News You Can Use: 7/17/2019
Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash
- How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State
The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.
Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/
- These Tech Companies Are Giving Millions To Politicians Who Vote Against LGBTQ People
The group, Zero for Zeros, analyzed the contribution data between 2010 and 2019 of the top-scoring companies on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. It found 49 corporate PACs that gave a combined $5,837,331 to members of Congress who had received ratings of zero on the HRC’s legislative scorecard. These elected officials include Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who introduced legislation in 2018 that would make it legal for businesses and nonprofits to discriminate against same-sex couples, unmarried couples, and single parents.
Companies like Google, through their corporate PACs, gave a combined $178,500 to politicians who scored zeros on the HRC legislative scorecard. Google, which has faced scrutiny for refusing to crack down on anti-LGBTQ speech, donated $10,000 to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee. In 2014, Lee said that the progressive agenda “rejects the enviable right to life according to one’s religious convictions, and is utterly blind to the moral and economic consequences of our nation’s growing marriage crisis.”
- Why aren’t Millennials buying homes?
- The 3 Essential Negotiation Tactics According to Researchers
The guilt and petty politics of socials debt can be a nightmare. But when it comes to negotiations, reciprocity can be used to give yourself some serious leverage, especially if you’re smart about it. Marketing and persuasion expert Robert Cialidini found that waiters offering their patrons an after dinner mint increased tips by 3%. For wait staff who added, “for you nice people, here’s an extra mint,” tips jumped by a whopping 23%.
This isn’t just for beguiling the other side, but for guilting them as well. Katherine Shonk, editor of Harvard Business School’s Negotiation blog, asserts that you should be specific about the things you’re giving up. Why? Well, in spite of people’s instinct to be even, you can’t always count the opposing side recognizing when you’re making a compromise or how important of a point you’re folding on. Getting a fair deal means making people understand exactly what you’re exchanging. As strong as reciprocity is, to really make it work for you, you need to make the exchange felt for it to have any effect.
https://www.primermagazine.com/2019/earn/negotiation-tactics
- Workers waste half their time as they struggle with data
Organizations are suffering from inefficiencies and ineffectiveness as they turn to data as the lifeblood of their digital transformation — and the workforce is struggling.
About 54M data workers around the world face challenges associated with the complexity, diversity and scale of their company’s data. These data workers represent a quarter of knowledge workers around the world.
Four out of five (80%) of organizations take advantage of data across multiple organizational processes, but despite increases in innovation, workers waste 44% of their time each week due to unsuccessful activities because of lack of collaboration, existence of knowledge gaps and resistance to change.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/workers-waste-half-their-time-as-they-struggle-with-data/
News You Can Use: 6/27/2018
- What if we killed the job interview?
In addition to the information interviews should provide but don’t, there’s also a great deal of information they shouldn’t provide but do. The latter isn’t just “noisy” data in the sense of not improving predictiveness–it’s actually toxic, focusing interviewers’ attention on problematic traits. For example, it’s all but impossible to ignore (and make biased, misguided assumptions about) a candidate’s gender, age, race, appearance, or social class, even when the most conscientious recruiter or hiring manager strives to prevent these factors from influencing her decision making. In fact, the more we try to ignore these qualities, the more present they’ll be in our minds.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40579524/what-if-we-killed-the-job-interview
- You gave your notice, and your boss gives a counteroffer. Now what?
Ultimately, only you can decide whether you should stay or go when you’re presented with a counteroffer. However, many experts are quick to warn job seekers that accepting a counteroffer can be complex.
First and foremost, you’ve already demonstrated to your existing employer that you’re on the lookout for greener pastures. The fact that you were strongly considering leaving could deem you as a flight risk. And, as terrifying as it sounds, there’s no guaranteeing that your employer didn’t just counteroffer to buy themselves some time to find your replacement.
- How women and men approach money differently
- Europe’s New Copyright Rules Will Be Devastating to the Internet as We Know It
The EU proposal in question is an attempt to shore up existing problems with EU copyright law. But the poorly crafted nature of the effort could have a profoundly negative impact on everything from your ability to share hot memes to the survival of new startups.
For example, Article 13 of the plan declares that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption will need to employ automated systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works.
Such automated internet filters (whether policing speech, porn, or copyrighted material) not only routinely don’t work very well, they tend to result in rampant collateral damage as legitimate content gets caught in the poorly-crafted automated dragnet.
- Yes, your employer is probably monitoring your Slack or email activity
The survey was conducted by Alfresco, a digital business platform, which received responses from 307 IT professionals who work at U.S. and U.K. companies with over 500 employees. The results are both illuminating and alarming. They say that 98% of companies monitor their employees’ digital activity, while 11% of employees aren’t aware that their company captures digital activity at all.
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
News You Can Use: 7/5/2017
- Five building blocks of a data-driven culture
A single source of truth is a central, controlled and “blessed” source of data from which the whole company can draw. It is the master data. When you don’t have such data and staff can pull down seemingly the same metrics from different systems, inevitably those systems will produce different numbers. Then the arguments ensue. You get into a he-said-she-said scenario, each player drawing and defending their position with their version of the “truth.” Or (and more pernicious), some teams may unknowingly use stale, low-quality or otherwise incorrect data or metrics and make bad decisions, when they could have used a better source.
Also:
HiPPO, “highest paid person’s opinion,” a term coined by Avinash Kaushik, is the antithesis of data-drivenness. You all know them. They’re the expert with decades of experience. They don’t care what the data says, especially when it disagrees with their preconceived notions, and they are going to stick to their plan because they know best. And, besides, they’re the boss.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/five-building-blocks-of-a-data-driven-culture/?ncid=rss
- A Higher Minimum Wage Is Not Doing The Bad Things Critics Said It Would Do
Contrary to the simple supply-and-demand theory, higher minimum wages, Allegretto says, may end up saving companies money in the long run. “We know that turnover decreases when you increase minimum wages,” she says. “If companies invest more in their workers, the workers are going to be more satisfied. In industries like the restaurant industry, where the turnover rate is sometimes above 100% in a year, that’s a lot of money to spend on recruiting and training and re-recruiting constantly,” Allegretto says.
- Goal Setting Is a Hamster Wheel. Learn to Set Systems Instead
- What Makes a Good UX? Part III “Mission Control Dashboards”
You see, whereas static first generation dashboards give you useless (and I mean useless) reports (which, at best, show a stoplight indicator with no description or backup data that lulls you in to a false sense of complacency or urgency), a modern mission control dashboard replaces those static widgets with modern fully enabled GUI widgets that allow users to drill down, initiate, and execute relevant actions such as data retrieval, workflow kick-off, or collaborative corrective actions. They can embed “apps” and “portlets” and allow a user to get what they need, and where they need, in 3-clicks, without missing anything important. They are the customizeable interactive views that applications have been missing. But, again, this is only the case for truly modern dashboards. First generation dashboards still belong in the dung-heap. For a truly deep dive into what these are, what they can do, and how they are used, check out the Pro piece [membership required].
- There’s a war brewing in Japan, and the banks should pay attention
Now there is a similar war brewing in Japan. This time it is for mobile P2P payments. A few players are vying to become the Japanese equivalent of Venmo, a company founded eight years ago in the United States and now owned by PayPal. The local equivalents are Anypay, Kyash, LINE Pay and, to a certain extent, Yoropay. What makes this war particularly interesting is how similar it is to the news app war. So much so that Anypay was even founded by the former CEO of Gunosy, Shinji Kimura.
Photo: Alain Pham
News You Can Use: 6/7/2017
- How Amazon hopes to win the cloud by hiring older engineers
In my own experience, AWS teams have a healthy mix of older and younger employees. Still, AWS leadership isn’t driven by millennials, but rather by graybeards (James Gosling, Adrian Cockcroft, Tim Bray, and Andi Gutmans are just a few people called out by Governor). Management at most companies will tend to skew a bit older, but AWS is notable for how those people are discovered. As Governor noted: “Some other older companies have older distinguished engineers because they grew up with the company. AWS is explicitly bringing that experience in.”
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-amazon-hopes-to-win-the-cloud-by-hiring-older-engineers/
- Will basic income mean the end of work? Nope.
In fact, some of this rhetoric could be missing the mark. The evidence from many trials of unconditional cash transfers, including basic income plans, finds little evidence that work (or the desire to work) disappears in conditions of free money. In almost all cases, giving people regular payments hasn’t dampened their thirst for employment. In fact, UBI is a bit like the lottery, says Ioana Marinescu, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, author of a recent paper looking at the relationship between cash transfers and behavior. We may imagine that lottery winners all decamp to Florida (or similar) and sit by the pool all day. Actually, most lottery winners keep clocking in (though presumably less despairingly than before).
https://www.fastcompany.com/40423154/will-a-basic-income-mean-the-end-of-work-dont-get-too-excited
- AI Can Now Self-Reproduce—Should Humans Be Worried?
- Aecom and IBM create “scorecard” to help cities prepare for disasters
The scorecard is structured around the UN’s 10 Essentials of Disaster Resilience, a list that enables city administrations to identify priorities for investment and to track progress over time. The goal is to guide cities towards optimal resilience by providing a set of assessments that cover the policy and planning, engineering, organisational, financial, social and environmental aspects of disaster resilience.
http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/aecom-and-ibm-create-scorec7ard-he7lp-ci7es/
- I just want to say one word to you: Data
You need a strategy: Tom Choi, executive director of CAPS Research, said that as procurement managers are tasked with looking downstream for ways to add value to their customers, a digitized ecosystem is crucial for business success. At the same time, the upsurge of Big Data and analytics technology (there are something like 163 platforms that an organization could subscribe to for data) has been rapid and radical, especially the increase in unstructured data from social and media outlets that does not easily fit in a box. Choi’s advice: Create an analytics team; convert your data into a form you can use; and then launch small projects that work or fail quickly. Use those learnings to start again.
http://www.scmr.com/article/i_just_want_to_say_one_word_to_you_data#When:14:30:00Z
Photo: Tony Lam Hoang