The 'Avatar' sequels are getting real with total social media relaunch

LOS ANGELES — Though the first of three Avatar sequels won't unspool until 2017, here's good reason to believe that they are right around the corner: All of the film's social-media feeds, some of which have sat idle since 2011, are being re-launched this week.

Avatar feeds on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, SoundCloud and Facebook started coming to life on Wednesday, just a couple of weeks after director James Cameron said he's delaying the release of the first of three sequels to give them time to finalize the script.

Learning How to Score a Job Using Social Media, for Beginners

With 92% of companies using social media in their hiring efforts, job seekers can’t afford to overlook social as a vital resource in the job search. While you're busy job searching, employers are leveraging online resources to find candidates just like you.

That's why Mashable is collaborating with The Muse to bring you a free, email-based class series called How to Get a Job Using Social Media. The series features five different lessons with actionable tips on how to boost your job search strategy. Once you subscribe, content for the class will be delivered to your inbox each day.

These beginner-level classes will teach you how to establish your social brand, network with people online, identify career opportunities through social media, and turn leads into job offers. The classes include homework assignments to give you a head start in the process. Links to advanced readings will direct you to additional resources.

From: http://mashable.com/

Researchers can identify people behind 'anonymous' data 90% of the time

Big data — huge data sets that are often made publicly available to anyone who wants to analyze it — are supposed to be anonymous. The idea is to leave out key pieces of information about the people involved, such as name or home address, and leave only the larger trends.

But such specifics are not needed to reveal exactly who you are, according to researchers who were able to identify "anonymous" participants in a big data set 90% of the time.

The study — published in the journal Science — posits that researchers were able to identify "anonymous" shoppers from a big-data set based on credit card metadata: vague things such as the type of venue (a gym, for example) or the amount spent on a purchase.

SEE ALSO: Big Data Is Changing the Way We Get Well

The team went through three months of credit card data, which encompassed 1.1 million people shopping at 10,000 shops. The shopping happened in an undisclosed country, sourced from records provided by a "major bank."

All of the "sensitive information," such as name, credit card number and the time of the purchase were taken out of the equation — but the shoppers' activities had unique qualities nonetheless. The research team was able to accurately identify a shopper 90% of the time by using just four pieces of data on customer location, coupled with some other information about the shoppers.

A location-stamped tweet, for example, could be used and crossed with the metadata to directly identify a shopper. It's what the researchers call a "correlation attack," or learning personal details about someone by correlating seemingly innocuous data with outside information.

It's a chilling concept — that the digital footprint we leave, no matter how vague, could be traced back to us in a very specific way.

From: http://mashable.com/