cryptogon.com

Mayer, 36, is vice president of Google’s “local and maps” division, which means she oversees products and software used on mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computes. Retailers like Wal-Mart are competing to sell more of their goods through mobile devices as more consumers use them to shop.

“We are on the cusp of a massive transformation in the way people shop in our increasingly connected world. Marissa’s insights and expertise in the technology and consumer areas are valuable assets to Wal-Mart as we move forward,” Wal-Mart Chairman Rob Walton said in a statement.

That the “enemy within” is the biggest threat to an enterprise is nothing new, but buried in the article was something that struck me as, well, Orwellian. The WSJ reports that some organizations “are even using new technology to look at the language of their IT staff’s emails to determine whether their behavior or mind-set has changed.”

“If you start to feel differently about the company you work for and the people you work with, you’d be surprised how your language changes,” says Ed Stroz, co-president at digital-risk-management firm Stroz Friedberg LLC, New York. The company, like other consulting firms such as Ernst & Young, makes technology to examine linguistics.

Common red flags include a dramatic change in the length of a person’s emails. For example, someone may start writing emails of half a dozen words when their messages used to read like novels. Other tip-offs: a rise in the number of anger-related phrases, greater use of the word “me,” and signs of more-polarized thinking, like the words “never” and “always.”

It was the first time a specific motive has been revealed for Neil Heywood’s murder last November, a death which ended Chinese leader Bo Xilai’s hopes of emerging as a top central leader and threw off balance the Communist Party’s looming leadership succession.

Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, asked Heywood late last year to move a large sum of money abroad, and she became outraged when he demanded a larger cut of the money than she had expected due to the size of the transaction, the sources said.

She accused him of being greedy and hatched a plan to kill him after he said he could expose her dealings, one of the sources said, summarizing the police case. Both sources have spoken to investigators in Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese city where Heywood was killed and where Bo had cast himself as a crime-fighting Communist Party leader.

Gu is in police custody on suspicion of committing or arranging Heywood’s murder, though no details of the motive or the crime itself have been publicly released, other than a general comment from Chinese state media that he was killed after a financial dispute.

The sources have close ties to Chinese police and said they were given details of the investigation.

They said Heywood – formerly a close friend of Gu and who had been helping her with her overseas financial dealings – was killed after he threatened to expose what she was doing.

Spanish yields were expected to rise further towards the panic-triggering 7 percent level beyond which debt costs are widely seen as unsustainable unless the European Central Bank resumes its bond purchases after a two-month break.

Yields on Germany’s benchmark 10-year Bund, viewed as the euro zone’s safest debt, hit a record low of 1.628 percent. The previous record was established in November 2011, at the height of the debt crisis before the ECB injected around 1 trillion euros of cheap three-year funds into the banking system.

“We’re back in full crisis mode,” Rabobank rate strategist Lyn Graham-Taylor said.

“It is looking more and more likely that Spain is going to have some form of a bailout. Assuming there is not an (ECB) intervention you would not see a cap on Spanish yields, they would just keep increasing.”

The latest blow to Spanish markets followed data on Friday that showed record borrowing by its banks from the ECB. Investors’ main fear is that banks parked most of the funds in domestic government debt, making them more vulnerable to sovereign stress.

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Underlining investor fears, the cost of insuring Spanish debt against default hit a record high of $520,000 a year to buy $10 million of protection.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The lenses are designed to be paired with compact heads up display (HUD) units – glasses that allow images to be projected onto their lenses.

Much bulkier HUDs are already deployed by the US Army and Air Force to superimpose data about targets and other status updates over users’ views.

The tech could help troops enhance their awareness on the battlefield.

…

The lenses work by allowing the wearer to focus on two things at once – both the information projected onto the glasses’ lenses and the more distant view that can be seen through them.

They do this by having two different filters.

The central part of each lens sends light from the HUD towards the middle of the pupil, while the outer part sends light from the surrounding environment to the pupil’s rim.

By building two filters into each lens, close-up and distant light sources are both in focus

The retina receives each image in focus, at the same time.

“Normally, for example, with a camera you focus on something distant or something close – but you focus on a particular spot,” said Mr Willey.

More than 200,000 money-strapped households will use their tax refunds this year to pay for bankruptcy filing and legal fees, says a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The NBER research confirms what bankruptcy lawyers have long known: At the first part of the year, when Americans receive their tax refunds, there almost always is a spike in personal bankruptcy filings.

But that has been especially true since the cost of bankruptcy soared after U.S. bankruptcy laws changed in 2005. And many more families have been forced to delay filing until they can afford to pay the fees, the NBER study says.