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NEW YORK (MainStreet)—It used to be the stuff of science fiction and Dick Tracy comic strips. But fiction became fact and Mobile Personal Communication Devices (MPCDs) are commonplace. Now they are used for more than mere conversation. Mobile financial transactions are routine. They are even beginning to replace wallets. But as wallets go high tech, so do criminals. The advent of mobile wallets is creating ... http://www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/technology/beware-vulnerability-cyber-pickpocketing

Bloomberg has become the first major corporate backer of the Ubuntu Edge, pledging $80,000 towards the project to build a crowdfunded smartphone, but this is unlikely to be enough to help Canonical reach its ambitious funding goal of $32 million (£20.8m). Canonical says the pledge is a huge boost for the company and other backers who want to get their hands on the world’s first “truly converged computing device”, but at the time of writing, the Ubuntu Edge has achieved just $8,544,097 of its target with just 14 days of fund raising left. Bloomberg has signed up for the ‘Enterprise...

Artist Sabine Pearlman headed to Switzerland in 2012 on a unique mission. She was there to photograph 900 cross-sections of ammunition in order to expose the "otherwise invisible architecture" of some of the most destructive weaponry ever created. But in doing so, Pearlman made a conscious choice to not provide her audience with details about specifics: things like the names or purposes of the bullets themselves. "I wanted to keep them out of context, in order to make it possible for people who look at the images to appreciate them for many different reasons," she said....

A person needs to understand how “Power” is distributed among the levels of the Triad. First level is the power elite who draw its members from three areas: the highest political leaders including the president and a handful of key cabinet members and close advisers; major corporate owners and directors; and high-ranking military officers. The Second or middle level (the Congress, the courts, the states), who implement corrupt policies and trample liberties, and the Third level are the masses (sheeple), you and I that get NOTHING. Most of the participants in the middle level are actually motivated by rather selfish...

LAPD is testing a program in several of their divisions that predicts where crime may likely to occur. Headed by Predictive Policing company known as PredPol (a team of mathmaticians & social scientists) LAPD reports a 13% crime down during the 4 months it was rolled out compared to an increase 0.4% in the rest of the city where the rollout had not happened. But, its still not 100 percent effective. So a big concern is who's paying for this experiment and what rights will be violated in the future to seek deeper information so law enforcement can predict.

One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives. The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — This is one of those incidents that may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If so, it does not augur well for the future of elections. The FBI announced earlier this month that a student from California State, San Marcos campus named Matthew Weaver, 22 of Huntington Beach, Ca., was sentenced to one year in prison for engaging in identity theft while trying to steal a campus election. He wanted to become student body president and engaged in some high tech voter fraud to do so. Weaver stole the identities and passwords of his...

Elizabethan craftsmen developed advanced manufacturing technology that could match that of the 21st century, claim researchers from Birmingham City University who are analysing a 400-year-old hoard of jewellery. The team from Birmingham City University have analysed the craftwork behind the famous Cheapside Hoard - the world's largest collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery discovered in a London cellar in 1912. Among the historic find – which is being showcased by the Museum of London – is a Ferlite watch that dates back to the 1600s and is so technologically advanced it has been described as the "iPod of its day"....

On July 5, the Pentagon's ground-based midcourse defense program, or GMD, failed to intercept a ballistic missile fired from the Marshall Islands. Although the launch was only a test, the July 5 failure was the latest in a string of failures since successful runs in 2008. Now, some lawmakers are blaming that failure on President Obama and his administration, because of their decision to "drastically cut funding for the GMD program," leaving it on "life support."

House Republicans aren't the only people rooting for the death of the Senate immigration bill. Ten thousand miles away, almost the entire Indian subcontinent is cheering on the bill's demise. That’s because a coalition of domestic high-tech companies and pro-labor Democrats has twisted the worthy goal of knocking down America’s barriers to technical foreign talent into blatant protectionism. Companies like IBM and Accenture have managed to rewrite the H-1B visa program so as to allow themselves to add foreign workers to their U.S. payrolls while forcing Indian companies in the U.S. to subtract Indian workers from theirs. Not only is...

Everybody talks about education -- the politicians loudest of all, until they get bored with the subject -- but the education, and the miseducation, of our children continues as the concern dearest to the hearts of parents. Everyone, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, male and female, agree that "somebody has to do something." The argument, angry and contentious, is about the who and the what. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City who has solutions to problems we don't yet have, arrived fresh from his first election three terms ago with the announcement that he wanted to be...

A source at Russia's Federal Guard Service (FSO), which is in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications and protecting President Vladimir Putin, claimed that the return to typewriters has been prompted by the publication of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website, as well as Edward Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence contractor. The FSO is looking to spend 486,000 roubles – around £10,000 – on a number of electric typewriters, according to the site of state procurement agency, zakupki.gov.ru. The notice included ribbons for German-made Triumph Adlew TWEN 180 typewriters, although it was not clear if the typewriters themselves were this...

The IRS has been credibly accused of targeting conservatives as a way to minimize their participation in the 2014 elections. But there is a mirror image to their suppression in the last cycle; the Obama campaign's utilization of Big Data to bring liberal partisans to the polls. It was something that the press writing of admiringly both before and after the election, for example: Time: How Obama's number-crunchers helped him win Businessweek: Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big-Data Brains Other outlets have confessed to some trepidation: Gizmodo: How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money...

Doug Engelbart, who has died aged 88, will be remembered as the man who in 1963 invented the computer mouse, but that was incidental to his vision of computers augmenting the human intellect and increasing our "collective IQ". While he became a much-loved and oft-lauded Silicon Valley celebrity, his most visionary ideas were neglected and went unfunded.

This stuff could very well revolutionize nuclear power. Thorium-MOX can be formed into rods and used in current generation (Gen II) nuclear reactor with minimal retrofitting. Thor Energy is currently testing the new technology on the small scale. A prototype reactor will power a paper mill in the town of Halden, Norway for the next five years. If the fuel proves to be commercially viable during that test, we could see a sea change in nuclear power by the end of the decade.

Children’s physical disabilities are all too often a reason for parents to decide to have an abortion, but sometimes parents choose life and then the miracle of modern technology takes over.That is the case for a three-year-old boy who is now hearing the world — and his father — for the first time thanks to an auditory brain stem implant.Little Grayson Clamp was born without his cochlear nerves — the nerves necessary to transmit sound form the inner ear to the brain. A cochlear implant did not work so his parents went to the next option.“They then enrolled Grayson in...

We all want a great, high-paying job. To make that happen, it helps to be in an area where there are more jobs to fill than qualified people to fill them. We worked with the folks at job hunting site Bright to scout out the places in the country that have the most tech jobs. Bright sifted through 3.5 million job postings, plus government job data. As you can see from the following maps, some cities post a lot of jobs per capita. Watch each map change to see how the job market changed last quarter.

What ever happened to the once strong, vital, unique American language? It hasn't been seen in some time. Maybe because it's been completely covered by the thicket of "you knows" and "whatevers" and various other verbal tics. The way kudzu, given sufficient time and neglect, will completely hide a great oak. H.L. Mencken, who wrote his authoritative three-volume study "The American Language" in between his provocative columns for the Baltimore Sun, would be hard put to recognize the once vibrant American vernacular. In recent years, a tumorous mass of text-message techno-lingo has only added another layer to the overgrowth covering...

Would you wear an electronic tattoo if you couldn’t log on to the Internet without one?  That may sound crazy to many of you, but the technology for such a system already exists.  RFID tattoos have existed for quite some time, and they are already being used on animals.  But now an entirely new generation of electronic tattoos are being developed that can monitor your vital signs, interact with your mobile phone and even communicate directly with your mind.  These new electronic tattoos are thinner than a human hair, and they are going to fundamentally transform the way that we think...

A popular meme of the immigration debate has to do with the claim from technology companies that there's a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) worker shortage in the United States. This is frequently used to bolster the argument that the U.S. should increase the number of temporary visas issued to foreign-born workers in order to fulfill demand in the tech industry for techie talent. A new report from the esteemed Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce presents a pretty significant rebuttal to that claim. Released on Wednesday, the annual report looks at how new college graduates are faring...