Plane Landing in Fog is Now Easy

Technology showing high-resolution, color depictions of runways could allow more airports to remain open when visibility is limited. Shown, a jet lands in fog at London’s Heathrow. eyevine/Zuma Press
Rockwell Collins Inc. COL +0.82% and other cockpit-equipment makers are developing technologies to combat a major source of frustration for airline passengers: flights that are canceled or diverted due to poor visibility at their scheduled destinations.

Using computer-generated color images, and sometimes infrared-enhanced views of runways and their surroundings, Rockwell, Honeywell International Corp. HON +0.32% and other suppliers are seeking to reduce such schedule disruptions and lost revenue for carriers.

The new onboard landing systems have been gaining momentum and seem poised for further regulatory approvals on both sides of the Atlantic. With high-resolution, color depictions of runways and other features, they are designed to allow many more airports that lack the latest ground-based navigation aids to remain open in bad weather.

In the U.S., they would enable low-visibility landings that are now prohibited at scores of mid-size and smaller fields.

Proponents say the result would be increased capacity and improved safety, because pilots would get significantly more detail about terrain or other potential obstacles.

Career Tips

Information technology is one of the most misunderstood areas out there. Most counselors and therapists have no idea what any of the job titles mean, and even career counselors can be surprisingly clueless when it comes to IT careers. It’s a shame because while it may have been true in the 1990s that someone could succeed in IT without trying, that’s not so true now.

Based on the recent experiences of people I work with in therapy, as well as my own brush with IT recruiting, here are a few pointers that will help put you ahead of the competition and keep your career on solid footing:

Be friendly and approachable even if you think the person you are speaking to is an overpaid dope. Yes, it is annoying to get ridiculous requests from someone who clearly has no idea what he or she is talking about. Yes, it’s unfair that the same person has a corner office and a six-figure salary when they don’t do anything all day. Welcome to the realities of working as a professional in a large organization. I’ve been through it too, and I’m not even in IT, so there you go. It’s important to keep in mind that the stereotype of IT professionals is socially clueless men who come in late every day, shower rarely, and make crude jokes about women. Fair? No, but neither is the myth that all women who have babies give up on their careers.
Proactively request professional development opportunities. If an application or platform that you use is undergoing major updates, you need to be kept abreast of those updates. Find dates for training, price it out, and go over it with your supervisor. Emphasize the reality that the company’s security and productivity depend on a solid and current IT infrastructure, and that means investing in regular professional development. If they say no, try your local community college’s continuing education program. Why spend your hard-earned money on classes after work that might benefit your tightwad employer? In the end, if that same employer’s questionable business practices end up putting them out of business, you need to be able to find a job, and you’re not going to do it with last year’s technology.
Constantly network with people. Some of it can be online. Depending on what you do, you might even be able to get some networking in during board-game meet-ups, Dungeons & Dragons games, or even fantasy football. The idea is to have the career equivalent of a “go bag.” Update your résumé whenever you have a new project to add. Join LinkedIn and keep it current. Always have an eye out for what is going on in the marketplace. This will make it easier for you to negotiate raises and promotions, and, if necessary, find another position.
Post your résumé on appropriate websites if you seriously want to get another job. A terrific LinkedIn profile can be effective on its own, but another gold mine for IT is Dice. You can also check out a compilation from The New York Public Library. The key to using any job board is to find a search that works well for you and subscribe to alerts. Posting a résumé is also helpful, preferably with an email address that you set up only for job-search inquiries. If you include a phone number, brace yourself for calls from Aflac and every other random job out there. Dice is better about that than Monster, but they’re still pretty bad.
Make your résumé human-friendly. I know we’re all terrified of applicant tracking systems and how they “weed out” the “undesirable” candidates. If you are preparing for your job search, what you’re really afraid of is that they will filter out qualified candidates and miss you. Anything can happen, but I don’t think this happens as often as people think. Skills are important, and you should highlight them in your résumé. Soft skills like being friendly and organized are also important. It’s also important to be clear on how you used your valuable skills to make a difference in the bottom line. How did you help save time, save money, or save other resources?

Trade of IT for BT

Companies have become customer-obsessed; IT leaders have not so much as developed a crush. A new study says they’d better warm to the occasion or risk losing their juice.

Will CIOs Ever Trade Information Technology for Business Technology?
People, not systems, need to be the CIO’s focus. Fully four fifths of customer service executives are of the opinion that their CIOs and IT departments do not accelerate their departments’ success. Three quarters of sales execs and half of marketing leaders feel the same way. That’s the dismaying conclusion of an international Forrester Research study of more than 14,000 business leaders and 2,000 IT executives who are tech influencers within their companies.
What’s up? Business leaders are customer obsessed; CIOs are not, according to Forrester analysts Sharyn Leaver and Kyle McNabb. Competitive advantage in today’s marketplace lies in “understanding, interacting with, and serving today’s empowered customers,” argue Leaver and McNabb, the study’s authors. “Leading firms like Amazon, dm-drogerie markt, Macy’s,Marriott, and USAA, do so by shifting their budgets, people, and business structure toward customer knowledge, relationships, and actions.”

Business leaders in the study, by and large, worry that their CIOs haven’t gotten the message that the game plan at top companies has shifted from information technology to business technology. Asked to rank the top five business priorities at their companies for the 12 months ahead, they resoundingly ranked “improve the experience of our customers” second behind “grow revenues.”

Frustrated with the situation at the home office, business executives turn to third-party providers for customer-facing technology, doubting the ability of their IT departments to take on the challenge, according to Leaver and McNabb. But it’s a challenge IT execs must accept to remain in the lead conversation. “As CIO,” they pose, “you must demonstrate that your team can play a central role in achieving new competitive advantage or be left simply managing your company’s systems of record.”

Ghost Goals

According to official estimates, FIFA is paying a small German start-up nearly $3.5 million to operate its new goal-line technology in the 2014 World Cup, which kicks off Thursday in Brazil.

The company, called GoalControl, would install 14 cameras in each of the 12 World Cup stadiums that triangulate the motion of the ball with maximum precision: up to 500 images per second.

With that tracking, plus sensors on the goal line, GoalControl can instantly alert a referee when the ball crosses the line. There’s no need to consult a replay booth or another official; the referee in charge merely looks at their smartwatch.

In other words, say “tchau” to ghost goals in Brazil.

"The cameras are connected to a powerful image-processing computer system which tracks the movement of all objects on the pitch and filters out the players, referees and all disturbing objects," a GoalControl representative said.

If the system registers that the ball has crossed the goal line, it can send a vibration and a visual “GOAL” signal to referees’ watches within a second.

GoalControl says the idea was developed by Dirk Broichhausen, a company founder, after he attended a soccer match in Germany in which there was a dispute over a goal. He began contacting technicians the next day.

For Broichhausen’s fellow Germans, though, the invention came nearly a half-century late.

Google $1 Billion Deployment of Satellites

The tubes that frame the net cowl much of the globe, however not all of it. Google has declared plans to urge web to wherever the tubes cannot reach, with 3 technologies: balloons, high-altitude solar-powered drones, and also the latest, satellites in space.

Google wouldn’t be the primary to use satellites to hide the planet in web. the first dotcom boom of the late Nineties saw corporations like Ir, Globalstar, and Teledisc market satellite phones and promise web service, however most failing or declared bankruptcy within the face of tremendous initial prices and poor management. In 2010, the Pentagon tested routing web through a satellite. Google’s own satellite team are going to be headed by eminent alumni of satellite web company O3b.

It is ahead of time to mention whether or not Google’s balloons, drones, or satellites can with success expand web access to the components of the globe while not it. Whichever works, it’s clear that Google is willing to travel to the sting of house and on the far side to unfold the net on the far side the terrestrial tyranny of tubes.

Infrascale

Cloud powered-data protection provider company Infrascale offers declared its motives to buy many other cloud solutions company Eversync Answers, furthering this company’s press into your expanding cloud burn and also retrieval market. The actual understanding to acquire Eversync had been made possible when Infrascale obtained an extra $16. 3 thousand with Collection W financing by buyer Carrick Cash Partners having more informing by DH Cash.

“I think a really important thing for our channel to understand is that we’re already a profitable company,” said Ken Shaw Jr., founder and CEO of Infrascale, in an interview with The VAR Guy. “For us, the capital allows us to do new and exciting things around technology and R&D and bringing new products to markets for our partners.”

The actual financing will permit Infrascale to aid its development and also speed up its check out market method, although widening its product collection from the buy of Eversync. Infrascale ideas to make use of this buy to realize the foothold inside the swiftly widening globe of cloud burn and also retrieval, which surpass $2 billion with 2013, in line with IDC. The complete amount of this buy was not unveiled.

Scanning Veins

Scanning veins in the human hand could become the biometric measure of choice  for authentication when we pay for things or want to unlock devices such as smartphones, an Australian professor says.

Thanks to the iPhone 5s and Galaxy S5 smartphones, fingerprint scanners are going mainstream quickly. But how will they fare against vein scanning?

According to computer science Professor Willy Susilo of the University of Wollongong, fingerprint scanners are a “gimmick” and iris and vein scanners are likely to trump them.

"Using our fingerprint is not a secure way to do [authentication]," Professor Susilo said. "It’s just like a gimmick."

One of the main benefits of vein and iris scanning is that you don’t tend to leave behind iris or vein prints, he said.

As most vein scanner sensors coming out this year require no physical contact, it means there are no residual biometric patterns that could be copied, preventing fraudulent use.

Fingerprints are notoriously easy to lift from surfaces and are not secure, he said, which has been demonstrated by researchers for more than a decade.

In 2002, Japanese researchers showed that fingerprint scanners could be fooled with about $10 worth of household supplies. They also found many fingerprint systems did not detect if someone was “live and well”.

"Gummy fingers, namely artificial fingers that are easily made of cheap and readily available gelatin, were accepted by extremely high rates by particular fingerprint devices with optical or capacitive sensors," their paper said.

At the time, renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier called their research impressive.

"The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing," he said. "Impressive is an understatement."

When the iPhone 5s came out in September last year, security researchers also managed to fool its fingerprint scanner within days. A fingerprint of a phone’s user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s, said the Chaos Computer Club researchers.

"This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as [an] access control method and should be avoided."

Despite this, many manufacturers continue to use fingerprint scanners.

Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 lets consumers pay for things with their fingerprint using PayPal.

Fingerprints scanners continue to be used because they are cheap, Professor Susilo said, but ultimately iris- or vein-scanning technology could win out.

"[Vein scanning] seems to be the way forward," Professor Susilo said, noting that there have been concerns about iris scanners potentially causing cancer.

Already shops and cafes at Lund University in Sweden offer Quixter, a vein pattern payment system developed by student Fredrik Leifland. It has 1600 users and, according to Leifland, is believed to be the first in the word.

US company Biyo, which Fujitsu has partnered with, is the first to provide payment terminals that connect a vein scan to a credit card. According to Fujitsu, it will provide one false positive for every 1.25 million attempts, paving the way for a wallet-less future where in-store purchases are verified by veins.