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This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”

but we do know that third-party data brokers sell all manner of information to businesses, including “police officers’ home addresses, rape sufferers, and genetic disease sufferers” as well as suspected alcoholics and cancer and HIV/AIDS patients.

The first is that almost everything is personal. In the words of computer scientists Arvind Narayanan (Princeton

this model simply doesn’t reflect the reality of the deeply unequal situation we now face. Those who wield the tools of data tracking and analytics have far more power than those who don’t.

So far, many companies have tried to dispel such fears by noting that the data they gather, store and analyze remains "anonymous." But that, as it turns out, is not entirely accurate, in that it sells the power of data analysis radically short. Take the analysis of anonymous movement profiles, for example. According to a current study by the online journal Scientific Reports, our mobility patterns are so different that that they can be used to "uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals." The more data is in circulation and available for analysis, the more likely it is that anonymity becomes "algorithmically impossible," says Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. In his blog, Narayanan writes that only 33 bits of information are sufficient to identify a person.

A study by New York advertising agency Ogilvy One concludes that 75 percent of respondents don't want companies to store their personal data, while almost 90 percent were opposed to companies tracking their surfing behavior on the Internet.

But for a modern society, an even more pressing question is whether it wishes to accept everything that becomes possible in a data-driven economy. Do we want to live in a world in which algorithms predict how well a child will do in school, how suitable he or she is for a specific job -- or whether that person is at risk of becoming a criminal or developing cancer?

It’s clear here that reddit—a site that is pretty much nothing but community—faces the same kinds of disconnects between executives and ground-level support that happen in associations where communities are only small parts of the total member offerings.

Reddit highlights how harmful a poorly handled staff transition can be for these volunteers.

When it comes down to it, an online community is about people, not just technology. And keeping that trust between community managers and the community at large is hugely important.

WeWork is on a mission to create a global platform for people who want to express themselves through the work they do. Oh, and by the way, they also rent office space.

They are attempting to scale a new kind of culture – one that promises a quality workstyle, to be certain, but one that also celebrates who we are as people: we seek to find meaning in work, we seek a connection to a community where we both belong and contribute.

work-life integration, a relatively new phrase rising concurrent to the entrance of millennials in our workforce. But as he explained his support for the idea, I realized I’ve been working this way my entire life. It’s fundamental to the entrepreneurial lifestyle – Life is simply life, and if you’re passionate about what you do, then work is part of that life. As you plan your time, you prioritize everything in that life, and because work is no longer bound to one office space during one eight-hour period of time, you can mix and mingle all kinds of experiences – some work, some family, some personal – throughout your waking day. The flip side of this: If you adopt the philosophy of work-life integration, you must also adopt a philosophy of total individual responsibility. That means understanding how to prioritize things like exercise, nutrition, downtime, and family/friends into a demanding work life. It means that you are willing to be judged not on showing up or managing up, but on the work you deliver to your company. And it means you’ve joined a like-minded group who together have created a company that understands how to thrive in this new environment.

And as Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad says “Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable”. What is necessary is to define what will be the key focus of the company and what it should be renowned for e.g. how should the intended customer experience look and feel like. Unless you do that there won’t be enough of a common ground to smash the silo thinking and deliver a consistent and deliberate customer experience. Take for example the way Paul O’Neill made the turnaround in Alcoa (the biggest aluminium producer in the US, manufacturing everything from the metal for the Coca Cola cans to bolts that hold satellites) as presented in Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit”.

1. Powering-down helps remove unhealthy feelings of jealousy, envy, and loneliness.

3. Solitude is harder to find in an always-connected world.

4. Life, at its best, is happening right in front of you.

Encouraged by Watson Sr. and his executive team, employees often formed their own study groups. One, known as the Owl Club, allowed employees to study any subject they wanted at company expense. Such programs evolved into adult learning classes, and eventually into grants for employees to pursue college credits and degrees

Today, industry specialists around the world in IBM Global Business Services use an array of e-learning tools—including podcasts and Twitter—customer on-site classes, and IBM conferences and classrooms to educate customers on everything from the use of social media and cloud computing, to how to build a smarter rail system. And IBM employees worldwide take advantage of their networked community to draw upon each other’s skills day and night to solve customer problems and develop the capabilities clients value most.

Is the gig economy just an intermediate step in the progression toward a fully automated robotic workforce?

my fictitious medical device firm would need to adjust to a team-based deadline model, with incentives to make sure the job gets done on time by somebody, even if the 5-hours-a-week-employee and the 10-hours-a-week-employee both decide not to work this month.

With the opt-in work week, everything changes.

When I ask people close to Zuckerberg how, exactly, he has pulled off these achievements, I don’t hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into small, doable victories. "Most of our conversation was about long-term strategy, and then we’d backtrack from there to what we should do over the next month," says Bret Taylor, who worked as Facebook’s CTO from 2009 to 2012 and who was at the company

or all of us who work with him, it’s like, Man, he is so good at improving."

Aim ridiculously high, and focus on where you want to go over the long term.

40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit.

And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.

His new book The Power of Habit explores the science behind why we do what we do — and how companies are now working to use our habit formations to sell and market products to us.

every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a "habit loop," which is a three-part process. First, there's a cue, or trigger,

third step, he says, is the reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the "habit loop" in the future.