Microsoft Releases Windows 10 Preview

Project Spartan is available for the first time for Windows Insiders to try out as part of the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview build for PCs. Be warned that you should be experience in computer use. Do not download the Windows 10 preview in your everyday computer.  http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso

The  bold new design for Project Spartan – one that is streamlined and puts the focus on the page, not the browser. This is part of our vision for a browser that doesn’t visually interfere with your life on the Web, but supports it.

Jay Z Purchased Aspiro For 56 Million

Jay Z  hosted a live-streamed event to reveal his plans for the service, Tidal Worldwide, which offers unlimited listening to high-resolution music for $19.99, extending a free 7-day trial. A press invite for the event was released, promising that “Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter and special guests will announce a commitment to a new direction for the music industry from both a creative and business perspective”.Aspiro is Spotify’s biggest rival. Project Panther Bidco, a company owned by Jay Z, offered $56 million for the company, Aspiro, which is based in Sweden.While Jay-Z won agreement this month from Aspiro shareholders to buy Tidal for $54 million, the shares are not due to transfer until mid-April,  Piracy has fallen to record lows in Norway, and the music industry is thanking legal streaming sites for the steep decline in file sharing.

The Launch of Artist Own Tidal First Ever
http://tidal.com/us

J

Volvo’s Glowing Bike Spray

Volvo has come up with a transparent spray that cyclists and pedestrians can apply on their clothes or bikes before heading out into the night.

Volvo collaborated with advertising agency Grey London and joined with Swedish startup Albedoo100, as a result LifePaint was born.

LifePaint is a highly reflective spray that’s invisible during the day but shines brightly when a light source — like the glare of a headlight — hits it. The safety spray washes off, and it doesn’t change the color of the surface to which it’s been applied.

“The spray is completely invisible and doesn’t stain or ruin clothes, and washable.

Cute Socks Sold At The British Library

Image

Facebook’s Messenger Platform

Facebook allows millions of people to share texts, photos, videos and stickers through its messaging app, and most recently to send money. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a platform Wednesday that will allow developers to integrate apps into Messenger and an upcoming tool aimed at making online shopping easier. Users will have access to more than 40 new apps, allowing them to send GIFs, e-cards, animations and other content by pushing a “send to Messenger” button.Facebook is also testing a feature that allows Messenger users to get order confirmations, shipping updates and send messages to businesses directly if they change their mind about an order. Facebook, which also plans to allow people to share on their Newsfeed “spherical videos,” which give a 360-degree view of the recorded surroundings, and is releasing a tool to help developers see how often people come back to their apps across multiple devices.

It also unveiled social plugins that would allow for comments shared on a website to simultaneously pop up on the social network’s comment section and for publishers to easily embed Facebook videos on their websites.

 

 

Facebook’s Messenger Chats & News Feed

How often you chat with someone using Facebook’s Messenger app is what the company determines how to place posts in your feed. If you haven’t chatted with someone in a while on Messenger, and then you start chatting again, posts from that person might appear higher in your news feed.

This information was shared by Facebook engineers during a session Wednesday during the company’s F8 conference in San Francisco.The algorithm Facebook uses to rank posts in people’s news feeds is complicated. If a user shares location data with Facebook, that is also taken into account. Friends who are geographically near may get more prominent placement.A user’s interests and his or her history of activity on Facebook may carry more weight.Some posts from Pages, however, may not always appear in users’ news feeds, if the posts don’t generate a lot activity on the site or if they’re overly promotional. Overall, some of the most important signals Facebook uses for its news feed ranking include the author of the post, the activity around it, and the type of content it includes, like a photo versus text. Photos tend to rank higher

Interesting Data & Visualization

http://insightfulinteraction.com/unemployment2013.html

http://insightfulinteraction.com/israelimmigration.html

http://insightfulinteraction.com/hatecrimes.html

http://insightfulinteraction.com/defence2014.html

http://insightfulinteraction.com/lux2014.html

http://insightfulinteraction.com/unemployment2013.html

Microsoft Office Free For Certain Devices

 

It appears that screen size determines professional and personal use.

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University Libraries To Hold Edible Book Festival

The second annual Edible Book Festival returns April 1, 2015 will be held at the Evans Library in the first floor Johnette & Elwyn Bass Library Commons. Food lovers and literary fans are invited to create an “edible book,” which is an edible, culinary interpretation of any book, literary pun, book character, or plot, for a chance to win prizes.

The Edible Book Festival is open to all students, faculty, staff, and community members. A panel of celebrity judges will select winners from seven categories: Puniest, Grossest, Best Construction, Best Children’s Entry (13 and under), Best Staff Entry, Best Texas A&M Student Entry, and People’s Choice. Each winner will receive a $100 Barnes & Noble gift card, and a grand prize winner for Best in Show will receive a $150 Barnes & Noble gift card.

Heres a look at the 2014 Edible Book Festival

 

Microsoft’s Code Hunt Challenge 2015

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Cont Here

Who’s Lookin

 

 

Report Reveal NYC Commuters Have The Longest Work Week

A report was based on data from the U.S. Census from 1990 and 2000 and the 2013 American Community Survey. A typical week for a full-time New York worker can total to more than 49 hours, including an average of more than six hours of commuting time. That was more than four hours longer than in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the average work week was about 44 ½ hours. Commuting time made up just under 3 ½ hours of that. The report revealed a need for the city to expand its transit networks, as well as promote flexible work arrangements along with predictable scheduling.

Windows 10 Will Be Free Upgrade

 

 

Any device running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows Phone 8.1 will be able to upgrade to the latest version of MIcrosoft’s OS — for free. Release Date expected this summer

The Preview

Brown Babies

Heres what Amy Ford Says

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Prejudice and Social Cognition

 

	Prejudice is defined as negative attitudes toward the members of specific social groups. A prejudicial attitude is linked with evaluation. Prejudice may be a blanket condemnation or rejection. “Dogs drool, cats rule.”
	Sexism is prejudice that is based on gender.
	Prejudice is at least partially an outcome of using mental shortcuts in evaluating people because of limited processing capacity, or social cognition. A schema is a type of mental organizational framework. John believes that women are bad at math tasks. He tends to notice when a woman fails at a math-oriented task, but rarely notices success. He is also good at bringing the failures to mind. He is using a prejudicial schema.
	Attitudes consists of feelings, beliefs, and behavior. The affective component of prejudice involves the negative emotions of prejudiced people in the presence of disliked groups. Most people tend to focus on the affective component of prejudice.

Tokenism

The practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a minority group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.

Tokenism

Tokenism is allowing members of a specific group to participate in an activity or event solely to satisfy requirements of diversity.

Chacko found that women who believed that they had been hired because of their gender had lower job satisfaction. Others found that persons hired for these reasons receive lower performance ratings from others. Because others tend to attribute the achievements to special hiring and not to hard work. “Perhaps they aren’t capable of the job.” This is particularly damaging because it gives an excuse for bigoted people to deny prejudice.

RACISM

• an underlying belief in the superiority of one race over another and its right to dominate.
• generalizing one group of people by believing in simplistic stereotypes of that group.
• affects every aspect of the lives of communities of colour: social, economic, political, health, etc.
• may take three main forms (though all work together to maintain a system of oppression):
• Individual Racism-individual acts that overtly reflect racist attitudes/beliefs. This is the easiest one to identify. ie. racial slurs, jokes, etc.
• Systemic Racism and Institutional Racism-organizational policies and practices at the structural level that indirectly target communities of colour and maintain white privilege. Ie. racism in the criminal justice system (police profiling); racism in the educational system (all white authors on a course reading list.)
• Cultural Racism-value system that supports and allows discriminatory actions against racially and ethnoculturally marginalized communities. Ie. white privilege.

Anti-Racism Media Education (ARMEd

Racism – Racial prejudice and discrimination that are supported by institutional power and authority. The critical element that differentiates racism from prejudice and discrimination is the use of institutional power and authority to support prejudices and enforce discriminatory behaviors in systematic ways with far-reaching outcomes and effects. In the United States, racism is based on the ideology of White (European) supremacy and is used to the advantage of White people and the disadvantage of people of color.

Enid Lee, DeMenkart and borah Margo Okazawa-Rey (eds.)

Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development

Racism – Racism involves physical, psychological, spiritual, and social control, exploitation and subjection of one race by another race. It is the social institutionalization of the psychological concept of White/white supremacy (a man-made ideology of white/White superiority and black/Black inferiority). This means that racial discrimination and injustice are established, perpetuated and promoted throughout every institution of society – economics, education, entertainment, family, labor, law, politics, religion, science and war. Racism is also used as an abuse excuse to rationalize violent behavior and inhumane policies toward Melanites.

Melanite/Melanites – Alternative term for the words “people of color,” “minorities,” and “non-whites.”

Phavia Kujichagulia

Recognizing and Resolving Racism: A Resource and Guide for Humane Beings

Principle I. Racism is an ideological, structural and historic stratification process by which the population of European descent, through its individual and institutional distress patterns, intentionally has been able to sustain, to its own best advantage, the dynamic mechanics of upward or downward mobility (of fluid status assignment) to the general disadvantage of the population designated as non-white (on a global scale), using skin color, gender, class, ethnicity or nonwestern nationality as the main indexical criteria used for enforcing differential resource allocation decisions that contribute to decisive changes in relative racial standing in ways most favoring the populations designated as ‘white.’

Princple V. Collectively, the ‘white’ and/or ‘whitened’ members of this racially privileged global population tend to bolster their shared political intent to impose patterns of restricted resource access on racially subordinant populations, and aim to preserve their presumably non-negotiable right to prescribe, and even dictate, lessor resource 6PM Coupon Code access rights for certain upwardly mobile members of the ‘non-white’ population whose internalized racism, reliable complicity, and carefully scrutinized willingness to cooperate with racial dominates is always required and rewarded.

Dr. Helan Enoch Page
Associate Professor, Anthropology Department
University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Distributed at the American Anthropological Association, 1993
Updated and extended, 1999

Next Generation Health Professionals

The next generation of nurses and others in health care fields will have to be quick-thinking, efficient and able to handle multiple disciplines.Nurses, especially, will have to take on more administrative roles as demand increases for registered nurses along with increasing acuity levels in hospitals — and more patients. Technology will teach them to work in interdisciplinary teams. That is the reality of the new employment experience for them. They won’t be isolated as much as they once were.

Nursing students will be trained for increasingly intricate electronic aspect of health care. The ongoing investment in pricey technology — one of the mannequins, for example, cost a quarter of a million dollars — is part of administrators’ commitment to supply a stream of prepared health care workers for the in-demand field. Employment in that field is projected to increase by almost 60 percent between 2012 and 2022, according the most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections program. There  has been steady growth in the health care industry over the past decade, according to information from the bureau, and is expected to add nearly 3.5 million jobs between 2012 and 2022. The bureau attributes the anticipated need to an aging population. The key area for growth is informatics. Nurses are working with a lot more information. The field of genetics is opeinign new doors for nurses. They could be researchers, or work with pharmaceutical companies. The two-year curriculum at the Conemaugh School of Nursing combines evidence-based nursing education and state-of-the-art clinical practicum in a Level 1 trauma medical center and an advanced primary stroke center. Students also gain experience in a medical skills learning lab, one of 58 nationally accredited simulation labs.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/03/07/3616616/top-shelf-nursing-programs-evolve.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/03/07/3616616/top-shelf-nursing-programs-evolve.html#storylink=cpy

Print Books Are Still Preferred

 

Libraries still buy books because they’re in demand. Moreover, a recent PEW study found “the highest print readership rates are among those ages 18 to 29, and the same age group is still using public libraries in large numbers.” Author Michael Rosenwald described how,Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning.  One finding revealed that paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion and narrative coherence, than iPad readers. Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure. Meaning, deep reading allows readers to feel transported to and fully immersed in the author’s written world. This does not hold true with the rapid scanning and mental dashing that’s inherent with online activities. It’s proven that reading on screens is slower and provides less comprehension than reading the same information on paper.  Reading screens take longer and result in less comprehension. Recreational readers perform better at school and work than non-readers, because they seek out books that are fun and practice close reading. For many students, school provides their only exposure to reading fun books, so the proposed move away from print in schools and increased reliance on iPads, is frightening. School libraries are more important and desired by students than ever before, and now they’re in danger of being squeezed out of the school budgets.

HBO Now

HBO CEO Richard Plepler has announced that its new cable-free streaming service will be available only on Apple devices and PCs when it launches in April. The price for HBO Now has also been confirmed at $14.99 per month.  To get HBO Now you need is a broadband connection and an Apple device to sign up. As it stands today, even though viewing is supported on PC or Mac via a web browser pointed at HBONOW.com, the only way to actually set up an account will be through Apple’s HBO Now app.

Featured Innovating Trends 2014,2015

Vending machine swaps cigarettes for leisure experiences

June 2014 a Brazilian TV station SBT launch a pop-up anti-smoking campaign. Installed at Mackenzie University in São Paulo, SBT’s ‘Machine of Life’ allowed people to exchange cigarettes for free gifts. Based on each cigarette being equivalent to 11 minutes of longer life, when people placed cigarettes in the machine, they were rewarded with free leisure-related gifts, such as magazines or movie tickets.

Changers CO2

App rewards users who travel sustainably

Available for download beginning December 2014, Changers is a free tracking app that rewards users for choosing sustainable transport options. When users take a journey on foot, or by public transport, the app compares the carbon imprint of the journey to that of the same journey made by car. Any emission savings are converted into Recoin units, which can be used to purchase CO2 certificates to make car or plane rides carbon neutral. Users are encouraged to compare their scores with others using a worldwide leader-board.

Brazilian haircare product exchanges shampoo bottles for cellphone credit

In October 2014, Unilever-owned Brazilian haircare brand Seda launched an interactive installation allowing consumers to exchange empty shampoo bottles for cellphone credit. Users could bring empty bottles of any brand’s shampoo to a machine in Sao Pãolo’s Republica subway station, which inventoried each item and displayed a corresponding number of cellphone top-up credits. A printed code could then be used to redeem the credits via a variety of mobile operators.

McDonald’s

Stockholm citizens pay for burgers using cans

Another low-tech example: in 2014, McDonald’s launched a promotion enabling Stockholm residents to pay for food by recycling cans. The fast food chain unveiled special billboards dispensing trash bags at music festivals and parks, each printed with a price list. In exchange for ten cans, people could get a free hamburger, while Big Macs were worth 40 cans.

Uruguayan shoe brand accepts plastic bottles as payment

Uruguayan shoe brand MAMUT accepted plastic bottles as currency when consumers purchased shoes from their summer ‘Native’ line for two weeks in February 2015. Each bottle was worth 100 Uruguayan dollars — about USD 4 — and customers could use bottles to finance up to 40% of their purchase. The project was intended to assist with a drive to clean up local beaches, and all bottles collected were sent for recycling.

 

Digital Self Tracking Results Are In

Digital self-tracking promised to be a dynamic self-improvement revolution. Now, the results are in, and provide a different story. The uptake of self-tracking has been impressive. For example, 21% of US adults already owned a wearable device, while an online global study of 24,000 consumers in 24 countries found that 8% owned a wearable fitness monitor, 7% a smartwatch, and 6% a wearable health device. 40%, 41% and 39% respectively plan to buy one in the next five years (Accenture, January 2015). However, despite this, evidence shows that self-tracking alone is not an effective long-term motivator for most users. A third of US consumers who have owned an activity tracker stopped using it within six months.

Suggested Solution
Combine new technologies with a deep understanding of human behavior and resolve this tension with compelling rewards that help customers become the people they want to be. Since it is known that in materially affluent societies, where basic needs are easily met, human motivation quickly shifts away from what I have to who I am. The result is a never-ending quest for personal enhancement that can play out across countless axes: health, formal education, informal skills and knowledge, creativity, ethics, values and many more.The problem? Other, self-sabotaging impulses and faults that are just as much a part of human nature: lack of motivation, poor time management, loss of focus, and yes, plain old laziness.

In a survey of US consumers, 89% said taking personal responsibility for health is the best way to stay healthy. Meanwhile, 91% admitted to ‘snacking all day on candy, ice-cream and chips’.

Should YouTurn Your Computer Off At Night?

 

This whole process of switching your computer on and off again and again can stress it out and can severely effect its working capabilities. Looking at it this way a very good question arises in one’s mind as to what should be done to enhance the working capabilities of their PC and how is turning it on and off related to all this. So It depends on how often you use it.

Geek Squad Tech says “If you use your computer multiple times per day, it’s best to leave it on. If you use it for a short time – say an hour or two – just once a day, or even less, then turn it off ”

Switching the computer on continuously gives the computer a constant stress depending on whether you are overloading it with over stressing programs or not. On the other hand, if you are turning on your computer every day in the morning or for several times a day, and you still expect it to function pretty well for several years then the small surge of power that works to make everything in turn works properly will eventually be exhausted and will be left with a shorter life span than expected.

Some items have a limited life cycle. For example, if the [LCD] panel is left on all the time, it’s only spec’ed for about 15,000 hours, or about two years.

Having your computer going to sleep rather than hibernation is a way better option since hibernation gets your device to wear and tear almost similar to as switching it off and on does. This is exactly what happens behind the screen you work on.

 

 

 

Android TV

Google announced a new feature that will allow users to play multiplayer games on Android TV while using their Android smartphones and tablets as controllers.The update is powered through a new Nearby Connection API, which allows developers to add the feature to their games. It’s part of a larger update to Google Play Games, which helps developers market their products.The changes will roll out over the next few weeks but Google showcased one early partner, Vector Unit, the studio behind Beach Buggy Racing, who has already built the Android TV functionality into their game.