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Loknath Das

African American employee’s office at Education Department vandalized

by Loknath Das August 25, 2019

written by Loknath Das

The office of an African American diversity change agent at the Department of Education was vandalized this week, department employees told CNN on Friday.

One employee said the woman’s diploma had been knocked down and that some figurines in her office had been broken.

“She had some dolls in her office that were decapitated,” the employee said, adding that the recently appointed agent was out of her office when the incident occurred.

A department official confirmed to CNN that the incident targeted an African American woman’s office.

Education Department spokesperson Angela Morabito confirmed to CNN that there was an incident “involving an employee’s personal belongings on the third floor” at the agency.

“Secretary (Betsy) DeVos took immediate action, including referring the case to Federal Protective Services for a comprehensive investigation, increasing building security, and most importantly, ensuring the impacted employee was supported,” Morabito said. “Because this is an ongoing law enforcement matter, it is inappropriate for us to comment any further on specifics.”

The diversity change agent program “trains employees involved in the program to foster a more inclusive workplace,” Morabito said.

[“source=cnn”]

August 25, 2019 0 comment

Education

School closures triple in Central and Western Africa as education comes under fire

by Loknath Das August 24, 2019

written by Loknath Das

In a new report detailing threats of violence against schools across the region and issues as a ‘Child Alert’, the UN agency warned that a generation of children risks being denied the right to learn.

“Nearly two million children are out of school due to conflict, so it is not an easy number,” UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, Muzoon Almellehan, told journalists in Geneva. “It is important to highlight those challenges, to highlight the struggle of those people. They need us, they need our attention.”

From Burkina Faso to Nigeria, more than 9,200 schools shut

Data gathered by UNICEF to June indicates that 9,272 schools have been closed in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger and Nigeria as a result of insecurity – three times the number at the end of 2017.

“Schools are being shut down,” according to UNICEF Deputy Executive Director, Charlotte Petri Gornitzka. “Over the past two years, the number of schools that have been shut down has tripled; over 9,000 schools due to the insecurity have been attacked.”

The UNICEF report notes how spreading insecurity across north-west and south-west Cameroon has left more than 4,400 schools forcibly closed.

In Burkina Faso, more than 2,000 schools are closed, along with more than 900 in Mali, owing to increasing violence in both countries.

In the central Sahel region, moreover, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have witnessed a six-fold increase in school closures owing to attacks and threats of violence in just over two years, from 512 in April 2017, to more than 3,000 by June this year.

School closures in the four countries affected by crisis in the Lake Chad Basin – Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria – remained at around 1,000 between the end of 2017 and June 2019.

Education is crucial when you’ve fled violence – UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador

Just back from visiting a camp for people displaced by violence in central Mali, Ms. Almellehan insisted in Geneva that for many people, herself included, education was vitally important in giving children hope for a better future.

“I had to flee my homeland in Syria in 2013 and I also had to live in refugee camps,” she explained. “It wasn’t easy for me and also I can feel like those children who can’t go to school, because education is something really, really important to me, myself.”

One direct result of children not getting an education is that they are more vulnerable to recruitment by extremists or abuse at their hands such as forced marriage, the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador insisted.

“When a child is not at a school, especially if the child suffers from a very bad economic situation, when they are in poverty, when they don’t have enough awareness, all of that can affect that child and can lead that child to being exploited easily,” she said.

On a wider level, the lack of schooling “is casting a foreboding shadow upon children”, their families, their communities and society at large,” UNICEF said in a statement, noting that more than 40 million six to 14-year-olds are already missing out on school in Central and West Africa.

The agency is working with education authorities and communities to support alternative learning opportunities including community learning centres, radio school programmes, technology for teaching and learning, and faith-based learning initiatives.

It is also providing tools for teachers who work in dangerous locations, and psychosocial support and care for schoolchildren emotionally scarred by violence.

$221 million appeal across seven countries only 28 per cent funded

“Now more than ever, governments must reaffirm their commitment to education and protect spending on education for their youngest citizens,” the UNICEF report insists. “Now is the time for renewed efforts to make sure the potential of a generation of young people is not wasted,” it emphasized, highlighting a funding gap of 72 per cent of the $221 million required for educational programmes across seven countries in the region.

[“source=un”]

August 24, 2019 0 comment

Internet

The Internet’s Invisible Cleanup Crew

by Loknath Das August 21, 2019

written by Loknath Das

At the heart of the Eastwood Mall in Quezon City, Philippines, stands a monument to “the men and women that have found purpose and passion in the business process outsourcing industry.” Ringed by flying steel birds, a man and two women preside over this small patch of Metro Manila, decked out in headsets and briefcases and facing a proud future. Steps away is a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where Sarah T. Roberts interviewed a group of commercial content moderators for her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadow of Social Media. Commercial content moderation, or CCM, describes one of the dirtier jobs on the corporate internet: reviewing and removing violent, racist, and disturbing content posted to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube and in the comments sections of brand-aware websites for consumer products. Such dirty work falls to people like these three cast-iron office workers who do that digital piecework just steps away from the mall.

In Roberts’s telling, the economic and social factors that produce our relatively sanitized experiences online also produce a global class of workers tied to one another by the shared conditions of commercial content moderation: contingency, race-to-the-bottom wages, ever-increasing work speeds and quotas, and exposure to the worst elements of humanity, again and again and again in round-the-clock shifts. Roberts interviews individual workers from the many sectors where content screening gets done: Filipino BPO (business process outsourcing) workers who take CCM jobs when more competitive call-center positions aren’t available; young college graduates in San Francisco whose big tech dreams turn into long-term-temp-worker realities; and American contracting company executives who market their human moderators as American, a xenophobia that feels right at home with contemporary US politics. Some of her informants focus on their own psychological trauma from the content they repeatedly engage. Others lament declining wages, job instability, and the lack of employer benefits as the worst parts of the work. Online, Roberts argues, the pleasure we take in sharing kid photos and memes and online petitions is made possible only by the business-processing workers from Manila to Silicon Valley, all clicking through the dregs of the social web, rendering the space safe from snuff films and child pornography.

Human moderation of online content is not new. In the early days of the web, Roberts recalls from her own experience, moderation was itself a social affair. “Mods” were of and by the communities they moderated, their roles known and respected by participants. Moderation in these contexts was about maintaining and facilitating norms so that the MUD or BBS or Usenet group could function collegially. Everybody knew that moderation was essential to a functional game setting or chat room, and while the early days were certainly not conflict-free, the role and importance of moderators were not in dispute.

Fast forward to the contemporary internet, and content moderation looks somewhat different. No longer the domain of community participants whose identity is known by all, mods are invisible, the fact of moderation, says Roberts, almost secret. Roberts attends to this secrecy in her book, using pseudonyms for informants and some of the companies they work for, mindful of the corporate secrecy that puts these workers at risk. Responsibility for upholding community norms online is carried out by workers in order to enhance the profit of the large-scale social-media companies they work for. The rules of engagement are subject to non-disclosure agreements, moderators work from cubicles and call centers, and the job is no longer a labor of community love, but just another low-paid contingent job from Quezon City to Silicon Valley.

In addition to this small group of Filipino workers, Roberts conducted extensive interviews with a handful of commercial content moderators working in Silicon Valley. That her research takes her to two sites where global capital is on glittering and flamboyant display offers a marked contrast to the working conditions of both. The California content moderators are largely recent college graduates taking jobs in this sector in the hopes that moderating content for Facebook and companies like it will lead to careers in the highly paid technology sector. What they find instead is that they occupy the growing sector of outsourced and contract workers of the new “gig economy.” While they may review content for name-brand companies, their checks come from temp agencies. Their positions are term-limited, pay higher than you make slinging coffee at a Starbucks but vastly lower than you’d get with a “real job” with the company, and lack the fringe benefits like sick time, vacation time, and health insurance that make working in America feasible.

On the other side of the planet, their Filipino compatriots face something much the same: working for contractors, not companies, with wages that once were relatively high in the local labor market, but have been plummeting since the mid-2000s in the face of a global race-to-the-bottom in wages for workers. While American screeners talk a lot about the difficulty of what they see, Roberts’s Filipino workers talk more about the trade-offs of non-voice BPO work: the pay is drastically less, but there’s no dealing with angry Americans screaming at you over the phone.

In Roberts’s analysis, the perils of this line of work are shared across national boundaries. Commercial content moderators face similar working conditions at Megaworld and in the unnamed American corporations in Silicon Valley: primarily contract work and its depressed salaries and lack of benefits; exposure to extreme violations of social norms around sexuality and violence and the attendant psychological harms that stem from that. Roberts focuses on the emotional lives of her informants and the psychological impact of scrubbing the internet clean, particularly in the American context. The discussions Roberts documents from the Philippines sound different. We read less about the need for workplace mental health interventions, and more about how competition with India to provide US corporations with cheap contract labor is increasing the speed and number of images the Quezon City workers must moderate each shift. It is a reminder of the ideological and sociohistorical structure of feeling: what matters to these workers as they click through the worst of the internet depends on the context in which each image flickers past.

What the San Francisco and Metro Manila workers have profoundly in common is both the necessity of their work—Roberts makes a clear case that the internet without commercial moderators would be impossible to navigate—and their utter disposability at the hands of global tech giants. Throughout the book, Roberts refers to commercial content moderators as “professional,” a designation that goes undefined and seems out of step with the labor conditions she describes. “Professional” connotes briefcases and headsets like those on Eastwood Mall’s BPO monument, not the unstable temporary contracts and intensifying quotas that actually structure these positions. The term reads almost like a wish: if these tasks could be professionalized, the workers would be respected, paid well, and given benefits. This is, of course, not how working conditions are transformed, and Roberts offers an array of potential remedies: legally mandated transparency around moderation policies, changes in social media consumption habits on the part of consumers, mental health counseling for moderaters, and labor organizing, which is already taking place among tech workers in San Francisco and Seattle, and among BPO workers in Manila.

The challenge, then, is to imagine ways for workers kept very much behind the screen, separated from one another by miles, by computer interfaces, and by outsourced contracts, to find common cause together against the Facebooks of the world.

[“source=jacobinmag”]

August 21, 2019 0 comment

Internet

What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?

by Loknath Das August 20, 2019

written by Loknath Das

Illustration for article titled What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?

A world in which the internet suddenly stops: surely the TV show’s already in development. Sprawling cast, gorgeous visuals, tediously on-the-nose themes. Some handsome B-lister tearing around the country in pursuit of his wayward kids, or the shadowy sect that pulled the plug in the first place. A patch of prairie in Kansas with a weak but functional signal, people lining for miles to check texts, riots breaking out. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait for this show to be shot and streamed to get a decent idea of what the internet apocalypse might look like: for this week’s Giz Asks, we asked a number of experts to do the imagining for us.

Francesca Musiani

Researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences, French National Centre for Scientific Research (ISCC-CNRS), Associate Researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, and Global Fellow at American University’s Internet Governance Lab

In the event of a global internet shutdown…

…autonomous vehicles freeze in place almost instantly. On highways, automatic tolls no longer allow any vehicle to go through them, creating massive traffic jams.

…on the streets, myriad passersby look at their empty-shell communicative devices, while bearing witness to several crashes of postal or other delivery drones.

…fully-automated sellers and cashiers, now disconnected, lead to the expeditious shutdown of supermarkets and hypermarkets which exclusively rely on them. In any case, a cashless, electronic currency-based society wouldn’t now know how to pay for things.

…vast regions are deprived of electricity, as providers are no longer able to receive correctly information from their sensors on the power grid and at individuals’ homes, and are no longer able to properly manage the supply of many areas.

…almost all the worldwide industrial production stalls. Financial centers have immediately suspended all their operations, canceling, in passing, all orders currently being processed.

And so on…

In which world does all of this happen? For the sake of the ‘thought experiment’, I have answered the question thinking about a 2030-ish temporal horizon—in what is likely to be an era of pervasive Internet of Things. In such a scenario, when a global internet shutdown takes place, interrupting suddenly the overwhelming majority of digital communications, what we today consider ‘communications’ (writing, chatting and talking by means of digital tools) is only a small part of the problem.

This scenario may not be exactly playing out like this in 2030, of course—it is indeed likely that the Internet will be a lot more pervasive than today, extending to many of the objects of our daily life and the basic infrastructures organizing our societies, but a lot of the technology I mention may very well not be the one we envisage and manipulate in the present day. However, one tendency seems clear: the extent of the reach of internet infrastructure, and the actors managing it, is expanding.

Larry Page once said that ‘Google would be building airports and cities’. It has long been believed that the influence of digital actors will remain confined to software, dematerialized content and information. It starts to be clear that they are using their mastery in these areas to take positions in non-digital markets, be it transport, infrastructure management or banking. Google may not be building cities yet but, directly or through its investments, it is already playing a role as a mobility organizer, while IBM participates in the management of water supply infrastructure in several cities.

With the ever-increasing connection of infrastructures and objects, the organization of physical flows requires the control of information flows. A global Internet shutdown is likely to have extremely important consequences for a world that will still be physical, but deeply driven and structured by information and data.

That being said, moving from the thought experiment to the actual functioning of the Internet today, it has to be mentioned that it is extremely unlikely that a global Internet shutdown actually happens. While it is relatively easy to shut down specific parts of the internet for some period of time—as it is well documented here—a global one is, at least so far, almost impossible, due to the distributed and interconnected nature of the Internet, as Kevin Curran explains well in his contribution to this page.

William H. Dutton

Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California, and Fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute and Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

For a day, the impact would be mixed. For managers and professionals, such as journalists and academics, it would be like a snow-day, providing time to relax, maybe read a book. For workers, such as plumbers and carpenters, it would have a negative impact on their livelihoods, such as missing new jobs. So there would be differential effects across social and economic classes within societies.

If down for a long period of time, the impact would be detrimental to all parts of society, worldwide. More than half of the world is online and in the high-income nations, the internet is increasingly embedded in the habits of how people do what they do. Shopping, banking, getting information, finding entertainment—all online. So this would be a shock to the social and economic fabric of society.

Time and again, politicians want to have a convenient ‘kill switch’ to shut down the internet. They quickly realize that this would have dramatically negative impacts, far beyond the harms they might be seeking to address.

Matthew Zook

Professor, Geography, University of Kentucky, whose research focuses on geoweb and new spatial media, big data, blockchain technologies and more

I’m going to take a moment and be that annoying person at a dinner party and insist for more details about why and how it shut down. I know it runs contrary to the spirit of the question but it really matters in terms of what unfolds. A mass failure of the domain name service (e.g., all the zone files for all TLDs disappear or are corrupted) would be very different that some kind of mass DDOS attack or some kind of physical failure (a small dedicated group with chain saws and backhoes start cutting fiber in some key locations is my personal favorite, etc.). But you said entire internet shutdown so I’m going to assume that the TCP protocol suddenly stopped working because… well, it is in its mid 40s now, maybe it and the IP protocol are going through a rough patch, contemplating divorce and both are taking a few weeks off to find themselves (which probably means hanging out in the darkweb and chasing much too young electrons).

Ok, now that I’m done anthropomorphizing the basic internet protocols, what would this actually mean? Everything, most likely but since I come from an urban planning background I’ll focus on some likely key points.

Work: with the internet down presumably any kind of knowledge work — teaching, lawyers, insurance, design—will not be possible. A lot of this would be tied to cloud computing—you wouldn’t be able to get your files and unless you had local copies or paper copies—you wouldn’t be able to work. Plus scheduling and meeting systems would be down.

Communications: I’m not sure if anything would work. I’m not certain how some technologies use TCP/IP but VOIP would be out, and I suspect SMS, WhatsApp and Telegraph probably rely on TCP/IP at some point. Ham radio operators would be kings!

Banking and finance: Boom. Absolutely nothing. The gold bugs would be feeling very smug and at Bitcoin folks might finally stop talking about how superior a decentralized, but TCP/IP-dependent, blockchain is. Not sure what would happen to ATMs… that would be key.

Transportation infrastructure: Cars should work (or at least my cars would work because I have old ones) but traffic lights, Fast Pass, etc. would probably fail in some interesting ways. Airlines would stop running. Trucking could still likely function, not sure about railways or ports. The entire logistics industry would be in shambles. We would still have all the basic infrastructure in place but when the internet fails the complex logistical systems that enable global supply chains are essentially bricked.

Other infrastructure: Electrical grids, water, sewer. I think sewer systems would still work (thank god!) as they are mostly gravity although there are probably some monitoring stations that would fail. I would be more worried about control systems in electric and water systems. Things might run for a bit but when adjustments need to be made, I’m not sure what would happen.

So. Bottom line. Good news. For most people there isn’t a whole lot of point in going into work or school because traffic will be horrible and once you make it there will be nothing to do. Bad news. You won’t be able communicate except face-to-face (or maybe snail mail and ham radio), the entire global banking system doesn’t work, and I’d really worry about logistics. Factories and food-processing wouldn’t get inputs so jobs would stop as would food deliveries to grocery stores. Probably a good time to visit the local farmers market (assuming farmers can travel). And electricity and water could be iffy. Best fill the bathtub and buy some batteries. And oil… ouch, that would be tough.

Alessandro Acquisti

Professor, Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Short-term? Bewilderment, followed as the effects percolate by disruption, chaos, the four horsemen of the apocalypse spotted in the horizon.

Medium-term: life goes on, we make do; we rediscover free time.

Long-term: reversion to normal; no more chaos—or much free time; hopefully, we are a little nicer to each other.

Mark Graham

Professor, Internet Geography, Oxford Internet Institute

If the entire internet was shut down, we would witness an almost immediate global economic collapse. The internet is the nervous system of contemporary globalization. Explicitly digital interactions would be the activities that would be most obviously immediately effected: most jobs that require computers or connectivity, core banking and payment networks, and so on. But then, even parts of the economy that initially seem relatively disconnected would begin to grind to a halt because of the fact that all contemporary societies rely on long-distance supply chains, and long-distance supply chains rely on the internet. A tomato farmer, fisherman, or factory worker won’t have much to do if the organizations they work for and trade with are unable to communicate with, and receive payments from upstream nodes in their value chains. And if there are two things that are guaranteed to cause chaos in the contemporary economy, it is an inability for food to be distributed and an inability for people to access money and the banking network. The social disorder generated by those two factors alone would spread into most corners of the world that aren’t characterized by relatively autarkic systems of production. Because only the most isolated parts of the global economy would be relatively unaffected, the only national economy to emerged relatively unscathed might be North Korea (although even there, there would be issues).

However, in the end, I’m sure that our societies are more resilient than we think, and backup communication systems making use of radio or other non-internet communication systems would quickly emerge to serve as the communicative glue keeping societies and economies together. But any abrupt loss of the internet would undoubtedly be extremely painful in the short-term.

Leonard Kleinrock

Professor, Computer Science, UCLA, who developed the theory of packet networks, the technology underpinning the internet

My assumption is that we are heading toward a world in which the internet will be omnipresent and will become invisible, in that it will disappear into the infrastructure resulting in a pervasive global nervous system. This is being driven by IoT among other things.

In the case of a total shutdown of the internet, the consumer reaction will result in an immediate run on batteries, food, gasoline, water, bicycles, etc. We will experience disorder, panic, riots, crime and violence in the early stages. There will be colossal failures and collapse of power grids, airline systems, commerce, banking and financial systems, on-line shopping, on-line communities, on-line entertainment, information exchange in major systems (e.g., health, legal, financial, government, education). Autonomous vehicles will run amuck and some transportation systems (e.g., traffic controls) will fail. Internet based physical security systems will disappear. We would lose rapid access to enormous stores of knowledge, and serious archiving of information will slow down considerably.

If electricity remains in certain regions, then WiFi would continue to work locally. We would see deployment of ad-hoc wireless networks.Television, non-voip telephony and radio would prosper.

But let’s look at the other side of this shutdown. If we look at the positive side, there would be some beneficial effects on the social structure of the planet. Here is a list of some of the possibilities:

Kids would likely find it liberating (or devastating, or both).

People would actually read newspapers, magazines, books, etc. instead of playing mindless video games on their smartphones—just take a walk down the center aisle of most airline flights!

People would start thinking again.Libraries would thrive.

Internet-based interactions (e.g. email, texts, social media, twitter, etc) would disappear and be replaced with more traditional meaningful and expressive forms with thought and care–writing, talking, singing, hanging out, etc.

Social life would change in meaningful ways.People would actually talk instead of staring at screens. They would interact with each other while actually looking at each other.

Security, privacy invasion, fraud, ransomware, phishing, hacking, would all be dramatically reduced.

People would engage in real hobbies, group board games, social interaction for real, with human contact.

Real life would arise again instead of virtual life.

Kids would play outside and get fresh air and experience something called nature.You would actually go out on the street, properly dressed and engage with your neighbors and neighborhood.

People would be required to know things by actually putting the information in their brain–and that would provide the benefit of being able to think with that information and generate new ideas when showering, driving, etc.

Loyalty would return to local vendors as on-line giant internet companies lose their monopolistic hold on consumers.

The huge influence of the internet megaphone would disappear ( and reduce fake news, hate speech, etc.)

Driving would revert to knowing how to navigate with your brain.Selfies would finally disappear or diminish.

In summary, balance in life would return. Now how bad would that be? But we would surely return to the world of the internet as soon as we were able, right? How about a balanced middle ground?

[“source=gizmodo”]

August 20, 2019 0 comment

Blogging

Five Proven Blogging Tips To Earn Loyal Clients And Higher ROI

by Loknath Das August 19, 2019

written by Loknath Das

uncaptioned Multiple companies, from small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) to multimillion-dollar corporations, tend to put their blogs on the proverbial backburner as they spend — and often times waste — money on other forms of marketing. One of the biggest culprits, in my experience, is Google Ads. This is a very valuable service when starting out, but once your spend is gone, that ad disappears. You have to continue fueling it for more leads, and I find it doesn’t do much for building brand awareness.

I believe this type of advertising is for a short-term mindset. As searchers steadily go against the status quo of advertising, they ignore these ads. Organic search results are more trusted and can provide endless lead generation. And this is where the blog rules. Creating a successful blog is not that simple, though.

First, you must have an SEO-friendly website with a strong technical platform — quick speed, mobile-friendly, image optimization, etc. You must also have a blogging strategy that’s built around target keywords.

The blog helps more than just increasing SEO value. It also builds what I call ART: a company’s authority, reputation and trust. When a business excels at ART, sustained growth will naturally follow.

I previously provided tips in “Starting A Business Blog Is A Must For Success: Eight Tips.” I’m going to take things a step deeper here, and provide additional tips that will help you garner ART, which leads to loyal clients and a higher return on investment (ROI).

Strike a 50/25/25 blend.

I once explained this by telling clients to create a blend of content that speaks to prospects in different phases of the traditional sales funnel. After reading Smash the Funnel by Eric Kieles and Mike Lieberman, I no longer refer to the sales funnel, but rather, as Smash the Funnel calls it, the “cyclonic buyer journey.”

This “journey” has eight cyclones, beginning with “pre-awareness” and ending with “ongoing delivery.” For success, you must create blog content that talks to each step of the cyclone.

I’ve had success creating blog calendar’s that feature a 50/25/25 blend of content:

• 50% for newbies seeking education about their problems and solutions.

• 25% for intermediate readers who know the problems, but want better solutions

• 25% for experts (think CMOs) who are fully educated and seeking better solutions. This 25% also talks to existing customers to further create loyalty.

It’s all about appealing and building ART from a large but targeted audience. Speak to all. The reason to put half of the focus on the newbies is simple — you want to be, as John Hall says in his book of the same name, “Top of Mind” for readers throughout their buyer’s journey, from awareness to post-client/customer status.

Blog from different company perspectives.

Another way to build ART within readers in various cyclones of the buyer’s journey? Create blogs from different perspectives throughout the company: CEO, marketing, sales, technicians, finance, etc.

Each perspective will offer a unique perspective that will naturally attract those in similar positions. Due to my position, I love reading inspiring pieces from fellow CEOs or heads of marketing departments. Well before I launched my own business, most of my time was spent reading content from people of similar stature — writers on writing, SEOs on SEO, etc.

The following is a quick example of diverse authorship from an investing firm:

• CEO blogs to inspire prospects and current customers to invest, projecting a long-term overall vision view.

• CMO blogs about finance project management advice.

• Finance team blogs about various tools that ease the investing process.

• Technician team blogs about investing techniques. They get super granular on details.

Create a quarterly calendar loaded with evergreen content.

Blogging without a strategy is like riding a motorcycle with bald tires. You’ll get somewhere, but it’ll be a horrible and dangerous ride. Same for blogging, though that horrible ride equates to lack of authority, reputation and trust. And this equates to zero readership and zero ROI.

A plan is needed, and the most successful route I’ve witnessed is through a blogging calendar that is, at minimum, a quarter out. This calendar should also feature mostly evergreen content — education that will stick around for years to come. Build out your calendar using the points above, and also remember the importance of keyword research that I talked about in my last article.

Post consistently and frequently.

Posting consistently and frequently is crucial for success from both the search engine and user perspectives. In regards to users, this type of posting shows how dedicated your company is to providing valuable information in an orderly manner. And if an internal team can get it organized, imagine how organized they will be with clients. This fact will even weigh on some prospects from a subconscious level.

It also shows search engines that you care about constantly creating new content, which aids in SEO.

Review quarterly.

Stale content gets noticed. What if a prospect landed on a blog and it was loaded with outdated resources and dead hyperlinks? This will show that the business doesn’t put quality first — even if this occurs on a subconscious level.

My agency recommends quarterly reviews when the team freshens the content (tweak headlines, newer factual info/statistics), and updates the blog with hyperlinks that point to newer blog posts or service pages. This process is relatively easy within the 12-18 months, depending on how much content is created, but can get laborious afterward. The results are worth every effort, and your prospects and current clients/customers will put higher levels of ART on your business.

If you’re using an agency, ask about this. Many agencies pump out content and forget about it. This is not optimal for long-term results.

Blogging with the goal of establishing authority, reputation and trust (ART) will help your business achieve long-term success. Again, this is no short-term play. Sometimes it can take up to a year for results to be observed. If you’re dedicated to the long-term vision of your company, the ROI will arrive. And once things start rolling, this ROI compounds over time. Who thought ART could be this cool in the business world?

[“source=forbes”]

August 19, 2019 0 comment

Education

Making the Grade: What’s the state of Apple in education in 2019?

by Loknath Das August 18, 2019

written by Loknath Das

Apple’s long had an interesting in their products being used in primary, secondary, and university settings. I believe this is partly due to the revenue opportunities (including e-rate), but I also know that Apple truly does care about the learning environment of students. One thing to consider for Apple is by investing in education, they are investing in their future customers and future employees. After attending the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, I have a clearer picture of where Apple is at, and where they are headed in Education. I love some of their strategies, and I have concerns about other parts, so I wanted to put all my thoughts together in a State of Apple in Education in 2019.

About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

In March of 2018, I attended Apple’s education event and came away less than impressed.

They need to build an “all in solution.” Apple is targeting teachers, but Google is targeting IT departments. Google is touting ease-of-management and deployment. Apple is touting new apps with Apple Pencil support.

Apple’s problems in education actually have less to do with the iPad being $299 or $259. They have a lot more to do with the story that they are framing in education being considered a pipe dream for a lot of the education market.

Education didn’t need a faster iPad. Education didn’t need Apple Pencil support. Those are great features for a consumer-friendly iPad, but education needed a clearer signal from Apple that they understand how school districts actually operate around the country and around the globe.

At the end of the day, students still have to pass standardized tests. They still have to meet all of their mandated requirements. I’m not sure an iPad with Apple Pencil support and some new GarageBand sound packs are really going to make that big of a difference as fun as they may be.

Since then, Apple has continued to double down on its “Everyone Can Create” strategy. Last fall, they released Evryone Can Create Curriculum on Apple Books.

Designed to help unleash kids’ creativity throughout their school day, Everyone Can Create teaches students to develop and communicate ideas through drawing, music, video and photos on iPad. The new, free project guides give teachers fun and meaningful tools to easily fold these skills into any lesson, assignment and subject. Everyone Can Create joins Apple’s successful Everyone Can Code initiative as one-of-a-kind programs for teachers that keep students excited and engaged.

As I’ve sat back and watched Apple and Google’s strategies from 40,000 feet, it’s clear they see education moving in different ways. Google values knowledge work (research, reports, spreadsheets, etc) where Apple values creativity (photo editing, augmented reality, music creation, podcasting, video creation, etc). Which one is right? I think modern students need a mix of both. Both types of devices (Chromebook and iPad) are well suited to the strengths of each company’s software platforms.

Going back to the ISTE conference, Apple took a unique approach this year. Instead of a booth in the Expo Hall, they took over multiple rooms in a connecting hotel to create a pop-up classroom experience. I was impressed. While Apple can often get the reputation of ignoring conferences in favor of their own events, they put in some serious effort to ISTE. Don’t take my word for it, though. I got to speak with Math teach from Texas on her thoughts:

Apple’s Pop-Up Classroom at ISTE leveraged a space theme across 6 stations of activities, transporting educators with an out-of-this-world experience. Lessons designed to utilize photo, video, music, drawing, coding, and augmented reality were shared in a playground format centered around creativity. Opportunities to interact with Apple Distinguished Educators and members of the Apple education team allowed for an irreplaceable human connection with one-on-one or small, intimate groups as participants moved at their own pace throughout the room. Personalized conversations proved inspirational as the relative magnitude of the large conference seemed a far reach from the calming environment of the Pop-Up Classroom.

This hands-on digital playground sparked creative lesson design as the participants were welcomed and encouraged to take the Apple Pop-Up Classroom Workbook, including completed tasks, with them upon exiting the experience. And, sample activities and resources to take back to school were made accessible on the Apple Teacher Learning Center at appleteacher.apple.com for everyone, including those who did not attend ISTE.

The augmented reality (AR) station in the Pop-Up Classroom highlighted the AR Makr app loaded with space-themed elements to coordinate with the rest of the stations. The possibilities for AR in schools are only restricted by the imagination. Opportunities for lesson design with AR spans storytelling to language acquisition practice, geography, re-creation of historical scenes, and mathematical scale and geometric spatial reasoning, just to name a few. – Mary Kemper, Director of Mathematics at Coppell Independent School District.

You can get a clear vision of what Apple wants education to be about. They want more of students getting to express themselves in new and exciting ways using the latest technology. I want that as well, and I think most teachers do as well. For Apple to realize that vision, they have some work to do, though. Here’s what I think Apple needs to focus on in education in 2019 and beyond.

Focus on Identity Management and App Roll Out Methods

Clever

I’ll talk about the problem of identity management in education until it’s no longer a problem. For me, it has to be a key part of Apple’s education plans in 2019 and beyond. For learning to be personalized, school districts need easier ways to deal with student login information across multiple apps. One company that is working to address this problem is Clever. Clever is a single sign-on service for K–12. Here’s the interesting pitch: it’s free for schools to use. Clever makes money by charging the applications that want to integrate with it. It’s a pretty simple pitch: Schools who use Clever get a free SSO (single sign-on) service that is geared towards education. Applications that integrate with Clever can promote ease of deployment to potential customers. It’s a win/win for everyone. Clever solves a problem that Apple school’s have. Why hasn’t Apple purchased Clever? If I was running education product marketing at Apple, I would be screaming to acquire them and make their technology at the center of the iPad deployment story. Apple’s app lineup is great, but The App Store has thousands of apps that extend the iPad even further. Clever creates a turn-key approach to app deployment and the iPad excels partly because of the App Store. Clever or Clever-like technology needs to be at the heart of Apple’s iPad story in Education. While they have launched Federated Authentication with Azure AD and Apple School Manager, this doesn’t work with schools who don’t use Azure AD or apps that don’t work with Azure AD.

Continue Desktop Class Safari Focus

As wide-ranging as the apps from the App Store is, Safari is still a crucial tool in K–12. One of the key features of iPadOS 13 is a desktop-class Safari. I wrote in June of 2018 that mobile Safari was holding the iPad back. I stand by everything in that article, and Apple looks to be addressing it. The web is an ever-changing platform, and Apple must continue to make sure Safari on iPadOS is usable for 100% of websites (including Google Drive/Docs/Spreadsheets). As important as the App Store is, school’s need to be able to count on iPad’s version of Safari just like they can with Chrome on Chromebooks. Web apps aren’t going away, and Safari needs to be a key focus of the iPadOS team for Apple to succeed in education in 2019 and beyond.

Wrap Up on Apple Education in 2019

Apple’s pricing for the iPad in K–12 is aggressive (as long as they keep updating the low cost iPad). They’ve got the app ecosystem to compete. They’ve got a vision of where they want education to go (moving away from simply knowledge work to embracing the creativity of students). Their challenge is less vision and more back-end/technical. Schools need an easier way to deploy user accounts across all of their apps. They need to continue to have access to a desktop-class Safari. If Apple keeps moving the ball forward while not forgetting the practicalities of how their products and services are deployed to the end-users, they will be well set up for continued success. Apple’s challenge in the long term is showing their products and services can be deployed and managed just as easy as Google’s can be. Google’s challenge will be expand the capabilities of ChromeOS to match the creative aspects of the iPad.

[“source=9to5mac”]

August 18, 2019 0 comment

Tech Update

Tech update including Experian, Facebook and Google

by Loknath Das August 13, 2019

written by Loknath Das

Image result for Tech update including Experian, Facebook and Google Facebook releases tools to flag harmful content on GitHub

Facebook is now open souring its photo and video flagging technologies and making them available on GitHub in a hope that its algorithms will enable other users to remove harmful content. These algorithms known as PDQ and TMK+PDQF will now be available to smaller developers and other users. PDQ is a photo-matching tool inspired by pHash but built by the social media giant. TMK+PDQF is the video-matching tool developed by Facebook’s AI research team and the university of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. In a bid to protect children from harmful footage, Facebook announced these open-source tools as part of its Child Safety Hackathon. They can be used along with Microsoft’s cloud-based PhotoDNA tool and Google’s Content Safety API; both were released to protect kids.

Google to unify App and website measurement in Google Analytics

To reduce the effort of using two products (Google Analytics for Firebase and regular Google Analytics), Google has plans to measure user interactions across platform with unified app and website analytics. A new property type, App + Web, allows business to combine app and web data in one report. The product enables measuring of custom events due to its flexible event-based model for collecting user interactions.
A new analysis module lets you inspect data without limitations of pre-defined reports and the different analysis techniques include; exploration in which one can drag and drop important variables onto a canvas to see instant visualizations, funnels in which one can identify steps leading to a conversation and how to move through it and path analysis wherein one can understand the actions users take between the steps with a funnel to the reasons of conversion.

Salesforce completes $15.7bn Acquisition of analytics thoroughbred Tableau Software

CRM solutions provider, Salesforce has acquired analytics vendor Tableau Software for around $15.75bn. With this acquisition, Salesforce aims to drive digital transformation. Working with Einstein and Tableau, Salesforce said that it would deliver the most intelligent and intuitive analytics and visualisation platform for every department and every user. Tableau on the other hand will work with Customer 360 enabling it to reach a broader customer base. It will continue to operate independently under the Tableau brand and will remain headquartered in Seattle.

IBM launches new blockchain platform for supply chain management

Information technology company, IBM and blockchain consultancy Chainyard have rolled out a new blockchain network for supply chain management, created in a way to upgrade supplier validation, onboarding and life cycle information management. This new blockchain is called Trust Your Supplier and the other participants along with IBM to formulate it include Anheuser-Busch InBev, Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, Lenovo, Nokia, Schneider Electric and Vodafone. To prevent the manual processing of managing suppliers, Trust Your Supplier uses a decentralized approach and an audit trail built on blockchain. It can transform the companies on board and manage the supplier network enabling buyers and sellers to identify procurement benefits through reductions in cost, complexity and speed.

Experian leads US$20M first close of Series B1 Investment in CompareAsiaGroup

Multinational consumer credit reporting company, Experian has invested US$20 million first close of Series B investment in CompareAsiaGroup, a comparison site with presence across Asia. This investment will be used to improve the use of data-driven technologies, offering customers more personalised services along with innovation, efficiency and scalability.

NUS and China firm tie up on AI research

A camera system based on AI that allows higher quality images and helps deep learning processes will soon be developed in Singapore. This technology can be mounted on AI robots or surveillance cameras. It will be jointly developed by a team of researchers from National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Dr Feng and Beijing-based AI firm Pensees technology.
Pensees has just opened the Pensees Singapore Institute, it’s first outside China and will house upto 70 staff including AI algorithm researchers, system researchers, hardware experts and engineers. Dr Fend stated that the research collaboration between the Chinese firm and NUS has been selected as one of the AI 100 Experiments (100E) project managed by AI Singapore (AISG) and will receive funding for 18 months.

HPE buys MapR and its Unique file system for analytics and machine learning

HPE has bought MapR for an undisclosed amount and said that I would make the Big Data analytics company’s unique file system technology part of its analytics and machine learning solutions for enterprises. MapR sells its proprietary file system simplifying the process for enterprise IT teams that are building infrastructure for analytics in a variety of environments. MapR’s investors have included Google Capital, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. MapR’s file system technology will enable HPE to offer a portfolio of products to boost AI and analytics applications to facilitate customers manage their data assets.

[“source=financialdirector”]

August 13, 2019 0 comment

Internet

This SoftBank-Backed Company Bags A Contract To Beam Internet From Space

by Loknath Das August 10, 2019

written by Loknath Das

OneWeb Wins Contracts To Beam Internet From Space

As the virtual space is becoming as important as reality, Right to the internet has gained momentum. Internet is now being seen as an enabler of the progress of humankind as a whole. It boosts economic, social and political developments, and provides a safe space for users to express one’s opinions.

United Nation in 2016 declared access to the internet as a human right which should be protected. The UN declaration focused on the access to internet services in providing and expanding reachability of the internet for the people who cannot afford it. The order also laid stress on avoiding disruption of internet services for current users.

A large number of NGOs, international organizations and companies have been working towards reducing the internet disability to create wider international communities. Global communications company OneWeb, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Technologies Corp and Jeff Bezos’s Project Kuiper have been racing to install constellation of small satellites to offer 4G like broadband around the globe. The installation of the global 4G network will provide global internet coverage.

OneWeb, backed by SoftBank, has secured the right to the airwaves it needs to launch a global satellite broadband network. The company met the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union’s ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ spectrum conditions by setting up six satellites broadcasting at right frequencies for 90 days.

Musk’s SpaceX is also on the go, it has sent dozens of satellites into orbit for its Starlink project. SpaceX has already got US’s approval to set up 12,000 satellites. Project Kuiper is yet to launch any of its satellites.

Will India Follow?

India too has been promoting digitization on a large scale. The Reliance-Jio movement was can be seen as the second liberalisation of India, since it has brought rural India to cyberspace as well, given them more opportunities to exercise their fundamental rights. The availability of internet in India has also given a significant push to the Indian startup ecosystem with both global and home-grown players coming to market. The growth of the internet increased the capacity and the reachability of the companies by empowering them.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had also announced a similar initiative to provide high-speed internet to the Indians, by the end of 2019, launching four heavy-duty communication satellites. ISRO launched various satellites to improve internet speed and its reachability.

According to Ookla’s announcement in the beginning of 2018, the average mobile internet download speed in India is 10.71 Mbps, compared to 33.88 Mbps that of USA. Even though India has 699 Mn- the second largest number- internet users in the world, it is largely comprised of an urban household.

60% of Indian still do not have access to the internet or mobile phones. To bridge the internet divide, the Indian government has invested to lay high-speed internet in 150,000 villages across India under the Bharat Net Programme.

With accessibility to internet, small businesses can reach the global audience easily, expanding the market.

[“source=inc42”]

August 10, 2019 0 comment

Education

UGC recognizes 14 new higher education institutes for open and distance learning

by Loknath Das August 9, 2019

written by Loknath Das

University Grants Commission has recognised 14 new Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) for providing courses through distance education. This list is in addition to 82 such institutes that were recognised by the UGC in May this year.

In December 2012, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Higher Education, dissolved the Distance Education Council which was the erstwhile regulator of Distance Education programmes and transferred regulatory functions to the University Grants Commission.

UGC recognizes 14 new higher education institutes for open and distance learning

Representative image.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development in a gazette notification published earlier recognised all the degrees awarded through open and distance mode of education by the universities established by an Act of Parliament or State Legislature, Deemed Universities, Institutes of National Importance are eligible for posts and services under the central government, provided they have been approved by the UGC and wherever necessary, by All India Council for Technical Education for the programme for which it is the regulatory authority.

[“source=firstpost”]

August 9, 2019 0 comment

Internet

Comcast’s $10 internet plan opens up to all low-income and disabled Americans

by Loknath Das August 7, 2019

written by Loknath Das

Closeup of colored computer network cables connected to a switch

Low-income families face the same issues the luckier among us do when it comes to getting broadband: few options and fewer still that are affordable. Comcast, though simultaneously the source of many of these issues, has a good program for anyone facing financial hardship, and several new groups now qualify for $10 connectivity.

The “Internet Essentials” program has for several years now offered cheap internet to the economically disadvantaged and other groups who need a helping hand. It has connected some two million households so far and may connect plenty more under the new, expanded eligibility options the company just announced.

Essentially if you’re the beneficiary of any of a bunch of financial aid programs from the government, or are disabled, or a low-income household, you’re eligible. You can apply here for free.

Previously you were eligible under a dozen or so of those programs, but today Comcast announced that the following groups are newly able to take advantage of the program:

Persons with disabilities
Seniors on Medicaid
All low-income adults (defined as 38% above the poverty line in your area)

That last one probably makes a lot of people eligible who might not have participated in one of the other programs, like the National School Lunch Program or Section 8 housing. If you’re low income, get on in there.

In case you’re not quite sure of your exact income, you’re also welcome if you take part in any of the following assistance programs:

Medicaid
National School Lunch Program (NSLP, free and reduced-price lunch)
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamps)
HUD housing assistance and Section 8
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare)
Supplemental Security Income (social security)
Head Start or Early Head Start
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)
Tribal assistance (TTANF and FDPIR)
Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
VA pension

Any of these should qualify you for $10 (plus applicable taxes and fees — probably a couple bucks) broadband. You also can apply for a $150 computer, but I’m not sure I’d recommend whatever they’re selling. Cheap laptops are pretty easy to find, so ask around before you go in on Comcast’s house brand.

Just to make sure expectations are in line with reality here, this is a 5-megabit connection, meaning it doesn’t really even qualify as “broadband” under current definitions. But you’ll be able to stream music, play games, do most web stuff and watch YouTube perfectly fine. Just be ready to buffer a bit if you want to watch Netflix in HD. There’s also a 1-terabyte data cap, so 4K all day probably isn’t a good idea.

Good on Comcast for offering this (and rare it is the company deserves kudos). It’s more comprehensive than other low-income connection options from AT&T, Cox and so on, though if they’re the monopoly in your area, you might not have a choice. At least the programs exist — there’s a pretty good list here. Be sure to ask your provider if they have one before you decide to pay full price.

[“source=techcrunch”]

August 7, 2019 0 comment