Geek Coefficient™

Facebook is wreaking havoc in the workplace. Employees are getting fired — or never getting hired — thanks to Facebook posts. But I say keep the employees and fire Facebook instead.

Here’s why.

Facebook is a brand-new phenomenon. The public hasn’t had time to master it yet, and the structure of Facebook itself is no help at all. As a result, people are posting things they later regret. As one HR attorney recently pointed out, reading an employee’s Facebook page is perfectly legal. At least here and now. The German government may pass an employee-protection law this year that, among other things, bans hiring managers from checking the Facebook profiles of prospective employees. If so, Germany may be the first country to illegalize the practice. But for the time being, it’s legal everywhere. But legal or not, is it ethical for employers to read the Facebook posts of employees? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question recently, and I surprised even myself by concluding that I believe the answer is no.

read more

Have you ever often wondered when you’re trying to change your eating habits either to become more healthier or lose some weight? That weaning yourself off some foods can be extremely difficult. And have you wondered why? A lot of our habits tend to revolve around repetition so after a while they become automatic it’s a bit like learning to do anything the more you do it the less you have to think about it, and it becomes automatic behaviour. So it could be quite easy to believe that the reason that you’re having trouble controlling what you’re eating is purely down to learned behaviour or is that necessarily the case? We often don’t tend to think that there may be some other mechanism at work causing us to eat foods that don’t necessarily do us any good. There have been various studies that have cited how foods affect our moods when we eat them.

read more

You may want to reconsider getting that double cheeseburger with fries. A study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences contains controversial claims about menu items served at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King. Using a technique that identifies carbon and nitrogen isotopes in meat, co-authors A. Hope Jahren and Rebecca Kraft tried to determine the animals’ diets and in what conditions they were raised. Based on the high levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in the meat products, the authors claim that the cattle and poultry were predominantly fed corn, which makes them as fat as possible in as short a time as possible, and were raised in extreme confinement.

read more

A public relations firm has “settled” Federal Trade Commission charges that it wrote bogus reviews of games on iTunes on behalf of its clients. Its the first major such case since the introduction of new guidelines on disclosure from people writing online. Reverb Communications staff had “consistently” posted reviews on iTunes using false usernames. Every review rated the game at four or five stars and included comments such as “GREAT, family-friendly board game app” and “Really Cool Game”. In the wonderful stating-the-obvious style of most legal verdicts, the FTC noted (PDF): “Respondents failed to disclose that those reviews were written by employees of Reverb, a company hired to promote the gaming applications and often paid a percentage of the applications’ sales. These facts would have been material to consumers in their purchasing decision regarding the gaming applications. The failure to disclose these facts, in light of the representation made, was, and is, a deceptive practice.”

read more

iTunes users need to be aware of an ongoing scam which attacks their accounts, racking up fraudulent charges on their PayPal and credit card accounts, according to various recent media reports. IDG News Service, citing the technology blog Tech Crunch and the San Jose Mercury News as sources, notes that the scam dates back to early last year, with victims finding themselves suddenly responsible for hundreds if not thousands of dollars in charges they did not authorize. According to IDG reporter Robert McMillan, however, the number of victims is rising. BBC News Technology Reporter Maggie Shiels, who covered the ongoing scam in a Tuesday article, listed several examples of victims, ranging from one individual who posted via Twitter that he/she had been “hacked for $1,000 worth of software, videos and music,” to another who told Tech Crunch that their PayPal account had been charged more than $4,700. The latter victim stated that he/she “called security at PayPal and was told a large number of iTunes stores accounts were compromised.” Likewise, McMillan quoted a Facebook page from a victim named Layne Harris, who wrote that his iTunes account had been hacked and “someone made about $700 worth of purchases… I contacted Paypal (who was awesome btw, refunded all) and they said Apple has gotten so many attacks since June, they can barely keep up with reporting them all!”

read more

Scientists reported progress in using a common virus to develop improved materials for high-performance, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that could be woven into clothing to power portable electronic devices. They discussed development of the new materials for the battery’s cathode, or positive electrode, at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), being held here this week. These new power sources could in the future be woven into fabrics such as uniforms or ballistic vests, and poured or sprayed into containers of any size and shape, said Mark Allen, Ph.D., who presented the report. He is a postdoc in Angela Belcher’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

read more

It’s not exactly official, but should also surprise no one: According to a new study the psychological profile of iPad owners can be summed up as “selfish elites” while have-not critics are “independent geeks.” Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.” They are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds,” MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck told Wired.com.

read more

Amazon hit a symbolic milestone last holiday season, when for one day its sales of e-books exceeded the number of dead-tree books it had sold. Now the company has hit a more significant milestone, selling 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the course of the second quarter. The rate is accelerating: For the past month, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers, and it sold three times as many e-books in the first six months of this year as it did in the first half of 2009. Amazon’s Kindle bookstore now offers more than 630,000 books, Amazon says, plus 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright titles. The overall e-book market is still a 90-pound weakling next to the Asiatic elephant of print publishing. According to a report from Publisher’s Weekly last year, hardback sales were projected to be about $4.4 billion in 2009 (including both adult and children’s titles), while paperbacks were expected to generate $5.1 billion in revenue, audiobooks $218 million, and e-books just $81 million — less than 1 percent of the print equivalents. That’s not even counting textbooks, Bibles and professional books — with those included, Publisher’s Weekly estimated the overall book market at $35 billion in 2009. Amazon also stated that sales of its Kindle e-book reader have tripled since it cut the price from $260 to $190, although Amazon did not provide any hard numbers about the number it had sold. The Kindle has topped Amazon’s list of bestselling products almost since it was first released two years ago.

read more

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes