Project Self-Sufficiency will be offering a variety of computer classes in June, including a basic Introduction to Personal Computers, an advanced class in Microsoft Excel, an introductory course in Microsoft Word, and courses designed specifically for men. All classes will take place in the agency’s Career Center, which is located at 127 Mill Street in Newton. The fee for each class is $ 10, with the exception of the free “Careering 101” and “Careering 102” courses. Students must be registered Family Success Center or Project Self-Sufficiency participants.

A basic Introduction to Personal Computers will be offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 5-21, from 9 a.m. to noon and from 6-9 p.m. This introductory course is designed for first-time computer users or people with limited computer experience. Students will learn computer basics, including the different components of the computer and the performance of simple procedures. Fundamental keyboarding skills and a brief overview of popular software applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and Outlook will also be discussed.

An introductory course in Microsoft Word will be offered on Mondays and Wednesdays, June 4-20, 9 a.m. to noon, and Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 5-21, 6-9 p.m. Students will learn word-processing techniques, including the creation of professional-looking letters, faxes, n…………… continues on Warren Reporter

The police have a crystal ball. It has a flat screen and a powerful processor.  And there is reason to hope it will help them predict where the next crime will be committed.

The Fall River Police Department recently hosted a weeklong seminar led by Steven Gottlieb, the executive director of the Alpha Group Center for Crime and Intelligence Analysis Training of Montclair, Calif.

Gottlieb led classes and exercises for 20 officers from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, advising them on how to use computer modeling to break down and analyze the information that floods police departments every day.

“Even a medium-sized agency will collect 1,000 reports a month,” Gottlieb said. “There wouldn’t be the time in the day to analyze it all.

“With computers now, we can.”

Using computers to recognize patterns in crime is not new. ComStat, as it is known, has been around for a decade. Police Chief Daniel Racine instituted weekly ComStat meetings shortly after he took office two years ago.

“As our department shrinks, we have to look for different ways to get the job done,” Racine said.

Lt. Andrew Crook was appointed by Racine as the person responsible for “data mining,” getting the most out of the information the department has on hand.

“Police are out there every day on patrol, taking reports,” Gottlieb said. “There is a tremendous amount…………… continues on Fall River Herald News

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It seems that Apple is retail’s Botox.

The minute an Apple store appears in a shopping mall — or, say, a vast famous New York railway station — somehow the area becomes prettier and more devastatingly young.

The Next Web reports that Apple is continually offered ludicrously favorable incentives just to be the next shiny dance partner for a city or a shopping mall.

Apparently, authorities in Grand Central Terminal and Salt Lake City didn’t bother with annoying complexities as some (or any) rent or share of profit in order to encourage Cupertino to erect a little more glass, white and silver in their vicinities.

ABC News suggests that the Utah city offered 5 years free rent.

This follows from a New York Post report that Apple is only…………… continues on CNET

They were Mark Zuckerberg’s cash cows.

Hordes of everyday New Yorkers played the fool yesterday to Wall Street fat cats and Facebook insiders, who used a bloated stock price to milk them of billions of dollars during an overhyped IPO.

With a $ 38-a-share price tag and forecasts for a 10 percent jump, mom-and-pop investors blindly bought in with dreams of instant riches that never came true.

Meanwhile, the social network’s hoodie-wearing CEO finished the day with a net worth of $ 19.25 billion. The average Facebook employee saw their on-paper wealth shoot up to $ 2.9 million.

Amid the IPO hoopla:

* A staggering 581 million shares traded hands, easily trumping the record of 458 million set by General Motors in 2010. In the first minute, 83 million shares crossed the tape.

* Because of Nasdaq computer glitches, individual investors were left in the dark for hours, wondering if their Facebook buy or sell orders had actually gone through.

* Zuckerberg’s Dobbs Ferry dentist dad got a $ 60 million payback for his initial investment in his son’s startup, but residents in the town were ready to “un-friend” the local boy wonder, saying he’s forgotten his roots.

nRock star Bono’s Elevation Partners finished the day with a staggering $ 1.4 billion in company stock after buying their shares for just $ 90 million in 2009.

*…………… continues on New York Post

The following information was released by Custon Computer Specialists:

Fifteen high school seniors throughout the Northeast are recipients of the 2012 Custom Computer Specialists Right Start Scholarship, including Watertown’s Jake Hellman. The $ 1,000 cash award is presented for academic achievement and for standout essays that creatively answer the question: “If you were in charge of enhancing education through technology at your school district, what technologies would you implement and why?” Custom Computer Specialists is one of the Northeast’s largest information technology providers in the education market.

“Technology has become a vital part of the overall educational experience and the ways that individual districts approach technology varies as much as the technology. The intelligent, creative and mature responses from our scholarship program participants clearly displays how so many promising seniors understand and embrace the direct impact different technologies can have on education,” explained Gregory Galdi, President of Custom Computer Specialists.

Responses to the essay question provided a broad range of ideas that transported the traditional classroom beyond its four walls. Award recipients explained how mobile technologies can revolutionize the educational experience by creating interactive learning experiences. One recipien…………… continues on Patch.com

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.

Name: Raspberry Pi

Big Idea: Raspberry Pi is a small, lightweight computer that runs on Linux and costs next to nothing — the Model A retails at $ 35, while the forthcoming Model B will be priced at $ 25.

Why It’s Working: By far the cheapest computer on the market, the creator of Raspberry Pi hopes to get the gadget in the hands of children all over the world.

---

Growing up in the ’80s, Eben Upton spent a lot of time in his bedroom learning to code. And in 2006, when Upton became a talented and successful mobile chipset developer, he began to realize that not everyone has the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of programming.

“Many [kids] just don’t have computers at all,” Upton explains. “If they do, it’s a family computer, and you don’t want to mess with it.”

So, he began the Raspberry Pi Foundation. R…………… continues on Mashable

Dr André Carvalho, from the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology and the Research School of Physics and Engineering, part of the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, worked with collaborators from Brazil and Spain to come up with a new proposal for quantum computers. In his research, Dr Carvalho showed that disturbance – or noise – that prevents a quantum computer from operating accurately could become the very thing that makes it work.

“Most people have experienced some kind of computer error in their life – a file that doesn’t open, a CD that can’t be read – but we have ways to correct them. We also know how to correct errors in a quantum computer but we need to keep the noise level really, really low to do that,” he said.

“That’s been a problem, because to build a quantum computer you have to go down to atomic scales and deal with microscopic systems, which are extremely sensitive to noise.”

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the s…………… continues on Phys.Org

After having helped invent the technology that set Steve Jobs off on a biopic-worthy career, Steve Wozniak is going to make sure that biopic gets the technology just right.

During a press conference to promote his new HBO show The Newsroom on Thursday, Aaron Sorkin also entertained a few questions about his new gig adapting Walter Isaacson‘s biography about the late tech icon.

Among the revelations was that Sony, the studio behind the film, has hired Wozniak, who co-founded Apple computers with Jobs in 1976, to be a “tutor” on the production, Reuters reports. He will help ensure that the early technology shown in the film is accurate to actual events, and will also offer advice about writing about Jobs himself.

Wozniak left Apple in 1987, but kept in touch with Jobs. Last month, he spoke positively about the upcoming indie Jobs biopic, starring Ashton Kutcher as the lead.

“I f…………… continues on Hollywood Reporter

So rarely do two events occur in such close proximity that perfectly capture the agony and the ecstasy of Silicon Valley.

As the sun rose, hundreds of hoodie-wearing Facebook employees gathered on their new campus to celebrate the social network’s first day as a public company. Meanwhile, employees of Palo Alto-based Hewlett Packard were still digesting reports that their company is potentially planning to lay off between 25,000 and 30,000 people.

Facebook represents the promise of the future. HP, the onetime icon, seems destined to continue its slow, ignoble slide. And Silicon Valley shrugs and marches on.

“We once again see how ‘creative destruction’ continues to transform the Valley as Facebook goes IPO and Hewlett Packard restructures,” wrote Doug Henton, CEO of Collaborative Economics, in an email Friday. “This is historical but fits a longer-term pattern.”

In a place like this, with its relentless fixation on the future, there is no time for sentimentality.

Today, who weeps for the passing of Netscape, SGI or Sun Microsystems? The valley just moves on, or, in the case of Facebook, moves into Sun’s old headquarters.

Earlier this year, I was having coffee in Palo Alto with former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to talk about a new health-related startup he had founded. I asked him how it…………… continues on San Jose Mercury News

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.

What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is fa…………… continues on ReadWriteWeb

Google has just launched Knowledge Graph, the latest refinement to its search engine product that seeks to provide users with more relevant and in-depth responses to search queries. The company actually started testing this new interface last week, but now its ready to take the wraps off its new method for connecting search queries to information-rich topics on people, places, or things. Along with the standard search results you’re used to seeing, Google’s search results page now displays instant results related to your queries — a search for Taj Mahal immediately brings up a list of facts, photos, and a map of the famous landmark, as well as quick links to other popular uses of the search term (like the musician or the casino in New Jersey). There are a multitude of sources behind this data — Google cites Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA World Factbook, but also notes that “it’s augmented at a much larger scale” and tuned based on what the average user searches for.

Google’s goal is to get you to the information you’re looking for in fewer clicks, while also increasing the relevancy of what you see when searching, and there are three main innovations the company is highlighting. Knowledge Graph results seek to remove the ambiguity from typic…………… continues on Washington Post

When Apple launched its current line of operating systems, called OS X, it chose to name the various versions after cats, starting with “Cheetah” in 2001.

Apple never gave a reason why, but it was a very fitting name, seeing as Apple was far behind its competitors at the time and needed to cover a lot of ground very quickly, like a cheetah could.

And now, more than a decade later, Apple is sitting at the top, and again very fittingly, the next version in the line of OS X is named Mountain Lion.

All very nice metaphors, but what happens when they Animal Kingdom runs out of cats?

Mountain Lion will be the eighth version of OS X, which means Apple has already used more than a handful of cats.

After Cheetah came Puma, followed by Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and the current version, Lion.

But as Gizmodo points out, Apple has worked its way up in terms of cat feroc…………… continues on Los Angeles Times

SEOUL – Apple (AAPL) will struggle to cut its reliance on rival Samsung Electronics for component supplies, analysts and industry sources said Thursday, despite speculation that it has begun reducing its use of Samsung memory chips.

Samsung has lost 6 percent of its value, or $ 11 billion, since a Taiwanese trade news outlet reported Wednesday that Apple had placed big new orders with Japanese chipmaker Elpida for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips.

The report has stoked concerns among Samsung investors that Apple wants to help turn the struggling Elpida, now in bankruptcy protection, into a much bigger supplier to the U.S. tech giant, partly at the expense of South Korea’s Samsung.

Apple is Samsung’s largest customer, buying chips and displays, but the pair are also bitter rivals for the sale of smartphones and tablets and are engaged in a patent war.

But tech analysts in the United States and South Korea said they doubted the report by Taiwan’s DigiTimes, if confirmed, would signal major damage for Samsung and for its supplier links to Apple, despite the fierce selloff in Samsung shares.

“Apple has been diversifying its suppliers and the de…………… continues on San Jose Mercury News

MINNEAPOLIS — Delta Air Lines may have charged some frequent fliers higher fares than other customers for almost three weeks because of a computer glitch.

Delta, the largest carrier at Detroit Metro Airport, acknowledged on Wednesday that frequent fliers who logged into its website to search for fares saw different prices than people who searched anonymously. Delta spokesman Paul Skrbec said frequent fliers sometimes saw higher fares, sometimes lower. He said the problem has been fixed and apologized to travelers. He didn’t know how many people had been affected.

The two business travelers who first noticed the problem said fares they saw were consistently higher when they logged in via their frequent-flier accounts.

A few weeks ago, security company executives Patrick Smith and Steve Lisle were side-by-side with their laptops open on the same conference table at their company’s Minneapolis office, trying to book tickets on the same flight to St. Louis. Smith was logged in as a frequent flier. Lisle wasn’t. In three out of five of their tests, fares for the frequent flier were consistently higher, including a $ 124 price difference for a trip to Los Angeles, the two told WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, which first reported their experience on Tuesday night.

“Not just a couple of bucks. It was pretty significant,” said Smith.

WCCO also searche…………… continues on Detroit Free Press

Near her wheelchair a blue and gray robotic arm swung into action. Swiveling towards patient S3, it reached out its mechanical hand and grabbed a container of coffee with a lid and straw, lifting it up to S3′s waiting lips. Arriving in just the right spot she sucked on the straw, a simple act for most people that she had been unable to do on her own for over a decade.

In a video of the maneuver, S3′s beaming face registers her delight.

According to the researchers, whose work was published today in Nature, this is the first peer-reviewed study of a person with severe paralysis controlling a robotic or prosthetic arm directly in three-dimensional space using thought.

“We now show that people with longstanding, profound paralysis can move complex real-world machines like robotic arms, and not just virtual devices, like a dot on a computer,” said Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, one of the lead researchers.

In 2006, Brown and colleagues published a paper in Nature on an earlier version of this device and process – called Braingate – that demonstrated in a man paralyzed from the neck down that it was possible to move a cursor on a computer using…………… continues on The Atlantic

By TRACIE CONE

SALEM — A plan to spend nearly $ 300,000 to upgrade the town’s computer network would end what the information technology manager called “complete chaos.”

Russ Harland, director of technical services for Neoscope Technology Solutions of Portsmouth, told selectmen Monday the town must invest in the system to avoid numerous problems.

“This is, to me, is a tremendous risk and liability,” he said.

Harland’s company was hired late last year to manage the computer network as of Jan. 1. It was a cost-cutting move Town Manager Keith Hickey said has paid off, saving the town thousands of dollars and improving service.

But it meant eliminating the town’s four-member IT department. The IT budget dropped from $ 573,000 in 2011 to $ 456,000 this year.

Outlining the improvements since his company took over, Harland showed selectmen photographs of the town’s computer network. The network handles communications for Town Hall and the police, fire and public works departments.

“We found a lot of risks and liabilities for the town,” Harland said.

The photos showed masses of tangled, color-coded wires and computer equipment stuffed in closets. He called it “a pile of spaghetti.”

“This is complete chaos from a man…………… continues on Eagle Tribune

NEW YORK — A federal judge cited the confident voice of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs on Tuesday as she refused to toss out lawsuits alleging the company and various publishers conspired to drive up the price of electronic books.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote noted in her written ruling that Jobs had made statements that agreements between the publishers and Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, Calif., would cause consumers to “pay a little more” and that prices would “be the same” at Apple and Amazon.com.

In a lawsuit this year, the U.S. government joined 15 states in suing Apple and publishers, saying they conspired in the fall of 2009 to force e-book prices several dollars above the $ 9.99 price charged by Amazon.com on its popular Kindle device. According to the lawsuit, the publishers were concerned that Amazon’s e-book price was too far below the price of hardcover books and Apple was concerned because it was preparing to launch the iPad. By 2010, Amazon was responsible for 90 percent of e-book sales in the United States, the judge noted.

Amazon’s $ 9.99 price for best-sellers was such a deep discount from list prices of $ 20 and more that it was widely believed Amazon was selling the e-books at a loss to attract more customers and force competitors to lower their prices.

The judge rejected the argument that Apple and the pub…………… continues on Washington Post

(Updates with closing shares in sixth paragraph.)

May 15 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. is preparing a new lineup of thinner MacBook laptops running on more powerful chips made by Intel Corp., people with knowledge of the plans said.

The MacBook Pro machines, to be unveiled at Apple’s annual developers conference starting June 11, also will feature high- definition screens like those on the iPhone and iPad, as well as flash memory to cut startup times and extend battery life, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been made public.

Apple’s Mac sales are growing faster than the personal- computer market, benefiting from the popularity of its mobile devices. Since 2007, when the iPhone was introduced, Apple’s Mac sales have more than doubled, reaching $ 21.8 billion last year. As Apple’s share has grown, competitors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. have followed suit in making thinner, aluminum laptops that start up more quickly.

Apple’s new laptops will run on Intel’s new processors, code-named Ivy Bridge, and will have a slimmed-down body design from the current 0.95-inch (2.4 centimeter) thickness, the people said. Apple’s other lines of computers — MacBook Air laptops and iMac desktops — also may…………… continues on San Francisco Chronicle

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