How to prevent accidental complexity in software development
Accidental complexity in software design isn't always so severe, but even in
mild scenarios, it does annoy users and waste time, Buhle said. Website
sign-up flows, for example, ask for too much information, turning away
frustrated prospects before they finish the form. Usually this bad UX
manifests because the company thinks of more questions to which it would love
to know the answers. However, the answers don't affect how the user will
experience the site. Another common example occurs in software menu systems.
Rather than create menus that match how users think, designers derive ideas
from internal business units and create menus accordingly, Buhle said. You
don't want your menu to match your org chart. Confused users will fail to find
critical functions when they need them. To avoid these kinds of UI complexity,
test products with real users. User acceptance testing is not always as easy
as it sounds. Professional UX researchers should analyze how users interact
with prototypes and existing products. Designers, engineers and especially
startup founders do a terrible job in this role. They are invested in the
products and lack training on how to conduct unbiased tests, Buhle said.
Exploring the transformational impact of AI and advanced analytics
For the last decade, business intelligence has been used to gain insight from
historical data, but until recently, these analytical techniques have been
mainly manual. This is changing and Wayne Butterfield, director at global
technology research and advisory firm, ISG, explains that business leaders are
welcoming “the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) to both remove the
manual process and improve the quality of insight.” He says: “Data-driven
insights — using historical data to predict future outcomes — combine data,
advanced analytics and AI to transform decision making, based on predictive
insights in areas like revenue, demand and supply. “It’s still early days, but
auto machine learning (AutoML) technologies are lowering the barrier to entry
for organisations that may not have large teams of data scientists, but that
still see the value in looking forward and not backwards with their data.”
Pointing to AutoML tools, like Kortical.io and Data Robot, Butterfield
explains that these are “becoming more popular in automation centres of
excellence, as advanced AI models are plunged into the relatively simple
robotic process automation-type processes, to take action based on these
predictions.”
Cybersecurity spending to grow this year but may be hit by budget constraints
"The shift to subscriptions will shield cybersecurity from immediate IT
spending cuts, but additional expenditure will be affected for the rest of the
year as organizations begin the next stage in their response to the pandemic,"
Matthew Ball, chief analyst at Canalys, said in a press release. "The switch
from free trials to paid-for subscriptions will be a factor in maintaining
cybersecurity growth. But the mix of cost-containment measures, workforce
reduction, and cashflow issues will result in greater scrutiny of existing
projects and smaller deals." Increases in spending will vary among different
security products and services, according to Canalys. Investments in endpoint
security will grow as remote working conditions continue. But this growth may
taper off following the strong spending during the first quarter, especially
among small and midsized businesses. Network security will remain the largest
segment, accounting for 36% of all cybersecurity spending. However, this area
may see a decrease in spending as organizations de-emphasize traditional
appliance-based perimeter defenses. Organizations will have to beef up
spending in other segments to address new vulnerabilities created by a remote
and decentralized workforce.
Machine Learning in Action in Finance: Using Graphical Lasso to Identify Trading Pairs in International Stock ETFs
Remember the regression method called lasso, used to induce a sparse solution
to your regression problem by adding an L1 regularization term? Graphical
lasso is its extension to the world of graphs. Instead of estimating
coefficients for independent variables in regression problems, graphical lasso
estimates the precision (inverse covariance) matrix of your data. Thus,
instead of driving many of the coefficients to 0 as in lasso regression, it
pushes many values in the matrix to 0. Why ‘graphical’? Because the precision
matrix can be shown to correspond uniquely to an undirected graph(more on this
in later sections). In other words, the goal of graphical lasso is to induce
from your data an undirected graph with sparse connections. This fact will
come handy later when we try to illustrate the ETF graph and identify possible
clusters. For a more mathematically concrete treatment of the algorithm,
please refer to this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_lasso for now, or stay tuned in for my
second article in this series, which analyzes the algorithm step by step. In
this experiment, let us use the daily closing prices of the tickers. We will
use historical data provided by Yahoo Finance.
Microsoft Edge Ramps Up The Browser Wars With Stellar New Features To Beat Chrome
Privacy and security are a key battle in the browser wars as users become
increasingly aware of what’s happening to their data. This is even more
important as people work from home during the pandemic—and Edge has been aware
of this when launching recent feature updates. But there are some obstacles to
Edge being seen as a privacy-based browser. A few months ago, Edge came under
fire for privacy violations, and its move to bring the browser to Windows has
irked some users. Meanwhile, Chrome recently introduced new featured to
help address user concerns about security and privacy. But a new report by NSS
Labs actually saw Microsoft’s Edge beat Chrome in the security stakes. Because
it uses Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, Edge was found to offer the best
phishing protection compared with the other browsers tested, blocking 95.5% of
phishing URLs. Google, which uses the Safe Browsing API, came second at 86.9%.
As Microsoft focused site OnMsft reports, another separate NSS Labs report
shows how Edge also has better malware protection than rivals Chrome, Firefox
and Opera. Microsoft Edge blocks 98.5% of malware, while second place Firefox
blocks an average of 86.1%, followed by Google Chrome at 86.0%.
Garbage in, garbage out: Data science, meet evidence-based medicine
Scales said he doesn't think there's a single person at Cochrane who doesn't
recognize this is a potential issue. It's more a question of what to do about
it, and a consensus does not exist. Scales referred to data science experience
to establish that trying to weed out bias out of data is extremely difficult.
"You essentially have to pick which biases you want. Or at least try to be as
transparent as possible about what biases might be there, or make the data and
metadata as transparent as possible, so other people can look through it to
decide what the biases are," Scales said. There is several suggested solutions
along these lines, Scales added. Some people suggest that more public money be
put into RCTs because they're essentially a public good. A way to reduce bias
is to make sure that non-biased studies are set up. Using public money to do
those studies could help ensure there's not one particular interest being
represented. Others point out the fact RCTs can be enormous multi-year
undertakings that get summarized in what's often an eight-page journal
article. Many important details and potential biases are being left out.
Registries hosting all of the information from these trials would enable
digging into the weeds and deciding whether there are any additional biases
from the original raw data.
Digital transformation ROI: 7 ways to improve
Worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies and services will
reach $2.3 trillion in 2023, forecasts IDC in its Worldwide Semiannual Digital
Transformation Spending Guide. That will mark an important milestone, notes
Craig Simpson, research manager at IDC’s Customer Insights and Analysis Group:
It will be the first time digital transformation will account for the majority
of IT spending (53 percent) in the IDC forecast. Measuring the return on this
increasingly significant category of the technology budget is tricky since
these initiatives transcend functional and business boundaries and take time
to yield results. But IT leaders can take a number of actions to boost the
long-term value that their organizations derive from digital transformation
dollars. Taking these steps is especially important now for IT leaders, who
face greater funding hurdles as the pandemic puts pressure on technology
budgets. “Return on investment (ROI) analysis is an important component of the
business justification behind any digital transformation effort,” says
Elizabeth Ebert, IT advisory lead for North America at IT consultancy and
service provider Avanade.
Cybersecurity basics more important than ever in the new normal of remote work
There are a small number of really important cybersecurity hygiene actions, so
think about it in the current climate as washing your hands from a
cybersecurity perspective, that businesses can do to really eliminate the risk
associated with a lot of common cybersecurity threats. So some examples of
this are enabling strong multi-factor authentication or ensuring that you're
rapidly patching all of your devices to it to inoculate them against known
vulnerabilities, to prevent things like ransomware attacks. And then finally,
treating cybersecurity like a team sport, building a culture of awareness in
your company so that all the employees in your company can act like security
trailblazers. ... One of the concepts that I think sometimes gets lost in
these security conversations is the concept of ethics and how data is used,
and I know these overlap quite a bit. What's the role in working with people
who are looking at the ethical use of data? So you maybe have something like
least privileged required, a concept of saying, "Hey, look, for security
purposes, only a certain number of industries or with certain roles need to
have access to this data."
Ali Baba and the forty cyberthreats
Some translations specify kitchen scales, some say that it was a pot of some
kind, but it’s not a weighty detail, so to speak. What’s important is that the
curious Kasim’s wife smears the bottom of the instrument with honey (suet in
some translations) to find out why her relative needs it all of a sudden. And
when it’s returned, lo and behold, a gold coin is stuck to the bottom — which
means that her sister-in-law was using it to count gold! Even a cyberdunce can
see that the author is describing a spyware module integrated into a
legitimate product. Kasim’s wife provides a device (under the
Measure-as-a-Service model) and spies on the activity of the client. The clear
moral of the story is: Use tools from trusted sources — and check them for
vulnerabilities and malicious implants. ... One of the gang members marks the
gate of Kasim’s house, where Ali Baba now lives, and returns with his
associates that night to slaughter its occupants. However, the cunning
Marjaneh spots the sign and marks the gates of all of the other houses on the
street in exactly the same way, thereby foiling the attack.
Don’t Mix the Paint! Primitives and Composites in the World of Software
Every software system is a solution to a problem. But if we start with
assumptions about the solution rather than clear statements of problems, we
may never figure out the best use of time and resources to provide value to
customers. Even if we had a crystal ball and knew exactly how to solve our
users’ problems, it would still not be enough. We also have to know how to get
there—the increments of value to be delivered along the way. We need to find
stepping stones to a final product, and each stone must align to something a
customer wants. How do we do this? Again, we try to work from indivisible
elements. I like to call these “semantic primitives.” We want these, our raw
materials, to be discreet and independently evaluable. Again, “don’t mix the
paint!” These are implemented in various ways. The word “requirements” gets a
lot of hate these days. “User stories” are popular, but “use cases” have
fallen out of fashion. After a blog post on Medium, “jobs-to-be-done” became
“the framework of customer needs” seemingly overnight. Regardless of how you
conceive them, the purpose is the same: to serve as building blocks for
understanding the problem we want to solve and to help us be creative as we
move along our product journey.
Quote for the day:
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