Daily Tech Digest - July 21, 2020

Why You Should Consider A Career In Data Science.

Another thing that makes data science so popular is that it accepts people of all sorts, regardless of their background and domain. People in literally any industry can move into data science and still do amazing work in their industry with the help of data science. People from the banking and finance industry, food and health sector, arts, climate science, engineering, and physics can all couple their domain knowledge and expertise with data science and make ground-breaking progress. You do not necessarily need to have a BSc or MSc in computer science or engineering in order to start a career in data science but rather couple data science with whatever career you currently have, find a problem you can solve with the combination of both and do something. Data science in combination with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and the Internet of Things has the power to literally automate anything in order to make lives easy. Automation of tasks can also bring huge progress to companies since work can now be done faster. Also, when work is done by humans, there is a natural tendency to be inconsistent and make human-related errors. Automating tasks handles these problems and gives us better results in a shorter time.


Top CEOs Agree That Culture Is The Key Before, During And After Crisis

“The One Carnegie approach, starting with myself and our executive team, really means coming together around common values. It doesn’t matter the country, language, race or religion, we wanted people to come together around our strong values. Just like Dale Carnegie would say, ‘Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.’ “The essence is that we want to value each person as an individual and as part of an organization. People value transparency and openness. When the pandemic hit, our One Carnegie foundation helped us tremendously. From a cultural standpoint, there was transparency, and we communicated very clearly what was happening and how we were responding to it. We shifted our entire global in-person training business to live online trainer delivery, and this could not have happened without a culture of working together and moving fast. Our strong culture created alignment in all 86 countries. People felt safe asking questions and working together. The results we are seeing are extraordinary.” CEO Gary Terrinoni of Brooklyn Hospital, founded in 1839 and cited as the number one safety net hospital in America, shared, “We had to move people around to be able to support the issues that we had with COVID-19, and people just stepped up. 


What to look for when modernizing the Data Lake

Whether a company is born into the digital world or has a more traditional business, they must invest and excel in tech advances such as mobility, cloud computing, and most importantly, advancedanalytics and data science. Doing so will equip them with the right tools to innovate their existing operations and deliver a seamless experience to customers. However, it isn’t that easy to achieve this goal. To realize the benefits of advances in technologies, organizations must leverage all their data. This requires modernizing their data architectures. In other words, organizations must unlock andmigratetheir data from multiple, heterogeneous systems including legacy mainframe systems and enterprise applications, and quickly process and refine it for consumption in AI and ML initiatives. Modern, cloud-based data lakes provide enterprises the agility and flexibility they need to store and process massive volumes of diverse data. Things to keep in mind when architecting a modern data lake. Data architectures are constantly evolving. Companies are adding new sources of data, offloading data to new target systems for processing and refining, and adding new analytical tools and solutions to their technology infrastructure.


If software architects' soft skills fail, so does the business

The history of software development contains rich lessons, both good and bad. We assume that current capabilities (like elastic scale) just appeared one day because of some clever developer, but those ideas were often born of hard lessons. Pets.com represents an early example of hard lessons learned. Pets.com appeared in the early days of the internet, hoping to become the Amazon.com of pet supplies. Fortunately, they had a brilliant marketing department, which invented a compelling mascot: a sock puppet with a microphone that said irreverent things. The mascot became a superstar, appearing in public at parades and national sporting events. Unfortunately, management at Pets.com apparently spent all the money on the mascot, not on infrastructure. Once orders started pouring in, they weren't prepared. The website was slow, transactions were lost, deliveries delayed, and so on … pretty much the worst-case scenario. So bad, in fact, that the business closed shortly after its disastrous Christmas rush, selling the only remaining valuable asset (the mascot) to a competitor. What the company needed was elastic scale: the ability to spin up more instances of resources, as needed. 


Successful innovation doesn’t have to be disruptive—it’s often small, incremental, and fast

The tension between breakthrough and incremental approaches can be found in most settings, not just online businesses. For example, medicine has had a long tradition of searching for interventions that have transformative outcomes on patients. But perhaps, as surgeon and researcher Atul Gawande argues, success “is not about episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress.” That, Gawande continues, “is what making a difference really looks like. In fact, it is what making a difference looks like in a range of endeavors.” One endeavor, manufacturing, has known and practiced this approach for decades. In Toyota’s renowned production system, for example, real-time experiments by its factory workers to eradicate problems are an integral part of its continuous improvement system. Even there, people are expected to form clearly articulated, testable hypotheses and explain their logic for each attempted improvement. Of course, breakthrough and disruptive innovation will continue to play an important role in driving growth, as there are limits to incremental approaches.


Determining and overcoming blockchain fatigue

“Blockchain fatigue sets in mainly due to the fact that not many people fully understand what this technology offers and so have difficulties trying to implement it into their business or process. This lack of understanding can lead to frustration and consequently a dwindling enthusiasm for the technology. “While still in its infancy, blockchain is perhaps stretching the patience of those who were initially overly optimistic about the technology. The continued lack of full-scale implementation of blockchain is creating this sense of fatigue as there are still no end-to-end fully deployable solutions available for enterprises. “Most of the work still focuses on small pilot projects and this, coupled with technology immaturity, lack of standards and a general misunderstanding of how blockchain technology works and what it offers, is also contributing to the market feeling fatigued with blockchain.” While usage of blockchain within various sectors continues to grow and develop beyond its best known function within cryptocurrencies, a recent study from Deloitte shows that a rising number of senior executives and practitioners worldwide are seeing the technology as overhyped, with 55% stating this in 2020. With this in mind, what must organisations do to overcome blockchain fatigue and continue to keep faith?


How Quantum Mechanics will Change the Tech Industry

In a digital computer, the system requires bits to increase its processing power. Thus, in order to double the processing power, you would simply double the amount of bits — this is not at all similar in quantum computers. A quantum computer uses qubits, the basic unit of quantum information, to provide processing capabilities unmatched even by the world’s most powerful supercomputers. How? Superposed qubits can simultaneously tackle a number of potential outcomes (or states, to be more consistent with our previous segments). In comparison, a digital computer can only crunch through one calculation at a time. Furthermore, through entanglement, we are able to exponentially amplify the power of a quantum computer, particularly when comparing this to the efficiency of traditional bits in a digital machine. To visualise the scale, consider the sheer amount of processing power each qubit provides, and now double it. But there’s a catch — even the slightest vibrations and temperature changes, referred to by scientists as “noise”, can cause quantum properties to decay and eventually, disappear altogether. While you can’t observe this in real time, what you will experience is a computational error.


Remote work is the new normal. But the tech problems won't go away

Once the technical issues are overcome, there is much to be gained from an off-premise workforce. Employees themselves seem to draw a better work-life balance out of telecommuting; in fact, three-quarters of UK employees have reported not wanting to go back to the office full-time. Half of the business leaders surveyed by Riverbed named a better work-life balance as a bottom-line benefit for their employees as a result of remote working. An equal proportion of respondents also mentioned savings from office space, and 43% said that they expected flexible working to increase productivity. "In a year's time, I believe the biggest difference to everyday work will be that people will be much more available, without all of the complications and logistics that we have always known, and this will make them more efficient and productive," says Bombagi. Since the start of the crisis, he has noticed that he can fit in up to eight virtual customer meetings on a given day, where he could previously only do two, and only if they were both based in London.  His working day used to be planned around logistics: "If I'm going to be on the Tube, I know I can't make a call. If I'm driving somewhere, I can make a call, but I can't do a presentation. If I'm on a plane, apart from some email, I can't really do anything," says Bombagi.


Quantum Computing: Looking Ahead To Endless Possibilities

It’s a strange behavior of quantum mechanics whereby the more complex the calculation is, the more impressive the algorithm becomes. Sometimes the result of square root acceleration is trumped by completing calculations in a logarithm of the time — so exponentially faster. Essentially, unlike the computers we know and use, it’s not a simulation or manufactured programmatic function that’s doing the calculating — it’s the quantum world, which needs to be maintained at almost absolute zero temperature with no interruptions or interactions with its surroundings. We’re so far away from these realities in an applicatory sense, but the fact that we know they are there — and in a few special cases, they already exist — is enough of a reason to begin thinking. If we don’t acknowledge the potential and possibilities now, by the time it does become application-worthy, the AI contingent will have already missed the boat. The aforementioned "few special cases" so far include the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Intel, as well as Google. They are further ahead than anyone else has been in history to unlocking the scope of quantum computing. To be able to wade through vast swathes of data laden with millions and billions of constraints, all in the blink of an eye.


Bringing NetOps Up to Speed With DevOps

Fortunately for NetOps teams, myriad networking vendors today readily offer pre-built, certified solutions for DevOps platforms, making it easier to get started on a cloud-native journey by automating activities such as device onboarding and configuration changes. This way, network administrators can leverage existing vendor partnerships, in-house knowledge and technology that is already proven within the larger IT environment. Additionally, network engineers shouldn’t need—and won’t have the extra time—to become top-notch developers to take advantage of programmability during their cloud-native journey. Developing basic programming skills is advantageous, but network management systems that offer Python scripting, a consistent set of APIs and webhooks can perform the “heavy lifting” when it comes to enabling extensibility with third-party IT platforms. Today, this level of extensibility includes being able to integrate with third-party IT service management tools. A common use case that can realize significant time savings and greater network and application availability is to auto-trigger and assign an incident ticket when a performance SLA is breached. 



Quote for the day:

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there." -- John Buchan

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