Adventure Ausrama Blog

, With fewer students choosing not to maths and science, or even worse doing badly in the subjects, there is a real shortage of people who can work in big data tech. Research scientists for universities are simply not there. Business pays twice as much as universities. Basically, universities need more money. The government is doing nothing about this commercial reality. Labor took a big chunk out of university funding with its educational reforms. The Liberal national government has promised less for both universities and schools, despite the Abbott back down. Just what the government plans to do is unknown at present. The Gonsky reforms are up in the air. Some states are not yet on board and states who have signed want the money promised by Labor. Universities are in the wings waiting for some kind of positive action by the government. If the Gonsky funding goes ahead there will very little left for the tertiary sector. Robbing tertiary to fund schools does not make

The NSA has said that it targeted non-US citizens in its information grab from large Internet companies. Australian and American government agencies have secured detailed data about Australian citizens. This fact came out in a new report. In the first half of 2013 546 requests were made on Australians. Facebook provided details on 349 of these. The US demanded information on 20,000 users assumed to be Americans. Access was granted on nearly 16,000 US accounts. Which government agencies made the demands was not announced by Facebook. Internet companies seem to have been given some sort of filtering power to decide what is released. This is strange considering such companies are not elected non-government agencies. Are they entitled to be above the law? Requests to Twitter by Australia have risen 600 percent since the second half of 2012. All members of the international data oligopoly were approached. About two thirds of all requests were successful. There is a fine balanc

The Internet is putting more people out of work and this is only the beginning. As more advanced algorithms are being developed established jobs are under threat. It will not only be lawyers and professional photographers employed by newspapers who get the chop. Unless you are in work that involves human problem solving like plumbers, mechanics and vehicle body repairers your job will face "extinction". Most of the burden will fall on older workers. Retail, for example, only wants teenagers who can be paid a pittance while "training". Open discrimination occurs against people over 45. They are simply not wanted. This barrier age has fallen in recent years. Computerized job selection processes cuts them off at the beginning. Their resumes are not even looked at. If they go personally to apply for a position they face insulting comments and bad jokes. Employers are no longer afraid of telling them directly that they are too old. Many have simply given up

Watch that computer. It could be bad for your health. Remember when complaints were rife about Wi-Fi signals damaging your brain? This charge was also aimed at mobile phones. Signals from towers were so small as to be hardly measurable. Radio and television transmissions are stronger. Home WiFi and computers generally are extremely low.  You are more likely to suffer repetitive strain injury from using a computer than brain damage. Repetitive strain is becoming a problem in all industries because computer use is so widespread. The upper-limb and neck are the danger areas. Even now though, many "experts" say the "illness" is imagined. It is difficult to prove that the injury was caused at work. People do many odd things away from work, though employment is the greatest culprit.  Like factory jobs where the same movements are repeated, data processors are likely to suffer from RSI. In the 1980s half of Telstra telephonists claimed they had RSI. Oddly, t

"I'm sick, but I gotta keep my website up to date." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funny Animal Photos Vista Computer Solutions Blog

We hear so much praise about progress of the new broadband network being rolled out by the National Broadband Network (NBN). The problem is - there has been little progress. Apart from the acclaimed network in a part of Tasmania, few customers enjoy ultra-fast broadband anywhere else. The Internet divide still exists between city and rural. Obviously the NBN will be laid out in city areas because this is where the greatest income will be obtained. As it now stands rural regions will not get faster Internet until way past 2020. Many people will be dead by then. How do we know if fiber optics will be superceded? Soon the ocean protection walls will be finished around Venice and there are cries that it is old technology and will not save the valuable city. Perhaps the same will be said about the NBN. In the present economic climate where will be few businesses left in populated cities to enjoy the improved communication. Only if the mineral sector declines and the Aussie dollar

Will Mankind survive the technological change? Since the year 2000 the world has changed extremely quickly. Our social lives have altered forever. At the turn of the century only a quarter of Australians were connected to the Internet. Now three quarters have Internet access with two thirds of these having broadband. Only a third of Australians had mobile phones in the year 2000. Today, just about everyone has one, including children. Verbal communication faded in favor of texting.  Even this is now declining in favour of voice and video.` We bought newspapers, magazines and books for news, general information, instruction and direction mapping. Now we do this over the Internet or by using direction indicators that speak to us. Relationships now begin on the digital information highway. We pay bills without even using a card or cash. And take our favorite music with us everywhere we go. Even ordinary emailing has been somewhat superceded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype.  Th

There isn't much doubt that mobile devices will soon outnumber the fixed PC. It is surprising that it has taken so long. People are tripping over each other to make pre-orders on the iPhone. There will probably be a rush for Microsoft's new offerings. In recent years Google's Android products have been racing forward, generally at the expense of Microsoft, not Apple. Web developers are slowly making a change as well. Old "easy" website building is a thing of the past. It seems websites have to provide a "traditional" PC type website and have another built-in for mobile devices. There must be an automatic link in the main website so that only the smaller site is sent to mobiles. Though many users have said they prefer looking at traditional sites with a small handheld, even though it means moving around a page to see all the info, download times are just too long for this to continue. HTML5 was envisaged to make it easier for developers, standard

Google Gmail offers a new Internet phone service if you have a Gmail Account. There is one thing about running such a service on the Internet; that is it costs nothing for the company providing the service to run. Users pay a local telephone company for access to the Internet from their homes and on their mobile phones. The connection goes through each country via local telephone companies servicing the internet and phone lines. There is no charge for US Gmail users and a charge per call for those living in other countries. Though it is a small amount it is discriminatory. The Internet goes all around the world like a net. Access to this net is open to anyone. No country charges its population to access the net to other countries . The European furniture company Ikea has already been accused of cross-subsidization for charging different prices for the same products in different countries. The production and even distribution costs are much the same. Google's discriminatio

People are jumping on the Internet without realizing that their action is leading to potential disaster. Many countries are leaving Internet investment to the private sector but such companies are only interested in short-term profit. Unless a monopoly exists it is just not worth while investing large amounts in Internet infrastructure. Communication is at the center of everything we do today. Soon mobile devices will outnumber PCs. In some places Internet speed is slowing down due to overload. To meet future demand Governments will have to get involved in telecommunication infrastructure investment. In some cases this will mean government take-over of information systems. Advanced technology requires very high speed and wide bandwidth. It takes up to ten years to build adequate optic fiber information networks. Soon poor countries will be measured by the quality of their Internet. Even some currently advanced nations will be left behind if they don't act in the near futur

Australian retailers are in a corner with people turning to the Internet to make purchases. With rents near zero for Internet sellers and high rents for retail shops the odds are stacked against local stores. Travel agents are the ones hit the hardest. It is so easy to buy an airline ticket online. Next are bookshops. They cannot compete with Amazon, though some Australian bookshops are selling online as well. Pharmacists are up against large cut-price online sellers in the US. However, chemists can still rely on the highly subsidized cash cow called the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Some Australian businesses are becoming paranoid. A woman was accused by a bookshop proprietor of making a list of books to buy on the Internet. A sports retailer asks for a deposit before customers try things on. Things are changing so fast. Major stores in the US are allowing goods purchased online to be returned at city outlets. Australian businesses must make the move to the Internet now, o

New evidence shows that mobile phones really are dangerous. Even the average user can suffer from brain damage, lower sperm count and altered DNA. Just 4 hours of continuous use will preempt the brain's capacity to repair itself. When scientists originally said that pulsed digital signals from cell phones cause DNA breaks they were condemned for making it up. Now proof is very strong. Apparently, the industry has known about situational damage from mobile phone use for years. They have intentionally hidden the truth. Research on insects shows that DNA fragmentation occurs in ovarian cells. Insects do have ovarian cells. This reduces the insects' capacity to breed. Long term exposure kills cells completely. Other work with rats shows bone damage to fetuses from just six minutes of radiation per day. And rats had memory loss. From this work it can be deduced that children are more at risk. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot

Why is Australia in such a bad way? The country is exporting at record levels. China is paying up front for these exports. Interest rates are not too high. Remember the Keating days of 14 per cent? We do have a "dual" economy with manufacturing doing it tough due to the high dollar, but Australia never has been a strong exporter of manufactured goods. Retailers are saying people aren't spending. You would think that people can only spend what they earn and no more. However, due to the multiplier effect, according to economic theory, when a person spends a dollar that one dollars turns over about five times. In other words the money supply, the real paper dollars out there, is actually only about a fifth of the money on the books in an economy. So what happens when a consumer saves? Think about it. The money in circulation "shrinks" by four more dollars. This is what is happening in Australia. We all envied Japan in its good years when they had very h

It seems odd for the Government to compensate Telstra for building the National Broadband Network considering fibre optic cable is a modern version of old copper. If a rival company in the market place builds a new factory with modern equipment established firms are not paid a cent. Besides, the copper was funded by Australian citizens and not by Telstra per se . Selling Telstra was a stupid idea anyway. People who bought shares should have known that the monopoly would eventually die. Perhaps John Howard saw the writing on the wall and decided to sell it. In recent times Testra has barely made a profit so it could no longer be relied upon as a cash cow. The Australian Government is paying Telstra $11 billion in compensation. Laws should have been changed to prevent this public liability taking place. Telstra's ownership of the copper should have been changed before the sale. It's control should have been altered to protection of the copper network which was paid

Despite calls by some countries for Internet companies to had over information on citizens' searches and email, the knowledge superhighway is moving in the other direction. Information stored in the cloud are out of reach of national police forces. Gone are the days when just about everything that a suspect has done is available recorded somewhere at sometime. Data is there but it cannot be accessed. The ordinary person will not have much sympathy for police trying to "background" a suspect. They see authorities as being too intrusive anyway. For years Australian social security sent out "demand" forms for aged pensioners to provide up-to-date information about what they had in the bank. A court found that social security did not have the legal right to demand honest answers. The forms are still being sent out. Legally they are still suspect. Such is the quagmire authorities are in. Anyway, back to the case in hand. Police are saying even getting data

It's about time Medicare moved into the modern age! Thankfully it has given people an alternative to queueing for their medical treatment rebate. It is a silly system anyway. X-ray clinics and specialists should be given the subsidy directly in the first place. This would reduce the number of public servants providing an unnecessary service. Now "customers" will be able to fill in forms online. Payment will then be made directly into their bank accounts. We are led to believe that Medicare delayed adoption of a direct payment process due to the potential for fraud. This is nonsense. Fraud could occur under the old system. Limiting payments to $250 a day will not stop fraud. Medicare holds that people will continue to use the queuing method of refunds. Internet banking is increasing in popularity. There is no doubt most will change to the new system in droves. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.co

Everything in society is controlled to make it safe, right? Wrong! Herbal medicine can be consumed freely without restriction even if it kills you. Try to buy opiates which can be taken for a lifetime without harm and all sorts of restrictions apply. Drug addicts die of illnesses such as aids and hepatitis. Recent tests were done on an Australian who took Ayervedic medicines. His body had eight times the maximum safe level of lead in it. The mistake he made on a visit to India has ruined his life. Ayervedid herbs are normally contaminated with heavy metals. Whether this part of their "healing" function is not known. Imagine taking lead, arsenic and mercury, daily. In Australia, Indian and Chinese herbs are monitored for dangerous levels of heavy metals. That's where it ends: the efficacy of the "medication" is not tested. You can buy such herbs on the Internet from countries where product quality is not regulated. It is surely time for the herbal medicine mark

Will Australia ever have a National Broadband Network? It seems it will only be partially completed before the Coalition wins the next election and puts a red line through it all. Telstra will remain the controlling body when NBN .com takes over. Not much will change in Australia's communication sector. Those who miss out will be terribly bitter about the mish -mash of a system we are left with. Just why the Coalition hates the NBN is hard to clarify. Why don't they want the nation to move forward with a world-class Internet network? Telstra is being criticized for being too competitive in price cutting. There is not much profit left for small telcos . Surely, this is the way of the market, but is Telstra trying to "grab" the market before it gains control over a market that will be opened up again with a coalition win? Telstra will survive a re-adjustment when smaller firms will fail. The Labor Government sees the deal "done" and a majority

Could what has happened in Egypt occur in Australia? That is Turning off the internet. It is as easy as clicking a switch. A government would just contact the main telecommunications company explain the state of emergency and the telco would turn it off. Minor internet providers would follow. A major problem for a government would be cutting off internet access of journalists. Much of their system is outside of public providers. Turn off that system and you stop government agencies talking to each other. Cutting off access for major cities would be a waste of time. Television, radio and the print media could not be stopped. In a place like Australia where information transmission is decentralised there is no one person to instruct. Let's face it - any Australian government that did pull the plug would self-destruct. There is no way the people would ever trust it again. There is also the problem of "leakage" as a few minor Internet providers refuse to submit - some are for

Internet advertising click fraud is still widespread. Throwing money around advertising in this way is madness, anyway, A click does not mean a sale. Of course website owners are going to position "clicks" where they will be clicked on - accidentally or not. Getting in there and clicking away for half an hour won't do much harm either. Automated botnets are being set up as well. They will really get the cash flowing in from "thick-headed" advertisers. Over a decade ago it was said the end of "brochure in the post" advertising was near with the advent of the Internet. How wrong they were! You can hardly get the car in the gate with all the paperwork strewn along the footpath from overflowing letterboxes. The more things change the more they stay the same. Businesses spend millions on advertising that for the most part is just wasted. They would be better off buying new machinery to decrease the cost of production and make money that way. http://www.adve