Info 202 F12

Everyone talks about the possibilities of exploiting the goldmine of personal information that Facebook has collected over the years. Many mobile and web apps dig into the pool of their users' information, but Wolfram Alpha's new Facebook Report function, as briefly explained in CNN Tech's article.

The term “surveillance society” was coined in 1985 by sociologist Gary Marx, who defined it as “all-encompassing use of computer surveillance technology in modern society for total social control”. Given that there are now security cameras in every store, office, bus, train, intersection, and ATM, it is clear that the first half of his definition is now reality. As city dwellers, we are captured on dozens, maybe even hundreds, of security cameras per day… and we don’t care.

A thoughtfully designed dashboard is an exceptional tool for keeping pulse on business performance, but a poorly designed conglomerate of charts and tables can be a distraction. The article “3 reasons to hate BI dashboards” by Joe McKendrick posted on the business technology news website ZDNet criticizes the current state of corporate dashboards for being poorly organized, not actionable, and not much more useful than they were 20 years ago even with technological advances.

On the 27th of August, 2012, Microsoft released its new terms of service agreement. What's interesting about this agreement is that much of it is organized in a question and answer format.