It's fast approaching tax day and if you haven't already filed, you may be feeling a lot of pain around the whole process. Fortunately, the Internet is here to help. Especially with next year. New innovations online, both literally and as metaphors, can substantially reduce the headaches associated with paying taxes.
Determining what you can write off as a business expense can be particularly time-intensive if you haven't kept good track throughout the year. My wife and I have developed some helpful practices after several years of filing together to mitigate the terrible tax-time pain. And when I say we, I mean she's come up with these ideas and then either done them or told me to do them. Here's what we've found to be most helpful.
First there were bar codes, then there were QR codes, now there are zebras. StripeSpotter, a program co-developed by researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Princeton University scans the distinctive stripes on a zebra.
The open-source system, which focuses on field photographs of zebras, can be used to associate field notes on a given animal, with the distinctive pattern, to track them through their life cycle.
There's increasing concern in China and worldwide about the detention of leading Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei. Reports first surfaced on Sunday U.S. that Weiwei had been detained by China authorities, while at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong. Weiwei is a prolific Twitter user, but his account hasn't been updated since Sunday (it's also translated into english). CNN reported today that China's ruling Communist party "unleashed a blistering attack" on both Weiwei and the West for criticizing the apparent arrest.
Many of China's own citizens are voicing their concern on China's leading Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo. To do this, users must creatively route around active censorship on Weibo.
Spammers are using Facebook Events to trick users into completing online surveys, taking part in online contests and perform other tasks which allow spammers to generate commissions. In some cases, users are also tricked into giving up their mobile phone number, which is then automatically signed up for expensive premium services.
According to multiple security firms, spammers using Facebook Events to promote their links have been highly successful in their efforts to dupe unsuspecting users thus far. According to a report from TrendMicro,"tens of thousands" of users had mistakenly registered for one spammer's event. Meanwhile, Sophos found an example where over 10 million Facebook users had been targeted, and over 165,000 had accepted.
Like the popular flight-finding service Kayak, a new startup called Sparkbuy, launching at the Web 2.0 Expo today, wants to make the process of finding the perfect gadget easier using a similar simplified interface. Although consumers already have a number of gadget-shopping services at their disposal, including everything from Google Product Search to Amazon, Sparkbuy is innovating through its easy-to-use website design and its manuallymcurated collection of data.
The result is a gadget-shopping site that even the most woefully un-tech-savvy consumer could use, while still appealing to gadget geeks looking for an easier comparison shopping tool.
Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue.
On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.
Part of covering the culture of technology is covering technology's use by the culture at large. At a certain point, however, I have had to acknowledge that we are not a general news organization. We don't cover world news, conflicts, crises. We cover technology. And when you attempt to force news to fit inside your frame, you run the risk of deforming it. As @laurenist put it, "Every major news event now also turns into a story about social media."
Social media is common enough, thankfully, that it has become a tool for dealing with news in a larger context. The mere fact that people are using social media in a given situation does not make that a piece of tech news.
Dr. Phil Andrews. Andrews was project director for the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee at his death at 55 of a heart attack earlier this month.
Prior to Tennessee, Andrews worked for a decade as the director of high-end computing technologies at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California. His professional interests included artificial intelligence and 3-D software. But his interests did not stop at the edge of his lab.
