Robin Good: EdShelf for Best Educational Apps

Education
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Robin Good
Robin Good

EdShelf is a free web service which allows you to curate, review, rate and organize your favorite educational apps as well as to find and discover the ideal ones for your kids or for the next class you need to teach. Ed apps can be organized into collections which can be further filtered thanks to tags and categories. You can search for tools as well as browse curated categories, most recent additions and popular ones. To keep the quality of new apps included in EdShelf and to protect itself from spam, while you can add at any time a new app and add it to your collections, for any new app added the EdShelf curation team will then review it for inclusion in the general EdShelf database and if accepted, it will add more detailed info to it including video clips, and other relevant info. Here's the official rundown: “edshelf is a directory of tools for education. You can search and filter for specific tools, rate and review tools you've used, access your tools with a single sign-on, receive recommended and featured tools, create collections of tools, and share your collections with friends and colleagues.” My comment: Crowdsourced curation focusing on a very fast-growing and much in-demand niche: educational apps and tools. Simple to use. Excellent tool for finding relevant apps for different educational uses. Intercepts a specific need. Promising. Free to use. More info: https://edshelf.com/ FAQ: https://edshelf.com/faq Reviews: https://edshelf.com/press *Added to Curation for Education section of Content Curation Tools Supermap

Patrick Meier: Crowd-Sourcing CPR — There’s an App for That + Next Step Is Local to Global Range of Gifts Table

Crowd-Sourcing, Governance, Innovation, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
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Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Crowdsourcing Life-Saving Assistance

Disaster responders cannot be everywhere at the same time, but the crowd is always there. The same is true for health care professionals such as critical care paramedics who work with an ambulance service. Paramedics cannot be posted everywhere. Can crowdsourcing help? This was the question posed to me by my colleague Mark who overseas the ambulance personnel for a major city.

. . . . . . .

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

So why not develop a dedicated smartphone app to alert bystanders when someone nearby is suffering from a Sudden Cardiac Arrest? This is what Mark was getting at when we started this conversation back in April. Well it just so happens that such an app does exist. The PulsePoint mobile app “alerts CPR-trained bystanders to someone nearby having a sudden cardiac arrest that may require CPR. The app is activated by the local public safety communications center simultaneous with the dispatch of local fire and EMS resources” (4).

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Stephen E. Arnold: Automated Analytics Ramps Up — Robert Steele Comments

IO Sense-Making
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Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Big Names Ramping up the Analytics Field

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 11:41 AM PDT

The world of analytics is getting much more competitive. We’ve been seeing some impressive names belly up to the bar or revamp their already available platforms. One such case we discovered in a recent Daily Finance article, “Actuate’s Newest Release of BIRT Analytics Add Key Advanced Predictive Analytics for Business Analysis.”

According to the story:

“Adding to its already rich set of capabilities for business analyst-driven predictive analytics, BIRT Analytics 4.2 sports three new advanced features: Association Rules for detecting purchase patterns over time (for instance in grocery receipts by and across customer segments); Decision Tree, which allows prediction of outcomes based on decision paths; and Campaign Workflow to enable you to effectively execute campaigns based on the analysis, and set up a process to improve them based on analyzing the results.”

While we have extremely high hopes for this new edition of BIRT, we are aware that it’s a long, hard climb to the top of the analytics mountain. Personally, we think organizations like Oracle and Sinequa do a better job. We are patiently waiting to watch BIRT burst to the top of the charts, but know that it might never happen. Such is the world of analytics, be warned.

Patrick Roland, July 23, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

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SmartPlanet: Poker Chip Sensor For Everyday Use

IO Tools
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smartplanet logoSign of the future: Sensors that stick everywhere

Lose your keys? Your cat? The TV remote? StickNFind has an app for that. Better yet, StickNFind has colorful sensors the size of a quarter, its own Bluetooth software stack, and a developer platform that could turn this crowd-funded Indiegogo product into a foundation piece for the coming “Internet of Things” revolution.

StickNFind Technologies, based in Davie, Fla., shipped its first products in March after raising nearly a million dollars in a campaign that ended earlier this year. The company’s low-power Bluetooth sensors are irresistible for the most mundane of reasons. Put a StickNFind sticker on virtually anything, and you can track it from your smartphone up to 100 feet away. In the company’s own survey of 12,000 users, about a third put the stickers on their keys, 20 percent on their wallets, and another 20 percent on pets (mostly cats).

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Coming Push for Open Source Everything

#OSE Open Source Everything
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The coming push for open source everything

When we can no longer trust proprietary hardware or software, open source becomes the only option

By | InfoWorld

July 22, 2013

Frankly, I can't say I was surprised when I read that RIM's BlackBerry 10 transmits user email account credentials to RIM servers, which then log into the account. Obviously someone at RIM thought this would be a good idea, but anyone who does anything that requires keeping email private — say, an executive discussing sensitive negotiation strategies with colleagues, or a doctor or other health care worker, or, well, just about everyone — should be appalled that RIM covertly collects their username and password, then logs into the account.

With the news about PRISM and other clandestine data-vacuuming operations in place all over the world, it's clear there's a problem. It's not just about hoovering up information from millions of people — it's the vast number of devices that can no longer be trusted for use in business and government. When the code running anywhere along a data path is not open source, there's a chance it's doing something you can't know about and potentially transmitting data to someone who shouldn't have it. That possibility should serve to upset even nontechnical executives, to say nothing about governments all over the world.

Last year I wrote about how easy it is to place backdoors within corporate networks using Swiss Army knife-type tools, but those still require someone to physically place them within a building or at least to be hooked up to a network jack. Wouldn't it be easier for the spies to make sure the network devices you purchase, such as routers and firewalls, are already backdoored?

This goes well beyond the software or firmware layer. This goes straight into the chips themselves. The code on proprietary commercial firewall chips is unlikely to be accessible to security admins; even if it were, it's unlikely they would be able or allowed to perform rigorous code audits.

I'm sure some extraordinarily sensitive organizations do this or take similar action for extraordinarily sensitive deployments, but you can bet that the costs explode. Vendors like Cisco aren't going to let just anyone sniff around their IP unless it's a huge contract. Even then, the vigilance must be maintained to ensure that every single device is running the very same code. All of this has to be done all the way up the stack, across every device that will touch the network.

Open source closes the backdoors

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