As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
The Sharing Economy Is a Gateway Drug
The Sharing Economy is a gateway drug that threatens the infrastructure of our economy as we know it. This collaborative consumption (working together to provide the general public with affordable access to all types of resources) has enabled individuals to cut out the middleman, replace big business and solve popular needs with personal services and solutions. It’s igniting a series of change from the underbelly of our society that’s creeping into the everyday lives of the masses.
If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that falling in line and remaining cemented in our beliefs leads to a sustainable economy. Those who have challenged this in the past instigated social progress, political recourse and cultural revolutions — all phenomenons rooted in change, outlined to disrupt the norm and drenched in risk — risk we can’t afford to take.
Or can we?
It’s in our nature to fear change — especially the type that involves uprooting everything we know about creating wealth and powering an economy. But if we put fear aside for a minute and focus first on the impact of the social economy to date instead of the challenges it may or may not produce in the future, it’s quite clear that we’re in the middle of a colossal shift. What we’re seeing now is that collaborative consumption actually drives progress. We’re watching the foundations for a more distributed, sustainable economy form as a result.
As the sharing economy releases a series of new jobs into the market, we’re seeing people dig themselves out of debt. Airbnb, a prominent player in the sharing economy, has been the cause of tens of thousands of individuals finding financial stability worldwide by renting out extra space to supplement income. Take Airbnb host Kimberly Kaye. Kimberly was forced to quit her job due to an incurable, degenerative disease and as a result she and her husband, Ray, “spent countless nights wondering if and when they would lose their home.”
Enter Airbnb.
From the completion of their first booking, Airbnb “provided immediate protection from homelessness, and enough income to pay for Kimberly’s treatment.” The income the couple makes from the home-sharing service is less than what they would receive through NY unemployment, but has enabled them to remain financially stable and keep their home in the city that they’ve both loved for so many years.
In the transportation industry, Lyft and Uber have been responsible for lifting the oppression former taxi drivers faced when operating under an antiquated transportation model. Lyft encourages drivers to work at least 10 hours per week, but operates without a regimented driving schedule. This flexible model has proven successful in attracting, empowering and retaining drivers. For Nick Hiebert, this meant being able to “take on work-trades and pursue otherwise-impossible learning opportunities,” as well as finance some travel — a luxury that would have been inaccessible without this form of income.
The impact of the sharing economy goes beyond the individual. Growing businesses are leveraging the sharing economy to escape the confines of traditional office space and offset costs. As businesses become increasingly dynamic and growth patterns shift, the structure of commercial real estate remains rigid and reluctant to conform to the patterns of modern (often digital) companies. The existing CRE system puts these businesses at risk as they are forced to take space based on projections. CRE broker, Greg Hoffmeister, has said, “Spaces for growing companies are few and far between. The ones that do exist come with complexities and cumbersome lease terms that add unnecessary delays and costs to young companies on tight timeframes and tight budgets.” Leveraging shared office space gives these businesses the flexibility to protect their bottom line and the opportunity to select a space based on their current needs.
Society has established these opportunities within our economy because there is a void of service from like-minded individuals. The innovative minds of today have found ways to more efficiently and effectively reach economic goals, while benefitting consumers and businesses. If we take what we know and combine it with what we know is possible, we have the potential to build something incredible and sustainable.
All we have to do is work together.
Nintendo halves annual profit target
Nintendo’s operating profit grew nearly 50% in the last quarter but it was not enough to keep the game-maker from slashing its full year target.
Why AI?
I have been perplexed lately by the media frenzy on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and all the inflammatory statements put forth about “deadly machines” and “robot uprisings.” Of course, this can partly be explained by the public’s general taste for frivolous alarmism and the media’s attempt to satisfy it. However, I feel that besides the question of: why this general reaction? there is another important question worth asking: why this particular topic? Why AI?
Why is AI capturing so much of our attention and imagination? Why is it so hard to have a levelheaded discussion about it? Why is the middle ground so infertile for this topic?
I have come to believe that the reason is that AI engages some of our deepest existential hopes and fears and forces us to look at ourselves in novel, unsettling ways. Even though the ways in which we are forced to face our humanity are new, the issues and questions are old. We can trace them back to stories and myths that we’ve told for ages, to philosophical questions we’ve posed in various forms throughout the centuries, or to deeply rooted psychological mechanisms that we’ve slowly discovered. Here are four of the deeper existential questions that AI forces us to ask:
What if we get what we ask for but not what we really want?
Or in the words of Coldplay’s “Fix you,” “when you get what you want but not what you need,” what happens then? The ancients were no strangers to this question. The legend says that king Midas asked the gods to make it such that everything he touches turns to gold. So the king became rich but he also died of starvation, because the food he touched turned to gold as well. AI, more specifically human or super-human AI, is that tantalizing golden touch. Any programmer has at some point experienced an inkling of it, the great power of a program that computes what it would take you several lifetimes to do — but it’s the wrong computation! Yet it’s the right one because it’s exactly what you asked for, but not what you really wanted. Welcome to the birth of a computer bug!
Superhuman AI could of course magnify this experience and turn itself into our own buggy god that would give us tons of gold and no food. Why would it do that? AI researcher Stuart Russell, likes to illustrate this through a simple example: imagine you ask your artificially intelligent self-driving car to get you to the airport as fast as possible. In order to do so, the car will drive at maximum speed, accelerate and break abruptly… and the consequences could be lethal to you. In trying to optimize for time, the car will set all other parameters like speed, acceleration etc. to extreme values and possibly endanger your life. Now take that scenario and extend it to wishes like: make me rich, make me happy, help me find love…
What this thought experiment should make us realize is that we blissfully live in the unspecified. Our wishes, our hopes, our values are barely small nodes of insight in the very complicated tapestry of reality. Our consciousness is rarely bothered with the myriad of fine-tuned parameters that make our human experiences possible and desirable. But what happens when another actor like AI enters the stage, one that has the power to weave new destinies for us? How will we be able to ask for the right thing? How will we be able to specify it correctly? How will we know what we want, what we really want?
What if we encounter otherness?
The issue of not being able to specify what we want thoroughly enough is in part due to our limited mental resources and our inability to make predictions in an environment that has above a certain level of complexity. But why wouldn’t our super-human machines be able to do that for us? After all they will surpass our limitations and inabilities, no? They should figure out what we really want.
Maybe… but likely not. Super-human AI will likely be extremely different from us. It could in fact be our absolute otherness, an “other” so different from everything we know and understand that we’d find it monstrous. Zarathustra tells his disciples to embraced not the neighbor but the “farthest.” However, AI might be so much our “farthest” that it would be impossible to reach, or to touch, or to grasp. As psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene points out, us humans, we have a common currency: our human experiences. We understand when someone says: “I’m happy” because we share a common evolutionary past with them, a similar body and neural architecture and more or less similar environments. But will we have any common currency with AI? I like it when Samantha explains to Theodore in the movie Her that interacting with him is like reading a book with spaces between words that are almost infinite, and it is in these spaces that she finds herself, not in the words. Of course, the real-world AI would evolve so fast that the space between it and humans would leave no room for a love story to ever be told.
What if we transcend and become immortal but transcendence is bleak and immortality dreary?
But what if instead of being left behind we will merge with the machines, transcend and become immortal just like AI advocate Ray Kurzweil optimistically envisions? Spending time with people who are working on creating or improving AI I’ve realized that beyond the immediate short term incentives to building better voice recognition or better high-speed trading algorithms etc., many of these people hope to ultimately create something that will help them overcome death and biological limitations — they hope to eventually upload themselves in one form or another.
Transcendence and immortality have been the promise of all religions for ages. Through AI we now have the promise of a kind of transcendence and immortality that does not depend on a deity, but only on the power of our human minds to transfer our subjective experiences into silicone. But as long as hopes of transcendence and immortality have existed, tales of caution have also been told. I am particularly fond of one tale explored in the movie The Fountain. When the injured, dying knight has finally reached the Tree of Life, he ecstatically stabs its trunk and drinks from it, and happily sees his wounds heal. But soon the healed wounds explode in bouquets of flowers and he himself turns into a flower bush that will live forever through the cycle of life and regeneration. But that is of course not what the knight had hoped for… It’s interesting that the final scene of the movie Transcendence also ends with a close-up of a flower, reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde and their tragic transcendence through a rose that grows out of their tombs. Of course, there are less mythical ways in which transcendence and immortality through AI could go wrong. For example, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi warns that even though we might build simulations that act like us and think like us they will likely not be conscious — it wouldn’t feel like anything to be them. Heidegger saw in death a way to authenticity, so before we transcend it and become immortal we might want to figure out first what is authentically us.
What if we finally fully know ourselves… and make ourselves obsolete?
Another promise from AI is exactly that: authentic knowledge about what we are. AI extends the promise that we could finally know ourselves thoroughly. A great part of AI research is based on brain simulation, so if we keep forging on we might actually figure out what every single neuron, every single synapse does; and then we will have the keys to our own consciousness, our own human experiences. We will finally be able to say a resounding “Yes!” to the imperative written on the gates of the temple of Delphi: “know thyself.” The catch is that, as my husband, physicist Max Tegmark, likes to point out, every time we’ve discovered something about ourselves we’ve also managed to replace it. When we figured out things about strength and muscle power, we’ve replaced it with engines, when we discovered more about computation we’ve invented computers and delegated that chore to them. When we will discover the code to our human intelligence, our consciousness and every human experience imaginable, will we replace that too? Is our human destiny to make ourselves obsolete once we’ve figured ourselves out? Creating AI is in some sense looking at our own reflection in a pond — just like Narcissus — without realizing that the pond is looking into us as well. And as we fall in love with what we see, might we also be about to drown?
Will we figure out who we are, what we want, how to relate to what we are not, and how to transcend properly? These are big questions that have been with us for ages and now we are challenged like never before to answer them. Humanity is heading fast to a point where leisurely pondering these questions will not be an option anymore. Before we proceed in our journey to changing our destiny forever we should stop and think where we are going and what choices we are making. We should stop and think: why AI?
Apple's Q1 certified as best quarter for any company ever
In addition to being the best quarter in the company’s history, Apple’s Q1 results also blew away quarterly revenue and profit figures for any company ever, according to credit rating analysts Standard & Poor’s. Even more remarkably, CFO Luca Maestri noted repeatedly that fluctuations in major currencies (such as the Russian ruble and the unusually-strong US dollar) actually cost the company a potential five percent — or $3.73 billion — in additional revenue.
Apps let parents 'spy' on their kids
Apps let parents spy on their kids
App links sighted helpers with blind people
New app gives blind people help to see
What Happened to Snapchat's Best Friends Feature and What It Means for Your Relationship
At a time when we obsessed over perfecting our Instagram posts, Snapchat empowered us to let go. Amidst a plethora of social media platforms celebrating permanence, Snapchat was the refreshing one-night stand that we all desperately needed.
That was Snapchat’s appeal, right? The durability of digital content, and the inherent risks associated with it, led users to seek more ephemeral means of self-expression.
It was a liberating thing, knowing that your selfies would self-destruct. It meant that your triple chin wouldn’t be on public display for all of eternity. You could care less and therefore, say more.
It’s no surprise that Snapchat soon became known as the dick-pic-app. With fewer strings attached, Snapchat users felt more comfortable sending each other raunchy photographs. Their Snaps became seemingly inconsequential, much like their dreams. Aware that every Snap would soon fade away, users treated each as an opportunity to do whatever he or she pleased.
Snapchat enabled users to communicate more freely, doing and saying things that they likely wouldn’t have through a traditional text message. They seemed to obsess less over capturing and saving the moment, and focused more on enjoying it, for however many seconds it lasted.
They also appeared desensitized to the emotional weight that a selfie could carry. One hundred years ago, if you wanted to capture a photograph of yourself, you needed access to a camera and a darkroom in which to develop the image. Then, if you wanted to actually share the image with someone, you had to send it the old fashioned way via mail. The recipient of your letter would likely have appreciated the time and energy that you spent enclosing a personalized photo. The process required to share selfies in 1915 was far more complicated and time consuming than it is today.
It’s no secret: the advent of smartphones and social networks expedited the sharing process so dramatically that today, it’s hardly a process at all. Snapchatting has become an impulse so effortless that often times, it’s difficult to control.
One of my best friends is in a long distance relationship with his girlfriend from high school. He’s madly in love with her and devoted to their relationship. He calls her every night before bed, but occasionally, she’s busy and he’s bored. Occasionally, he’ll Snapchat his ex-girlfriend to pass the idle time. He doesn’t think much of it. It’s just a stupid little selfie and it vanishes after 1-10 seconds anyway.
The problem is, his current girlfriend would not, by any means, appreciate the gesture, no matter how quick or harmless it may have been. In her eyes, this is a clear violation of trust. Sending anyone, let alone your ex, a personalized picture is a big deal. It demonstrates to that individual that you still care.
The larger problem is, my friend doesn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing on his end. He thinks that he’s living in a new world with new rules and that it’s now socially acceptable to Snapchat your ex without thinking twice about it.
Sometimes he even sends the same picture to his current girlfriend and his ex. It’s an effortless move and, in his mind, a brilliant one. He simply takes an audience-neutral-selfie and selects multiple recipients. Neither recipient has any idea (unless, of course, she were to peep his Best Friends list, which, as of yesterday, doesn’t exist, bringing me to my second story).
I know this chick from work who’s in a serious relationship and also has a ton of guy friends. One of them was, until yesterday (when Snapchat removed the Best Friends feature), listed as one of her Best Friends. This meant that he was one of the people with whom she interacted most frequently on the mobile app. Her boyfriend, and all of her Snapchat friends, for that matter, had access to her Best Friends list. So her boyfriend knew, as the rest of her friends knew, that she was sending personalized pics to this random dude on the side.
Now this is where things got messy. She also became conscientious of her Best Friends list (prior to its removal), and more so, concerned that her boyfriend had too. Consequently, she developed a strategy whereby she would send decoy Snapchats to her three girlfriends in order to keep her guy friend from appearing on her Best Friends list. Essentially, she was covering her tracks with content designed to do nothing more than overshadow other content.
For the life of me, I can’t help but condemn the dishonesty of such behavior. At the same time, I understand that she’s grappling with a rapidly changing technological environment. She’s bound to mess up here and there and at least she’s able to recognize when she’s behaving questionably.
I’m sure that she, and many Snapchatters like her, would be overjoyed to learn that yesterday’s update removed the Best Friends feature altogether. Yes, you heard me correctly: the Best Friends feature is history — much to the delight of sneaky girlfriends and the dismay of social media stalkers everywhere.
With the Best Friends feature gone, we can no longer rely on the fear of getting caught to act appropriately. We must hold ourselves accountable for our actions. It doesn’t matter who’s watching.
Oh, and if you were the type who chronically checked your boyfriend or girlfriend’s Best Friends list, maybe you should think twice about committing to that relationship. Maybe you should think twice about commitment period. You see, you shouldn’t have to constantly monitor someone in order to trust them. Keeping tabs on someone you love is much like erecting a barbwire fence around a beautiful tree. It may keep the intruders away, but it’s also a waste of your time. Shouldn’t you be enjoying the tree?
It seems to me that the Best Friends feature was getting in the way of everything that Snapchat stood for in the first place. After all, many of my friends enjoy Snapchatting for the same reasons that they celebrate one-night stands. It represents commitment-free fun that distracts them from whatever is really on their minds.
Now, to make things clear, I’m neither an advocate nor opponent of Snapchatting, just as I’m neither an advocate nor opponent of one-night stands. Both serve their purpose when conducted responsibly.
I’ll say this though. I’m glad that Snapchat removed the Best Friends feature, and I hope that it’s gone for good. It saddens me to see the people around me living dishonestly — and I truly believe that the now late, great feature promoted disingenuousness. To have to create bullshit content to cover up what you’re actually doing on social media must be a stressful burden to bear. Besides, wasn’t Snapchat all about communicating more freely?
Nobody should live in fear of doing what they want to do, or saying what they want to say. So if you’re yearning to send some random chick a dick pic, knock yourself out, but have the decency to dump your girlfriend before clicking send.
Samsung earnings hit by mobile sales
South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics reported its first annual earnings decline in three years.
VIDEO: How Apple made 'biggest profit ever'
US technology giant Apple has reported the biggest quarterly profit ever made by a public company.
VIDEO: Smart goggles for hi-tech bobbies
A range of new tech ideas for the UK’s police forces, including facial recognition, has been demonstrated.
Snapchat As You Knew It Is Gone
One of the most popular messaging apps sure isn’t what it used to be, oh, 48 hours ago.
Snapchat on Tuesday announced a massive update called “Discover,” which will feature content from media outlets that the social network has partnered with. As of Wednesday, those outlets are CNN, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail, ESPN, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Yahoo! News and Warner Music Group.
And just a day after the update, AT&T announced that it would premiere on the platform a superhero series called “SnapperHero.” In it, social media personalities will take suggestions from fans, influencing the show’s 12-episode story. Keeping with the Snapchat tradition, episodes of the show will disappear 24 hours after they’re first made available.
Comedy Central’s page on Snapchat’s new Discover feature. More outlets for “Broad City”: Always a good thing.
The changes seem to emphasize branded content over that from individuals.
Still, “Discover” was met with some excitement: The NiemanLab said it “could be a significant moment in the evolution of mobile news.”
But regular Snapchatters just want to know where their “best friends” went. Users have flooded Twitter with complaints about the removal of the feature allowing anyone to view the three people a user most frequently interacted with. In theory, this “best friends” feature gave you some idea of who your friends were closest with, at least on Snapchat.
Snapchat did not respond to a request for comment on the changes.
It’s worth noting that while the official emphasis on media properties is new, brands like Taco Bell have long used Snapchat to reach teens and 20-somethings. If anything, the app’s new direction signals that Snapchat wants to play along — and reap ad revenue, too. We’ll see if the audience sticks around.
Don't Even Think About Bringing Your Drone To The Super Bowl, FAA Says
The Super Bowl is traditionally a time for multi-million dollar commercials and wardrobe malfunctions. Oh, and some football.
One thing that’s not welcome? Drones.
That’s the message behind a recent Federal Aviation Administration ad warning fans not to bring drones to this Sunday’s game.
“Going to the big game?” says the ad, posted to YouTube Wednesday. “Have fun, cheer on your team and keep it a no-drone zone. Don’t spoil the game; leave your drone at home.”
Sorry, drones. Looks like you’re stuck tailgating the whole game. Save some Bud heavies for us.
A post on the FAA’s website elaborates that unauthorized aircraft are not allowed over any NFL games, regular and post-season. The rule also extends to NCAA college games in 30,000-seat stadiums or larger, Major League Baseball games and various NASCAR events.
The site also outlines the penalties for violating this rule:
The FAA Notice to Airmen (PDF) makes it crystal clear that anyone violating the rules may be “intercepted, detained and interviewed” by law enforcement or security personnel. Besides possibly landing a violator in jail, flying an unmanned aircraft over a crowded stadium could result in an FAA civil penalty for “careless and reckless” operation of an aircraft.
While the FAA has yet to release a comprehensive set of regulations on drone use, pressure is mounting after a man drunkenly crashed his drone on White House grounds Monday. A drone carrying six pounds of meth from Mexico was also recently found crashed near the border.
But in case you’re concerned about a government organization clamping down on the overall rowdiness at the Super Bowl, you don’t have to worry about the FAA. The department apparently approves of the following game-day shenanigans:
H/T The Week
Systems Science Meets Planet Earth
I am at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, speaking mainly about the societal impact robot technologies are likely to have in our near future, and I am happy to report there is intense interest in these topics. Will robotics empower human communities, or will our machines become the masters of our fate? Business interests, science fiction, singularity and human rights all pervade every tech conversation I have witnessed here — it is a welcome change to see this bubble to the surface.
But I’m writing this blog about an even more pressing topic — planetary change. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has an outstanding demonstration, through interactive graphics, of how we can categorize the health of our planet along nine axes, from atmospheric loading and ocean change through biodiversity, identifying tipping points and boundaries that quantify just where we are along a continuum from healthful to Emergency Room to irreversibility. Their website is well worth your visit, and best of all their decadal effort is nailing the science of characterizing and measuring global boundaries as complex systems, in collaboration with scientists round the world. Science just published their latest full report, and I highly recommend giving this article a read: “Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet.” It is no longer behind a paywall, just a free registration roadblock; you can access the figures without even registering here.
Their approach is refreshing because it frames our decisions and our planet’s future trajectory in terms of a real system, with feedback loops that we can directly impact with our local and global decisions. We have only a few years to effect the kind of policy changes that will keep us in a safe operating margin; one of the authors expressed his concern that we don’t even have time to change the public’s mindset. And yet I believe it is a shift at the ground level — if we can become truly mindful at the global scale — that has the best possible chance of catalyzing the high-level changes we must see. Thanks to global social media, that groundswell of change can touch us more more quickly than ever before; so it’s time for technology to help us deeply rethink our relationship to the planet.
Emma Watson Tells Young Fan To 'Be An Engineer' Even Though Her Dad Doesn't Want Her To
Just when you thought Emma Watson couldn’t possibly be more inspiring, she goes and inspires some more.
While at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday, Watson took to Twitter to answer some questions about the HeForShe campaign’s Impact 10x10x10 initiative, which aims to involve governments, corporations and universities in taking action towards gender equality.
Along with discussing the campaign, she offered advice to someone whose issue hit particularly close to home. The young fan said she wants to become an engineer one day, but tweeted that her father told her it’s a male profession. She asked Watson how to change that — and the actress’ response was on-point.
@lordvoldemot @HeforShe Become an engineer.
— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) January 23, 2015
Female engineers then began responding to Watson’s words of encouragement.
@EmWatson @lordvoldemot @HeforShe I’m an engineer! It’s hard work but we’re changing the industry together!
— Vicky Ferguson (@VickFerg) January 28, 2015
@EmWatson @lordvoldemot @HeforShe I’m an engineer designing spacecraft for Mars. My dad worked for NASA. You can do it!
— Marguerite (@chicspace) January 28, 2015
As a female aerospace engineer……I love this. Thank you to @EmWatson: @lordvoldemot @HeforShe “Become an engineer.”
— Jill Meyers (@jillrandimeyers) January 28, 2015
@EmWatson @JulieBorowski @lordvoldemot @HeforShe 30 years ago I was told to become a secretary. I became a global engineering manager
— Kim Visintine (@Visintinek) January 28, 2015
And that’s why she’s our heroine.
17 Ways to Make Your Resume Fit On One Page
This post was originally published on FindSpark.
By Christina Madsen
You may look at your resume and think that everything on it is too important to be left off. But let’s get real. You’re looking for an internship or entry-level job, which means you have just a few years experience.
While we’re all about making your experience relevant, there isn’t a single recruiter out there who thinks it’s ok to have a resume longer than one page for an internship or entry-level job. You may have plenty of experience for your level, but you don’t have that much experience. Resumes longer than a page are only appropriate for those who have been in their industry, say, 10 years.
Photo courtesy of Christian Schnettelker
So how do you cut down your resume to something readable, while still getting across how awesome you are? These easy tips will help you easily achieve such a lofty goal.
1. Only talk about relevant experience.
Even if you have a ton of internship experience, it probably doesn’t all need to be on your resume. Read the job description carefully and highlight keywords and skills they’re looking for. Then, look over your experiences and only include the ones that demonstrate your ability in those areas.
2. Cut repetitive bullets.
If you’ve had similar roles at different companies, you probably had some similar tasks. That’s great! It means you have lots of experience in those areas. However, recruiters do not need to read “Strategized social media content for various clients” or “Wrote and distributed press releases” two or three times.
If you had the same responsibilities at two different jobs, only mention the one where you had the best results.
3. Leave out “References available upon request.”
Many people will use an entire line (and probably a blank space above it) to write this phrase. If you’re struggling to fit your resume to a page, those two lines are valuable real estate.
If an employer wants references, they’ll request them. It’s rare for an applicant not to have a single reference available, so don’t waste precious resume space with this phrase.
Photo courtesy of buyalex
4. Make your name smaller.
Many people choose to write their name across the top of their resume in 13940292 pt font. We get it — it’s dramatic, eye catching, etc., etc., but it’s a total waste of space.
It’s plenty attention-grabbing to write your name in bold, maybe one or two font sizes larger than the rest of your resume. Recruiters know they can find your name at the top of the page, so you don’t need to make it so obvious for them.
5. Get rid of your objective.
We’ve heard plenty of mixed feelings from recruiters on the objective. Some find it helpful, some say it’s a waste of space. We happen to side with the latter.
Let your experience show your objective. If your experience doesn’t seem obviously relevant to the position, then use your bullet points to demonstrate how those roles apply. Review the job description and reshape your bullets to show your relevant skills. Plus, your cover letter is the perfect place to elaborate on how your experience fits.
6. Reformat ”widows.”
A “widow” is one word that has it’s own line. In resumes, this is often seen in the “skills” section, and it’s a major waste of space. Try reformatting sections like that to make the most of your space. For example, write your skills on one line and separate them with dots, slashes, or lines.
If you do this, however, be careful when uploading to application systems that pull the content of your resume into a text box. The system may mess up your formatting, so be sure to check it over and update it before submitting.
7. Leave out your high school.
Very rarely is your high school going to be relevant to a position you’re applying for. Unless you went to a very specialized high school, or you know that the recruiter reviewing your application also went to your high school, there’s no reason to include it.
Your work experience and college education say a lot more about you than where you went to school when you were 16, so just leave this out.
8. Put information about each position on one line.
You might like the way your resume looks when the company, duration of your position, location, and your title each have their own line. But if it’s pushing your resume over a page, it’s time to move things around.
Play around with ways to fit this information on one or two lines. Doing this for each of your positions will save you a ton of space.
Here’s a real example of a three page resume trimmed down to one with the help of FindSpark tips and tricks.
9. Format relevant leadership experience under work experience.
Having a separate “leadership experience” section uses more space than necessary. Evaluate your leadership and see which roles are truly relevant to the position you’re applying for. Then, move the most relevant ones into your “work experience” section. Cutting out that header and selecting only the roles that are actually relevant will free up some room on the page.
10. Adjust your spacing.
It might seem scary to have tiny margins — it’s against everything you learned in school — but it actually makes your resume look much more impressive. Try making your margins 0.5″ and see how much space you suddenly have.
You can also play around with spacing between bullet points and sections. Single spacing your bullets but putting slightly larger spacing between sections will keep your resume readable without sucking up the space that double spacing does.
Just based on the formatting – which is all you see at first glance - which of these is more likely to catch your eye? Spacing can make a huge difference.
11. Put your contact information on one line.
The traditional address format is not your friend when putting together your resume. Use the same trick we used earlier for putting your skills on one line, and separate your contact information using dots, slashes, or lines.
12. Use a smaller font.
Just because 12 pt font was standard for your college essays doesn’t mean the same goes for your resume. Play around with 11 or 11.5 pt font instead. You’ll find that it’s readable and gives you more room to play with.
13. Don’t feel pressure to put three bullets.
It may look nice to have at least three bullet points under each title you’ve held, but it’s not necessary. If you didn’t have three separate and relevant roles in each position, then you don’t need three bullets. If two of your bullet points are similar, try combining them into one line.
14. Use bullet points that make you stand out.
Forget the bullets that everyone in that sort of role performed. Only include ones where you had great results (“Increased ticket sales by 200%”) or the context is impressive (“Worked the door for a 500+ person event”).
Photo courtesy of Flazingo Photos
15. Only mention self-explanatory awards.
Having awards on your resume is nice, unless you’re using up all your space explaining what they’re for. If the name of an award doesn’t obviously explain what it’s for, and you find yourself adding bullets under it to explain, then just leave it out altogether.
16. Leave off irrelevant experience (yes, again!).
Seriously. This one is so important, it’s worth repeating. If I’m considering you for an editorial internship, I don’t need to know that you were a member of your school’s ballroom dance club. Unless you can clearly show in your bullets how the experience applies to the role, don’t include it.
17. Submit it as a PDF unless otherwise specified.
Once you’ve made all these changes, save your resume as a PDF. Employers want to see PDF resumes 99% of the time, so unless the application specifically says to submit it as a Word Document, you should save it as a PDF.
Nothing says “careless” like submitting a Word document that highlights typos, and you never know if the formatting will change on the recruiter’s computer, making it look sloppy and possibly over one page. Submit a PDF so you know exactly what they’ll see when they open it.
Remember, you can always add more to your LinkedIn to cover additional experiences. Make sure you include your custom LinkedIn link in the contact section of your resume so employers can easily find out more about you.
Ready to build your cover letter? Head to our cover letter check list.
Why You Should Talk to Your Partner About Technology
As I’m wiping down the table from dinner, I casually listen in on the lively game of superheroes being played out in the next room. My husband promised the older two he’d play with them before bed, and now it’s a mighty showdown: My Little Pony versus toy soldiers versus The Riddler. It’s a fantastical scene that could only be concocted in the minds of seven and five year olds. I hear Dylan excitedly play out one of the scenes: “And then, Daddy, The Penguin is going to use his rays to stop the soldiers and then he’ll take over the Bat Cave!”
I wait and listen for my husband’s response. It sounds like this: “umm hmmm…”
Every part of my body tenses up. Without moving, without looking, I know exactly what is happening right now. His phone went off — more work emails. He responded to the notification. He is looking down and checking email. I do not in any way blame him for this. He is caught in a constant tug between his personal and professional life. And that phone is the rope that keeps him mentally and physically tethered to his job all day and night. He wants to separate but then another email comes in and well, he’ll just read this one more. But I hate that this scene is playing out in front of the kids and completely interrupting critical Bat Cave time.
Too often, his time with the kids is limited really to bedtime hours — that brief window between 6:30 and 8pm. When he’s home during those hours, it is imperative to me that he have his phone put away. This is important not just for the kids, but because he too needs this break to refocus, refresh. But I realize, how does he know what this means to me when I’ve never told him — when we’ve never had the talk.
When we first came together as a couple 10 years ago, we talked about all sorts of things that couples talk about to help them sort out whether or not they are in it for the long haul and assess compatibility. We discussed children, if we wanted them and how many of them we wanted, where we wanted to live, our views on social justice, faith and money. But we never discussed technology because it was a non-issue back then. My husband had a Blackberry and a flip phone. I had a flip phone. Data plans were nonexistent, and the habits that are so pervasive in our daily life literally didn’t exist.
Flash forward to 10 years later. We’ve got a house and three kids and a marriage that requires constant TLC because anything worth anything always does. And it occurs to me that technology advanced so quickly over the course of our relationship that we never stopped to talk about the spaces in which we were and were not comfortable letting it in or conversely expressly wanted it out.
As silly as it sounds, technology and the subsequent ripple effect it can have on feelings and people, is still a relatively new concept to the coupled version of us. Technology takes up space and if you don’t acknowledge that and specifically carve out where and what you’re going to give it access to, it’s like a third person in your relationship. And no one expressly invited Siri into my Chuppah.
So I said something like this: “I don’t think I ever told you how important it is to me to have your phone off between the hours of 6:30 and 8pm. I really want this to be our time together — just us. I hope you understand what this means to me.”
And he said something like, “I really didn’t know how important that was to you. I will keep it off between 6:30 and 8pm.”
And then I said, “Is there a time of day when I use my phone that bothers you? Like for example when Hope wakes me up in the middle of the night and I have a hard time going back to bed, I’ll turn on my phone and look at it. Does that bother you? Does the light bother you when you are sleeping?”
To which he not surprisingly responded, “Yes. This bothers me.”
And so we agreed to respect the spaces in our family and relationship and home where we weren’t willing to let technology in. I’m certain we will both need gentle reminders from time to time, but the idea that we talked specifically about this seemed landmark to me in some way. It was so important yet so deceptively simple and easy to overlook. I wonder if there are more couples that experience tension around these different moments in the day but can’t quite pinpoint the source.
These phones can be tricky like that, making us so available to so many people, places and things, that we forget how quickly this access can erode the intimacy that our families are built on. It is the kind of intimacy that exists solely outside of our phones, in real relationships hashed out through grown up talks about complicated stuff and in live action play on the Bat Cave battlefield.
And so the phone goes away. Dylan lines up the soldiers and The Penguin makes a daring attempt to take over Green Lantern’s cave!
Indeed this is turf worth defending.
Facebook earnings beat expectations
The social network reports fourth-quarter profits of $701m, a 34% increase from the same period a year earlier, buoyed by strong mobile advertising sales.
Facebook Is Now Bigger Than The Largest Country On Earth
If Facebook were a country, it would be the most populous nation on earth.
The huge social network said Wednesday that 1.39 billion people log in to Facebook each month to scroll their News Feeds, communicate with friends and look at photos.
That’s more than the entire population of China, the world’s most populous country, which the CIA last estimated to have 1.36 billion people.
The comparison to China is somewhat ironic, since Facebook is largely blocked there. But that didn’t stop Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from visiting last fall, where he met with Chinese business executives and conducted an interview in Mandarin.
Although Facebook’s user base is still expanding, growth has slowed in recent quarters because there simply aren’t as many people left to join the site.
Data for chart courtesy of Statista.
That’s one of the reasons Zuckerberg has been pushing Internet.org, an initiative backed by a handful of tech companies, including Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson and Qualcomm, that aims to get Internet access to the two-thirds of the world not yet online.
Facebook reported revenue of $3.85 billion for the three months ending in December, up 49 percent over the same period last year. The company’s stock is trading at $76.24, up nearly 22 percent over the last 12 months.
The Internet of Things and the Race to Singularity
The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) has become the catch-all for every device on the planet that can interact, react, or contribute to the greater network. From fitness wearables to smart refrigerators, we are gradually integrating our entire lives onto the web and the massive grid of interconnected devices.
Today’s apps are tracking our heart health, caloric intake, daily activities, sleep quality, and perhaps even shaming us into losing weight by tracking our expanding waistline (Yes, that’s what the smart belt by Emiota, a crowd-gatherer at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas, is claiming). To give you an idea of where technology is headed, a new tech start-up hopes to create a 3D “digital alter ego” of people who will talk to their family and friends after they’ve died. Evidently, technology is turning the very idea of our existence upside down, and if not today then in the very near future, we will have little part of our identity that isn’t tech-connected.
Where are we headed? Predictions point towards a future where devices will become our “digital shadows,” a reflection of everything we are, and even hope to be. The question is: is that a good or bad thing? And, does it even matter?
The Internet Knows it All
With the proliferation of smart devices, we are constantly under technology’s gaze. We are looking for benefits and solutions to improve our quality of life and in the process, perhaps giving away too much information. While technology impacts us in all areas of life — making our work easier and better, helping us manage our homes, or taking care of our health — it is also exposing us to a huge wave of interconnectedness where we are constantly relinquishing the grip on our lives and handing over the reins to technology. As the Internet becomes more and more knowledgeable about us, it will be more accurate at knowing just about everything about us from our health to our feelings.
Internet of Things is Pushing us Toward Singularity
Interestingly, the fabled concept of singularity is coming to life right before our eyes. “Singularity” or more precisely, “technological singularity,” speaks to the possibility of man merging with machines in a future where tech progress becomes so rapid that devices will become “super-intelligent,” even beyond the imagination and predictive capabilities of human beings. Ultimately, we could reach a point when artificial intelligence will take over human intelligence. Now, it may sound like some sci-fi jibber-jabber, but when experts like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk voice their fears about the rise of machines and the potential threats of artificial intelligence (AI), we’ve got to sit up and listen.
Singularity Applies to Each One of Us
Forget about techies and gadget-geeks, even for an average user, who only uses Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram, we still see a certain amount of singularity that is driving our physical and digital identities to a place where the web knows us better than we know ourselves. Even those who limit their time online are leaving a digital fingerprint behind.
The actions of artificial intelligence, which have so far been the subject of fiction and fantasy, may soon descend upon us. While we may not be close to romancing our Operating System, as was the case in the movie Her, we are nearing the 2001: A Space Odyssey-styled race between man and machines. Stephen Hawking says, ”[T]he development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” While the end may be a long way off, it could be a very likely future awaiting mankind.
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