How to Be Happy the Microsoft Way: Endorsed by the Harvard Business Review?
February 25, 2022
I read a fascinating article about being happy. “A Microsoft Exec Says Tech, Not People, Makes Employees Really Happy” recycles an article from the estimable Harvard Business Review published an article titled “In a Hybrid World, Your Tech Defines Employee Experience.” I want to be upfront. I find most of the information in the HBR focused on authors hawking some type of consulting expertise. The outputs in the HBR acted like a magnet on blue chip consulting firms. Getting an article in the HBR was the equivalent of getting Elvis Presley to throw a perspiration tinged scarf to an adoring fan.
According to the source recycling the HRB information about being happy, I noted these statements of Delphic grade insight minus the blood of a dove, a goat, and possibly a misbehaving acolyte.
- Employee experiences are defined by technology.
- Technology and workplace tools are the new workplace. [HBR apparently likes this type of repetition]
- “Technology is “becoming central in attracting and retaining new talent, fostering workplace culture, creating productivity, and more.”
I want to offer some of my personal happy experiences with Microsoft technology:
- Updates which kill functions; for example, a system cannot print. This makes me happy for sure.
- Posturing about security when the vulnerabilities spawned by Microsoft software thrill bad actors each and every day.
- Microsoft Word’s remarkable ability to move images in delightful ways.
- The shallow spidering of the just so wonderful Bing content processing system.
- Rumors and allegations about Bill Gates and his interesting interactions with other Microsoft professionals
- A foldable phone with weird performance characteristics for two-screeners with good eyes
- Microsoft WiFi hardware which a Softie told me, “Doesn’t work.”
- Meaningless features in a screen capture utility
- Did I mention Exchange Server vulnerabilities? Yeah.
- And Teams for those using a Mac without a Microsoft 365 subscription. That’s a thrill.
I recall one meeting at which a senior Softie took an iPhone from an employee in a meeting with lots of people in the audience. I recall the baffled looks on the faces of Microsoft Research experts when I asked for a show of hands for those who were familiar with Kolmogorov’s approach to probability. No hands went up. Bummer. I recall a mobile meeting in which I was told, “Mobiles will never have multiple radios.”
Ah, memories.
But the HBR write up explains that my experiences would make me happier via technology.
Yeah, right. Thoughts from the Microsoft person who pointed the finger at a 1,000 engineers directed by a nation state to compromise Citadel Windows. Yep, that person.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2022
New York Times May Be Embracing the High School Science Club Management Method
February 10, 2022
I read “New York Times Opposes Tech Staff Push to Organize.” The write up from the always-objective outfit owned by the esteemed information kingpin Rupert Murdoch reports:
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, said the company didn’t voluntarily recognize a technology union because it would be ‘an unproven experiment with lasting implications.’”
The Guardian reported in “Leaked Messages Reveal New York Times’ Aggressive Anti-Union Strategy” stated on February 1, 2022:
Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of the New York Times Company, wrote a memo on 19 January circulated to staff titled “Why a Tech Union Isn’t Right for Us” on the tech workers’ union election at XFun, the group within the New York Times responsible for product development operations. “In short, we don’t believe unionizing in XFun is the right move. But that’s not because I’m anti-union,” said Kopit Levien. In the memo, Kopit Levien cited the origin of the XFun group and its growth, and attributed any disconnect workers might be feeling to working apart during the pandemic. She also cited Wirecutter’s union as a warning sign for unionization.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, the Manhattan centric dust up is amusing. We have the Gray Lady, who wants to expand its online subscription business, reduce costs via adoption of smart software, and a staff of professional who are quite sharp. One might say really woke.
My hypothesis is:
- Workers are divided into classes; that is, the “real” journalists and the others.
- The others sense that they are like Google marketing and legal professionals: Down the management crafted totem pole.
- The union effort is one way to try and put up a Chinese wall so that jobs can be defended. (If the wall is like the nifty one in China, it will demonstrate the skills of those who built it. You have to respect that Chinese wall even though it is tough to ride a horse from Point A to Point B on the top of the wall.)
The result is that the traditional publishing wants its class structure. It wants to be digitally hip as the XFun vivifies. However, the others are not in the game plan.
So far New York Times’ management team have taken decisions which remind me of the moves employed by Facebook- and Google-like outfits in Silicon Valley. The shallowness of the approach creates drama.
Drama makes news. News is good. The publicity may not be so beneficial. The lasting implications, however, may be great for the not-real-journalists. Despite snappy podcasts, “real” journalists may not be able to select, optimize, and maintain the smart systems the Gray Lady wants and needs. Talking about technology is not the same as doing technology in my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2022
What Speed Brings
February 7, 2022
People, especially senior citizens, love to proclaim that the Internet is ruining personal relationships, eroding communication and participation, and destroying society. While society will continue to stand, the old fogies might be right about the ruination of participation and communication. The Guardian has an interesting and startling article titled: “Faster Internet Speeds Linked To Lower Civic Engagement In UK.”
Faster internet might be a detriment to society, because a recent study from Cardiff University and Sapienza University discovered that when people had faster Internet they engaged less with political parties, trade unions, and volunteering. Ironically faster Internet did not impact interactions with family or friends. The joint university study found that faster Internet speeds reduced civic engagement among 450,000 people. That is more than double of Great Britain’s Conservative party.
While one cannot trust the polarization of media and the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet does bring attention to civic-centered actions whether that be positive or negative. With that in mind, one would think that people would engage more in civic duties. Faster Internet speeds, however, mean faster access to entertainment and increase the instant gratification syndrome.
Faster Internet might decrease social engagement according to this study, but others found the opposite:
“The study’s authors have also speculated that the phenomenon may have helped fuel populism as people’s involvement with initiatives for “the common good”, which they say are effectively “schools of democracy” where people learn the benefit of cooperation, has declined.
Other studies have shown that social media engagement has strengthened other kinds of civic engagement, for example by helping to organize protests and fuelling an interest in politics, even if it does not manifest in traditional forms of participation.However, politics conducted online has been found to be more susceptible to “filter bubbles”, which limit participants’ exposure to opposing views and so foster polarization.”
The study did take the Covid-19 pandemic into consideration, because it limited civic involvement. Bonding with family and friends grows with faster Internet speeds and current communication trends, but people’s understanding of the importance of civic duties. Economic activity and how democratic institutions function suffer. What is the solution to repair that?
Whitney Grace, February 5, 2022
Machine Learning: Compare and Contrast
February 2, 2022
For machine learning pros looking to choose a framework, Analytics India Magazine examines one of the most prominent options alongside a new contender in, “TensorFlow Vs PyCaret: A Comparison of Machine Learning Frameworks.” The article takes us through an informative juxtaposition of the two open source frameworks, but it looks like neither option overwhelmingly comes out on top. Writer Sreejani Bhattacharyya begins:
“As companies are deploying more and more machine learning models into their systems, a variety of frameworks (some open-source, some not) have come up over the years to make this deployment faster and more efficient. Some of the popular frameworks include TensorFlow, Amazon SageMaker, IBM Watson Studio, Google Cloud AutoML, and Azure Machine Learning Studio, among others. Tensorflow, by far, takes one of the top spots when it comes to machine learning frameworks that technologists depend on. Recently, PyCaret, a low-code machine learning library in Python, has also become increasingly popular among ML practitioners. Let us take a look at how both of them work and what makes them different from each other.”
Bhattacharyya reminds us Google-developed TensorFlow recently celebrated its sixth birthday. At first it was designed for internal Googler use, but was later released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Since then, a wealth of tools and libraries have grown up around the framework. TensorFlow works with several programming languages, including Python, C++, JavaScript, and Java and can be run on multiple CPUs and GPUs running macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, or 64-bit Linux. The most recent version 2.7.0 improved several features, like debugging, public convolution, and data service auto-sharding.
So why even consider a newcomer like PyCaret, which launched just last November? Code efficiency. We learn:
“Also open source in nature, PyCaret is a low-code machine learning library in Python. It helps data scientists perform end-to-end experiments efficiently. It allows them to move from preparing data to deploying their model within minutes. … Pycaret is rising in popularity in comparison to other ML libraries, as it provides an alternate low-code library that can perform complex machine learning tasks with only a few lines of code. It is built around several machine learning libraries and frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, Microsoft LightGBM, and spaCy, among others.”
The write-up goes on to describe the working areas of each framework and concludes with a summary of the advantages of each. In a nutshell, TensorFlow excels in performance, scalability, and library management. PyCaret has the edge in productivity and being business-ready. Bhattacharyya found both easy to deploy. Both of these ML frameworks are good options—the choice really comes down to one’s needs and preferences.
Cynthia Murrell, February 2, 2022
Opinion Shaping Shifts into High Gear
January 25, 2022
Two interesting opinion shaping initiatives caught my attention. Both are based on digital constructions but will make use of fuddy duddy print and television as warranted. Let’s look at each quickly and then step back and figure out what’s the context of the two activities.
The first is explained in two write ups. The first is “The UK Government Is Reportedly Preparing a PR Blitz against End-to-End Encryption.” The idea is that making it more difficult to access a British citizen’s messages is not a good idea. There are nuances, of course. Certain government agencies want ASCII, easy access, and real time content pipes. A related story is “UK Government Readies Anti-Encryption Publicity Campaign to ‘Keep Children Safe’ Online.” One cannot argue with the keep children safe angle. Who doesn’t want that? In order to achieve “safe,” it is necessary to have access to user content; for example, actors messages sent via Threema, the Swiss messaging system.
The second initiative is explained in “Big Tech Foes Launch Campaign Style Initiative to Push for Antitrust Legislation.” The idea here is that some wealthy people are concerned about big tech. Did big tech make these concerned individuals wealthy? Well, that’s another issue. The push is designed to build support for clipping the wings of outfits which are not doing what the big tech foes find acceptable. The idea is to use the Fancy Dan methods of political campaigns, ad agencies, and big tech to get this antitrust breakup thing done.
Here’s my take on these two initiatives:
- Both are very upfront propaganda initiatives. Each is designed to result in changes to technology. Technology has been the lead dog for too long. Now the humans are going to use technology to put the lead dogs in the kennel.
- The pivot for each is the elimination of negative capabilities like social media or encryption. Tech is bad; change is needed.
- The initiatives are likely to further fractionalize discussions of the issues sucked into these quite visible programs. There’s nothing like starting a discussion with one side asking, “Are you in favor of child abuse?”
Net net: These are externalizing activities and make clear that methods once kept under wraps are now on public display. Good or bad? It depends on how one answers those tough questions?
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2022
A Comparison: US Vs. European Government Methods
January 21, 2022
I know one thing about 5G. The T Mobile super high speed service delivers data more slowly than my 4G / LTE service. Thus, it is difficult for me to accept that the pig slow 5G in rural Kentucky is a threat to aircraft eager to land on the dirt road used by certain characters in the Commonwealth.
I noted “5G Is Grounding Planes and Freaking Out Airlines: We Found Out Why.” I want to sidestep the somewhat interesting discussion about who shot John, the 5G expert. The US government and the airlines are wrestling with US 5G carriers. The main idea is a minor one; that is, 5G signals in the C band emitted from vertically mounted towers could — note the word could — cause an aircraft to demonstrate one of Newton’s Laws in an expensive way.
But here’s the quote which caught my attention:
The issues haven’t affected other countries as badly because they don’t use the same 5G frequencies as the US. In Europe, for instance, the network operates on a wavelength that is less likely to cause interference. Both the EU’s Aviation Safety Authority and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority say there’s no such problem with their networks. China and Australia have also rolled out 5G without any issues with aircraft…. Critics have also pointed the finger at the federal government. They’ve blamed the Trump administration for failing to create a national spectrum policy and the Biden administration for the chaotic rollout. Somehow, Europe’s collection of crappy governments has avoided such problems. [Emphasis added by the Beyond Search editor]
Interesting. Now European governments have a larger challenge to surmount. Vacationing in Kiyv perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2022
HP: A Minor Glitch from the Outfit Purchasing Autonomy
December 30, 2021
My Japanese is non existent, so I rely on Google Translate. (The Beyond Search team loves the Google.) According to the Institute for Information Management and Communication at Kyoto University, an HP supercomputer system experience a momentary lapse. (Possibly the same type of issue which sparked the purchase of Autonomy?) Google Translate offers this output:
An accident occurred in which some data in the capacity storage (/ LARGE0) was unintentionally deleted.
How much data were lost? Not much. Just 77 terabytes or the equivalent of 77 trillion bytes. This worked out to 34 million files affecting 14 groups of researchers. Good news some back ups were available but for four of those groups, the data are now gone, or in the phraseology of social media, cancelled.
The apology appears in red, which makes the problem go away.
Who beavered away on the system? Nippon Hewlett Packard.
Wasn’t HP the outfit allegedly paying very close attention to its board of directors’ behavior? Maybe not. But HP definitely bought Autonomy and HP definitely will be unpopular with the four groups losing their data.
Happy New Year. And what’s the New Year’s resolution for the Institute for Information Management and Communication? Buy more HP is one possibility.
Stephen E Arnold, December 31, 2021
Lick Tech: A Taste for Covid and Leukoplakia?
December 30, 2021
I spotted a remarkable photo in this online story: “Lick It Up: Japan Prof Creates ‘Tele-Taste’ TV Screen.” Here’s the main point of the write up:
Japanese professor has developed a prototype lickable TV screen that can imitate food flavors, another step toward creating a multisensory viewing experience. The device, called Taste the TV (TTTV), uses a carousel of 10 flavor canisters that spray in combination to create the taste of a particular food. The flavor sample then rolls on hygienic film over a flat TV screen for the viewer to try.
I am reluctant to replicate the image in the online publication. Visualize this. One approaches a large TV screen and licks the panel as one would an ice cream cone on the beach in Guarujá.
Think of this approach:
Winner!
Stephen E Arnold, December 30, 2021
The CEOs Have a New Best Friend: Information Technology People
December 21, 2021
During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizational leaders turned to their IT departments to keep business running. IT professionals were propelled into leadership roles and were integral to keeping the entire globe from crumbling. ZD Net explains how, “Technology Leaders’ Influence In Their Businesses Grows Beyond Expectations.”
Snow Software recently conducted a survey of 1000 IT leaders and discovered that they faired well during the world crisis. Their roles became so important that they will venture into leadership positions that fall outside IT. Before COVID-19, 89% of respondents said that their roles were undervalued. Now 90% claim they are viewed as trusted advisors within their companies. Ninety-four percent of IT leaders view innovation as an integral part of their jobs, but 71% said they are spending too much time fixing problems than the former.
In 2022, IT leaders want to concentrate on reducing IT costs, improving customer relations, and improving day-to-ay operations. The survey showed:
“‘These areas of focus can often conflict, or at least compete, with one another which, so often, is an all-too-familiar pain felt by IT leaders,’ the researchers observe. ‘To balance these priorities moving forward, CIOs need a more advanced approach for managing their technology environment. Nearly all respondents say they are in the process of adopting the cloud in some form — and 61% increased their use of cloud services over the last year.”
It is great that IT leaders are influencing business decisions and shaping the work environment, but will things revert back as the world heads towards normalcy? Also since IT is a white, male dominated industry will this exacerbate the bro culture that dominates industry?
Sounds like a winner for the techies who happen to be male.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2021
Scientific Research Might Not Work The Second Time Around or the First Time Either
December 20, 2021
Scientific research is one way humanity advances, but Science Alert brings into question if studies’ results can be replicated: “Strenuous 8-Year Effort To Replicate Key Cancer Research Finds An Unwelcome Surprise.” Common sense and the scientific process tells that if results cannot be replicated a second time, then they are not going to work. Cancer research is facings a stigma about scientific studies being replicated:
“The research looked at 193 different experiments found in 53 cancer-related papers published in high-profile journals between 2010 and 2012, and found that none of the experiments could be set up again using only the information published. After getting help from the original study authors, 50 experiments from 23 papers were reproduced.
That only a quarter of the experiments could be rerun at all is concerning – some of the original authors never responded to requests for help – but the results showed that these reproduced tests showed effect sizes that were often smaller than what the original studies yielded.”
The findings of the replicated studies discovered that the evidence was weaker than the original experiments. This does not mean that findings are false, but further testing is needed. Furthermore, time, money, and resources are wasted in clinical trials on patients where drugs do not affect diseases. Demands for results shape cancer biology and other scientific research.
These mounting pressures hinder scientific research and delay eventual cancer cures. There is a saying, “Art for art’s sake,” so why cannot there not be “Research for research’s sake” in order to advance science? Plus one can make up data, fiddle the results, or contact colleagues for some STM SEO goodness.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2021
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