Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Traffic: Palm Beach County testing new technology to ease traffic woes - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

  • Based in Palm Beach County's Intelligent Transportation System Center, a combination of traffic cameras, computer programs and devices that detect travel times and speed are giving traffic engineers quick access to data that allows them to make immediate changes to traffic signal timing to break up traffic jams.

    Since October, they've been using Bluetooth readers to determine how long it takes motorists to travel along those corridors. The readers pick up signals emitted by Bluetooth-enabled devices. The wireless signal can be turned off on smartphones, but is on all the time in cars

• Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy - Tech News and Analysis

  • Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy. If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action
  • But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.
  • This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.

• People Not In Labor Force Soar By 663,000 To 90 Million, Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels | Zero Hedge

  • Things just keep getting worse for the American worker, and by implication US economy, where as we have shown many times before, it pays just as well to sit back and collect disability and various welfare and entitlement checks, than to work .The best manifestation of this: the number of people not in the labor force which in March soared by a massive 663,000 to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer even looking for work.

• Microsoft threatened as smartphones and tablets rise, Gartner warns | Technology | guardian.co.uk

  • PC market begins to slip and tablets will outsell desktops and laptops combined by 2015, as Android ascendancy means challenge to relevance of Microsoft, research group warns
  • a huge and disruptive shift is underway, in which more and more people will use a tablet as their main computing device
  • also see shipments of Android devices dwarf those of Windows PCs and phones by 2017
  • "the interesting thing is that this shift in device preference is coming from a shift in user behaviour. Some people think that it's just like the shift when people moved from desktops to laptops [a process that began in the early 2000s]. But that's wrong. The laptop was more mobile than the desktop, but with the tablet and smartphone, there's a bigger embrace of the cloud for sharing and for access to content. It's also more biased towards consumption of content rather than production

• Gimmick or a breakthrough? - The Hindu

  • Technology forums say the technology that has been on the sidelines for several years might finally be taking centre stage now.
  • Though some enthusiasts would like the world to believe that the technologically superior NFC would spell death for the QR Code,

• Intel to Offer Multichannel TV Service, Takes on Pay-TV Cable Business | Variety

  • Intel intended to invade the pay-TV business with a nationwide multichannel TV service of its own.
  • his vow that Intel would start selling a device that would deliver video to TVs via broadband by the end of the year

• Obamacare to pay 'navigators' $20 to $48 an hour, provide free translators | WashingtonExaminer.com

  • Tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists hired as "navigators" to help Americans choose Obamacare options starting Oct. 1 will be paid up to $48 an hour, more than six times the federal minimum wage of $7.25
  • The rules allow navigators to come from the ranks of unions, health providers and community action groups such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood. They are required to provide unbiased advice

• 22nd Century Group Announces U.S. Patent Issues for MPO Nicotine Biosynthesis Gene - Yahoo! Finance

  • a company that has developed groundbreaking technology for tobacco harm   reduction products
  • The MPO gene encodes a protein involved in a key step of nicotine   biosynthesis. Scientists have attempted to clone the MPO gene for   decades
  • MPO expression can be either down-regulated or up-regulated to   produce tobacco plant varieties and tobacco products with a wide range   of nicotine levels (from very low to high), or altered ratios of   nicotine and other nicotinic alkaloids such as anatabine and   nornicotin

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.