Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Bye Bye Ballmer
The next stop on the Farewell Steve tour takes up to Windows XP. The Verge reports that Steve Ballmer, who attended Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI before he moved on, had an hour-long town hall in the Microsoft (MSFT) HQ in Redmond to bid the MSFT worker bees adieu. At one point The Verge says an emotional Ballmer paused to “enjoy this for a minute,” with tears visibly streaming down his face. He told the audience “You work for the greatest company in the world, soak it in.”
Here is another chance to enjoy the moment in an ad with Steve Ballmer and Brian Valentine in a Crazy Eddie spoof hawking Windows XP. If you listen closely at about 1:40, it sounds like Valentine even says Windows XP is secure!
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Brian Valentine, Business, Crazy Eddie, Microsoft, MSFT, Steve Ballmer, Windows, XP
How Does Caffeine Work?
More than 80 percent of American adults drink coffee daily in such mundane settings as the office and in the car that we often forget it’s the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. The Smithsonian’s Surprising Science article This Is How Your Brain Becomes Addicted to Caffeine, reports that scientists declared caffeine chemically addictive in 1994. The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) included caffeine withdrawal as a mental disorder.
Caffeine is a naturally occurring chemical stimulant called trimethylxanthine, which in its pure form, is a white crystalline powder that tastes very bitter. Regular caffeine use alters your brain’s chemical makeup, leading to fatigue, headaches, and nausea for those who try to quit.
The article describes coffee withdrawal. Within 24 hours of quitting, withdrawal symptoms begin. Initially, they’re subtle: The first thing you notice is a mental fogginess, and lack of alertness. Muscles become fatigued, even when you haven’t done anything strenuous, and you suspect that you’re more irritable than usual. Over time, an unmistakable throbbing headache sets in, making it difficult to concentrate on anything. Eventually, as your body protests having the drug taken away, you might even feel dull muscle pains, nausea, and other flu-like symptoms.
The author explains the reason caffeine is addictive stems from the way the drug affects the human brain, producing the alert feeling that caffeine drinkers crave. Soon after you drink (or eat) something containing caffeine, it’s absorbed through the small intestine and dissolved into the bloodstream. Because the chemical is both water- and fat-soluble it’s able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain.
The article says caffeine closely resembles a molecule that’s naturally present in our brain, called adenosine (believed to play a role in promoting sleep and suppressing arousal)—so much so, that caffeine can fit neatly into our brain cells receptors for adenosine, effectively blocking them off. Normally, the adenosine produced over time locks into these receptors and produces a feeling of tiredness.
When caffeine molecules are blocking adenosine receptors it generates a sense of alertness and energy for a few hours. Additionally, Surprising Science notes some of the brain’s own natural stimulants (such as dopamine) work more effectively when the adenosine receptors are blocked, and all the surplus adenosine floating around in the brain cues the adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline, another stimulant.
For this reason, caffeine isn’t technically a stimulant on its own, says Stephen R. Braun, the author or Buzzed: the Science and Lore of Caffeine and Alcohol, but a stimulant enabler: a substance that lets our natural stimulants run wild. Ingesting caffeine, he writes, is akin to “putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals.” This block stays in place for anywhere from four to six hours, depending on the person’s age, size, and other factors, until the caffeine is eventually metabolized by the body.
In people who often invoke this process (i.e. coffee/tea, soda or energy drink addicts), the brain’s chemistry and physical characteristics actually change over time as a result. The most notable change, the author says, is that the brain grows more adenosine receptors. This is the brain’s attempt to maintain equilibrium in the face of a constant onslaught of caffeine, with its adenosine receptors so regularly plugged (studies show that the brain also responds by decreasing the number of receptors for norepinephrine, a stimulant). This explains why regular coffee drinkers build up a tolerance over time—because you have more adenosine receptors, it takes more caffeine to block a significant proportion of them and achieve the desired effect.
This also explains why suddenly giving up caffeine entirely can trigger withdrawal effects. The underlying chemistry is complex and not fully understood, but the Smithsonian reports that your brain is used to operating in one set of conditions (with an artificially inflated number of adenosine receptors, and a less norepinephrine receptors) that depend upon regular ingestion of caffeine. Suddenly, without the drug, the altered brain chemistry causes all sorts of problems, including the dreaded caffeine withdrawal headache.
The article has good news, compared to many drug addictions, the caffeine effects are relatively short-term. To kick the habit, you only need to get through about 7-12 days of symptoms without drinking any caffeine. During that period, your brain will naturally decrease the number of adenosine receptors on each cell, responding to the sudden lack of caffeine ingestion. If you can make it that long without a cup of joe or a spot of tea, the levels of adenosine receptors in your brain reset to their baseline levels, and your addiction will be broken.
Related articles
- 10 Interesting Facts About Caffeine (livescience.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
LA Schools iPads Hacked In A Week
– UPDATE 08-28-2014 – Just in time for the start of School reports surface LAUSD is “re-opening” bids for its controversial billion-dollar contract with Apple and Pearson to give all students, teachers, and administrators iPads.
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The second-largest school district in the US is spending at least $1 Billion to complete a 1:1 tablet initiative. The Las Angles Unified School District (LAUSD) plans to deploy 650,000 Apple (AAPL) iPads, one for each student in LA county. The project slated to be completed by December 2014, has had problems that may prevent if from reaching that goal.
The project includes 500 million dollars for iPads and 500 million dollars for Wi-Fi and related infrastructure. The initiative is funded mostly by voter-approved school construction bonds, which taxpayers typically pay off over 25 years which the LA Times says “has sparked some concerns and legal and logistical hurdles.” (rb- I first noted the project here)
The project has run into a series of issues. The first issue focused on the 25 year payback period on a $500.00 device. A second issue emerged in September 2013 when the district recognized that it may need to buy Bluetooth keyboards for the iPads. The LA Times estimated a bill of $38 million for the oversight. The LA Times reports that the included software keyboard on the iPad might not satisfy the needs of older students writing term papers.
Also, LAUSD has planned to use the iPads for testing based on new Common Core English and math learning standards. The article contends that the iPad’s touch screen could frustrate students and even obscure portions of a test item that would be visible in its entirety on a full screen. (rb- I talked to many school districts about the SBAC keyboard testing issue, who is going to configure Bluetooth on and off? What about power? Does Bluetooth decrease the battery time on the iPad? Do you have enough electrical outlets to plug in 30 iPads? How is your Wi-Fi?)
In late September 2013, the LAUSD iPad project ran into a bigger problem as they deployed the iPads to high school students. According to the LA Times, it took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Theodore Roosevelt High School to defeat the LAUSD installed device security. Following the news that students were using the hacked tablets for personal use, district officials halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.
Students told the LA Times once they had the iPad home they could not do anything with the $678 device. Apparently, the students began to tinker with the security lock on the tablets and soon discovered all they had to do was delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf, tweet like, and stream music.
The new found freedom prompted L.A. Unified School District Police Chief Steven Zipperman to suggest that the district might want to delay the distribution of the devices. The chief said in a memo obtained by the LA Times, “I want to prevent a ‘runaway train‘ scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.”
According to a March 2013 blog post from Roosevelt HS, LAUSD chose AirWatch as the provider for the mobile device management system. And that when students first get their iPads they will have AirWatch already installed. The district posted an update on their website that indicated they have turned to AirWatch and Apple for better solutions to their iPad problem.
rb-
This really is a story of mismanagement from the top down. A billion-dollar project for consumer devices financed over 25 years – Really? Are the students of LA’s class of 2038 going to have to use the iPad’s from 2013? Where is the refresh program? How are they getting the money to buy 650,000 iPad 9’s in 5 or 6 years?
If the iPads are to be used at home? how is LAUSD addressing the digital divide in LA?
Did the big-wigs consider the equity of using iPads for high-stakes nationwide common core testing? Not only will LA students be compared against each other and the rest of California but also students in 44 other states. It is my understanding that the current SBAC test is not optimized to display well on small screens. Will the tablet form factor handicap LA students or others across the US using tablets when competing against others using large screens and real keyboards in ergonomically proper positions? Will LAUSD show the test takers how to see the entire question, or how to easily switch between back and forth between screens to review a passage and then write a response.
Call me cynical after working in K-12 and living in the Detroit area, but a public $1 Billion dollar government project seems like a magnet for mismanagement, fraud, waste, and pay-to-play scams. It already seems to be at least $20 million over budget to buy keyboards even at K-12 discounts. Hopefully, the iOS and AirWatch updates are already included in the existing contracts.
While the headline-grabbing hacking story may be resolved in Apple’s iOS7. AFAIK Apple does not let anybody into its BIOS or whatever chip it is on an iPad. That is why students can easily delete the AirWatch agent. LAUSD still has a task on its hands to get all the deployed devices up to iOS 7.
In more signs of mismanagement, The LA Times reports that LAUSD is missing 71 iPads. They deployed 69 of the missing iPads last year at the Valley Academy of Arts and Science. PadGadget reports that after the fact, the District ramped up its tracking efforts by adding stronger safeguards. Global positioning can now be activated for every tablet. Plus, an electronic inventory system registers who is now responsible for a particular device, and District officials can remotely shut down iPads reported stolen. Lt. Jose Santome of the school district’s Police Department stated, “We know what’s going out and deployed on every campus.”
Related articles
- How Apple is replacing Macs with iPads at school (gigaom.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Ultimate Hot Wheels Track
The “World’s Highest Wall Track” for Mattel (MAT) Hot Wheels was built on the side of an apartment building in Barcelona. The seven-story, 60-foot track was constructed on the ground and the 500 parts were hoisted and mounted on the side of the building.
Autoweek reports the track was part of fan-fest during the Spanish Grand Prix and the run was witnessed by 40,000 adoring Hot Wheels fans. See this record-breaking track in action in the video below… (OK- it’s in Spanish).
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
BYOD Could Land Employees in Jail
Agreeing to a BYOD policy could land an employee in jail. Courts can go after employee personal phones in litigation involving companies. Michael Kassner, an information security consultant told FierceMobileIT that employees could be dragged into civil or criminal litigation.
Employees could be required to give up their personal device to the courts or even have all the data on the device searched, with possible legal ramifications for the owner. According to Mr. Kassner, “There is legal precedence involving e-discovery and plain-view doctrine that allows the seizure of evidence whether it is related to the case under investigation or not.” There are three possible legal scenarios involving BYOD, says Mr. Kassner who consulted with Tyler Pitchford, with the law firm of Brannock and Humphries.
The first scenario outlined in the article involves an employee who has signed a BYOD end-user license agreement, having his personal data wiped along with the corporate data. If the end-user agreement includes the clause enabling the wiping of all data on the personal device, the employee is out of luck.
“In the above scenario we’re talking about a legal contract, which means if the employee signed the contract, he agreed to its terms, granting his employer the right to reset the employee’s phone,” comments lawyer Pitchford.
In the second scenario, the enterprise becomes involved in a civil lawsuit and a subpoena is issued for the employee’s smartphone. During the legal discovery process, sensitive personal information is publicly disclosed.
“Since the employee co-mingled work and personal data, she has turned her smartphone into discoverable evidence …The employee can seek an order quashing the subpoena or an order sealing the discovered information, but that’s unlikely in this circumstance,” Mr. Pitchford observes.
In the third scenario brought up in the article, the employee’s company does business with a firm that is the subject of a criminal proceeding. Authorities issue a warrant for the employee’s phone because the employee has done work for the targeted firm. Incriminating evidence is found on the employee’s phone and the employee is now under criminal investigation.
“Assuming the warrant is valid, then anything the government located in plain view within the scope of the warrant is admissible against the employee in another proceeding,” Mr. Pitchford notes.
Mr. Kassner concludes: “Until case-law or new technologies decide which way the legal winds are blowing about BYOD, it might be in your best interest to avoid BYOD and its alluring convenience.”
rb-
I am not a lawyer and you should consult your own legal counsel but as I have said this before – ummm Acceptable Use Policy?
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.