That was Then... This is Now

My MIS 320 Business Decisions class just took their mid-term exams. Much of it involved your typical advanced Excel calculations, conditional logic, and forecasts. Certainly hard enough, but really pretty standard stuff. One question however involved "making sense" of a collection of data regarding travel to and from the state of Indiana. The requirement was to create a series of charts that would interpret the data for Indiana business leaders, politicians, state and local governments, and average citizens. On the surface, this appeared simple--after all how hard could graphs be? The challenge was that the data was a “mess” and students had to dig deep in order to uncover useful information. They also were encouraged to experiment with color, 3-D effects, and styles. Some of the more interesting graphs are shown here... Eric Sheppard used a "Pie within a Pie Chart" to breakout the "Other" category regarding means of trasportation in Indiana. This i...

Mattel has developed a tag that goes on your dog's collar that allows them to send one of 200 predefined "tweets" to a Twitter page depending on the animal's activity level. So far Mattel has not develped one for cats. Yet.

Across the U.S. and around the world this week, " Cyber Storm III " a global cybersecurity exercise, designed to test the security of the Internet as well as the people charged with protecting it, is underway through October 1st. This is the third time that the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with other federal agencies, is conducting this exercise. Previous Cyber Storm exercises were conducted in 2006, and again in 2008. For the first time, DHS will manage its response to Cyber Storm III from its new National Cybersecurity and Communications and Integration Center.

Raytheon has updated the exoskeleton suit that they designed for the military to a newer version that is lighter, more agile and uses less power. Wearers of the suit can easily lift over 200 pounds hundreds of times, punch through several inches of wood, and have the agility to fight, climb stairs, or kick a soccer ball. Read more about the "Iron Man" suit here .

Now you can monitor your home energy use with an app that connects your home's electric grid to an iPad. You can turn off lights, air or appliances when they're not in use, or even program them to turn on and off at certain times of day. According to Jim Gist, a vice president at Control4, you can even monitor and ovveride changes that others make when you re not home. "If your teenage kids are home alone and they turn down the air to 62 degrees, your iPad or iPhone will alert you and you can change it," he said. If you already have an iPad, you can download the app from iTunes for free, although you will have to pay a one-time licensing fee of $99. However, you should be able to make that back in energy savings. According to Gist, the app can cut lighting costs 10% to 30% and air conditioning costs 20% to 40%. See the other green ideas at CNN Money.com .

Might Pac Man have a shot at the presidency? According to researchers Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan and Ariel Feldman of Princeton University it might be possible. The two reprogrammed one such system, the Sequoia AVC Edge, to play Pac-Man. The researchers were able to load the software into the machine without breaking the tamperproof seals. The project, presented at the recent 2010 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, is another strike against electronic voting systems. "We could have reprogrammed it to steal votes, but that's been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun," Read the complete article at InfoWorld .

In an earlier post I mentioned that I'd deactivated my Facebook account due to some innappropriate content showing up. There have been other issues as well and today I'd like to share this great article about the latest problem by Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post . It is a sad but true fact that the Internet makes it very easy to spread disinformation as well as outright scams. Another reason to examine your own use of the Internet.