Find: FCC votes for net neutrality, a ban on paid fast lanes, and Title II

FCC votes for net neutrality, a ban on paid fast lanes, and Title II
// Ars Technica

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to enforce net neutrality rules that prevent Internet providers—including cellular carriers—from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

The most controversial part of the FCC's decision reclassifies fixed and mobile broadband as a telecommunications service, with providers to be regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. This decision brings Internet service under the same type of regulatory regime faced by wireline telephone service and mobile voice, though the FCC is forbearing from stricter utility-style rules that it could also apply under Title II.

The decision comes after a year of intense public interest, with the FCC receiving four million public comments from companies, trade associations, advocacy groups, and individuals. President Obama weighed in as well, asking the FCC to adopt the rules using Title II as the legal underpinning. The vote was 3-2, with Democrats voting in favor and Republicans against.

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Announcement: class cancelled today

Happy snow day.

Professor Watson

Fwd: Monday's nexUX meetup: Ron Statt of SAS on UX in analytics, at 3p

Folks, 

My thanks to you all for coming out to our last meetup! 

Monday is our next, with Ron Statt, senior director SAS R&D. Please come out again! As always, you will receive extra credit for coming out.

Professor Watson 

Come to Monday's nexUX Meetup! @ Hunt Library @ 300p
View this email in your browser

Come to the nexUX Meetup!

With Ron Statt of SAS R&D

SAS Design and accessibility, mobility, and the future 

The Design Division at SAS is an umbrella organization responsible for supporting hundreds of offerings and thousands of users around the world. In this presentation, Ron will talk about the organization structure, their focus on accessibility innovations, how they’ve been impacted by the explosion of devices, how he feels they need to change to adapt to the future, and about how they are reaching out to collaborate with the academic community. 

Ron Statt is a senior director in the R&D Division at SAS Institute. He’s currently responsible for the Design Division, which includes user experience designers, visual designers, and accessibility analysts who impact the majority of SAS software offerings. Additionally, Ron provides program management for a cloud-based academic offering that is used by thousands of instructors, students, and independent learners throughout the world to learn SAS. During his 17+ years at SAS, Ron has held positions as a technical writer, project manager, manager, and director in various divisions.

As always with our meetups, this is not a "sit back and listen" meeting, but a chance for us to bring together a cross disciplinary group of people to think about the relationship between UX and analytics. Mostly though, we'll get to know one another, and have some fun.

RSVP and send your questions in advance using the buttons below. 

Also, please forward this email to whomever you think might be interested!

RSVP to this Meetup
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When

Monday, February 23, 300pm

Where

nexUX Meetups take place in the James B. Hunt Library on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. Events will be held in the Duke Energy Hall of Hunt Library, with a few exceptions.

James B. Hunt Jr. Library
1070 Partners Way
Raleigh, NC 27606
google maps

How

There is ample parking near the Hunt Library on NCSU’s Centennial Campus.

  1. Visit the Parking Kiosk located as you enter Centennial Campus from the corner Varsity Drive and Avent Ferry Road. At the kiosk you can purchase a day pass for $5.00. This will allow you to park it the C-parking deck located near the Hunt Library on Partners Way. You can access this lot when leaving the parking kiosk by driving down Varsity drive, through Main Campus Drive and taking a right onto Partners Way. The multi-level parking deck will be on your right hand side.
  2. Directly outside the front doors of the Hunt Library (on Partners Way) is an hourly lot. There is a mechanical arm at the entrance to this lot. You can pay by the hour at $2.00/ hour to park here. Just be prepared, as this lot only accepts credit cards (no cash).

Once parked, you will be entering the Hunt Library on the ground floor. The Duke Energy Room is up the yellow stairs and on your left.

NCSU Wolfline buses also service the Hunt Library on several routes. See the full system map (PDF) or the real-time bus tracking map.

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A Kickstarter project wants to make immersive virtual reality for groups [feedly]

Speaking of vr movies ...

A Kickstarter project wants to make immersive virtual reality for groups
// The Verge - All Posts

A recently funded Kickstarter project wants to create technology that can beam virtual reality into an entire room. The project, called Immersis, plans to make virtual reality something that a group of people can experience all at the same time — without wearing anything on their faces.

The company behind the project, Catopsys, calls Immeris an "innovative, disruptive technology" and says it can change the social aspects of virtual reality. The projector, which Wired points out looks like a sinister Pixar lamp, can connect to your computer and beam any content in 180 degrees.

"An immersive, disruptive technology"

The technology can adapt an image to fit the size and shape of any room it's in, but Immersis users must first create...

Continue reading…



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Announcement: don't forget about your egames entry

At 12 today. Please email me a copy!

http://ift.tt/1DoAA3a

The walk potato, traces and beacon teams.

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Find: Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever

Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever
// Ars Technica

For the first time since the introduction of the App Store in 2008, Apple is increasing the maximum size of the app binaries that developers can upload to iTunes Connect. The company announced today that the cap would increase from 2GB to 4GB, though this doesn't affect the 100MB limit imposed on apps downloaded on cellular networks.

iOS app binaries contain both the executable file and all of the images, sounds, and other assets that the app needs—everything from icons to splash screens to UI is all included in one big file. Because of how they're packaged, these binaries can get rather large. Binaries include all the assets for all the devices they support. If you're shipping a universal app that supports all iOS 8 devices, for example, you've got Retina iPhone assets, Retina and non-Retina iPad assets, and special "3x" assets specifically for the iPhone 6 Plus (Apple's got a table here).

Universal apps include all of those assets, and the binary you download from the App Store is the same whether you've got an old iPhone 4S or a brand-new iPad Air 2. If you're running on an iPhone, for example, a universal binary will still contain assets for other iPhones and iPads, increasing the amount of space the app needs even though some of those extra assets aren't needed for your device. Xcode 6 partially supports vector graphics to ease the developer burden of maintaining and generating all these assets, but they're still stored as PNG files when the binary is built and uploaded.

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Announcement: indicate your project preferences

You should all have received an email this morning letting you indicate your project preferences.

Please do so tonight or latest by tomorrow (Thursday) morning. Else I'll simply choose for you!

Professor Watson

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Announcment: Friday's nexUX meetup: Chang Nam on measuring experience, at 3p

Come to Friday's nexUX Meetup! @ Hunt Library @ 300p
View this email in your browser

Come to the nexUX Meetup!

With Chang S Nam of Industrial and Systems Engineering

New brain measurement technologies: an emerging alternative for capturing experience?

New technologies such as EEG, FMRI and fNIR can measure brain activity. How well suited are they to capturing human experience? In this meetup we'll learn about the practicality and utility of these technologies for UX. 

Chang S. Nam has been an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University since 2011. He is also an associated faculty in the UNC/NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering as well as Department of Psychology. He conducts basic and applied research in human factors and ergonomics engineering, including brain-computer interfaces and rehabilitation engineering.

As always with our meetups, this is not a "sit back and listen" meeting, but a chance for us to bring together a cross disciplinary group of people to think about how we measure experience, why we measure it, and how we should be doing it.

Mostly though, we'll get to know one another, and have some fun.

If you're coming, please RSVP with the button below. Also, please forward this email to whomever you think meet be interested!

RSVP to this Meetup
Tweet
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+1
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When

Friday, February 6 (tomorrow), 300pm

Where

nexUX Meetups take place in the James B. Hunt Library on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. Events will be held in the Duke Energy Hall of Hunt Library, with a few exceptions.

James B. Hunt Jr. Library
1070 Partners Way
Raleigh, NC 27606
google maps

How

There is ample parking near the Hunt Library on NCSU’s Centennial Campus.

  1. Visit the Parking Kiosk located as you enter Centennial Campus from the corner Varsity Drive and Avent Ferry Road. At the kiosk you can purchase a day pass for $5.00. This will allow you to park it the C-parking deck located near the Hunt Library on Partners Way. You can access this lot when leaving the parking kiosk by driving down Varsity drive, through Main Campus Drive and taking a right onto Partners Way. The multi-level parking deck will be on your right hand side.
  2. Directly outside the front doors of the Hunt Library (on Partners Way) is an hourly lot. There is a mechanical arm at the entrance to this lot. You can pay by the hour at $2.00/ hour to park here. Just be prepared, as this lot only accepts credit cards (no cash).

Once parked, you will be entering the Hunt Library on the ground floor. The Duke Energy Room is up the yellow stairs and on your left.

NCSU Wolfline buses also service the Hunt Library on several routes. See the full system map (PDF) or the real-time bus tracking map.

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Find: Spyware aimed at Western governments, journalists hits iOS devices

Spyware aimed at Western governments, journalists hits iOS devices
// Ars Technica

A malware campaign targeting European defense organizations, governments, and media organizations first detected on Windows computers late last year has now spread to iOS devices, according to a report by security researchers at TrendLabs. The spyware campaign, called "Operation Pawn Storm," has been linked by some researchers to the Russian government, beginning as tensions between Europe and Russia rose over the crisis in Ukraine.

Pawn Storm began with "spear phishing" attacks and targeted Web attacks from fake Outlook webmail pages and "typo-squatting" websites that used site names close to those of legitimate sites. Now, the attack has spread to Apple iOS devices—without having to jailbreak them. "We have seen one instance wherein a lure involving XAgent"—one of the two malware components discovered so far—"simply says 'Tap Here to Install the Application,'" the researchers reported. The "lure" website then delivers the malware via Apple's ad-hoc provisioning feature for developers. A .plist file on the remote server will install the application over broadband or Wi-Fi.

Once installed, the XAgent malware connects to a command and control (C&C) server and uploads data from the device, including text messages, contact lists, pictures, Wi-Fi status and Wi-Fi networks connected to, installed apps, and running processes. The malware can also take photos, capture screen grabs, start voice recording, and collect location data on the device. However, it appears the malware was written for iOS 7, and it is unable to hide itself or automatically restart itself on iOS 8 devices. The second malware agent, which is disguised as a game called "MadCap," is focused on recording audio and only works on jailbroken devices.

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Find: mips is back competing with arm

Doesn't look good yet though. 

*** 

MIPS Creator CI20 released: Interesting, though not very useful
// Ars Technica

Imagination Technologies, best known for providing the PowerVR GPUs that power most of Apple's mobile devices, has started selling the Creator CI20 single-board computer in Europe and North America. The CI20, priced at a rather exorbitant $65, comes at an odd time: The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, which costs just $35, has a similar hardware spec, and has a better developer ecosystem, was released yesterday. There is one aspect of the CI20 that you might find intriguing, however: It has a MIPS CPU.

The Creator CI20 is being pitched by Imagination Technologies as a low-power Android/Linux development board, much like the Raspberry Pi. There are builds of Debian, Android 4.4, OpenWRT, and a few other distros that should work on the CI20 out of the box. Hardware-wise, the heart of the beast is an SoC—produced by Ingenic, a fabless Chinese semiconductor company—with a dual-core MIPS32 CPU and last-last-generation PowerVR SGX 540 GPU (the iPhone 4 had a very similar GPU). Rounding out the specs, there's 1GB of RAM, 8GB of on-board NAND storage, a full-size SD card slot, and lots of connectivity (HDMI 1.4, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, and a couple of USB ports). For makers/developers, there are also a bunch of GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins for interfacing with motors, cameras, etc.

Overall, the CI20 is generally comparable to the Raspberry Pi—except on price and CPU architecture. MIPS has a bit of cachet from the '80s and '90s, when it was used in some high-profile applications (SGI's workstations, the Nintendo 64)—but since the late '90s, the architecture has languished. Imagination Technologies, probably seeing an opportunity to compete against ARM and x86 in the mobile and embedded spaces, acquired MIPS Technologies in early 2013 and announced a new MIPS-based architecture called Warrior soon after. Sadly, the CI20 doesn't use a new Warrior-based CPU, instead opting for a pretty old MIPS32 release 2 architecture.

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Find: In Net Neutrality Plan, F.C.C. Chief Sees Internet Service Regulated as Public Utility

Boom! Mobile data also net neutral. 

Telling fcc announces at wired. 

*** 

In Net Neutrality Plan, F.C.C. Chief Sees Internet Service Regulated as Public Utility
// NYT > Business

The proposal would create legal authority to ensure that no content is blocked and that the Internet is not divided into pay-to-play fast lanes for Internet and media companies.


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Find: on the topic of distancing...

Why only in classrooms?

*** 

App Gives Students an Incentive to Keep Their Phones Locked in Class
// Wired Campus

screen568x568Resisting the urge to pull out your phone in class is quite difficult for many students, apparently. There are texts to answer, emails to read, snapchats to send, and rude comments to post on Yik Yak. But two students at California State University at Chico have created something they hope will persuade students to keep their phones tucked firmly in their pockets: An app that rewards them with coupons for local businesses when they exhibit self-control and leave their phones untouched during class.

Rob Richardson, a junior computer-science major, got the idea for the iPhone app, called Pocket Points, by looking around his classes and seeing what he considered to be far too many students with their heads down, paying attention to their phones rather than to the lesson taking place in front of them.

If you’re in class, it’s simple: “There should be no reason you should be on your phone,” Mr. Richardson argues. He says he realized there was a business opportunity that could also help students pay better attention.

Here’s how it works: Students acquire points—based on the length of time the phone is locked and how many people around them are also using the app—that can then be redeemed for discounts at local businesses. The app is location-based and works only on the campus. The app is being extended to other campuses as well, including a few community colleges and high schools.

Professors have been some of the app’s biggest supporters, Mr. Richardson says. Some have even expressed interest in offering rewards to their students, like extra credit or attendance points, through the app, though Mr. Richardson says such features are not currently being explored.

The app also has a leaderboard and rankings, elements incorporated to “gamify” it, says Mr. Richardson’s co-founder, Mitch Gardner, a senior business-marketing major. Some students appear to care more about those elements than the coupons.

Mr. Richardson coded the app last summer, while Mr. Gardner got local businesses on board.

Though the app is meant to help students focus on their studies, Mr. Gardner says, it was difficult to do so while they were setting up the app last semester.

“I don’t think our grades were very good,” Mr. Gardner admits with a laugh.

Both Mr. Richardson and Mr. Gardner have taken a leave of absence from Chico State this semester and are working full time in an office in Chico to further develop the software.

Right now, Pocket Points is focused on education, but its creators say it could one day move beyond that—because students aren’t the only ones addicted to their phones.



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Announcement: project pitches

Folks,

Forgot to mention. On Thursday we'll have project pitches.

A portion of the projects this semester will be drawn from your own ideas. We'll select those projects based on your pitches. Only some will be selected.

Pitches are three minute descriptions of what you'd like to work on. You can find a good description of pitches here.

Please indicate if you are planning to pitch something here.

See you Thursday.