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