Monthly Archives: January 2021

In a world of remote-learning, Zoom calls, and streaming, do the benefits out weigh the risks?

With technology easily accessible, students oftentimes find themselves multitasking homework and entertainment.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, school has moved online for many students. This means more time sitting and staring at a screen. In addition to school, teenagers are also spending a significant amount of time socializing, playing games, and shopping virtually. This over-use of technology is negatively impacting the mental and physical health of young people across the country, as well as right here at Becton.

Bectons Student Assistance Coordinator, Mr. Connor Wills stresses that Once people become 25-27 years of age, their brain stops developing and it is hard to change habits and learn new skills. It is for this reason that children need to learn how to manage their emotions and not become too dependent on technology to self-regulate.

How technology is used depends on some factors and their purpose. While computers are normally used during class time, cell phones are used to keep in touch with friends, and television is used to help the children and their families unwind. According to Science Daily, 1 in 5 young people regularly wake up in the night to send or check messages on social media. Teenagers that do this are three times more likely to be tired at school, compared to those who do not log on a night.

Students that do not log on at night are also much happier. Studies have shown that females are more likely to log onto their social media accounts than boys leading to emotional issues, depression, and even suicide. Citing a study from 2015, Jamie Zelazny, Ph.D., RN, and assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine explains that Teens who reported using social media sites more than 2 hours a day were much more likely to report poor mental health outcomes like distress and suicidal ideation.

Unfortunately, these habits tend to form at a much younger age. The American Association of Pediatrics states that there should be avoidance of screens for children under 18 months (except for video-chatting), and limits of 1 hour per day of high-quality programming for children up to the age of 5.

Furthermore, excessive technology use also harms academic performance. Guidance Counselor, Mrs. Victoria DeSantis, expresses, More children feel isolated, lonely, and they become apathetic about their studies when they spend excessive amounts time on the electronics. Moving forward, when electronics are present, children develop the habit of switching between tasks. Michael Rich, the Executive Director of the Center of Media and Child Health in Boston states, Childrens brains get rewarded for jumping to the next task rather than staying on task. Multitasking can be beneficial, but certainly not when it distracts students from what is truly important. When a computer is near, it may serve as a distraction, even if the initial intent was for educational purposes.

Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University, states when left to themselves, children most often used home computers for entertainment instead of learning. This means that adults must supervise their children to ensure that technology is being used for the right reasons. Moreover, childrens ability to manage emotions and self-esteem is also affected by technology. Oftentimes, children resort to technology when they feel upset or stressed out.

According to Mr. Wills, Electronics provide us with immediate gratification and this ultimately results in increased anxiety and depression. He recommends for students to go outside and connect with nature, by hiking or meditating, because using technology to escape can eventually become addictive.

Lastly, the physical health of children is also greatly affected. When children are spending more time using their electronics, they are also spending more time sitting and being mostly still. This can lead to long term problems, such as obesity and/or cardiovascular diseases. Physical Education teacher, Ms. Jessica ODriscoll stresses the importance of physical health when she states, you need your health to do anything and achieve anything. People who are healthy and in shape can fight off diseases and viruses better than those that have health issues and have not taken care of their bodies. Ms. ODriscoll advises students to go outside for a walk or run, if they feel uncomfortable doing this, they can also use their stairs.

With the pandemic, many activity options are limited, but young people need to be active indoors or outdoors rather than opting for video games and/or television. Exposure to blue and blue-green light (used in electronics), counteracts the melatonin creating process in the pineal gland. Melatonin is a hormone that helps people fall asleep at night. Mr. Wills explains, The worst time to use electronics is before bed. Childrens sleep tends to be more affected when they are exposed to blue light before sleep, compared to adults. The blue and blue-green light also bad for the eyes because it is known to cause nearsightedness, blindness, and eye strain. As a result, blue-light blocking glasses have become

popular and are available through many retailers.

Children have technology all around them and it is negatively impacting their mental health, physical health, and performance. Even electronics, whose primary purpose is for education, end up being a distraction to many young people. Using an electronic device requires children to be sitting, mostly still, and with education being forced into this sphere as a result of Covid-19, teens need to find ways to become more physically active and take a break from technology. Oftentimes they opt to play video games or binge-watch a Netflix show, rather than go outside for a jog. As expressed by Mr. Wills, technology needs to be used only when necessary and when used often as an escape, can become addictive. He advises students to notice how you feel and to be social, but be social in person.

Read more from the original source:

The Effects of Technology on Teens - Cat's Eye View

By 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britains motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London.

1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of 2020 Uber, one of the biggest players and supposed beneficiaries, decided to park its plans for self-driving taxis, selling off its autonomous division to Aurora in a deal worth about $4bn (3bn) roughly half what it was valued at in 2019.

The decision did not, Ubers chief executive protested, mean the company no longer believed in self-driving vehicles. Few technologies hold as much promise to improve peoples lives with safe, accessible, and environmentally friendly transportation, Dara Khosrowshahi said. But more people might now take that promise with a pinch of salt.

Prof Nick Reed, a transport consultant who ran UK self-driving trials, says: The perspectives have changed since 2015, when it was probably peak hype. Reality is setting in about the challenges and complexity.

Automated driving, says Reed, could still happen in the next five years on highways with clearly marked lanes, limited to motorised vehicles all going in the same direction. Widespread use in cities remains some way further out, he says: But the benefits are still there.

The most touted benefit is safety, with human error blamed for more than 90% of road accidents. Proponents also say autonomous cars would be more efficient and reduce congestion.

Looking back, Reed says the technology worked people had the sense, it does the right thing most of the time, we are 90% of the way there. But it is that last bit which is the toughest. Being able reliably to do the right thing every single time, whether its raining, snowing, fog, is a bigger challenge than anticipated.

Waymo, the Google spin-off that has led the field, could be a case in point: having quickly wowed the world with footage of self-driving cars, the subsequent steps have appeared small.

In October last year it announced the public could now hail fully driverless taxis, in the near term without a safety driver in any car although the range remains limited to the sunny suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, whose every centimetre has been mapped by Waymo computers.

Elsewhere, robotaxis have stalled. Like Uber, the cab firm Addison Lee had staked out bold ambitions, signing up with the UK autonomy pioneer Oxbotica in 2018 to get robotaxis into London by 2021.

That deal was quietly dropped in March last year, under new ownership. Addison Lees chief executive, Liam Griffin, said: Driverless cars are best left to the OEMs [manufacturers], and dont form part of our current plans.

The launch of an autonomous taxi service by Ford has also been postponed at least a year to 2022 because of the pandemic.

Globally, Covid-19 has delayed trials and launches of connected and automated vehicles, says Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Regulatory changes could still allow developments such as Automated Lane Keeping Systems being rolled out in 2021 across everyday cars.

ALKS is the first version of automated driving technology which could prevent some 47,000 serious accidents over the next decade, while creating up to 420,000 new jobs, Hawes said.

The system could let the car take control on UK motorways thisyear although insurers are trying to talk the government out of giving the go-ahead.

Alexandra Smyth, who leads on autonomous systems at the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: Theres lots of progress and interesting developments with regulations and codes of practice all important components that sit alongside the technology itself. But realistically there are still going to be errors and things that dont perform as we hoped. Public trust will be one of the major hurdles.

Fears were stoked after Ubers self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. And despite Elon Musks continuing bold claims for Tesla, and reports that Apple is still secretly pushing to develop a personal autonomous vehicle by 2024, the law is unlikely to permit drivers to relinquish the wheel soon.

According to Christian Wolmar, the author of Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere?, problems such as social acceptance, cybersecurity and cost have never been addressed.

He says: People do not want to replace the car outside the front door with an app its just not a viable concept. I think more and more people are sceptical of the model that well all be in robocars soon. Instead, the industry is now talking about specific uses.

If Oxboticas Paul Newman, one of the Oxford University professors pioneering Britains autonomous industry, has any doubts over the long term, he is not showing it although he says the level of autonomy where occasionally there might be a remote assist is a far more achievable ambition than a world where the machines can entirely get on with it.

Oxbotica is running a fleet of autonomous Ford Mondeos on public roads in a trial in Oxford but the technological progress, he says, is not about robotaxis: Its purely about the software, its agnostic about the vehicles.

The driverless car world, he says, is a great moonshot: cars are a huge market but also the hardest to transform, long after autonomous mining or rail or shuttle services are in place.

Newman compares the progress with mobiles phones, recalling the first he saw, wielded by Danny Glover in the 1987 film Lethal Weapon, which was the size of a small suitcase.

Is a future of driverless cars coming? Assuredly as mobile phones. This is the normal cycle that technology goes through. Were still moving along that graph, he said.

Weve gone through the flashy stage, when weve said its six months away Now weve got engineers saying this is properly hard.

Continue reading here:

'Peak hype': why the driverless car revolution has stalled - The Guardian

Credit: ZDNet

The predictions business seems more precarious than usual this year. As 2020 has shown quite clearly, attempting to predict anything makes zero sense any more. However, I'm not done with dusting off my crystal ball and trying to ascertain which technologies -- announced and not -- are likely to get their days in the Redmond sun in the coming year.

I've settled on five Microsoft areas that I'll be watching closely in the new year. I'm choosing these five because I think they'll have the biggest potential impact on business users in 2021. (I'm sure there are also a number of Microsoft gaming announcements that could be big in 2021, but -- happily -- that's outside my main focus here on ZDNet.)

My five, in no particular order:

MetaOS for the Mobile Masses

Microsoft has an evolving strategy and foundational layer in the Microsoft 365 cloud space which is somewhat better known internally than externally. That initiative is known as "Meta OS" (and also sometimes as "Taos").

MetaOS is meant to be a single mobile platform that provides a consistent set of work and play services across devices. It's not an OS the way Windows is an OS, but it does consist of a number of layers or tiers, including the Office substrate and Microsoft Graph, and an application model that includes work Microsoft is doing around Fluid Framework (its fast co-authoring and object embedding tech); Power Apps and Visual Studio dev tools.

I think in 2021 we'll hear more about how Microsoft is looking at apps as a set of single-task products and services (think Planner, Stream, Tasks, Lists, Files, Whiteboard, Notes). Fluid Framework plays a big role here. This strategy and its rollout could have big implications for developers, consumers and firstline workers.

Universal Search: Information at Your Fingertips Revisited

Microsoft founder Bill Gates had a vision of enabling users to have information come to them instead of having to seek it out. His Comdex 1990 keynote was even titled "Information at Your Fingertips." Decades later, Microsoft is finally getting closer to making this idea a reality via its universal search technology.

From 2018 to 2020, Microsoft teams were putting the pieces in place for a unified search experience across Windows, Edge and its existing Office apps. Microsoft Search is the company's unified Intranet search offering, meant to exist alongside Bing, Microsoft's web search technology.

Microsoft Search and the underlying Microsoft Graph API are meant to help make sense of users' work life (documents, the entities, the people they work with regularly, etc.). Bing's main focus is to provide an understanding of the world outside an organization, with acronym and entity extraction, machine reading comprehension, computer vision and other tools and technologies, officials say.

In 2021, Microsoft will be actively seeking ways to get more users to "turn on" unified search and use it to get work results wherever they are -- in an Office app, in the new Edge browser, or even inside Bing. Unified search dovetails nicely with Project Cortex, Microsoft's knowledge-management technologies. And, like MetaOS, unified search is meant to be people-centric and not tied to any particular device.

The 'Intelligent Edge': More Than Just IoT

Microsoft was the first of the major cloud vendors to embrace hybrid. Although some officials called out PCs and servers as examples of "intelligent edge" devices, Microsoft's embrace of that definition will likely become more prominent in 2021 and beyond.

When many think of "edge" devices, they immediately think of Internet of Things (IoT) products. But Microsoft has been growing its portfolio of what constitutes an edge device over the past couple of years. Ruggedized PCs like Azure Stack Edge Pro and Pro R, are edge devices. Any kind of device with onboard AI-processing capabilities qualifies as an intelligent edge device. Even the recently announced Azure Modular Datacenters -- which are datacenters inside shipping containers which can operate without Internet connections, intermittently connected and/or permanently connected via satellite -- also are edge devices.

Microsoft has yet to announce its AWS Outposts competitor, which is codenamed "Fiji." I'm expecting this could be a 2021 announcement. Fiji is meant to provide users with the ability to run Azure as a local cloud, managed by public Azure and delivered in the form of racks of servers provided by Microsoft directly to users. Fiji also fits into the Microsoft intelligent edge family.

Cloud PC: Desktop Virtualization as a Flat-Rate Service

Microsoft is expected to announce in the spring of 2021 its Cloud PC desktop-as-a-service offering. Cloud PC, codenamed "Deschutes," is built on top of the existing Windows Virtual Desktop service. But unlike WVD, Cloud PC will be a flat-rate subscription service, not a consumption-priced service.

Cloud PC will be an option for customers who want to use their own Windows PCs made by Microsoft and/or other PC makers basically like thin clients, with Windows, Office and potentially other software delivered virtually by Microsoft. It may debut alongside Windows 10X, providing the first batch of 10X users a way to run their existing Win32 apps (since the first version of 10X won't include Win32 container support, our sources say).

Depending on how the various Cloud PC plans are priced, this service potentially could become a strong member of the Microsoft 365/commercial cloud stable of services.

Windows 10X: Another Run at Chromebook Compete

Since Chief Device Officer Panos Panay took over more of the Windows team earlier this year, Microsoft's message is Windows is BACK, baby! In 2021, Panay and team are hoping to prove the company has decided to invest more in making Windows great (again?) with a variety of efforts, including the 21H2 "Sun Valley" UI refresh; more work to makeWindows 10 on ARM viable; and the launch of Windows 10X, a new Windows 10 variant meant to be simpler, cleaner and more manageable.

Microsoft's original plan was for 10X to debut as the OS for dual-screen and foldable Windows devices. The new, post-COVID plan calls for 10X to debut on new single-screen PCs, including clamshell laptops and 2-in-1s, among other form factors. Microsoft officials publicly deny that 10X is the company's latest attempt to compete with Chromebooks, but sources say this is definitely the sweet spot for 10X devices. Their initial target markets include education and firstline workers -- the same customer groups on which Microsoft focused with Windows 10 in S Mode (and which officials also refused to say publicly was a Chromebook compete effort).

Microsoft officials have not made 10X available externally to Windows Insider testers. Word is 10X will only be available on brand-new (not for existing) PCs and could begin shipping on those devices starting this spring. Windows 10X is expected to run on Intel-based PCs at launch, but Microsoft has been testing 10X internally on Arm devices, sources say, so maybe it also will be available on new Arm-based devices at some point in the future.

See the original post:

Five Microsoft technologies to watch in 2021 - ZDNet

Author Nathan Watson - January 1, 2021January 1, 2021Kimberly OLoughlin, CEO, Therapy Brands. Photo via Analytics Insight

In their December 30, 2020 issue, Analytics Insight named Birmingham-based Therapy Brands CEO Kimberly OLoughlin among their list of The 100 Most Powerful Women In Technology 2020. Heres what we learned about Kimberly and Therapy Brands.

According to Analytics Insight, although the information technology industry is rapidly growing, it still lags when it comes to women in technology. Although there are many factors at play, Analytics Insight noted that a lack of role models in the industry is a challenge for women looking to pursue a career in the tech world.

In an effort to remedy that issue, Analytics Insight put together a list of exemplary women that have broken the glass ceiling to become the top in their profession and organization.

Click here to view the full list of The 100 Most Powerful Women In Technology 2020.

Among Analytics Insights list of influential women in tech is Kimberly OLoughlin, CEO of Birmingham-based Therapy Brands. Kimberly first joined the Therapy Brands team in February 2020. Before serving as CEO of Therapy Brands, she served as President of Greenway Health and helped the company win the KLAS Most Improved Ambulatory EHR not once but TWICE for Revenue Cycle Managementmeaning Therapy Brands is in good hands.

In fact, Analytics Insight was so impressed with Kimberly that they decided to feature her in a full article. Click here to read Kimberly OLoughlin: Empowering Yourself and Your Business For Success.

Therapy Brands: Website | Facebook | LinkedIn

In an era of social distancing and Zoom calls, retaining access to your preferred therapist can be challenging. While practicing therapists have been shifting their business to telehealth, Therapy Brands has been there to help ease the transition with their collection of practice management tips, telehealth software and data collection tools.

In fact, since the start of COVID-19, Therapy Brands has seen a 4300% increasein telehealth use.

I believe that initiative is one of the most important factors in a persons success. Great leaders find a way to overcome obstacles and seize opportunities!

We are thrilled to see Birmingham executives get national recognition for their hard workand we cant wait to see what theyll accomplish in 2021!

Related

Here is the original post:

Birmingham CEO named in "100 Most Powerful Women In Technology 2020" - Bham Now

EXCEPT for some defiant holdouts, most Muslims have come to accept the printing press, loudspeaker, weather forecasts, cameras and television, blood transfusions, organ transplants, and in-vitro fertilisation. Earlier fears that technology will destroy their faith are disappearing. Although religious extremists have killed polio vaccine workers by the dozens, Pakistanis are likely to accept the Covid vaccine more easily than Americans. This is progress.

Technology for religious rituals is also becoming popular. For example, you may buy a small gadget called the SalatCard which uses proximity sensors to count the number of rakats performed during prayers. Also available online is an environmentally friendly wuzu (ablution) machine using visual sensors. Responding to public complaints of muezzins with rasping voices or bad pronunciations, Egypts government is carrying out an experimental airing in 113 mosques of Cairo where a computer will initiate the standardised azan at exact times. A few years ago multiple fatwas would have lambasted such innovations. But not anymore.

What of science, the fount of technology? Consuming technology does not, of course, resolve conflicts between science and religion. Nor does it necessarily mean that science as a way of looking at the world is gaining ascendancy. The latter motivated the 2020 Task Force Report on Culture of Science in the Islamic World. Led by Prof Nidhal Guessoum (Sharjah) and Dr. Moneef Zoubi (Jordan), with input from Dr Athar Osama (Pakistan), their online survey gives some hints.

At one level the results are encouraging. Their survey of 3,500 respondents, chosen mostly from Arab countries and Pakistan, shows knowledge of basic scientific facts as slightly better than in developed countries. The authors concede that this surprising result is probably because relatively educated and internet-savvy respondents were chosen. Still, one hopes that this is not too inaccurate.

Without a culture of science Muslims will continue consuming technology without producing much.

But even if true, knowing facts about science is unconnected with having a scientific mindset. The difference is like that between a USB memory stick (where you dump data) and a CPU chip (which is the decision-making brain of your laptop or smartphone). The first is passive, relatively simple and cheap. The second is active, extremely complex and costly.

Correspondingly, the traditional mindset takes knowledge to be a corpus of eternal verities to be acquired, stockpiled, disseminated, understood and applied but not modified or transformed. The scientific mindset, on the other hand, involves ideas of forming, testing and, if necessary, abandoning hypotheses if they dont work. Analytical reasoning and creativity is important, simple memorisation is not.

Going through the report, it is unclear to me whether the questions asked and the answers received have helped us understand whether Muslims are moving towards a scientific worldview. Perhaps the organisers thought that asking difficult questions upfront is too dangerous. But the strong emphasis they place upon freedom, openness and diversity as a condition for nurturing science is praiseworthy.

Heres why science and developing a scientific mindset is so difficult and alien. Humans are never completely comfortable with science because it is not commonsense. In our daily lives one sometimes has to struggle against science. As children we learned that actually its the earth that moves and yet we still speak of the sun rising and setting!

Another example: heavier things fall faster, right? This is so obviously true that nobody tested it until Galileo showed 400 years ago that this is wrong. Wouldnt it be so much nicer if the laws of physics and biology lined up with our nave intuition and religious beliefs? Or if Darwin was wrong and living things didnt evolve through random mutation? Unfortunately, science is chock-full of awkward facts. Getting to the truth takes a lot of work. And so you have to be very thorough and very curious.

Historically, lack of curiosity is why Muslim civilisations were ultimately defeated. After the Arab Golden Age petered out, the spirit of science also died. The 17th-century Ottoman sultans were rich enough to hire technologists from Europe to build ships and cannons (there were no Chinese then) but they could not produce their own experts from the ulema-dominated educational system. And when the British East India Company brought inventions and products from an England humming with new scientific ideas, the Mughals simply paid cash for them. They never asked what makes the gadgets work or even how they could be duplicated.

Without a scientific culture, a country can only consume and trade. Pakistan functions as a nation of shopkeepers, property dealers, managers, hoteliers, accountants, bankers, soldiers, politicians and generals. There are even a few good poets and writers. But there is no Pakistani Covid vaccine. With so few genuine scientists and researchers it produces little new knowledge or products.

That 81 Pakistanis were recently ranked in the worlds top two per cent of scientists by Stanford University turned out to be fake news. Stanford University was not involved in this highly dubious ranking. This was confirmed to me over email last week by Prof John Ioannidis of Stanford University. He, together with three co-authors, had been cited as the source.

What will it take to bring science back into Islam? The way may be similar to how music and Islam which in principle are incompatible are handled in Muslim countries today. It is perfectly usual for a Pakistani FM radio station that is blaring out Lady Gagas songs to briefly pause, broadcast a pre-recorded azan in all its dignified solemnity, and then resume with Beyonc until the next azan. Although the choice of music is quite abysmal, there is a clean separation of the worldly from the divine.

Separation is the key! When Galileo famously said the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, he was arguing the domains of science and belief do not overlap. This is how the West, China, and India developed modern scientific cultures. Centuries earlier, Muslim scholars had readily absorbed Greek learning while keeping their religious beliefs strictly personal. This made possible major discoveries and inventions. Whether one likes it or not, there is no other way to develop a culture of science.

The writer is an Islamabad based physicist and writer.

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2021

View post:

Muslims and technology - DAWN.com

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer.

In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this article is not about successes. Instead, this is our annual list of the worst technology flops and failures. Our tally for 2020 includes billion-dollar digital business plans that faceplanted, covid tests that bombed, and the unforeseen consequences of wrapping the planet in cheap satellites.

The polymerase chain reaction is not a new technology. In fact, this technique for detecting the presence of specific genes was invented in 1980, and its inventor won a Nobel Prize a decade later. Its employed in a vast array of diagnostic tests and laboratory research.

GETTY

So it counts as a historic screw-up that at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the specialized laboratories of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states lab kits with wrong ingredients that didnt work. So began the failure to stop the pathogen, the sidelining of nations top public health agency, and, more broadly, the unexpected inability of the country that invented PCR to get coronavirus tests to everyone who needs one. Widespread and frequent testing is what economists said would be the swiftest, cheapest way to keep the country up and running. Even now, 11 months later, lines and delays are still the testing norm in the US, even as private labs, universities, and health centers run approximately two million tests per day.

Read more:

Stop covid or save the economy? We can do both, MIT Technology Review

The CDCs failed race against covid-19: A threat underestimated and a test overcomplicated, Washington Post

Imagine a grainy video from a convenience store robbery. A shoplifter looks at the camera and presto, police use face recognition to identify a suspect. Now imagine a citylike Portland, Oregonthat decides it has to ban police from doing that.

The ability to match faces is one of the signal triumphs of the new generation of artificial intelligence, and the technique is appearing everywhere. That includes settings where its use can seem intrusive or unfair, like schools or public housing. The result this year: a run of bans and restrictions by cities, states, and companies that could stifle one of the first and most significant results of superhuman AI.

The reason the technology is accelerating is that cameras are everywhereand we all handed over our selfies. We have allowed the beast out of the bag by feeding it billions of faces, and helping it by tagging ourselves, says Joseph Atick, who built an early face recognition system using special cameras and a custom image database. Now there are hundreds of face recognition programs crunching pictures online. Controlling these systems, says Atick, is no longer a technological issue.

Over the summer, Microsoft and Amazon both denied police access to their face-matching systems, at least temporarily, and cities like Portland enacted sweeping bans that also stop hotels and shops from identifying people. Whats still missing is a national framework to guide right and wrong uses. Instead of a cycle of abuses and bans, we need policy. And in the US, we dont have it yet.

Listen to more: Attention, Shoppers: Youre Being Tracked, In Machines We Trust podcast

Quick bites. Big stories. That was the motto of Quibi, a Hollywood-powered streaming service that set out in April to revolutionize entertainment with 10-minute shows for phone screens.

But the big story ended up being Quibis fast demise. Six months after its debut, the company was firing talent and giving what remained of its $1.75 billion budget back to investors.

DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR QUIBI

The misfire reminded us of journalisms infamous 2018 pivot, in which news sites reassigned reporters en masse to manufacture ultra-short text-on-screen videos before brutally firing everyone. Similarly, Quibi was using well-paid pros to make slick $4.99-a-month subscription content that competed with YouTube, TikTok, and hordes of creators who film cat videos and dance moves for free.

In a farewell letter, studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said their pursuit of a new category of entertainment might have been misguided, but they also directed blame at the pandemic, which kept people at home in front of the TV. Unfortunately, we will never know, but we suspect its been a combination of the two, they wrote. Our failure was not for lack of trying.

Read more: Quibi Is Shutting Down Barely Six Months After Going Live, Wall Street Journal

Since 2016, several dozen US diplomats and spies in Cuba and China have been hit by a spectrum of painful and strange neurological symptoms. Theyve woken to sharp noises and experienced loss of balance and a feeling of pressure in the face. The most plausible cause of their torment, according to the National Academies of Sciences: a microwave weapon.

AFRL DIRECTED ENERGY DIRECTORATE

No one can say for sure if a directed beams of pulsed radio energy aimed into diplomats homes and hotel rooms are to blame for Havana syndrome. The US was slow to recognize and investigate the pattern of injuries and still cant name a cause with certainty. What is clear is that anyone using a microwave weapon in deliberate attacks has failed to think things through. Other powers, including the US, can also generate powerful, invisible beams to cause headaches, clicking noises inside the skull, nausea, and hearing loss. The clandestine use of such over-the-air technology, the academies said, raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others.

Some weapons just shouldnt be used.

Learn more: An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies, The National Academies Standing Committee to Advise the Department of State on Unexplained Health Effects on U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies

Have you ever had a dream where you show up at work or school in your underpants? With Zoom, its entirely possible.

During the pandemic, the video app became our new office, our schoolyard, and our way to socialize. With it came the hazard of broadcasting what should remain private. There was the toilet flush as the Supreme Court held oral arguments, and the Mexican senator who changed her top on video without realizing it.

JOE KOHEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE NEW YORKER

Gross-out humor turned to tragedy in the case of prominent CNN and New Yorker legal critic Jeffrey Toobin, who allegedly exposed his genitalia to coworkers as he fumbled between a work Zoom and a pornographic interlude. Many said Toobin deserved to be fired by the New Yorker, citing the #metoo movement (#metoobin became the hashtag). Others sympathized with an all-too-human situation. There but for better camera work go I, they seemed to be saying.

Read more: New Yorker Suspends Jeffrey Toobin for Masturbating on Zoom Call, Vice News

Since prehistory, humankind has looked upwards for awe and inspiration, to imagine what forces created the worldand which might end it.

But now, that cosmic view is being contaminated with the reflections of thousands of inexpensive commercial satellites put aloft by companies like Amazon, OneWeb, and SpaceX, who want to cover the Earth with internet connections. Sixty satellites can swarm out of a single rocket.

CTIO/NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA/DECAM DELVE SURVEY

The problem for astronomers is that sunlight reflects from the satellites, which race by at low altitudes at dawn or hover overhead, perpetually illuminated. Their sheer numbers pose a problem. SpaceX plans to launch 12,000 of its Starlink satellites, while other operators plan 50,000.

Concern is greatest for wide-field optical telescopes sitting atop mountains, whose job includes detecting exoplanets or near-Earth objects that could collide with our planet. Now theres an after-the-fact attempt to fix the problem. SpaceX tried coloring a satellite black, but it heated up too fast. More recently, the company started equipping satellites with sunshade visors to stop the reflections.

Read more: Satellite mega-constellations risk ruining astronomy forever, MIT Technology Review

Learn More: Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations, NSF NOIRLab

We knew things could go wrong with the rushed vaccine effort against covid-19, but the fate of Australias homegrown candidate was still a surprise.

Read more:

The biggest technology failures of 2020 - MIT Technology Review

Every year around this time we make our annual digital transformation predictions for the coming year, but this time its different as we have not only witnessed a global pandemic disrupting lives and upending industries, but also a wave of digital transformation like never before.

Businesses have fast-tracked their digitisation journey and operations by at least three years.

The digital economy triggered by the pandemic promises to bring in an unprecedented confluence of people, businesses, and things that reconstruct existing business models. There are six key trends that will define the future of the tech and IT industry.

Today the internet has become the core of everything we do and has become nothing less than a lifeline. Unfortunately, not everyone was privileged enough, as the pandemic put a glaring spotlight on the other half for whom access to the internet was a luxury.

In the coming year, the next generation of wireless technologies, including 5G and WiFi6, will help flatten the digital divide, as these will provide bandwidth, speed, and latency, and reach rural areas.

According to PwC, bringing the internet to those who are offline would add $6.7 trillion to the global economy, lifting another 500 million people out of poverty.

There is now need for a modern, agile network that facilitates safe and seamless reintroduction of workers to the premises. Companies need to ensure a safe and productive environment by providing touchless and intelligent experiences to their employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

Location technologies, and collaboration platforms like WebEx, will identify underutilised or overcrowded spaces, while monitoring room temperature, humidity, air quality, and light.

Business agility, flexibility and resilience have become necessities for organisations, so cloud-based technologies, security, analytics, and automation are all going to be crucial for organisations, to empower their employees, and thrive in the next normal.

The distribution of connectivity and the growth of multi-cloud networking will force many businesses to rethink their networks in favour of SD-WAN technology and secure access server edge (SASE), as it will enable networks to securely access cloud workloads and SaaS applications.

Businesses today must make every effort to keep pace with the evolving consumer sentiment. For brands, customer experience has always been an important differentiator, but now its about delighting the customer with a combination of immersive, intelligence-based personalisation and experience that will trigger a lasting impact on customers perception of trust and loyalty.

With the shift in the way we engage with each other, remote workers distributed across the globe, and cloud deployments, the traditional security perimeter has to be reformed, as the fundamental unit of access, is now identity. Organisations need to prepare for this inevitable shift, where users no longer rely on a traditional password as their primary method of access, instead look at adapting a zero-trust approach, with authentication and strong identity-focused technology.

Organisations have long invested in tech solutions where one had to pay for features they might not need. But today with the growing demand for everything-as-a-service consumption models, businesses have to rethink their models. Moreover, the flexibility and cost savings that pay-as-you-consume models provide to organisations are simply too good to resist.

Today, technology is becoming core to everything we do and consume, therefore, to emerge stronger out of this crisis, businesses will have to digitally disrupt themselves and push the boundaries of innovation.

As organisations try to pivot their portfolios in preparation for the next normal, the post-Covid world will witness the emergence of disruptive business models.

Shifts in consumer behaviour, new delivery models, and the remote workforce will influence the industry and form the crux of reimagining businesses in the future.

All these changes present a massive opportunity for technology providers and define the next normal.

The writer is Managing Director, Digital Transformation Office, Cisco India and SAARC

More here:

Technology trends to thrive in the new normal - BusinessLine

An Irving technology company that provides business automation software to 60% of the nations Fortune 100 companies is hiring an investment banking firm to assist it in exploring strategic alternatives.

Exela Technologies Inc. said Wednesday that it has retained UBS Investment Bank for help in pursuing alternatives to strengthen its balance sheet and enhance shareholder value.

The disclosure comes two weeks after Exela secured a five-year, $150 million term loan that executives said improved the companys financial position. The loan was from global alternative investment firm Angelo Gordon.

On that basis, the companys previously announced strategic initiative to improve liquidity to approximately $150 million will be substantially achieved, Exela said at the time.

The companys debt totaled $1.477 billion as of Sept. 30. In November, Exela said it wanted to reduce debt by as much as $200 million, largely by selling off business lines. It had already sold its tax benefit group for $40 million in March and its physical records storage and logistics business for $12.3 million in July.

As part of its third-quarter financial report, Exela said it expects to make additional divestitures of up to $150 million.

In the companys quarterly earnings call in November, CEO Ron Cogburn noted the COVID-19 pandemics impact on Exela and its customers.

Throughout the pandemic, our dialogue with customers has increased as they analyze the best way to balance reopening physical office locations with enabling work-from-home solutions on a more long-term basis, Cogburn told investors.

We estimate that going forward, approximately half of our customers will remain and maintain some level of work-from-home environments, which we believe will drive greater need for Exela services, he said. ... They are also seeking greater cost efficiency across their organizations through increased automation.

Exelas third-quarter revenue of $305 million was down more than 18% from the same period a year ago. For the nine months ending Sept. 30, the companys revenue of $978 million was 16% lower than a year earlier.

Sixty percent of the companys revenue is derived from its 100 top customers.

With the remaining 40% of our revenue generated from all of the other customers, we are focusing additional sales and marketing attention on accounts that have the ability to expand significantly, Cogburn told investors and analysts.

Exelas 21,000 employees provide cloud-enabled services to over 4,000 customers in 50 countries. Its back-office software is used for information management, workflow automation and integrated communications, as well as industry-specific products for banking, health care, insurance and the public sector.

It was the regions 54th-largest public company in 2019, with revenue of $1.6 billion.

Link:

Irving-based Exela Technologies hires firm to help it explore strategic alternatives - The Dallas Morning News

A Harvard professor named Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvards Department of Astronomy, believes the first sign we will get of an alien intelligence wont be spacecraft. Rather he thinks the first sign we will get of extraterrestrial life will be the civilizations trash. Loeb has a book being published on January 26 that lays out a case for why a bizarre asteroid that entered our solar system in 2017 was a piece of alien technology.

The object he is talking about was the first known interstellar object to enter our solar system and traveled to our solar system from the direction of Vega. Vega is a star about 25 light-years, nearby in the cosmic scale. The object entered our solar systems orbital plane on September 6, 2017. By September 9, the object, known as Oumuamua, made its closest approach to the sun, and by the end of September and it traveled past Venuss orbital distance.

It streaked past Earth at about 58,900 mph on October 7 and moved quickly towards the constellation Pegasus. The object was about 100 yards long and was cigar-shaped. The big splash the object made was that it was the first interstellar object ever detected in the solar system. Astronomers came to that conclusion after studying the objects trajectory. They found it was not bound by the Suns gravity, suggesting it was passing through our solar system.

Initially was believed to be an ordinary comet, but Loeb theorized that it could be discarded technology from an alien civilization. Several observations lead him to the conclusion. The first observation was that the cigar-shaped object was 5 to 10 times longer than it was wide, and scientists have never seen a naturally occurring space body look like that.

It was also unusually bright, at least ten times more reflective than typical stony asteroids or comets. The observation that pushed Loeb to believe it was a discarded alien technology was the way it moved. He said it had excess push away from the sun. He said typically, the suns pull will significantly speed up an object as it nears, then the object will slow considerably after it passes the sun and gets further away. However, Oumuamua accelerated at a slight but statistically significant rate away from the sun.

Loeb believes it was being pushed by force besides the Suns gravity alone. Loeb and colleagues looked at numbers having do with the shape and size of the object and concluded that it wasnt cigar-shaped but possibly a disk less than a millimeter thick with sail-like proportions. If it was a solar sail, which would account for his acceleration as it moved away from the sun. Not all scientists agree with this theory and will likely never know exactly what Oumuamua was.

Original post:

Harvard professor believes bizarre asteroid from 2017 was alien technology - SlashGear

ADA Century Technology Group LLC looks to reload by pursuing acquisitions of technology companies that it can grow.

The Ada-based company a family office for Grand Rapids businessman and entrepreneur Keith Harrold made two acquisitions in 2020 and is getting close on two more, one of which is under a letter of intent, President Dana Jacks said.

The company wants to acquire companies that are technology focused or can be bent toward technology or utilize some type of technology in their go-to market, Jacks said. Acquisition targets as well would have a strong, hungry management team that could use some rounding out or could use some help in certain areas, she said.

What were looking for is something that has good bones and potential. They have a value proposition that makes sense and that can evolve and grow if it were accelerated with some capital, and has a good management team and they want to build something, she said. We really want to grow stuff.

Century Technology Groups return to acquisition mode comes more than two years after the divestiture of its last prior portfolio company, Data Strategy LLC, to Miami-based private equity firm H.I.G. Capital in August 2018. Data Strategy originally founded by Harrold, Century Technology Groups CEO at the time had sales of more than $400 million, Jacks said.

The investment firm is now using the liquidity from the Data Strategy deal to pursue acquisitions of tech companies, Jacks said.

Century Technology Group has been looking at companies that typically have annual sales ranging from $3 million to $5 million, and will make investments in the Midwest with a preference toward West Michigan-based companies.

Right now our focus is mostly West Michigan. Thats where our roots are, Jacks said. As we reload were going to stay a little closer to home and build out from there. We understand the people, we understand the clients, and its our home. And the second time around as we go through this is not about us being operators anymore its about lifting and elevating management teams of the companies that are in our portfolio.

Century Technology Group presently holds two portfolio companies: Inno-Versity, an Ada-based company that provides customized instruction and training to clients; and Mutually Human LLC, a custom software and applications developer in Grand Rapids that it acquired in November.

At the time of the deal, Century Technology Group Executive Vice President Jason Kuipers said Mutually Human fits perfectly with our vision of growing a leading software development and application modernization services business and adds to our charter of investing in growth-oriented technology services businesses.

Jacks cites Inno-Versity, acquired in August 2019, as a great example of Century Technology Groups interest in companies that can be bent toward technology. Inno-Versitys custom learning programs for higher education and Fortune 500 companies have been adaptable to technology for remote learning.

Were introducing concepts such as ARVR (augmented reality and virtual reality) and gamification into what theyre doing, or helping them with the delivery of some of these custom-learning programs, Jacks said. Its really been fun to not only watch how theyve been able to evolve, but how theyre servicing their clients and the rejuvenated energy in the company. The sales team has more to sell and theres a lot more thought leadership coming from the creative side because they have more options to offer.

The technology sector that Century Technology Group operates in ranked as one of the top areas for activity in 2021 in law firm Dykemas annual M&A survey.

Technology ranked among the sectors where corporate executives and M&A professionals expect the most activity this year, behind health care and automotive and ahead of consumer products and financial services, according to the annual survey released in November.

Read the original:

Century Technology Group leans on tech acquisitions to drive growth - MiBiz: West Michigan Business News