Inappropriate Facebook pictures could cost you a job

Facebook users beware! Having inappropriate pictures on your profile could cost you a job, a new research has found.

Researchers warned of increase in employers checking candidates lifestyle, attitudes and even appearance in photos loaded on Facebook profiles.

In one of the biggest ever studies of the importance of Facebook profiles among job hunters, American scientists found that employees increasingly use the social networking site to weed out unsuitable candidates, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

"While employers are using Facebook to monitor their employees, they have also begun to use it as a screening tool when considering potential candidates," said Vanessa de la Llama of the Florida International University in North Miami.

However, the lack of guidelines means many firms simply follow their own judgement of just how bad your Facebook profile pictures are."Because this is a fairly new trend, a standardized set of guidelines has yet to be established, with employers often assessing job applicants in a subjective manner," said Llama, who led the research.

The research team interviewed representatives from the areas of information technology, healthcare and wellness, education, law enforcement, food and drink, travel,

advertising and suggest that their findings shed light on a growing trend.

They hope to raise the ethical questions for debate surrounding whether or not employers should be using Facebook and other social networks to screen candidates.

"The question of whether employers are providing job candidates with equal opportunities if they are assessing on-line "image" prior to interviewing candidates must be raised," they said in the report.

"Of course, it is possible that one's Facebook activity is a perfectly acceptable window on to one's personality."

Facebook itself has already said that the practice, which has been documented at several American organisations, is a violation of its terms of use and could potentially lead to legal action.

Twitter releases 'targeted tweets' for advertisers

Twitter has released a new advertising tool called 'targeted tweets' to allow advertisers to reach out to its users based on their geographic location.

"Until today, it's been impractical to send these kinds of highly tailored Tweets, since there was no way to reach people in New York without also reaching followers in Norway, Nebraska and Nigeria who can't take advantage of your offer," Twitter said in a blog post.

Twitter further says the new feature will help global brands to send tweets different times with tailored messages for specific nations. Also, developers who only want to reach customers using a specific device can also use the new advertising tool.

The company had been testing 'targeted tweets' feature for several weeks with companies like Coca Cola, The Washington Post and British Airways. The service is currently available to the advertisers using the company's promoted tweets platform, via ads.twitter.com

Twitter explained the new service with a recent tweet from from British Airways targeted at U.K. users, which said: "Our ad shows our plane in London. But it can go all over the UK. Enter FYI14BJ & see where we are now."'

"As with all Promoted Tweets, advertisers only pay when users engage with it, and Tweets that generate the most engagement are likely to appear more often," Twitter said. "Simply put, advertisers are rewarded for messages that resonate with audiences."

Samsung Galaxy S III goes to doctor; gets X-Ray

 

Old-school: Tearing apart your smartphone just to get a glimpse of what's inside and to see how a manufacturer has crammed the parts and pieces into a super-slim frame.

New-school? Tossing that smartphone under an X-ray machine and letting technology do the work for you, sparing you from having to purchase all kinds of tiny tools and possibly wreck your phone something good in the process.

At least, that's the impression we get from checking out Engadget's latest pictures of a Samsung Galaxy S III under the ol' X-ray. As it turns out, one of the site's readers apparently has access to a hospital digital mammography machine, which helps him both save lives and scan smartphones during the downtime.

However, the drawbacks of the X-ray are pretty apparent at first glance – pardon the pun. While the technique gives interested smartphone owners a way to see just how meticulously their device was assembled, they're left to their own guesswork as to which component is which.

To that, however, we turn to iFixit's previously posted Samsung Galaxy S III teardown – an eight-step guide that covers a bunch of different components that can be removed from the smartphone itself. That includes the simple bits like the phone's 2100 mAh battery (newbie removal) to more complicated techniques like removing the smartphone's entire mainboard to get a glimpse at its Melfas 8PL533 touch sensor – a chip that transforms your screen presses into binary language.

The Samsung Galaxy S III sports either an Exynos 4412 quad-core A9 processor or a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, depending on whether you purchased it in the United States or internationally. One gigabyte of RAM – DDR2 Green Memory, as identified by iFixit – comes with the international versions, whereas United States-based Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones get bumped up to a full two gigabytes. Korea wins the day on specifications though, as Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones released there come with the quad-core processor and two gigabytes of memory.

Also depending on your location and provider, the smartphone packs 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of storage. The last one is a bit of a sticking point for United States Samsung fans, however, as the company has yet to release a 64-variant of the phone stateside.

But as we recently reported, Samsung's intention is to deliver a 64-gigabyte version of the Galaxy S III at some point "during the second half of this year," said Samsung vice president Teri Daley in a statement.

Mozilla releases early desktop version of Firefox OS for developers

Mozilla last week released a test version of Firefox OS, to help developers get some quality time with the new mobile OS and test their apps, before it is released to the general public. The early desktop version is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows users.

First introduced as Boot to Gecko last year, Mozilla unveiled its mobile OS at MWC this year, before renaming it to the Firefox OS earlier this month. Mozilla had at the time announced that TCL Communication Technology and ZTE will be Firefox OS’ first manufacturing partners.

The first Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Firefox OS devices are expected to launch in early 2013, with operators across the world, such as Telefónica's Vivo, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, and Telenor, announcing their support for the new OS.

Writing about the new test version of Firefox OS, Mozilla’s Tony Chung said:

"We've been culturally challenged to build up an interested community of testers, but limited to our distribution of builds due to legal contracts. However, the release engineering team was able to get Daily desktop builds created and published online for anyone to play with."

"If you're a web developer, you can use these builds to create and test your webApp against," Chung added, "If you're looking to help do some testing, these desktop builds will also give you an immediate opportunity to play with and help us write testplans and file bugs. We encourage anyone interested to give the desktop builds a spin."

Detailed setup instructions for the early desktop version of Firefox OS are currently available on the Gaia/Hacking site. For more details, refer to Chung's blog post.

For Olympic Games, Tweets Will Turn The London Eye Into A Giant Mood Ring

It’s hard to accurately portray the predominant emotion surrounding any major event. We of the press rely upon certain devices, using quotes from an individual to capture an overall mood, pegging sentiment to an exceptional quote or well-timed photograph.

This is exactly the aim of Energy of the Nation, a joint venture between the United Kingdom’s EDF Energy Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on capturing the emotion of those in the U.K. bearing witness to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. But instead of publishing words and photos to newsprint, EDF is doing it a bit differently: The group will use audience tweets as its stock in trade.

The EDF will analyse tweets centered around the Games throughout the course of the Olympics, and will use those tweets to power a spectacular light show at nine and ten o’clock every evening.

The focal point? The London Eye, the tallest Ferris wheel in all of Europe and a renowned U.K. tourist destination that sits right off the river Thames. Tweets lighting up the Eye are based on the feelings extrapolated from the millions of Twitter messages flowing through the stream.

Professor Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton and a band of MIT grads will use access from the raw Twitter firehose, scanning them to see if they’ve originated within the U.K. If so, the team then scans each tweet to see if it contains any specific words or hashtags — Olympics, #energy2012, and others related to the Games — to see if they’re relevant to the overall sentiment measurement.

After making it through those filters, tweets are met with a sentiment algorithm which attempts to measure the type of sentiment caught within the tweet. Adjectives that describe feelings are of course taken into account, but also punctuation and even emoticons will measure non-verbal forms of sentiment. The tweets are then scored, and the positive and negative emotions are tallied up over the course of each day.

Those results are distilled, creating the basis for the 24-minute light show displayed on the London Eye twice each evening. And if you aren’t there to watch the show yourself, there is of course an app to track the flow of positive and negative tweets around the U.K.

Will real-world data visualizations render the emotion of the games better than our usual methods? Perhaps, and perhaps not. One thing is certain, though: If the crowds don’t go for it, they can certainly let it be known over Twitter.