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Today's lead story in the Observer is a maddening and excellent investigative piece revealing that for three decades, the UK's biggest construction companies worked with British police and spy-agencies to build illegal dossiers on whistle-blowers who complained about unsafe working conditions and trade-unionists. The victims of these investigations -- thousands of them -- were economically ruined as the firms conspired to keep them from being hired at any job-site, and saw to it that if they were ever hired, they were promptly fired.

Some Internet piracy groups decided to implement some new regulations and standards last week. Instead of releasing TV shows in the Xvid/avi format, groups responsible for putting major TV shows online switched to MP4/x264. Outraged by the lack of democracy, some BitTorrent users are directing their anger at bewildered torrent sites and even threatening to boycott releases. For those who understand, the whole thing is pretty amusing.

The World Knowledge Dialogue Symposium was streamed live from Crans Montana, Switzerland from 10 to 13 September 2008. All plenaries, roundtables and talks have been archived and may be watched anytime here.

You want to start your own blog but you don't want to look tacky by using an existing design. Creating your own theme can be daunting, but with some assistance you can have a unique design for your blog in no time. This post will help you put it all together using WordPress, the most popular (and free) blogging software available.

A lot of us stare at a computer monitor for the bulk of our day and reading long articles or books is rarely a comfortable experience. With that in mind, here's a few steps you can take to make you reading experience less terrible.

The winners of the "Badges for Lifelong Learning" competition were announced this past week at DML2012. It's hardly surprising, with it being the focus of the research competition, that much of the conference -- formal sessions and informal conversations -- was devoted to the questions surrounding badges: what are they for? what will they do? what practices will they reward? will badges change what we learn, what we value? how?

Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).

Launched by two Stanford professors who left academia to create a new networked vision of education. 

I am a bit odd. I will rarely if ever answer a question on StackOverflow (SO). If I do its because I didn't have any other easy way of answering the question. This is entirely by design.

Could Anonymous be the next al-Qaeda? FBI Director Robert Mueller warned a group of cybersecurity experts on Thursday that online attacks will replace terrorism as the most serious threat facing the U.S., according to The Associated Press.

Can a person's Facebook profile reveal what kind of employee he or she might be? The answer is yes, and with unnerving accuracy, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

There's a new adventure video capture company in town, and both Zeyez and GoPro would have good reason to be afraid. You may not have heard of Pivothead -- the company has had a remarkably quiet push to market over the last few months -- but the video recording eyewear startup could very well become a household name after its first products hit the market this April for $349. Aurora, Durango, Moab and Recon may offer distinct exterior designs, but they're virtually identical under the hood. Each model includes an eight-megapixel Sony sensor (that reportedly captures higher quality images than the iPhone 4S cam), a four-element glass lens, 8GB of built-in storage, a 440mAh battery (with about an hour of shooting time) and three video modes: 1080/30p, 720/60p and 720/30p. We had a chance to go hands-on with Pivothead earlier today, and took the glasses for a spin on the streets of New York City. You'll find that sample video, along with our impressions, just past the break.

 Ever since Rosie the Robot took care of "The Jetsons" in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease. Enlarge This Image   Jodi Hilton for The New York Times, left; Hanna-Barbera With Ava, left, iRobot is trying to do Rosey the Robot of "The Jetsons" one better. Ava will have an iPad or Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. Rosie, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. "Then, 50 years passed."

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, a shit storm of epic proportions has just gone down. Something which had the potential to affect practically every coder. (Top four stories on HackerNews all related to this crisis).    Every GitHub repository was vulnerable to attack and absolutely nothing was safe.  If you are one of those strange coders that don't use GitHub and think you are in the clear because you use SVN, well the potential damage from the ripples of this vulnerability would of eventually reached you. When the large portion of the technical world all depends on a single service, and that service is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, that makes *anyone* who consumes these services also vulnerable. 

Forgetting that cloak of invisibility - how about a device that hides you in the very fabric of time? New research published in Nature reveals that scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time - even if for only for 40 picoseconds. Rather than bending light around the object, their technique creates a temporal hole in light beams where an event can be hidden.

In a nutshell The Data Journalism Awards (DJA) is the first international contest recognising outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide. By recognising outstanding work and editorial excellence in the field of data journalism, the DJA seeks to: Contribute to setting high standards and highlighting the best practices in data journalism. Demonstrate the value of data journalism among editors and media executives.

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Create Video Through Collaboration Share Large Files in Public or Private SpinXpress is used by independent global media producers to create videos, music compilations, and other collaborative media projects. * Works with any file format * Place free ads for your services * Built in Wiki for open forum * Publish your work * Search for Creative Commons Licensed Media * Share your files with anyone, anywhere, anytime

video worth watching

What's in store for robotics in 2012? Nearly a quarter of the year is already behind us, but we thought we'd spend some time looking at the months ahead and make some predictions about what's going to be big in robotics.