Category: Science & Technology News

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Analysis, facebook, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Nielsen releases 2012 Social Media Report

85.5 million people access social networks via a smartphone or tablet app.

People are accessing the web more frequently and for longer periods, using smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and smart TVs both in the U.S. and globally. We’re still using PCs as well, but personal computer usage of social media is just about the only category that’s down: 4 percent fewer Americans connected to the Internet via a PC in 2012, while 82 percent more connected via the mobile web and 85 percent more connected via a mobile app.

 

 

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Analysis, Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Accelerators are headed for a shakeout

Incubators and accelerators are churning out thousands of startups a year.

There has been a glut of tech incubators and accelerators and  for over a year now we have been warned about them. With at least 100 such programs churning out thousands of startups a year and the expectation that 90 percent of them won’t return their money, the seeming launch of a new accelerator program each week is a valid concern.

 

 

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Analysis, Business, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Rethinking the way we publish online

Apple’s Newsstand

There is a pretty clear preference on the part of many publishers for creating an online or mobile experience that looks as much as possible like the physical magazine or newspaper it is intended to replace.  This is something Apple reinforces with its Newsstand platform, which has virtual shelves with tiny virtual magazine covers and newspaper front pages. In many cases this approach is not surprising, but is it the best way to either publish or consume content.  Which is why some of the most interesting experiments in online content are coming from those who are not just thinking outside of the box, but aren’t even willing to admit that there is a box.

 

 

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Analysis, Business, facebook, Science & Technology News

Apple, Google, Amazon, And Facebook have declared World War 3

Rich beyond belief.

Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are at each others throats.  So this has become an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin.

 

 

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Analysis, Education, Globalism, Science & Technology News

New type of college proposed by Khan Academy founder

Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy

Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, believes college should look very different from the typical four-year institution.  The Khan Academy is a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.

 

 

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Analysis, Health & Fitness, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Office ergonomics take a stand on the health hazards of sitting

Extended sitting  slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood.

Health studies have always concluded that people should sit less, and get up and move around more. But the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. Recently two studies have reiterated that point, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Analysis, Brain, Business, Science & Technology News

Does multitasking make you dumber?

Multitasking is attempting to handle more than one task simultaneously.

As part of Simon Hørup Eskildsen’s, a ruby developer,  research of super productivity, he has explored the topics of context switching and multitasking. Eskildsen found that multitasking has a tremendous effect on how we approach tasks and too much multitasking can negatively alter how our brain processes information.

 

 

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Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us why futurists get it wrong

According to Taleb the future will not be cool.

What will your future surroundings look like in five, 10 or 25 years.  Your imagination will probably see new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, and killer technologies. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.

 

 

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Will Big Data Destroy the Stock Market?

Futurist Thomas Frey: When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.

 

 

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Analysis, Education, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Samuel Arbesman explains ‘The Half-life of Facts’

Much of what we believe to be factual has an expiration date.

In primary school you learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. There weren’t any that were  known to exist outside of it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more “candidates”) and demoted Pluto to a mere “dwarf planet”. Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.

 

 

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Business, Great Videos, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Companies store data but have no idea what to do with it once it’s stored

Companies that had collected unstructured data (texts, emails, reports, and so on), but had no idea about what to do once it was stored.

Even though Big Data is all the rage it’s rare that you’ll hear real case-studies from companies that are storing, processing and analyzing vast stores of data.

 

 

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