In the coming months, major cellular networks are expected to unveil family data plans, which should cut my family's cell phone bill. Here are ten other ways I save on my cell phone service. Read more here.
Hear about the radioactive fish? The mad cow? Unsafe food continues to make headlines. Rather than avoiding meat, poultry and fish entirely, I manage the risk and cost of food borne illnesses by practicing safe food preparation, minimizing stocking and subsequent food waste, paying a premium for certain value-add items like cage-free and free-range, and keeping an eye out for recalls. This way, I hope to save the $1850 Americans on average spend in medical bills when someone gets sick with a food borne illness. Read more here...
As a value consumer, I only sometimes pay a premium to justify a higher quality product or added convenience. In many of those occasions, such as booking a hotel for a recent vacation, paying a premium is worth it. A vacation hotel case study.
Earlier this year, my high school friend Paro, a fashionista with a penchant for oversize sunglasses who I had reconnected with on Facebook, died suddenly of a brain aneurism at the age of 34. This week, she recommended Levi's. Read more here...
Hear about the new Dish Network Hopper DVR that lets viewers skip over ads for recorded prim time shows? TV networks don't want you to. Why they should adapt themselves to Auto ad Hop instead. Read more here
Several corporate executives have been in the news recently for missteps ranging
from trading losses, falsifying resumes, misappropriating corporate resources
and offering personal stakes in the company as loan collateral. Despite
suffering public humiliation and sometimes forced resignation, many of these
executives will still hit payday jackpot totaling tens of millions of dollars. Read more...
On May 16, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Skechers will pay $40 million to settle charges that it
deceived U.S. consumers with advertising for its toning shoes, including Shape
Ups, Resistance Runners, Toners, and Tone Ups. Customers who bought these toning
shoes will be eligible for refunds from the $40 million settlement fund either
directly from the FTC or through a court-approved class action lawsuit. An
additional $5 million settlement is being made with state Attorney Generals.
David Vladeck, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection said
"Skechers' unfounded claims went beyond stronger and more toned muscles. The
company even made claims about weight loss and cardiovascular health. The FTC's
message, for Skechers and other national advertisers, is to shape up your
substantiation or tone down your claims."
In contrast, Reebok, which made Easy Tone and Run Tone shoes and apparel,
settled with the FTC for $25 million in September 2011. In a statement to CNBC, Reebok said "We stand behind our EasyTone technology -
the first shoe in the toning category that was inspired by balance-ball
training. Settling does not mean we agree with the FTC's allegations; we do not.
We have received overwhelmingly enthusiastic feedback from thousands of EasyTone
customers, and we remain committed to the further development of our EasyTone
line of products."
Reebok's website had some of the settlement items on sale, whereas several
settlement items on Skechers' site were on clearance, selling at 20-40% off. New
Balance, a smaller player in the field, now sells its toning walking shoes
without any additional claims.
I owned a pair of New Balance 850, which had a flat sole instead of the
convex soles of Reebok and Skechers. Although I never lost any weight (and I
didn't expect to), I could tell they worked differently, making my leg muscles
work harder and causing discomfort and fatigue similar to a workout. When it
came to shaping and toning, I suppose they did work the same way high heeled
shoes do, but were more comfortable to walk in.
The settlement amount, in my estimation, was less than 10% of the annual
sales of Skechers Shape Ups and Tone Ups shoes. To me, these settlements are
about overhyped advertising claims much more than they are about product
performance. The FTC has previously chided consumer companies like General Mills
for insufficiently backing up their health claims. In 2007, it fined several "weight
loss in a bottle of pills" companies, including EFX, CortiSlim, TrimSpa, and
One-A-Day WeightSmart for deceptive advertising. The FTC typically has no issue
with "aspirational" product ads, say Victoria's Secret lingerie, which show
supermodels with impossible bodies, or "puffery" like Axe deodorants, which show
average males becoming chick magnets after using Axe products. What it took an
exception to was Skechers implying that simply buying their shoes would make a
consumer look like Kim Kardashian or Brooke Burke, without having to hit the
gym (or the cosmetic surgeon's office), something that I believe should be
obvious to all consumers.
Less than six months after he joined Yahoo! on January 9, 2012, Scott Thompson has resigned as Yahoo!’s President and CEO. His resignation came 10 days after it was discovered by activist hedge fund Third Point LLC that his resume had been inflated with a fictional computer science degree. It is still unclear how this educational embellishment came to appear on Scott Thomson’s official biography, which was filed by Yahoo! with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as its own website.
Following the claim of inaccuracies on Mr. Thompson’s biography by dissident investor Third Point , Yahoo! formed a special committee comprised of three independent board members and an independent legal counsel to conduct a review of CEO Scott Thompson’s academic credentials and the circumstances surrounding his appointment.
Over the weekend, Yahoo’s finalized the terms of Scott Thompon’s departure. The Board of Directors appointed Fred Amoroso as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO, replacing Mr. Thompson, effective immediately. Yahoo! also settled its proxy fight with Third Point LLC, and nominated three of the hedge fund’s nominees to its formal slate for election to the Board.
Based on public regulatory filings available on edgar.sec.gov, Mr. Thompson received an annual base salary of $1 million. He received an annual equity grant for 2012 with a value of $11 million and a special signing bonus grant of $5 million in February 2012. In addition, Mr. Thompson received a Make-Whole Cash Bonus of $1.5 million and the Make-Whole RSUs valued at $6.5 million, which match compensation he had to forego while the President of Paypal. These have clawback provisions. In addition, Scott Thompson received benefits, participated in an incentive compensation program (which was guaranteed on the low end for 2012), and had 20 days of paid leave.
According the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Thompson’s disclosed to Yahoo!’s board that he has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. While there has not been a formal announcement from Yahoo!, WSJ’s AllThingsD contributor Kara Swisher claims the parting is “for cause,” which would allow the severance to be much smaller than a termination without cause. Wall Street Journal also reports that Mr. Thompson’s termination was negotiated over the weekend “along with some severance pay.”
Details of Scott Thompson’s golden parachute may or may not be disclosed by the new Yahoo! board in the proxy filings prior to Yahoo!’s 2012 annual meeting. If CNN Money is right, Thompson may even owe Yahoo! up to $7 million. In 2011, the annual meeting was held on June 23.
One in 20 Facebook users are victims of ID fraud. A secure password is only the beginning to preventing identity fraud and preserving my family's security on Facebook and other social media. Here are my best practices.
Recently, Facebook announced the acquisition of face.com, its partner in face recognition for over two years. The company expects to take instant facial recognition to the next frontier... mobile phones.
As if you didn't know uploading photos to Facebook, Google+ or other social networks can be dangerous to your privacy.
But did you know it might even give your social security number away? Facial recognition software, public profiles and photographs on social networks, and cloud computing has made it possible to mine for private information, almost instantaneously.
Courtesy: sxc.hu/Image ID: 1260785
The most important technical security conference series in the world, BlackHat USA, took place in Las Vegas on August 3-4, 2011. One of the key briefings: "How The Largest Real ID Database In The World Came To Be" a presentation by Prof. Alessandro Acquisti on how publicly available photos, like those available on Facebook, reveal sensitive information strangers online and offline, including their address, date of birth, marital status, sexual orientation, and even partial social security numbers.
When did this happen? Facial recognition software has been around for decades but it has now permeated into our daily lives. When you are taking a picture of your son's soccer team and your digital camera automatically focuses on your kid's face, it is using facial recognition software. You might also have noticed Google's Picasa, Apple's iPhoto, and Facebook know and can tag your photographs. These companies have acquired and deployed facial recognition software such as NevenVision, Riya, and PittPatt (Google), Polar Rose (Apple) and Face.com (Facebook). Meanwhile, uploading profile and other photographs online has become socially acceptable. In 2010, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded by Facebook users alone per month. Powerful cloud computing has made it possible to analyze and map this vast database to other publicly available data sources, and it is this convergence that has the potential to become particularly intrusive to our personal privacy.
In 2007, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University successfully de-anonymized and identified 10% of their subjects from match.com (where pseudonyms are common) using photos (and real names) from Facebook. In 2009, the same team used Facebook profile information to predict individuals' Social Security numbers. They successfully predicted the first five digits with about 30% accuracy in less than four attempts. In the same paper, Prof. Acquisti showed that he could predict an entire Social Security number with fewer than 1,000 attempts for close to 10% of people born after 1988.
The latest research and the subject of the BlackHat briefing is largely funded by National Science Foundation and U.S. Army Research Office and marries these two experiments. Therefore, it becomes possible to reveal social security numbers from online public profile photographs using PittPatt software (currently owned by Google) that Carnegie Mellon University originally developed.
Applications of this kind of technology exists in government surveillance programs in the U.S. and abroad. TV and movie viewers have many times seen it being used to nab terrorists in shows such as "24." In real life, Brazil is using "Robocop" style glasses in preparation of the 2014 World Cup. What is news is that such technology can be used and abused by private people using publicly available information.
What now? Opting-out is a limited option. Facebook and other social networking sites require real names and often encourage a publicly-searchable profile picture. The facial recognition software is also getting sophisticated so that it can better identify non-frontal photographs. On the regulatory front, Swiss and German privacy regulatory authorities have argued that Facebook's photo-tagging feature is not in compliance with the European Union's privacy laws. In June, the U.S. Social Security agency launched a new "randomized" numbering system, which will make such predictions more difficult for future generations. However, the key question is whether U.S. authorities will step in or if "Minority Report" style commercial application will become a reality much sooner than 2054.
Note: This article was previously published in Yahoo Voices. Author retains copyrights.
Despite a refund policy that allows returns for buyer's remorse and store closings, when it comes to daily deal sites like Groupon, Livingsocial, AmazonLocal, DoubleTakeDeals, etc. I try not to scour them daily for shopping discounts. Here is why.
With Mother's Day just around the corner, dads and older siblings are probably trying to find what to make for mom. Here are some simple treat ideas to surprise and delight your mother or grandmother for mother's day. Although adult supervision is needed, they can be prepared by kids three to five years old, using readily available items from the supermarket. So encourage your budding sous chef to whip up these mother's day treats. No prior cooking experience is necessary. The recipes are ranked in order of difficulty, even though my 4 year old son was able to make all of them, and boy was he proud!
Heart Shaped 3 Layer Strawberry No-Bake “Cake”
Active cook time: 10 minutes
Nothing says “I love you, Mom” like a breakfast in bed. While dad can make tea, have your preschooler make this special “heart shaped 3 layer strawberry cake.” It is not really a cake, but pretty and eminently edible, it is bound to bring smiles to your kids and mom. You will need two slices of mom's favorite sliced bread (something that goes well with jam), strawberry or mixed berry jam (I love Smucker's Orchard's Best, which is free of high fructose corn syrup), and a heart shaped cookie cutter.
Help your child use the cookie cutter to cut out four heart shaped pieces of bread. Using a spoon or knife, spread strawberry jam on three pieces of the bread. Arrange carefully on top of each other to make the cake. Happy Mother's Day!
Chocolate covered strawberries
Active cooking time: 10 minutes, post prep time: 30-60 minutes
Peak strawberry season is fast approaching, and they are my favorite fruit for dipping in chocolate. Strawberries are also the right size for kids to handle. You will need to purchase dipping chocolate, such as Baker's and a pound of strawberries, preferably with stems. If dad is a fancy cook, you can use any chocolate (or a couple of varieties) you want, and use a double boiler or stovetop. For everyone else, the microwave is the way to go. For easy cleanup, use parchment paper.
Wash and pat dry the strawberries. Follow package directions to melt the chocolate in the microwave, making sure not to overheat. Stir. Using a fork or a toothpick, have your child dip the strawberries, one by one, twirling as they go. Then carefully shake off excess chocolate and place on parchment paper. Repeat until done (dad might need to take over). Refrigerate for 30 minutes to an hour until the chocolate coating is set. Carefully lift from parchment paper (usually comes off easily), and serve to your happy mom.
Icecream sundae Mini Phyllo Cups
Active cooking time: 15 minutes
This is a triple delight, with chocolate, ice-cream and a cherry to top off your fabulous Mother's Day treat. You will need chocolate chips (any kind, say dark chocolate for mom, milk for the kids), Athens Mini Fillo Shells or another brand of pre-made phyllo dough cups, mom's favorite ice cream and and a jar of maraschino cherries. You will also need a cookie sheet and some parchment paper.
Set oven to preheat to 350 degrees. Arrange parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then place frozen phyllo cups. Place 3-4 chocolate chip cookies in each cup. When oven is ready, bake phyllo cups according to package directions, usually 3-5 minutes, keeping an eye not to burn the cups or the chocolate. When cups appear to just start getting crisp, remove. Spoon one teaspoon of mom's favorite ice cream. Add sprinkles. Top off with a maraschino cherry. Serve immediately.
Dental costs can create big dents in the wallets of Americans who are
not covered by dental insurance. Unfortunately, even those who have
coverage often have to foot a large bill, as most dental insurance
covers only the most basic of services.
Should a charity like Smile Train use a sick child's photo printed outside an envelope to raise funds for its own cause? Especially when a small percentage of the donations are actually going to cure cleft palate with surgeries? Is this ethical or exploitation?
More financial analysis on Smile Train, and how its "program expenses" include overhead items like CEO salary, pension and 401(k), even rent for its Madison Avenue offices.
