As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
- Apple’s New TV Ad Highlights Parenthood & iPhones
Apple has released another new television advertisement today, highlighting the pleasures and challenges of parenthood which can be helped the iPhone. It is a quick 1 minute ad but it is packed with features of the iPhone itself along with apps that can help parents in their day-to-day… or day-int0-night. The ad highlights really every […]
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- Aperture & iPhoto for OS X Users – What You Need to Know
As many of you have read by now, Apple announced to 9to5Mac this weekend that they are ending development on Aperture, their professional photo management and editing app, as well as their more consumer oriented iPhoto. The move comes in the wake of the announcements around OS X Yosemite at WWDC 2014 where the new […]
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- Do robots pose a threat to our jobs?
Will workplace robots cost more jobs than they create?
- Facebook attacked for emotion study
Facebook is criticised after it emerges it conducted a psychology experiment to test emotional reactions of nearly 700,000 users without their knowledge.
- So You Are Shocked Facebook Did #psyops on People?
Well then. Let’s start with a working definition of psyops.
Here is some background on the Facebook mass psychological testing as being reported recently. The study about the test itself, an interesting take on it by another scientist.
You should not be either shocked, or surprised. Companies in the social media space run an implicit yet often almost silent social compact with you. The social networking or social media company develops, tests and produces a product you want to use.
In order to use it, you have to click through terms of services or terms and conditions. These are lengthy legal documents created by very smart lawyers to basically protect the company from almost anything.
Most people literally never bother to read these “click thrus,” and instead just literally do that.
Click thru.
By doing so, one should expect to be spied on by companies and governments alike. One should also expect to be used in a multitude of “experiments,” “a/b testing,” and “algorithmic adjustments.” Expect this daily.
People forget the internet is not theirs. It is actually “domain” of some powerful companies that access our data, b.c we give it up freely.
— Alan W. Silberberg (@IdeaGov) June 29, 2014
. @IdeaGov we give it up, yes; but not so sure it is all that “freely” (& even less likely to be “knowingly”). Choice = merely an illusion.
— Adrienne Mead (@AdrienneMeadEsq) June 29, 2014
The social compact between you and the big social networking companies is implicit, if mostly silent. We get to use things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Secret, Whisper, Google, Bing, etc. without paying in hard dollars (usually.) What we pay for it with is the invisible digital currency. That of your life on display for anyone with an algorithm, and a way to analyze that data can easily see. Either use these services and accept that in part or do not use the services. But this is the hard choice we all face, if you ever stop to think about it.
- Poland's gaming champions
How two school friends created a global blockbuster in Warsaw
- KLM Under Fire For Offensive World Cup Tweet
Dutch airline KLM made a big social media no-no when it tweeted an image celebrating the Netherlands’ World Cup win.
Minutes after the Dutch team beat Mexico, the airline posted the following:
The picture contained an cartoonish picture of a man wearing a sombrero and a poncho. Twitter users found the tweet to be racist and offensive.
Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who has nearly 2 million Twitter followers, called out the airline:
.@KLM I’m never flying your shitty airline again. Fuck you big time.
— Gael Garcia Bernal (@GaelGarciaB) June 29, 2014
The airline quickly deleted the post.
- Improving Healthcare and Reducing Cost Through Clinical Data Analytics
Jim needs to have his knee replaced. He is a 52-year-old former long-distance runner who has recently picked up on CrossFit and often wears a Fitbit. To schedule the surgery, he goes online and coordinates his family’s calendar with the calendars of his surgeon and the pre- and post-operation nursing teams. He is asked a few personal questions: In the past year, did he ever have trouble covering co-payments? Does he have friends or family who can transport him to rehabilitation therapy? Does he have to climb stairs to reach his bedroom?
After a short wait he receives his Quality and Risk Report Card. The report card says he is an excellent candidate for total knee arthroplasty (TKA). However, his recent trip to the urologist for kidney stones and urinary tract infection (UTI) suggests prophylactic antibiotic therapy prior to the surgery to reduce the risk of surgical site infection. And, because of his lack of adherence to prior clinical treatment plans, a post-discharge care coordination team will be engaged before he leaves the hospital.
If all of this sounds worlds apart from the kind of surgery your father might have experienced, it is. I spoke with Randy Salisbury, chief marketing officer of Streamline Health Solutions, about how healthcare is rapidly moving from relatively subjective decision-making based on isolated incidents to more evidence-based medicine; becoming connected, predictive and personalized. The days of the trip to the doctor resulting in referrals followed by the same tests and questions repeated over and over are nearing an end. Patients are taking a more active role in their own care. With relevant historical information about the patient and the experiences of patients like them, care teams can avoid undesired outcomes such as surgical site infections, ongoing pain, stiffness and poor physical function. This can save thousands of dollars in unreimbursed follow-up care costs for hospitals and health systems and can help keep patient satisfaction high.
Randy Salisbury, CMO of Streamline Health SolutionsHow is all this possible?
Although hospitals and health systems have long monitored financial and operational data, the difference comes with tracking clinical data. This includes information such as a patient’s diagnosis, treatments, prescriptions, lab tests and hospitalizations.
Clinical data is extracted from a variety of sources, including electronic health records, information exchanges, disease registries, and even personal health devices and direct patient surveys. Examining clinical data completes a 360-degree view, enabling providers to analyze their patient populations, understand which individuals need the most help and proactively reach out to give them the care they need. When intelligently applied, clinical analytics help not only support a hospital’s bottom line, but also improve patient outcomes and reduce avoidable readmissions.
What’s behind the drive toward analytics?
For one, it’s you, me and everyone else who waits to get help for a medical condition until they are sweating and complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath. It is no secret that “reactive” healthcare is more costly than preventive care designed to keep patients out of high-cost settings such as the emergency room.
Encouraging “wellness,” in fact, lies at the heart of healthcare reform initiatives that move away from fee-for-service reimbursement and toward value-based, accountable care models that tie together cost and quality of care. For hospitals, this shift means that future success depends on the ability to use data and analytics to improve both financial and clinical performance.
How it works
In the past, evidence-based treatment has meant following well-studied care protocols. With increased access to clinical data and advances in computing power, however, predictive analytics can provide a new kind of evidence to drive action. Aggregating and analyzing information about a broad population of patients over extended periods of time can help care managers understand — and therefore facilitate — the root causes of good outcomes for individual patients and for patient populations.
Predictive modeling helps care managers identify patterns in a population’s health in order to prospectively determine individual risk scores. These scores can then be used to triage the work of a care team, allowing them to focus first on patients at highest risk. In the earlier example of Jim, the TKA patient, predictive analytics helped identify him as a high risk for surgical site infection — and therefore in need of prophylactic antibiotics — or it might identify him as being inexperienced with physical therapy, which is a critical component of post surgery success.
Predictive modeling, whether based on claims data, medical records or patient-supplied risk assessments, can segment individuals prior to service and address a myriad of concerns before they turn into problems. This can be done through:
- preventive care and wellness activities
- chronic disease management programs that teach patients how to care for themselves, such as when to take their medications
- better care coordination, for example, making sure medical records are sent to a skilled nursing facility prior to a patient’s transfer from the hospital
Clinical analytics can quantify everything from patient outcomes to readmissions and emergency department visits, to wait times and utilization of high-cost services. This new level of insight and transparency is good for both clinical outcomes and for business. In addition to setting internal benchmarks to measure cost and quality performance, for instance, clinical analytics also can help an organization compare how well it stacks up against its competitors and use that data to negotiate better payer contracts. It gives hospitals the ability to quickly make strategic decisions to improve clinical quality, reduce costs, optimize resources and enhance their competitive positions.
The benefits to patients are equally strong. By providing a holistic understanding of patients, analytics ushers in a new era of personalized healthcare. Clinical analytics have the power to arm individuals with timely, relevant information to help them make good health choices. This 360-degree view helps doctors predict risk for disease and response to treatment, supporting better diagnoses, safer drug prescribing and more effective treatments. Over the years, both as a patient and in his role as an executive for a leading healthcare analytics solution provider, Randy has witnessed this evolution first hand.
Forward-looking hospitals have already begun to embrace clinical analytics — and that means their patients can enjoy a life well-examined. With that will come lower costs, reduced readmissions, improved outcomes, and a better overall patient experience.
This post was co-authored with Randy Salisbury, chief marketing officer of Streamline Health Solutions, Inc.
- VIDEO: Nasa tests Mars landing technology
US space agency Nasa has successfully tested a flying-saucer shaped space craft that could help scientists plan future missions to Mars.
- What's New On Netflix In July?
While it feels like June has only just begun, we are in the final hours of the summer month. Some of us may not be ready for July, but there is one thing we can all agree is great news: the beginning of the month means new movies and TV shows on Netflix. When you want to beat the summer heat and couch surf for a few hours, here are the new additions to cleanse your viewing palette:
TV Shows:
1. “Animorphs: Seasons 1 & 2” available on July 1
2. “Knights of Sidonia” Season 1 available on July 4
3. “Hemlock Grove” Season 2 available on July 11
4. “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” Season 1 available on July 17
5. “Baby Daddy” Season 3 available on July 18
6. “Melissa & Joey” Season 3 available on July 18
7. “Hell on Wheels” Season 3 available on July 19
8. “Lost Girl” Season 4 available on July 24
9. “Continuum” Season 3 available on July 26Movies:
1. “12 Angry Men” available on July 1
2. “A Raisin in the Sun” available on July 1
3. “Bad Santa” available on July 1
4. “Basic Instinct” available on July 1
5. “Boyz N the Hood” available on July 1
6. “City of God” available on July 1
7. “Dead Man Walking” available on July 1
8. “Fever Pitch” available on July 1
9. “Funny Face” available on July 1
10. “Gandhi” available on July 1
11. “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” available on July 1
12. “Legends of the Fall” available on July 1
13. “Patton” available on July 1
14. “Philadelphia” available on July 1
15. “Primal Fear” available on July 1
16. “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” available on July 1
17. “The Karate Kid” available on July 1
18. “The Karate Kid II” available on July 1
19. The Karate Kid III” available on july 1
20. “The Manchurian Candidate” available on July 1
21. “The Parent Trap” available on July 1
22. “Under the Tuscan Sun” available on July 1
23. “Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo” available on July 1
24. “American Ninja” available on July 1
25. “Ararat” available on July 1
26. “The Babysitter” available on July 1
27. “Best Defense” available on July 1
28. “Blue Chips” available on July 1
29. “Body of Evidence” available on July 1
30. “Can’t Buy Me Love” available on july 1
31. “Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke” available on July 1
32. “Crimson Tide” available on July 1
33. “Croupier” available on July 1
34. “The Dark Half” available on July 1
35. “Don’t Look Now” available on July 1
36. “Eight Men Out” available on July 1
37. “Halloween: Resurrection” available on July 1
38: “The Hunt For Red October” available on July 1
39. “Jersey Girl” available on July 1
40. “The Keys of the Kingdom” available on July 1
41. “Madeline” available on July 1
42. “Mean Girls” available on July 1
43. “My Girl” available on July 1
44. “My Girl 2” available on July 1
45. “People I Know” available on July 1
46. “Phantoms” available on July 1
47. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” available on July 1
48. “Venus” available on July 1
49. “Renoir” available on July 6
50. “Homefront” available on July 9
51. “Out of the Furnace” available on July 9
52. “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” available on July 11
53. “Sleeping Beauty” available on July 12
53. “The Master” available on July 14
54. “Hitch” available on July 14
55. “The Last Days” available on July 15
56. “Christmas with the Kranks” available on July 26 - You May Have Been A Lab Rat In A Huge Facebook Experiment
A newly published paper reveals that scientists at Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on hundreds of thousands of users by tweaking their feeds and measuring how they felt afterward.
In other words, Facebook decided to try to manipulate some people’s emotional states — for science.
The research involved Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of status updates, photos and news articles that appears when you first fire up the site. For a week in January 2012, a group of researchers, variously affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, altered the algorithm that determines what shows up in News Feed for 689,003 people. One group was shown fewer posts containing words thought to evoke positive emotions, such as “love,” “nice” and “sweet,” while another group was shown fewer posts with negative words, like “hurt,” “ugly” and “nasty.” The findings were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal.
The researchers were studying a phenomenon called “emotional contagion,” a fancy psychological term for something you’ve almost certainly experienced: If you spend more time with a happy-go-lucky friend, you end up being more of a ray of sunshine yourself. (Same goes for sadness: Hang with a Debbie Downer, and you likewise become a vector for gloom.) Researchers have found that emotions can be contagious during face-to-face interactions, when a friend’s laugh or smile might lift your spirits. But what happens online? Facebook was trying to figure that out.
It turns out that, yes, the Internet is just like real life in this way. People who were shown fewer positive words on Facebook tended to turn around and write posts of their own that contained fewer positive words (and more negative words). And people who were shown fewer negative words tended, in turn, to write posts with fewer negative words and more positive words.
Hypothesis: proven!
In the PNAS article, lead researcher Adam Kramer and his team note that “the effect sizes from the manipulations are small.” And in a statement to The Huffington Post, Facebook offered justification for doing the research.
“This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account,” a company spokesperson told The Huffington Post. “We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it’s positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow. We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process.”
Still, reaction against Facebook was swift when the story was picked up by Animal and then the A.V. Club:
I wish I hadn’t quit Facebook so I could quit them all over again.
— John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) June 28, 2014
“Facebook isn’t just the place you see pic of your friends —it’s also an exciting research lab, with all of us as potential test subjects.”
— Alba Mora Roca (@albamoraroca) June 29, 2014
Get off Facebook. Get your family off Facebook. If you work there, quit. They’re fucking awful.
— Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 28, 2014
The researchers’ findings aren’t exactly trivial. If positivity begets more positivity online, we may be overblowing the whole idea of “F.O.M.O.,” or “fear of missing out” — the idea that pixel-perfect beach pictures and other evidence of fun fills Facebook friends with jealousy, not joy.
Facebook employs a group of data scientists to study user activity and publish their findings, often pegged to events like Valentine’s Day and national elections. But until now, the research has mostly fallen into the category of “observational studies” — that is, research that involves someone poring over existing data and trying to draw conclusions from it.
The News Feed manipulation, though, is a different beast. It’s an experiment, in which scientists create the data by tweaking one variable to see if it affects another. That’s what’s disconcerting: The “things” being manipulated in this case are people on Facebook — i.e., basically everyone with an Internet connection.
If you don’t remember agreeing to being a Facebook guinea pig, well, you must not have read all of the site’s mind-bogglingly complex terms of service when you set up your account. Within those TOS is language specifying that Facebook members consent to having information about them used for “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
Even though this research was not illegal, Susan Fiske, the Princeton University psychology professor who edited the study for PNAS, was queasy about it. Fiske told The Atlantic:
I was concerned until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it — and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.
“Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.” That’s comforting.
[New Scientist via Animal]