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The Almighty Dollar

The Almighty Dollar
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Technology Review: Augmented Identity An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality. “It’s taking social networking to the next level,” says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT. “We thought the idea of bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating would be really interesting.” TAT built the augmented ID demo, called Recognizr, to work on a phone that has a five-megapixel camera and runs the Android operating system. A user opens the application and points the phone’s camera at someone nearby.

The 5 types of programmers « Steven Benner's Blog In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan. However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enough or are too perfect for humans to look upon. The duct tape programmer The code may not be pretty, but damnit, it works! This guy is the foundation of your company. The OCD perfectionist programmer You want to do what to my code? This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. The anti-programming programmer I’m a programmer, damnit. His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. The half-assed programmer What do you want?

Syria: 'I am the real dictator', declares Asma al-Assad The people of the city have long been the target of derision for other Syrians. Mrs Assad received from her husband an email with the subject line “Student who obtained 0% on an exam”. It contained one of those lists of jokes that circulate widely on the internet, in the form of questions with silly answers. The first was: “In which battle did Napoleon die? – His last battle”. The next day she forwarded the email to her father and two other family members with the changed subject line: “A really bright Homsi student!” Mrs Assad’s “dictator” comment was made partly in jest during an exchange with a friend about how much attention spouses typically pay to each other. “As for listening – I am the REAL dictator, he has no choice ...” she wrote on Dec 14. It will not be helpful to Mr Assad, who has made a show of passing reforms since protests against his rule broke out. But international sanctions forced her to shop online with an alias and to to ask friends to collect jewellery from Paris.

The Forgotten World of the Web Introvert There's a fascinating post up over on GigaOM which starts to address something that's been niggling at me for a while: Much less noticeable is another trend: the rise of the web introvert. But while some web introverts might be introverted in the classic sense -- that is, uncomfortable in social settings -- many of them aren't shy at all. They are simply averse to having a public presence on the web. I have several people like that in my immediate circle of friends and family, and I think this is rapidly becoming the elephant in the room of social media discussions. Unless we can find a way to draw these people into the social web - and that probably means more thought around both privacy and data ownership - we're only ever going to get a subset of a subset of people involved. What's the solution?

Website grader with backlink benchmarks Why should I care about backlinks? There have been many onsite SEO web graders running around the Internet. We have tried many of them, and especially the most popular ones. There is nothing wrong with these web graders. They do the job they were built to do - which is to give you some help with your onsite SEO. Many people still struggle to get their websites positioned so that the search engines will categorize them optimially. So what is the other 70% that drives your search engine rankings?

Programs - Anchors/Reporters - Hala Gorani Why the New Caribou Coffee Logo Features Less Caribou Caribou Coffee, a distant No. 2 in the coffee chain category next to Starbucks, is attempting to bolster its appeal as a branded coffee company by playing down the ski lodge imagery and, yes, the caribou, with a sweeping rebranding. The push, which includes a new logo and print work, comes as the brand attempts to foster a more contemporary, less regional image. With locations in 15 Midwestern and Eastern states, Caribou doesn’t have the national retail footprint of Starbucks and has a fraction of the marketing budget. But it is known for its quality—Consumer Reports ranked it No.1 among java purveyors—and a new management team wants to expand upon that and build a national presence. One way to do that is by rolling out branded ground coffee on other retailers’ shelves. The rebranding is being driven by CEO Mike Tattersfield, a former Yum exec who joined Caribou in 2008. Continue to next page → “We were looking for more mass appeal.

11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks Science comes up with a lot of awesome stuff, and you don't need a Ph.D, a secret lab, or government funding to get your hands on some of the coolest discoveries. We've got a list of 11 mostly affordable gifts that are guaranteed to blow your mind, whether or not you're a science geek. Click on any image to see it enlarged. 1. Also known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world's lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. Aerogel isn't just neat, it's useful. Price: $35 2. Inside these sealed glass balls live shrimp, algae, and bacteria, all swimming around in filtered seawater. EcoSpheres came out of research looking at ways to develop self-contained ecosystems for long duration space travel. Price: $80 3. NASA has been trying to figure out how to get a sample of rock back from Mars for a while now. Every once in a while, a meteorite smashes into Mars hard enough to eject some rocks out into orbit around the sun. Price: $70+ 4. Price: $150 5. So what's next year's new color going to be? 6.

Google Launches User-Generated Street View – GigaOM Although it continues to face criticism from European privacy authorities about Street View, that hasn’t stopped Google from adding features to the service. The latest to launch is a kind of user-generated layer to Street View that uses photos uploaded by individuals to create a pseudo-3D panorama of a specific spot. Although there aren’t going to be enough user photos to do this for every site or building, it’s an additional way to get different perspectives on popular landmarks. If the new feature sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is very similar to a photo feature launched by Microsoft in 2008 called Photosynth, which also takes user-submitted photos of famous sites that have been shot from all different angles and generates a 3D panorama from them. Google started incorporating user photos into the Street View part of Google Maps last year.

Young America's Foundation - The Conservative Movement Starts Here. Bing Maps takes on Google Street View as Flickr pictures illustr Microsoft is taking on Google Street View with the addition of photos to Bing Maps. Both Bing Maps and Google Maps now pull users' photos from Flickr to show locations as they really are. Google Maps has also added Flickr pictures recently, alongside Street View. Bing, however, benefits from the whooshy-swooshy effect seen in Microsoft's Photosynth software. Microsoft demonstrated the new features earlier this week at technology conference TED 2010. The advantage of user-generated content is that maps have no limits on where they can go, including indoors -- and into space. User-generated photos can also offer a wider range of photos, showing a location at different times of day and night, and potentially more up to date than pictures taken on a camera car's last trip round the block.

Marc Hrisko, America's Millionaire Coach D.C. hospital fires 11 nurses, 5 staffers for snowstorm absences The District's largest private hospital has fired 11 nurses and five support staff members who failed to make it to work during the back-to-back snowstorms that paralyzed the region earlier this month. Dozens of staff members at Washington Hospital Center face internal investigations, union representatives say, and it is unclear how many employees will lose their jobs. On Friday, the nurses union, Nurses United of the National Capital Region, filed a class-action grievance with the hospital. "I see it as so unfair and uncaring," said Shirley Ricks, a 57-year-old nurse who has spent her entire career at the hospital. In a letter sent to the staff on Friday, hospital President Harry J. "Sadly, we did experience some issue with associates who did not show the same commitment as most of their co-workers to the community, our patients and their fellow associates. The hospital continues to examine the circumstances of staffers who did not make it into work, Pak said. Hoping for sympathy

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