“Apple has been working with at least one partner, Swatch, to release a line of smartwatches in a variety of branded styles and price points. Apple and its partners will offer a family of smartwatches to suit all tastes ‘from geek to chic,’ our source says.”
Read full story => CultOfMac

Technology News: 10 technologies that will transform PCs in 2015 and beyond
The PC’s future is so bright, you gotta wear shades. You might write off PCs as archaic or boring. You might take for granted that they’ll get faster, lighter, more power-efficient and more convenient to use over time. But if you stop and consider all the things that go into making a computer better, there’s actually a lot to be excited about. Here are 10 PC advancements that will transform PCs over the next several years.
Read full story => PCWorld

Programming News: Introduction to TypeScript
Microsoft’s alternative to JavaScript adds modularity, generics, and type information while maintaining JS source compatibility. Used to develop applications for browsers, servers, phones, and the desktop, JavaScript has grown to be one of the most ubiquitous programming languages. For all its popularity, the language was not originally designed for the scale and complexity of today’s use cases. One of the key features of programming languages designed for this kind of use is a type system that can enable developers to use modern tooling to refactor, navigate, and detect errors in the code as it grows and changes. TypeScript helps to fill this gap for JavaScript applications. As a superset of JavaScript, TypeScript allows programmers to use their existing JavaScript code and frameworks. TypeScript provides a flexible type system that layers well on top of existing JavaScript, which enables developers to scale their codebases more quickly and with more confidence than with vanilla JavaScript.
Read full story => Dr.Dobbs

Photography News: MIT Will Teach You Photojournalism For Free
If you ever wanted to get more serious about photography, but weren’t quite sure where to start, MIT’s free online course in photojournalism just might be the right entry point. The worst possible outcome is that you might end up a better photographer. It’s not a full-blown photography class–there’s no instructor or peer feedback, and the course assumes you already know a little something and don’t need to learn all the technical aspects of camerawork. Instead, it centers around the type of photography most of us partake in: shooting our environment on the fly. A curated reading list and weekly assignments are designed to guide you in thinking about how to approach subjects and environments. They’re also intended to help you translate the five senses you experience in the living world into a single, dynamic photo.
Read full story => FastCodesign

Technology News: Dispatches From a Connected Future
Unmanned aerial vehicles developed by Yan Wan from the University of North Texas are capable of providing wireless communications to storm-ravaged areas where telephone access is out. The vehicle was one of the cyber-physical systems showcased at the Smart America Expo. Anyone looking for a glimpse into the technologies that will change our lives, businesses and organizations in the coming decades received an eyeful at the Smart America Expo in Washington, D.C. in June. There, scientists showed off cyber-dogs and disaster drones, smart grids and smart healthcare systems, all intended to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. The event brought together leaders from academia, industry and government to showcase the results of six months of rapid team-building and technology development. The Expo demonstrated the ways that smarter cyber-physical systems (CPS) – sometimes called the Internet of Things – can lead to improvements in healthcare, transportation, energy and emergency response, and other critical areas.
Read full story => HuffingtonPost

Programming News: Webinar: Back to Basics 1: Thinking in Documents
New applications, users and inputs demand new types of data, like unstructured, semi-structured and polymorphic data. Adopting MongoDB means adopting to a new, document-based data model. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for relational databases, these rules don’t apply to MongoDB. Documents can represent rich data structures, providing lots of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. In addition, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense. In this session, Mike Friedman explores how you can take advantage of MongoDB’s document model to build modern applications.
Read full story => mongoDB

Photography News: MIT Has A Free Photojournalism Course You Should Take
Lots of schools now offer free, online courses, but here’s a doozy from MIT: an introductory course about documentary photography and photojournalism that won’t cost you a cent to work through. Published through MIT’s Open Courseware project, the course — Documentary Photography and Photojournalism: Still Images of a World in Motion – was originally taught by Professor B. D. Colen. The class is pretty full-on: there are readings, and assignments you need to work through, plus an image gallery and course material to download too. But it should provide you with a great understanding of the theory and practice of photojournalism. You can investigate it and download the course materials here.
Read full story => gizmodo

Technology News: Game Changer – Your lawyer is a robot!
Can you train a computer to think like a lawyer? Though it might seem like a far-fetched, science fiction scenario, that is precisely what goes on at “e-discovery” law firm Wortzman Nickle Professional Corp. “Predictive coding” is just one of the sophisticated technological innovations the Toronto firm utilizes to help companies in litigation identify, process and present their electronic data during a trial’s discovery stage.
Read full story => TheGlobeAndMail

Programming News: The lie of the API
Really, nobody takes your website serious anymore if you don’t offer an API. And that’s what everybody did: they got themselves a nice API. An enormous amount of money and energy is wasted on developing APIs that are hard to create and even harder to use. This is wonderful news for developers, who get paid to build two pieces of software—a server and a client—that were actually never needed in the first place. The API was there already: it’s your website itself. Shockingly, a majority of developers seems unable to embrace the Web and the important role URLs and hypermedia play on it. The lie called “API” has trapped many publishers, including the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.
Read full story => Ruben Verborgh

Photography News: The week’s best photojournalism
In some of the week’s most stirring photos, a man stamps down coals, protesters clash with police, and a boy snuggles with a sheep.
Read full story => TheWeek

Technology News: Chromebooks Gain Ground In The Education Market; But A Majority of Educators Still Prefer iPads
Schools around the world are trading in desktop PCs for tablets, netbooks and increasingly Chromebooks, especially in the United States, new research shows. The unexpected popularity of Chromebooks, which were dismissed when they first came out as stripped-down machines with limited appeal, is a challenge for Apple. Less than a year ago, Apple appeared poised to inherit a significant share of the education market from vendors of traditional PCs. Today, Apple’s dominance seems far less assured. According to the National Survey on Mobile Technology for K–12 Education, 81 percent of respondents had adopted or planned to adopt an iPad, up from 73.5 percent in 2012, while 31 percent had adopted or planned to adopt a Chromebook, up from 14 percent in 2012.
Read full story => Forbes

Programming News: Upton: A Web Scraping Framework
Today we’re announcing a new open-source project that aims to make web scraping simpler. It’s named Upton, after labor journalist Upton Sinclair, because the project started as part of our intern investigation. Upton is a web-scraping framework packaged as a RubyGem. It abstracts away some of the common parts of web scraping so that developers can concentrate on the unique parts of their project. Web scraping is a common task in data journalism and news-application development. In every scraping project there are often at least two kinds of web pages we’re interested in: One contains a bunch of links to other pages that contain data, and the other contains the data itself. Think about the relationship between a search result page on a job board and a job listing page itself, or the ProPublica homepage and ProPublica stories, or a page listing payments to doctors and a page describing a payment to a single doctor. Let’s call these “index” pages and “instance” pages respectively. Upton understands this paradigm out of the box.
Read full story => Propublica

Photography News: Photojournalism eats Instagram for breakfast
The other day, on Mother Jones, another article was published on whether photojournalism could survive in the age of Instagram. For some reason, Instagram is always positioned as the photojournalism killer when other platforms, like Twitter or Flickr have more potential to destroy it. If it can be destroyed. A few clarifications: It is not, nor does it ever been the tool that has defined photojournalism. No one ever worried that the instamatic would destroy photojournalism, nor that the Polaroid would end photojournalism. In fact, up to recently, no one cared about what equipment and platform photojournalists were using to carry their messages to the masses. The only thing that mattered was the result. And it still does.
Read full story => MelcherSystem

Technology News: Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records
The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services. The privacy protection of those records has been a primary concern.
Read full story => NYT

Programming News: Clean up Python source code with PythonTidy, available as Sublime Text 2 plugin too
PythonTidy is a utility to reformat Python source code according to Python PEP–8 style guide. It cleans up your source code and makes it adhere the community recommended practices. PythonTidy does not lint or validate Python source code – it rewrites it to follow PEP–8 (and other) configured rules.
Read full story => Open Source Hacker

Photography News: Is smartphone journalism the way forward?
Filtering apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic have penetrated the world of photojournalism. The Guardian picture desk receives a lot of filtered photographs from news agencies on the wires. We recently included this Hipstamatic shot in our Picture desk live blog.
Read full story => The Guardian