News You Can Use: 8/8/2018
- Are we losing the art of telephone conversation?
The number of calls made dropped for the first time in 2017. It’s not a huge drop – 1.7% – and the figure may be misleading since calls made on WhatsApp and Facebook weren’t counted. Three-quarters of people still believe that voice calls are important. But that’s not as many – 92% – as the number who value their phones mainly for internet access.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/03/phone-calls-becoming-lost-art
- What James Gunn’s firing says about the rising stakes of social media
Gunn’s tweets were up to a decade in the past, while Barr’s tweet reflected her current thinking and displayed actual racism, as opposed to tasteless humor. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be learned from similarities between the two, namely: If you want to keep your job, don’t tweet anything that could possibly be construed as controversial. In the case of both Barr and Gunn, their employers’ response was, essentially, “Shut This Down Immediately, Sort Out The Details Later,” with the emphasis on damage control over details. (The details were taken care of eventually; ABC later backtracked on canceling Roseanne, announcing the replacement series The Conners in late June, and similarly, there are now reports that Marvel might consider rehiring Gunn.)
- Elon Musk is fulfilling Thomas Edison’s energy dreams | Michio Kaku
- How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can
Inside OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk and several other big Silicon Valley names, you will find a robotic hand called Dactyl. It looks a lot like Luke Skywalker’s mechanical prosthetic in the latest Star Wars film: mechanical digits that bend and straighten like a human hand.
If you give Dactyl an alphabet block and ask it to show you particular letters — let’s say the red O, the orange P and the blue I — it will show them to you and spin, twist and flip the toy in nimble ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/30/technology/robot-hands.html
- Steven Pinker, Author of Bill Gates’s Favorite Book, Says Entrepreneurs Should Trust Stats, Not Their Intuition
The thesis of Pinker’s book ultimately boils down to, that while you might think that the world is doomed — considering the news we read and see — if you measure health, wealth, safety, knowledge and quality of life generally, humanity overall is better off than ever.
“For all the flaws in human nature,” Pinker writes, “it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits.”
Photo by Ye Fung Tchen on Unsplash
News You Can Use: 5/25/2016
- The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It
A recent Motherboard piece took a look at the impact of no HR on company culture. It found that women are more often than not the most vulnerable employees due to startups’ lack of HR and general anti-harassment procedures. The article states, “Ultimately, these structural issues contribute to one of the greatest systemic problems facing working women today: barriers to advancement, known to many as the glass ceiling.” And over the years some of the biggest tech startups have had accusations of harassment levied at them.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3059673/the-future-of-hr-and-why-startups-shouldnt-reject-it
- Go Deep and Go Wide with Procurement Analytics
Data unification is a two-step process that catalogs all data sources and uses that information about data to build a global reference that shows how all of the data relates to the questions at hand. This resource is typically built through a combination of machine learning and smart sourcing of human experts, and provides three clear benefits: making exponentially more data available for analysis, eliminating the biggest contributor to analysis time overhead – data preparation, and building in repeatability so any analysis that has been done can be rerun at anytime with no repeat of the data preparation.
- A 40 Hour Work Week . . . Really?
Of course, I’m being a fit facetious here but I don’t think it’s all that far from the truth. Here’s a shocking business statistic: if you or anybody on your team wastes just one hour per day — and please understand that I’m also guilty of this — it equates to six weeks of wasted time per year! Isn’t that incredible? That’s a lot of vacation time. My advice: just work hard when you are at work. Of course, we all need some down time to handle personal matters but do so sparingly because you can’t get those hours back.
- Call me crazy (regarding conference calls)
A conference call is over when someone uses one of the many conversational gaps, false starts, or “No, you go” truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should put our ideas in writing. As if to say, “Yeah, I guess flip-flops weren’t a good choice for this 5K run.” Acknowledging that we’ve engaged in the discourse equivalent of a toddler’s squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool instead of the Indian Ocean.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/hang-up-the-conference-call
- Want to Improve Your Decision-Making? Shut up for 10 days.
Insight meditation, also known as vipassana, is a method handed down by Gautama Buddha himself to his followers. Insight meditation focuses on maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, without judgment. Students first take a vow of silence. They then enter into a daily routine of sitting for as many as 11 hours per day, renouncing all other religious or ritualistic practices, eating only vegetarian fare and not speaking except during a short Q&A session with the teacher.
- How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession
“If you were to download everything in the PACER system, it would cost you hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Lewis of Ravel Law, which has found an alternative by partnering with Harvard Law School to digitize its archive. “They’ve made an effort to collect every … court decision from every state and federal court over the last 200 years,” Lewis says. Ravel collects new information in real time. “The courts themselves are doing a much better job of pushing out today’s law,” he adds. Ravel has published the complete case law for California and New York. It aims to offer all U.S. federal and state law online by mid 2017, for free.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3059725/how-ai-and-crowdsourcing-are-remaking-the-legal-profession
- The Chinese Millennials
We have heard the stories of changing and increasing wages. The migrant workforce in China’s eastern coastal cities is also changing. Today, young people coming to the factory towns from rural China are less open to the long working hours, constant overtime and poor working conditions. Today’s Chinese Millennials stand apart from their parents and grandparents. They have many new economic opportunities, they are focused on the present, they are interested in more work/life balance, and they have become conspicuous consumers.
Photo: Benjamin Child
News You Can Use: 5/11/2016
- Chris Sacca says there’s “a greed case for diversity”
There’s a very strong business case for diversity that can affect a company’s bottom line. If you have a gender-diverse company, it can result in a 15 percent greater financial performance compared to a company that is not diverse, according to McKinsey. Meanwhile, ethnic and racial diversity at the leadership and board level leads to a 35 percent greater financial performance. In Silicon Valley specifically, the tech-dominant area could gain $25 billion (a 9% increase) in gross domestic product by 2025.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/chris-sacca-says-theres-a-greed-case-for-diversity/
- Why outsourcing customers are terminating their call center deals
What’s going on, say Everest’s analysts, is that buyers have greater expectations from their call center providers today. No longer content with simply lower costs, they are looking for vendors that can partner will them to deliver improved business outcomes. They are seeking engagements that incorporate emerging technologies, automation, and big data analytics. And they’re showing the vendors who can’t meet these increased demands the door.
- How Men’s Changing Friendships Might Reshape The Workplace
There are lots of reasons why we think friendship and work don’t mix, aside from hyper-competitiveness. First, there’s longevity: gone are the days when, like my grandfather, you spent your entire working life at one company with the same colleagues, until death or retirement, whichever came first. Now our colleagues are unlikely to be around in five or six years.
There’s also hierarchy to consider. What if you get promoted—or your friends do—and you suddenly aren’t “peers” but supervisors and supervised? And besides, social media can keep us connected to older friends, no matter how far-flung.
It’s hard to say whether the evolving workplace is changing male friendships or vice versa; probably it’s a mix of the two. But what’s clear is that at the same time that corporate hierarchies are flattening and employee tenures shortening, men are steadily growing closer.
- Supply Chain Managers Put on High Alert Against “Ransomware”
Ransomware uses special encryption software to lock up the targeted data, so that it is irrecoverable until the hackers release the key. The malware is typically spread via phishing emails, infected websites and other means (portable media, vendor networks, ‘botnets,’ etc.) – and all it takes is one infected computer to put a company’s entire network at risk.
Any supply chain is potentially vulnerable, unless it’s completely air-gapped and undiscoverable from a public-facing web server. However, this is unlikely – it is exceedingly difficult to silo networks and data in such a way that malware can’t get through and still be able to manage them easily.
- Technological Sustentation 90: Open Source
Open Source brings unique advantages, but it also brings unique risk. Who is going to support the platform day to day? Maintain it and fix the bugs? Add new functionality and integration capability as the organizational platforms change? And how can you be sure someone didn’t sneak something proprietary in there, either on purpose or by accident, and you won’t be accused of IP theft or a license infringement and have to tack legal costs onto the bill (as there is no provider to indemnify you)? All of this is addressable, and controllable, but you need to be aware of all the risks, and have a game plan to mitigate them up front, or getting any open source project approved in an organization that still wants a one vendor platform and “one neck to choke” (that is outside the organization) will be an uphill battle.
http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/04/27/technological-sustentation-90-open-source/
- Why analytics is eating the supply chain
“It’s about agreeing on forecasts and collaborating on inventory throughout the supply chain,” Myerson said. “It really improves efficiency, cost and quality, and not just for manufacturers.”
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3063541/big-data/why-analytics-is-eating-the-supply-chain.html
News You Can Use: 3/23/2016
- Why 2016 Is The Year Of The Hybrid Job
The 21st-century workplace demands versatility. Big data, for example, is becoming increasingly important to the success of businesses, and every industry is making considerable investments. “Not surprisingly, occupations pertaining to data analysis are the fastest growing today across multiple industries,” says Brennan. “The ability to compile, analyze, and apply big data to everyday business decisions is driving major change. In the IT space, big data roles have seen a nearly 4,000% jump in demand. But with the availability of data comes the requirement to analyze and visualize data.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/3057619/the-future-of-work/why-2016-is-the-year-of-the-hybrid-job
- An interesting post on the history of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge.
The book…helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives — the building blocks of computing — and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible.
- Rebranding The American Man
According to research from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, single, unmarried women under 30 are now out-earning single, unmarried men across the country. In New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego, women make 17%, 12%, and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. A big part of this shift has to do with the fact that women now earn 60% of higher education degrees, so this trend is likely to continue. And women are the primary jobholders in 13 out of the 15 job categories projected to grow in the United States over the next 10 years.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3057609/rebranding-the-american-man
- The Air You Breathe at Work May Be Slowing You Down
The culprit is carbon dioxide, according to a series of studies since 2012. The most recent research, led by Joseph Allen, who teaches at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzed the performance of knowledge workers, including engineers, programmers, creative marketing professionals and managers. For several hours each day, unbeknownst to those employees, the researchers raised and lowered the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and then tested everyone on nine different kinds of cognitive ability, like responding to a crisis, strategic thinking and applying their knowledge to a practical task.
The higher the concentration of CO2, the lower the test scores. Even allowing for uncontrolled factors such as diet, previous night sleep quality and mood, employees’ overall sharpness fell by an average of 15 percent when CO2 levels reached “moderate” levels of about 945 parts per million (ppm). In modern office buildings, designed to maximize energy efficiency by letting in as little outside air as possible, CO2 levels around 1,000 ppm are common.
- IT workers dispute Disney rehiring claims
“This is nothing more than corporate speak intended to muddy the waters,” Perrero said. “New more exciting jobs were promised by Disney that acted as a carrot to keep us around just long enough to have us Americans be the trainers and the foreign workers as the trainees.”
- John Oliver on Encryption (NSFW language… don’t watch this in the office!)
Related:
WhatsApp’s Other Encryption DilemmaThe messaging app has made clear it hopes to sell businesses on using WhatsApp as a way to communicate with consumers. Tests of WhatsApp business accounts are expected to start by the end of this year, Facebook has said. But WhatsApp has told potential clients that one of its biggest challenges is how to roll out a customer service application for businesses without giving up end-to-end encryption protecting messages on the app, according to a person briefed by WhatsApp.
https://www.theinformation.com/whatsapps-other-encryption-dilemma
- D.C., San Francisco tech leaders aim for ‘future-proof’ procurement
The idea of future-proofing procurement, Vemulapalli said, is to make it easier for city governments to procure technology from a diverse group of vendors — from massive international companies to local startups in the civic innovation space.
http://statescoop.com/d-c-san-francisco-tech-leaders-aim-for-future-proof-procurement
Photo: Simon Stratford