What Tech Jargon Reveals about Bias in the Industry
Tech language was developed back in the early days of modern computing during
a time when globally racism was much more explicit and often went
unchallenged. But there is no reason we can’t change that language. It’s not
embedded in the code itself; it’s just how we talk about these concepts. I
recently heard of an example where a team of coders working on a solution had
to go through the “blacklist and whitelist” of terms/commands for a specific
product. The “blacklist” was terms/commands they couldn’t or shouldn’t use
while the “whitelist” was stuff that’s OK. Because of the Black Lives Matter
movement and what’s in the news, they noticed these terms in a new light for
the first time and changed the language they were using to avoid using those
racialized terms. It’s easy to just use different words, so why not? It’s an
easy low-cost, low-tech solution to change language and improve output.
Recently, Microsoft removed terms like these from their documentation.
Cloudflare is debiasing some of the terms used in their coding. There are no
reasons why such simple conscious actions can’t be undertaken for the benefit
of us all. The benefits of diversity are widely stated. But they’re actually
only available to companies when they include people.
How to make remote pair programming work
When you cannot assemble a team physically, turn to pair programming remotely. But to see the benefits of remote pair programming, approach the practice systematically with one of the following styles: unstructured, driver/navigator or ping-pong. Plan pair programming remotely with decisions about the team's skill level: Should novices work with experts, or is a different approach better? Editor's note: Interest in remote pair programming has risen during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Developers working in distributed, at-home settings for the first time should also check out tips to empower productive remote dev teams, and insights into psychological safety when the workplace is suddenly part of home life. ... Most pair programming relationships fall into the unstructured style, where two programmers work together in an ad hoc manner. With the collaboration being loosely guided, both programmers should have matching skill levels. A common variant of this style is the unstructured expert-novice pair, where an expert programmer guides a novice. An unstructured approach is hard to discipline and unlikely to persist on longer projects. Unstructured pair programming is also harder to sustain remotely than styles with established guidelines.Enterprise Architecture: What It Is, Why It's Important And How To Talk About It
The enterprise architect’s ultimate goal is to enact effective and measurable
change. To do so, architects work to create not just a complete picture of the
organization, but also roadmaps that represent different desired future
states. By mapping out the paths to desired future states, they can decide the
best path to take—with metrics to back up that decision showing how much
better the organization will operate once changes are made. With precise
understanding of the tradeoffs that come with each potential scenario,
architects can propose multiple solutions in line with changing strategies.
These scenarios can be optimized for different business outcomes, like growth,
cost optimization, risk reduction, etc., and ultimately drive important
business decisions that can be confidently backed with data. Modern enterprise
architecture tools go far beyond the old-school perceptions of EA as a simple
visualization tool, and now include dynamic and collaborative data that
supports the different ways to model future states. One example of enterprise
architecture in action comes from New Zealand’s largest retail grocery
organization, Foodstuffs, which implemented enterprise architecture to help it
stay agile and competitive.
Intel details Horse Ridge II as helping overcome quantum computing hurdle
Horse Ridge II, Intel says, supports "enhanced capabilities and higher
levels of integration for elegant control of the quantum system". New
features include the ability to manipulate and read qubit states and control
the potential of several gates required to entangle multiple qubits. Horse
Ridge II builds on the first-generation system-on-chip (SoC) ability to
generate radio frequency pulses to manipulate the state of the qubit, known
as qubit drive. "With Horse Ridge I, we essentially were able to drive the
qubit, basically apply signals that would manipulate the state of the qubit
between 0-1; with Horse Ridge II, we can not only drive the qubit, but we
can read out the state of the qubit, we can apply pulses that would allow us
to control the interaction between two qubits, and so we've added additional
controller capabilities to Horse Ridge II," Clarke said. "We have a very
programmable filter that would allow us to send a variety of different pulse
shapes to control our qubits, we have an integrated microcontroller, we have
a lot of DACs -- digital to analogue controllers -- that would allow us to
control the individual qubits to a greater extent and these DACs would
otherwise be discrete boxes in a control rack external to the refrigerator,
so we're starting to take some of these boxes and put them into our SoC
inside of our qubit refrigerator."
What organisations should expect next in the evolution of data
Before Covid-19 hit, data was already becoming fundamental to organisations’
future success. That journey has been supercharged. According to new
research from Druva, 79% of IT decision makers in the US and UK now see data
management and protection as key to competitive advantage. Similarly, 73%
say they rely more heavily on data for business decisions, while 33% believe
its value has permanently increased since the pandemic began. Therefore, if
the message for IT leaders on their data strategy pre-pandemic was ‘get
moving’, in 2021 it will be ‘go faster’. As the move towards a digitally-led
future gathers pace, we’ll see a growing number of organisations move to
make data a pervasive part of everything, from operational decision-making
to customer experiences. Rapid availability and analysis will be vital.
That’s not to say this transformation comes without risk. The same Druva
research found 73% of IT decision makers have become more concerned about
protecting their data from ransomware, and rightly so. Many report a
year-on-year increase in phishing, malware and ransomware attacks. With
large numbers of people working outside the office and some high-profile
recent successes for cyber criminals, we can expect this threat to grow
further in 2021.
Blockchain Attempts To Secure The Supply Chain
Counterfeiting is a real and growing problem. “We have several customers who
are very concerned about counterfeiting and other security issues, and they
are thinking of multiple ways to secure their ICs and systems,” said Geoff
Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. This is partly the role of identity, but identity
may not be sufficient without the further knowledge of the history of the
item. And that history can involve an enormous range of considerations. How
much to include must balance the cost of tracking and storing data about
huge numbers of individual components and systems against the consequences
of having too little historical information. “Blockchains provide a
convenient means to permanently record transactions, and they have
application to the provenance of components,” said John Hallman, product
manager for trust and security at OneSpin Solutions. Dave Huntley, business
development at PDF Solutions and co-chair of three SEMI committees/task
forces, elaborated further. “When a new asset like a package is assembled,
it is enrolled as a brand-new asset on the blockchain, along with its bill
of materials,” he said. “You now have a genealogy, and you could take a
module from a car, open it up, figure out the printed circuit board and
slide it out, open that up, look at the packages inside, open one of them
up, and look at the die inside. ...”
Building real cyber resiliency in government
While threats are constantly evolving, Branko Bokan, a cybersecurity
specialist at CISA, said the tactics, techniques and procedures are
actually the same -- the real change is in the distribution type and
frequency of these attacks. “Regardless of how well we try to prevent
cyberattacks, they will always happen, and we have to be ready and able to
detect bad things when they happen, or as soon as possible after they
happen,” he said. Often, organizations think of cybersecurity as
preventing/protecting networks against cyber threats – but that is just
one element of the cybersecurity framework, as outlined by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST framework includes five
functions, which match the pillars for cyber resiliency: identify,
protect, prevent, respond and recover. By dividing cybersecurity into
these five stages, agencies can identify cyber actions adversaries might
take. It can also help them create a coverage map of the threat landscape
to see how their current capabilities can protect, detect and respond to
each one of these actual threat actions – and identify where the gaps are.
As agencies take a threat-based approach to security, cloud is also
playing a large role in resiliency plans.
Microsoft Cloud Security Exec Talks New Tech, WFH, Gamification
From a cloud operator's perspective, Ollmann is seeing the growth of cloud
security posture management (CSPM) technologies, which are meant to help
security teams bring together their assets and resources in one place to
better manage and understand their cloud infrastructure. "CSPM has
been that vehicle for providing visibility of security risk,
vulnerabilities, vulnerability management, and then a little bit of
gamification to enable and help customers and organizations improve their
security posture as they go along," he explained. Security posture
management gives infosec teams visibility and control while managing
policies. The gamification – a "loose interpretation" of the term, Ollmann
noted – is in the score, which informs teams of the risk or security value
in a particular asset, resource, application, or environment as a whole.
Every vulnerability and poor or absent configuration has a value tied to
it. By addressing the weaknesses, a team can increase its overall security
score. "Security will never be 100%, so hopefully as you develop these
sorts of things, you keep improving on your score," he said. Some larger
businesses have multiple apps in multiple environments, and teams compete
against one another to boost their numbers.
The resurgence of enterprise architecture
Because enterprise architecture enables a business to map out all their
systems and processes and how they connect together, EA is becoming a
“very important method and tool to drive forward digital transformation,”
said Christ. He explained that since most transformations don’t start off
as greenfield projects, about 70% of them fail due to their existing IT
landscape. Having a solid baseline, which EA aims to provide, is crucial
for any transformation initiative. “The reason for this is that once
you’ve started a transformation program, you discover new dependencies
because of applications connected to other systems that you never knew of
before. So replacing them with better applications, with newer interfaces,
and with better APIs all of a sudden isn’t as easy as you thought when you
were starting the transformation program,” he explained. Businesses
also want to understand where their investments in the IT landscape are
going, and connect the business strategic goals to the activities in their
transformation program. “This is where enterprise architecture can help
you. It allows you to look at this whole hierarchy of objectives and
programs you are setting up, the affected applications you are having, and
the underlying changes in detail,” said Christ.
Quantum Acceleration in 2020
Many frameworks and tools have emerged for developing quantum applications
based on these algorithms. Microsoft’s Quantum Development Kit (QDK), for
example, provides a tool set integrated with leading development
environments, open-source resources, and the company’s high-level
programming language, Q#. It also offers access to quantum inspired
optimization (QIO) solvers for running optimization problems in the cloud.
For building quantum circuits and algorithms that take advantage of quantum
processors, IBM offers Qiskit, an open-source quantum computing library for
Python. Cirq is yet another quantum programming library created by the team
of scientists and engineers at Google. It contains a growing set of
functionalities allowing users to manipulate and simulate quantum circuits.
Finally, Quil is a quantum programming toolkit from Rigetti that also
provides a diverse array of functionalities and data structures for
supporting quantum computation. There are also packages, such as Xanadu’s
Strawberry Fields and D-Wave's Leap, aimed at quantum backends that are not
based on the gate model paradigm. In addition, we see the ongoing creation
of domain-specific tools, such as OpenFermion and Xanadu’s PennyLane,
purpose-built for running quantum chemistry and quantum machine learning
applications, respectively.
Quote for the day:
"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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