July 22, 2013

UK spies aren’t breaking law by using PRISM data, security oversight committee claims
The committee issued a statement on Wednesday in which it said it had extracted “substantive reports” out of UK intelligence service GCHQ, which detailed which citizens were monitored through PRISM, what information was gleaned, which warrants were obtained and so on. The committee also talked to the NSA and Congress.


Big data privacy concerns spur research, innovation
Masses of mobile phone data already exist, said panelist Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. “Companies gather it but are scared to use it,” he said. “It’s politically controversial. But we have to start to see that cell phone and public data is for the public good.”


Closing the Big Data Skills Gap Requires Educational Innovation
Here's the issue that the IT industry is already starting to deal with: Big data creates lots of new, well-paying jobs but in a digital update of the prime maxim of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, demand will outstrip supply, some experts contend. And it will get worse, because those newly graduated data scientists are too few in number and possess the wrong skills needed to fill that big data gap.


6 Surprising Secrets of Truly Great Bosses
The very best managers do the exact opposite of what the average manager does. At best, following conventional wisdom results in mediocrity. Truly great bosses don't just march to the beat of a different drummer, they convince everyone else to march along with them. Here's how:


When Will ‘Bursting’ Become Acceptable Boardroom Terminology?
The “so what” factor here comes down to how CIO’s are referring to cloud and explaining its “burstability” (not a real word) to the CEO; indeed, this use of the term bursting has been as widely adopted by cloud hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace as it has by companies selling broader IT services such as HP, IBM or any of the other usual “big vendor” suspects.


Data, Metadata and the Assumption of Quality
We have no way of knowing if the underlying operational data is accurate (as well as other aspects of data quality), nor do we have any way of verifying any aspect of the information quality. Some of the metadata could be verified by cross-referencing other sources (e.g., for books, we could verify the metadata with the publishers and other sellers such as Barnes & Noble).


Is there room for network admins in software-based networking?
The good news for IT professionals is that virtualization reduces costs and improves flexibility, but it increases complexity. Management software companies have diligently worked to develop solutions that take the pain out of this complexity. In fact, it is management software that allows admins to wrangle herds of servers with drag and drop -- not the virtualization technology itself.


How could anyone confuse BPM and event processing?
The fact is that more than a few corners of the marketplace know very little about the difference between BPM (business process management) and what’s typically called CEP (complex event processing). These two concepts are very different and understanding those differences in today’s business climate will mean success or failure for many organizations.


Sony to sell 'world's first' SD card-based backup for PCs
Sony announced the product on Thursday, and said it will be available in Japan from August 20 in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions. The backup software will initially support only Windows-based machines. The cards are rated Class 4 speed, a standard that provides write speeds of at least 4MBps.



Quote for the day:

"No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched." -- George Jean Nathan

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