Tech Talk
Organize your life – with your smartphone
This article outlines some high-quality smartphone apps to help you stay organized, efficient, and on-time. Calendars that remind you of upcoming events (from your wedding anniversary to contract negotiation deadlines), note dictation, and apps that will let you plug in to social media sites like LinkedIn so you can easily schedule meetings with your contacts.
Crowdsourcing methods put to test after Typhoon Haiyan
21st-century information technology is aiding humanitarian relief efforts in the Philippines as they struggle to deal with the aftermath of the crippling typhoon that struck a few weeks ago. Even in times of major crisis, people often have some access to social media via smartphones, and researchers are figuring out ways to use tweets, photographs and videos of disaster areas to figure out what is happening on the ground before relief arrives. This technology could be extremely helpful in any kind of mass disaster response efforts and first responders should check it out.
This may help you save for retirement
There are places in Africa where banking is so expensive and unreliable that telephones have taken over the majority of the banking industry, after local telecom carriers saw a market waiting to be tapped and enabled a bank-by-phone system that anyone can access. Scientists are now looking at the accessibility of those systems and trying to figure out how we can apply them to help people plan for their futures by making it “as easy to save money as it is to spend money” all via your smart phone.
Twitter releases tool to create custom timelines
Twitter is introducing a new tool to allow their users to make their own “timelines” of tweets which could be useful and powerful for hot-topic current events of all kinds, from terrorist attacks to draft picks. The tool allows you to create and publicly display lists of tweets and updating it in real time. You can control the process completely, even picking out each tweet manually. Hashtags (which are the current method of tagging/sorting tweets) for major events can reach into the millions, so there is great value in being able to put together, share, and embed a personally curated list of truly worthwhile tweets on a subject. It could also be a great way to share very specific information with a core group of Twitter followers.
Bitcoin could become even more difficult to track
Bitcoin, which has been in the news a lot recently for its role in anonymous and illegal internet transactions, may be becoming even more anonymous. Combined with anonymizing browser tools such as Tor, using Bitcoin to purchase things like guns and drugs was relatively easy for criminals to do – maybe not quite as easy as buying a book from Amazon, but not that far off, either. Matthew D. Green, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins, has been working to close a loophole in the Bitcoin system that could allow purchases to be tracked by law enforcement.
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