Many Lyft and Uber drivers have seen a bump in business from the spreading coronavirus, but they’re also weighing the risks of staying safe versus continuing to earn a paycheck. From a report: A study published Friday shows that more than half of ride-hailing drivers said they were now “very concerned” about reduced earnings as a result of the virus and…
Tag: Productivity
Starting A New Career On The Right Foot With A Professional Certificate Program: Meet Maureen
What program did you take on edX, and what were your goals in taking it? Six Sigma and Lean: Quantitative Tools for Quality and Productivity Professional Certificate program from TUMx. Although I have a background in engineering, I was starting a new career in performance excellence (continuous improvement of processes and reduction of waste). I wanted to learn the concepts and…
Microsoft’s Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users
With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. From a report: That’s very much in line with Microsoft’s new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans….
When AI Can’t Replace a Worker, It Watches Them Instead
Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it. From a report: When Tony Huffman stepped away from the production line at the Denso auto part factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, to talk with WIRED earlier this month, the workers he supervised were still being watched — but not…
Barclays Installed Big Brother-style Spyware on Employees’ Computers
Barclays has been criticised by HR experts and privacy campaigners after the bank installed “Big Brother” employee monitoring software in its London headquarters. From a report: Introduced as a pilot last week, the technology monitors Barclays workers’ activity on their computers, and in some instances admonishes staff in daily updates to them if they are not deemed to have been active…
Save the giants, save the planet
Protecting large animals such as elephants and whales, and large plants like the sequoias, has a disproportionate positive impact on the health of the planet and resilience to climate change. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/why-to-conserve-large-animals-trees…
Companies That Buy Data Derived From Scraping the Contents of Your Email Inbox
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy…
Programmer Moneyball: Challenging the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
Slashdot reader jbmartin6 summarizes a new article from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute:
An academic study challenges the notion that “some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills, abilities, and talents of these programmers exert an outsized influence on that organization’s success or failure.” Instead, the author shows productivity variation is often a…
iPad Launch Blindsided Windows Team, Reveals Former Microsoft Executive
The launch of the iPad ten years ago was a big surprise to everyone in the industry — including to Microsoft executives. Steven Sinofsky, the former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, shares Microsoft’s perspective as well as those of the other industry figures and press on the iPad: The announcement 10 years ago today of the “magical” iPad was…
Red Hat and IBM Jointly File Another Amicus Brief In Google v. Oracle, Arguing APIs Are Not Copyrightable
Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the “Google vs. Oracle” case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted. “That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse…