CIS Focal Issue

Sociologists from Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), avoid using the term “middle-class”, explaining that a mechanical transfer of terms used in most developed countries standards only distorts the picture. Other researchers claim that if the middle-class does not exceed 25%-30 % of the population (the highest figures obtained for Russia), it is useless to discuss the phenomenon, since this figure is around 60% and over in developed societies! It is not just a matter of statistics; it means quality difference for middle-class role in society in general and its consumer aspect in particular.

‘The Russian middle-class is growing not due to entrepreneurs and people from free business, but due to government employees or state corporations. Furthermore, gradually this tendency is becoming more vivid and changing the mentality of what the middle-class is

Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility

With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.

Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.

OpenBCI, a Kickstarter project by Conor Russomanno and Joel Murphy, aims to fill this need by offering makers, hobbyists, and other geeky tinkerers a fully open-source prototyping platform for designing whatever mind-control UIs they can dream up

100 Famous Movie Quotes, Visualized

The only thing that will lead to the tipping point of BCI practicality is simultaneous and rapid hardware and software iteration; Joel and I both believe that this type of rapid technological innovation cannot take place behind closed doors, hence our unfaltering mission to keep OpenBCI totally open source and include as many people of varying disciplines as possible

If data from personal biometric devices is ever going to be truly useful to researchers, big medical centers will have to pull it into electronic health records (EHRs), de-identify it, and make it public. Without the medical data found in EHRs, like CT scans, X-rays, and blood tests, researchers have little context for wearable sensor data and there is little useful information that can be gleaned from just the raw data

Practice Fusion, a popular EHR company, will begin opening up its API over the next year to pull in data from wearable sensors to its platform.

Basis, a startup that makes a health sensor-laden watch, is working on the first step: a device-agnostic platform that puts all of a person’s health sensor data into a single online repository.

NEW EDUCATION MODELS

education will become an "on-demand service" where people "pull down a module of learning" when they need it.

"School kids will learn from short bite-sized modules, and gamification practices will be incorporated in schools

Но самое интересное, что совершенно зашкаливающий уровень ксенофобии обнаруживается у людей, обитающих еще дальше от Парижа, в богатых зеленых пригородах.

Это кажется странным — почему они так боятся иммигрантов, если они с ними практически никогда не сталкиваются?

их ксенофобию подпитывает экономическая неуверенность:

. The future of identity lies in digitizing the physical world, and the context in which we collect data about identity needs to become transparent.

Will consumers understand that better identity data equals higher-quality messaging to them throughout their lives? Context will allow us to exchange value better and build deeper networks in physical world data collection.

We need better systems to understand and provide access to individuals’ identity by service and by object

As more people move into cities, natural resources decline, climate change heats up, and the "sharing economy" continues to pick up steam, our notions of family will continue to shift.

five different types of families of the future: the Multi-Gens, the Silver Linings, Ruralites, the Tandem Tribe, and Modular Movers. The firm also work out how different brands might service each family type

The Multi-Gens are exactly what they sound like--multiple generations of families living together.

Parents can program up to five numbers into the gadget, which kids can call with the touch of a button.

The FiLIP's simple interface only includes two buttons, one of which is bright red. In case of emergency, the child can hold down the red button, prompting the watch to call the first person in its contact list.

Today, the most convenient way to have access to something you want is to own it and keep it where you live. That's because the process of having something delivered is too costly, cumbersome, and slow to do every time you need it.

Still, people don't want things soon. They want them NOW. A 30-minute Amazon Prime Air is the closest approximation of “now” we've seen yet.

Yet the greatest impact of robotic delivery might not be owning things quicker, but rather not having to own them in the first place. That's because once you can have something approximately now, the functional difference between ownership and rental disappears

To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked.

Though Google would often note that the report was not complete picture of how governments accessed user data online, it couched that admission in the context that the report was growing and improving with each release.

Since we began sharing these figures with you in 2010, requests from governments for user information have increased by more than 100 percent. This comes as usage of our services continues to grow, but also as more governments have made requests than ever before. And these numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish.

Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants living in the country vary widely, but fall somewhere in the range of three to six million people. It is likely that around 30 percent of Moscow's immigrant population is illegal.

According to Russia's Federal Migration Service director, Konstantin Romodanovsky, these middlemen have created a shadow economy that amounts to almost $1 billion. As with every lucrative industry in Russia, this shadow market inevitably has ties to the government.

The cruelty that has become an all-too-common refrain in today's Russia stems, at least in part, from the ingrained belief in Russian exceptionalism -- the idea that Russian morality is unique and therefore beyond reproach. Originating in ancient Kievan Rus, this idea was propagated by the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages, and was prominently displayed in the communist revolutionary claims of the 20th century.