Features

NEW YORK — Radiohead’s ever-experimental frontman Thom Yorke on Friday released a surprise new album through computer file sharing, testing a new way of revenue generation that he hopes can directly benefit musicians.

Called “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes”, Yorke’s second solo album is a melancholy, ambient composition whose layered but measured textures of electronic rifts reflect his frequent theme of the role of the individual in an increasingly industrialised world.

While the sound will be instantly familiar to Radiohead fans, Yorke chose a new way to sell the album — over BitTorrent, the system to share large files between computers that has become notorious for the free swapping of copyrighted material.

“Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” breaks new ground by charging for the files, although the $6 price is less than most album sales.

“I am trying something new, don’t know how it will go,” Yorke wrote on Twitter as he suddenly released the album.

In a longer message, Yorke said that BitTorrent could allow artists — who frequently complain of meagre royalties — to bypass “the self-elected gate-keepers” and sell their work directly.

“If it works well, it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work,” he said.

But Yorke admitted he was unsure the public will “get its head around” the idea. In an age when streaming and smartphones are transforming the music industry, BitTorrent relies on computers with “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” unavailable on iTunes.

Radiohead has frequently experimented on distribution techniques, with the last album “The King of Limbs” self-released for downloading on the band’s website before it went on general sale.

In 2007, Radiohead let customers name their own price when downloading “In Rainbows”. A study later found that, while many fans paid, more people downloaded it — for free — on BitTorrent than from the band’s website.

The latest innovative release comes weeks after mega-stars U2 took a different approach by releasing album “Songs of Innocence” for free on iTunes as part of a promotion with Apple.

Dark sci-fi atmosphere

“Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” further hones Radiohead’s sound developed in the late 1990s on albums such as the seminal “Kid A”, when the former guitar-driven alternative rockers turned to keyboards and classical theory with Yorke’s voice subservient to the songs’ greater atmosphere.

Yorke’s keyboards duel throughout “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” with a tighter rhythm section, as the dark and sometimes wobbly digitised chords impatiently toy with picking up the tempo.

The first track, “A Brain in a Bottle”, sets the tone for the album with an accompanying video glaring at a dishevelled Yorke from assorted angles before he retreats behind boxing gloves.

“Oh, what’s that seeking us? Steel hands have come to talk to us. Take me back,” Yorke sings over an electronic backdrop that produces an air of science fiction.

Yorke similarly rues the direction of modernisation on “Interference”, in which he sings, “In the future, we will change our numbers and lose contact / In the future, leaves will turn brown when we want them.”

“Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” gradually shifts into long instrumental sections, with pulsating keyboards that would be at home on the hazy floor of a trance set — even if the pace is barely danceable.

The album could be followed by fresh Radiohead work. 

Yorke recently sent out a series of cryptic tweets hinting at a new album — including a link to an untitled picture of a white turntable.

While the picture could have foreshadowed “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes”, Yorke also indicated that he has spent two days in the studio with longtime Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood.

Should you keep your data on a hard disk, on a USB drive or on some other digital storage media? Which one is the safest and keeps data for the longest time? It’s now a typical case of too many choices, often leading the consumer to confusion.

As if it was not enough to have to decide for local storage versus cloud, an important decision by all means, one is confronted with countless hardware solutions for local, personal storage found on the market.

USB flash drives are attractive and present many advantages. They are small, fast enough, inexpensive, and physically good looking (yes it does matter, for the vast majority of us). The typical USB drive today sports an average capacity of 16 of 32 gigabyte, enough to store an impressive amount of files of all kinds. They are also easy to carry around and to plug into virtually any device that has a USB port.

USB drives, however, have a major weakness. They are the least reliable of all digital storage devices. The casual user often is not aware of this point. If you have data that is important for you to keep and want to be able to access it after a while, with a good level of certainty, a USB drive simply is not the place to store it. These little “USB sticks” as some also call them, and as handy as they may be, tend to lose and to damage data at a non-reasonable rate.

As usual, there are ways to protect data from loss, even if stored on a USB flash drive, one of them and the most frequently used is having multiple copies of the same files on several media. Apart from this time-honoured method that is built on redundancy, it is useful knowing which storage media are the most reliable, per se, and which are the least. Here’s a refresher.

So again, the least reliable are USB flash drives. There are countless reasons for that, but let’s stay on topic. After them comes a variety of memory cards of all kinds: CompactFlash (CF), Secure Digital Card (SD), Micro SD, Multi Media Card (MMC), etc. By design they are not much more reliable than USB drives; they actually share most of the design traits, but because they are moved around less than the ubiquitous USB drive, they are slightly less prone to wasting data.

A little bit up on the reliability ladder are magnetic tapes. However, these are not commonly found among consumers and remain a feature of professional installations and networks.

One step up — we’re almost at the top now — and we find the traditional hard disk drive. They come in various sizes and capacities but the design has proven to be strong, durable and shock-proof up to a significant point, not to mention other factors such as speed and huge capacities. Whether internal, inside the computer, or external, connected via USB cable, hard disk drives are your best bet today to store and preserve your data, and to know you’ll find it there long after you stored it in the first place.

At the very top sit the optical media, CDs and DVDs. 30 and 20 years, respectively, after their introduction these amazing little discs care about your data to the point of keeping it for you for 100 years. Yes, 100 years is the theoretical shelf-life of information stored on an optical disc. No one yet has had the tangible proof of that understandably, but practical experience has confirmed that indeed it is the most trustable digital storage media today.

So you can choose to keep your important files locally or to save them in the cloud and you may want to make multiple copies on various media or not, just remember that you can’t leave just one copy on a vulnerable USB drive; that’s a certainty.

ALMHULT, Sweden — Having redesigned kitchens, bathrooms and sitting rooms around the world, IKEA has decided to redesign itself.

The store that inserted Scandinavian design into millions of households from Beijing to Boston needs to come up with something new to keep its leading position in an industry which is fast being transformed by travel and the Internet.

Says its head of design Marcus Engman: “I think we have to — and we are — rethinking what’s Scandinavian for tomorrow.”

IKEA’s sales boomed in part because it kept costs down by cleverly convincing customers to piece their purchases together themselves. Now it wants to double those sales to 50 billion euros by 2020, expand its current 362 stores by launching in places like India, and boost online revenues.

To do that successfully, it must take into account the fact that its customers are now global citizens with sophisticated tastes, and that it is catering to a far wider audience than when it first launched in 1943. Over the last year IKEA had 775 million store visits across about 50 countries — and 1.2 billion visits to its website.

“Everybody has a bigger view than what they had in the fifties,” Engman told Reuters from IKEA’s design centre in the remote southern Swedish village of Almhult, where he leads a tight team of 20 designers.

“That means we have to change.”

In seeking to recreate a new Scandinavian image — IKEA is best known for its minimal designs — the company acknowledges too that the face of Sweden has also changed.

Since founder Ingvar Kamprad started selling matches and flower seeds to his neighbours as a child, Sweden’s open-door immigration policy has seen refugees from war in Africa and the Middle East arrive in their thousands. Now one-tenth of the population of the country can say it was born overseas.

IKEA itself is also expanding well beyond Europe, which currently brings in around 70 per cent of its sales, to emerging markets.

That means tomorrow’s store design may be more about blended styles — a challenge given IKEA’s well-known utilitarian chic.

“If you have an extremely elaborate pattern out of Asia, for instance, could we mix that with a very straight forward, functionalist view from us?” wondered Engman.

No rules

Wearing trendy spectacles, a black and white striped t-shirt and sneakers, the 48-year-old Swede acknowledges the importance of fashion in his business.

With the likes of clothes retailers Zara, Next and Hennes & Mauritz competing to sell home furnishings, IKEA is looking to catwalks for inspiration.

For the first time, it is bringing in fashion designers — Londoner Katie Eary, for instance, who is developing wild-looking textiles for items like lamps and pillow cases.

“She’s a little bit into scary digital patterns, and we like that,” Engman says, pointing at a lamp covered in giant hot pink eyeballs as he walks around IKEA’s design centre, a massive open-space playground for product developers.

Fashion designers can bring new zest to home furnishings because they have a less traditional view and attack colours and patterns differently, he adds. “They are not taught the rules.”

Engman’s design team currently spends 30 to 40 per cent of the time out of the office — travelling to places like China, Brazil or Southeast Asia to source new ideas and material such as wood from eucalyptus and acacia trees. IKEA is one of the world’s top users of wood and works with more than 1,000 suppliers across 52 countries.

Counting pennies

Engman’s father developed IKEA’s “Klippan” sofa in the seventies. It is a model that is still sold in stores today.

But mass production has become more difficult since then — part of the challenge being a world where people want more than ever to be seen as unique.

One answer to this, Engman says, would be to let buyers choose their own colours and textiles in order to tailor-make more products to their own tastes.

His designers are also spending a great deal of time thinking about modern living and how to deal with smaller spaces, more frequent moves and social media-focused lifestyles.

“In the past, a family started out looking at the fireplace together and playing games. Then it was the TV set,” he said. “Now, you have a whole family of four in the living room, but they are all doing different things.”

Whatever IKEA decides upon for its new design approach, some aspects will not change.

Across Engman’s sprawling design centre, new products are stuck with post-it notes bearing a suggested price, and the design chief talks constantly of “cracking the code” to ensure prices are affordable for the masses.

“The price is always something everybody should know about any product,” he says. “What’s the goal? It’s the accessibility of the product.”

NEW YORK — It’s easy to dismiss Apple’s new iPhones as merely catching up to Android.

After all, phones running Google’s Android system long have had larger screens. In addition, many Android phones already have the wireless chips that iPhones are getting for making credit card payments without pulling out a card at retail stores.

But the new iPhones are a big deal for one simple reason: Only Apple has the advantage of building both the hardware and the software, so iPhones are easier to use and more dependable.

There are many flavours of Android out there, and some phones won’t run the latest apps or work with accessories such as smartwatches. In addition, many leading apps come to the iPhone first or have features exclusive to iPhones.

There are still reasons to go with Android. Samsung’s flagship phones are still slightly larger than the new iPhones, for instance. Their cameras have higher megapixel counts — though that’s just one factor in what makes a good photo.

What the new iPhones do is eliminate screen size as a reason to avoid iPhones.

The question, then, becomes: Which one?

Size considerations

The iPhone 5, 5s and 5c have screens measuring 4 inches (10.16cm) diagonally. The iPhone 6 boosts that to 4.7 (11.938cm) inches, while the iPhone 6 Plus is at 5.5 inches (13.97cm). Yet the new phones are thinner than the smaller models.

Apple gets rid of glass in the back in favour of an all-aluminium body with curved edges. The new iPhones don’t feel as boxy as previous models.

And the new phones make good use of the larger screens. Those with poorer eyesight can choose a “zoom” option so that everything gets blown up to fill the extra space, just like larger Android phones. Otherwise, you can fit in more content, including an extra row of icons on the home screen.

The iPhone 6 Plus also allows apps to rearrange their layout in horizontal mode. Content appears in two columns, so you’re not switching back and forth as much. The drawback: The Plus is huge for those who don’t regularly carry a backpack or purse.

I personally find past iPhones easier to carry and fit in the pocket, especially when I go out running. Apple will still make last year’s 5s and 5c available, at reduced prices. The 5c is essentially two-year-old technology, so the 5s is the better option.

New features

The 5s doesn’t have the new iPhones’ faster processors, but speed should be adequate for the next year or two. But here’s what you’ll miss, besides the bigger screen:

Only the new phones have the mobile payment technology, so you can start using Apple Pay next month. A new barometer sensor measures elevation, so fitness apps can credit you for climbing stairs and hills.

Where the new phones shine is in the camera. Although the rear cameras stay at eight megapixels, compared with 16 megapixels in the flagship Samsung phones, performance has improved.

Both phones have new technology for faster and more accurate focus. The Plus model also has a physical image stabiliser to help reduce shake, especially in low-light settings. The iPhone 5s and 6 use software tricks to do that.

I took the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Microsoft’s Lumia Icon to Central Park to take about 250 photos and 30 videos.

In my limited tests, photos on the new iPhones weren’t noticeably better, but that’s because the 5s already takes good photos. The Icon takes better shots at night, but its response time is slow and night images sometimes look grainy and distorted. I have found the camera on the 5s to be consistently good, and the new iPhones won’t disappoint.

Where improvement is obvious is in some new features:

— There’s now a second slow-motion mode — for video at one-fourth the normal speed, rather than just half the speed in the 5s.

— A time-lapse feature lets you combine multiple still shots from the same location over a period of time. Think of those fast-moving videos showing an entire building being constructed in just a minute. I had fun making joggers in Central Park appear to be superhero fast.

— The front camera can now take 10 shots a second in a burst mode, matching what the rear camera can do. You can choose the best shot for selfies. The front camera also lets in more light than before.

The time-lapse and front burst features are part of the new iOS 8 software, so the iPhone 5s gets the improvements with a free download. All iOS 8 phones also have an easier way to adjust exposure, in case the sensors don’t get it right.

Storage and pricing

It’s tempting to get the cheapest models with 16 gigabytes of storage — in the case of the iPhone 6, for $200 with a two-year service contract. But phones fill up quickly with photos, music and apps, and iPhones don’t let you add storage.

Fortunately, Apple is doubling the storage for its top two models. So $300 at the contract price gets you 64 gigabytes instead of 32 GB, while $400 gets you 128 GB rather than 64 GB. I recommend getting at least 64 GB.

For the Plus models, add $100 to the price. If you don’t want a contract with your carrier, add another $450 for an unlocked version.

PARIS — France said Thursday it would introduce plain cigarette packaging and ban electronic cigarettes in certain public places, in a bid to reduce high smoking rates among the under-16s.

Following a successful similar campaign in Australia, Health Minister Marisol Touraine said cigarette packets would be "the same shape, same size, same colour, same typeset" to make smoking less attractive to young smokers.

"In France, 13 million adults smoke on a daily basis. And the situation is getting worse. The number of smokers is growing, especially among young people," said Touraine.

"We can't accept that tobacco kills 73,000 people every year in our country — the equivalent of a plane crash every day with 200 people on board," she added.

France has one of the highest rates of under-16s smoking in Europe and, in addition to the plain packaging measures, Touraine also announced that smoking would be banned in playgrounds and in cars with passengers under 12.

European Union laws already force tobacco firms to cover 65 per cent of the packaging with health warnings.

But France wants to go further and follow Australia's example, to the fury of the tobacco companies.

Celine Audibert, spokeswoman for French firm Seita, which is a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco, slammed the move as "completely incomprehensible".

"It's based on the Australian experience which, more than a failure, was a complete fiasco," added Audibert.

In 2012, Australia forced all cigarettes to be sold in identical, olive-brown packets bearing the same typeface and largely covered with graphic health warnings.

Experts say it has helped curb consumption, although tobacco companies dispute this.

It also raised taxes, pushing prices up and consumption down. Tobacco clearances, an indicator of tobacco volumes in the Australian market, fell 3.4 per cent in 2013 relative to 2012.

Unlike Australia, however, French brands will remain on the packets "but limited to a very discreet and defined size, always on the same place on the packet", according to the plan.

Don't vape here

Touraine also announced the banning of the very popular electronic cigarette in certain public places.

E-cigarette use has rocketed in France, with statistics published by the French Observatory for Drugs and Addiction estimating that 18 per cent of French people between the age of 15 and 75 had tried them.

Touraine acknowledged that "it's better to vape than to smoke" but stressed: "For a young person who has never smoked, an electronic cigarette can become a way in to smoking."

E-cigarettes will be banned in locations where young people gather — schools, for example — as well as on public transport and in enclosed workspaces.

In addition, advertising of the popular e-cigarettes will be restricted, then banned completely from May 2016 except at the point of sale and in trade publications.

A federation representing e-cigarette sellers (Fivape) said the decisions taken were "absurd" because "it places the electronic cigarette at the same level as tobacco”.

Smoking is the main cause of death in France, with 73,000 people dying each year of tobacco-related illnesses.

Approximately 13 million people smoke in France every day, out of a total population of around 66 million.

"We can no longer accept this scourge which kills 20 times more people than road accidents, while it is avoidable," Touraine said.

The aim is to reduce this number by 10 per cent over five years.

Anti-tobacco campaigners hailed the measures, with Yves Bur, president of the anti-tobacco alliance saying that plain packaging was a "nuclear bomb for cigarette manufacturers”.

Jacqueline Godet from the anti-cancer league said her organisation had been "waiting for a vision to fight against tobacco for a very long time”.

Of all the irresistible tickles that we humans are inflected with, the restless leg syndrome is the worst. I should know because I suffer from it too.

I have not compared the attack with other sufferers, but it comes upon me, without any prior warning. One minute I could be sitting on a chair, or lying on a cot, and the next I am fighting an overpowering urge to shake my feet, left, right or in some rare instances, both. 

It is an odd creepy sensation and not something that is easy to describe. Jiggling of the foot provides some relief, albeit temporary. It is a minor annoyance because the need to move the limb occurs almost immediately, right after you have stopped the movement. It can become quite catastrophic too. If for some reason you are unable to execute the wiggle, there is a feeling of being suffocated, and the oxygen supply, slowly emptying from your lungs. 

One does not get chocked in reality by not jostling the foot, of course not. But that is the impression your nerve endings transmit to your brain. Someone compared it to the perception one gets before a yawn. Only here it is situated in the legs. Or arms, as the case may be. 

Incidentally, restless arm syndrome is also clubbed together under the same disorder headline. The scientists were too lazy to coin a new phrase for the uncontrollable shaking of our upper body appendages. Why bother, they must have thought? The irrationality factor is identical, so they never felt the necessity to look for fresh classifications. 

They should have known better. I mean being left handed is not the same as having two left feet. The former is a personal choice of any ambidextrous person, while the latter is a metaphor, for individuals who are unable to dance. But here I digress. 

Similar to other physical ticks like, nodding of the head, twitching of the eyes, jerking of the torso and so on, the leg jiggling is also more prominently noticed, when it is observed in others. Administered upon one’s own self, it loses its shine, so to speak. 

This was brought home to me recently when I became party to an interaction between two diverse shakers: of the upper and lower limbs respectively. My own two feet were motionless, because standing straight up, there was not a chance that my either foot would display any involuntary movement. 

I was at the lost and found section of the Queen Alia International airport. My bag was misplaced in transit, and I was there to lodge a formal complaint. I had just disembarked from a long flight and had a long fruitless wait at the conveyer belt. 

“Luggage missing, yes?” smiled a portly official, shaking a long thin pencil forcefully. 

“Missing luggage, yes,” agreed my porter, who had offered to accompany me. 

“Flight arrived from?” he left the question hanging, just the pencil tip quivered. 

“New York,” said the porter, waggling his legs rather vigorously under the huge table. 

“Why you answering, and not you?” he asked pointing the shaking pencil at me. 

“She is upset,” my porter emphasised, with another violent shake of his left leg. 

Both of them glowered at each other. 

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, stop jiggling, er, fighting,” I intervened.

“Sit down Ma’am,” they chorused, shamefaced, handing me a chair. 

“No thanks. I like my feet planted firmly on the ground,” I said, filling in the form.

NEW YORK — Coke, Pepsi and Dr Pepper said Tuesday that they’ll work to reduce the calories consumers get from beverages by 20 per cent over the next decade by more aggressively marketing smaller sizes, bottled water and diet drinks.

The announcement was made at the Clinton Global Initiative and comes as the country’s three biggest soda makers face pressure over the role of sugary drinks in fuelling obesity rates.

In many ways, the commitment follows the way customers’ tastes are already changing: People have been moving away from soda on their own for several years.

In response, Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. have been pushing smaller cans and bottles, which tend to be more profitable and are positioned as a way to control portions. They’ve also rolled out flavoured versions of Dasani and Aquafina, respectively, as demand for bottled water has grown.

John Sicher, publisher of the industry tracker Beverage Digest, said the commitment appears to be a response to the growth challenges the industry has been facing, in part as a result of health concerns. Between 2000 and 2013, the calories people got from drinks fell by about 12 per cent, according to Beverage Digest.

Susan Neely, president of the American Beverage Association, said the commitment announced Tuesday with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation is intended to take such trends “to an ambitious new level”. She said the companies will focus their efforts on communities where there has traditionally been less interest in lower-calorie drinks.

The initiative could be another way to get out in front of campaigns for more aggressive tactics to fight obesity, which the industry has fought. The American Beverage Association has spent millions of dollars campaigning against taxes on sugary drinks, for example. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it is now working to defeat a proposed tax set to go before voters in November.

Instead of such government measures, the beverage association has touted the need for greater awareness about choices and the need to balance calorie intake with physical activity. That will be one component of its new push, with an ad campaign called “Mixify” aimed at teens set to start airing on national TV this week.

The association also noted companies will provide calorie counts on places such as vending machines. A federal regulation is expected to soon require such disclosures, but Neely said beverage makers will go farther by providing some sort of “nudge” for people to make better choices.

The association said it will hire an independent evaluator to track its progress.

It isn’t the first time the industry has partnered with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. In 2006, the American Beverage Association also announced an agreement with the organisation to remove full-calorie soft drinks from schools. That came after the threat of legal action by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, said Jeff Cronin, a spokesman for the nutrition advocacy group based in Washington, DC.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of CSPI, said the announcement shows “the industry is seeing the writing on the wall” and that it’s a way for the industry to burnish its reputation.

BERLIN — Clutching their preserve jars, Tupperware boxes and cloth shopping bags, Berliners can now buy their groceries package-free in a “precycling” first for the environmentally switched-on city. 

From ground Colombian coffee, to olive oil from Greece, biscuit wrappers and ready-made meal trays, the layers of packaging that consumers usually have to get through — and dispose of — are a thing of the past at “Original Unverpackt” (Originally Unpackaged).

Two German women fed up with a packaging “overdose” founded the store, which opened its doors in the cosmopolitan Kreuzberg district last week.

“It was important to act and to be part of the solution instead of just getting worked up about the predicted end of the world,” one of the co-founders Milena Glimbovski, 24, said.

Shoppers can buy muesli, rice or pasta by directly helping themselves from the large store containers to fill their own receptacles before getting it weighed at the cash till.

For beer and red wine, it’s the same thing — “bring-your-own” bottles are just fine, while vodka is even stored in a big demijohn from which customers can buy a few shots, or more.

The shop also sells washing-up liquid and toiletries in bulk, with shoppers helping themselves to grease-busting shampoo using the tap on the 10-litre tin, while toothpaste comes in tablet form.

The shop’s lay-out and decor make one almost expect an old-fashioned storekeeper in a striped apron with a pencil behind his ear to appear.

Precycling rather than recycling

But its mission is all about forward thinking, by encouraging “precycling”, a preventive form of environmentalism, as opposed to just recycling already used packaging, Sara Wolf, 31, the other co-founder, said.

Germans throw away 16 million tonnes on average of rubbish a year, according to the Federal Environment Agency.

Three quarters of the garbage found in the ocean is made up of plastic bags and packaging, as well as cigarette lighters and toothbrushes, and takes up to 400 years to disintegrate, according to environmental group WWF.

Customers seemed taken with the Berlin store.

“Our society worries far too little about the problem of plastics,” complained Kathrin Puzia, a shopper in her 40s, who said she planned to get her groceries at the new shop “from time to time”.

Another customer Lisa Specht said she’s been buying organic aubergines out of concern for the environment but questioned the benefit when they were still packaged.

“Each one was wrapped in plastic film. Where’s the ecological gain?” she asked.

While jumbo size is often the order of the day at big supermarkets with shoppers’ trolleys full to brimming, “Original Unverpackt” allows customers to buy far smaller quantities to avoid waste.

Valentin Thurn, a writer and director, who made the 2010 German documentary “Taste the Waste”, said the food industry played on consumers’ feelings to get them to buy.

“Seventy per cent of our purchases are spontaneous decisions where the packaging’s importance is going to have something reassuring or exciting, for example, to push us to buy,” he said at the shop’s launch.

The package-free Berlin shop is among a handful in Europe but the trend is still in its infancy, with two in Italy, one in Bordeaux in southwestern France and the Austrian capital, Vienna, boasting one too.

It’s perhaps hard to imagine big supermarkets following suit.

Marie Delaperierre, who opened Germany’s first no-packaging shop in the northern city of Kiel at the start of the year, told AFP that she believed the key was to simply meet local people’s daily needs.

“This concept must remain a small neighbourhood shop to fulfil daily needs, such as ‘I need 150 grammes of maize to make some popcorn,’” she said.

SAN FRANCISCO — Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son’s school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc. iPhone.

“I couldn’t believe how accurate it was,” said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand.

The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people.

Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

The $99 app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. According to its website, K-NFB Reading Technology Inc. and Sensotec NV, a Belgium-based company, led the technical development of the app.

Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB’s annual convention in June, said it can replace a “sighted adviser”.

Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image-processing technology as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen.

The app has already given some people greater independence, users said on Thursday and Friday on social-media sites such as Twitter. One early adopter, Gordon Luke, tweeted that he was able to use the app to read his polling card for the Scottish Referendum.

The app will be available on Android in the coming months, Kurzweil told Reuters in an interview. He may also explore a version of the app for Google Glass, a postage stamp-sized computer screen that attaches to eyeglass frames and is capable of taking photos, recording video and playing sound.

“Google Glass makes sense because you direct the camera with your head,” Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil started working on so-called “reading machines” in the early 1970s after chatting on a plane with a blind person who voiced frustrations with the lack of optical-recognition technology on the market.

A few years later, “Kurzweil burst into the National Federation of the Blind’s offices in Washington, DC, and said he had invented a reading machine,” recalled Jim Gashel, a former NFB employee who currently heads business development at KNFB Reader. “It was phenomenal.”

Kurzweil’s first reading machine was the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000. The technology has continued to improve over the past few decades — the new smartphone app can recognise and translate print between different languages and scan PowerPoint slides up to 7.6 metres away — but it was not available on a mainstream mobile device until now.

Previously, it cost more than $1,000 to use the software with a Nokia cell phone and a camera.

The app’s release comes at a time when the technology industry has faced criticism for being too focused on making what some deem frivolous products such as apps for sharing photos and video games, as well as for intruding into people’s personal privacy.

In San Francisco, activists have blocked commuter buses operated by companies such as Google and Apple, and picketed the homes of some tech company executives for driving up the cost of living and not doing enough to help fix the city’s problems.

San Francisco-based Bryan Bashin, executive director of the nonprofit Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, said the KNFB app shows the positive and profound impact that technology can have.

“There are innumerable times in life that I’ll have a bit of print and there will be nobody around who can help me out, and I’ll just want to know something as simple as ‘Is this packet decaf or caffeinated coffee?’” Bashin said.

“The ability to do this easily with something that fits in your pocket at lightning speed will certainly be a game changer.”

Without a doubt, technology is the biggest factor transforming the workplace. It is driving the continued evolution of connectivity and productivity of workers.

Therefore it’s not surprising that an emerging trend, being championed by human resource (HR) departments, is the practice of utilising personal data from an employee’s social media accounts to understand what motivates the workforce.

A comprehensive study by PwC has researched this movement and has found that online monitoring by employers will rise in the next decade. “By 2020, people currently aged 18-32 will form half of the global workforce, bringing with them different attitudes to technology and personal data.”

Apparently, younger people are more open to sharing their personal data with their employers; whereas only 36 per cent of Generation Y workers say they would be happy to do so. They also believe it is only acceptable if it is related to more job security. 

Previously, HR and recruitment staff would “snoop around” a candidate’s social media account to know more about that person’s suitability to be hired. In fact, LinkedIn partly exists for the purpose of providing recruiters with glorified online CVs.

But now, and in a move towards transparency in the age of “personal information protection”, it appears that companies want permission from their staff to monitor their social media interactions, and they claim it is for their own good.

HR specialists believe that what you do on Facebook could provide signals to why you move jobs and could present HR professionals with an understanding of how to improve your well-being.

If you think that sounds appalling, you’re not alone. Nearly two-thirds of the 10,000 employees surveyed by PwC in several countries don’t like this idea. However, they’re probably powerless to do anything about it. After all, social media profiles are accessible to the public, which is the case with LinkedIn and Twitter, and are exposed to friends and co-workers, in the cases of Facebook, Instagram and others.

In fact, the majority of the five hundred HR professionals surveyed by the PwC study say that social media content monitoring is “inevitable”. 

To justify this, it is being compared to the way advertisers and retailers use customer data and track online and social media activity to tailor their shopping experience.

So, according to this somewhat frightening logic, employers can utilise a workers’ personal data to measure and anticipate performance and retention issues.

It’s like watching the movie “Minority Report”. For example, disguised as a process aimed at your own good, companies will be able to reduce your days of sick leave by “real-time monitoring and advising you regarding your health-related activities”. That should make you hesitate before sharing information about your latest workout, or lack of workouts.

The HR community is now buzzing with the possibilities that “consensual social media monitoring” provides. They’re working on developing measures to build trust with employees regarding this process while instituting the benchmarks for the data analysis process. Obviously, there must be clear rules about how data is acquired, used and shared.

There are, of course, those who object to this trend in the psychiatric community, saying that such monitoring would inhibit employee interactions on social media channels, and could therefore defeat the whole purpose.

What’s more, agreeing to such monitoring could actually reduce one’s job security as employers misinterpret their findings regarding an employee’s personal life. Certain pre-set ideals or prejudices that are held by a company’s management regarding an employee’s personal choices may actually have no bearing on his/her performance at work.

Imagine this ridiculous situation, quoting the misplaced enthusiasm of some HR specialists, whereby you are expected to “adhere to a standard of ensuring that your personal life does not conflict with company policies, and that your actions — even in your personal life — reinforce your engagement with business objectives”.

It all sounds a bit too creepy and a wide-ranging discussion is required regarding what to do with the realities of technology in the work place. 

For now, it seems like this is another price we all pay for the over-exposure of our personal and professional lives in the digital age. If you put the information about yourself out there, then it’s difficult to complain that someone is using it to analyse your character and your potential as an employee. Live with it, or delete it.