How much...

do you love your cell phone?

According to a new survey by phone security company Lookout, the majority of Americans would put themselves at risk to get their lost or stolen phones back. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed cared more about their device and the data on it than the danger they were putting themselves in to retrieve it...

As for the aftermath of having your phone stolen, ten percent of theft victims lost confidential company information, nine percent had their identities stolen, and twelve percent found fraudulent charges to their accounts. They also suffered a variety of negative emotions:

Not passing judgement, just passing along information. Read the whole article here...

Cell Phone laws....

Passwords

Time to check your password.

Password management company SplashData has analyzed millions of passwords released online by hackers to compile its list of the most used passwords of 2012. 
Once again, "password," "123456" and "12345678" were the top three most common passwords. 

But there were some interesting new additions to the list. "Jesus" and "Welcome" were new. So were "ninja," "mustang" and, intriguingly, "password1."

Our favorite password on the list, "trustno1," fell three spots from last year, making it only the 12th most common password. "Shadow" moved up one spot to No. 18 from No. 19. And "monkey" remained unchanged at No. 6.

SplashData recommends that if you use one of the passwords on this list, you change it immediately.

"Even though each year hacking tools get more sophisticated, thieves still tend to prefer easy targets," said Morgan Slain, SplashData's chief executive, said in a statement. "Just a little bit more effort in choosing better passwords will go a long way toward making you more secure online."  LA Times


To see the entire list, check the link above. If your password is listed, you might think of changing it, or modifying it at least. I'm glad to say mine (I use more than one) are not
listed...but that doesn't mean I'm safe from hacking...just a little harder to get to.

Be Careful!

If I could teach the young people coming up one thing about the internet, it would be this...



They say the spoken word can travel through space to the ends of the universe. The internet may not be that far reaching but the words you type can in fact, live on forever. Be Careful!

The strangest wedding...

I've seen so far! But if they're happy, we should be too! If you listen closely, you can hear the soft strains of Ave Maria being played in the background as the "I-Fairy" robot conducts the service!



The nuptials at this ceremony were led by "I-Fairy," a 4-foot tall seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. Sunday's wedding was the first time a marriage had been led by a robot, according to manufacturer Kokoro Co.

You can read the rest here....

Divorce

Seems that each time there's a new advancement or development in technology, we create a new "god". Not only do they tend to get in our way spiritually, they do so with our every day life. Suddenly Facebook and other social networks are playing havoc with marriages.  

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a U.K. survey by Divorce Online, a  legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook.

There's a discussion of the phenomena at the Wall Street Journal, as well as here

But as a divorce lawyer who has practiced family law since before the Internet, I don’t think human nature has changed, or been changed by Facebook. Human beings seek happiness. Sometimes they find it in a good book or movie. Sometimes in alcohol, sometimes in a lover, and hopefully, in the best case scenario, they simply find happiness in themselves and their loved ones.

Technology

As someone who grew up in an era where I remember the following:
Black and white TV
Changing the channel (manually!)
Transistor radios, AM only!
only (3) network channels that went off the air at midnight
dial telephones
the advent of 8 Track tapes
men landing on the moon
Spending $25 for a "plain jane" calculator in High School
8mm movie cameras
and the list goes on and on...

The following article tells which new technologies will be obsolete before a child born today has the chance to use them!

As my newborn son grows to match the size of a mid-tower desktop, a large-screen TV and eventually a server rack, I can’t help but think about all the gadgets he won’t even remember using that were so important to his dad. I’m not talking about long dead-and-buried technologies such as the VHS recorder or the 35mm camera. Rather, I’m thinking about devices and concepts most of us use today that will fall out of mainstream use so soon that he either won’t remember them, or will only have very hazy memories of having lived with them.

Water

This is too cool...



The video contains no computer-aided visual effects or post processing...it's because:

YouTube user Brusspup took a subwoofer (a speaker which provides deep bass tones for music) and set it to the same frequency as the frame rate of his video camera. Then, he pumped water through a small plastic hose directly in front of the woofer, which vibrates the water as it flows into a pan below.
Because the water is vibrating at the same rate that the camera is recording, the water appears to freeze in mid air. By slightly tweaking the speaker's frequency, the water can even appear to flow up from below. 

 What minds can conceive!

Christmas Trees and I-Pads

No, not IPads under Christmas Trees...

Good Night...

M.W. Brown wrote "Goodnight Moon" sixty years ago. Countless children have gone to sleep with the pleasing refrain of the child telling everything good night. Now there's a new take on this timeless classic..."Goodnight IPad"...

Creative brains on campus....

"How much time scholars will henceforth save!"
Imagine your dissertation has, say, 200 sources, and sifting through the pile of books and holding one open on your knee while you type takes something on the order of three minutes per book. Copyediting that and getting the formatting consistent will take you another minute or so for every 10 citations if you're extremely speedy. Furthermore, you'll need sanity breaks.

Thanks to a new App by 7 college students...writing papers just got easier...

The app works by using the smartphone's camera to scan the barcode on the back of a book. Then it emails you a citation formatted to fit one of four common bibliographic styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE. The app was one of seven developed over seven sleepless days by seven undergraduates at the University of Waterloo. Thus they called the week-long experiment in coding creativity and class-cutting "7Cubed," and even made a little video about it.
Check out the video below or The Great App Race...

The Internet...

The last part of the video asks, "How has it changed your business?"...The church as a whole seems to have fought becoming a presence on the internet. Don't get me wrong...there are now thousands of blogs and web-sites dedicated to Christianity and the Church but we have been slow to utilize it's capabilities. I don't ever want it to replace attending church on Sunday morning or Bible Study on Wednesday night...but what about the other days of the week? And if we want to reach out to the younger generations, we MUST speak to them in ways that interest them...

We must communicate our message in every way possible...and if we do, people will listen!

Devotion...

but not in the way you think!



What is the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words...

BBC's take on a Blackberry

For those who are up to date on the latest technology...it's too funny. For those who are not, try not to scratch your head too much!

Great new site!

I can always count on Gavin to be on the cutting edge of all things technical...he's associated with a new website that looks to be something I'll check in on time and again...check out Sticky Sheep!

Especially the article about footwashing...everyone's favorite subject!

Monday

Considering everyone's love of technology...it was only a matter of time! Saw this on The Anchoress blog...

Now you see it...

The visual technology used to make movies and television programs is absolutely fabulous! And amazing. But what if this ability were used to manipulate or deceive people? While it is normally used to make what we watch more entertaining, I'm a wee bit nervous about it's potential for misuse. What if you can't believe what you see anymore?