Tag Archive for 2012

| December 23, 2012
Comments Off on Christmas Tree-gonometry

Christmas Tree-gonometry

Christmas TreegonometryGizmag let us know how to get the perfect Christmas tree. University of Sheffield Maths society students Nicole Wrightman and Alex Craig have developed a formula for the perfect Christmas tree. They developed that formula in response to a challenge by U.K. department store Debenhams.

The formula uses the height of a Christmas tree to get that catalog-perfect look. The height tells you how to decorate the tree. The formula calculates the ideal number of baubles, length of tinsel, and length of lights. It even calculates the height of the star, fairy, or angel sitting atop the tree required to get the catalog-perfect look. “The formulas took us about two hours to complete,” Ms. Wrightmas said. “We hope the formulas will play a part in making Christmas that little bit easier for everyone.”

The “treegonometric” formulas are:

Perfect Chrismtas Tree

For example, a 6 foot tall (180 cm) Christmas tree needs the following decorations. It needs 37 baubles, around 309 feet (919 cm) of tinsel, and 18.5 feet (565 cm) of lights.  The star or angel must be 6in (18cm) to achieve the perfect look.

For those without a calculator at hand, an online calculator can be found here.

Sonya Gillam, Debenhams’ Christmas decorations buyer said, “We wanted to create a way for our customers to save time and money while still achieving the perfect looking tree, no matter what the size.”

Or try Treeasy.

 

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: Holidays | Tags: , , , , , ,
| December 21, 2012
Comments Off on I Survived the End of the World

I Survived the End of the World

According to some ‘experts’, the Mayans predicted that the end of the world is on or after 12/21/2012. Well if you are reading this the world did not end.

end of the world,

So who were the Mayans? According to this article, the Mayan civilization flourished in what is now the modern-day Central America region which includes parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. The period of their society lasted from roughly 1800 BC to 800 AD. Why the Maya civilization disappeared is subject to debate among scholars, and includes theories such as a multi-year drought, peasant revolt, disease, and possible overpopulation.

The Mayans left many contributions to the world including their hieroglyphic language, Mayan architecture which includes the famous stepped pyramids, and one of their most famous contributions, the Maya Long Count Calendar.

What is the Mayan Calendar? The Mayan Calendar is actually a collection of several calendars the Mayans used to synchronize events for farming, politics, and astrological events such as the Venus cycle. All of these calendars ranged from as short as 13 days up to 584 days. The Mayans designed their calendar (we believe) to be liner in nature so that it could be extended to any date in the future until eternity. BUT IT STOPS! December 21, 2012 is the last possible day of the current Mayan Calendar.

Did they expect a new, updated calendar would be created?

Are you supposed to re-cycle the existing calendar as the Mayan culture was steeped in the recognition of death and rebirth?

What did they intend when they made the current calendar?

 

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: Holidays | Tags: , ,
| December 20, 2012
Comments Off on Detroit Leader in Identity Fraud Rings

Detroit Leader in Identity Fraud Rings

Detroit Leader in Identity Fraud RingsMotown has a new not-so-good title. ID Analytics‘ ID:A Labs has identified the metro Detroit area as one of the top areas for identity fraud. According to their research, there are over 10,000 identity fraud rings in the U.S., and the three-digit ZIP codes with the most fraud rings are around Washington DC; Tampa, FL.; Greenville, MS; Macon, GA; Detroit; and Montgomery, AL.

DetroitThe credit rating bureau says an identity fraud ring is a group of people actively collaborating to commit identity fraud. Help Net Security reports this study is the first to investigate the interconnections of identity manipulators and fraudsters to identify rings of criminals working in collaboration.

While many of these fraud rings involve two or more career criminals, surprisingly, others are family members or groups of friends. The article says that ring members operate by either stealing victims’ identities or improperly sharing and manipulating personal identifying information such as dates-of-birth (DOB) and Social Security numbers (SSNs) on applications for credit and services.

Other findings of the study include:

  • States with the highest numbers of fraud rings include Alabama, the Carolinas, Delaware, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas.
  • While many fraud rings occur in cities, a surprisingly high number were also found in rural areas of the country.
  • A large number of families are working together in fraud rings, even using each other’s SSNs and DOBs. However, rings made up of friends are more common, with the majority of fraud rings made up of members with different last names.

“In this latest research, we have taken a broader approach, looking at connections among bad people rather than studying individual activity,” Dr. Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer of ID Analytics said in the post. “This information enables us to build new variables into our fraud models so we can help our customers to make better decisions and improve protection for consumers.”

ID:A Labs looked at about 1.7 billion identity risk events including applications for credit cards, wireless phones, payday loans, utilities, and other financial services credit products. It also examined changes in personal identifying information among accounts such as changes in name, address, DOB, and SSN to identity over 10,000 fraud rings in the United States.

 

10,000 ID fraud gangs active in US, especially the Southeast, study finds

ID Analytics chart The dots show concentrations of identity theft crime rings.

 

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.

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| December 18, 2012
Comments Off on VC’s Take on Ed Tech

VC’s Take on Ed Tech

VC's Take on Ed Tech  at GigaOM reports on an open online course on entrepreneurship in education called Ed Startup 101. During the course, Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, gave a little insight into how venture capitalists view opportunities in education technology. Union Square Ventures has invested in education social network Edmodo, Skillshare, Codecademy, and Duolingo.

skip over institutional buyers to target teachers and studentsVC Wilson said that education’s, notorious reputation for bureaucracy and long sales cycles have traditionally turned off VC’s (full video available here). But as startups have attempted new models that skip over institutional buyers to target teachers and students, investors have steadily warmed to the sector, including K-12 education. The blog cites data from GSV Advisors, a Chicago-based investment firm that specializes in education, which says that transactions in K-12 education climbed from just $13 million in 2005 to $389 million in 2011. Funding has been so strong that some have already started asking the inevitable question about whether an ed tech bubble is brewing.

Takeaways from the video

VC's Take on Ed TechConsumer tech offers plenty of models for freemium ed tech startups –The venture capitalist gave several examples in which consumer startups with a free service eventually found a path to profitability after years of venture backing, including Dropbox and Twitter. In those examples, he said, venture capital played a key role in helping them reach the scale that would make a freemium model work.  As the ed tech market expands, he expects models of all kinds – from those supported by advertising to those with enterprise licensing models – to emerge. Both Dropbox and Twitter are problematic to an enterprise network.

  • Someone, PLEASE give me a long-term educational reason to give students on-network access to Twitter that outweighs the distraction and cheating factors.
  • Dropbox is a potential data theft tool if allowed. We have seen 600 – 800 Mb of Dropbox space on user shares, then they complain when they can’t save their work to the network. Dropbox’s network behavior is annoying. Dropbox wants to check in with the mother-ship thousands of times a day. On our network, we block file sharing with the content filter. When a user installs a Dropbox client on their workstation (don’t get me going about local admins) we have seen 60,000 attempts to connect to the Dropbox mother-ship over the course of a week. Dropbox could improve their product by throttling their checking in – the longer it doesn’t connect throttle down their phone homes.

Sell to the learner first, not the institution

Work-aroundMr. Wilson says that ed tech firms should bypass traditional education sales channels. “We should compete with the existing education system as opposed to sell to it,” Wilson said. He thinks that entrepreneurs can make faster progress by bringing their tools straight to the learners and the teachers providing instruction. That’s the way Edmodo has gained its strong traction and the approach Codecademy has taken with its after-school program targeting students in schools without computer science instruction. As students and teachers adopt new platforms, Wilson said, the institutions will come around.

Gee I don’t know, sell to the end-user and then force the entire enterprise to change to accommodate a new toy, how very Apple of him. But VC’s don’t have to do the work. Maybe if he had to make AppleTV work on a network or get iMac‘s to regularly log in to Active Directory.

Vendor exclusivity is a bad thing

Vendor lock-inAs more companies turn their attention to online learning and digital education, Wilson said universities shouldn’t standardize with just one vendor but support the range of tools that faculty members choose. Exclusivity, he said, makes vendors “fat and happy” and less incentivized to innovate.  “I don’t think there’s any benefit anyone would get by standardizing on one platform,” he said.

I agree with him here, the perfect example is Blackboard. They don’t seem to want to make our life easier. The restoration process is stupid. Bring on Moodle.

Other areas of opportunity in ed tech

The VC says that his firm also thinks there are ed tech opportunities include:

  • Credentialing (Grades) Now that plenty of platforms offer courses and instruction, the next step is figuring out whether students are actually mastering the skills and knowledge that they’re setting out to learn.
  • He also said he thinks there are opportunities in peer-to-peer platforms, which leverage online communities to reduce the cost of creating curriculum and learning content,
  • Vertically focused startups, such as those similar to Codecademy and Duolingo.

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freemiumIt’s not only my opinion that the freemium model is a bait and switch scam. It sucks users into a product and then does a switch at some time in the future to a pay model. But that is a VC’s take on Ed Tech, what is yours?

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.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , ,
| December 15, 2012
Comments Off on Scan Your Sclera for Security

Scan Your Sclera for Security

Scan Your Sclera for SecurityTyping a password into your smartphone might be a reasonable way to access the sensitive information it holds, but a startup called EyeVerify thinks it would be easier—and more secure—to just look into the smartphones’ camera lens and move your eyes to the side scan your sclera for security.

EyeVerify logoMIT Technology Review says that Kansas City, KS-based EyeVerify software claims that it can identify you by your “eye-prints,” the pattern of veins in the whites of your eyes. The firm claims the method is as accurate as a fingerprint or iris scan, without requiring any special hardware.

The company plans to roll out its security software next year. CEO and founder Toby Rush envisions a range of uses for it, including authenticating access to online medical records or bank accounts via smartphones. Mr. Rush told TR that phone manufacturers are interested in embedding the software into handsets so that many applications can use it for authenticating people, though he declined to name any prospective partners. The security software allows people to bypass the security on their mobile devices just by looking at it.

The article explains that the technology behind EyeVerify comes from Reza Derakhshani, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Dr. Derakhshani, the company’s chief scientist, was a co-recipient of a patent for the eye-vein biometrics behind EyeVerify in 2008.

Retina scanTo the users, EyeVerify seems pretty simple (though somewhat awkward in its prototype stage according to the article). To access data on a smartphone that’s locked with EyeVerify, the blog says you would look to the right or the left, enabling EyeVerify to capture eyeprints from each of your eyes with the camera on the back of the smartphone. (Eventually, EyeVerify expects to take advantage of a smartphone’s front-facing camera, but for now, the resolution is not high enough on most of these cameras, Rush says.) EyeVerify’s software processes the images maps the veins in your eye and matches that against an eye-print stored on the phone.

EyeVerify CEO Rush says the software can tell the difference between a real person and an image of a person. It randomly challenges the smartphone’s camera to adjust settings such as focus, exposure, and white balance and checks whether it receives an appropriate response from the object it’s focused on.

Biometrics

The look of the veins in your eyes changes over time, and you might burst a blood vessel one day the article speculates. But Mr. Rush says long-term changes would be slow enough that EyeVerify could “age” its template to adjust. And the software only needs one proper eye-print to authenticate you, so unless you bloody up both eyes, you should be able to use EyeVerify after a bar fight.

EyeVerify still needs to do more to prove that. Mr. Rush says that in tests of 96 people, the eye-print system was 99.97 percent accurate. The company is working with Purdue University researchers to judge the accuracy of its software on 250 subjects—or another 500 eyes.

Mr. Rush’s favorite application is for voters on Election Day. “Being able to vote from the convenience of my house, I can already send in a mail-in ballot, why not verify biometrically here and simply vote?” he told Fox News.

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The end-user will be the fundamental roadblock to any eye-based biometrics.   Traditionally, anything related to eye recognition has received strong resistance, because it is just human nature to be squeamish about having our eyes scanned.

I covered the challenges of biometrics here, as long as this technology is limited to smartphones, some but not all biometrics issues remain:

  1. What is the real-world sensitivity/specificity trade-off i.e. quantified False Positive and False Negative Error Rates?
  2. Revocability. What happens if the mobile device is lost? What is the strategy to cancel and reissue a pair of eyes?

Despite the concerns scanning your sclera for security is coming to an iPhone near you.

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.

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