Thursday, June 26, 2014

Doing LinkedIn Right

If you are in the professional world, it is very important to have a LinkedIn account. Secondly, it is important to have a good LinkedIn account. It doesn't matter how well you can provide content management services, if you do not present a good image of yourself. Customers want to be able to see what they are buying. First of all, you need to include a profile picture, and a good one at that. The professional headline also needs to be good in the sense that it needs to be specific and be able to grab the attention of viewers. The summary section acts as an elevator pitch where you can talk about who you are, what you have done, and where do you hope to be professionally. It should make the reader want to scroll further down. Lastly, always be honest about your accomplishments because a lie like that is grounds for firing.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Future of Computing

When people speak of the future of computers it always seems a bit gloomy and reminiscent of the Terminator. It is not all completely bad. For one thing computers can store a lot of information and are great at retrieving it. The ultimate librarian. Many of the databases are used for research purposes so that scientists will be able to use the information to save time and money just by looking something up. Researchers are getting better at teaching robots how to read the syntax of human movement, so they can work more closely on more complicated projects. Machine learning isn’t just keeping the cloud services clutter-free; it’s going to turn smart phones into geniuses. Current machine learning programs can require hundreds or thousands of iterations, but researchers are building animal-inspired algorithms that can learn good from bad after only a few trials.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Connected Bikes

These days everything is connected and customized. We do not have the courage to go off the grid...ever. Even if we decide to go out for a nice bike ride, there are plenty of mobile applications that can be right there with you. If you decide to ditch your phone, you can use you bike to gather data about that bike ride. It isn't so leisurely and enjoyable anymore, is it? The Toronto-based Vanhawks crew went whole hog and put all of the “connected” functionality that the Helios bars have into a badass, heck of a good-looking bike. And they took “the internet of bikes” theme quite a bit further than Gibbs did, though he still has one thing on them -- his Helios bars have blinking directional lights, a safety feature we’re surprised the Valour doesn’t seem to have. Designed to make urban bike commuting safer, the Valour does, however, warn riders of dangers lurking in their blind spots. The bike’s mesh network, ultrasonic haptic feedback sensors detect nearby vehicles. When riders veer too close to traffic, the sensors trigger the handlebars to vibrate, another industry “first” the bike’s designers claim they boast the bragging rights to. What do you think of this bike?

Thursday, May 8, 2014

The Internet: Again

How long can you go without being online? Would you be able to ignore those internet faxes or emails for more than a day? And what exactly did we do with our time before the internet? It is easy to hate the internet and what it has made us into. People used to have conversations face to face and spent their time meaningfully. Now many of us are checking our Facebook statuses and reading Twitter feeds in between the time we are playing riveting games of candy crush. Admit it, you know it sucks when you run out of lives in that game. These days we actually have to tell our kids that they should never type anything online that they could not say to their mother's face. Anonymity has given people a wall that they use for protection. Along the same lines, what if the internet have left some positive effects? It has been able to connect more people that live thousands of miles away. It has exposed many companies and businesses and made everything more transparent. People have more access to information. The question then becomes, are more people taking advantage of everything that the internet has to offer?

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Glass and Bars

Would you ever wear Google Glass into a bar? Can you even imagine the repercussions that might follow?I f you’re unfamiliar with Glass, as it’s called for short, it’s a set of glasses—sometimes prescription, sometimes not—that come with a little visible camera affixed. Glass can read your email, take videos, take photos, Google stuff for you, and in the not-too-distant future, instantly recognize faces at bars and tell you whom you’re talking to. Ok, first of all, no one wants to be recorded in a bar with a camera or internet phone services. People go to the bar for a reason and sometime things do not turn out the way they are supposed to and you end up with a night that you would much rather forget. But throw in Glass, and it is a whole other animal. Someone might think that it is funny and post it somewhere. You can see where this is going. But can we be honest? Facial recognition is going to be the saddest prospect of all. Because while bars can be places to make deals and break them, make out and break up, one of their primary lures is meeting people, sometimes people in whom one has a romantic interest. And Google Glass marks the end of mystique.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Universality

If Pythagoras had not lived, or if his work had been destroyed, someone else eventually would have discovered the same Pythagorean theorem. Moreover, this theorem means the same thing to everyone today as it meant 2,500 years ago, and will mean the same thing to everyone a thousand years from now — no matter what advances occur in technology or what new evidence emerges. Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless. What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?This question has divided thinkers for centuries. It seems spooky to suggest that mathematical entities actually exist in and of themselves. But if math is only a product of the human imagination, how do we all end up agreeing on exactly the same math? Some might argue that mathematical entities are like chess pieces, elaborate fictions in a game invented by humans. But unlike chess, mathematics is indispensable to scientific theories describing our universe. Another interesting part of this whole conundrum is that a lot of the computer science, technology, and communication services that we use now is based off of the math. If the math that is "universal" can be used then what of the things that it is used for?

Saturday, January 11, 2014

High Tech Beds

At what point does a bed have to be smart enough that we can be sufficiently afraid to go to sleep in it? I understand we want everything so connected but this bed that was showcased at the CES is going overboard. First of all the bed has a WiFi connection. Why is this necessary? Because a bunch of sensors built into the bed can track your sleep patterns, relaying your sleepy-time data to a connected app that gives you a sleep score. Also with the internet connectivity you might throw in some app development for this bed and program how it work and more than you can do with it. The bed also has tasteful ambient lighting that shoots out from under it in a sort of nightlight mode. And the thing does full-body massage, because of course it does if you are going to be paying eight grand for it. All existing technology of it aside, use your imagination as to the different apps and sensors that you can have on it.