Gmail Advanced Search Tips: Cutting Through That Inbox Clutter

Google products are known for their usability and uncluttered interfaces. This is great for novices, but users who demand more precision can be left frustrated as their basic keyword searches yield masses of irrelevant results. Gmail is one service in particular where it can be difficult to sift through a huge library of emails trying […]

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Continuous Partial Attention on the Social Web: Beneficial or Dangerous?

In today’s environment of constant connectivity, we routinely slog through multiple tasks in a single session. Blinking notifications pull us away from whatever we had been doing to something more pressing. We surf the web by opening up multiple browser tabs and scrolling back and forth between various articles, email accounts, social media streams and other types […]

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Can Microsoft Office Stay Relevant for a Future in the Cloud?

Microsoft Office has remained the industry standard for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations for many years, an impressive feat. But in terms of meaningful innovation, there hasn’t been a whole lot lately. Sure, there have been plenty of Office updates (too many, some would say), but they are mainly cosmetic changes and bundles of new “features” […]

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More Than Just MOOCs: The Major Types of Online Education Today

Online education is often talked about as a homogeneous force poised to either bring radically improved education to every corner of the globe or ruin learning and knowledge as we know it. But in reality there are many different types of online education across which generalizations can’t be made. A more nuanced understanding of these varieties, […]

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Is Amazon Poised for World Domination?

Amazon is often portrayed in the media as an unstoppable behemoth indiscriminately crushing everything from indie bookstores to big box stores on its way to world domination. But recently more have started to question that narrative. Amazon’s July attempt at entering the smartphone market was a highly-publicized disaster, but critics are pointing to far more […]

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Best Tools to Visualize Text with a Word Cloud

Visualizing a chunk of text into a word cloud, which sizes and styles words based on their frequency, is a versatile technique. The idea likely first emerged on blogging and social networks in the mid-2000s as “tag clouds,” which visualized social media metadata mainly as a navigational aid. (You could click on the word “Technology” […]

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Staring at Screens Too Long – Is It Bad for My Health?

These days, not many of us earn our paychecks by laboring out in the fields or at a factory. The transition to a knowledge economy has resulted in some great advantages, but it also means that more and more jobs now consist of sitting at a desk all day starting at a computer. New research […]

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Is Amazon’s eBook Subscription Service a Big Deal?

Last week Amazon launched a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, immediately dubbed the “Netflix for ebooks” by just about everyone. It costs $9.99 per month to subscribe, which works out to be $120 per year. For that reasonable price you get unlimited access to a library of over 600,000 books as well as around 2,000 audiobooks. That […]

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Can Our Mobile Devices Enhance, Not Distract Us From, Our Surroundings?

Recently, we looked at location-based mobile apps and their ability to allow us to interact with our surrounding environment. Examples of this trend include “checking in” to a business, finding other people nearby or redeeming a special deal. Beyond possible issues with surveillance and ad targeting, this business of walking around using our smartphones raises another crucial […]

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Taking a Google Field Trip: What’s the Appeal of Location-Based Apps?

Location-based mobile apps are a hot trend these days. These services allow people to use a smartphone to interact somehow with their surrounding environment, such as earning rewards and discounts for “checking-in” somewhere using the popular platform Foursquare. Other big-name apps that incorporate some location-aware features include OpenTable, Fandango and Yelp. And still others allow […]

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