biogychamp - Tumblr blog

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

14 Comforting Vegan Soups - Vegan Richa

Rounding up some amazing vegan soups to warm you up. Creamy soups, hearty, brothy, veggie filled, lentil, bean, comforting soups.

It’s cold out here and all I’ve been craving this past month is soups. Here are few you can whip up for a cozy dinner by the fire. Ah it’s our adopted puppet’s birthday today! Send him some good vibes. We adopted him from the shelter last year and he will be 7 years old today. Also it’s big game day! See here for all the fun party recipes

Let’s make some delicious vegan soups!

All instant pot recipes have stove top options mentioned in recipe notes. Vegan Lentil Soup Instant Pot or Saucepan 1 Pot Vegan Lentil Soup made in Instant Pot or Saucepan. This Easy Lentil Vegetable Soup is warming, comforting and so filling. 30 Minute Freezer friendly, Everyday Ingredients! Gluten-free, Soyfree, Nutfree Recipe TRY THIS RECIPE

Lentil soup : Els says ….“Absolute winner with our (usually fussy) family!! We used this in our brand new instant pot, and found recipe easy to use and result looked pretty much like the pic!” Chickpea rice soup: Meredith says ….“5 stars for sure! I usually just use recipes for inspiration, but this is one that I come back to, and actually do it word for word. Don’t wanna mess up this magic. Making it for my non-vegan in-laws tonight because it’s perfectly hearty and comforting and everyone always loves it!” Vegan Chickpea Rice Soup Comforting and Healing Vegan Chickpea Rice Soup with Veggies. A glutenfree variation of Vegan Chicken Noodle Soup. Easy 1 Pot 30 minute meal. Instant Pot option Gluten-free Nut-free Recipe. Soyfree option TRY THIS RECIPE

Instant Pot Lasagna Soup - Vegan Lasagna Soup Instant Pot Lasagna Soup - Vegan Lasagna Soup with Red lentils, lasagna noodles, veggies, and basil. 1 Pot weekday meal. Vegan Nut-free Recipe. Can be gluten-free. TRY THIS RECIPE

lasagna soup:Trysta says….”I keep googling to find your recipe again, this is a winner. Our favorite dinner, no changes needed. So darn yummy!” Turkish lentil soup : Jane says :….”Seriously delicious. With a squeeze of lemon and a little pita it’s absolute heaven!” Turkish Red Lentil Soup Easy Turkish Red Lentil Soup with carrots, turkish spices, red lentils.Easy weeknight meal. Few ingredients. Vegan Gluten-free Soyfree Recipe. Since the soup gets blended, the veggies can be chopped roughly to save time. TRY THIS RECIPE

Vegan Hot and Sour Soup with Ramen For a hearty Indo-Chinese meal full of veggies and tofu try my Vegan Hot and Sour Soup with Ramen! The perfect Asian-inspired comfort food that’s ready in under 30 minutes! 1 Pot No added Oil! TRY THIS RECIPE

Hot sour soup ramen: Meredith says…”Wow. This is outstanding and very authentic tasting. It’s also super easy and fast. I’ll be adding this to our regular dinner rotation. I’ve been on a quest for a good vegan hot and sour soup recipe for ages. Thank you!!” Potato soup: phoebe says …” I cooked it tonight. It is super easy and quick. I made it in 20 mins. It was absolutely delicious. My boyfriend really loved it.!” Vegan Potato Soup This thick, hearty Vegan Potato Soup is quick and easy to make using simple ingredients and very budget-friendly too. Enjoy it chunky as is, puree it until smooth and/ or get all fancy with toppings. TRY THIS RECIPE

Vegan Black Bean Soup This easy Vegan Black Bean Soup made from dried soaked black beans is a delicious plant-based Instant Pot meal that is perfect for feeding a crowd on a budget. TRY THIS RECIPE

Black bean soup: Jackie says …”This was delicious!! I will definitely make this often. It was good by itself or over rice or baked potato!” Minestrone : Donna says …” love this. I have been making this for almost a year. It’s simple, super quick and delicious every time!” Vegan Minestrone - Veggies Pasta & White Bean Soup Vegan Minestrone - White Bean Soup with Elbows, Veggies, Basil and vegan parmesan. Can be gluten-free, nut-free. Soy-free Vegan Dairy-free Recipe TRY THIS RECIPE

Chickpea Potato Soup in Instant Pot Chickpea Potato Soup in Instant Pot. Creamy Potato Chickpea Spinach soup with Veggies. Saucepan option. Vegan Gluten-free Soy-free Nut-free Oil-free Recipe. TRY THIS RECIPE

Chickpea potato soup; Kate says …” This was the most flavorful veggie soup I’ve had! Loved that it was super easy to make in the pressure cooker. I used zucchini, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower for the veggies and coconut milk and vegetable broth for the soup.” Mushroom chickpea soup: Arla says …”Perfectly spiced. Great way to use up veggies! Hearty soup. One of my favourite soup recipes ever!” Mushroom Chickpea Soup with Veggies and Greens Easy brothy Mushroom Chickpea Soup with pepper, cayenne, ginger, garlic and cinnamon. Peppery flavorful soup for the cold season. Vegan Gluten-free Recipe TRY THIS RECIPE

Vegan Egg Drop Soup Vegan Egg Drop Soup. Egg-less Egg drop soup with Jackfruit and Tofu. Soothing Chinese "egg" drop soup. Vegan Gluten-free Recipe. TRY THIS RECIPE

Emily says ..”Amazing! Loved the texture added by the jackfruit. We had this with some take out mapo tofu. Fantastic dinner.” Moroccan lentil soup: yasmin says …” This was the best soup I’ve had in a little while. Perfect mix of spices and so good for you!“ Moroccan Lentil Soup Recipe from The Abundance Diet. Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

14 Comforting Vegan Soups - Vegan Richa

Rounding up some amazing vegan soups to warm you up. Creamy soups, hearty, brothy, veggie filled, lentil, bean, comforting soups.

Let’s make some delicious vegan soups!

Vegan Black Bean Soup This easy Vegan Black Bean Soup made from dried soaked black beans is a delicious plant-based Instant Pot meal that is perfect for feeding a crowd on a budget. TRY THIS RECIPE

Vegan Egg Drop Soup Vegan Egg Drop Soup. Egg-less Egg drop soup with Jackfruit and Tofu. Soothing Chinese "egg" drop soup. Vegan Gluten-free Recipe. TRY THIS RECIPE

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Ghostwire: Tokyo isn't a horror game, it's Japanese 'Ghostbusters'

Did you miss a session from GamesBeat's latest event? Head over to the GamesBeat & Facebook Gaming Summit & GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 On Demand page here. Ghostwire: Tokyo is launching on March 25 for PlayStation 5 and PC. Publisher Bethesda confirmed that date as part of its gameplay reveal video today that showed the ghost-hunting adventure in action. And “action” is key to understanding this new game from developer Tango Gameworks. This isn’t a tense survival-horror game where you try to outrun powerful enemies like Tango’s Evil Within franchise. Instead, Ghostwire is an open-word Ghostbusters game with a Japanese yokai skin. In Ghostwire, you play as Akito who shares his body with the powerful spirit KK. This gives you an arsenal of magical powers and abilities to take out hordes of spirits. Those magical powers come in the form of a mystical bow and arrow and the art of “ethereal weaving,” which is like if Tik Tok dancers could create magical attacks with their weird hand dances. This ether-based offense uses familiar elements like wind, fire, and water. With these powers, Akito and KK can explore the streets of Tokyo. The game has a Grand Theft Auto-style minimap, which reveals its open-world design. You will seek out points of interest, fight spirits, and unlock new parts of the world. Webinar Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded. Watch On Demand To ensure that exploration is fast and fun, KK enables Akito to use an ethereal grappling hook. This magical ability enables Akito to hook onto floating yokai to quickly jump onto rooftops. But these spirits can also open up interdimensional portals. Naturally, you’ll upgrade your character over time, and this will enable you to develop and adapt your combat strategies as you face off against bigger and meaner foes. And that sounds like the core of Ghostwire: Tokyo. While fans of Tango may have expected something closer to Evil Within, the studio is building an action game with open-world exploration and character progression. And we’ll have to go hands-on to determine if that was a smart departure for the team. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Learn More Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Neil Young won’t change Spotify’s mind about Joe Rogan

Sometimes it’s hard to predict the future. Other times it’s really easy: Back in the spring of 2020, it was incredibly obvious that by paying Joe Rogan a ton of money for the exclusive rights to his podcast, Spotify would inevitably find itself under fire. Because a big part of Rogan’s appeal — we don’t know how big his audience is, but double-digit millions seems reasonable — is courting controversy by interviewing the likes of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Sure enough, the list of people criticizing Spotify over its Rogan deal — and the content Rogan has put out since then — includes Spotify’s own employees, who complained that his podcast is transphobic, and 270 doctors and other health experts, who wrote an open letter saying Rogan’s podcasts were “mass-misinformation events” that have been “provoking distrust in science and medicine” during the pandemic, for hosting the likes of Robert Malone, an anti-vaxxer who’s been banned by Twitter. And now rock star Neil Young, who said those doctors’ open letter opened his eyes to the “dangerous life-threatening Covid falsehoods found in Spotify programming,” has taken his music off the service in protest. So. How big a deal is this? Here’s one data point: My brother-in-law just texted me asking for recommendations for a new streaming service. Young’s argument — that by paying for Rogan’s podcast, “Spotify has become the home of life-threatening Covid misinformation. Lies being sold for money” — has hit home for him. (For the record, you can still find Young’s music on Amazon, Apple, and every other streaming platform.) Here’s a competing data point – a list of prominent musicians following Young’s lead and pulling their catalogs from Spotify as well:

It’s possible, of course, that things could change. Back when Neil Young was making popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, famous musicians routinely made political arguments, and sometimes even put their own livelihoods at risk in doing so. The Nixon administration, for instance, put John Lennon under FBI surveillance and at one point tried to deport him because of his work protesting the Vietnam War. But that level of activism is almost completely absent from today’s lineup of popular musicians, who will sometimes tweet about things they don’t like but generally leave it at that. Taylor Swift has fought with Spotify, Apple, and a music manager who bought the rights to her catalog, but those disputes were all about money and control, not ideology or vaccines. To his credit, Young — a famously cantankerous character who has complained about streaming for years — is clear-eyed about what his pullout will mean: “I sincerely hope that other artists can make a move, but I can’t really expect that to happen,” he wrote on his website this week. So unless there are a lot of people like my brother-in-law, expect Spotify to do what it has done every time people have complained about their deal with Rogan: nothing. Spotify is betting billions of dollars that podcasting will be a meaningful business, and Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the world. It would have to take much, much more than the absence of a legacy act that hasn’t released a popular song since 1989 to get it to change course. Spotify will take issue with that characterization, of course. It says it takes all this stuff very seriously, and routinely examines content on its service to see if it violates content policies, which it has yet to disclose publicly. Here, for the record, is the company’s statement: “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.” It’s worth pointing out here that Spotify, like other tech companies that distribute media, is fundamentally uncomfortable making decisions about what kind of media it does and doesn’t want to distribute. See, for instance, its 2018 decision to remove musicians like R. Kelly — who had long been accused of sexual misconduct — from its playlists but not from the service itself. After a few weeks of criticism from artists and managers, it abandoned the policy. (Kelly was convicted on racketeering and sex trafficking charges three years later; his music remains on Spotify.) And while Spotify often argues that, just like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, it’s simply a neutral platform that connects creators with people who want to engage with the stuff those creators make, that argument doesn’t work in Rogan’s case: While he’s not technically working for Spotify, he is very much getting paid by them, to make stuff you can’t hear anywhere but Spotify. But so far that distinction hasn’t mattered. Every so often, Spotify gets asked about Rogan, and the company answers with the equivalent of a shrug. “For us, it’s about having a diverse voice of people, for a global audience,” content chief Dawn Ostroff told me a year ago. “And he happens to remain wildly popular.” Expect more questions to arise next week, when Spotify announces its quarterly earnings. Don’t expect a different answer. Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Anything that can go wrong: Using Metcalfe’s Law to avoid Murphy’s Law

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here. By Andrew Bruce, CEO and founder of Data Gumbo. As international supply chains experience massive disruptions, Murphy’s Law feels appropriate with its adage: “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Beyond the regular costs attributed to manual workflows, extended payment delays, disputes, complicated reconciliation processes and informational friction, the pandemic has magnified challenges exponentially, manifesting in supply chain disruptions and circumstances greatly exacerbating counterparty contention. Commercial transaction costs are soaring, resulting in global enterprises wasting billions of dollars — though, this doesn’t have to be the case. Aphorisms aside, it’s imperative that businesses figure out repeatable, scalable ways to reduce inefficiencies and eliminate variables that incur excess transaction costs — during turbulent times or the regularly scheduled program. How, then, can businesses conduct business better? Companies that embrace technology to address the multiple issues involved in the execution of contracts can drive down the costs of doing business by eradicating margins of error and removing friction. In other words, the antithesis of operating in an environment governed by Murphy’s Law is one that, instead, looks to the expansive and exponential properties of Metcalfe’s Law.

Power in numbers

Contracts, particularly those in the industrial sector, are often hundreds of pages long and loaded with byzantine language, opaque business logic, and metrics that result in distrust between counterparties. The majority of counterparty disagreements center around terms and fulfillment. Smart contracts offer an opportunity to revise the unavoidable business process of commercial transactions. Additionally, smart contracting in a network environment enhances the benefits by invoking the principle central to Metcalfe’s Law to provide greater value to network participants. Metcalfe’s Law posits that “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.” Essentially, value exists due to the “connectivity between users, enabling them to work together and achieve more than they could alone.” Companies that utilize a smart contracting network rather than a point solution become an ecosystem of customers, suppliers, data providers, and validators. As smart contracts are implemented across participants using a standard data model, a de facto set of standard contract clauses and code and organically make each company a potential data source and contract counterparty for the entire network can be created. As large industrial companies adopt smart contracts and the network approach, they add their suppliers and customers to the network, increasing the data and participants available to the entire network. Since the network enforces common data models and contract standards, apples-to-apples comparisons become more widely available and credible with every smart contract executed on the network.

Tactical steps forward

In the real world, organizations can begin with a single contract and a willing partner, ideally with whom invoice processing has been a challenge. For this example, both counterparties have agreed upon a reliable and trustworthy data source. Data should first be brought into a blockchain platform, where it can be mapped to a data model referenced by the smart contract and then stored. The smart contract uses the stored data to confirm that the contract conditions have been met and applies the appropriate modifiers and pricing to create charges and then accumulates the charges for invoicing. Blockchain records all transactions and supporting data in immutable blocks and identically distributes them to the contractual parties. From there, the preparation, submission, approval, and payment of the invoice can become frictionless. When the first contract is automated, businesses naturally begin to evaluate other smart contract use cases and can extrapolate the benefits from one relationship throughout their entire supply chain. As large organizations use the Gross Transaction Value (GTV) of their contracts on a network, the value flows through the network and its multiple layers of counterparties and subcontractors, allowing for the opportunity for each participant to reap the financial benefits of smart contracts.

Metcalfe’s Law: Application of a theory

Consider the precedent set by Walmart when it revolutionized inventory management by forcing its top 100 suppliers to adopt RFID tags to encode smart labels on product palettes digitally. Initially, the move was met with resistance, but the traceability benefits quickly overcame the objections. As large companies figure out the savings and security inherent in smart contracting, particularly in a complex landscape amid much supply chain disruption, it’s only a matter of time before players of all sizes get on board to capture the value and efficacy available when Metcalfe’s Law cancels out Murphy’s Law. Andrew Bruce is the CEO and founder of Data Gumbo. DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation. If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers. You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Major vulnerability found in open source dev tool for Kubernetes

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here. Researchers today disclosed a zero day vulnerability in Argo CD, an open source developer tool for Kubernetes, which carries a “high” severity rating. The vulnerability (CVE-2022-24348) was uncovered by the research team at cloud-native application protection firm Apiiro. The company says it reported the vulnerability to the open source Argo project before disclosing the flaw on its blog today. Patches are now available, Apiiro said. Argo CD is a continuous delivery platform for developers that use Kubernetes, the dominant container orchestration system. Exploits of the vulnerability in Argo CD could allow an attacker to acquire sensitive information—including passwords, secrets, and API keys—through utilization of malicious Kubernetes Helm Charts, said Moshe Zioni, vice president of security research at Apiiro, in the blog post. Helm Charts are YAML files used to manage Kubernetes applications. Zioni said the vulnerability has been given a severity rating of “high” (7.7), though as of this writing, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website had not yet posted the rating. In an email to VentureBeat, Zioni said the vulnerability could potentially have a “very significant impact on the industry” since Argo CD is used by thousands of organizations. The open source project has more than 8,300 stars on GitHub. The Argo CD platform enables declarative specifications for applications as well as automated deployments leveraging GitHub, according to Intuit. The company donated the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2020 after acquiring its creator, Applatix, in 2018.

Potential threats

The newly disclosed flaw in Argo CD “allows malicious actors to load a Kubernetes Helm Chart YAML file to the vulnerability and ‘hop’ from their application ecosystem to other applications’ data outside of the user’s scope,” Zioni said in the Apiiro blog post. Thus, attackers “can read and exfiltrate secrets, tokens, and other sensitive information residing on other applications,” he said. Exploits of the vulnerability could lead to privilege escalation, lateral movement, and disclosure of sensitive information, Zioni said in the post. Application files “usually contain an assortment of transitive values of secrets, tokens, and environmental sensitive settings,” he said. “This can effectively be used by the attacker to further expand their campaign by moving laterally through different services and escalating their privileges to gain more ground on the system and target organization’s resources.” Zioni said that the Argo CD team provided a “swift” response after being informed about the vulnerability.

Open source insecurity

The disclosure of the vulnerability in Argo CD comes amid growing concerns about the prevalence of insecure software supply chains. High-profile incidents have included the SolarWinds and Kaseya breaches, while overall attacks involving software supply chains surged by more than 300% in 2021, Aqua Security reported. Meanwhile, open source vulnerabilities such as the widespread flaws in the Apache Log4j logging library and the Linux polkit program have underscored the issue. On Monday, The Open Source Security Foundation announced a new project designed to secure the software supply chain, backed by $5 million from Microsoft and Google. “We are seeing more advanced persistent threats that leverage zero day and known, unmitigated vulnerabilities in software supply chain platforms, such as Argo CD,” said Yaniv Bar-Dayan, cofounder and CEO at cybersecurity risk management vendor Vulcan Cyber, in an email to VentureBeat. “We need to do better as an industry before our cyber debt sinks us,” Bar-Dayan said. “IT security teams must collaborate and do the work to protect their development environments and software supply chains from threat actors.” VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Web3 is the future, a scam, or both: The crypto and NFT rebrand, explained

Web3 is a scam. Web3 is a world-changing opportunity to make a better version of the internet and wrest it away from the behemoths who control it today. Web3 will make some people a lot of money. But many other people will lose their shirts on it. I know! I’m confused, too. The fact that Web3 is hard to define — I’ll try to do that in a bit — isn’t necessarily a bug. It’s a nascent idea floated by a mix of buzz, optimism, confusion, theological battles, and pure unadulterated speculation, which means it’s incredibly malleable. You can explain why Web3 is a fundamental remaking of the internet, and some people will take you very seriously. And you can argue that it’s an MLM scheme built to enrich people who are already rich, and find plenty of people nodding along. What you can’t do, right now, is ignore Web3 if you work in or around tech. Because it’s all anybody has wanted to talk about for the past several months. I see and hear Web3 pitches, debates, and dunks daily. When I talk to investors, executives, or just people who work or dabble in tech, it usually takes them a minute or two to tell me — either with pride or embarrassment — that “they’ve gone down the rabbit hole” into Web3 and are convinced there’s something very Big and Important down there. Maybe the fact that the stock market in general — and the tech sector specifically — has been tumbling in recent weeks will cool interest in this stuff eventually. But it certainly hasn’t yet. This week, for example, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that Web3 represented a “previously unimaginable opportunity to grow the connection between creators and their fans”; on the same day, two of her executives announced they were leaving to join … Web3 companies. This stuff also makes people irrationally angry — even by Twitter standards. Last month, we got to see Elon Musk team up with Jack Dorsey to have a Web3 Twitter spat/wrestling match with Marc Andreessen, perhaps Silicon Valley’s most prominent VC, and Chris Dixon, who works at Andreessen’s firm and may be the most prominent Web3 evangelist. No surprise: These men have a lot to gain and lose, depending on the way this shakes out.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen speaks onstage during a TechCrunch conference in San Francisco in 2016. Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Jack Dorsey, then the CEO of Twitter, speaks during a cryptocurrency conference in Miami in June 2021. Marco Bello/AFP via Getty Images Web 3 “is intrinsically tied with financial value,” says Li Jin, a venture capitalist and one of the few prominent women in the Web3 world. “Anytime you introduce financial success, that’s what really incites strong emotion.” It’s easy to dismiss all of this out of hand, especially if you’re an oldster like me who has seen tech bubbles before. But lots of interesting and important things were hatched during tech bubbles — like the web browser you’re using to read this story right now — even if people blew a lot of money on a lot of dumb stuff while the bubble was inflating. So when and if the bubbles deflate — which may be exactly what’s happening now — you can still find value in the aftermath. Which means maybe people like Tina He, a 25-year-old product designer-turned-startup CEO, will be right. Six months ago, He co-founded Station, which she’d like to be the Web3 version of LinkedIn, connecting workers anywhere in the world. Instead of relying on a résumé to tell prospective employers or co-workers what you’ve done, He thinks Station will use tech to provide comprehensive, verified evidence of your actual work so people can evaluate you based on your output, not your job title or credentials. She thinks Web3 is a big, big idea, big enough to transform her life and the lives of people around the world. “It’s an immense opportunity to give people the opportunity to transcend time, space, and financial constraints,” she tells me. “To pursue what they want, and be legitimized by the work they do — not just their identity that was given to them.” That techno-optimism is bracing when you hear it on the phone. In print, it can seem like a fairy tale. But in the world I live in, or at least the one I’m adjacent to, it’s increasingly the norm. Which is why a flurry of tech workers who are already very well compensated are leaving their current gigs at established web 2.0 companies for something Web3. So I’ve been spending time — and trying to adopt a mindset of cautious skepticism — attempting to figure out Web3 for myself. Spoiler: I didn’t quite figure it out. But I found enough smart, thoughtful people who are genuinely fascinated with this stuff to make me think that there still may be something here, even while so much of it is nonsensical or worse. So I’ll keep paying attention. You might want to, too. So WTF is Web3? Let’s start here: At its core, Web3 is a rebranding of crypto and blockchain, the technology based around a worldwide network of computers that talk to each other and validate and record transactions without human intervention or centralized oversight. Blockchain tech has been around in some form for more than a decade, and for much of that time most people who thought about it focused on bitcoin, the digital currency created in 2009 that was most closely associated with blockchain. But you couldn’t really do much with bitcoin except buy or sell it and debate whether it was going up or down. And it has gone up, a lot: At the end of 2014, a single bitcoin was worth around $400; today, even after crashing more than 40 percent from its peak, it’s worth $38,000. Now you can actually do some things with the blockchain. Not many things, yet. And most of it is still about buying and selling stuff — except now instead of digital currency, you can also buy and sell digital art, or plots of digital land or other items you can earn in a handful of video games. Which is why you’ve seen headlines about someone paying $69 million for a digital collage, or someone mistakenly selling a digital ape cartoon that was supposed to be worth $300,000 for $3,000. Or maybe you’ve heard about “play to earn” video games that are supposed to let you make real money by acquiring digital goods you can sell to other gamers.

Blockchain entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as MetaKovan, at his home in Singapore. The NFT shown, “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” is by the artist Beeple. In March 2021, Sundaresan bought the NFT for $69.3 million. Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images It’s entirely possible that this is all Web3 will be: an interesting way for people to collect and/or speculate on digital artifacts. That’s potentially meaningful for people who create art and people who like to buy art — and here you can use the word “art” broadly, meaning “things people like to look at or consume somehow.” But if it stops there, it’s not world-changing. But Web3’s most fervent evangelists think it goes much further. They believe it will bring about a remaking of the entire internet. Hence the name. Web1, the argument goes, was about getting normal people onto the internet, helped along first by browsers — that’s Marc Andreessen’s work, not coincidentally — and then via internet access and search services like AOL and Yahoo. Web2 was about converting the time people spent on the internet, and all the content they share online, into real businesses, and then consolidating those businesses into massive operations that now seem too big to fail (think Facebook and Google). But with Web3, the argument goes, you take control back from the Facebooks of the world. How’s that supposed to happen? Well, it’s complicated. And, for the most part, theoretical. But: The blockchain lets people create their own money, without permission from any country or bank. It could also, Web 3 boosters say, let them build anything on the internet they want, without having to rely on existing platforms like Google or Facebook, or tools like Amazon’s AWS cloud computing services. And crucially, the new services could be owned, in part, by the people who built and use them. And that idea, many of Web3’s believers tell me, is the thing that gets them excited, for multiple, intertwined reasons. There’s the possibility of profit, for starters: Many of the folks who are intrigued by Web3 also feel stymied by the current version of the internet, where their ability to create meaningful new companies — especially those aimed at consumers — seems capped by the current internet giants, who can buy, build, or crush upstarts. “The reason why VCs and startup people who are not baked into the old winners are excited about this is the opportunity to create new winners,” says an investor who is all-in on Web3 … but doesn’t want me to use his name. And some of the interest in Web3 comes from political fears, real or imagined: You might like the fact that Donald Trump lost his social media access a year ago, but you should also be worried that a handful of companies could deplatform the former president of the United States, Web3 advocates say. In a Web3 world, Donald Trump would only get kicked off a social network if the social network’s users — who would be the social network’s owners — wanted that to happen. And even if they did, there would be other platforms on Web3 for Donald Trump — or any other person you like, instead of loathe — to set up shop instead.

Former President Donald Trump speaks about legal actions targeting Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their CEOs during a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021. Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Remote work, innovation, and the Great Resignation

Employees want to work from home. Their bosses, however, can’t wait to get back to the office. Knowledge workers think being remote makes their jobs better, while managers worry the arrangement could cause the quality of work to suffer. But in scapegoating remote work, companies may be disguising the real scourge of creativity right now: too much work. Executives were nearly three times more likely than non-executives to say they want to return to the office full time, according to Slack’s Future Forum Pulse survey. The report found that while nearly 80 percent of knowledge workers want flexibility in where they work — citing benefits ranging from work-life balance to lower anxiety at work and a better sense of belonging — their employers think that the arrangement will lead to a variety of ills, diminishing the company’s collaboration, creativity, and culture. These concerns track with another recent report from Northeastern University that found that more than half of C-suite executives were concerned about their workforce’s ability to be creative and innovative in a primarily remote work environment. As the worst effects of the omicron variant start to wane, companies will again start to make noise about bringing people who’ve been working from home on their computers for the last two years back to the office. Thanks to an incredibly tight labor market, however, these employees have more leverage than they typically do to get what they want. How this plays out will shape how work is done for years to come. One issue is that some employers’ concerns with remote work may be baseless. “It seems to be the prevailing consensus, at least if you ask managers, that, ‘Oh, if you’re all remote, it has to be bad,’ and hence you have to bring people back to the office,” said Christoph Riedl, an associate professor at Northeastern University who’s been studying team collaboration and processes for nearly a decade. “We can directly compare the performance of teams that work remotely versus teams that work face to face, and we generally find no difference with regard to team performance.” What is certain, and what’s the cause for a lot of this concern, is that our work networks are shrinking. Observed data from both Microsoft and employee engagement platform Time is Ltd. has found that workers are communicating with fewer people at work outside their direct teams. While not a silver bullet for innovation, this type of cross-department conversation can help break down silos and encourage novel solutions. But remote work isn’t the main reason keeping these interactions from occurring: The problem is there’s not enough time for them to happen. In other words, we’re talking to fewer people not because we’re working from home, but because we’re working too much.

Time is Ltd. “More directly causal of people’s use of time and available hours in the day is the workload, and not the being remote,” Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, told Recode. “I do think there’s a tendency for people to attribute one problem to another cause just because they co-occur, saying, ‘We’re working at home, that’s why we’re not innovating,’” Rousseau said. “Our task lists are high, and our headcount is down. That’s another really good reason for not innovating.” As people have quit their jobs or stepped out of the workforce, in what’s called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, those left behind have had to pick up the slack. Two-thirds of workers said their workload has increased “significantly” since they started working remote (read: since the start of the pandemic). More than half of those who stayed at their jobs reported taking on more responsibility when their coworkers left, with 30 percent struggling to get the necessary work done, according to a survey last summer by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM). People are putting in longer hours, sending and reading more email, and have less time to focus, according to data from Time is Ltd. “Even before the Great Resignation, if someone were to leave in a department, oftentimes the key tasks would get shared among others in the department until they found a replacement,” SHRM knowledge adviser John Dooney told Recode. “The challenge is there’s a higher percentage of folks resigning, therefore there’s more work to be distributed, and it’s just taking longer to hire people.” That shortfall can be seen in our communication with wider networks of people at work. “There’s no time for chitchat, there’s not a time for that interaction that would occur naturally,” Dooney said. As if increased work-related work weren’t enough, pandemic-related obstructions like lack of child care and smaller social support systems have caused many people to have more work outside of paid work. “They have more work from their job, and they have an extra role of armchair public health experts,” said Dana Sumpter, associate professor of organization theory and management at Pepperdine University, referring to the many new hats the pandemic has forced people to don. The situation is especially severe among women, who are more likely to take on an outsized share of child care and labor at home. “They’ve made the sacrifice of allowing work relationships to decay or even end because they have finite time and energy and attention.” People everywhere are burnt out from the pandemic and are doing their best to get by. As Brandy Aven, a professor of organizational theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon, put it, “When we’re under threat and everybody’s still filled with dread, people will retreat and get very tribal and they hunker down. That’s what we’re seeing.”

Responses indexed on a scale of -60 (very poor) to +60 (very positive). Source: Future Forum Pulse survey What does seem to be providing workers some solace, according to the Slack survey, is the very thing executives are worried about: remote work. While there’s certainly room to make remote work better as far as maintaining collaboration, creativity, and innovation, the more pressing issue is lightening our workloads. That means either hiring more people or lessening the amount of work for existing employees. It would require separating the mission-critical from the nice-to-haves in order to give people the breathing room to talk to those outside those it’s absolutely necessary to talk to. Once we have a little more time and space, we can focus on how to encourage collaboration, creativity, and innovation in a remote setting. If executives want to make the quality of work better, they might want to take a look at the quantity of work they expect. If they want to make remote work better, there are better places to start than the office. Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Amazon is raising the price of Prime despite shipping hurdles

Amazon is raising the price of its Prime membership program in the US, even as a top Amazon executive admitted on Thursday that the company’s shipping speeds “are not where we want them to be.” The price of an annual Prime membership in the US is increasing to $139 from $119, while the price for customers who pay on a monthly basis is rising to $14.99 a month from $12.99. Existing Prime members will see the price change on membership renewals after March 25, while the fee increase will apply to new Prime members beginning February 18. The company has more than 200 million Prime members worldwide but did not announce a price increase for any other countries. The oldest and most popular benefit of Prime membership is the rapid shipping speed Amazon promises customers for a huge selection of products. Yet, even with pandemic-fueled shipping delays, it seems unlikely that this price increase will convince many of the people who’ve come to rely on Amazon for everything from fast delivery to streaming video to cancel their memberships. Since its launch in 2005, Prime has single-handedly reshaped what consumers expect from retailers in the way of merchandise selection and convenience. The increase to the Prime membership fee is the first in nearly four years, which is the same interval at which Amazon has instituted its last two Prime price increases. “We’re not where we want to be,” Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said on a call with reporters on Thursday. Olsavsky was answering my question about what seems to be regular instances of Prime-eligible products showing delivery dates as long as five, six, or seven days from the time of order. Amazon says more than 15 million items are still available for next-day delivery. In recent social media posts Recode reviewed from Prime members complaining about slow delivery times, Amazon customer service reps have responded by stressing that the historical two-day Prime delivery promise should actually be measured by looking at the time between when a product is shipped from a warehouse and not when a customer places an order. These company representatives also make clear that the shipping promises are counted in business days. Yet there was a time not long ago when Amazon boasted about Sunday deliveries in the US, thanks to a special arrangement with the United States Postal Service. Hello there! Prime shipping refers to transit time, in business days, from when your order ships. There are many factors that can impact processing times, such as local availability and location. For more information: https://t.co/eno2kujnSD. -Teia— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) January 29, 2022 Still, Olsavsky said Amazon is seeing improvements in the percentage of products it has available with faster shipping speeds, including for one-day shipping. In April of 2019, Amazon had announced that it was working to make one-day shipping the new standard for the Prime delivery program. The pandemic has delayed that ambitious goal. It’s possible the Prime price hike could provide an opening for competing delivery subscriptions from big-box competitors to attract cost-conscious shoppers. Walmart unveiled a $98-a-year membership called Walmart+ in September 2020, which offers free shipping and same-day delivery of groceries and other general merchandise direct from local Walmart stores, as well as fuel discounts at Walmart gas stations and prescription discounts at Walmart pharmacies. But the Walmart offering doesn’t include many of the other perks that come with Prime, such as the Prime Music and Prime Video streaming services, which now include exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football and Amazon Originals like The Boys, The Wheel of Time, Sound of Metal, and, soon, a new Lord of the Rings series. The price increase comes as Amazon’s core e-commerce business in North America actually lost money in the holiday quarter for the first time in many years. Olsavsky told reporters and analysts that the omicron variant has once again disrupted warehouse work and led to increased labor costs. He said that the company is at times paying two or three times a normal wage for a single role — paid leave to the employee who’s out sick, plus a regular wage and overtime for a worker filling in. Prime has long been the engine behind Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, with members shopping more frequently and spending more on Amazon than non-members do, and price-comparing on other sites less. But as inflation results in price increases on everything from homes to cars, Prime members can add another price hike to the list. Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile will shut down 3G to make room for 5G

It’s time to say goodbye to 3G, the wireless technology that gave our phones near-instantaneous access to the web and helped make everything from the Apple App Store to Uber an everyday part of our lives. More than two decades after its launch, wireless service providers are shutting down 3G to clear the way for its faster and flashier successor: 5G. The expansion of 5G is welcome news for the growing number of people with 5G-enabled devices, and it could be a critical step toward more advanced technologies, like self-driving cars and virtual reality. But the 3G shutdown will also disable an entire generation of tech: everything from 3G phones to car crash notification systems. For the people who rely on these devices, this transition will cut off a cellular network they’ve depended on for years, and in some cases, disconnect crucial safety equipment. “The number of 3G devices has been decreasing steadily,” Tommaso Melodia, the director of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, told Recode. “Now it’s at the point where carriers are starting to say, ‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to continue to use these precious frequency channels for 3G. Let’s turn it off.’” Ideally, wireless providers could keep both 3G and 5G networks up and running, but the physics of the radio spectrum that cellular technology relies on means that companies have to make a choice. The radio spectrum includes a wide range of frequencies, which are used to connect everything from AM/FM radios to wifi networks, and is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Because there are a limited number of frequencies the agency sets aside for cellular service, wireless providers have to divide up the spectrum that they’re allocated to run multiple networks, including their 3G, 4G, 5G, and eventually 6G, services. The FCC does make new bands of frequencies available to wireless providers through spectrum auctions, during which wireless providers can bid on rights to specific bands. But winning bids can be in the billions of dollars, so providers try to use the spectrum they already have as efficiently as possible. By turning off older generations of cellular technology, companies can repurpose the frequencies in order to improve newer networks, like 4G and 5G. AT&T will go first and shut down its 3G network on February 22, followed by T-Mobile in July and Verizon at the end of the year. Not everyone will be affected by the 3G shutdown. Many of the cell-phones manufactured in the past few years include hardware that can connect not only to 3G networks but also to 4G and 5G, so they won’t be impacted. But there are still some phones that only work with 3G networks. Once 3G goes offline, these devices won’t be able to connect to a cellular network, which means they won’t be able to send texts, make phone calls, or access the internet without wifi. Any emergency alarm service that depends on 3G will also stop working. These include certain medical and security alarms, as well as some voice assistants, navigation software, and entertainment systems built into cars. Older Kindles, iPads, and Chromebooks designed to connect to 3G networks will be affected, too. While the 3G shutdown will come with its own set of consequences, the expansion of more advanced networks should bring better speeds and reception to customers with 4G and 5G devices. 4G is 500 times faster than 3G, according to Verizon, and 5G should be even faster than 4G once it’s fully turned on. 5G will also come with lower latency, which means you’ll have very little lag when you’re connected to the internet. This lower latency will make it easier to use your phone for complicated tasks in real time, like playing an online video game or participating in a live telehealth session. In the meantime, 3G device owners need to brace for the imminent 3G shutdown. Some may not even know their service is about to go offline. Depending on their provider, these customers may only have a few weeks or months to upgrade their tech. Right now, it’s not clear they’ll be able to make the switch in time. Why can’t 3G and 5G work together? When your phone connects to a cellular network, it sends and receives signals on the frequencies to which that specific network has been assigned. Those signals travel over those frequencies to transmission stations, like cell towers, which are connected to the internet cables that provide your web connection. This is similar to the way a laptop connects to a home wifi network that’s powered by an internet router. In the US, 3G generally runs between 850 megahertz and 1900 to 2100 megahertz frequencies. These sections of the spectrum are useful for both digital voice and internet data, which is what made 3G so exciting when it was first introduced in the late 1990s. Wireless carriers have since developed new equipment and better technology, which they’ve used to launch their 4G and 5G networks. Because these networks can carry more data at a faster rate, wireless providers want to run them on the frequencies they currently use for their 3G networks. And that can only happen if they turn 3G off first.

Apple employees applaud the launch of the iPhone 3G at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in New York City on July 11, 2008. WireImage “It’s a one-or-the-other choice,” said Kevin Ryan, a professor who researches wireless systems at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “It would be analogous to trying to have two FM radio stations broadcasting at the same frequency.” Aside from the logistics of how radio spectrum works, wireless providers are also reallocating 3G spectrum because it makes more financial sense for them. Verizon and AT&T estimate that less than 1 percent of their service still runs on 3G networks, while 90 million 5G devices shipped in the last year alone. Once 3G is finally turned off, wireless providers can devote more resources to expanding their 5G networks and convincing customers to upgrade their service plans. “Operators are spending a lot of money for the spectrum, and they have to pass those costs on to the consumers. That’s why we pay a very high price for cellphone service,” explains Sundeep Rangan, the associate director of the NYU Wireless technology research center. “Those operators, for that amount of spectrum, want to send as much data, or serve as many users, as possible.” While the 3G shutdown may feel sudden, it isn’t surprising. Carriers stopped selling 3G devices years ago, and many have spent the past several months notifying their remaining 3G customers that it’s time to upgrade their tech. 3G isn’t the first network to go offline, either. 1G, the cellular network that supported analog voice devices, like the brick-sized cellphones in ’80s movies — hasn’t been operational for decades. Though T-Mobile still supports 2G devices, Verizon and AT&T both shut down their 2G networks several years ago. By the end of 2022, 3G will be gone, too. How to prepare for the 3G shutdown We don’t know exactly how many, but millions of operational devices throughout the US could be left unconnected when 3G sunsets. Many of these devices include hardware that can’t be adapted to connect to 4G and 5G networks. If you have one of these devices, you should have already heard from your wireless provider about your next steps. But if you want to double-check, you can research your specific device or reach out to your wireless provider. You can also try checking your phone’s settings or user manual, or just keep an eye out for a 4G or 5G connection on your device as you go about your day. The 3G technology systems that are built into cars are generally supported by a major wireless provider, and they’ll stop working whenever that provider officially shuts down its 3G service. CNBC and Consumer Reports have released lists of known affected car models, but there’s no reason not to check with your car’s manufacturer just in case. Cars built in the mid-2010s appear to be the most likely to be affected by the 3G shutdown, but even some cars released in 2020 may need an upgrade. There are also 3G devices that are meant for emergencies. Along with some medical and security alert systems, prepaid 3G phones and deactivated 3G phones, which can only call 911, will go offline. Elderly people, people who live in rural areas, low-income people, people experiencing homelessness, and survivors of domestic violence are more likely to rely on these devices. Because people only turn to these devices in extreme circumstances, they may not realize until long after 3G shuts down that they need to be replaced, creating a potentially critical safety issue. That’s why some think that 3G should stay online for a while longer. AARP says the pandemic has prevented many older people from updating their tech, and wants the shutdown pushed back to the end of the year. Alarm companies, including those that manufacture fire and carbon monoxide detectors and home security systems, have also asked for an extension. They say that the computer chip shortage has gotten in the way of their efforts to produce and install replacement devices. But you shouldn’t bet on a delay. If you have a 3G device, the best time to upgrade is now. If you know someone who uses one of these devices, it’s worth checking in and seeing if you can help them find a replacement. Inevitably, history shows that cellular networks come and go. The next cellular network, 6G, may be less than a decade away and could be used to introduce everything from 3D holograms to internet-connected clothing. At that point, 5G won’t seem so new and exciting anymore, and 4G’s time will likely be up. Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Cyberattack was attempted against a western government 'entity' in Ukraine, researchers say

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here. Last month, a Russia-linked threat actor attempted a cyberattack in Ukraine against an “entity” that’s part of an unidentified western government, according to researchers in Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 organization. The attempted attack took place on January 19, and was carried out by a group that Unit 42 calls “Gamaredon.” The group’s leadership includes five Russian Federal Security Service officers, the Security Service of Ukraine said previously. In a blog post today, Unit 42 researchers said that Gamaredon has “primarily focused its cyber campaigns against Ukrainian government officials and organizations” since 2013. The researchers said they have been closely monitoring Gamaredon’s activities because of the geopolitical situation and the group’s target focus. The disclosure of the attempted attack came amid estimates that Russia has stationed more than 100,000 troops on the eastern border of Ukraine. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden approved sending an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

A ‘precision’ attack

Unit 42 said it has mapped three clusters of Gamaredon’s infrastructure, which are being used to support malware and phishing activities—including more than 100 samples of malware, 700 malicious domains, and 215 IP addresses. “Monitoring these clusters, we observed an attempt to compromise a Western government entity in Ukraine on Jan. 19, 2022,” the researchers said. The attack involved a “targeted phishing attempt,” Unit 42 reported. “In this attempt, rather than emailing the downloader directly to their target, the actors instead leveraged a job search and employment service within Ukraine,” the researchers said. “In doing so, the actors searched for an active job posting, uploaded their downloader as a resume and submitted it through the job search platform to a Western government entity.” Due to the “steps and precision delivery involved in this campaign, it appears this may have been a specific, deliberate attempt by Gamaredon to compromise this Western government organization,” Unit 42 said in its post. The post does not identify or further describe the western government entity. When contacted by VentureBeat today, Unit 42 said it’s not providing further details. The attempted attack came less than a week after more than 70 Ukrainian government websites were targeted with the new “WhisperGate” family of malware.

Global tensions

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month suggested it’s possible that Russia might be eyeing a cyberattack against U.S. infrastructure, amid tensions between the countries over Ukraine. The DHS intelligence bulletin suggested that in the event Russia invades Ukraine, a U.S. or NATO response to the invasion might prompt a cyber offensive from Russia against targets located in the U.S. The attacks could range “from low-level denials-of-service to destructive attacks targeting critical infrastructure,” according to the January 23 bulletin, as cited by CNN. Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, said in a previous statement that “we’ve seen notable ransomware groups operating out of that region, including REvil and DarkSide, with the technical ability to compromise large networks rapidly and at great scale.” “It would be wrong to assume that the nation state housing such criminal elements doesn’t have a matching capability,” Breen said. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Trouble hiring leads to record low layoffs and firings

One more sign that American workers are in a uniquely powerful position these days: Layoffs and discharges are at record lows. In December, just 0.8 percent of all US employees were let go, a record according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that goes back more than two decades. The low rate of layoffs is yet another indicator that workers have a unique amount of power right now. How long they have it and what they will do with it remains to be seen, but there’s reason to believe that this moment could lead to lasting changes in the dynamic between employees and employers. The low level of layoffs and discharges, which includes employer-initiated separations like firings, coincides with high levels of job openings. In this difficult hiring economy, employers are loath to lose the employees they’ve got. Job openings have been at or near record highs in the last year. Faced with changing outlook on work’s place in our lives, millions of people have quit or left the workforce for a variety of reasons, including early retirement and pandemic child care needs. That has left employers struggling to find enough employees to fill the rebounded job market. Job openings are highest in industries like hospitality and food service, which saw tons of layoffs early in the pandemic. Since then, there have been record numbers of job openings in and outside these industries. The problem for those employers is that people who work in these industries are using the demand for their labor to find better-paying jobs in and outside their industries. Hence the historically low rates of layoffs and firings. Since it’s so hard to find workers, employers are doing their best to retain the ones they’ve got. “There’s never been a time in the past 20-plus years that you’ve been less likely to get laid off,” Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed’s Hiring Lab, told Recode. “If employers are so desperate to hold onto or are, more frankly, not laying anyone off, that’s also another signal to workers of, hey, you have more ability to negotiate with employers.” All of this has given workers, especially in the lowest-paid sectors like retail and food service, a bit more leverage. Pay is the most obvious area in which workers are seeing improvement. Compensation rose 8.4 percent last year for those in food service and accommodation jobs and 6.3 percent for retail workers, compared with 4.4 for all jobs. Employees should note, however, that wages are rising much more quickly than usual for those who switch jobs than for those who stay at their jobs, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Some are using the hiring shortfall to eke out better conditions in addition to better pay, like more regularly scheduled hours or health care or even perks like the ability to work from home. Employers could also use this situation as an opportunity to invest in their existing employees through training programs. The need for employees could also change management’s treatment of those employees, though that could take a while. At least anecdotally from sites like the antiwork subreddit, there are still lots of bad bosses out there. “Yes, the labor market is pretty tight right now, but it might take a long time for there to be structural and cultural changes in how people might be treated at work,” Bunker said. And this leverage will only last as long as the hiring shortfall continues, and it’s not clear how long that will be. It will depend on a number of pandemic- and nonpandemic-related factors, like schools and day cares staying open and whether those who retired early can afford to stay retired. But for now, the time is ripe to get what you want from your employers. Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

How small business marketers can optimize marketing budgets and drive leads (VB Live)

Presented by CallRail Businesses today have to do more with limited budgets, while keeping customer experience front and center. In this VB Live event, learn how to make the most marketing impact, leverage data to generate hot leads, harness personalization, and more. Register here for free. Today, small business marketers are faced with some very particular challenges, from shrinking marketing budgets and growing number of marketing channels, to the waves of data it all generates, to the growing emphasis on personalized marketing. And the tides are continually shifting in an ever-changing pandemic. Here’s a look at how small business marketers can do more with less in an increasingly complex landscape.

Prioritize quality over quantity

The first step in optimizing your marketing budget is making sure that your efforts are all focused on the time and investments that will move the needle the most. In order to do that, first you need to know what quality looks like. “Make sure you clearly define, for yourself and your business, what qualified or good leads look like to you,” says Laura Lawrie, principal product manager at CallRail. “Is that somebody submitting an appointment request form? Calling to discuss your services? Understand who your prospects and leads are, who’s most likely to convert, and then trace back efforts that are most likely to lead to those quality leads.”

Prioritize the right channels

The explosion of channels means there are so many more ways to reach potential leads, but how do you narrow down the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck. Focusing on understanding that customer journey and investing in tools that can give you insight into it is key. “Understanding the lead sources that get you to the top of the funnel versus the bottom of the funnel will help you understand where to focus your budget and how to plan your campaigns accordingly,” Lawrie says. But if you’re well versed in data collection and reporting, and you feel like you already understand that lead journey really well, then maybe it’s time to progress into looking at trying to tie ROI to your marketing efforts, which is a very challenging prospect, but a worthwhile one, Lawrie says. “You might find that maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for some of your offerings,” she says. “You’re spending so much on your cost per click to get those customers that really the margin you get out of that particular service or product isn’t worth it. That gives you the power not just to market with confidence, but to do business with confidence, because you understand and invest in the things that will give you the best return.”

Prioritize your budget allocations

With a limited budget, you need to know how much to put into search, how much to put into social, how much to put into display, and so on. To do that, you need to get a good understanding of your baseline, or as the saying goes, know what makes your phone ring. But from there, you need to test. “Even if you just have a starting point, a budget you’ve invested in that makes sense to you, use that as a test,” she says. “Let that run for a month, and again, take a look at what’s leading to your qualified leads. That can tell you where to divert that spend into the appropriate areas. Test, test, and test again.”

Prioritize key customer touchpoint data

No matter where you’re allocating your marketing dollars, you’re going to get a wild amount of data back in return. Managing that volume of data can end up being a time sink, if you don’t know where to turn your attention. Lawrie strongly recommends a marketing attribution tool that stitches together all the reporting data from the various sources you’re tapping, and takes care of identity resolution, or consolidating potential customers according to their phone number, their email, their tracked web session data, and so on. This will give you insight into multi-touch customer journeys. “If you’re just doing something like pulling in Google Ads reporting, Facebook reporting, or organic search result reporting through something like Rank Ranger and just trying to throw that onto a dashboard, what you’ll end up with is just multiple reports from various biased points of view,” she points out. But a marketing attribution platform can tell you, for instance, that someone found you organically through the organic search results, but then because of your Facebook Pixel remarketing strategy, they saw a Facebook ad and they clicked it, but they still didn’t purchase. Then their last touch was a click on a Google ad because it was at the top of a search. “If you’re just looking at those individual sources of reporting, even if they’re consolidated in one dashboard, you’ll miss out on, hey, those three clicks, actions, they were really one single person with one intent to purchase,” she says. “Something that can consolidate that and reconcile those is going to allow you to market with confidence.” To learn more about how small business marketers can do more with a limited budget, harness data, and leverage marketing attribution like a boss, don’t miss this VB Live event! Register here for free. Attendees will learn: - How to do more with the marketing budget you have in 2022 - How to prioritize lead management and reduce friction throughout the entire customer journey - How to sift through marketing and sales data to optimize your campaigns, and ultimately drive more leads and improve your ROIPresenters: - Laura Lawrie, Principal Product Manager, CallRail - Seth Colaner, Moderator, VentureBeat - More industry thought-leaders to come! Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

It’s a new space age for billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk

On January 24, the James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its final destination, about a million miles away from Earth. There, the largest telescope in history is stationed to observe the cosmos, allowing astronomers to look farther out in space and further back in time. The Webb took over a decade of work and billions of dollars, but the timing of its launch coincided with a record-breaking year of space activity, in addition to growing cultural and commercial interest. Some believe we are at “the dawn of a new space age.” 2021 was a big year for rocket launches, with activity nearly rivaling that of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 and kick-started the space race. Last year was a turning point for commercial space tourism and exploration, with various billionaire-backed ventures embarking on recreational spaceflights. In July, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic, accompanied by five passengers, took a 90-minute trip about 50 miles into Earth’s atmosphere. Fellow billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos flew out 10 days later on a 10-minute tour. His rocket, carrying three other space tourists, surpassed Branson’s distance to reach the Kármán line, which is internationally recognized as the edge of space. And in September, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a four-person civilian crew into Earth orbit for a three-day journey. (Musk himself was not on board; billionaire Jared Isaacman, who helped finance the mission, was.) Some industry experts say the success of privately funded endeavors like SpaceX and Blue Origin has piqued the attention of private investors. Investments in space startups nearly doubled from 2018 to 2019, according to analytics firm BryceTech, and space companies raised a record $14.5 billion in 2021, reported CNBC. The US government, too, seems interested in expanding NASA’s foothold in space. This year, the agency has plans to launch a space station into the moon’s orbit, and will collaborate with SpaceX to send an astronaut crew to the International Space Station. It’s not just America and its billionaires, however, that are clamoring to make gains in space. Russia and China are close behind, although the latter’s wealthiest citizens have kept a much lower profile. The two countries have agreed to collaborate on lunar missions, and are looking to build a research station on or around the moon. Russia and Europe are also planning to launch a rover to Mars next year, while South Korea, with the help of NASA, is scheduled to send its first mission to the moon. A new era of space technology and exploration is upon the world, one that could rival the 1960s in historical significance and magnitude. It’s unclear, however, if these advancements will be met with the cultural fervor that made the last Space Age feel so distinct. This time, the public interest in space is driven less by spectacle and more by the agendas of highly influential billionaires. Despite all the recent hullabaloo, regular people don’t seem to be very excited about the cosmos. Most Americans want the US to remain a leader in space exploration, but a Pew Research poll from 2018 found that the public was evenly divided on the future prospect of space tourism. A majority also think that NASA should prioritize monitoring the Earth’s climate and atmosphere for asteroids and debris above sending manned trips to outer space. In fact, it seems as though citizens, stuck at home on Earth, have grown resentful of billionaire-led space tours. These publicized missions have received their share of online backlash. People have argued that Bezos’s or Branson’s money should go toward pressing earthly causes, like fair wages for workers, taxes, medical research, climate change, or world hunger. These arguments aren’t new; similar concerns were raised during the first Space Age. These expeditious joyrides, however, can seem even more unnecessary during a pandemic that has exacerbated the wealth gap and weakened the American health care system. That being said, space is much more than a zero-gravity playground for the wealthy. Space technology is key to our modern communications infrastructures, climate monitoring capabilities, air travel, security systems, and much much more. If this is the beginning of the 21st century Space Age, why are Americans so disillusioned with its potential? Is there reason to hope that our lives on Earth will be all the better for it? The Space Age, then versus now In the decade leading up to the Apollo moon landing, Americans were captivated by science fiction and the prospect of exploring outer space. Some historians interpreted this cosmic fascination as a coping mechanism in the aftermath of World War II and America’s ongoing wars in Asia. Space, as an unexplored realm, was a destination for escape, fantasy, and even fear. “It has often been suggested that the atomic bomb was responsible , creating at once an appetite for vicarious scientific adventure and a need to externalize fear,” wrote space historian Walter McDougall. It was, in hindsight, a form of cultural anticipation, fueled by a mass media obsession with outer space. It was reflected in the public frenzy over UFO sightings, and in works produced by Hollywood, Disney, science fiction writers, major magazines and newspapers, avant-garde artists, and fashion designers. Space was on everybody’s mind. And after the US’s first successful manned mission to the moon, the prevailing narrative, in retrospect, was one of unity — of a common dream being achieved.

French designer Pierre Cardin’s space-inspired outfits were on display at the 1968 Paris Fashion Week. Getty Images “The Apollo 11 moon landing was such a landmark event because, and this sounds clichéd, it was a dream that became real,” said Stephen Petersen, an independent scholar who published a book on Space Age aesthetics. “There was so much media — in pop entertainment, the art world, news coverage — that envisioned space exploration and rocket launches years before anyone thought it possible. So I can imagine how seeing it unfold was significant to people because of the imagery, the films and books that preceded it.” This wasn’t entirely true. Public opinion polls revealed a majority of Americans opposed the Apollo Program “consistently throughout the 1960s,” Alexis Madrigal reported for the Atlantic in 2012, despite the positive press and political leverage it generated. “We’ve told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there’s almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world,” wrote Madrigal. “Yes, there was a brief, shining moment right around the moon landing when everyone applauded, but four years later, the Apollo program was cut short and humans have never seriously attempted to get back to the moon ever again.” “We’ve told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity” Citizens thought space exploration was too expensive, with the exception of a poll conducted after the first Apollo landing in 1969. Scientists, too, saw no need to rush a trip to the moon with humans, or for the government to focus on space over other earthly scientific endeavors. NASA’s budget was also sharply reduced after Apollo. While the agency has steadily received more federal money throughout the 2010s, it isn’t close to receiving the apex of funding that made Apollo possible. Americans, to that end, have seemingly begun to regard the cosmos with much less wonder and excitement, although public support for the moon landing has only grown over time. With the US in the midst of another space boom, it’s possible people will be unenthused by — if not downright opposed to — federally funded exploration. This time, its cultural novelty might’ve worn off for good. Part of that is a result of our fractured media ecosystem: Fewer people watch shuttle launches, which have become much more frequent. What audiences watch is no longer dictated by television programming, and the entertainment value of a new Netflix or Disney+ show likely outweighs the lengthy lead-up to a rocket takeoff. It doesn’t help how modern media is a mishmash of familiar aesthetics, tropes, and themes. Frequent reboots of old shows and franchises, like Star Wars and Dune, contribute to this alienating circumstance, where nothing feels particularly innovative or exciting. Much of the aesthetics and art produced during and after the 1960s Space Age were experimental and visually striking, according to Petersen. Futurism, for example, encouraged artists to liberally engage with new technologies and materials, and was popularized by influential figures like Andy Warhol and David Bowie. The modern ’60s revival in fashion and style has brought Space Age imagery and design back to the fore, but largely without its futuristic edge. The pop star Dua Lipa coined it best: It’s a form of “future nostalgia.” This aesthetic return is mostly style with little substance, and encapsulates the fleeting, anachronistic state of modern trends. It’s hard for us to collectively care about anything when social media discourse and the news cycle move so fast. We don’t have the patience for space or the protracted timeline it operates on. “Most space companies are working on a decadeslong timeline,” said Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law. “The startups getting funding might seem mundane to people, like satellite imagery and telecommunications.” In fact, Hanlon added, most people have taken for granted the advances in space technology that make modern life possible. (Satellites, launched with the intention of expanding internet access across the globe, are crowding up the night sky, to the ire of astronomers.) Nearly every part of it bears some relation to space. Like it or not, billionaires — and private enterprises — will define much of the modern space race NASA has increasingly outsourced space-related work to private companies; it’s likely a cost-cutting measure, and also leaves room and support for the emergence of a robust commercial space sector. The agency, for example, has announced that it would buy lunar dust samples harvested by private contractors for independent assessment. CNBC reported that the agency has paid SpaceX and Boeing more than $3.1 billion and $4.8 billion, respectively, since 2014 to develop launch capsules for American astronauts. These private partnerships with NASA, according to Laura Forczyk, founder of the space consulting firm Astralytical, are a turning point for the commercial space sector. “NASA has always contracted out work. The Apollo rockets, for example, were built to the agency’s specs and standards,” she said. “We’re now seeing a different approach to government partnerships. Instead of buying hardware, the US is looking to fund or buy entire services.” To Forczyk, this seems like “a concerted effort to build a commercial industry.” In recent years, a handful of American billionaires have, for better or for worse, drawn the public’s eyes toward the skies again, sometimes to the chagrin of the public. Many working in the space sector, though, like Hanlon and Forczyk, are grateful for the presence of Bezos, Branson, and Musk. “I’m actually thankful for the billionaires because they’re taking a long-term approach,” Hanlon said. “They’re spending money on space that taxpayers wouldn’t want to spend.” Without these privately funded endeavors, they claim, the prospect and pace of space exploration would be much slower. Billionaires “are spending money on space that taxpayers wouldn’t want to spend” Forczyk predicts that space tourism will develop as an industry similar to commercial air travel, with wealthy individuals as the early adopters. “Over time, these trips will become accessible to regular people,” she said. However, the purpose of these tours, beyond their recreational aspects, are still murky. So far, these commercial trips have yet to produce any major scientific insights, although they could contribute information for future human exploration. These tours, reported Recode’s Rebecca Heilweil, have been marketed as potential opportunities for scientific experiments. Last year, a Virgin Galactic flight brought plants to space and tested how they responded to microgravity. It’s unlikely, however, that scientific discovery for the greater good of humanity is the sole force driving billionaires toward the cosmos. (After his space tour, Bezos suggested that, decades from now, heavy and polluting industries could move their manufacturing to space to reduce environmental harms. Meanwhile, Amazon was responsible for 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020.) Other motivating factors could be ego, power, or the ambitious ability to chart their own extraterrestrial destiny. In 2016, Musk declared that “history is going to bifurcate along two directions.” One path is to stay on Earth and risk an “eventual extinction event.” The alternative is to become what he described as a “spacefaring civilization.” Spacefaring comes at a steep cost — one that is inaccessible to most citizens, even if they cobbled together a lifetime of savings. The average American’s annual salary is about a tenth of a $450,000 Virgin Galactic ticket to space. Even if Musk’s far-fetched vision is intended to be a humanistic warning, it’s not hard to figure out why the public seems so impassive about outer space. From down here, space travel appears to be an escapist fantasy for the rich. Yet there’s still a romantic idealism attached to the universe, in its ability to foster collective unity and wonder. In observing Earth from afar (farther than the route of current commercial spacecrafts), former astronauts described experiencing “a profound sense of awe and a dramatically different perspective on life.” Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Metroid Dread has sold 2.74M copies

Did you miss a session from GamesBeat's latest event? Head over to the GamesBeat & Facebook Gaming Summit & GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 On Demand page here. Nintendo revealed during its latest earnings report that Metroid Dread has sold 2.74 million copies on Switch as of December 31. It’s hard to gauge how to feel about these numbers. Compared to other Switch games, it can fee low. The HD port of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, for example, has sold 3.85 million copies on Switch. That’s a rerelease of an older Wii title. But Metroid has never been able to do Mario or Zelda numbers. No game in the series, despite its acclaim, has ever sold past the 3 million mark. There was some hope for Metroid Dread, as it received positive reviews and launched on October 8 alongside the new Switch OLED model. Plus, with over 100 million Switch consoles out there, the giant install base has given most Nintendo franchises a nice boost when they debut on the console. Webinar Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded. Watch On Demand Alas, it seems that the Metroid ceiling still exists, for now. If Dread can continue to sell, it could eventually become the best-selling entry in the franchise, overtaking the original Metroid Prime. Otherwise, maybe Metroid Prime 4 will pass that mythical 3 million barrier. GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Learn More Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Low-code/no-code could reshape business innovation.

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here. By Adam Burden, North America lead of technology and chief software engineer of Accenture. John Lennon and Paul McCartney are two of the greatest songwriters in music’s history. Without their talents, pop music as we know it wouldn’t exist. This makes it all the more surprising that neither of the two Beatles could actually read music — they learned the chords of each song by heart before committing them to vinyl. This suggests something important: creativity doesn’t need formal training to thrive, just a means of expression. It’s a lesson that many enterprises can now apply to their systems using low-code / no-code tools. These tools enable everyone to build apps, even if they have little or no formal training in coding. Such tools have been around since the 1990s, but they’re only now being applied at scale with cloud services and enterprise-grade software development. Recent research from Forrester predicts that low-code / no-code platforms will account for 75% of new app development by the end of 2021. These tools reflect the democratization of technology — and a considerable shift in how we manage, promote, and feed innovation in our businesses. Even at this early stage of adoption, several compelling use cases are apparent. Most obviously, low-code / no-code can be used for the automation of repetitive and routine transactional tasks. Low-code / no-code turns software users into developers, giving them the tools to automate the ordinary and derive maximum value from the tools they use. But low-code / no-code is about more than automating the ordinary, it’s also about unleashing the extraordinary. In the digital age, businesses need to move fast to outpace competitors and adapt to change. Applications, therefore, need to be continually developed, released, and refined at pace. For instance, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care provider Geisinger saw a sudden 50% decline in outpatient visits and a surge in in-patient and ICU needs. The company faced a major challenge trying to get the appropriate healthcare professionals to the right places at the right time. It sprang to action using a low-code development platform from Quickbase Inc. In just one week, Geisinger staff were able to add a COVID-19 resource hub to their mobile app that helped coordinate and reassign thousands of health care workers in their network based on patient needs.

Innovation in the fast lane

Low-code / no-code is an important enabler of fast-paced innovation and benefits professional and citizen developers alike. First, low-code / no-code accelerates and simplifies agile sprints, as low-code / no-code tools can rapidly build prototype interfaces or processes. Low-code / no-code becomes the scaffolding for prototypes, which developers can then pad out with more detailed coding as needed. low-code / no-code also helps pro-coders by reducing their workload. The shortage of skilled coders represents a real drag on innovation and can overburden a company’s team of professional developers. Low-code / no-code provides a solution by creating a new breed of citizen developers able to share the workload. Using Microsoft’s Power Apps, G&J Pepsi demonstrated exactly why this approach is such a game-changer. The company rapidly built and deployed transformative digital applications across its inventory and merchandising functions. In one case, employees with little to no software development experience created an app that would examine images of a store shelf to identify the number and type of bottles on it, then automatically order the correct items for restocking based on historic trends. In all, this group created eight applications without a professional developer on staff and saved $500,000 in the first year alone. Professional coders are the Bachs and Beethovens of the enterprise, orchestrating complex lines of code to build the sort of sophisticated functions and algorithms that result from years of dedication and formal training. Other employees are our Lennons and McCartneys, creating beautiful and important applications that can change the world, but which are comparatively easier to build. Low-code / no-code may well free developers, but it also ends a monopoly on innovation.

Tips for low-code / no-code implementation

Low-code / no-code is one of those disruptive movements that enterprises cannot afford to ignore. To do so would, ultimately, put the business at a competitive disadvantage. So, what should the CIO and other business leaders bear in mind when implementing a low-code / no-code approach? In my view, there are several key considerations: - Review the buy vs. build equation. For years, the balance has tipped in favor of buying commercial off-the-shelf products over building applications in-house. Low-code / no-code changes this equation. There’s still a compelling argument for using off-the-shelf software for commoditized and common core systems that directly impact the customer, employee, or partner experience. Yet major software vendors recognize that customers are no longer willing to wait for them to decide that a feature is important enough to build out and release six months from now — customers expect the new features quickly, and low-code / no-code features can help manage this expectation. - Map talent journeys. Low-code / no-code expands the pool of talent available for application development. For low-code / no-code users to achieve maximum results, training is a must. While deep technical skills will not always be required, citizen developers will need to be taught how to think like traditional developers and architects and reuse common services and functions for efficiency and consistency. Meanwhile, generations of developers trained in legacy systems such as mainframe and midrange can be upskilled to work in the cloud-first world of low-code / no-code, as they have invaluable knowledge of existing processes and systems. - Put security guardrails in place. Security and reusability are important issues. If you want your people to use the same authentication service for the applications that they’re building, you need to build in the appropriate level of governance. I recommend choosing low-code / no-code solutions that allows for customization of tools to create standards frameworks that citizen developers can use by default. - Start small and move slowly. Take enough time with your first low-code / no-code deployments to iron out any bad notes before they become a bigger issue. As your citizen developers and IT staff build competence and begin to understand potential use cases better, they can expand the low-code / no-code program and capabilities. This also allows time to adjust more challenging notes like security, data management and reusable components like authentication. Slow and steady will always win the low-code / no-code race. - Use the right instrument for the song. Low-code / no-code is one of many tools available to build custom systems, but just like you wouldn’t add in a drum for a guitar solo, it’s not always the right tool to use. Low-code / no-code is an excellent choice for departmental-level apps, helping to automate specific processes. It’s also a good choice to accelerate front-end development of more complex, enterprise level applications. But more sophisticated components or functions often mean leveraging professional coding tools like Visual Studio to achieve a more layered melody.Lennon and McCartney were great because they gave full reign to their imaginations and enthusiasm, and subsequently changed the face of music in the process. Now, with low-code / no-code, enterprises are empowering their workers to do the same in the business context. I for one can’t wait to see the results. I’m betting that our era of digital innovation is only just getting started. Adam Burden (@adampburden) is Accenture’s chief software engineer and the North America lead for Accenture Technology. DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation. If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers. You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers Source link Read the full article

0 notes

biogychamp · 3 years ago

Text

Turtles all the way down: Why AI’s cult of objectivity is dangerous, and how we can be better

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here. This article was contributed by Slater Victoroff, founder and CTO of Indico Data. There is a belief, built out of science fiction and a healthy fear of math, that AI is some infallible judge of objective truth. We tell ourselves that AI algorithms divine truth from data, and that there is no truth higher than the righteous residual of a regression test. For others, the picture is simple: logic is objective, math is logic, AI is math; thus AI is objective. This is not a benign belief. And, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. More than anything, AI is a mirror: something built in the image of humans, built to mimic humans, and thus inherit our flaws. AI models are computer programs written in data. They reflect all the ugliness in that human data, and through the hundreds of random imperfections across the mirror’s surface, add some hidden ugliness of their own. Joy Buolamwini showed us that, despite the open admission of these challenges in academia, these technologies are being actively adopted and deployed under a fictitious notion of what today’s AI represents. People’s lives are already being upended, and it is important for us to recognize and adopt a more realistic view of this world-changing technology.

Where this belief in objectivity comes from, and why it propagates

Why do so many experts believe that AI is inherently objective?There is a classic lie within the realm of AI: “there are two types of machine learning — supervised and unsupervised.” Supervised methods require humans to tell the machine what the “correct” answer is: whether the tweet is positive or negative. Unsupervised methods don’t require this. One merely presents the unsupervised method with a large raft of tweets and sets it to work. Many novices believe that — because the human subjectivity of “correctness” has not corrupted the unsupervised model — it is a machine built of cold, objective logic. When this cold, objective logic doesn’t align with reality, it’s an afterthought. Always one more regularization step, one more momentum term, one more architecture tweak away. It’s merely a matter of finding the correct math, and human subjectivity will reduce to nothing, like some dimensionless constant. Let me be clear: this is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. Why, then, has this dangerous notion spread so broadly? Researchers are, in their estimation, algorithm builders first and foremost. They are musicians plucking on the chorded equations of God. Meanwhile, problems of model bias and objectivity are data problems. No self-respecting researcher would ever muddy their hands by touching a disgusting database. That’s for the data people. They are building models, not for the real world, but for that messianic dataset that will someday arrive to save us all from bias. It is eminently understandable. Just like everybody else involved in the development of AI, researchers wish to abdicate responsibility for the often horrific behavior of their creations. We see this in academic terms like “self-supervised” learning, which reinforce the notion that researchers play no part in these outcomes. The AI taught itself this behavior. I swear! Pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard…

The objectivity myth is dangerous

“Unsupervised” learning, or “self-supervised” learning as described in the section above, and as understood by large swaths of the world, does not exist. In practice, when we call a technique “unsupervised,” it may paradoxically involve several orders of magnitude more supervision than a traditional supervised method. An “unsupervised” technique for Twitter sentiment analysis might, for instance, be trained on a billion tweets, ten thousand meticulously parsed sentences, half a dozen sentiment analysis datasets, and an exhaustive dictionary tagging a human-estimated sentiment for every word in the English language that took over a person-century of effort to build. Also, a Twitter sentiment analysis dataset will still be needed for evaluation. So, long as it is not specifically trained on a Twitter sentiment analysis dataset, it may still be considered “unsupervised,” and thus “objective.” In practice, it might be more accurate to call self-supervision “opaque supervision.” The goal is to effectively layer in several layers of indirection such that the instructions provided to the machine are no longer transparent. When bad behavior is learned from bad data, the data can be corrected. When the bad behavior comes from Person A, for example, believing that three is a better value for k than four, nobody will ever know, and no corrective action will be taken. The problem is that, when researchers abdicate responsibility, nobody is there to pick it up. In most of these cases, we simply don’t have the data needed to even appropriately evaluate the bias of our models. One reason that I believe Joy Buolamwini has focused on facial recognition to date is that it lends itself more cleanly to notions of equity that would be difficult to establish for other tasks. We can vary the skin tone of a face and say that facial recognition ought to perform the same across those skin tones. For something like a modern question-answer model, it’s much harder to understand what an appropriate answer to a controversial question might be. There is no replacement for supervision. There is no path where humans are not forced to make decisions about what is correct and what is incorrect. Any belief that rigorous testing and problem definition can be avoided is dangerous. These approaches don’t avoid or mitigate bias. They’re no more objective than the Redditors they emulate. They simply allow us to push that bias into subtle, poorly understood crevices of the system.

How should we look at AI and model bias?

AI is technology. Just like computers and steel and steam engines, it can be a tool of empowerment, or it can bind us in digital shackles. Modern AI can mimic human language, vision, and cognition to an unprecedented degree. In doing so, it presents a unique ability to understand our own foibles. We can take our bias and boil it down to bits and bytes. We’re able to give names and numbers to billions of human experiences. This generation of AI has repeatedly, and embarrassingly, highlighted our fallibility. We are now presented with two options: we can measure and test and push and fight until we get better. Or we can immortalize our ignorance and bias in model weights, hiding under a false cloak of objectivity. When I started Indico Data with Diana and Madison, we placed transparency and responsibility at the core of our corporate values. We also push our customers to do the same. To have those difficult conversations, to define a consistent truth in the world that they can be proud of. From there, the key to eliminating the bias is in the testing. Test your outcomes for any flaws in objectivity, before production, then test again so you are sure not to fail when you are already in production.

The path forward

It is important to note that obscurity is not a replacement for responsibility. Additionally, hiding human biases in model biases does not eliminate them, nor does it magically make these biases objective. AI researchers have made astonishing progress. Problems considered unsolvable just a few years ago have transformed into “Hello World” tutorials. Today’s AI is an incredible, unprecedented mimic of human behavior. The question now is whether humans can set an example worth following. Can you? Slater Victoroff is founder and CTO of Indico Data. DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation. If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers. You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers Source link Read the full article

0 notes