed.
Matchesfashion.com and Asos report rise in sales of bright dresses driven by attractiveness on Instagram or Facebook
It was once the failsafe option for the party season, but the peerless status of the little black dress is now looking less certain. If sales of the LBD used to dwarf those of braver brights and prints, retailers report that the dominance is over. At Matchesfashion.com, print or coloured dresses sell double the amount of black ones. Asos report 60% of dress sales come from designs that are not LBDs.
The fact that these two retailers do most of their trade online is significant. Part of this trend is down to online shopping. Unlike in a physical boutique, black clothing can look flat when presented in two dimensions. Brights and prints, by contrast, are tantalising. "Prints are always key for Asos as they are visually appealing when looking online," said Jacqui Markham, Asos's womenswear design director. The e-tailer has played to this strength – it has an inhouse team creating unique prints.
Print has had a resurgence in fashion of late. London-based designers lead the trend. Jonathan Saunders was an early pioneer and Mary Katrantzou and Peter Pilotto nailed the look on the catwalk with vibrant, photo-real, multi-coloured prints that made black seem beta to the fashion crowd. This shift – dating back to 2009 – has now been in the zeitgeist for long enough that it has gone mainstream. LBDs are the casualties. "Print isn't taboo any more," said Katrantzou. "Women want to wear an outfit that will say something about their aesthetic." The designer is well aware of the power of her aesthetic online. "The colour and detail of my designs make them more noticeable," she said. "It makes a big difference when you're selling online."
Social media is turning an average night out into a red carpet moment. A bright or printed dress is more attractive on Instagram or Facebook – a black dress looks boring by comparison. "The only black pieces that will make the best-dressed lists are those with embellishment or couture details," said Emma Elwick-Bates, style editor at British Vogue. The same holds under the lens of social media – and women's shopping habits are changing accordingly.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The surge into social networks is gaining pace among Americans, with Facebook dominating but with many people using multiple platforms, a study showed Monday.
A Pew Research Center survey found 73 percent of Americans over age 18 on the Internet use at least one social network -- or about 63 percent of the total adult population.
Facebook is the preferred network, used by 71 percent of online adults, or 57 percent of all American adults, according to Pew researchers.
However other platforms like Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter are making gains, and a growing number of people are using multiple social networks.
Pew found that 42 percent of Internet users (or 34 percent of all American adults) use two or more of the five most popular social networks.
Use of Facebook rose to 71 percent of online adults from 67 percent a year ago, the study found.
A large part of the growth for Facebook came from older Americans: Roughly 45 percent of Internet users over 65 are using Facebook, up from 35 percent in late 2012.
Four other social networks, including Facebook-owned Instagram, are battling for the number two spot for US users.
LinkedIn is used by 22 percent of online American adults and is especially popular among college graduates and those in higher income households. That is up from 20 percent a year earlier.
Pinterest usage grew sharply to 21 percent of online adults, from 15 percent a year ago. Pew said that women are four times as likely as men to be users of the bulletin-board style social media platform.
Some 18 percent of online adults use Twitter, up from 16 percent a year ago, Pew said, with adoption levels particularly high among younger adults and African-Americans.
Instagram use rose to 17 percent of online adults from 13 percent a year ago, according to the survey. Much of this growth came in the 18 to 29 age bracket and among African-Americans.
Pew found that Facebook and Instagram drew high levels of "user engagement," with a majority of users checking in on a daily basis.
Some 63 percent of Facebook users visit the site at least once a day, and 40 percent do so multiple times throughout the day.
That compares with 57 percent of Instagram users who visit the site at least once a day and 46 percent of Twitter users.
The researchers also found considerable overlap among the leading social networks. For example, 93 percent of Instagram users also use Facebook, as do 83 percent of LinkedIn members.
Some 53 percent of Twitter users also use Instagram, and 53 percent of Instagram users use Twitter, the survey found.
The report is based on telephone interviews conducted from August 7 to September 16 among 1,801 adults age 18 and older. For the total group, the margin of error is estimated at 2.6 percentage points and 2.9 points for Internet users.
"I get lost in your eyes," you say? Researchers are working on ways to find you and save the resulting image for posterity – or for a criminal investigation. Scientists have found that photo portraits of an individual can yield images of the photographer…
TorrentFreak declared that the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones remains the most pirated show on BitTorrent.
When TorrentFreak declared it the most downloaded show of 2012, Time Warner CEO Alan Bawkes said, "I think you're right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world, and that's better than an Emmy."
According to "download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers," TorrentFreak declared that the season finale was downloaded 5.9 millions, well ahead of the second most popular download, the series of finale of Breaking Bad, which clocked in at 4.2 million.
Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad were followed by AMC's hit series, The Walking Dead, and Showtime's Dexter.
Facebook is 'dead and buried' to older teenagers, an extensive European study has found, as the key age group moves on to Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Researching the Facebook use of 16-18 year olds in eight EU countries, the Global Social Media Impact Study found that as parents and older users saturate Facebook, its younger users are shifting to alternative platforms.
"Facebook is not just on the slide - it is basically dead and buried," wrote Daniel Miller, lead anthropologist on the research team, who is professor of material culture of University College London.
"Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives."
Teens do not care that alternative services are less functional and sophisticated, and they also unconcerned about how information about them is being used commercially or as part of surveillance practice by the security services, the research found.
"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person’s decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," wrote Miller.
"It is nothing new that young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool anymore."
In part of the study's research with Italian Facebook users, 40% of users had never changed their privacy settings and 80% said they "were not concerned or did not care" if their personal data was available and accessed, either by an organisation or an individual.
Information that people choose to publish on Facebook has generally been through a psychological filtering process, researchers found - unlike conversations, photos and video shared through more private tools such as Skype, or on mobile apps.
"Most individuals try to present themselves online the way they think society is expecting them to," wrote contributing anthropologist Razvan Nicolescu on Thursday.
"It seems that social media works not towards change – of society, notions of individuality and connectedness, and so on – but rather as a conservative force that tends to strengthen the conventional social relations and to reify society as Italians enjoy and recognise it.
"The normativity of the online presence seems to be just one expression of this process."
["Unhappy Teenage Girl Sending Text Message Whilst Lying In Bed" on Shutterstock]
India's biggest Bitcoin trading platform said on its website Friday it had suspended operations after the central bank warned against the risks of using virtual money.
BuySellBitCo.in closed its platform, citing an advisory by the Reserve Bank of India issued on Christmas Eve highlighting the risks of trading in digital currencies.
"We are suspending buy and sell operations until we can outline a clearer framework with which to work," BuySellBitCo.in said on its website, adding the move was "to protect the interest of our customers".
The central bank's warning comes after Bitcoin, which can be stored either virtually or on a user's hard drive and offers a largely anonymous payment system, had begun gaining popularity in India.
The emergence of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in India has come despite a traditional preference for assets backed by property and other tangible goods.
"There is no underlying or backing of any asset for virtual currencies and as such their value seems to be a matter of speculation," the bank said in its December 24 advisory.
The "huge volatility in the value of virtual currencies has been noticed", it added.
The central bank stopped shy of issuing a ban on Bitcoin or other virtual currencies.
However, because the currencies were not authorised by any monetary authority there was no established recourse for customers in the case of problems, the bank noted.
The move comes weeks after the People's Bank of China ordered financial institutions not to provide Bitcoin-related services and cautioned against its potential use in money-laundering.
Bitcoin was invented in the wake of the global financial crisis by a mysterious computer guru using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamotoby.
At the last rate posted by BuySellBitCo.in, which was conducting about 12 million rupees worth of Bitcoin transactions monthly, according to Indian media, one Bitcoin was selling for 48,039 rupees ($776).
The dollar worth of a Bitcoin has rocketed from just cents in 2010 to a $1,200 peak in early December, but has since fallen back.
Various India-based Bitcoin trading exchanges have emerged in the last few months, allowing Indian users to purchase Bitcoin using the local rupee currency.
The Reserve Bank of India noted several media reports of the use virtual currencies, including Bitcoins, for unspecified illegal activities in several jurisdictions.
The absence of information around who is trading in the currency could expose users to "unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism laws," the bank added.
An end-of-year report by Kaspersky Security Bulletin said there appears "little doubt they (e-currencies) are also popular with cybercriminals, who are looking at ways to evade the law".
It suggested governments may crack down "on the (virtual currency) exchanges in a bid to put a stop to their illicit usage".
Even though India's central bank issued no formal ban on e-currencies, The Hindu newspaper quoted an unnamed senior banking official as saying most virtual currency exchanges in the country saw the RBI advisory as a precursor of a potential clampdown.
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