Mike Miller Joins the Digital Reasoning Team as Head of Sales
July 13, 2012
After receiving funding for a big data intelligence push last year, data analytics leader Digital Reasoning has been quite busy. Business Wire recently published a news release announcing “Mike Miller Named Digital Reasoning Executive Vice President of Sales.”
According to the story, Miller has over twenty years of experience in the software industry developing marketing strategies for a number of leading companies, in addition to serving as director of the Digital Reasoning Advisory board for nearly a decade. Under his new title, Miller will lead the Tennessee based firm’s client acquisition and retention in both government and commercial markets.
Rob Metcalf, Digital Reasoning’s President and Chief Operating Officer, stated:
“For nearly a decade, Mike has been a trusted advisor and director of Digital Reasoning, and we are extremely pleased that he can help us continue the acceleration of our business in an executive capacity. There are very few individuals who can match Mike’s experience in technology sales for public and private markets, and we’re thrilled to have him join our team.”
Based on Miller’s long tenure spent working as an executive for a multitude of software companies as well as his obvious passion for Digital Reasoning’s mission, we think that this is an excellent fit.
Jasmine Ashton, July 12, 2012
Kroll Overhauls Management
July 9, 2012
It is not unusual for a corporation to occasionally replace a few executives, but Altegrity’s Kroll just had a major personnel overhaul all within twenty days. We’re not sure what motivated this type of turnover in corporate management, but the press releases on Altegrity’s Web site announce all three of the new additions with glowing recommendations.
- May 30th was the beginning and brought, “Kroll Factual Data names Jennifer Byers Vice President, Product Development”, acknowledging her as bringing a wealth of experience in all aspects of deploying technical business solutions and applications.
- The next release followed shortly thereafter on June 5thwith, “Kroll Factual Data names Mike Mauseth Senior Vice President, Product Development” who will not only head the product development, but will also manage channels, alliances, marketing and analytics.
- The latest announcement came on June 19th in regards to “Kroll Factual Data names Michael Larkin Vice President, Risk Management”. The new VP of Risk Management has 22 year of vast experience in the industry and will be overseeing all initiatives and new business opportunities.
Kroll Advisory Solutions is a global leader in risk mitigation and response. The company asserts:
“Kroll delivers a wide range of solutions that span investigations, due diligence, compliance, cyber security and physical security. Clients partner with Kroll Advisory Solutions for the highest-value intelligence and insight to drive the most confident decisions about protecting their companies, assets and people.”
It appears Altegrity Kroll perceived the need for a personnel overhaul.
Jennifer Shockley, July 9, 2012
Does Modern Life Keep Us Addicted to Stress?
June 30, 2012
Dopamine. That chemical is at the root of the problem described in the Pacific Standard’s “Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress.” When you think of crazy entrepreneurs and MBAs, boy does this guy have a fresh angle on their behavior.
Dr. Whybrow, director of UCLA’s Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, has been applying behavioral neuroscience to social issues for 14 years. Reporter Mary Fischer interviewed Whybrow about the ways our brains deal with modern reality. It is an intriguing read, and I recommend checking it out. Fischer writes:
“‘The computer is electronic cocaine for many people,’ says Whybrow. ‘Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward. With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty.’ We can’t stop because the brain has no built-in braking system. With most natural constraints gone, all we’ve got left is our own intelligence and the internal regulatory system in the frontal cortex, the most recent evolutionary addition to the brain. This ‘executive brain’ regulates impulse control and reasoning. But, Whybrow notes, ‘despite our superior intelligence, we remain driven by our ancient desires.'”
Ancient desires like the yearning to catch dinner, or to avoid becoming dinner. Our brains evolved to reward such accomplishments with a shot of dopamine. Unfortunately, this desert comes with a side of flight-or-flight response. This heightened state of anxiety was once appropriate to our stressful situations, which tended to be life-or-death matters. They also tended to end conclusively, allowing our minds and bodies to recover from the stress. Now, though, our stressful situations can continue perpetually, especially if we make no effort to counter their influence. This sustained stress, to put it mildly, is very bad for us.
How does Whybrow reduce his own stress? By actively choosing when he will interact with his electronic devices and the people on the other ends of them. He refuses to work at home, and he only checks his email once a day on weekends. That may sound crazy to many of us, but it may be that Whybrow has the key to staying sane.
Cynthia Murrell, June 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
The Huber Affair: Demining Now Underway
June 26, 2012
Google is working overtime to keep attention focused on technical issues. You can wallow in the smart software encomium in the New York Times. (See “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000” in the June 27, 2012, environmentally unfriendly newspaper or you can give the newspaper’s maybe here, maybe gone link at http://goo.gl/Twl9I.) The Google I/O Conference fast approaches, so there are the concomitant write ups about a Google hardware and news in “Google’s I/O Conference: New Operating System, Tablet”.
But there are two personnel stories which seem to haunt the company at what is the apex of the Google techno-promo machine: Larry Page’s minor voice problem and a person few people outside of Google have heard about. Both of these are potential “information minefields.” Google does not, as far as I know, have an effective demining system in place.
I have avoided commenting directly on the health thing. You can get the story or what passes for a story in “Google CEO Larry Page and the Healthy Way to Answer, ‘What’s Wrong?’” But I do have an opinion about the wizard responsible for Local Search, Maps, Earth, Travel, Payments, Wallet, Offers, and Shopping. I read more about about one Google executive than I expected in “This Exec May Have The Hardest Job At Google, And His Colleagues Are Tired Of Seeing Him Get Trashed In The Press.”
The basic idea, as I understand it, is:
Last week, we [Business Insider] published a story headlined: “Depending On Whom You Ask, This Google Exec Is Either ‘Weak’ Or He Just Drew The Short Straw?
The publication did some digging and learned from “senior sources”:
Their view is that Huber is a top-notch Google executive who asked for the hardest challenge his boss could give him and he got it – in the form of nascent, unproven products and an executive reporting to him that ended up being vastly under-qualified for her job.
The weak link in the Google brain mesh was a person from PayPal. Yikes. A female goofed with some PayPal type projects. The story wraps up:
Quote to Note: Insurance on Larry Page
June 26, 2012
Interesting factoid in the form of a quote to note. We don’t know if this is accurate, but we wanted to document the item because it is interesting. The source is “Google Voiceless: Larry Page to Skip Big Conference.” The passage we noted:
Google spokesman Jim Prosser told us that Page’s condition is “notserious” but that Page had been told to rest his voice. That’s a goodthing because as we reported earlier, Google has not insured itselfagainst the loss of Larry Page.
Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Smart Folks Found to Think Like the Addled Goose
June 25, 2012
After reading the New Yorker’s “Why Smart People are Stupid,” our publisher Stephen E. Arnold is delighted that he is an addled goose living in rural Kentucky. Must be because his IQ is 70, which is dull normal for a human but okay for a water fowl. (I say that with the greatest respect, Steve.)
[Editor’s note: The guy’s IQ is closer to 50 on a good day and with the wind behind his tailfeatures! Sure, he was mentioned in the Barron’s blog here, but that was obviously a fluke.]
The blog post discusses findings from a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto. The study builds on the work of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, who has been studying the human thought process, including when, why, and how it can fail us, for decades.
Researchers posed classic bias problems to almost 500 subjects and studied the results. Like Kahneman, they found that most people usually take the easiest route to an answer rather than the most logical. We refuse to actually do the math. Most of us are also susceptible to “anchor” bias, where we are likely to base our answers on a factor supplied within the question. See the post for examples (and a more extensive discussion), and try the bat-and-ball and lily pad problems for yourself.
The researchers went beyond Kahneman’s work to study the ways in which such thinking errors are linked to intelligence. They found that they are indeed linked—but perhaps not in the way one would expect. Blogger Jonah Lehrer writes:
“The scientists gave the students four measures of ‘cognitive sophistication.’ As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, ‘indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.’ This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.”
So why are smarties so dumb? No one knows just yet, but I theorize it has to do with the sort of laziness smart kids learn in elementary school—they can get top marks without fully engaging their brains. Perhaps that means when they come across a slippery question as an adult, they fall right into the trap.
Cynthia Murrell, June 25, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Quote to Note: Management Wisdom
June 24, 2012
I love management wisdom published by the New York Times, an outfit working to inject technologists into its management structure. Yes.
Navigate to the your local vendor of newspapers (good luck with that). Purchase the June 24, 2012, New York Times which contains news as fresh as two day tuna, and read “Who Made That Cubicle?” in the New York Times Magazine. (Fees may apply, but the Sunday newspaper is just $6 in rural Kentucky. You will find the quote below on page 19 as the last paragraph of a Dilbert-type story: “Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive, Propst [the father of the Dilbert cubicle] two years before he died in 2000.” Now the keeper:
Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren rat hole places.” He spent his last years apologizing for his utopia.
Ah, irony. Utopia. Are any search and content processing vendors relying on cubicles? Probably not. Enlightened management. Don’t trip over the scooters, volleyball, or crate of organic protein bars.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
New Version of Cuadra STAR Available
June 4, 2012
Knowledge management company Cuadra is releasing version 2.0 of their popular archival collections management solution, STAR Knowledge Center for Archives (SKCA). This version features the addition of a Research Services module, which had been requested by costumers. The press release explains:
“SKCA users requested the new module because they wanted to integrate the tracking of requests with the cataloging data that they already have in SKCA. They needed to be able to track the work done by archives staff on behalf of researchers, including actions such as pulling materials from storage, photocopying, digitizing, and research. . . .
“With SKCA 2.0’s integrated approach, a staff member can easily log a request, generate a pull report, identify materials that need digitization, and use batch operations to mark the catalog records of materials that have been pulled, returned and reshelved. In addition, archivists can use the statistical and management reports to help them substantiate the work they have already done and monitor the additional needed work.”
Customer response to the new module has been positive. In fact, one client shared that the software will not only help with their current work, but also help them pursue long-term plans. Very nice.
Founded in 1978, Cuadra is headquartered in Los Angeles and has offices in Silver Spring, MD, and New York, NY. At the core of each of their products is STAR, an acclaimed software package with the power and flexibility to manage information collections of all types from many types of environments, including archives, libraries, museums, and publishing houses. A SaaS version of the system was released in 2003.
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
More Autonomy Activity at HP
May 31, 2012
Short honk. The addled goose is in London. The management traffic jam at Hewlett Packard seems to be getting worse. I thought London was tangled. I read “HP Names New Software Chief, COO.” The founder of Autonomy will leaving HP, which purchased Autonomy for $10 billion or so about eight months ago. First, an HP software wizard named William Veghte had responsibility for Autonomy. Not if the write up is accurate. The new boss reporting to Margaret Thatcher inspired Meg Whitman is a venture capitalist and former IBM software wizard, George Kadifa. Will there be more changes? Will the management snarl be resolved? Sure. But how will HP recover its $10 billion and keep those Autonomy customers happy? Tough questions. The goose has some ideas, but these are not for the free blog.
Stephen E Arnold, May 31, 2012
Sponsored by Information Today which bought me dinner last night
MarkLogic: The Door Revolves
May 17, 2012
MarkLogic hit $55 or $60 million. Not good enough. Exit one CEO; enter an Autodesk exec. Hit $100 million. Not good enough. Enter a new CEO. Navigate to “Former senior Oracle exec Gary Bloom named CEO of Mark Logic.” The new CEO is either going to grow the outfit or get it sold if I understand the write up. Here’s a passage which caught my attention:
Gary Bloom has been named CEO of Mark Logic, which returns him to his database roots.
According to MarkLogic’s Web page, the company is:
an enterprise software company powering over 500 of the world’s most critical Big Data Applications with the first operational database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure.
However, I can download a search road map. Hmmm. I thought search was dead. Well big data search is where the action is. MarkLogic is pushing forward with its XML data management system.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
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