Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 24, 2014

Ford to Add Pedestrian Detection to Its Cars
Like other automakers, Ford is also experimenting with more complete automation. Its bigger Detroit rival, General Motors, plans to offer a Cadillac by 2017 that can drive automatically on freeways. But Ford’s new system also reflects a more incremental and cautious approach, in contrast to Google, which has committed to delivering full autonomy. Google’s latest prototype vehicles originally came without a steering wheel and didn’t feature brakes that were operable by its human passengers, although it was forced to add such controls so it could legally test the cars on the road.

Congratulations Hadoop, You Made It–Now Disappear
That’s not to say that there will no longer be a need for geeky technologies like Pig and Sqoop and Flume–or for Teradata, EMC, or Oracle, for that matter. In fact, Cloudera just announced partnerships with the first two. And there’s more geeky technology on the horizon, particularly with Apache Spark, which is gathering huge momentum among developers and ISVs because it enables them to build big data analytic workloads without the complicatedness of first-gen Hadoop. But even if Spark and the rest help abstract away some of the underlying complexity, the complexity is still there under the covers.

Be Careful! Backups Can Bite You!
Every time you perform a backup in SQL Server, you must specify the target media for the backup. This is called a media set. It is called a set, because you can specify multiple backup devices. A media set is an ordered collection of backup devices (tapes, disk files or Azure Blobs) that contains one or more backup sets. A backup set is the content that is added to a media set by a successful backup operation, striped between the backup devices in the media set.The problem lies with the backup and restore operations. Before I explain what happened, let me give you a brief explanation of the way SQL Server handles backup operations…

The Role of the Technical Architect in Development
Responsibility for the quality and effectiveness of code is, of course, shared by the whole team; however, an architect needs to challenge the team and help it to implement even better code which meets industry standards. This can be achieved by evangelising and promoting good practises (SOLID, KISS, DRY), tools (FxCop, StyleCop), metrics - or just by giving a good example in doing regular development tasks. This last aspect is very important because it helps the architect to stay close to the team and technical nuances as well as allowing him to double-check how well the proposed design materialises in code.

7 Big Data Blunders You're Thankful Your Company Didn't Make
Big data, especially the right data, has the potential to completely transform how companies communicate with their customers and fans. With new technology and tools like sensors and beacons, we can track every aspect of a customer’s online and offline interaction with a brand, and use that data to customize and curate content and promotions. Many customers are willing to share their data with brands in return for personalized experiences and offers that offer value while still being respectful of personal boundaries. In a recent survey by SDL, 79% of respondents said they’re more likely to provide personal information to brands that they “trust.”

AVG adds identity services to Cloudcare platform
The latest addition - identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) - is designed to provide managed service providers with an option of secure sing-on to monitor and manage their customers. Mike Foreman, AVG's general manager, SMB, said that it was responding to market needs, "to help MSPs grow their businesses further by enhancing the levels of protection and control built in to their customer services". “We know that with the rapid adoption of mobile, BYOD and Cloud applications customers will require additional expertise from partners to help control and manage all their users’ applications and data. We are listening," he added.

World's Wireless Record Breaks 40 Gbit/s
"We have designed our circuits with very high bandwidth, greater than 30 GHz, in an advanced semiconductor process -- 250 nanometer DHBT [double heterojunction bipolar transistor] with four metal-layers offered by Teledyne Scientific of Thousand Oaks, Calif.," Zirath told us. The team has been working on this invention for over a decade, finally pulling all the pieces together this year. "We started research on millimeter-wave transceivers about 12 years ago. We have also been focusing on high-data-rate transmission research for over six years. Over these years of hard work, we have gradually built up a knowledge base from many people's results.

Will Free Data Become the Next Free Shipping?
Those rising costs mean companies trying to deliver products or services to mobile devices face an extra hurdle: Not only do they have to sell potential users on the idea, they also have to convince them it’s worth the hit to their data plans. A new service launching this week called Freeway allows users of AT&T smartphones to access a number of sites, including StubHub.com and Expedia.com, data free. Users of the app, which is made by a Seattle-based company called Syntonic, can also watch a trailer for the independent film “Frank vs. God” without it counting against their data plan.

Who Makes Your Health IT Decisions?
Modern IT governance embraces this by placing key IT decisions in the hands of those clinical and operational partners. If your chief medical officer, your chief nursing officer (CNO), your director of patient financial services, and your health information management director have the final say about your IT budget, it changes the game. Now they have to understand the value of IT and choose the initiatives that make sense. Your CIO and IT staff have to translate IT arcana into language that makes operational sense and generate questions that have operationally focused answers. This isn't wasted time. It's critical engagement work that makes sure that scarce organizational dollars wind up in the right place and in the right hands to drive the mission of the health system.

Going beyond the PC and the tablet: How to be authentically digital
We're already starting to use elements of machine learning in our day-to-day lives, with cloud scale AIs adding context to our device interactions. Both Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana are able to use location as a tool for adding context to a query - so what if we could use that context in a digital workflow? It's easy to imagine a near future hybrid of Storyteller and Sway, where our building site surveyor is photographing work in progress on a building retro-fit. He takes a series of photographs, which are automatically wrapped as a report using real-time speech recognition to convert his spoken notes into captions.

Quote for the day:

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -- African Prover

October 23, 2014

Generic pagination in C# for .NET WebAPI

The idea is really simple, and it's not a lot of code, but it's guaranteed to save you time in your next .NET WebAPI project. It's built with Entity Framework in mind, but it will work with any IQueryable collection. We use IQueryable because at the time of pagination, you should not have executed your query yet in most cases. Otherwise you would be fetching the full list of items before just returning a few of them, rather than fetching only those few to begin with. Of course if you need to fetch the whole list (to perform a calculation on each result perhaps) you can do that as well and simply cast the list AsQueryable() when you pass it to the pager.

How to Design for Discovery
Disruptive vendors focus on providing tools that facilitate discovery by design; they provide tools and technology solutions that make the end user more independent. Yet, self-sufficiency doesn’t happen in a silo. True discovery tools provide users the ability to connect to large volumes of new data and easily join different data sets together to filter, query, and visualize to explore data in detail without choking the system or relying on IT. Navigating the “new breed” of truly disruptive discovery tools means we must concentrate first and foremost on the elements that make a tool designed for discovery – with a robust, agile IT-independent and user-centric approach that has better access to data, agile high-performance,

Abandoned subdomains pose security risk for businesses
The risk to website owners depends on what can be done on a third-party service once a domain is pointed to it. If the service allows users to set up Web pages or Web redirects, attackers could exploit the situation to launch credible phishing attacks by creating rogue copies of the main website. In an attack scenario described by Detectify, a company might set up a subdomain for use with an external support ticketing service, but later close its account and forget to delete the subdomain. Attackers could then create a new account with the same service and claim the company’s subdomain, which already has the needed DNS settings, as their own, allowing them to set up a fake website on it.

Capitalizing on the data driven revolution
Despite the potential of big data, managing the massive amounts of data generated by customers and enterprises can be overwhelming. CMOs are constantly hearing about how they must use data to evaluate their marketing campaigns, operations managers are well aware that the use of data can optimize their supply chain, and finance executives are clamoring for ways to use analytics to realize cost savings. However, many organizations don’t know where to start or are stuck at an unsatisfactory halfway point.

Gmail’s New Inbox App Puts the Important Stuff on Top
Like-kind messages are grouped together in bundles so you can easily sort through a collection of messages quickly. The “social” and “promotions” tabs found in Gmail are default bundles in Inbox. You can tap into a “promotions” bundle, glance over all the companies who’d like to sell you stuff, and if nothing jumps out at you, swipe the entire collection of emails away and out of your view (doing this can archive or delete your emails in both Inbox and Gmail, depending on how you set up the app). The goal is that you’ll be able to open Inbox up and see a stream you can quickly browse through, acting on what you want and discarding the rest.

Happy 10th Birthday, Selenium
Selenium as a technology is now 10 years old. ThoughtWorks is proud to have created and open-sourced what is now the defacto-standard for cross platform cross browser web-app functional testing. We’re also proud to have released it as open source for the greater good. In honor of its 10th birthday, we put together the below timeline. Here’s to another 10 successful years.

U.S. national security prosecutors shift focus from spies to cyber

As part of the shift, the Justice Department has created a new position in the senior ranks of its national security division to focus on cyber security and recruited an experienced prosecutor, Luke Dembosky, to fill the position. The agency is also renaming its counter-espionage section to reflect its expanding work on cases involving violations of export control laws, Carlin confirmed in an interview. Such laws prohibit the export without appropriate licenses of products or machinery that could be used in weapons or other defense programs, or goods or services to countries sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Lessons in cybersecurity launched for schoolchildren
Ken Mackenzie, head of at Sedgehill School, said that presenting students with the opportunities to expand their digital skills was one of the key reasons why the school signed up. “Students at our school may live in London but they don’t necessarily experience London in the same way that students from more affluent backgrounds would. We feel computing is a particular strength at the school and we work hard to make sure we are presenting students with a full range of opportunities.” However, Mr Mackenzie also stressed that, aside from enhancing digital skills, the focus on careers was one that appealed to the school.

Sweat and a smartphone could become the hot new health screening
Heikenfeld says future applications for the patch could involve drug monitoring. "A lot of drug metabolites come out of sweat, so by using this technology, doctors can help patients take drug dosages more evenly. Our current methods, often based on age or body weight, are extremely crude when you think about all the side effects listed on the warning labels." "Ultimately, sweat analysis will offer minute-by-minute insight into what is happening in the body, with on-demand, localized, electronically stimulated sweat sampling in a manner that is convenient and unobtrusive," Heikenfeld concludes in the article.

Regulation on cloud security may spur SaaS use in health care
"The role of government is to move toward that transparency and data sharing," he said. Governments could also pass legislation that gives people more access to the data companies have collected on them and the ability to control it, such as correcting wrong information, said Ralph Zottola, CTO of the research computing division at the University of Massachusetts. "People are smart and are willing to participate but they need to feel they're not being abused," he said. This applies to all industries, not just health care, he said.

Quote for the day:

"A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and those who are doing well to do even better." -- Jim Rohn

October 22, 2014

8 cutting-edge technologies aimed at eliminating passwords
In the beginning was the password, and we lived with it as best we could. Now, the rise of cyber crime and the proliferation of systems and services requiring authentication have us coming up with yet another not-so-easy-to-remember phrase on a near daily basis. Is any of it making those systems and services truly secure? One day, passwords will be a thing of the past, and a slew of technologies are being posited as possibilities for a post-password world. Some are upon us, some are on the threshold of usefulness, and some are likely little more than a wild idea.

The Software-Defined Data Center: Translating Hype into Reality
Software-defined technologies are driven by virtualization, an abstraction layer which uses hypervisors and virtual machines to organize and manage workloads in new ways. Provisioning virtual resources with software makes it easier to scale applications and use hardware efficiently. Software-defined networking holds the promise of reducing costs by shifting network management task to commodity servers rather than expensive switches. It’s a new world, with major implications for infrastructure. Virtual machines make it easier to move workloads from one location to another, a capability that unlocks a world of possibilities.

'Internet of things' data should be 'treated as personal data', say privacy watchdogs
"When purchasing an internet of things device or application, proper, sufficient and understandable information should be provided," the declaration said. "Current privacy policies do not always provide information in a clear, understandable manner. Consent on the basis of such policies can hardly be considered to be informed consent. Companies need a mind shift to ensure privacy policies are no longer primarily about protecting them from litigation." The declaration outlined the DPA's backing for new technology that accounts for privacy by the way it has been designed. The concepts of 'privacy by design' and 'privacy by default' "should become a key selling point of innovative technologies", it said.

Why You Should Kill Your Employee of the Month Program
While rewards and recognition programs are designed with the good of employees, teams, and the company in mind, they tend to backfire for a simple reason. When you raise one person up on a pedestal, it leaves others below on the ground. And some of those left behind may feel resentful. Perhaps they contributed to the effort that's being recognized, or even came up with the original idea. Maybe they were part of a team that facilitated a key component to the successful outcome, but it happened behind the scenes where you couldn't see it. The point is, when you single someone out as the hero, it can make others who are just as worthy feel like goats.

Addressing 5 Objections to Big Data
Big data is all the rage these days. It has transitioned from just a hype word that people liked to throw around to sound smart to a technology that’s completely changing the world. Still, people try to minimize the importance of big data. Whenever something good comes around, there are people that will try and fight it. That can surely be said about big data. There are numerous objections to big data and what it can do, but most of these objections are unfounded and can easily be refuted by those who understand the big data industry. Let’s take a look at five common objections to big data and the responses for each one.

Back to the Future was right: a working hoverboard will be available in 2015
The big catch is that the Hendo can only hover over some types of metal. At the Arx Pax office, we hovered over a floor and half pipe covered in copper. That’s because the board generates a magnetic field. When there is a sheet of metal underneath, it is powerful enough to push the board upward (it’s the same technology as a Maglev train). The developer kit can support up to 40 pounds. The Hendo board can support up to 300 pounds, with support for 500 pounds planned for the future. It only dipped for a fraction of a second when I hopped on.

Keep calm and plug the holes
With network monitoring and analysis in place, you need to think about how best to make use of the data. Don’t be too quick to throw it out. Network analysis tools have gotten a lot better than what was out there in the ’90s and early 2000s. It’s easier now to sift through huge amounts of data in a relatively short amount of time. When a zero day is published, that data can be useful for taking a look back at what had been happening prior to the zero day being published. You also need to have workarounds in place so that you’re not entirely dependent on outright fixes when zero days pop up.

The Untapped Potential Inside Social Media, Analytics (Part 2 of 2)
Grady, the social media analytics and enterprise search sales manager at Information Builders, has worked on social media analytics, search-based business intelligence, mobile applications, predictive analytics, and dashboard design in his 15 years at the company. He blogs about social media, business intelligence and more. Grady recently spoke, along with Fern Halper, TDWI's research director of advanced analytics, at a TDWI Webinar on "Social Media Analytics – Getting Beyond Tracking the Buzz."

Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot?
The glum robot is named Takeo, and by the end of the play, it’s clear he is not the only one with problems. The man of the house is unemployed and pads around barefoot, a portrait of lethargy. At one point, his wife, Ikue, begins to weep. Takeo communicates this development to his fellow robot Momoko, and the two discuss what to do about it. “You should never tell a human to buck up when they are depressed,” says Takeo, who himself failed to buck up when the man attempted to cheer him with the RoboCop theme song earlier. Momoko agrees: “Humans are difficult.”

Java Sleight of Hand
Every now and then we all come across some code whose behaviour is unexpected. The Java language contains plenty of peculiarities, and even experienced developers can be caught by surprise. Let’s be honest, we’ve all had a junior colleague come to us and ask “what is the result of executing this code?”, catching us unprepared. Now, instead of using the usual “I could tell you but I think it will be far more educational if you find it by yourself”, we can distract his attention for a moment (hmmm.... I think I just saw Angelina Jolie hiding behind our build server. Can you quickly go and check?) while we rapidly browse through this article.

Quote for the day:

"In a number of ways Open Data improves society - for one it can grow GDP" Chris Harding, The Open Group

October 21, 2014

Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy (Richard Rumelt, 2011)
It is because crafting a good strategy takes a lot of discipline. Most managers mistakenly take strategy work as an exercise in goal setting rather than problem solving. A bad strategy is often characterized by being full of fluff, as it fails to face the challenge, mistakes goals for strategy, and comprises of bad strategic objectives (mostly misguided or impractical). Talking about the prevalence of bad strategies, the author quips that- "if you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don't have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, or budget, or a list of things you wish would happen"

Technology and Inequality
Brynjolfsson lists several ways that technological changes can contribute to inequality: robots and automation, for example, are eliminating some routine jobs while requiring new skills in others (see “How Technology is Destroying Jobs”). But the biggest factor, he says, is that the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck, and dramatically increasing their rewards. Brynjolfsson argues that these people are benefiting from a winner-take-all effect originally described by Sherwin Rosen in a 1981 paper called “The Economics of Superstars.”

Building Culture Is Always Better Than Trying to Transform It
A strengths-based approach to organizational culture is, in part, a matter of perspective. Instead of seeing the cultural glass as half empty, we see it as half full. Instead of carping on about everything that’s wrong with the organizational culture, we focus on everything that’s right. We should work with culture, instead of against it. ... But where traditional culture change often focuses on stopping old practices and starting new ones, a strengths-based approach to managing culture would instead concentrate its efforts on figuring out how to better use — amplify, optimize, intensify — the culture’s most helpful existing attributes

Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game
He’s a VB programmer (be gentle, he’s only 10), which is part of the problem schools face in teaching coding; they are supposed to teaching coding before the idea of a variable has appeared in maths. To get past this, the Doctor Who creative team have used a similar look and feel to Scratch, already in widespread use in schools to introduce coding. Although as an IT pro you take pride in mastering cryptic error messages, like “NULL pointer is not NULL at line -1” (yes, I’ve had that one), it can put off the average eight-year-old. The “Make it Digital” agenda is that every child should code, not just the smart ones, so as in Scratch, it is actually impossible to have a syntax error.

Devops has moved out of the cloud
Continuous everything is a part of the devops process, where devops is the fusing of software development (dev) with IT operations (ops). The core notion is to release high-quality code and binaries that perform well and are of good quality, and to do so much more rapidly than traditional approaches to development, testing, and deployment would allow. Many people attribute the rise of devops directly to the growth of cloud computing. The connection: It’s easy to continuously update cloud applications and infrastructure.

Health IT Interoperability Up To Market, Say Feds
One of their biggest recommendations is the immediate need within the health industry for standard, public application programming interfaces that allow disparate health systems to speak with one another. Such APIs are critical to enabling the interoperability required for electronic health information exchanges. "We believe that a standards-based API, combined with appropriate incentives to encourage vendors to implement the API and providers to enable access to their data via the API has potential to move interoperability forward dramatically," McCallie said in emailed comments.

The Benefits of an Application Policy Language in Cisco ACI: Part 4
Though the DevOps approach of today—with its notable improvements to culture, process, and tools—certainly delivers many efficiencies, automation and orchestration of hardware infrastructure has still been limited by traditional data center devices, such as servers, network switches and storage devices. Adding a virtualization layer to server, network, and storage, IT was able to divide some of these infrastructure devices, and enable a bit more fluidity in compute resourcing, but this still comes with manual steps or custom scripting to prepare the end-to-end application infrastructure and its networking needs used in a DevOps approach.

Why Apple Pay Is the Perfect Example of the Hummingbird Effect
Apple Pay will work at retail stores but it could also become the defacto standard for online purchases that add an extra security step--namely, proving your identity using the Touch ID fingerprint reader. I'm impressed with how fluid it works even at launch. There's a good lesson here for small businesses, beyond the fact that it's important to follow these tech trends and start preparing for the inevitable. In his book How We Got To Now, author Steven Johnson explains how breakthroughs in science and technology often lead to what he calls the "hummingbird effect"--essentially, a way to "piggyback" ideas on top of one another that helps catapult them into mainstream consciousness.

Best Practices for Moving Workloads to the Cloud
The adoption of cloud architecture is a process that requires strong effort for the entire enterprise. Every function, application and data have to be moved to the cloud; for this reason, it is necessary to have a strong commitment from the management. Top management is responsible for the harmonious growth of the company, and technology represents a key factor for business development today. Managers have to establish reasonable goals for adopting the cloud computing paradigm. A migration to the cloud requires a team effort to plan, design, and execute all the activities to move the workloads to the new IT infrastructure.

Crafting a secure data backup strategy on a private cloud
Backing up data is not something to be taken lightly, and a repercussion of data loss could be significant financial loss. Frequently, companies are unaware that they don't have a backup strategy in place, or that their backup product is not working properly. More often than not, this is because companies aren't devoting the necessary resources to create a proper backup strategy. Even if they do, they expect the backup product to work indefinitely. Unfortunately most things have an expiration date; the backup strategy is not any different.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in." -- Seth Godin

October 20, 2014

Is your Ethernet fast enough? Four new speeds are in the works
Work is also beginning on a 50Gbps specification, which could be the next speed offered for linking servers in data centers. Both servers and high-performance flash storage systems will drive a need for something more than 25Gbps in the biggest data centers in a few years, Weckel of Dell’Oro said. At Thursday’s event, attendees debated whether to seek a 50Gbps standard or go all the way to a single-lane system for 100Gbps. A 50Gbps specification is more within reach, said Chris Cole, director of transceiver engineering at Finisar.

How Microsoft's expected fitness band fits into its new wearables game plan
It's the Microsoft side of the wearables equation that interests me the most, however. I'm expecting the coming fitness band to have a Windows core inside the device, given Microsoft execs' insistence that Windows 10 will run "everywhere," meaning from the smallest Internet of Things devices, to datacenter servers. The Operating Systems Group team at Microsoft is building a common set of graphics, gaming and media consumption/creation services that will work on PCs, tablets, phones, Xbox consoles and wearables. .

Q&A with Futurist Martine Rothblatt
The data for evolution is so compelling that to deny it seems to me to be denying reality. Evolution is either a consequence of a material world or it’s the result of some kind of supernatural act. To me, it’s the same thing with consciousness. Either you think that consciousness is something metaphysical, or else it’s the result of physical interactions of matter. It’s because people’s brains have a series of connections, of atomic interactions, and computers could have that. To me, to deny cyber-consciousness is to deny we live in a physical universe.

Internet Of Things Will Turn Networks Inside-Out
The point where these two networks connect -- the "come hither" enablers of IoT and our current, manicured data center plumbing -- is going to be a bit like that creepy scene in Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, where Gigolo Joe is explaining to a wide-eyed 10-year-old David what he does for a living. Neither had a clue what the other's world was really like, and fortunately neither David nor data center admins really need Joe's icky details. However, the firewalls between these networks will need something entirely new, something that Software-Defined Networking only begins to offer: intelligence.

Sacrificial Architecture
Knowing your architecture is sacrificial doesn't mean abandoning the internal quality of the software. Usually sacrificing internal quality will bite you more rapidly than the replacement time, unless you're already working on retiring the code base. Good modularity is a vital part of a healthy code base, and modularity is usually a big help when replacing a system. Indeed one of the best things to do with an early version of a system is to explore what the best modular structure should be so that you can build on that knowledge for the replacement. While it can be reasonable to sacrifice an entire system in its early days, as a system grows it's more effective to sacrifice individual modules - which you can only do if you have good module boundaries.

Big Data for Finance – Security and Regulatory Compliance Considerations
Many of the traditional point security solutions that are deployed add complexity and management costs, and leave gaps between systems and applications that are highly vulnerable to attack. The increasingly global nature of the financial services industry makes it necessary to comprehensively address international data security and privacy regulations. Financial institutions are top targets of cybercrime. While all types of businesses are vulnerable to attacks by criminals, it’s the security breaches at financial firms that elicit the most media attention, public scrutiny and legislator consternation. When threats occur, it’s more than financial loss at stake.

Oracle v. Google at the Supreme Court: Industry Watchers Weigh In
"If Google wins, the status quo prevails; if Oracle wins, then Google will either have to strip out Oracle-patented IP or pay Oracle for the right to use its IP," he said. "In the latter case, Google will 'own a piece of Android,' a nice position given that Java ME is a nonstarter among smartphone and tablet OSs." Martijn Verburg, CEO of jClarity, a startup focused on automating optimization for Java and JVM-related technologies, and co-leader of the London Java Users' Group, is also sanguine about the effect of the rulings on the Java community so far.

How Microsoft is taking on the cross-platform challenge with Office
With a common C++ core, a thin native UX layer and evolving PALs, Microsoft is building its Office apps so they work on different OSes with fairly little tweaking required. Zaika cited PowerPoint as an example, noting that only four percent of its tens of millions of lines are unique to the WinRT/Universal version of Office (the touch-first Office release some of us have been calling "Gemini"). If the XAML code is excluded, the amount of shared code is 98.6 percent he said. The PowerPoint for Android code base includes 95 percent shared code, Zaika said.

Jonas Bonér on Reactive Systems Anti-Patterns
A Reactive approach is able to first isolate and contain the error to avoid it from spreading out of control—which can lead to cascading failures, taking down the whole application—and instead capture it at its root allowing fine-grained failure management and self-healing. Second, it allows you to reify the error as a message and send it to the best suitable receiver—the component best suitable for managing the failure (usually called the component’s Supervisor)—not just right back to the user of the service. Now, if the error is just an ordinary message then it can be managed just like any other message; sent asynchronously, to one or many listeners, even across the network for full resilience.

James Comey, F.B.I. Director, Hints at Action as Cellphone Data Is Locked
But F.B.I. agents see the encryption as a beachhead they cannot afford to lose. With the latest software, the new phones will be the first widely used consumer products to encrypt data by default. If that is allowed to stand, investigators fear other technology companies will follow suit. If all desktop computers and laptops were encrypted, it would stymie all kinds of criminal investigations, they say. Mr. Comey’s position has set up a potentially difficult struggle between law enforcement agencies and the nation’s high-technology manufacturers, who have rebuffed the government’s demands for a way to decode data.

Quote for the day:

“The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same.” -- Steve Maraboli

October 19, 2014

Services and Enterprise Canvas review – 3C: Validation
In practice – as can be seen in part via that list above – it’s often the case that each value and validation-service is supported by a relatively small core-team whose job it is to ‘hold the flag’ for the respective value. Also in practice, each of these core-teams would (or should) typically report direct to the organisation’s senior-executives – because in most cases, it’s that executive board who are formally liable and accountable for compliance to the respective laws, regulations and standards around that respective value.

A Big Data Strategy — A CIO Survival Tool for Today’s Organization
Even if data is useful today, it may not be useful in a month, or six months, or a year. So whenever data is stored within your system, whether on-premises or in the cloud, that data should have an end-of-life date. Yes, in some cases that date will be never, but there’s relatively little data most organizations need to preserve for all time. Any data that doesn’t meet that standard should sunset at a pre-determined time. Ideally, this should happen automatically, without further action from you or your staff.

PaaS is the Operating System
When looking at container-based PaaS offerings, such as CloudFoundry and Heroku, one can see many of these functions in operation across a set of virtual compute resources. If we consider that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), bare metal and virtualized hardware inclusive of traditional operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, all represent the modern day equivalent of a compute node in a cloud universe then we can take the leap that the PaaS provides the interface between the user and that node.

Intelligent Transportation Systems Require Intelligent Mobile Networks
Cisco also showed how Connected Transportation solutions can leverage the intelligent – and virtualized – mobile core network. We demonstrated a [fictional] after-market connected car application (“CarConcierge”) that enables users to remotely start or unlock their car, do a car “health check,” and extract car-sourced analytics over an LTE mobile network. The demonstration showed how the Connected Transportation market will see an explosion of innovative new applications that mobile operators can monetize by providing secure, intelligent, and cost-effective connectivity and process automation to devices and vehicles.

How to define the ISMS scope
You can draw your processes that are included in your ISMS scope, and then outside of this circle draw the processes that are provided from outside of your scope. By processes, I don’t mean only security or IT processes – I mean the main business processes within your scope; ... Once you know the dependencies, you have to identify the interfaces. They are important for a company to understand its ISMS boundaries, and to understand which inputs and outputs will be going through these interfaces in order to protect them better.

Why R is Better Than Excel for Fantasy Football (and most other) Data Analysis
Many articles have been written on why R is better than Excel for data analysis. In this post, I will summarize the reasons why R is advantageous in most data analysis circumstances, with a focus on fantasy football analysis. Although this post focuses on the benefits of using R for fantasy football analysis, the benefits of R extend to many other domains (e.g., finance, time series, machine learning, social sciences; for a list of different domains of R packages, see here).

Calling Dr. Algorithm
The race to develop a working tricorder is just one small aspect of a much larger movement to integrate advanced technologies into the process of delivering healthcare. Although many other fields have been massively disrupted by new technology in the past several decades, healthcare has been relatively immune to change. Unfortunately, the U.S. healthcare system (despite claims that “it is the best in the world”) has serious problems: Although U.S. per capita healthcare costs are the highest of any country in the world, the U.S. lags behind many other countries in terms of key health indicators like longevity and infant mortality.

Preparing Your Enterprise for Big Data
Big data involves the acquisition, transformation, and storage of large volumes of data and its subsequent analysis. To do this, most organizations acquire one or more ready-made solutions from vendors. A popular choice is the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA), a hybrid hardware and software solution from IBM. This hardware (sometimes called an appliance) includes a multiple terabyte disk storage array in a special-purpose hardware chassis, as well as high-speed networking cables to transfer data from enterprise storage. Once the data is stored in the appliance it can be accessed as if it were a database.

Why Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is no longer a tool or process only exercised by the IT department to capture a static image of the IT infrastructure. EA has climbed the corporate ladder and now resides with upper management as a decision support tool translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. By incorporating and integrating Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), and executive leadership’s vision, EA now takes a risk based approach to help organizations achieve mission goals and accomplish business objectives by selecting, controlling and evaluating projects to determine the best mix of projects and the right level of investment to make in each.

The State of Practice in Model-Driven Engineering
The study reflects a wide range of maturity levels with MDE: questionnaire respondents were equally split among those in early exploration phases, those carrying out their fi rst MDE project, and those with many years’ experience with MDE. Interviewees were typically very experienced with MDE. We discovered several surprises about the way that MDE is being used in industry, and we learned a lot about how companies can tip the odds in their favor when adopting it. Many of the lessons point to the fact that social and organizational factors are at least as important in determining success as technical ones. We describe elsewhere the gory details of the research approach.

Quote for the day:

"A leader should demonstrate his thoughts and opinions through his actions, not through his words." -- Jack Weatherford

October 18, 2014

Bionym's wearable authentication device ships to developers
A wearable authentication device, which communicates with devices and apps via Bluetooth, could get around that issue. "Passwords, which we still use today, are yesterday's answer to security," Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst, said in a previous interview. "We need new technology going forward. This sounds like an interesting company trying to solve a growing problem that we're all experiencing." That means the wearable could give users the convenience of being able to move about their day without remembering passwords or carrying keys, a credit card or ID.

The Emergence of the Third Platform
The successful implementation and deployment of enterprise SoR has been embodied in best practices, methods, frameworks, and techniques that have been distilled into enterprise architecture. The same level of rigor and pattern-based best practices will be required to ensure the success of solutions based on Third Platform technologies. Enterprise architecture methods and models need to evolve to include guidance, governance, and design patterns for implementing business solutions that span the different classes of system. The Third Platform builds upon many of the concepts that originated with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and dominated the closing stanza of the period dominated by the Second Platform technologies.

Press Start to Learn: How Gamification Is Changing Education
One essential element of gaming being utilized is that of visual progression. Students and gamers like to see their progress, whether it be with a level-up bar slowly being filled or actual cosmetic changes on the player’s avatar. They like knowing all the work they’re doing is having a more immediate result instead of waiting for a report card many months down the line. Some classrooms are using the idea of acquired points as a reward for students. That visible progress is an outward sign of how well they are doing.

Best Practices in Mobile Business Intelligence
Enterprise-wide integration of mobile business intelligence has many benefits for organizations, including increased workforce productivity, the ability to collaborate anytime and anywhere, and improved customer satisfaction. However, there are a number of hurdles to overcome: convincing your organization to deploy the infrastructure that is necessary for mobile security, understanding mobile versus desktop report development, incorporating the concept of bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and garnering support for utilizing a mobile device to analyze critical decision-making data.

Cloud computing terms defined in new ISO standard
"A public cloud may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organisation, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud service provider," it said. "Actual availability for specific cloud service customers may be subject to jurisdictional regulations. Public clouds have very broad boundaries, where cloud service customer access to public cloud services has few, if any, restrictions." The private cloud, in contrast, is "where cloud services are used exclusively by a single cloud service customer and resources are controlled by that cloud service customer".

The Contrarian’s Guide to Changing the World
It’s less clear whether his ideas have much to offer the rest of us. Thiel has been asking a huge question for a few years now: How can we avoid a dismal future of resource depletion, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and technological stagnation? He thinks the answer is a new wave of startups that grow as large as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon but take on bigger problems, such as curing cancer or providing cheap, clean energy. He claims we aren’t making progress on such things now because we’ve grown less ambitious as a society.

BCBS 239 – What Are Banks Talking About?
BCBS 239 set out 14 key principles requiring banks aggregate their risk data to allow banking regulators to avoid another 2008 crisis, with a deadline of Jan 1, 2016. Earlier this year, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision released the findings from a self-assessment from the Globally Systemically Important Banks (GISB’s) in their readiness to 11 out of the 14 principles related to BCBS 239. Given all of the investments made by the banking industry to improve data management and governance practices to improve ongoing risk measurement and management,

Silicon Valley's next disruption: Reality!
Microsoft Research is working on a patented technology that uses projectors to display game play onto the walls, ceiling and floor of a room. The basic application is that you play some future Xbox game. As is the case today, the main game play happens on a TV screen. Let's say you're playing a first-person shooter in a tropical jungle. IllumiRoom would project the rest of the jungle all over the room -- creating peripheral vision to the focused play on screen. This again challenges the notion of virtual reality. The room is real, but the jungle is virtual and computer-generated.

Data-Driven Business Processes Essential for Optimization
The information management issues in process design and execution are similar to those at work for analytics. However, addressing them effectively requires a different approach than just creating a separate data store to be the “single version of the truth.” Careful consideration is required to determine the best method to manage data throughout a core business process, particularly when multiple applications are required to automate and support the execution of the process. Software application platforms offered by some vendors make it far easier to integrate niche software applications into processes in a way that may eliminate the need for an operational data store.

Cloud Automation in a Windows World
There are a couple different perspectives one can take to stack up today’s Windows automation landscape. One is to compare the state of Windows automation as it stands today with its state five years ago. This might lead one to feel impressed with how much the technology has grown and you may look optimistically to the future. The other perspective is to compare today’s Windows automation ecosystem with the tooling that surrounds Linux based infrastructures. At first glance things may not look so different but the closer you look and the more you tinker, you become aware of the fact that there is an undeniable gap in maturity.

Quote for the day:

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." -- Albert Einstein

October 17, 2014

Six browser plug-ins that protect your privacy
There's one other consideration, and that's the funding behind the blocker. While most of the apps that I looked at are free or open-source, supported exclusively by donations, at least one, DoNotTrackMe, employs a freemium model (charging a subscription fee if you want advanced features), while Ghostery asks you to provide usage data. Of the six tools reviewed here, only Adblock Plus has an "acceptable ads" feature that allows advertising from Google and other paying companies, and it's turned on by default. But you can easily disable it if you want a totally ad-free experience.

The anatomy and physiology of APT attacks
Nothing in our past has happened so quickly or with as far-reaching implications and dependencies. Critical networks, utilities and other infrastructures are all intertwined with the networks of companies and governments. Almost everything that's built, designed and manufactured is on the Internet. If the Internet stopped working, the global economy would collapse. With that dependency comes issues of national security. Governments have recognized the strategic and tactical advantage of having both defensive and offensive capabilities in the electromagnetic arena.

New technique allows attackers to hide stealthy Android malware in images
In the researchers’ demonstration, the APK hidden inside the image was designed to display a picture of Darth Vader, but a real attacker could use a malicious application instead to steal text messages, photos, contacts, or other data. During the demonstration, Android displayed a permission request when the wrapper application tried to install the decrypted APK file, but this can be bypassed using a method called DexClassLoader so that the user doesn’t see anything, Apvrille said. The image wouldn’t even have to be included in the wrapper application and could be downloaded from a remote server after installation, she said.

Putting the R in the Open Source Revolution
With big data, of course, comes big data analytics. R is the statistical and data science programming language of choice. It is capable of solving complex statistical problems, applying machine learning techniques and creating very rich data visualizations, and it doesn’t care how big the data is. As an open source language, R has seen its share of development and distributions. Its thriving user community has been steadily creating packages to perform specialized techniques and reporting tools. R is perceived by some as being far more flexible and extensible than its legacy counterparts, namely SPSS and SAS. And the college kids are learning it, so it must be cool.

Isolationism, Globalization and the Role of the Colocation Provider
The UK Data Protection Act’s eighth principle states that “personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.” When you read the interpretation of the principle, it suggests that a colocation provider could be subject to “the law in force in the country or territory in question.” Does this mean that despite many colocation providers not knowing what is on a client’s server, they could be unwittingly contravening an international law and in doing so also contravening the UK Data Protection Act?

10 areas of IT risk you could be overlooking
CIOs spend hours reviewing risk management. Prominent areas of concern include disaster recovery, data breaches, and the financial viability of certain technology strategies. But there are a number of less obvious issues that IT typically overlooks -- and the negative consequences of doing so can be significant. Here are some of those under-the-radar risks.

Intel preps new technology to secure credit card transactions
"We need to make sure retailers have the tools they need to collect data from the end point and hold onto it securely," Corrion said. Consumers are also using new forms of payment, including Google Wallet and Apple Pay, which use NFC (Near Field Communication). Intel's technology can protect NFC transactions, and can create a secure layer so payment data is securely transmitted. The Intel system handles every step of a transaction, making it easier for retailers to deploy, Corrion said. Other systems use separate payment peripherals and encryption technologies, which are difficult to manage centrally, he said.

Continuous monitoring demystified
Even though continuous monitoring has been a part of the information security lexicon for several years now, many security professionals are still wondering how to get started: What technologies typically make up continuous monitoring infrastructure? What steps should you take to successfully implement these types of security controls organization-wide? Before implementing a model with specific technologies, you and your team should set high-level goals and plan to achieve the following objectives with your continuous monitoring approach:

Living With 1990 Tech for a Day – Part 1
Since my music collection is in digital form, I have no choice but to rely on the radio. Here I'm in luck. Large swathes of the New Zealand population are conservative in their musical tastes: they like what they know and they know what they like. Within moments, Fleetwood Mac's Seven Wonders drifts over the airwaves, Stevie Nicks' dulcet tones providing the perfect backdrop to my retro computing experience. Then doubt strikes me as I seem to recall that the song was from the late 80s, not 1990. The doubt vanishes when I realise that without the internet I have no easy way to check.

Why SOA Should Be Viewed As “Dependency-Oriented Thinking”
If you had to reduce the principles of SOA to one practical rule of thumb for designers, what would it be? I’m willing to bet it will be “Avoid point-to-point connections”. That’s the rule of thumb I’ve heard dozens of SOA experts provide as advice at more than a few organizations I’ve worked for. On the face of it, that sounds like perfectly reasonable advice, because everyone knows that point-to-point connections cause rigidity and brittleness, and SOA is all about flexibility and agility, right?

Quote for the day:

"One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you." -- Dennis A. Peer

October 16, 2014

McAfee highlights security challenges of a next-generation government
“The fundamental nature of the threat is unlikely to change as governments move towards the next-generation," said the report. "On one hand, new technology could reduce the number of human ‘entry points’ into the system. On the other, the human element that remained would be that most critical to the system’s operations. This could mean the impact of a breach would be more significant than in a situation with multiple users with more limited responsibilities.”

Researcher builds system to protect against malicious insiders
"Insider threats are many times the most devastating, as they are the least expected," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "Companies spend most of their security time and money guarding against external threats.... So that sometimes leaves the inside exposed." To combat this, Yao is combining big data, analytics and security to design algorithms that focus on linking human activities with network actions. Typical computer systems monitor things like network traffic, file system events and email activities. They also focus on looking for specific warning signs, like someone uploading large amounts of data.

Top 10 IT trends that rattle data center I&O
Whether it's software-defined networking, storage or data centers, software-based tools that connect computing resources and components are dispensing with traditional physical devices hard-wired or hand-configured across the data center. Software-defined anything concentrates management in a single place or tool, either on- or off-premises. These technologies also share a common goal of enhancing workload mobility and traffic flow based on logical rules, allowing workloads to be provisioned and run where they are most effective or efficient.

Google's big Android Lollipop challenge: Make Material Design stick
Google has rolled out its Nexus 9 tablet, Nexus 6 phone and Nexus Player streaming device all in a bid to show off the latest version of Android, known as Lollipop, and the glue between the screens will be a something the search giant calls Material Design. Like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, Google is on a mission to tie its various devices together and adapt content and tasks to multiple screens. Windows 10 will be all about the multiple screens. Apple's iOS 8 melds tablets and smartphones and increasingly blends in with the Mac OS too with matching design metaphors.

Startup builds on Wi-Fi chips for cheaper 'last mile' to home broadband
The Mimosa gear uses that protocol along with beam-forming features to point radio signals at individual homes. That lets it cover a whole neighborhood with transmitters placed one per kilometer or so, Fink said. In a typical setting, such a network could offer service of about 500Mbps (bits per second) both down to subscribers and back up to the Internet, he said. Mimosa has met with service providers in the U.S. and other countries and expects networks built with its technology to launch in the middle of next year. Mimosa's system uses the same unlicensed 5GHz band as Wi-Fi for the main connections between access points and homes.

How to match cloud integration tools to business needs
It really has to do with the intensity, if you will, of the integration task that is being overcome when an organization is deploying a variety of cloud [or] SaaS solutions. And in some cases, a simple API may be all that's necessary. But in many cases, especially when it comes to a couple of these who are using enterprise-class business applications across their organization and in tandem with legacy on-premises applications and data sources, depending upon the use case and business process, there's going to be a need for varying kinds of cloud integration tools and connectors and, even in some cases, platforms to satisfy their needs.

Google adds security and flexibility to latest Android mobile OS
Security enhancements include the flexibility to secure devices with a PIN, password, pattern, or by pairing a smartphone with another trusted device like a watch. This feature – called Smart Lock – is aimed at encouraging users to set passwords by making it unnecessary to type in a password whenever the trusted device is detected. The encryption of all stored data is also now a default setting to help increase security by offering protection for data on lost or stolen Android devices. According to Google, security-enhanced Linux enforcing for all applications means even better protection against vulnerabilities and malware.

Security vendors claim progress against Chinese group that hacked Google
The hackers, referred to as "Hidden Lynx" by Symantec, are believed to have been behind "Operation Aurora," a famous cyberespionage campaign revealed in early 2010 that compromised as many as 20 companies. Google said the attack stole some of its intellectual property and also appeared to target the Gmail accountsof Chinese human rights activists. Google's comments fueled a growing diplomatic row between the U.S. and China over cybersecurity issues. Other U.S. companies followed Google in more directly blaming China for sophisticated long-term infiltration campaigns.

IT Hiring Trends Up, But Budget Trends Disappoint
The persistence of lower budgets seems to have finally impacted IT leaders’ confidence in their ability to satisfy business demands. Over the course of the year there has been a decline in those who expressed confidence (-3 percent) and those who were neutral (-4 percent) and an increase in those who were not confident (+7 percent). In addition to never receiving increased budgets in order to complete workloads, reasons for this decline in confidence could be attributed to the realization that time is running out to complete planned projects or that additional IT projects have been scheduled for the remainder of the year.

Forget the Internet, Brace for Skynet
Several important technology milestones need to be reached along the way. The drones that will make up Skynet have a lot more in common with satellites than the flippy-flappy helicopter drone thingies that the popular press is fixated on right now. They’re really effing BIG, for one thing. And, like satellites, they go up, and stay up, pretty much indefinitely. For that to happen, we need two things: lighter, higher-capacity wireless gear; and reliable, hyper-efficient solar tech. So some work still needs to be done on the physics of Skynet; but not that much work, and certainly not anything beyond the reach of hard-working American (or Chinese, or Chinese-American) engineering types.

Quote for the day:

"A leader is someone people respond to, trust and want to work with." -- @ShawnUpchurch

October 15, 2014

This Headline Is One of Many Experiments on You
“When doing things online, there’s a very large probability you’re going to be involved in multiple experiments every day,” Sinan Aral, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said during a break at a conference for practitioners of large-scale user experiments last weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Look at Google, Amazon, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook—all of these businesses run hundreds of experiments, and they also account for a large proportion of Web traffic.”

Distributing data science brainpower more equitably among the haves and have-nots
Everybody has to make a living. Data scientists, like anybody else, tend to gravitate to where the jobs are, especially those that fetch higher salaries, offer the resources needed to achieve their dreams and promise more rewarding career paths. For that reason, larger employers with well-established, amply funded big-data initiatives tend to have an advantage over smaller organizations when it comes to recruiting the best and brightest data scientists. For that reason, nonprofits, charities and small businesses tend not to have full time staff data scientists, even though they may benefit as much from data mining and predictive modeling as much as their Fortune 1000 counterparts.

How is a Mega Data Center Different from a Massive One?
The concept of “size” in data center discussions and reports is sometime defined by power capacity, utility supply, number of racks, building area or the compute room area. Density today also has a variety of meanings. DCI proposes that in data center context, size should only describe size of the compute space, and density should be measured peak kW load. Size, according to the think tank, is defined using rack yield and area of the compute space. Here are DCI’s size definitions:

Big Data Can Guess Who You Are Based on Your Zip Code
The database is a fascinating glimpse into how marketers see the world, and how data profiles can link populations in distant cities—or not. Though cities like Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, might be compared culturally, their marketing profiles are fairly distinct. And while the majority of consumers in Beverly Hills share a profile with those on Philadelphia's Main Line, for example, they don't match up with the profile for residents of similarly expensive zip codes on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Flashback: CP/M and the beginning of the microcomputer era
Like all operating systems of the time, CP/M was a proprietary operating system, with the source code closely protected by its creators. Even so, through judicious pre-Internet networking on the university-centric Arpanet, I was able to get my hands on a reverse-engineered dump of the CP/M source code. In fact, the CP/M source code is what inspired me to write this article today. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the first build of CP/M, the Computer History Museum is releasing dumps of a few different versions of CP/M source code, including the reverse-engineered listing I found so valuable to my work.

POODLE flaw POOs on SSL (time to panic?)
security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in SSL 3.0 that allows attackers to decrypt encrypted connections. ... The attack is, we're told, easy to perform, and can be done on-the-fly using JavaScript. It is a blunder within the blueprints of SSL 3.0 rather than a software bug, so it affects any product following the protocol. ... Websites and...browsers are...expected to end support for SSL v3 as it's now considered insecure by design, and instead enforce the use of TLS. ... Websites that end support for SSL v3 will become incompatible with older browsers and OSes...the final nail in the coffin for machines stuck on IE6 and XP.

CIOs fear poor cloud investment is making businesses uncompetitive
CIOs acknowledged the missed opportunities and threats involved if IT does not move to a more flexible and agile approach to support revenue growth and competitiveness. Over a third of CIOs admitted that if their IT departments were not able to modernise IT effectively in the next 12 months it would lead to reduced staff productivity (38%), increased time to market (34%), reduced ability to service customers in new ways (33%), a risk of data theft occurring (35%) and limit their company’s ability to launch new products and services (35%).

Big Data and Quantified Self-Awareness
A lack of self-awareness, what I call self-not-so-aware-ness, is a blessing at times since it makes us blissfully blind. Happiness, according to some psychologists, is largely about self-delusion. As David McRaney explained in his book ... “You believe that your abilities are sound, your memories perfect, your thoughts rational and wholly conscious, the story of your life true and accurate, and your personality stable and stellar. The truth is that your brain lies to you. Inside your skull is a vast and far-reaching personal conspiracy to keep you from uncovering the facts about who you actually are, how capable you tend to be, and how confident you deserve you feel.”

French Bank to Allow Sending Money With Tweets
As part of the service, called S-Money, people will be able to transfer up to 500 euros, about $635, through their Twitter accounts in the latest sign of how technology is seeping into the world of banking. "The service is instantaneous," said Nicolas Chatillon, the head of the BPCE unit that is overseeing the project. He first approached Twitter with the money transfer idea over the summer. "We are pioneers," he said. "We’re trying to make life easier for Twitter users." The American tech giant, which is testing a ‘‘buy’’ button that can be embedded in posts that allow users to buy products through their smartphones or computers, did not directly partner with BPCE on the money transfer service.

More Than LeSS
This is just about the opposite of what senior management typically seeks: they strive for low-risk ways to achieve short-term goals. They are often looking for the legendary low-hanging fruit. This leads to what might be called the “conundrum of change”: small organizational changes can lessen problems, conveniently avoiding the underlying structural problems. And because the prolonged structural problems remain, the next issue will be just around the corner and will require another quick fix.

Quote for the day:

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind." -- Henry James