Category: Industry News

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/25/2018

She bought those lights on Amazon

  • Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for Consumers

    In short, by the standards of consumer welfare — providing a variety of high-quality products, innovation, low prices — big tech is one of the best things to happen in the economy in decades.

    A more subtle argument against big tech involves the future: Yes, many new and innovative products are given away free today. But what effect is big tech having on tomorrow’s prices and innovation?

    This argument assumes that big tech is stifling the competition today that tomorrow would lead to innovation or lower prices. I’m not sold. It is certainly true that consumer welfare can be harmed by the absence of products that might have been created if a market had had more competition. But look at what is actually happening: Big tech firms plow revenue into research and development in order to continue creating new and better products. These companies are innovation powerhouses, and there are no signs that that will change.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-20/google-and-amazon-antitrust-fears-are-misplaced

  • Why My Open Office Feels … Walled Off

    Open offices have been the trend in workplace design for a while now — as of 2014, some 70 percent of office layouts were open — and despite some backlash, they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon. Proponents tout the upsides: collaboration, flexibility, bottom-line savings, attracting millennial workers. But even the biggest fans know all of this comes with a loss of privacy. (New reality: booking a conference room to make a doctor’s appointment.) And though sharing is nothing new to us in 2018 — see: communal tables at restaurants; car rides with strangers — it can feel at odds with how increasingly individualistic and aesthetic-driven our culture has become. Sharing is about more than giving up your personal space — it’s about not being able to personalize your space, either. Designed-for-all means one-size-fits-all, so the shared spaces we exist in — like the offices we spend so much time in — become uniform. The modern office lives and dies by 50 shades of gray.

    https://www.phillymag.com/articles/2018/03/17/open-office-personalization/

  • How to detect baloney the Carl Sagan way
  • Fired FBI director James Comey reveals how Apple and Google’s encryption efforts “drove me crazy”

    When Apple and Google announced in 2014 that they would be moving their mobile devices to default encryption, by emphasizing that making them immune to judicial orders was good for society, “it drove me crazy,” he writes. He goes on to lament the lack of “true listening” between tech and law enforcement, saying that “the leaders of the tech companies don’t see the darkness the FBI sees,” such as terrorism and organized crime.

    But Comey understood it was an unbelievably difficult issue and that public safety had to be balanced with privacy concerns. Towards the end of the Obama era, the administration developed a technical plan to show it was possible to build secure mobile devices and still allow access to law enforcement in certain cases. During one Situation Room discussion on the issue, Obama acknowledged, “You know, this is really hard.” Comey’s first reaction was “No kidding” but he also appreciated the former president’s humility.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40559334/fired-fbi-director-james-comey-reveals-how-apple-and-googles-encryption-efforts-drove-me-crazy

  • Amazon warehouse workers skip bathroom breaks to keep their jobs, says report

    Workers who pick up products for delivery at a warehouse in Staffordshire, UK use bottles instead of the actual toilet, which is located too far away, Bloodworth reported. They are afraid of being disciplined for idling and losing their jobs as a result, he added. Bloodworth told The Sun in an interview that the warehouse resembled a prison or an airport, with high security scanners that check workers for banned items like hoodies, sunglasses, and phones, and other employees who pat down workers to check for stolen goods.

    Bloodworth’s findings are in line with first-hand accounts collected in the survey by worker rights platform Organise, which reported that 74 percent of workers avoid using the toilet for fear of being warned they had missed their target numbers. Rising goals have also taken a toll on employees’ mental health, as 55 percent of them report having suffered depression since working at Amazon. Over 80 percent of workers said they would not apply for a job at Amazon again.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks

Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/18/2018

News You Can Use, Productivity and Agile Thinking

  • Agile’s dark secret? IT has little need for the usual methodologies

    With the exception of the company’s website and mobile apps, one of IT’s core principles is “buy when you can, build when you have to.” IT licenses something like 90 percent of all new functionality in the form of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) and software as a service (SaaS), leaving 10 percent for software developed in-house.

    Scrum, Kanban, Lean Software Development and most other agile methodologies are designed for the 10 percent, not the 90 percent. On top of which, in a typical shop, about 70 percent of developer hours goes to maintaining and enhancing applications already in production, leaving 30 percent for implementing new ones.

    Do the math. Agile is mostly useful for 10 percent of the 30 percent — in other words, it handles a whopping 3 percent of what IT’s application teams are called on to do.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3263647/methodology-frameworks/agiles-dark-secret-it-has-little-need-for-the-usual-methodologies.html

  • What To Do When A Coworker Has It In For You

    What you should do really depends on whether you’re dealing with someone who dislikes or is threatened by you versus someone who is actively trying to undermine you or derail your career, Raina says. If the former, it may be a good idea to handle the situation on your own. If the latter—or if you’ve tried to confront the individual and it didn’t work or made the behavior worse—then you may need to engage your supervisor. However, if you can show that you tried to fix the issue on your own, that may show your boss that you made the effort to solve the problem first.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40554709/what-to-do-when-a-co-worker-has-it-in-for-you

  • Fake News in Mexico
  • 5 Ways To Reset An Unproductive Afternoon

    Multitasking gets a terrible rep, but sometimes it can be a great tool when monotasking is just not getting you anywhere. As Saunders previously wrote for Fast Company, “Some situations just aren’t meant for long stretches of unbroken focus.” The trick is to experiment what form of task switching helps you best. For Saunders, task switching motivates her to work through small and boring tasks. She gives herself permission to toggle between writing business emails and looking at her calendar tasks, or she’d alternate these administrative tasks with more “exciting” work (such as book marketing). Saunders wrote, “The promise of soon being able to do something fun helps me quit procrastinating on what’s not fun.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40550317/5-ways-to-reset-an-unproductive-afternoon

  • What Can You Really Accomplish in Just an Hour?

    But you’ll only make your hours matter to the extent that you displace your time wasters with planned, high-value activities you know you can accomplish in a day. That way, when you’re unconsciously reaching to check Instagram or texts, you can shift your attention back to your daily planner, open it up and then do something valuable for an hour. Do something that boosts your confidence — something that counts.

    Limit time-wasters by scheduling your email, text and social check-ins as independent goals on your daily planner. Most of my clients do fine with three to five scheduled visits per day. Also, consider going on a social media cleanse

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311449

Photo by Lê Tân on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/11/2018

The world can be crazy, we should try to be reasonable

  • China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and trains

    With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

    Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17130366/china-social-credit-travel-plane-train-tickets
    This is literally right out of Black Mirror:

  • Marques Brownlee, ‘the best technology reviewer on the planet,’ talks about the past four years and his plans beyond YouTube

    So, one of the biggest things about YouTube versus any other platform is the built-in audience and discovery tools. Before this was even a business for me, it was always kind of a fun hobby. People don’t think about SEO and keyword optimization and things like that as a hobby, but it was kind of fun for me to see how I can focus on making a better YouTube channel, and just get better at that personally.

    Now that it’s a business, obviously it’s expanded and it still grows as a YouTube channel, but yeah, we’ve gotten to the point where we think about other platforms, or other ways to own our own content. I think YouTube has been awesome for the years we’ve been on it, but we’re starting to think about other things now.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/marques-brownlee-mkbhd-youtube-interview-2018-3
    I am a big fan of MKBHD and I don’t normally get to mention him on my “professional” blogging.

  • Kids on the Internet: Why parenting must keep up with the digital revolution
  • Sheryl Sandberg defends Facebook’s data-hungry business model

    In the past, Facebook has faced criticism for product updates that alienated some users. But in each case, that criticism eventually dissipated. This time around, the company is under scrutiny for the fundamentals of its business model–which Sandberg resolutely defended. “We believe that we can operate our service with our current business model, continue to provide a free service all around the world, and protect people’s data, but we are going to have to earn that trust,” she said.

    Sandberg also had a message for her Wall Street viewers, whose increasingly negative outlook on the company had erased $50 billion in market value earlier in the week. “We’ve already said that we’re going to significantly impact our profitability, and we mean it,” she said. “And if we need to do more, we continue to do more. … We will make any investment we need to make.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40548425/sheryl-sandberg-defends-facebooks-data-hungry-business-model

  • Agile: Myths and Reality

    Agile development is elegantly simple and many agile fundamentals are spreading from engineering to marketing, sales, and finance teams, transformational consultants Sol Sender and Ben Edwards write in a Quartz at Work article. But, they caution, “much can and does go wrong at every level of the organization, from the individual team member all the way up to the CEO. Which is why most companies, despite their intentions to adopt agile methods, often end up working in a way that doesn’t look much like true agile at all.”

    Top executives have to be willing to cut through cultural barriers and unbind their teams from restraints that deter them from new achievements. They must accept that a successful transformation is a journey that may not always run smoothly.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3264466/leadership-management/agile-myths-and-reality.html

Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/28/2018

  • Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask teenagers for images?

    On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

    The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.
    **
    In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/facebook-men-children-sexual-images
    I called out Facebook on SourceCast 106 for “outsourcing” policy to users instead of doing it themselves. This survey is even worse. Facebook needs to decide what kind of community it wants to be. Users will come and go as a result. Also – Facebook should not be trying to attract children and teens, so this line of question is problematic on a whole other level.

  • For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

    On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

    There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

    Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

  • What Happens In One Lifetime?
  • Another new survey underscores that skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want

    According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

    In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/another-new-survey-underscores-that-skilled-workers-can-pretty-much-live-wherever-they-want/?ncid=rss

  • United Airlines’ Bonus Lottery Was Doomed to Fail. Don’t Make the Same Mistake With Your Team.

    If you want to know what your employers need or want, try asking them what they’d change about the culture of your workplace. I doubt the answer will be, “We need a Ping-Pong table” or, “I’d love to have my name picked out of a hat for a bonus” but instead, “I don’t understand what I need to do to get promoted or a raise,” “I’d love to be able to attend a conference to learn more about our industry” or, “I would love a mentor who could help guide me.”

    If your employees want to play the lottery, they have that option outside of work. Adults don’t want to play games at work, and United Arilines found that out the hard way. We don’t need toys; we want job satisfaction. And most importantly, employees want predictability.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309984

Photo: Joshua Earle

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/14/2018

  • China using big data to detain people before crime is committed

    Chinese police theorists have identified specific “extremist behaviours, which include if you store a large amount of food in your home, if your child suddenly quits school and so on,” she said. Train a computer to look for such conduct, and “then you have a big data program modelled upon pretty racist ideas about peaceful behaviours that are part of a Uyghur identity,” she said.

    The report “adds some pieces to the puzzle” over what is happening in Xinjiang, where it became clear over the last year “that tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs were disappearing without having done anything illegal,” said Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has travelled extensively in Xinjiang.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-using-big-data-to-detain-people-in-re-education-before-crime-committed-report/article38126551/
    The dark side of “big data” and “AI” need to be reported on and discussed.

  • This One Aspect of Your Office Design Is Wasting a Lot of Time and Money

    Meetings are expensive — the rent of the office space combined with the wages of each attendee — but a lot of that investment is wasted. A UCLA and University of Minnesota study finds that executives spend up to half of their working hours in meetings and that as much as 50 percent of that time is unproductive. With 17 million business meetings in the United States every day, there are a lot of frustrated workers: 88 percent of people are annoyed by technology problems in meeting rooms, and 20 percent of meetings run late due to those issues, wasting 2.83 working days a year for the average employee.

    Also:

    Making meeting rooms more interactive and easier to navigate is part of a movement to upgrade our office spaces to better reflect how we work today. Real estate executives acknowledge updating is needed with 86 percent saying they are remaking or adapting offices and another 51 percent are planning to reinvent shared workspaces this year, according to the CBRE’s 2017 Americas Occupier Survey. Employing technology to more efficiently use meeting space is a vital part of those efforts and can make a big impact on a company’s bottom line.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309625

  • Can DIY Solar Panels Solve Puerto Rico’s Power Crisis?
  • Everyone on LinkedIn is a “passionate, experienced, motivated” leader

    While it’s awesome that we’re all so “experienced,” “passionate,” and “creative,” these labels won’t help any of us stand out. Slinging around the same generic language as everybody else is among the worst strategies for getting ahead.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40538110/everyone-on-linkedin-is-a-passionate-experienced-motivated-leader
    4 Signs You’re Trying Too Hard On LinkedIn

    The number one sign Marco Montinari, a recruitment consultant at Mason Frank International, sees repeatedly is LinkedIn users trying to be philosophers or motivational speakers. “It usually involves reflecting on their own successes while also advising people to stay humble,” Montinari says. While there’s nothing inherently bad about trying to deconstruct common professional issues or trying to uplift people through motivational words, unless you actually are, you know, a philosopher, what you think is deep or uplifting often comes across as simply trite or self-congratulatory. As Montinari points out: “A lesson in self-awareness is often needed for people who spend time telling others how to live their lives.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40523265/4-signs-youre-trying-too-hard-on-linkedin

  • Science Says Money Does Buy Happiness If You Spend it the Right Way

    The reason that money demonstratively increases happiness levels up until a point is that it takes a certain salary to feel financially secure.

    Having enough money means no anxiety when shopping at the grocery store, going out to eat or paying your rent. This type of security is overlooked when you are used to it.

    Remembering and being appreciative of the fact that you are free to purchase things, though, will make you happier even after it has settled in as normal amount of your finances. Fundamentally, having enough money to buy these basic necessities will no-doubt increase your happiness levels.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309814

Photo: Brooke Winters