Tag: CoronaVirus

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News You Can Use: 6/10/2020


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

  • Poorly Designed Curfews Are Wreaking Havoc on Cities

    The problem stems in part from the litany of exceptions and caveats embedded within the curfew policy. Essential workers are allowed out past curfew as long as they are going from work to home. But they are allowed to stop at a deli for a meal. But then they have to go right home. Unless they need medical supplies, then they can get those too. Food delivery workers can also be out, as can media, but only if they’re working. If you’re stopped, there are “no specific requirements for ID.” It is, in short, up to whether the police officers believe you or not.

    Plus, the guidance that “transportation infrastructure such as bus, rail, and yellow and green taxis will be operating normally” proved not to be the case. At Columbus Circle, Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz tweeted a photo of police in front of the subway entrance 13 minutes prior to curfew. “Uber and Lyft have been ordered shut at 8. Citi Bike and Revel are already deactivated in the neighborhood,” Offenhartz added, referring to the city’s bike and moped share systems. “When curfew hits in 10 minutes, how the hell are people supposed to get home???”

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4bv7/poorly-designed-curfews-are-wreaking-havoc-on-cities
    DoorDash says it is ‘prepared to provide support’ for Caviar workers arrested in NYC during curfew

    On-demand delivery workers are now caught between the protests and law enforcement, as on-demand apps like Caviar, DoorDash, and Uber Eats informed them that they could continue taking orders as essential workers in certain cities despite the curfew. In some locations, like San Francisco and Washington, DC, Uber and other apps ceased operations during curfew hours. But in New York City, the apps assured their contractors, many of whom rely on the apps for income during the pandemic and yet receive no other form of financial assistance, they could continue working.

    “Our teams on the ground are working closely with cities on how to best support them based on their needs and the local situation,” an Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News earlier this week regarding its inconsistent approach to city curfews. “Some cities have requested that we suspend operations during curfew hours while others want to ensure Uber is available for essential services.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/5/21281272/doordash-caviar-nyc-workers-arrested-response-curfew-protests-police-brutality

  • What should schools teach? Now is the moment to ask
  • Google outlines plan to get some employees back to the office

    Google will begin opening some of its office buildings in various cities starting on July 6, allowing a small amount of its employees who need a physical workspace “the opportunity to return on a limited, rotating basis.” The idea is to rotate employees in for a day every few weeks to keep facilities at only around 10% occupancy.

    If all goes well in its initial efforts, Google will scale that 10% up to 30% around September “which would mean most people who want to come in could do so on a limited basis, while still prioritizing those who need to come in,” according to Pichai.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/google-campuses-reopening-covid-19/
    Google’s work from home strategy includes a $1,000 allowance

    As a result the company is providing a $1,000 allowance to staff to help them buy computers, office furniture and other equipment needed for remote work. While that might not cover everything, it should ease the burden for workers who don’t have everything they need.

    https://www.engadget.com/google-work-from-home-allowance-221701178.html

  • Why Does Zoom Exhaust You? Science Has an Answer

    Zoom and other video-conference services present many communication pitfalls—an inability to read body language, faces that move into different spots on the screen, a chat feature to accommodate side comments and transmission delays that hinder turn-taking. “You are always making a judgment about how much to speak and when it’s appropriate,” says Steve Harrison, associate professor at Virginia Tech and director of its Human-Centered Design Program.

    With so little non-verbal and real-time feedback, it’s difficult to tell if people on the other end of the video line are with you. “Ask a question and there’s silence. You feel like you’re talking to empty air,” says Keeley Sorokti, director of knowledge sharing at the Chicago-based nonprofit Ounce of Prevention Fund.

    Another source of stress, researchers have found, is that a mirror or video camera trained on study subjects causes them to see themselves the way they think others do. “When you look in a mirror, what you tend to see is your objective self,” says Amy Gonzales, assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies media and identity. “I guess my nose is kind of big. Maybe I do need some wrinkle cream.” Zoom says it offers a control to block the mirror image.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-zoom-exhaust-you-science-has-an-answer-11590600269

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/27/2020


Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

  • The office is dead, according to most startup founders

    The implications of these findings offer a glimpse into a post-COVID-19 work world. Sixty-six percent of CEOs are considering letting go of (or downsizing) their offices, according to the survey, because an average of 70% of employees who previously reported for duty at a company’s workspace would be allowed to work remotely once stay-at-home orders are lifted.

    The majority predicted that mandatory shutdowns will be over by the end of Q3, and 67% said that they would make a sanitized/sterilized workspace a priority to keep their people safe. The majority (61%) said they would allow employees to continue working from home until they felt safe enough to travel and could manage childcare. These CEOs said their companies would not incur additional expenses to help their workers with childcare or commuting.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90507601/the-office-is-dead-according-to-most-startup-founders
    Mark Zuckerberg’s new work-from-home zeal is very, very convenient

    Getting out in front on this work-from-home revolution might just be the message for today, when many of us have come to believe that COVID-19 will change work forever and radically deemphasize the importance of brick-and-mortar offices. (Though not everybody buys it.) It’s a feel-good message that comes just after Facebook picked off Giphy in the midst of a pandemic and during the height of anti-trust angst in Washington. Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that Facebook is behind the launch of a new lobbying group called American Edge, which will try to calm anti-tech and anti-trust fever in the capital.

    If Zuckerberg follows through on his comments, there are some positives here. Zuckerberg stated that Facebook will immediately start focusing on hiring people who live away from the crowded and overpriced housing markets of the coasts. If Facebook did transition to 50% remote work, it could expand the tech talent pool geographically and make it easier for tech companies small and large to find good people. “It doesn’t seem that good to constrain hiring to people who live around offices,” Zuckerberg eloquently said. It might also extend the economic spillover zones that benefit indirectly from tech industry money to new places farther from the coasts.

    Even here, there’s a dark side. Facebook says it will adjust salaries to fit the location of the employee, so an engineer working in Silicon Valley will make more money than an engineer doing the same work in Nevada. But, to be fair, such an adjustment might be appropriate so long as the quality of life the two salaries can buy in different markets is equal.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90508223/mark-zuckerbergs-new-work-from-home-zeal-is-very-very-convenient

  • Understanding the Economic Shock of the Covid-19 Crisis
  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns about the consequences of embracing remote work permanently

    “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he said.

    Nadella warned about the consequences of embracing telecommuting permanently:

    “What does burnout look like? What does mental health look like? What does that connectivity and the community building look like? One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

    Nadella’s concern doesn’t appear to be shared widely throughout the technology industry. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey notified staff this week that they should feel free to work from home indefinitely if they choose. Salesforce and Zillow will give employees the option to telecommute for the rest of the year.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/pandemic-isnt-hurting-microsofts-bottom-line-changes-still-worry-satya-nadella/

  • The hunt for a work-from-home webcam: A story of broken supply chains, ‘sold-out’ messages and refreshing online carts

    Webcams are sold out or on weeks-long back order nearly everywhere across the Internet, and people are reporting having trouble finding them in the limited number of retail stores that are open as well. E-commerce tracking company CommerceIQ found 78 percent of views on webcam product pages on big online retail sites showed the items were out of stock during the week ended May 9.

    People’s shopping habits have shifted away from just buying bulk amounts of food during the pandemic to facing extended work-from-home periods, CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan said.

    “Now, I think people are slowly starting to realize this is a new normal,” he said. “They realize they need to get prepared for a new operating normal.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/webcam-backorder-coronavirus-pandemic/

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/13/2020

  • The rise of the human-centric CEO

    At a micro level, the misplaced application of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO can fundamentally change a company for the worse. A wartime CEO, as Horowitz notes, is “completely intolerant, rarely speaks in a normal tone, sometimes uses profanity purposefully, heightens contradictions, and neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” In the strictest application, we are seeing this align with a common false trope that has plagued the tech industry: “To change the world like Steve Jobs, I need to emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality.” A classic logical fallacy many founders/CEOs have learned the hard way — if you emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality, it doesn’t mean you will change the world like he did.

    At a macro level, peacetime CEO/wartime CEO conjures outdated themes that are at best inaccurate, and at worst, counterproductive. War implies “destruction, ruthlessness, blood, death;” there is an innate sense of machismo and bravado in this language reinforcing a homogeneous tech community. This type of vernacular and attitude increases barriers to a more inclusive community excluding women and underrepresented minority participation.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/05/the-rise-of-the-human-centric-ceo/

  • CIOs Set Aside Rivalry for Collegiality to Tackle Coronavirus IT Problems

    Enterprise tech leaders are finding a lot of value in real-time knowledge-sharing as they seek solutions to IT problems brought on by the health crisis and its fallout in the economy, said Sunny Gupta, a board member of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit trade group that seeks to establish standards and best practices for enterprise IT managers.

    Among other issues, Mr. Gupta said CIOs are being called upon to rapidly support a distributed workforce, replan IT spending and redo budget forecasts, cancel noncritical projects and refocus IT team efforts into capacity upgrades, public cloud and operational resilience—often all at once.

    As a result, the IT industry is seeing an “unprecedented level of peer-to-peer support,” said Mr. Gupta, who is also chief executive of software maker Apptio.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cios-set-aside-rivalry-for-collegiality-to-tackle-coronavirus-it-problems-11588930203

  • Some employers use software to monitor employees working from home
  • How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work From Home

    With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.

    The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.

    Last month, I downloaded employee-monitoring software made by Hubstaff, an Indianapolis company. Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. (Whoops.)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/6/2020

  • Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home

    In the weeks since social distancing lockdowns abruptly scattered the American workforce, businesses across the country have scrambled to find ways to keep their employees in line, packing their social calendars and tracking their productivity to ensure they’re telling the truth about working from home.

    Thousands of companies now use monitoring software to record employees’ Web browsing and active work hours, dispatching the kinds of tools built for corporate offices into workers’ phones, computers and homes. But they have also sought to watch over the workers themselves, mandating always-on webcam rules, scheduling thrice-daily check-ins and inundating workers with not-so-optional company happy hours, game nights and lunchtime chats.

    Company leaders say the systems are built to boost productivity and make the quiet isolation of remote work more chipper, connected and fun. But some workers said all of this new corporate surveillance has further blurred the lines between their work and personal lives, amping up their stress and exhaustion at a time when few feel they have the standing to push back.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/

  • Coronavirus Ravages the Food Supply Chain
  • Nursing home design is deadly. Here’s how to change it

    Nursing homes have long been seen as grim and sterile, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve also been fatal—1.3 million individuals living in nursing homes around the world have died from the virus. While elderly people and those with preexisting conditions are high-risk populations, the infection’s rapid rate of spread is also due to the way nursing homes are designed. Most rooms have two or four beds that are placed in close proximity; sinks and windows can be hard to access; and dated systems require surfaces to be frequently touched. In the face of coronavirus, it’s time to rethink how nursing homes are designed.

    Also…

    Reducing these clusters to 12 people maximum, each with their own room, would help limit virus transmission while allowing for more targeted and intimate care. “Within that cluster, they have their rooms but [there’s a] living room, dining room, [and a] nurse station [with] administrative support,” according to Bryan Langlands, a principal at NBBJ who focuses on the design of healthcare spaces. “The easiest way to help mitigate prevention and spread of COVID-19 is certainly to no longer build any double-bedded, semi-private rooms.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90484506/nursing-home-design-is-deadly-heres-how-to-change-it

Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/24/2020


Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

This truly must be the end of days because Larry Ellison complimented a company that wasn’t Oracle. Ellison gave conferencing tool Zoom (which has had major security issues since their rise to fame) a shout out in a recent news article stating the technology was transformational…

Speaking of security issues, several governments around the world are using technology to track the covid virus and the people infected. Some watch groups are concerned about eroding rights in a time of crisis.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Airbnb Gets $1 Billion Loan, Bringing Coronavirus Funding to $2 Billion

    The San Francisco-based company didn’t disclose Tuesday the terms of the loan or the names of the investors. According to a person familiar with the matter, the loan is five years, and the interest rate will be 7.5%, plus a benchmark rate known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

    Airbnb had planned to start trading publicly this year. Instead, it faced escalating losses as travel ground to a halt, forcing it to raise money privately at a lower valuation than the $31 billion price tag of its last fundraising round in 2017, people close to the company have said.

    Last week, Airbnb said it was raising $1 billion from private-equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners. That investment came with a steep price tag: an interest rate of 10%, plus Libor, according to people familiar with the deal.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-gets-1-billion-loan-bringing-coronavirus-funding-to-2-billion-11586929819

Security/Privacy

  • How Coronavirus Is Eroding Privacy

    Authorities in Asia, where the virus first emerged, have led the way. Many governments didn’t seek permission from individuals before tracking their cellphones to identify suspected coronavirus patients. South Korea, China and Taiwan, after initial outbreaks, chalked up early successes in flattening infection curves to their use of tracking programs.

    In Europe and the U.S., where privacy laws and expectations are more stringent, governments and companies are taking different approaches. European nations monitor citizen movement by tapping telecommunications data that they say conceals individuals’ identities.

    American officials are drawing cellphone location data from mobile advertising firms to track the presence of crowds—but not individuals. Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google recently announced plans to launch a voluntary app that health officials can use to reverse-engineer sickened patients’ recent whereabouts—provided they agree to provide such information.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-paves-way-for-new-age-of-digital-surveillance-11586963028

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle’s Larry Ellison calls Zoom an ‘essential service’ as coronavirus forces remote work

    Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison gave Zoom high praise this week, calling it an “essential service” for his business and others around the world.

    Ellison said in the video posted Monday he believes Zoom will continue to be an important to businesses once workers return to the office.

    “We’re looking forward to the economy being reopened, we’re looking forward to going back to work, but the way we work will never again be the same,” Ellison said. “We will now meet not just face-to-face, we’ll meet sometimes face-to-face and sometimes digitally via Zoom.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/15/oracles-larry-ellison-calls-zoom-an-essential-service.html
    Larry Ellison actually said something nice about another tech company… wow. He must be an investor.

Other

  • Amazon fires two employees who condemned treatment of warehouse workers

    The user experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa said on Tuesday they had been fired after internally circulating a petition about health risks for Amazon warehouse workers during the Covid-19 crisis. Costa had worked at the company for more than 15 years and Cunningham had been an employee for more than five.

    “I don’t regret standing up with my co-workers,” Costa said in a statement. “This is about human lives, and the future of humanity. In this crisis, we must stand up for what we believe in, have hope, and demand from our corporations and employers a basic decency that’s been lacking in this crisis.”

    An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the two employees were fired for “repeatedly violating internal policies”, which prohibit employees from commenting publicly on its business without corporate justification and approval from executives.

    “We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies,” the spokeswoman said.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/14/amazon-workers-fired-coronavirus-emily-cunningham-maren-costa

  • IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

    The judge overseeing Jonathan Langley’s age discrimination lawsuit against IBM has dismissed the case, which was scheduled to go to trial later this year.

    The court order [PDF] closing the case, signed on Wednesday by Judge David Ezra in the Texan Western District Court, cites a stipulation of dismissal by Langley and IBM. That suggests the two parties have agreed to settle confidentially out of court.

    The Register asked IBM to confirm that the case has been settled. We’ve not heard back. Langley’s attorneys could not be reached for comment.

    In 2018, Langley sued IBM, claiming age discrimination. He was laid off at the age of 60 after 24 years at the biz. The lawsuit was filed several months after a report from ProPublica and Mother Jones claimed that IBM had embarked on a company-wide campaign to dismiss older workers, a project said to be called Operation Baccarat.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/15/ibm_age_discrimination_lawsuit/