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Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

amazon political economy of the internet political economy of communication labour conditions

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
manca_

Apollo Plus: Microsoft's next Windows Phone update to include Wi-Fi, audio, and other f... - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...ollo-plus-windows-phone-update

microsoft Apollo Plus: Microsoft's next Windows Phone update to include Wi-Fi audio and other fixes

shared by manca_ on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • bring new features to Windows
  • // 33inShare Microsoft is currently preparing an update for Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo Plus.
  • A Wi-Fi connection fix is also planned to let connections always remain on, alongside some audio improvements. Apollo Plus will also test Microsoft's ability to deliver Windows Phone 8 updates over-the-air, a change from the previous OS that required users to plug devices into PCs to get similar updates.
Patricija Čelik

Next generation of social media 'exposing girls to sexual abuse' - Online - Media - The... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...s-to-sexual-abuse-8493945.html

cyber bullying social media

shared by Patricija Čelik on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A new breed of social media websites is leaving young people open to cyber bullying, with anonymous users able to bombard others with sexually explicit messages and demands.
  • The anonymity provided by the sites has made them a hotbed for sexual pressure, bullying and abuse.
  • Despite little mainstream media coverage, “question and answer” websites such as ask.fm, qooh.me and formspring.me have exploded in popularity
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  • Browsing some of the sites for just a few minutes reveals a torrent of sexual demands, explicit questions and abusive threats to users whose photos suggest they are young teenage girls.
Sandra Hribar

Study: Facebook Is Your Frenemy - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...272728

shared by Sandra Hribar on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Facebook is terrible. But Facebook is, at the same time, wonderful. We love it, we hate it. We love to hate it, hate to love it, etc. It is our best friend. It is our worst enemy. Facebook may be friending the world, in other words, but it is also frenemy-ing us, one click at a time. This, according to new research from the Skype-like service Rebtel, which regularly surveys its users about their habits. The company recently queried U.S. users aged 18 and older, garnering responses from 1,632 mobile device owners. Among its questions: What social networking sites cause you the most stress? Which have the most negative effect on your mood? Which have the most positive?  The survey's major finding was unsurprising: Most social networks seem to have very little negative effect on those users' overall moods or stress levels. However: Of the users who did implicate social networks in stress and general mood changes, the overwhelming majority of them pointed their collective fingers at one network in particular: Facebook. Asked "what social network causes you the most stress?," 18.4 percent of Android users and 21.4 percent of iPhone users replied, "Facebook." By comparison, the next-most-named network, Twitter, was called out by only 5.9 percent of Android users and 4.4 percent of iPhone -- and the next-most-named, LinkedIn, clocked in with 4.0 percent and 3.2 percent of users, respectively.
Meta Arcon

Figuring out the future of online privacy - CNN.com - 1 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

future online privacy cnn

shared by Meta Arcon on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • They may not be paying for the services directly, but customers still have a lot of power -- and companies know that they need to listen.
  • "We can't just sit back and allow the industry to just continue to ignore a core component of the user experience online," said Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader.
  • The more devices that connect to the Internet, from smart cars to home thermostats, the more data there are about a person to collect.
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  • Free versions come with ads, but for a price, people can upgrade to the ad-free experience.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information
  • Not everyone will want the same level of privacy,
  • "Do not track" seems like a clear, smart option to give consumers
  • Companies that provide free services, such as search engines or social networks, have to strike the right balance between respecting their customers' privacy concerns and serving advertisers.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information, attached to their real-world identity, in exchange for more heavily customized computing experiences.
donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...firefox-os-open-source-failure

shared by donnamariee on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
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  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
Janja Petek

Upgrade or Die: Are Perfectionism and Inequality Linked? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ism-and-income-inequality.html

technology google

shared by Janja Petek on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The New Yorker Online Only « The Powerless Presidency Main When a Criminal Leads a Country » March 6, 2013 Upgrade or Die Posted by George Packer Every day, in every way, things are getting
  • better and better.
  • Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, and execute other essential functions of contemporary life simply by issuing conversation-level spoken commands to a smart lens attached to a lightweight frame worn above the eyes.
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  • The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent. The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers.
  • “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
  • The strange thing is that technological romanticism doesn’t divide Americans. In an age when class and wealth determine everything from your food and beverage to your TV shows, news sources, mode of air travel, education, spouse, children’s prospects, longevity, and cause of death, it’s the one thing that still unites us.
  • the future, when the price drops below its current fifteen hundred dollars, the unemployed might wear Google Glass, too.
Rebeka Aščerič

BBC News - Children 'must know web limits' says Wales commissioner - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...uk-wales-21333477

internet ipraktikum children bbc limits

shared by Rebeka Aščerič on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Adults must impose the necessary checks and balances to keep children safe online, says the children's commissioner for Wales.
  • "All children and young people don't seem much of a distinction between their online and offline lives,"
  • Mr Towler told BBC Radio Wales. "It's all just one thing and they get really excited by the opportunities the internet affords and sometimes parents get a little scared about that and worried about what their children are accessing." 'Crossing the road' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones ” End Quote Keith Towler Children's commissioner Mr Towler said he talks to children in lots of different settings and they "still enjoy playing outside as much as they ever did". He said we need to recognise that the internet provides fantastic opportunities for education and learning and its making sure that children access that safely. He said that was a real challenge for parents and carers. "It's a bit like crossing the road, you try to teach your children the best way of crossing the road well. We need to teach our children the best way of using this fantastic resource. "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'". Handheld computers The commissioner also praised Hwb, the virtual learning environment, which he said provides protection for children using the web in schools. Mr Towler said: "We've got to get parents and carers to recognise that children do operate in the digital world. They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones. "They can access whatever they want whenever they want and parents need to engage on that. " "We need to remember that children and young people are much more savvy than sometimes we think they are, and they are much more responsible than sometimes adults think they are so its not all doom and gloom. "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that." Sangeet Bhullar, executive director of Wise Kids, added that the digital landscape was "evolving rapidly" and up-to-date data was needed on how children and young people in Wales related to it. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Web safety lessons urged for infants 05 FEBRUARY 2013, EDUCATION &amp; FAMILY Online chat 'should be monitored' 22 JANUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Body to promote digital teaching 22 JUNE 2012, WALES $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Children's Commissioner for Wales The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this pageShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Wales stories RSS Army base shuts in defence shake-up An Army base in Pembrokeshire is to close with 600 troops transferred to St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Soldiers' conman jailed three years Wales recall Warburton and Jones <!--
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'".
  • "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that."
Katja Saje

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier; Big Data by Victor Mayer-Schönberger an... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...wns-future-jaron-lanier-review

manipulation privacy data intrusiveness malevolence benefit danger

shared by Katja Saje on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Successful technologists are the new "ruling class". In this digital world order, money and power are concentrated in the hands of a few.
  • Each technological innovation produces the potential not just for cyber-crime, but for manipulating the way we lead our lives.
  • imagine you take a driverless taxi. Without explanation, it lingers in front of billboards during your journey or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something. Is that very different to search engines reading your mind through your click-habits or Amazon telling you, often accurately, what you really want to read next?
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  • The amount of raw data about all our lives continues to rise exponentially.
  • benefit and danger will depend on the use to which the information is put and the safeguards that protect us from technical malfunction and human&nbsp;malevolence.
donnamariee

A 'more revolutionary' Web - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23iht-web.html

shared by donnamariee on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Just when the ideas behind "Web 2.0" are starting to enter into the mainstream, the mass of brains behind the World Wide Web is introducing pieces of what may end up being called Web 3.0. "Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this was the embryonic period," said Tim Berners-Lee, 50, who established the programming language of the Web in 1989 with colleagues at CERN, the European science institute.
  • To many in technology, Web 2.0 means an Internet that is even more interactive, customized, social and media-intensive - not to mention profitable - than the one of a decade ago.It is a change apparent with multilayered media databases like Google Maps, software programs that run inside Web browsers like the collaboration-friendly word processor Writely, high-volume community forums like MySpace, and so-called social search tools like Yahoo Answers.
  • In this version of the Web, sites, links, media and databases are "smarter" and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today.For example, Berners-Lee said, a Web site that announces a conference would also contain programming with a lot of related information embedded within it.A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "There is an obvious place for the semantic Web in life sciences, in medicine, in industrial research," Shadbolt said, and that is where most of the focus is today."We're looking for communities of information users to show them the benefits," he said. "It's an evolutionary process."The big question is whether it will move on next to businesses or consumers, he said. A consequence of an open and diffuse Internet, he noted, is that unexpected outcomes can emerge from unanticipated places.
  • "People keep asking what Web 3.0 is," Berners-Lee said. "I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource."Said Sheehan: "I believe the semantic Web will be profound. In time, it will be as obvious as the Web seems obvious to us today."
sintija

BBC News - US internet 'six strikes' anti-piracy campaign begins - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-21591696

internet bbc campaign anti-piracy

shared by sintija on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • US internet 'six strikes' anti-piracy campaign begins
  • Five of the country's leading internet service providers (ISPs) are taking part in the Copyright Alert System (CAS), which they say is designed to educate rather than punish users.
  • "Over the course of the next several days... our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged peer-to-peer copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of copyright alerts to consumers,
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives. And for those consumers who believe they received alerts in error, an easy-to-use process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the alerts they received.
  • Meanwhile the UK has favoured a proposed "three strikes" policy
  • Under telecom regulator Ofcom's draft code, users who receive three warnings within 12 months would have anonymous information about their activities passed to copyright holders which could then seek court orders to discover their identities.
  • The policy had been due to come into effect in March 2014, but has been delayed after a House of Lords committee queried whether the Digital Economy Act - which the code is part of - complied with Treasury rules.
Katja Saje

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...le-glass-threat-to-our-privacy

google glass privacy public misuse social deprivation

shared by Katja Saje on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive.
  • The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it.
  • (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."
  • The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?
  • For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting.
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop.
  • "People will have to work out what the new normal is,"
Rok Urbancic

Facebook News Feed must reduce confusion - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...eed-must-reduce-confusion.html

shared by Rok Urbancic on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A new version of the Facebook News Feed will be unveiled
  • major overhauls of the News Feed, like the one coming this evening, are not that regula
  • the News Feed is for: it's there to tell you what your friends have been up to.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In reality, news from your friends is competing with updates from media organisations, such as newspapers and record labels, sports clubs, advertisers, app developers and all kinds of other organisations who would like to send you a message.
  • Teens are said to be drifting away from Facebook.
  • the company wanted the News Feed to be capable of displaying "more engaging ads".
anonymous

A world wide web of communication - but Yahoo! tells its staff to get back in the offic... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ack-in-the-office-8512141.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A memo sent last week by the company’s head of human resources told Yahoo! staff that they had until the summer to migrate back to the company HQ in Sunnyvale, California, or forfeit their job amid mounting concern that workers were “hiding” from bosses who had lost track of who was supposed to be where and doing what.
  • Some analysts have suggested the back-to-work diktat could be a covert way of reducing staff numbers and restoring a competitive work ethic at the company which employs 11,500 people in 20 countries. However, the move was described by Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson as “perplexing” and a “backward step”.
  • Chief executive Ms Mayer, 37, who once ranked her priorities as God, family and Yahoo!, is charged with turning round the company which has been eclipsed by rivals such as Google. She is said to have become frustrated at the sight of the half-full company car park emptying rapidly at 5pm each day – not least after building her own nursery next to her office to allow her to put in longer hours.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the CIPD, said there was a powerful business case for allowing workers greater freedom.
Meta Arcon

Google Glass: what it means for business | Media Network | Guardian Professional - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ass-mobile-smartphones-tablets

google glass business media network

shared by Meta Arcon on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google Glass could herald the next phase of mobile computing.
  • One of the most exciting announcements and demos from Google IO 2012 was Project Glass – Google's computerised glasses designed to let wearers use apps, capture images and video, use the internet and social networks on the move
  • Glass has a processor, memory, and a visual display that is positioned above the eye so that one is able to interact with the virtual world without inhibiting the real one. It has a camera, microphone, and speaker to capture and receive information. It has multiple radios for data communication. Glass also has gyroscopes, an accelerometer, and a compass so the device is aware of its context not only to you, but to your location in the physical world as well.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But how does knowing a fact faster help us? How can near-instantaneous access to information make a difference?
  • How does a wearable mobile device such as Glass represent a step forward for business? It does so because it provides the ability to interact with relevant data, in real-time and in a collaborative fashion that has never before been possible.
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