Shelly Palmer
The governments of NY, NJ, Connecticut and Pennsylvania have combined resources to launch contact tracing (exposure notification) apps to help fight the spread of COVID-19. How do they work? Are they safe? Should you download them? Shelly Palmer talks with Kerry Drew and Bianca Peters about your digital privacy and the pandemic on Fox 5's Good Day New York. Original Airdate: October 6, 2020 Continue Reading →
TikTok
CNBC is reporting that a growing number of TikTok users are turning to the app for personal finance advice. As of mid-June, the #investing tag on TikTok had racked up 278.1 million views. Stating the obvious, experts caution that accounts offering guidance may be skipping important lessons and hawking get-rich quick schemes. We’ve been here before. Continue Reading →

Working Remotely

Earlier this week, Twitter held an all-hands meeting using Google Hangouts and Slack. According to my friends at Twitter, the experiment was a resounding success. This raises the question: what are your favorite tools for remote meetings, as well as remote work? Continue Reading →
Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer talks with Kerry Drew and Bianca Peters about Google's "Loretta" Super Bowl commercial and why he believes that Google should have put a disclaimer on the spot warning potential users about how it would use the data gathered. Original Airdate: February 4, 2020 on Fox 5's Good Day New York Continue Reading →
Google Paid Search
Over the past couple of weeks, Google has made some unsubtle changes to its search results pages. To say that the line between paid ads and organic search results has been blurred is to understate in the extreme. Continue Reading →
Severe Weather
Weather forecasting is tough. Very tough. It requires immense amounts of data and it is computationally intensive. But Google has published a paper that suggests that AI can use simple radar data to "nowcast" the weather with remarkable short-term accuracy. Continue Reading →
Smart Speakers
Amazon, Google, Apple, and the Zigbee Alliance announced a new partnership called Project Connected Home over IP. It will create a new smart home standard so their products can work together. Sadly, we won’t see a draft specification until late next year. But the good news is that the partnership is announced and there will be a spec and open source materials, too. Continue Reading →
Star Trek Universal Translator
Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the "Universal Translator." While Gene Roddenberry's epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show. Continue Reading →