2015 will be the year wearable tech gets under the skin

Want to know how much ultraviolet exposure you’ve had on a summer’s day? Next year, a hair slide could tell you.

Need to monitor your heart’s electrical activity? A pair of headphones could do that and feed the data to your smartphone.

Both are just around the corner. For the past year or so, the main application of “wearable” technology has been for very simple tasks – measuring how many steps you’ve taken, guessing how many calories you’ve consumed doing so, and measuring your heart rate as you did so. But in 2015, we’ll be moving past that, experts say, with a panoply of products about to be launched. Apple’s Watch, expected to go on sale in spring, will take the wearable idea beyond eager technology and fitness users, to the general public. “It will probably get more uptake than anything so far, just because it’s Apple,” says Ruth Thomson, campaign manager for consumer product development at Cambridge Consultants, who has been following the wearables space intently. “They seem to have this magic method of getting people to buy things.”

Though its full capabilities aren’t yet known, the watch has already grabbed a tonne of publicity simply by being announced – eclipsing other smartwatches announced earlier this year from companies including Samsung, LG and Motorola. “There isn’t a mainstream smartwatch yet,” says Thomson. But she sees potential for wearables to expand beyond simple counting – steps, calories – into something that truly connects.

The UV hair slide is one idea Cambridge Consultants is working on; another is a suit embedded with technology that communicates with itself, so that the different elements “talk” to each other. “The next step is to make wearables truly wearable,” Thomson says.

Smartwatches, which (generally) connect to your phone to display notifications from apps running there, are likely to be in the forefront to begin with. Research company Futuresource found interest in buying smartwatches more than doubled, and there had been a 50% rise in intention to get a fitness tracker between May and October 2014; the biggest change was among iPhone owners, possibly once they saw Apple unveil its watch in September. Another analysis company, Juniper Research, believes it will take four years before smartwatches overtake fitness trackers in sales volume, simply because trackers are cheaper.

A key focus for 2015 will be health. Microsoft has already shown off its Band, a wrist-mounted fitness and health tracker (that also measures UV exposure). Microsoft, Google and Apple have launched their own “health” platforms, for aggregating data about what we have done, or to measure essential data on people who may have a health condition. (My own GP’s system can hook into Apple’s HealthKit on an iPhone, if the user gives permission.) Doctors are increasingly interested by the uses of wearables to give information about health. And even the finance world is interested: Canadian banks are looking at the potential for a wristband made by a startup called Bionym that measures unique elements of your ECG pattern to authenticate payments.

Most wearables still have to pass the “turn around” test, according to Sonny Vu, founder of Misfit, which makes the Shine activity tracker. That is, would you turn around to go home to get it if you found you’d left it behind in the morning? But as they become more popular, and more flexible (after UV sensing-hair slides, why not pollution-sensing clothing?), they could become essential.

The only drawback might be that really successful wearables could be used to spy on us. A case in Calgary, Canada, could be a first, where data from a Fitbit is being used to try to show that a fitness trainer who suffered an accident had lower activity levels than would be expected for someone in her profession. The case is claimed to be unique – but that’s only so far. Perhaps in the future, our wearables will be used to prove if we really are as active as we claim to be, and really did run (or walk) where and when we said we did.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/

Funny Thanksgiving Quotes: Presenting the USDA's Top 5 List

When it comes to funny Thanksgiving food stories, few can beat the USDA's own Top 5 entrants.

Who's ready for some funny Thanksgiving stories? Thought you might be.

It sounds more like something you would hear on a late-night comedy show, but these are strange but true Thanksgiving Day stories as told by the US Department of Agriculture.

The USDA operates a hotline for people to call in with questions about food safety and preparedness. The hotline helps reduce foodborne illnesses that people may contract and be deadly in some cases. The hotline remains open on Thanksgiving Day to give people last-minute advice and Kristina Beaugh, a spokeswoman of the USDA offered up some of these interesting tales from the 2013 hotline as told to food safety specialists

They're definitely hard to believe but after watching some of the reality TV shows on what people do, it sounds plausible.

It's not quite David Letterman's "Top 10 List," but here's the USDA's Top 5 list from 2013 as recounted by Beaugh. You won't see this on the USDA Website, but here's for a good chuckle via Beaugh who asks if people would eat these turkeys. She says she hopes they wouldn't.

No.5: Lifeguard Not On Duty
Never leave your turkey by the pool unsupervised. A couple found a wild turkey in their swimming pool, apparently drowning the night before. The caller actually considered serving it to their guests for dinner. This takes being economical to a whole new level.

No.4: Tumble Dry Low
Make sure you have the tools before you commit. One clever caller didn't have a large enough container to brine his large turkey. So of course, the washing machine is next best thing, right? Wrong. After putting ice and brine solution into the machine, his roommate put in a load of laundry with detergent and bleach.

No.3: What's That Fowl Smell?
It's true that cold water can be used to defrost frozen poultry, but one should really consider where that water comes from. One Thanksgiving host had a large frozen turkey and a small amount of time, so he put the turkey in the toilet and continuously flushed to allow water to run all over it. Somebody get a plunger and a take-out menu.

No.2: In By 9, Out By 5
One "resourceful" Thanksgiving hostess forgot to buy a cooking bag for her turkey. Instead she slipped the bird into a dry cleaning bag. During cooking, the bag melted around the turkey and produced a strong, chemical smell. This is a great way to get the family on the fast track to Black Friday.

No.1: You Are Now Free To Move About The Country
Ever find a great clothing sale when you're on vacation so you take some things back home with you? Yeah, you probably shouldn't do that with poultry. A woman found a turkey on sale while visiting family and decided to pack it in her carry-on for the flight home. To make matters worse, her flight was delayed overnight so she kept the turkey on ice in the hotel bathtub. "Ma'am, you're gonna have to check that bag... for Salmonella."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

What is the single biggest mistake that most businesses make?

If I had to give one simple answer to this question I would have to say communication is the biggest weakness of many, if not most businesses. It frustrates me no end because it really is such an easy issue to remedy.

A business owner can find a pile of money to set up a business, rent premises, fit it out, find staff, advertise, build a website and do everything else right to get customers knocking down the door - and then they bugger it up by failing to deliver when it comes to communication.

They take forever to respond to a customer enquiry, promise to get back to you and never do, fail to take the right instructions or orders, make you chase them day after day and week after week, or even worse, they simply ignore you.

We have all experienced this frustration time and time again and around the world, the biggest consumer complaint is always around a lack of communication.

There is little doubt that the business world, and the small business world in particular is changing dramatically. As customers we have choice when it comes to buying anything and the amount of choice is extraordinary. We don't need to accept second best anymore, not should we or will we.

This is going to be a shock for many business owners who will wake up one morning to an empty shop and a very quiet phone because they have treated their customers badly, through lousy communication (and taking them for granted). Put simply, their customers finally got sick of being ignored and treated badly so they went elsewhere.

Now is the time to really service our customers. Follow up and deliver on our promises. If there is a problem call them, don't make them chase you. Listen to what they want and most importantly make sure you give it to them.

Look at response times to emails - taking a week to get back to a customer is not OK. Using the excuse that you are busy is not what a customer wants to hear - because this is implying that your time is more valuable than their time.

From my experience most people who are poor at communicating are generally disorganised, so if this applies to you, get organised.

Generally we put a lot of time, money and effort into getting new customers but very little if anything to keeping them. Anyone who wants their business to not just survive but to actually grow stronger in the years ahead needs to sit down and have a good long look at how they communicate with their customers.

Find ways to improve response times, make follow up a must do activity within your business, listen to what your customers are saying and build a reputation for being a business that delivers what it promises and one that communicates with its customers.

To me this is a real opportunity for any business owner to not only strengthen the business they already have, but to increase word of mouth referral. Quality communication leads to loyalty. We are in a time where surely we want as many loyal customers as we can get? And best of all the cost is zero.

My view is that for a business to thrive in the coming years, they need to master the art of communication. Do this and you will have good times, ignore this and your days are numbered. This applies to every business, online and bricks and mortar, across every industry and in every country.

Source: https://www.thesbhub.com.au

Where does Halloween came from?

Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31.  The word Halloween is a shortening of All Hallows' Evening also known as Hallowe'en or All Hallows' Eve.

Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses" and carving jack-o-lanterns. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century including Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom as well as of Australia and New Zealand.


Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (pronounced "sah-win").
The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture. Samhain was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and prepare for winter. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and cause havoc such as sickness or damaged crops.

The festival would frequently involve bonfires. It is believed that the fires attracted insects to the area which attracted bats to the area. These are additional attributes of the history of Halloween.

Masks and costumes were worn in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or appease them.

Trick-or-treating, is an activity for children on or around Halloween in which they proceed from house to house in costumes, asking for treats such as confectionery with the question, "Trick or treat?" The "trick" part of "trick or treat" is a threat to play a trick on the homeowner or his property if no treat is given. Trick-or-treating is one of the main traditions of Halloween. It has become socially expected that if one lives in a neighborhood with children one should purchase treats in preparation for trick-or-treaters.

The history of Halloween has evolved.  The activity is popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and due to increased American cultural influence in recent years, imported through exposure to US television and other media, trick-or-treating has started to occur among children in many parts of Europe, and in the Saudi Aramco camps of Dhahran, Akaria compounds and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. The most significant growth and resistance is in the United Kingdom, where the police have threatened to prosecute parents who allow their children to carry out the "trick" element. In continental Europe, where the commerce-driven importation of Halloween is seen with more skepticism, numerous destructive or illegal "tricks" and police warnings have further raised suspicion about this game and Halloween in general.

In Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts, the night designated for Trick-or-treating is often referred to as Beggars Night.

Part of the history of Halloween  is Halloween costumes. The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays goes back to the Middle Ages, and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of "souling," when poor folk would go door to door on Hallowmas (November 1), receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (November 2). It originated in Ireland and Britain, although similar practices for the souls of the dead were found as far south as Italy. Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of "puling [whimpering, whining], like a beggar at Hallowmas."

Yet there is no evidence that souling was ever practiced in America, and trick-or-treating may have developed in America independent of any Irish or British antecedent. There is little primary Halloween history documentation of masking or costuming on Halloween in Ireland, the UK, or America before 1900. The earliest known reference to ritual begging on Halloween in English speaking North America occurs in 1911, when a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, near the border of upstate New York, reported that it was normal for the smaller children to go street guising (see below) on Halloween between 6 and 7 p.m., visiting shops and neighbors to be rewarded with nuts and candies for their rhymes and songs. Another isolated reference appears, place unknown, in 1915, with a third reference in Chicago in 1920. The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but do not depict trick-or-treating. Ruth Edna Kelley, in her 1919 history of the holiday, The Book of Hallowe'en, makes no mention of such a custom in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America." It does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the earliest known uses in print of the term "trick or treat" appearing in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939. Thus, although a quarter million Scots-Irish immigrated to America between 1717 and 1770, the Irish Potato Famine brought almost a million immigrants in 1845-1849, and British and Irish immigration to America peaked in the 1880s, ritualized begging on Halloween was virtually unknown in America until generations later.

Trick-or-treating spread from the western United States eastward, stalled by sugar rationing that began in April 1942 during World War II and did not end until June 1947.

Early national attention to trick-or-treating was given in October 1947 issues of the children's magazines Jack and Jill and Children's Activities, and by Halloween episodes of the network radio programs The Baby Snooks Show in 1946 and The Jack Benny Show and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1948. The custom had become firmly established in popular culture by 1952, when Walt Disney portrayed it in the cartoon Trick or Treat, Ozzie and Harriet were besieged by trick-or-treaters on an episode of their television show, and UNICEF first conducted a national campaign for children to raise funds for the charity while trick-or-treating.

Trick-or-treating on the prairie. Although some popular histories of Halloween have characterized trick-or-treating as an adult invention to re-channel Halloween activities away from vandalism, nothing in the historical record supports this theory. To the contrary, adults, as reported in newspapers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, typically saw it as a form of extortion, with reactions ranging from bemused indulgence to anger. Likewise, as portrayed on radio shows, children would have to explain what trick-or-treating was to puzzled adults, and not the other way around. Sometimes even the children protested: for Halloween 1948, members of the Madison Square Boys Club in New York City carried a parade banner that read "American Boys Don't Beg."

Source: http://www.halloweenhistory.org/

1890's Burwell House

This Saturday, the 27th, is the last regular day of the season to stop in for a historic tour of the 1890's Burwell House on Minnehaha Creek in Minnetonka. Tours from 12-4pm. And while you're there, take a stroll through the peaceful Burwell Park; bridge over Minnehaha, picturesque bench areas, boardwalk & rock wall scavenger hunt for the kids.

Join Creative Director, Erik Johnson, and his passion to help preserve history, by becoming a member of the historical society by joining with the "FALL back into history" promo for only $15, and receive a FREE Minnetonka history book. And of course, our spectacular eNewsletters.

Be a part of history, before it becomes... HISTORY!
More information, directions & secure online order form at:
www.MinnetonkaHistory.org

Meeting Oprah Winfrey — briefly: Bartolotta gets 5 seconds with fame

You'd think from the picture that Jennifer Bartolotta and Oprah Winfrey have been close for years. In reality, it only captures an instant, but one that resulted in a great photo and memory for the prominent Milwaukee restaurant executive.

She was always inspired by Winfrey, but never made it to one of her shows, said Bartolotta, president of Train-2-Gain and head of the Bartolotta Restaurants' charitable arm.

In April, she jumped on a chance for tickets to Winfrey's "Live the Life You Want" tour — including passes to meet and have her photo taken with the talk-show icon.

Bartolotta and a friend saw Winfrey's speech, then took an elevator up to the post-show reception, where they were told to line up.

"This is actually going to happen," Bartolotta remembers thinking, "I'm going to have five seconds with Oprah in my life."

Five seconds was about all she got. But as she stood in line, Bartolotta thought about what she wanted with those few seconds, and recalled an appearance in Madison by the Dalai Lama.

"So, when it was my turn, I said, 'Actually, if you don't mind, I have a favor to ask,'" Bartolotta said.

Initially, Winfrey wasn't familiar with the request, but Bartolotta explained the Dalai Lama's traditional greeting.

"And next thing I know, she grabs my face with both of her hands," Bartolotta said. "They snap a picture, and then I'm gone."

The warmth in Winfrey's eyes and smile is evident in the photo. Bartolotta draws a bigger lesson from the brief moment.

"I think that's the beauty of someone who has spent her life living with intention, recognizing that she — as we all do — has the opportunity to impact another person," Bartolotta said. "You can light up or diminish a person's life."

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/

Meet The World’s Poorest President, Jose Mujica

In a generation where you might think all politicians are ruling the world and continuously becomes rich and powerful by stealing money from its citizens, you may think that all of them are the same.  The story today proves otherwise as a man from the country of Uruguay who is globally known as “the poorest president” demonstrates that you can still rule a country by living your life in simplicity.

Here’s how Jose looks like (where it is also not uncommon that you see him dressed this way)

He spent most of his life fighting for his country
He was a Guerrilla leader in the mid 1960’s whom battled the war for the rights of his country’s citizen where he was also got imprisoned twice and shot 6 times
Instead of living at this presidential house, he chose to live in this simple farm.

He drives a 1987 VW beetle

He only has two guards positioned on his road. Along with his beloved 3-legged dog

Another fun fact is his salary is $12,000 per month (not bad) what’s great about it is that he donates 90% of it to charity to help his country.

This is a truly heartwarming story of a very inspiring president. I believe if our leaders would follow more of Jose’s example, the world would become a much better place.


Source: http://ohviral.com/