Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Labor Participation Rate Hits 34-Year Low

  • Following the Great Recession, we've entered into the Great Shift," says Express Employment Professionals CEO Bob Funk, who previously served as chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. "This is a period defined by the Boomer retirement, Millennial frustration, and growing reliance on government programs. All indicators suggest this shift is not sustainable.
  • he New York Times reported on the study and suggested that "another cause [of the Great Shift] may be the rise in the number of workers on disability."

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

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Lou Basenese - Seeking Al...

  • According to the 21st Business Herald, citing sources close to the National Population and Family Planning Commission, “China may relax its one-child policy at end-2013 or early-2014 by allowing families to have two children if at least one parent is from a one-child family,” says BofA Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu.
  • if the Chinese start (ahem) getting it on, we’re talking about an extra 9.5 million screaming mouths to feed each year, or about 170 million more Chinese by 2033. That’ll be enough to put the U.S. Baby Boom to shame. And then some

• Home | Mail Online

  • Watt a bright idea! Brazilian mechanic uses plastic water bottles and bleach to create LIGHT - illuminating 1million homes

• Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals, and Need No Power Source | MIT Technology Review

  • A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.

    These seemingly impossible devices could lead to a slew of new uses of computing, from better contactless payments to the spread of small, cheap sensors just about everywhere.

  • The devices communicate by varying how much they reflect—a quality known as backscatter—and absorb TV signals. Each device has a simple dipole antenna with two identical halves, similar to a classic “rabbit ears” TV aerial antenna. The two halves are linked by a transistor, which can switch between two states. It either connects the halves so they can work together and efficiently absorb ambient signals, or it leaves the halves separate so they scatter rather than absorb the signals. Devices close to one another can detect whether the other is absorbing or scattering ambient TV signals.

• NBC News buys smartphone video streaming company in bet on user-generated footage | The Verge

  • enable real-time sharing of smartphone video, which chief NBC News digital content officer Vivian Schiller believes is going to be the next generation of news coverage

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

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• The Business Case For Going Mobile - Network Computing

  • but there are plenty of good reasons why "mobilizing" your developer corps makes competitive business sense.
  • Adapting enterprise applications to the mobile world can be difficult but Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service promises to help.

• Creative Destruction Of Internet Age: Unstoppable - Global Cio -

  • Software is eating the world," is how Netscape founder and tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen puts it. "More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services -- from movies to agriculture to national defense," Andreessen wrote in The Wall Street Journal two years ago. "Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

• Market Daily News

  • It would be bad enough if hard working Americans just had to pay for their own health insurance.  But no, they are also expected to pay for the health care of members of Congress, employees of the IRS and other federal agencies, state and local government employees, their adult kids (because they can’t afford health insurance), the elderly, the poor, and now under Obamacare they will also be expected to subsidize the health plans of tens of millions of other Americans that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. 

    When you add it all up, the hard working, productive members of society are at least partially subsidizing the health care of well over half of all Americans while having to pay for their own health care at the same time.

  • And if you can believe it, Obamacare actually provides an incentive to not work too hard, because if you make too much money you could lose your health insurance subsidy…

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