Google, Apple, IBM & Many Other Companies No Longer Require Employees To Have A Degree
Google had acknowledged several years ago that college degrees are slowly becoming irrelevant and what matters most are skills.
The list of the 15 companies where you can apply and get selected without a college degree are- Google, Bank of America, Chipotle, Lowe’s, IBM, Home Depot, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Apple, Publix, Hilton, Whole Foods, Costco Wholesale, Penguin Random House, Ernst and Young (EY), and Google.
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more on microcredentialing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredentialing
https://medium.com/@anubhav.2709/a-comprehensive-list-of-best-blockchain-platforms-to-watch-out-in-2018-a4a14ee0c166
http://blockchain.oodles.io/blogs/best-blockchain-platforms-2018/
https://www.reddit.com/r/TechNewsToday/comments/9a7elq/a_comprehensive_list_of_best_blockchain_platforms
Best Blockchain Platforms 2018
Founded in 2014 by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffery Wilcke, Ethereum is one of the fastest growing blockchain technology-based platforms and a cryptocurrency like bitcoin.
Ripple was developed in 2012. Currently, the cryptocurrency that represents Ripple blockchain, XRP, is one the high performing cryptocurrencies in the crypto world.
Based on the blockchain technology, Hyperledger offers distributed ledger frameworks to a variety of industry leaders in the fields of banking, finance, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing, and technology.
4. IBM Bluemix Blockchain:
Developed using the base of Hyperledger, IBM Bluemix offers transparency in transactions and security in information for enterprises. At present, IBM Bluemix runs on the IBM cloud.
5. Multichain
Multichain is one of the best Blockchain platforms that enables the creation and execution of private blockchains. This multi-asset exchange is becoming popular for solving real problems in finance, infrastructure, and e-commerce.
6. Openchain:
Developed by Coinprism, Open-chain is a Blockchain infrastructure that’s used for the perseverance and management of digital assets. Open-chain is an enterprise-ready platform for digital assets. Its approach is different than the standard Bitcoin approach to implementing Blockchain.
Conclusion:
With the above-mentioned blockchain platforms, you can get unprecedented services for the security of digital transactions and assets. The blockchain technology provides independent and secure work structure and is a reliable solution that can be utilized to streamline an organization’s processes and transfer of assets without getting into any extensive documentation or periodical controls.
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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain
India, China Lead the Race in Voice-activated Technology
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/318998
Nidhi Singh August 24, 2018
In dynamic markets, a high percentage of users are engaging voice functions daily to complete a variety of tasks, particularly in India (51 per cent) and China (42 per cent). These users were engaging in voice to complete tasks like playing music, finding directions, setting timers, scribing messages, making calls, even ordering pizza. For these markets, the initial trial has proven so useful that people are testing voice applications across many different functions and devices.
Alternately, in conservative growth markets like Singapore, Japan and Australia it seems the journey to daily adoption is taking longer, with the majority of current users activating voice two to four times per week.
Hacking, Innovating and Failing Well—How Tech Sector Principles Can Revolutionize Education Workplaces
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-04-18-hacking-innovating-and-failing-well-how-tech-sector-principles-can-revolutionize-education-workplaces
In recent years, school reformers, philanthropists, and venture capital investors have placed big bets on blended learning, and edtech professionals have responded with vigor. But as education historian Larry Cuban has noted, the innovative instruction envisioned by edtech advocates remains the exception to the rule—in large part because of the lack of time for teachers to “learn, experiment, and overhaul their practices in collaboration with each other.”
Operating within archaic organizational structures, very few of our nation’s teachers have opportunities to incubate and execute ideas prompted by their deep knowledge of students, families, and communities. This includes ideas about how best to integrate technology.
Google’s 9 principles of innovation for every organization, to which many attribute the company’s dominance in the market.
1. Innovation should come from everywhere
recent Harvard Business Review post enjoined, hackathons are not just for coders. At the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), our TeacherSolutions model, like the one we used with Brevard Countyeducators, stokes creativity and prototypes promising ideas quickly.
2. 20% Time
3. Fail Well
European university researchers Oliver Baumann and Nils Stieglitz suggest that “to get more breakthroughs, the best approach is to focus on increasing the variety of ideas that are generated.” They note that some companies are experimenting with rewarding “brilliant failures that provide some sort of insights, even if they turn out not to work.”
The attitude in most schools couldn’t be more different. As education policy expert Linda Darling-Hammond has noted, our nation’s “test-and-punish approach” to accountability has tamped down much-needed innovation.
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more on leadership and technology in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leadership+technology
Teens worry they use phones too much
Andrew M. Seaman
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/teens-worry-they-use-phones-too-much-2251987/
Roughly half of U.S. teens say they spend too much time on their cellphones, according to research from Pew. About the same proportion of teens report taking steps to limit their use of the devices. Another survey found that about two-thirds of parents also worry their children spend too much time in front of screens; nearly 60% of parents report setting screen time restrictions for their children. The findings come as some technology companies introduce features to cut back on phone addiction.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6438043256424054784?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base%3BK6U2j7wPTx2kZp6R0t9WBg%3D%3D&licu=urn%3Ali%3Acontrol%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base-view_activity_details
http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/08/22/how-teens-and-parents-navigate-screen-time-and-device-distractions/
Amid roiling debates about the impact of screen time on teenagers, roughly half of those ages 13 to 17 are themselves worried they spend too much time on their cellphones. Some 52% of U.S. teens report taking steps to cut back on their mobile phone use, and similar shares have tried to limit their use of social media (57%) or video games (58%), a new Pew Research Center survey finds.
Overall, 56% of teens associate the absence of their cellphone with at least one of these three emotions: loneliness, being upset or feeling anxious. Additionally, girls are more likely than boys to feel anxious or lonely without their cellphone.
The vast majority of teens in the United States have access to a smartphone, and 45% are online on a near constant basis. The ubiquity of social media and cellphones and other devices in teens’ lives has fueled heated discussions over the effects of excessive screen time and parents’ role in limiting teens’ screen exposure. In recent months, many major technology companies, including Google and Apple, have announced new products aimed at helping adults and teens monitor and manage their online usage.
Girls are somewhat more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on social media (47% vs. 35%).
Meanwhile, 31% of teens say they lose focus in class because they are checking their cellphone – though just 8% say this often happens to them, and 38% say it never does.
Girls are more likely than boys to express feelings of anxiety (by a 49% to 35% margin) and loneliness (by a 32% to 20% margin) when they do not have their phone with them.
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more on contemplative computing in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing
Alphabet’s Plans for a China Comeback Go Beyond Google Search
Google has faced sharp criticism, including from
its own employees, for its efforts to
rebuild an internet search presence in Chinaafter quitting the country eight years ago over censorship issues.
for Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the opportunities in the world’s largest internet market may be too good to resist. And the full scope of the company’s interest in China now appears to be broader than just internet search.
The latest hint came from Waymo, the driverless-car company that was spun out of Google in 2016. Chinese media noticed this week that the business had quietly registered a Shanghai subsidiary in May, suggesting that it wants a piece of an industry that the Chinese government has made a priority.
Unlike Google, Apple runs its own app store in China, heeding government directives about the kinds of apps that can be available to Chinese users. Microsoft and Amazon offer cloud computing services, working with local partners and following strict controls on how customers’ data is stored.
Baidu, maker of the country’s leading search engine, has made its autonomous-vehicle software platform available to dozens of local and foreign companies. SAIC Motor, China’s largest carmaker, is working with the e-commerce titan Alibaba. BMW and Daimler have received permission in China to test their own self-driving vehicles.
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more on Google and China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=google+china
How Churchill broke the Greek Resistance
How Winston Churchill and the British government attacked the Greek Resistance and sowed the seeds of civil war.
in December 1944: Nazi troops were still resisting the Allies, which were making slow progress in Italy and being pushed back in the Ardennes faced with the Wehrmacht’s final counter-offensive. Yet the “bands” here targeted by Churchill were not groups of collaborators, but the partisans of the great
National Liberation Front (EAM), which had for three years mounted mass resistance against the German occupiers.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean had been the center of a rivalry between Britain and Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 having put an end to the latter country’s ambitions in the region, in the early 1940s, Greece was under unchallenged British influence. In this context, the country was of some strategic importance.
during the
Quadrant Conference with Roosevelt in Quebec (August 17-24, 1943), Churchill saw his last hopes of an Allied landing in Greece vanish. Meanwhile, the Red Army’s advance beyond the USSR’s own frontiers was no longer in doubt. Churchill now took matters directly in hand, despite his advisers’ reticence, blocking off any possibility of negotiation and sending the EAM delegates home. At the same time, in a note to his high command, he drafted what would later become the MANNA plan: namely, to send an expeditionary corps to Greece after the German troops’ withdrawal.
The EAM-ELAS nonetheless succeeded in liberating a large part of the country. It established popular institutions which formed a counter-state. The worries among the British peaked in March 1944, when a “government of the mountains” was created that organized elections. Conversely, this approach awakened the enthusiasm of the Greek armed forces in Egypt, who immediately demanded that the Resistance be included in the exile government. Churchill replied with pitiless repression. He had “rebellious” elements deported to camps in Africa, and set up a praetorian guard prepared to return to Greece with the King and the British troops upon Liberation.
Everything was set for the application of the MANNA plan, which had been prepared the previous year. The victorious Red Army offensive in Bulgaria in September 1944 forced the Wehrmacht to withdraw from Greece, under attack from ELAS partisans. It was after this retreat that the British expeditionary corps arrived, accompanied by Papandreou and Scobie. Establishing themselves in the capital on October 18, the two men demanded that ELAS lay down its weapons, even as they rejected the disarming of the praetorian guard that had been formed in Egypt and, conveniently enough, transferred to Athens in early November.
December 3, 1944, saw a monster demonstration in Syntagma Square to demand Papandreou’s resignation and the constitution of a new government. The massacre that followed — the police opened fire on unarmed civilians, leaving over twenty dead and more than a hundred wounded — triggered the insurrection of the people of Athens. This was the pretext that Churchill had sought in order to be able to break the Resistance.
While the ELAS was still present across the rest of Greece’s territory, its leaders dreaded imposing new trials on an exhausted and famished population: 1,770 villages had been burned, more than a million people did not have a roof over their heads, and grain production had fallen by 40 percent. Meanwhile, the Allies’ aid only reached those who collaborated with them. With the Varkiza accord signed on February 12, 1945, the ELAS agreed unilaterally to give up its weapons. At the same time at Yalta, Churchill, together with Roosevelt and Stalin, solemnly proclaimed “the right of all peoples in liberated Europe to choose their own form of government.”
In breaking the Greek Resistance, the British had precipitated a civil war that would last — in open or latent forms — for some thirty years, with a brief lull between 1963 and 1965. It would only end with the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship in 1974. This “coup in Athens” reminds us that through its history, modern Greece has only enjoyed a very limited sovereignty.
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more on history in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=history
What’s Your Social Brand?
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-04-03-what-s-your-social-brand
What is social branding?
Social branding is the way you present yourself online. All of us have a digital footprint and a digital shadow—being cognizant of what these are helps you curate what kind of persona your potential employer sees when they Google you, look you up on LinkedIn, or find you on Twitter. Social branding is when you make a decision about what you want these results to be and what parts of your experience you want to highlight.
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more on social branding in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=branding