New Study: Open Offices Kill Teamwork — from inc.com by Suzanne Lucas
People don’t like to have serious conversations in public, it turns out.

Excerpt:

Employees hate open office plans, but at least they help employees collaborate and work together? It saves companies money and it increases teamwork, right? Well, wrong.

Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, at Harvard Business School and Harvard University, took a look at people who switched from individual cubicles to an open office plan. What they found wasn’t more collaboration after the switch but less. Participants in the study spent

  • 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions
  • 67 percent more time on email
  • 75 percent more time on instant messenger

Not exactly what you want to see when you move your employees into an open office plan. Instead of looking up across the table and saying, “Hey, Jane, what do you think about this?” they are sending text messages.

 

FTC reportedly hits Facebook with record $5 billion settlement — from wired.com by Issie Lapowsky and Caitlin Kelly

Excerpt:

AFTER MONTHS OF negotiations, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record-setting $5 billion on Friday for privacy violations, according to multiple reports. The penalty comes after an investigation that lasted over a year, and marks the largest in the agency’s history by an order of magnitude. If approved by the Justice Department’s civil division, it will also be the first substantive punishment for Facebook in the US, where the tech industry has gone largely unregulated. But Washington has taken a harsher stance toward Silicon Valley lately, and Friday’s announcement marks its most aggressive action yet to curb its privacy overreaches.

 

Also see:

 

 

Top 9 Ways Artificial Intelligence Prevents Fraud — from forbes.com by Louis Columbus

Excerpt:

Bottom Line:
Rule-based engines and simple predictive models could identify the majority of fraud attempts in the past, yet they aren’t keeping up with the scale and severity of fraud attempts today. Fraud attempts and breaches are more nuanced, with organized crime and state-sponsored groups using machine learning algorithms to find new ways to defraud digital businesses. Fraud-based attacks have a completely different pattern, sequence, and structure, which make them undetectable using rules-based logic and predictive models alone.

AI Is A Perfect Match For the Challenges Of Battling Fraud

 

Amazon pledges $700 million to teach its workers to code — from wired.com by Louise Matsakis

Excerpt:

Amazon announced Thursday that it will spend up to $700 million over the next six years retraining 100,000 of its US employees, mostly in technical skills like software engineering and IT support. Amazon is already one of the largest employers in the country, with almost 300,000 workers (and many more contractors) and it’s particularly hungry for more new talent. The company currently has more than 20,000 vacant US roles, over half of which are at its headquarters in Seattle. Meanwhile, the US economy is booming, and there are now more open jobs than there are unemployed people who can fill them, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

Against that backdrop, Amazon’s jobs skills efforts provide some reassurance that—in theory at least—you could be retrained into a new role when the robots arrive.

 

From the announcement:

Based on a review of its workforce and analysis of U.S. hiring, Amazon’s fastest growing highly skilled jobs over the last five years include data mapping specialist, data scientist, solutions architect and business analyst, as well as logistics coordinator, process improvement manager and transportation specialist within our customer fulfillment network.

 

Also see:

  • Amazon to Invest $700M to Retrain 100,000 Workers for New Jobs — from pcmag.com by Michael Kan Icon
    ‘There is a greater need for technical skills in the workplace than ever before. Amazon is no exception,’ the company said. The goal is to ‘upskill’ one third of Amazon’s total work force by 2025 through free retraining programs.
 

How WiFi 6 is about to revolutionize the Internet of Things — from interestingengineering.com by John Loeffler
While 5G tends to get all the press nowadays, WiFi 6 is going to have as big an impact behind the scenes by powering a next phase of the Internet of Things.

Excerpt:

So what’s such a big deal about these new standards? The difference between WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 is much like the jump from mobile’s 4G LTE networks to the new 5G networks rolling out this year and next.

The primary improvements will be in speed, connection strength, a wider spectrum of channels to operate in, and simultaneous streams. This means that there will be more room for each connection at an access point, allowing more devices to connect with less loss of bandwidth than current standards; these connections will be 37% faster than WiFi 5; and the ability of a WiFi 6 network to handle different data streams at the same time.

All of this adds up to a significant jump in speed over WiFi 5, allowing for up to 10 to 12 gigabytes per second of data transfer per connection, which opens up a whole new world of connected devices both at home, at work, and everywhere else in our lives.

 

 

4 models to reinvent higher education for the 21st century — from edtechmagazine.com by Eli Zimmerman
To appeal to Gen Z students and employers, universities will adopt new ways to deliver academic materials, focusing on customizable courses and experiences outside of the classroom.

Excerpts:

  1. Platform facilitator:
    From online content to food orders, Generation Z has become accustomed to customizable consumption, and education may follow. Some universities may begin to offer a Netflix-style distribution of course materials, while others will be “content providers for those platforms, licensing courses, experiences, certificates and other services,” according to the report. Many university administrators are already considering the idea of building AI-enabled programs to distribute academic videos, according to a 2018 survey by Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite and University Business.
  2. Experiential curator
  3. Learning certifier
  4. Workforce integrator

 

Also see:

 

What's the future of law?

Excerpts:

There’s no crystal ball for the legal industry, just as there’s none for life. That said, industry trends don’t arise out of the ether — they develop over time. These trends collectively form the basis for estimations about what the future of the legal industry will look like.

These industry insiders have studied the trends, and they lent us their insights into the future of law. Take a look:

 

#AI #legaloperations #legal #lawfirms #lawyers #lawschools #legaltech #disruption #paceofchange

From DSC:
In looking through these perspectives, one can often see the topics of emerging technologies, changing client expectations, and changing business models.

 

Addendum on 7/1/19:

What Does 2019 Hold for Legal AI? — from law.com by Emily Foges
What developments can we expect in the next year? Where and in what new ways will AI tools be deployed?

 Just as accountants no longer imagine life without excel, lawyers will soon be unable to imagine their day-to-day without AI.

Technology should be seen to work seamlessly in tandem with the lawyers, surfacing relevant and pertinent information which the lawyer then decides to act on.

 

 

 

Amazon launches Personalize, a fully managed AI-powered recommendation service — from venturebeat.com Kyle Wiggers

Excerpt:

Amazon [on 6/10/19] announced the general availability of Amazon Personalize, an AWS service that facilitates the development of websites, mobile apps, and content management and email marketing systems that suggest products, provide tailored search results, and customize funnels on the fly.

 

 

 

Amy Peck (EndeavorVR) on enterprises’ slow adoption of AR and the promise in education — from thearshow.com by Jason McDowall

Description:

In this conversation, Amy and [Jason McDowall] discuss the viability of the location-based VR market and the potential for AR & VR in childhood education.

We get into the current opportunities and challenges in bringing spatial computing to the enterprise. One of these challenges is the difficulty in explaining a technology that needs to be directly experienced, so much so that Amy now insists C-level executives put on a headset as a first step in the consulting process.

We also talk about VR & AR in healthcare, and the potential impact of blockchain technology.

Fast forward to 29:15 or so for the piece
of this podcast that relates to education.

Also see:

Reality Check: The marvel of computer vision technology in today’s camera-based AR systems — from arvrjourney.com by Alex Chuang
How does mobile AR work today and how will it work tomorrow

Excerpt:

AR experiences can seem magical but what exactly is happening behind the curtain? To answer this, we must look at the three basic foundations of a camera-based AR system like our smartphone.

  • How do computers know where it is in the world? (Localization + Mapping)
  • How do computers understand what the world looks like? (Geometry)
  • How do computers understand the world as we do? (Semantics)

 

 

What new trends and technologies can we use to design and deliver modern training experiences? — from modernworkplacelearning.com by Jane Hart
Here are 3 meta-trends that I’m seeing which show how new thinking, trends and technologies can be used to offer modern training experiences.

 

But more significantly, what this means is that these platforms are becoming a hub for work and learning. It’s no longer just about taking an online courses or classroom training – disconnected from the real world of work. Learning is now being seen in a very different light – as a work activity – and one that is highly performance-focused.

 

 

 

 Also see:

Microsoft is building a virtual assistant for work. Google is building one for everything else — from qz.com by Dave Gershgorn

Excerpts:

In the early days of virtual personal assistants, the goal was to create a multipurpose digital buddy—always there, ready to take on any task. Now, tech companies are realizing that doing it all is too much, and instead doubling down on what they know best.

Since the company has a deep understanding of how organizations work, Microsoft is focusing on managing your workday with voice, rearranging meetings and turning the dials on the behemoth of bureaucracy in concert with your phone.

 

Voice is the next major platform, and being first to it is an opportunity to make the category as popular as Apple made touchscreens. To dominate even one aspect of voice technology is to tap into the next iteration of how humans use computers.

 

 

From DSC:
What affordances might these developments provide for our future learning spaces?

Will faculty members’ voices be recognized to:

  • Sign onto the LMS?
  • Dim the lights?
  • Turn on the projector(s) and/or display(s)?
  • Other?

Will students be able to send the contents of their mobile devices to particular displays via their voices?

Will voice be mixed in with augmented reality (i.e., the students and their devices can “see” which device to send their content to)?

Hmmm…time will tell.

 

 

INSIGHT: Ten ways machine learning will transform the practice of law — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Caroline Sweeney
Law firms are increasingly using machine learning and artificial intelligence, which have become standard in document review. Dorsey & Whitney’s Caroline Sweeney says any firm that wants to stay competitive should get on board now and gives examples for use and best practices.

 

 

Resources from Bluescape Brings Creatives Together to Ideate and Collaborate in New Ways at Cannes Lions 2019

  • Design with Greater Ease Using Bluescape on Wacom video <– From DSC: Very sharp!
  • Bluescape for Creatives – War Rooms video
  • Bluescape for Creatives – Review and Approve video
  • Bluescape for Creatives – Presentations and Storytelling video
  • Bluescape for Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe XD page
  • Bluescape Speeds up UX/UI Design Cycle with XD Plugin video
 
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