The anonymity software has sparked controversy but who built it, what is it used for, what browser does it use – and why is the NSA so worried by it?
Read: What is Tor? A beginner’s guide to the privacy tool | Technology | theguardian.com.
Category Archives: Technology
Your Next Investment: People, Not Projects | Mashable
Many investors say they invest in people, not ideas. Everyone has great ideas, but not everyone has the right mix of intelligence, resourcefulness and determination to execute the idea.
Enter Pave, an impact-investing site that need not be compared to Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Pave is a platform where individuals can back young people’s careers (the average funding goal is $27,000). The idea isn’t new — patrons and angel investors have been around for a while — but the technological tactics are new, and the platform helps to level the playing for people with big ideas and passion to match. The site launched in December 2012 and has 4,500 prospects and 1,700 backers to date.
Pave prides itself on people, not projects, and the setup enables investors to back someonebased on aligned interests, such as business, education and environment. It’s not a traditional loan, and it’s not a donation — the point isn’t for the prospect to pay the investor back quickly. The financial backing is a way for established individuals to help young, ambitious people build sustainable careers and projects over the next 10 years — and the prospects can spend money how they see fit. Backers earn financial returns for supporting successful prospects, and they often evolve into mentors for the prospect, though that’s not written into the funding agreement.
Read more: Your Next Investment: People, Not Projects | Mashable
Infographic: The History Of Audio Equipment | Co.Design
A prominent sci-fi writer once told me that, as prescient as they’d been, he and his peers had missed one big tech trend: Miniaturization. And they really did miss it. Because as you examine Pop Chart Lab’s latest mega print of 219 sonic devices across history, The Advance of Audio Apparatuses, it’s obvious that technology has been getting smaller for a long time.
Read more: Infographic: The History Of Audio Equipment | Co.Design | business + design.
12 Monumental Structures Made From Type | Gizmodo
Electronic printable ink developed by scientists | Telegraph
An electronic ink that can be printed on a laser and then conducts electricity has been developed by scientists.
The graphene-based ink was used to make a small plastic keyboard by researchers at the University of Cambridge, who found the one atom-thick material could be used to make cheap, printed electronics.
It could be used in the future for people who need heart monitors, as they could be embed onto clothes, or for tracking luggage in an airport to ensure it is loaded on to the correct plane.
The graphene-based ink has a number of interesting properties, including flexibility, optical transparency, and electrical conductivity.
via Electronic printable ink developed by scientists | Telegraph.
Google Maps becoming more context-aware and ’emotional’ | CNET
Snip
SAN FRANCISCO — For Google, the map of the future is taking everything it knows about you and the world and plotting it in real-time as you move through your life.
“We can build a whole new map for every context and every person,” said Bernhard Seefeld, product management director for Google Maps, speaking at the GigaOm Roadmap 2013 conference. “It’s a specific map nobody has seen before, and it’s just there for that moment to visualize the data.”
Like the early days of map making that told stories of discovery and created more of an emotional connection with the unfolding world, Google wants to build what Seefeld called “emotional maps that reflect our real life connections and peek into the future and possibly travel there.”
Google’s context-aware maps will require refining and extending the underlying map data, and combining it with the kind of personal data from applications that powers Google Now, the company’s personal digital assistant technology.
Read more: Google Maps becoming more context-aware and ’emotional’ | Internet & Media – CNET News.
Video gaming boosts certain brain regions, study says | CNET
This is your brain. This is your brain on Super Mario 64. See how the gray matter is increased? A new study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry suggests a whole lot of benefits to playing video games.
The study concludes that “video gaming causes increases in the brain regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation, and strategic planning, as well as fine motor skills.”
Read: Video gaming boosts certain brain regions, study says | Crave – CNET.
A Website Designed Infographic | Simple Square
A Website Designed is an infographic of the average website’s creation. via A Website Designed Infographic | The Simple Square Blog | Simple Square.
Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift
Our classroom glows with activity. One kid drafts a how-to article in which he explains the steps involved in wiring a cardboard Minecraft controller. Another writes a branching-path, choose-your-own-adventure story in Twine, a free, downloadable interactive fiction app. A student who’s claimed throughout his middle-school career that he isn’t a writer leans close to his laptop screen, finding and fixing coding errors. He composes, compiles, and debugs more than 100 lines of code to light up a three-by-three-light LED display plugged into his laptop.
A pair of especially curious students sits huddled around our newest computer, an exposed-faced circuit board smaller than a paperback book. It’s called a Raspberry Pi. They’re watching how the code they write in one window changes the course of a game in another. They may not know it yet, but these kids are playing with an open-source computing platform that just might change the way we teach young people how to interact with computers.
Read: Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift.
News: Books & Publishing, Music & Film
Books & Publishing
Jeff Bezos’ Wife And Co-Workers Call Out Brad Stone’s Amazon Book As Inaccurate…On Amazon | TechCrunch
In what can only be seen as a moment of delicious cyclical irony, a new fairly negative review of the book has been posted by none other than Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos. We’ve confirmed the identity of the reviewer, the only peson to leave a one-star reaction so far.
Readmill is my new Favorite eBook Reading App [Review] | Beautiful Pixels
One of the biggest problems faced while upgrading to the paperless world — at least when it comes to reading ebooks — is that the system is horribly fragmented. Some ebooks are available on one platform while some on others. Keeping track of all your purchases and syncing them with different devices is always a pain. Readmill wants to take some of that pain away from you.
New E-Book Services Borrow a Page From Netflix [Review] | AllThingsD
Review of Oyster and Scribd e-book subscription services.
- 50,000 books to be donated to kids by Capital One | LA Times
- Noted Mozambican Author Mia Couto Wins 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature | Neustadt Prize
- PD James claims to have solved 1931 cold case murder | the guardian
- NaNoWriMo: how to write a novel in a month | The Telegraph
- Surprised by C. S. Lewis Fifty Years After His Death | HuffPost
- ‘Favourite Scottish book’ sought | The Bookseller…but, JK Rowling ‘not good enough’ for favourite Scottish books ballot | theguardian
- 12 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Masterpiece | Flavorwire
- 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers | Flavorwire
- What Your Favorite ‘Harry Potter’ Character Says About You | HuffPost
- Romance and the Problems with “By Women, For Women, About Women” | BookRiot
- 20 ‘Bookmarks’ To Show Off Your Literary Love | Mashable
Music & Film
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