Daily Tech Digest - February 19, 2017

Fantastic (data)-Beasts and Where to Find Them: Data Scientists and Data Engineers

In reality, data scientists as imagined by most do not exist because it is a completely new figure, especially for the initial degrees of seniority. However, the proliferation of boot camps and structured university programs on one hand, and the companies’ increased awareness about this field on the other hand, will drive the job market towards its demand-supply equilibrium: firms will understand what they actually need in term of skills, and talents will be eventually able to provide those (verified) required abilities. It is then necessary at the moment to outline this new role, which is still half scientist half designer, and it includes a series of different skills and capabilities, akin to the mythological chimera. 


Intelligent Computers Could Replace Lawyers in Coming Years: Report

Advocates of the technology believe that AI machines could help create more jobs in the legal sector as the technology drives costs down and makes legal services more affordable to greater numbers of people. “It’s like the beginning of the beginning of the beginning,” said LawGeex CEO Noory Bechor. “Legal, right now, I think is in the place that other industries were 10 and 15 years ago, like travel.” LawGeex is an AI-powered platform for legal contract review. The LawGeex platform is designed to “take a new contract, one that it’s never seen before, read it and then compare it to a database of every similar contract that it’s seen in the past.” LawGeex, like other AI platforms, also learns from each review it performs. Can AI legal platforms do better than people? Will the machine miss things that an experienced lawyer would otherwise catch?


We’re only human: Vulnerability, machines set to disrupt sales jobs

The intangible benefit of being human may no longer be an advantage regarding relationship building skills. These human capabilities have been primary considerations for giving the nod over robots in any potential sales role—tech-related or otherwise. It could be argued that the benefit of being human, is no longer a benefit at all. People in sales get and keep customers. It’s what they do. If you’ve known successful sales people, you will have heard of the importance of building and fostering good relationships with clients. ... With the advent of the digital age and global economy, humans are increasingly not building or fostering relationships particularly well. This is ironic on any number of levels that are not lost upon me. The ability to engender consistent, quality communications with the assistance of unprecedented technology has resulted in the unexpected failure to do so.


Teaching Staff To Respect The Risk Of A Data Breach

Research by the Ponemon Institute reveals that just 35 percent of respondents who are familiar with their companies’ data protection and privacy training programs feel that executives prioritize their employees’ understanding of the causes and effects of data breaches. This statistic should concern every organization. Although attacks on data originate from external sources, the vulnerabilities exist internally. In fact, employees themselves are most often responsible for introducing a threat into an IT infrastructure. Most executives who realize that their employees don’t know much about security also struggle with the fact that, if there is a major breach, it’s them — the CEOs and CIOs — who will lose their jobs. ... Companywide security initiatives must place a major focus on social engineering in order to minimize the risk of user errors.


2017 Will Prove Pivotal in Efforts to Bring Smart Home Technology to Mass Market

An important year for smart home, 2017 will be the launch-pad year for EMEA and APAC adoption rates along with consolidation and maturity in North America. For the market as a whole, professional and DIY channels will continue to be fierce competitors, with a hybrid of the professional channel ultimately winning out at the end of 2017. Although DIY companies such as Apple will make large strides, DIY solutions will continue to suffer from mixed reviews and high upfront costs. As a result, the non-smart home enthusiasts will opt for professional support until DIY platforms become more reliable. As the price for connected devices come down, DIY systems will benefit until the cost of back-end services and maintenance allow service providers to lower monthly subscription fees.


The one critical skill many data scientists are missing

To be open and transparent with clients, we can’t just explain the potential for our products, we need to explain the possible pitfalls as well. We have started running “under-the-hood” sessions with some of our clients where they visit our offices and we talk about some of the more technical aspects of what we do. These are informal sessions, though, so people don’t want a math lecture or a discussion on coding practices. In this case, the challenge is finding the right balance between the formal, the detail, and the enjoyment. If any of the communication had failed, our product would never have got off the ground. It has all made me appreciate how vital communication is as a data scientist. I can learn about as many algorithms or cool new tools as I want, but if I can’t explain why I might want to use them to anyone, then it’s a complete waste of my time and theirs.


Designing the Data Management Infrastructure of Tomorrow

Enterprises struggle to create a data-driven culture in order to realise the true business value of data. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach towards creating a data-driven culture as this depends on the people and the precise work environment of an organisation, there is a unique business model that can be used as an inspiration to create an effective data management strategy and plan data management infrastructure. It is called Agile.  The Agile approach is being used by renowned firms like Google, Spotify, Zappos, and Netflix. The purpose of this approach is to empower people to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams and enable them to make the right decisions quickly and effectively.


Evolution of Business Logic from Monoliths through Microservices, to Functions

The first steps to reduce cost of delivery focused on process automation. Many organizations developed custom scripts to deploy new hardware, and to install and update applications. Eventually common frameworks like Puppet and Chef became popular, and “infrastructure as code” sped up delivery of updates. The DevOps movement began when operations teams adopted agile software development practices and worked closely with developers to reduce time to value from months to days. Scripts can change what’s already there, but fast growing businesses or those with unpredictable workloads struggled to provision new capacity quickly. The introduction of self service API calls to automatically provision cloud capacity using Amazon EC2 solved this problem.


An Angular Wish List

There are many ways of implementing browser screen sharing – what is proposed here is to have a new Angular platform type (let’s call it Platform-Shared). It would have a composite renderer with functionality similar to what is both in Platform-Browser (to display locally) and in Platform-WebWorker. It could be configurable whether the remote user only gets to see the rendered output or could also send events back. The X Window System has the concept of a display server, which runs on the machine the human user sits in front of, and this offers a display service that remote applications can use to render on screen. Currently with Angular, the entire application runs in the web browser where the user is located. Imagine a new Angular Platform-DisplayServer that would allow the web application to run on some remote machine


10 things to consider when buying a router

Keep in mind that networking hardware doesn't last forever. Not only do the standards change fairly often, but networking hardware is put through a lot of stress on a daily basis. Your Wi-Fi connection is stretched across your computer, gaming console, smartphone, tablet and streaming devices. And with more devices being added to the mix, such as smart lights or thermostats, that load is only getting larger, and over time, a router's performance can degrade. ... The positioning of your router is extremely important. It should be in a central location, away from other gadgets or obstructions and, ideally, high up on a shelf. Still, even with great positioning, you're likely to run into dead spots inside your home, places where the wireless signal just can't reach. Using heat map software can help you maximize your wireless coverage, and buying a more expensive router might give you better range, but it still doesn't mean the signal will reach the far corner or your basement.



Quote for the day:


?Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together." -- Marilyn Monroe


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