Breaking up in IKEA

I have to admit, I was completely oblivious of the regularity of meltdowns between couples while shopping at IKEA. Usually Emily and I end up hating everyone else, not each other, navigating the hordes of listless meandering shoppers doing their best impersonation of The Walking Dead extras. But I guess it's a pretty common place to call it quits while, ironically, bickering over MALIN LÖV pillows...

Read more and watch the video

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/breaking-up-in-ikea-170053

Men set to live as long as women, figures show

The gap between male and female life expectancy is closing and men could catch up by 2030, according to an adviser for the Office for National Statistics.

Prof Les Mayhew said the difference between the sexes peaked at nearly six years in the 1970s.

Life expectancy is going up all round, but the rates for men are increasing faster.

Plummeting smoking rates in men are thought to explain a lot of the change.

Prof Mayhew, a professor of statistics at Cass Business School, analysed life expectancy data in England and Wales. He was working out how long 30-year-olds could expect to live.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17811732

Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?

To briefly state the obvious, the internet giants are seriously big: Google is not only the world's largest search engine, it's one of the top three email providers, a social network, and owner of the Blogger platform and the world's largest video site, YouTube. Facebook has the social contacts, messages, wallposts and photos of more than 750 million people.

Given that such information could be used to sell us stuff, accessed by government or law enforcement bodies (perhaps without warrants, under legal changes), or – theoretically, at least – picked up by hackers or others, it's not unreasonable to wonder exactly how much the internet giants know about us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/me-and-my-data-internet-giants

The downstairs loo: the most British of rooms

Around the world, bathrooms are mainly functional. Whether a hole in the ground in the Amazon or a futuristic outpost in Tokyo, most lavatories are happy to serve their crucial but unglamorous purpose without too much fuss.

The exception to this rule is the British downstairs loo. In this peculiar lair, anything goes, except taste or decorum. Minor aristocrats will merrily display semi-pornographic Victorian postcards. Otherwise more modest adults hang up old school reports, or pictures of themselves at the seaside as a baby.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/9211537/The-downstairs-loo-the-most-British-of-rooms.html

Love is in the air: romantic garden visits

Maintaining a large-scale garden can be expensive, so opening it to the public makes sense. However the real reward lies not in financial gain but in meeting kindred spirits.

Adam Nicolson

Sissinghurst, Kent

There’s a great sleight of hand that goes on with Sissinghurst, an illusion. It pretends to be a private garden, that just happens to receive 200,000 visitors a year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenstovisit/9217428/Love-is-in-the-air-romantic-garden-visits.html

McDonald's profits boosted by store revamps

McDonald's profits rose 5% in the first quarter to $1.27bn, helped by a revamp of its restaurants.

The company said profits had also been boosted by new menu items, including chicken McBites and McCafe drinks.

Sales at US stores that have been open at least 13 months rose 8.9% in the quarter.

Last month McDonald's said Don Thompson would takeover as chief executive in July. He replaces Jim Skinner who retired after 41 years at the firm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17790279

London 2012: Air traffic chief speaks of challenge

The head of air traffic control in and around London has spoken of the "challenge" of preparing for 4,000 extra flights during the Olympic Games.

Paul Haskins, of National Air Traffic Services (Nats), is in overall charge of organising how thousands of aircraft will get in and out of London.

Air traffic controllers face leave restrictions during the Games.

Staff have been given special radar training to monitor newly-restricted airspace around London.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17804783

A Point of View: In defence of obscure words

We chase "fast culture" at our peril - unusual words and difficult art are good for us, says Will Self.

...

But the most disturbing result of this retreat from the difficult is to be found in arts and humanities education, where the traditional set texts are now chopped up into boneless nuggets of McKnowledge, and students are encouraged to do their research - such as it is - on the web.

In place of the difficulty involved in seeking out the literary canon, younger people are coming to rely on search engines to do their thinking for them. The end result of this will be a standardisation of understanding itself, as people become unable to think outside of the box-shaped screen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17777556

Apple iPhone 5 'to be cased in Liquidmetal'

The iPhone 5, likely to be released later this year, is expected to be cased in a ‘metallic glass’, otherwise known as Liquidmetal, says a Korean news outlet citing ‘industry sources’.

The case is expected to be 20 times stronger than the current encasement. According to The Register, ‘metallic glass is a metal alloy, but one with the disordered structure of glass’. The material has been around since the 1990s, but since a new breakthrough in ‘superspeed pulse mould technology’, this type of glass, which is as tough as metal, can now be used for phone casings.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on rumours and speculation.

The technology giant has signed an exclusive deal with Liquidmetal Techologies Ltd, the inventors of the material. Apple is believed to have paid $11m for the exclusive arrangement.

The part of the new iPhone expected to be made out of metallic glass is the back casing – as opposed to the glass display.

The same Korean news outlet has also predicted that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3, due to launch on May 3 in London, will be made out of high-tech ceramics.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9216108/Apple-iPhone-5-to-be-cased-in-Liquidmetal.html

The Five Qualities of Remarkable Bosses

Remarkable bosses aren’t great on paper. Great bosses are remarkable based on their actions.

Results are everything—but not the results you might think.

Consistently do these five things and everything else follows. You and your business benefit greatly.

More importantly, so do your employees.



http://business.time.com/2012/04/09/the-five-qualities-of-remarkable-bosses/

The Business Card Is Dying, Part 3,658

Business cards, it seems pretty clear, are on their way out -- at least as the default mode of communication among new acquaintances. It's not just that the little cuts of cardboard are easily lost, relatively difficult to produce and, compared to free contact-sharing apps, not at all cost-effective; it's also that the information they offer is severely limited compared to the information offered beyond their borders. Why stick to email addresses and phone numbers (and -- oh my! -- fax numbers) when you can share social media handles and personal blog addresses and other gateways not just to communication, but to knowledge? Who needs business cards when you have Google?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-business-card-is-dying-part-3-658/255921/

Career Strategies How to Make Your Resume Last Longer Than 6 Seconds

This should cheer you up: You spend days, weeks, maybe even months working on your resume, fiddling with fonts and wording and getting it into perfect shape for your dream job. Then a recruiter looks at it for mere seconds and tosses it. (We’re not joking about mere seconds.)




http://moneyland.time.com/2012/04/13/how-to-make-your-resume-last-longer-than-6-seconds/

3D printers could create customised drugs on demand

Scientists are pioneering the use of 3D printers to create drugs and other chemicals at the University of Glasgow.

Researchers have used a £1,250 system to create a range of organic compounds and inorganic clusters - some of which are used to create cancer treatments.

Longer term, the scientists say the process could be used to make customised medicines.

They predict the technique will be used by pharmaceutical firms within five years, and by the public within 20.

"We are showing that you can take chemical constituents, pass them through a printer and create what is effectively a chemical synthesiser in which the reaction occurs allowing you to get out something different at the end," researcher Mark Symes told the BBC.

"We're extrapolating from that to say that in the future you could buy common chemicals, slot them into something that 3D prints, just press a button to mix the ingredients and filter them through the architecture and at the bottom you would get out your prescription drug."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17760085

Cute cats, memes and understanding the internet

Why is the internet so obsessed with pictures of cats and is there more to them than meets the eye?

“Oh hai. Welcom 2 dis weekz colum all bout teh peculiar fenomenon ov memez an teh internetz fascianashun wif kats.”

That sentence probably puts you in one of two camps: someone who thinks the BBC’s standards have reached an all time low, or an aficionado of one of the most virally pervasive of all internet memes, the lolcat.

For the uninitiated, lolcats are the near-numberless offspring of a venerable class of object: the “image macro”, in which text is superimposed on to a photograph. Born in the mid-2000s, “laugh-out-loud-cats” – as nobody would ever dream of spelling them out – pair cute animal images with comically-misspelt captions.

This may seem distinctly limited grounds for amusement. But type “lolcat” into Google and you’ll turn up not only six-million-plus pictures, but initiatives ranging from scholarly studies to the frankly bewildering “lolcat bible translation project”, which is steadily converting the entire holy book into “lolspeak” (Genesis 1:1 – “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs...”)

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120222-cats-memes-and-internet-schemes

Colleges Are Pressured to Open Up Student Data

College campuses are hothouses of data, including course schedules, degree requirements, and grades. But much of the information remains spread out across software systems or locked on university servers. Now a crowd of start-ups has emerged with hopes of prying out those rich data sets to build an app economy for universities—a world of new personalized services that could transform the student experience.

The idea of opening data to consumers has already spread to such industries as health care and energy.

http://chronicle.com/article/Unlocking-Student-Data-Could/131551/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Screening Out the Introverts

Some years ago I joined my students in taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test to determine personality type. It was an assignment in a course I was teaching on vocational exploration.

Assuming there would be an average distribution of results among the 20 students, I planned a series of small-group assignments in which they would discuss their own results for each of the test's personality dichotomies (e.g., thinking versus feeling). But a problem turned up immediately: Not one student had received an "I" for introversion. Everyone, it seemed, was an extrovert (Myers-Briggs spells it with an "a," like "extra"). Everyone but me.

http://chronicle.com/article/Screening-Out-the-Introverts/131520/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

We Require Your Facebook Password (Comic)

http://allthingsd.com/20120327/we-require-your-facebook-password-comic/

London 2012: 10 reasons some people will dread the Olympics

This year's Olympics have generated vast amounts of excitement among everybody in the UK. Well, that's not quite right. Some people are really, really dreading them.

It's been difficult to escape the crescendo of positive publicity about the London games.

IOC chief Jacques Rogge is visiting London for the final inspection, which is set to suggest everything is on track.

Everyone from politicians to pole vaulters has waxed lyrical about the amazing spectacle that is going to take place this summer, bringing together a nation in a blaze of feverish excitement and sporting pride.

But there are those who are not quite convinced.

There are criticisms from people in London that the Games will cause chaos, disrupt business and make life more difficult for many people.

And there are critics hundreds of miles away from London who still can't quite work out why they're paying for the Games.

So what are the reasons behind some people's lack of enthusiasm?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17525402

'Imagine' That: Fostering Creativity In The Workplace

Beethoven would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. But other great ideas seem to come out of the blue. Bob Dylan, for example, came up with the lyrics to the chorus for "Like a Rolling Stone" soon after telling his manager that he was creatively exhausted and ready to bail from the music industry. After going to an isolated cabin, Dylan got an uncontrollable urge to write and spilled out his thoughts in dozens of pages — including the lyrics to the iconic song.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/148607182/fostering-creativity-and-imagination-in-the-workplace?sc=ipad&f=1008

New Study Shows that Free Apps Are Killing Your Battery

Is it worth it to buy the paid version of an app if you can download another version for free? If you value your battery life, it very well could be.

A new study conducted by researchers at Purdue University found that 65% to 75% of the energy used by free apps is committed to user tracking, downloading ads and uploading user information. That means only 25% to %35 of the energy is used for performing tasks like, you know, actually running the app’s core function.

http://techland.time.com/2012/03/19/new-study-shows-that-free-apps-are-killing-your-battery/

Building An Enterprise App Store – How To Choose Which Apps Your Employees Need

The enterprise app store is becoming a reality in many companies. Initially envisioned as a way to make internal apps available to employees, the concept has quickly grown to include public apps available in Apple’s iOS App Store. This allows businesses to offer employees a curated list of apps that relate to specific fields or job functions.

http://www.cultofmac.com/156640/building-an-enterprise-app-store-how-to-choose-which-apps-your-employees-need/

Two Years Later, iPad Apps Rule The World

The first iPad was debuted by Steve Jobs to thunderous applause on March 12, 2010. Many media pundits criticized the tablet for its ridiculous name and called it a huge flop. Fast forward two years later, and we couldn’t imagine a world without the iPad. It has shaped what Apple has dubbed the “post-PC era.”

Over 50 million iPads have been sold to date, and Apple just sold 3 million third-generation iPads over launch weekend. Most tablet manufacturers dream of selling 3 million units in a year, but analysts estimate that Apple will sell an upwards of 66 million iPads in 2012 alone. That is an absolutely astounding figure.

A new report from app analytics firm Distimo takes a look at the iPad and its App Store footprint two years later. Let’s take a closer look:

http://www.cultofmac.com/156895/two-years-later-ipad-apps-rule-the-world-report/

Tracking-Cookies Die tägliche Verfolgungsjagd

Wer sich vor Tracking schützen will, ist auf sich selbst gestellt. Ein Cookie-Gesetz ist nicht in Sicht. Dabei werden die Methoden zur Profilbildung immer ausgefeilter.

Sie suchten doch braune Wanderschuhe? Oder vielleicht einen passenden Rucksack? Eine praktische Regenjacke? – Man könnte es das Zalando-Gefühl nennen. Kaum hat man ein wenig ziellos in einem Online-Shop wie eben Zalando gestöbert, schon scheint das ganze Internet aus persönlichen Werbebannern zu bestehen. Und die zeigen immer genau die Produkte, für die man sich kurz vorher interessiert hatte. Gegenwehr ist möglich, aber mitunter aufwendig.

Re-Targeting heißt das im Fachjargon der Werbebranche. Gemeint ist, dass dem potenziellen Kunden nach einer bereits erfolgten Suche immer wieder das vermeintliche Objekt seiner Begierde unter die Nase gehalten wird. Es funktioniert, indem Shops und Suchmaschinen Cookies in den Browser des Nutzers setzen, also kleine Datenkrümel, anhand derer der Kunde später wiedererkannt werden kann. Dass die Werbewirtschaft mit diesen Krümeln nicht knauserig ist, zeigen Programme wie Ghostery, die alle Cookie-Annäherungsversuche von sogenannten Drittanbietern sichtbar machen.

http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2012-04/cookies-tracking-gegenwehr 

Titanic anniversary: The myth of the unsinkable ship

Design and technology innovations may have revolutionised ship safety in the 100 years since the Titanic’s fateful maiden voyage, but no-one will dare repeat the foolhardy boast

"There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers."
Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912

Words that have gone down in history, for all the wrong reasons. At latitude 41° 43' 32" north, longitude 49° 56' 49" west, 370 miles (595 kilometres) southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2.5 miles (4 km) down lays the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The rust-coloured remains rest in two parts, the stern around 2,000 feet (600 metres) from the bow and facing in opposite directions.

The belated iceberg spot, a failed swerve, the lack of lifeboats and the loss of over 1,500 lives – roughly 70% of the ship's passengers and crew – the sinking of the largest and most luxurious ship built at the time has become immortalized in popular history, inspiring documentaries, television dramas and Hollywood blockbusters.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120402-the-myth-of-the-unsinkable-ship

Rethinking the social network

It’s not how many friends you have in your social circles but who you are friends with that matters, argues columnist Tom Chatfield. 

At some point later this year, Facebook will connect one in every seven people on the planet. When it passes the billion user mark – and really it is a question of when, not if – it will inevitably be accompanied by the common lament of the social media critic: social networks degrade the idea of friendship. It’s absurd, they argue, to be “friends” with thousands of people – and an alarming sign of shallow times.

It’s a critique backed by several studies suggesting that it’s only possible to maintain meaningful social relationships with a relatively small number of people. A maximum of around 150 is often cited: a figure is known as “Dunbar’s number” after the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, whose work first proposed such a limit.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120411-rethinking-the-social-network

Life after Firefox: Can Mozilla regain its mojo?

Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker is sitting on a ticking time bomb.

The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google.

If you haven't heard of Mozilla, you almost certainly know - and perhaps use - its most famous product: the Firefox browser.

Since 2002, it has been steadily gaining market share against Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft's pre-loaded, oft-criticised equivalent.

It now has about half a billion users, a huge number of which are evangelists for the software. Many even help create it - it is one of the largest open-source projects on the net.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17663669

Titanic 100: We survived

Just over 700 people escaped from the Titanic after it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on the night of 14 April 1912. More than 1,500 others were not so fortunate.

The survivors scrambled into lifeboats or plunged into the icy water. In the years after the disaster, some of them spoke publicly about the Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage.

Here, with the help of archive images and audio, listen to what happened through the voices of crew members Charles Lightoller and Frank Prentice and passengers Eva Hart and Edith Russell.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17608126