Weekly Tech Roundup for November 2 2018
Technology is essential to a profitable business in today’s landscape. All silliness aside, technology is so important. And embracing technology isn’t always easy. From new apps, to updates, to the next big craze—keeping up can feel impossible.
We also included some snippets from our daily knowledge development sessions, just to give you a little extra knowledge. After all, knowledge is never enough. Take your time and digest every one of them. The world is fast evolving and so should your mind.
A New Device Can Hear Your Thoughts.
In early April, MIT research assistant Arnav Kapur, 24, uploaded a short video on YouTube. The clip showed him moving around campus in various settings wearing a white plastic contraption wrapped around the right side of his face.
As he walked by rows of bikes parked next to mounds of melting snow, his lips were closed while his inner thoughts flashed as words on the screen. “Time?” it read. A male voice responded, “10:35 a.m.” In the next scene, Kapur was shopping in a bodega. The prices of the things he tossed into his shopping cart — toilet paper, an Italian wrap, canned peaches — appeared on the screen. “Total $10.07,” the male voice responded. In the final scene, Kapur moved a cursor around a video console, ostensibly with his mind.
Arik Air – grounded by an Amazon S3 leak
Millions of customers flying Arik Air may have had their data leaked as details emerged on Wednesday that the airline’s data were found in exposed and vulnerable Amazon S3 buckets.
Hilarious Graphs Prove That Correlation Isn’t Causation
Anyone who has taken an intro to psych or a statistics class has heard the old adage, “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because two trends seem to fluctuate in tandem, this rule posits, that doesn’t prove that they are meaningfully related to one another. While that sounds nice enough on paper, it’s easy to forget when a provocative headline like People Who Have More Sex Make The Most Money woos us with a scenario we wish to be true. (Just imagine what visiting your financial planner could be like!)
Here’s the cure to being duped again. It’s a site called Spurious Correlations by Tyler Vigen–or more accurately, Tyler Vigen’s software. He created code to spot correlations in public data sets and pump out ugly but hilarious graphs in response.
‘Shock, Anger, Disappointment’: An Amazon Employee Speaks Out
In June, more than 100 Amazon employees signed a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, strongly protesting the company’s push to sell its controversial facial recognition software, known as “Rekognition,” to local police departments around the country. The letter has now been signed by more than 450 employees, and an Amazon employee published an anonymous op-ed with Medium detailing their concerns.
Rekognition has made headlines for months, as civil liberties groups have called on Amazon to stop selling the software to police departments because of the extreme privacy and civil liberties concerns that accompany the technology. In August, the ACLU uploaded 10,000 mugshots into the software and cross-referenced photos of each of the 535 members of Congress. The results yielded 28 false matches, a disproportionate number of whom were African-American.
40 Best Google Chrome Extensions
Google Chrome is the most-used Web browser worldwide, according to Stat Counter. With its swift performance, clean interface and easy syncing with mobile devices, that popularity is easy to understand. But Google’s browser also benefits from plenty of useful extensions available on the Chrome Web Store. Here are the best ones.
Just be aware that extensions can slow down your browser, so make sure you stick to what you think will be most useful. Some extensions can be ethically dubious or even malicious, but Chrome recently announced new restrictions on extension developers that should help mitigate that problem.
Samsung will reportedly open its Bixby assistant to developers
Poor Bixby. We admittedly haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about Samsung’s smart assistant since launch — but that’s not for lack of potential. The company has promised great things since day one, but has been slow to deliver on, well, just about everything.
Third-party integration was supposed to be one of Bixby’s biggest selling points, but in the year and a half since launch, Samsung hasn’t offered a lot on that front. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the hardware giant will shed more light on its plans at next week’s Samsung Developer Conference, with the launch of third-party “capsules.”
On the face of it, at least, the offerings sound fairly similar to the skills and actions we’ve seen on the competition, letting devs build their own custom responses. It’s something Samsung will really need to push if products like the upcoming Galaxy Home premium smart speaker are going to find any sort of market.
Apple News will launch a real-time election results hub on November 6
Apple is preparing to launch a new way for its customers to track election results. At 8 PM ET on November 6, the company will swap out the existing Midterm Elections section in the Apple News app and replace it with a new Election Night section instead. This section will also replace Apple News’ Digest tab at the bottom-center of the app, in order to lead users directly to the special section where they’ll be able to track the live results, updates on key races, latest developments and more.
The company is partnering with the Associated Press for its real-time election results, as do many news organizations thanks to AP’s history and experience with verifying results.
WhatsApp Android beta has been updated with a new feature that allows people to respond privately to a contact in a WhatsApp group. As per a report by WABetaInfo, which is known for its accurate information when it comes to features in WhatsApp, the feature has been enabled in 2.18.335 of Android beta. However, the site recommends to wait for version 2.18.336/337 update to try the feature as the the current version causes crashes when one tries to delete media in a chat.
The feature is called ‘Reply privately’ and it allows people to reply privately to a message received in a WhatsApp group. When the users select a contact for options and tap on the ‘reply privately’ option, WhatsApp will automatically open a private chat window with the contact. The report adds that the feature also works for old messages as well and also for groups where Send Messages setting is set to “Only administrators”. The feature apparently works for closed groups as well.
Build, deploy, and manage modern web projects
They aim to perfect a unified platform that automates code; creating high-performant sites and web-apps. Users should be able to simply push their code and let them take care of the rest. Build, deploy, and manage modern web projects. An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS. And that’s just the beginning.
Dealing with angry customers – Samuel
Every business or service provider have to deal with its customers. They have to be able to provide top notch customer experience for its users.
People get angry, users lose patience sometimes and choose to take it out on whomever is on the other end of the phone when calling customer care. This knowledge development session touches on how best to deal with these angry customers.
STEPS TO DEALING WITH ANGRY CUSTOMERS
- Let the customer speak and acknowledge the callers feelings
- Empathize with the customer
- Accept responsibility
- Offer help
About Weekly Tech Roundup by Bincom Dev Center
You probably already know that Bincom ICT‘s core is Best Use of Technology. This initiative is a compilation of some of the things the people at Bincom Dev Center found interesting during the week in review. Bincom Dev Center is the Training & Development Arm of Bincom ICT.
In this weekly publication, You will find various pieces ranging from ideas to trends, to random thoughts. They are here because we found them interesting. We also include some knowledge development pieces and where to get more information about the topic. We aim to publish an edition every Friday at 5:00pm (with exception of Holidays). We are working hard to keep ourselves updated and we think you should too!
Time for some Shameless Advertising:
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- And if you are more of a “Do it yourself” person (or organization) or simply need additional technology resources to augment your team, you can check out our IT outsourcing solution called Outsource IT by Bincom.
One more thing, Credits for this edition goes to :
- Contributors: All_of_us @ Bincom Dev Center
- Compiled by: Fisayo Adesomoju
- Edited by: Nnaemeka Nwosu
- Senior Responsibility Officer: Bade Adesemowo
