Students are addicted to social media

According to research from the University of Maryland, American students are so addicted to mobile phones, social media and the internet that the students shows withdrawal symptoms if they have to do a day without social media.

The investigators asked 200 students to abstain from all forms of social media for one day. After 24 hours many of them showed signs that correspond to those of people are drug and alcohol rehabilitation, such as fear and greed and they could not function without their social relationships.

The students complained the most about the need to send SMS messages, chat, mail and to use Facebook. ‘Text messaging and IM, gives me a constant comfortable feeling’, wrote one of the students. ‘Without these two luxuries, I felt very alone and disconnected from my life’.

Feet for the iPad

Apple offers for $69 a keyboard to make it more comfortable to type on the recently launched iPad. The company Bluelounge offers a cheaper solution: feet which can be stick under the tablet of the iPad.

By placing the plastic feet under the iPad, there will be arroused an optimal quarter for typing via the virtual keyboard. A set consists out of two higher feet and two lower ones which can be fixed on the iPad with suction cups. For that matter, the feet can also be used for the notebook. A set ' iPad feet' costs just $12.95.

Advertisements on Twitter

The American micro blog service Twitter started Tuesday with inserting advertisements on the site. The advertisements become visible by search tasks of the user, reported the American business paper The Wall Street Journal.

In the first instance Twitter ensnared ten advertisers, including Starbucks en Best Buy. Between two and ten percent of the users of Twitter will be seeing the advertisements. That number will increase the next days, thus the concern.

This step has to lead to the profitability of Twitter. There are millions of people who disperse tweets, messages with a maximum of 140 signs daily, but that did not produce much sales. The first revenues came in recently out of agreements with Google and Microsoft about the delivering of tweets on the search engines of that companies.

Mobile phone for spying on employees

New software for the mobile phone enables curious bosses to follow every movement of their employees at a distance.
Investigators of the Japanese telephone giant KDDI developed a mobile phone which can even register the smallest movements of the users. Next the data will be sent to a head office.

The program makes uses of gear meters which normally can be found in modern sets.
By an analyze of these sensors, complex movements can be different from each other. The program sees of the use walks, climbs a three or of the user is cleaning. Even the difference between the cleaning activities such as scrubbing or sweeping can be distinguished by the program.
The company has the intention to sell the technique to managers, chef or Job Centers, but it can also be skilful by monitoring a patient at a distance.

Efficienty
The aim of the new system is according to KDDI to enable employees to work more efficient and it gives managers the possibility to judge their employees better.
“Of course there is the privacy aspect and the employers have to achieve an agreement before they are going to use the system” says Hiroyuki YokoYama, chief web data research of KDDI.
It is not the first time that employees are spied on via their mobile phones by their bosses. Japanese truck chauffeurs are spied on for a longer time with the GPS-receiver in their mobile phones.

Machines
Privacy interest groups are not pleased with the developments in Japan, where the privacy discussion is less fierce then elsewhere. “People are treated as machines, or as cattle’s which are watch out constantly” says human rights layer Kazuo Hizumi. “New techniques have to be used to improve our quality of life, not to spy on us”.