The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre

I was lucky enough to receive a pre-publication copy of the new book from Chris Brookmyre called The Cut.

tl;dr Ocht, just buy it.

The Cut

The latest crime noir release from the genius of Christopher Brookmyre is a great addition to his canon.

Focussing on the unlikely pairing of a recently released ex-con geriatric make-up genius and a young misfit horror film fan who survive multiple attempts on their lives before embarking on an unlikely road trip to clear their names.

Along the way they encounter many ghosts of the past as well as uncovering a cover-up that involves politicians at the heart of Westminster.

This book will not disappoint Brookmyre fans (and to be clear that should be everybody) who will enjoy the smartly drawn characters, the authentic dialogue and the sparkling wit.

Ocht, just buy it.

The Cut

How to Protect Students From Fake News | Edudemic

English: Graph of social media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: A protester holding a placard in Tahrir Square referring to Facebook and Twitter, acknowledging the role played by social media during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

For those raised in the information age, life without the internet is no life at all. It is often a primary focus of a teen’s day (75% of teens are online several times per day) and an important means by which they communicate with the world and take in new information. While information can be found in various sources across the internet, an overwhelming majority of teens and pre-teens tend to gather their information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A 2015 report by the Media Insights Project found that the majority of surveyed Millennials (aged 18-34) cited Facebook as their sole or primary source of key news and other information.

Unfortunately, Facebook is not known as a credible source for news. The recent outbreak of “fake news” has hit social media sites particularly hard, as these types of platforms are set up to propagate information at record speed regardless of source or content. In addition, teens are particularly bad at discriminating between real and fake news. According to a recent study out of Stanford, 82% of surveyed middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between ads and real news on a website, highlighting the need to teach students media literacy and proper research skills.

Source: How to Protect Students From Fake News | Edudemic

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Free Technology for Teachers: eduClipper Is What Teachers Want Pinterest To Be

English: Diagram of technology-empowered professional development for teachers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My friend and fellow ed tech blogger Adam Bellow has relaunched his start-up company eduClipper. Some of you may remember that Adam launched a private beta of the service last year. Well after a big investment from some venture capital firms and ten months of testing and revising features eduClipper is better than ever. In fact, I think it’s what teachers wish Pinterest could be. Last week Adam and I spent an hour talking about the new eduClipper in it’s current state and where it is going in the future. Let’s take a look at what will make eduClipper a very popular service amongst educators.

The thing that is obvious when you visit eduClipper is that it is a visual bookmarking tool. You can use the eduClipper bookmarklet to add “clips” (bookmarks) to your eduClipper boards. But eduClipper is much more than a visual bookmarking service. You can add PowerPoint, PDF, and image files to your boards. You can also add links to videos to your boards. You can play the videos without leaving your eduClipper board. And those of us who have Google Drive embedded into our professional lives will be happy to know that we can add Google Drive files to our eduClipper boards.

via Free Technology for Teachers: eduClipper Is What Teachers Want Pinterest To Be.

Microsoft Azure Sphere and teaching students about the next generation of security for MicroControllers – Microsoft Faculty Connection

WELCOME TO Microsoft® (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 2018 we are all living in a world where almost everything is becoming connected, whether it’s the power grid, network, phone system, our cars, or the appliances that heat our home or chill our food.  As this Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate. This growing class of cloud-connected devices – 9 billion of which ship every year – run tiny MCU chips that will power everything from kitchen appliances and toys to industrial equipment on factory floors. This next wave of connected devices is in increasingly intelligent and connected. They will improve daily life in countless ways, but if they’re not secure, they will make people, communities and countries vulnerable to attack in more ways than ever before.

As s result of this the Threat and security risks expand exponentially. At this year RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced new offerings to take security more squarely to where it needs to go and where it has not effectively gone before – the edge.

The Azure Sphere Services are a new services and features that will better harden not only our intelligent cloud but also the billions of connected devices that live on its edge.

Source: Microsoft Azure Sphere and teaching students about the next generation of security for MicroControllers – Microsoft Faculty Connection

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Download an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fascinating History of the 20th Century in Sound | Open Culture

Sound Affects (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was crate digging at my local used vinyl emporium a little while ago and came across some sound effects records from the early ‘60s. Nothing amazing, until I checked the track list and noticed “Sounds of Football Match — ‘Block that Kick!’”

If you’re a Beatles fan like me, you’ll know what I suspected and then found to be true: I was holding the source of not just one, but several of the sound effects used in “Revolution 9” as well as the bird effects heard on “Across the Universe” and “Blackbird.” Apparently this must have been a popular disc at Abbey Road.

Now I mention this as a preamble to this amazing website by the BBC, in which they’ve opened their archive of 16,000 (technically 16,016) sound effects, many of which have surely been used over and over on various radio plays. (For the Americans out there, yes, BBC Radio still produces radio plays!)

Source: Download an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fascinating History of the 20th Century in Sound | Open Culture

10 Awesome Handwriting Apps for Your iPad ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Digital immigrants (Ed. – hate that description) are still trying to come to grips with all the digital innovations that are unfolding in today’s world. And even for those who have succeeded in making the digital transition, they still have an urge for the old days of pen and paper practices. That is probably why even with the prevalence of touch screen devices, some people still prefer to use a stylus when working on their tablets. While stylus does satisfy the craving for holding a pen in your hand, it still does not function as expected.

English: Apple iPad Event (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So if you are one of those people who like to use their fingers to take notes on iPad, the list below will be of great help to you. I have curated several useful apps that will allow you to experiment with your handwriting right on your iPad screen.

via 10 Awesome Handwriting Apps for Your iPad ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.

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Web Service Testing: A Beginner’s Tutorial

Architectural elements involved in the XML-RPC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is WebService?

Web Services is the mechanism or the medium of communication through which two applications / machines will exchange the data irrespective of their underline architecture and the technology.

Why is WebService Needed?

In general, software applications are developed to be consumed by the human beings, where a person sends a request to a software service which in-turn returns a response in human readable format.

In the modern era of technology if you want to build a software application you don’t need to build each and everything from scratch. There are lots of readymade services available which you can plug into your application and you can start providing those services in your application.

For example you want to display weather forecast information you don’t need to collect, process and render the data in your application. You can buy the services from the people who already well-established in processing and publishing such kind of data.

Web services allow us to do these kind of implementations.

Source: Web Service Testing: A Beginner’s Tutorial

With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom | TechCrunch

English: The Google search homepage, viewed in Google Chrome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

via With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom | TechCrunch.

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Googles Coder tool turns Raspberry Pi into a mini web server | ZDNet

English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at TransferSummit 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google has released Coder, a free open source tool to make it easier to use Raspberry Pi mini-computers to build for the web.

Hatched by Google Creative Lab creative technologist Jason Striegel, designer Jeff Baxter, and a small team in New York, Coder offers a stepping stone for people interested in building for the web by converting cheap Raspberry Pi mini-computers into personal web servers through a stripped-back web-based development environment.

Google’s pitching Coder at an education audience, a potential sweet spot for Raspberry Pi given its $35 price tag and one Google has focused on previously, gifting 15,000 of the devices to UK schools earlier this year. Raspberry Pi supporters in the UK have also been urging schools to use the devices to spur interest in coding, hacking and building.

via Googles Coder tool turns Raspberry Pi into a mini web server | ZDNet.

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Why you should turn off push notifications right now | WIRED UK

We live in an age of interruption. Ping – you have a text message. Ping – you have a new email. Ping – you have a Facebook friend request. Ping – you have a match on your online dating app. Ping-ping-ping, all day long.

A recent Gallup poll found that more than 50 per cent of Americans who own smartphones keep their phone near them “almost all the time during waking hours”. Over 50 per cent say check their smartphone at least several times an hour and 11 per cent say they check it every few minutes. And that’s just what they’re aware of and admit to – I would not be surprised if the real frequency and intensity is much higher.

Until relatively recently in our technological history we did not have a lot of content coming to our devices. Now, we have texts, all kind of notifications and what seems like an endless stream of both personal and work emails. And it’s not just our phones. How many times have you been at your computer working on something when you get an email notification? And of those instances, how often did you stop what you’re doing to look at your email, realised that it was not that important and returned to your work – after taking a few minutes to remind yourself where you were and what your train of thought was?

At this point, it should be painfully clear to everyone that we need to be worried about the interruptions economy. What value do interruptions provide, under what conditions, and what are their costs? A little ping may seem innocuous, but there is cumulating evidence that the cost of an interruption is higher than we realise, and of course given the sheer number of interruptions, their combined effect can very quickly become substantial.

Source: Why you should turn off push notifications right now | WIRED UK