Strathclyde Associates News

http://www.dailyiowan.com/2012/03/05/Metro/27325.html

BY JORDYN REILAND

Identity theft continues to raise countrywide concern, according to a 2011 Federal Trade Commission report, but Iowa faces less of the crime than other states.

Iowa, with 1,208 identity theft complaints in 2011, ranks 45th out of the 50 states.

Yet local police officials said identity theft is relatively prevalent in Iowa City.

According to records from the Iowa City police, there was one filed complaint of identity theft in 2011. Yet, Sgt. Dave Droll said, many cases are not officially filed.

“It’s not that uncommon for someone to report that their identity has been stolen,” he said. “We do probably have several a week.”

One state expert said an increase in technology may have sparked an increase in identity theft cases nationwide.

“Twenty-five years ago, [scams] came through the mail … now so much of it is done electronically,” said Bill Brauch, the director of the Consumer Protection Division at the Iowa Attorney General’s Office.

The new electronic technology has provided both relief and concern for retailers and residents.

“We have had your traditional Dumpster-diver thefts; it’s still around,” Brauch said, referring to scammers who rifle through trash for personal information on discarded mail. “Today, it is so much easier for the scam artist sitting at the computer to intercept transmissions anywhere in the world.”

But one FTC official said the new technology might also help catch identity thefts.

“It’s not an all-or-nothing kind of thing,” said Steven Toporoff, a director in the division of privacy and identity protection. “Technology has made it possible to detect and deter a certain amount of identity theft.”

A large percentage of identity theft is related to the misuse of a credit card, he said, but new technology has helped customers communicate with credit-card companies about possible fraudulent charges. In 2011, Iowa had 215 reported credit-card frauds.

Despite the possible deterrence, Brauch said attempts at electronic identity theft have still seen an increase nationwide.

“You have seen a tremendous uptick in the last 10 years in the number of electronic attempts because of the growth of the Internet and technology,” Brauch said.

But overall, officials said Iowa has been proactive against identity theft.

“We have a lower incidence than average,” Brauch said. “I think Iowans have done a pretty good job identifying [scams] and not falling for them.”

States with lower identity-theft rates than Iowa included West Virginia, Montana, and Maine.

David Torok, head of the FTC’s planning and communications unit, said identity theft will continue to pose a problem for consumers until those consumers learn how to protect themselves.

“Identity theft is still a significant problem given the number of complaints we receive, and it’s a challenging one to correct,” he said. “We try to encourage consumers to be very wary and realize that this crime goes on out there.”

The New Years Eve marks the time of joy and happiness. However based on the study conducted by the University of Vermont on more than 60 million of English speaking twitter followers, the typical happiness is finding its way down to a year after year. On the Strathclyde Associates News, Following the study of Harvard on Facebook users in accordance with its social influence, a team of scientists from Vermont under the lead of Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at UVM came forward with the facts about happiness. With regards to the review based on twitter followers, after the slow increase in happiness which climbed its peak in April 2009, the overall series is showing a gradual downward drift.

The research was done by means of collecting around 46 billion words “tweeted” by more than 63 million users in the last three years. These words are used to conclude the feelings and relative mood of a large group of people. UVM used Mechanical Turk, a service from the Amazon. They appointed a group of volunteers on the website to rate about what is the perception of happiness and the emotional temperature on the scale of 1 to 10. The researchers were able to interpret the changing patterns of words according on the date and time of the ‘tweets’. This also gave them a hand to find out the moods of people depending on the diverse geographic regions. According to the Strathclyde Associates News, as the result the volunteers rated say, 8.5 for ‘laughter’ and 1.3 for ‘terrorist’. So then, the Vermont team applied and calculated the average score of millions of words that they gathered from twitter. Wherein, “It appears that happiness is going down” Dodds said. Or at least the happiness of people who is using twitter is going down. But this cannot be interpreted in one angle because Twitter has a universal impact. The research also shows interesting facts like the happiness usually surges around holidays and weekends and falls particularly around some negative news events. The data also points that twitter has gone more popular in the last two years. The researchers also made a happiness meter which is not available to the public now. So may be in the future, one can tell the mood of the city which passes by below, from a flight.

Let’s just wait and see what twitter can do to bring more happiness into the lives of its worldwide users and of course, irrespective to the continuous development of the social and networking sites around the web.

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

 

Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related changes on at least October 3rd andOctober 13th. In several  cases, I saw sites with Google organic traffic declines on 9/27, recovery on 10/3, and decline again on 10/13.

I talked to Google to find out more about the flux and what site owners could expect. Google confirmed the flux but didn’t provide any other detail other that what they’ve said in the past. The crux is that:

• Some Panda updates are due to new signals being incorporated into the overall Panda algorithms
• Some Panda updates are recalculation of how sites perform within the Panda algorithms, based on updated data about the sites since the last recalculation
• The only difference with this update vs. the previous ones is that there will be (and have been) several updates (presumably of both types) within days or weeks of each other

Panda 2.5 then is a series of Panda algorithm and site recalculation updates over a period of several weeks. September 27th, October 3rd, and October 13th have been confirmed by Google, but it appears that there may have been several other updates (of either Panda algorithm changes or site recalculations) as well during this period.

If you’ve noticed traffic declines from Google organic referrals since September 27th, remember that Panda is a site-wide assessment (so even high quality pages will be impacted)  and key recovery strategies are around:

• Creating valuable content (so the page is the best answer to the query on the web)
• Consolidating approximate duplication (if lots of pages on the site about the same topic)
• Getting rid of exact duplication (syndication, manufacturer feeds and other measures that result in the exact text appearing on multiple sites)
• Improving usability (such as ensuring a valuable and engaging user experience, providing easy and useful navigation, not obscuring the content with an overwhelming amount of ads)
• Working on engagement (building a site that people want to stay on, link to, return to, share, and otherwise show happiness towards)

Now that Google is only months away from unwrapping Ice Cream Sandwich, Android’s latest OS, leaks of it running on a Nexus popping out every now and then should be expected.

Screenshots were leaked by Android Police and RootzWiki which, as can be seen in one, shows Ice Cream Sandwich running in a Nexus S.

Reminiscent of the Honeycomb’s Tron, ICS looks like a blue-themed one, with icons on the notification bar like those ones on Gingerbread (sans the green color).

There’s an image showing what seemed to be the notification panel pulled all the way down and something for news and app notif as well.

RootzWiki also released details about the alleged specs of the Ice Cream Sandwich Nexus, though they have been vague about the ‘reliable source’. Looks like the new Android build will sport a blue theme, some ICS features, a built-in camera panoramic mode, task switching capabilities,  app drawer, launcher and the good old Google search bar embedded on the top. It is also rumored that Google Shopper will be launched in this version while Gmail will be having a new theme.

For now, this will only be available on Nexus Prime (and then prolly Nexus S).

Some of those are really not shockers; we had been expecting Google Shopper to be connected to ICS seeing how Google is busy testing out their Wallet service.

The camera’s built-in panorama mode is an interesting one just because the default cam app in most Droids is not so remarkable. We only hope there are more functions or features that will be added.

Aside from that, there is nothing more to scrape. And we’re seeing a lot of black bars all over the leaked images, too.

What’s fishy here is the uncanny resemblance of the leak images to Gingerbread. Except for the neat blue theme and a quite different variation of glass launcher at the bottom part, it’s basically the same. For all we know, this could just be a custom theme installed on Gingerbread; which begs the question whether the leak is legit or just the work from trolls.

Hoping for the best, maybe it’s really an early version of ICS we have here. Remember the untimely shots of Android 2.3 that are so fuzzy you barely recognize a thing? Well, that turned out as a genuine one. We could only hope the same (or better) for Ice Cream Sandwich.