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LA Times article by Matt Pearce, January 20, 2013 on infrequent Office MAx customer who received a solicitation from Office Max with his name on it followed, by "Daughter Killed in Car Crash." How did the company get the information and why did it appear on the envelope because the recipient had lost his daughter in a car crash a year before?

Harvard Business Review's top trends identified by using 5 questions that determine if these are indeed a trend or not. Top trends for 2015 are: Deep learning (machine learning); Smart virtual personal assistants; Uber's monetization of downtime and the offer for those needing employment to work. Uber-like businesses such as grocery delivery, massage services, dry cleaning and laundry, etc. will take off; Oversight for Algorithms - ethics of how algorithms can be used especially when programmers add subjective judgments to algorithms causing false answers; Data privacy - dealing with ongoing breaches. The public does not blame hackers but blames business for not taking measures to combat hackers; Block chain technology is a transactional Database that is shared by everyone participating in bitcoin's digital system. Block chain systems may become a universal platform for anything needing a signature or authentication.

Harvard Business Review's top trends identified by using 5 questions that determine if these are indeed a trend or not. Top trends for 2015 are: Deep learning (machine learning); Smart virtual personal assistants; Uber's monetization of downtime and the offer for those needing employment to work. Uber-like businesses such as grocery delivery, massage services, dry cleaning and laundry, etc. will take off; Oversight for Algorithms - ethics of how algorithms can be used especially when programmers add subjective judgments to algorithms causing false answers; Data privacy - dealing with ongoing breaches. The public does not blame hackers but blames business for not taking measures to combat hackers; Block chain technology is a transactional Database that is shared by everyone participating in bitcoin's digital system. Block chain systems may become a universal platform for anything needing a signature or authentication. 

story of how algorithms and big data sealed the deal for Trump

Great post by Beth Kanter on infographs, rationale for using them to array and understand data, how to construct them, and tools that can help simplify the process. Feb. 27. 2013

A community of adjuncts for adjunct teaching at colleges that uses crowdsourcing to collect data for the field, research issues, and get and give advice. Something like this could be adapted to provide value for other part-time workers be they professional or not, such as baby boomers shifting into retirement (what would such a site or community be called?), contractors, etc.

article by Joshua Rothman on leadership and how our views of leadership have changed through the centuries and how leadership virtues don't always agree with the actions taken by "leaders" whom we admire. 

article by Steven Mintz for the Chronicle of HE, July 22, 2013 Excerpt: "But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language." Fifteen innovations: 1. e-advising 2. evidence-based pedagogy 3. decline of lone eagle teaching 4. optimized class time 5. earlier educational transitions 6. fewer large lecture classes 7. new frontiers for e-learning 8. personalized adaptive learning 9. increased competency based and prior learning results; 10. data driven instructions 11. aggressive pursuit of new revenue 12. online and low-residency degrees at flagships 13. more certificates and badges 14. free and open textbooks 15. public-private partnerships

Interesting study using Facebook volunteers. The authors analyzed 700 million words, phrases and topic instances from Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers who took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, age. Used an open-vocabulary technique where the data itself drives the exploration of language that found connections not captured with traditional methods. To date, this is the largest study, by order of magnitude, of language and personality.

Some interesting findings based on age and gender

Here are five ways to successfully tap into the women's market: 1. Provide good quality information. Producing a newsletter and Web site are excellent ways to demonstrate your expertise and to keep your image in front of clients and prospects. Include plenty of strategies and tips that will help guide women to be more successful in running or growing their businesses. Conducting free seminars or workshops is another good strategy for imparting your knowledge and has the added benefit of serving as a networking forum. 2. Build relationship marketing strategies. Develop and sustain relationships with women and cultivate a sense of community. 3. Host networking events. Historically, women have not had the same opportunities to network as their male counterparts. You can create your own networking events for women clients and prospects. Featuring a guest speaker in your industry can be an excellent addition. Just be sure to build in enough time for networking as well. 4. Sponsor women's business associations or events. If you are looking to target this market and build awareness, consider sponsoring one of the many women's business associations and events. These range from something as specific as mentoring programs (such as the Step Ahead One-on-One Mentoring Program - www.stepaheadonline.com ) to associations for women exporters (such as the Organization of Women in International Trade - www.owit-toronto.ca ). Most hold regular meetings and special functions. Some provide opportunities for sponsors to speak and showcase their expertise. Contributing material to their newsletters, publications and Web sites is another good way to build your identity among members, as these associations often welcome good quality, educational submissions of interest to members. 5. Share core information on a regular basis. Email or mail information that is considered to be "in our mutual interest." News clippings, industry data, notes from indus

Commencement speeches at different colleges, June 15, 2014 Harvey Mudd College Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist "Your unique education has prepared you for careers at the cutting edge of innovation. This is both good news and bad news. It's good news because you're probably going to find a job, it will pay well, and it will be intellectually fulfilling. It's bad news because whatever you thought you were training for when you started this exercise might not actually exist anymore. Five years ago, when you guys were deciding where to go to college, there were very few mobile-app developers or big-data architects, and there certainly weren't any chief listening officers for social media outlets. It's hard to imagine where the next five years will go, but it's kind of fun to do so. ... Who knows, but you guys are going to be among the people that are actually making it happen. And it'll be awesome, as long as you're willing to take some risks and step outside of your comfort zone. When an opportunity arises, take it." UNC at Chapel Hill Atul Gawande, doctor and writer "Ultimately, it turns out we all have an intrinsic need to pursue purposes larger than ourselves, purposes worth making sacrifices for. People often say, 'Find your passion.' But there's more to it than that. Not all passions are enough. Just existing for your desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty. The only way life is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. ... the search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea. It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in your own small way. It could be a classroom where you teach, a business where you work, a neighborhood where you live. The key is, if you find yourself in a place where you stop caring - where your greatest conce

Article by Peter Cappelli, Washington Post, September 5. "Companies simply haven't invested much in training their workers. In 1979, young workers got an average of 2.5 weeks of training a year. While data is not easy to come by, around 1995, several surveys of employers found that the average amount of training workers received per year was just under 11 hours, and the most common topic was workplace safety - not building new skills. By 2011, an Accenture study showed that only about a fifth of employees reported getting on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years."

Great blog by Nick Bilton in the Sunday NYTimes July 16, 2014 about how social media sucks us in to spend a lot of time on it. Although there isn't data as such, scientists are beginning to wonder if this diversion of our time sucks creativity too. The author ends the piece by saying instead of spending the first hour of the day on social media, he has been reading a book and finding it much more satisfying, enlightening, and stimulating.

Intuit report from 2010 that speaks to demographic trends ( including digitally savvy kids with global grid; baby boomers gray to go into unretirement); she-economy; social trends (social networks via web and mobile platforms, localism, individuals shoulder the risk); economic trends (including "work shifts from full-time to free agent employment" and niche markets); ubiquity of technology (working in the cloud; data criticality; "social and mobile computing connect and change the world").

Interview with Vera Michalchik published by DML Research Hub, funded by the McArthur Foundation. Michalchick heads up research on Informal Learning Environments in SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning. "I'm paraphrasing Richard Feynman who said that the more that we have a monoculture of learning, the less chance we have of producing creative, innovative, capable thinkers. We really want diverse learning environments, and assessment is always the tail that wags the dog. People are beholden to systems of accountability, and what knowledge is valued and how that knowledge is valued really shows up in an assessment system. Besides reducing the diversity of learning environments by having common metrics, we short-change a natural process. This is what we mention in the Naturalizing Assessment article. " Offers pros and cons on badging system (is disinclined but open-minded about their usage) and suggests various kinds of informal learning assessments that do not following the standardized testing model such as: continual monitoring of where kids are in the program, for when kids are "getting it", "minimally invasive studies of behavior and performance" to support documentation of participation and capacity building, ethnology, video documentation, data mining methods of video archives, embedded assessment in learning games, etc.

Like this article written by Susan Wojcicki in July 2011 on how to stay innovative. Found it today via my twitter feed. 1. Have a mission that maters 2. Think big but start small 3. Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection 4. Look for ideas everywhere 5. Share everything 6. Spark with imagination, fuel with data 7. Be a platform 8. Never fail to fail

interesting article by Facebook co-founder on how tech start-up expectations/long hours result in diminishing returns and ageism and sexism

gig economy may not be showing up in data WSJ, Real Time Economics

book by Robert Gellman and Pam Dixon on privacy issues. When data are used to construct "behaviorally based advertising," does that not violate our ability to participate online w/o interference and with freedom of movement?

blog post by Quentin Hardy, NYT, on how new companies developing algorithms are using them to loan money to people who are better risks than their financial circumstances might suggest, track high performers in sales jobs to find the indicators of their success for export and use by other employees, etc. July 26, 2015

From Andrew Wiseman at The Atlantic City Lab, June 25, 2015. What seemed to be an amusing article on When Maps Lie actually has some good tips on how to interpret maps based on the data or lack thereof being depicted. Part of our digital literacy skillset.