Category: personal AnGoL

What Is Big Data? Big data is the collection and analysis of information from various sources. It has two types: structured and unstructured. Structured data includes SQL databases, while unstructured data includes document files and raw streaming data from sensors. The industry describes big data in three major Vs:

1. Volume: A business can have multiple sources for its data. Technologies today have allowed business to store more data than has ever been possible.
2. Velocity: In reality, data is coming in at breakneck speed — and in real-time, or as close to real-time as possible. Velocity also describes how fast data is processed and analyzed.
3. Variety: In addition to the amount and speed of data that goes into your system, it also comes in different formats. From business sale records to database information, it’s all big data.

Source: A Beginner’s Guide to Big Data – DZone Big Data

The “Phoenix Checklist” is a set of questions developed by the CIA to define and think about a problem, and how to develop a solution.

THE PROBLEM
Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?
What is the unknown?
What is it you don’t yet understand?
What is the information you have?
What isn’t the problem?
Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?
Where are the boundaries of the problem?
Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?
Have you seen this problem before?
Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?
Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown
Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?
Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?
What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?
=====
THE PLAN
Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?
What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?
How much of the unknown can you determine?
Can you derive something useful from the information you have?
Have you used all the information?
Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?
Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?
What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?
Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?
How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?
What have others done?
Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result?
What should be done? How should it be done?
Where should it be done?
When should it be done?
Who should do it?
What do you need to do at this time?
Who will be responsible for what?
Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?
What milestones can best mark your progress?
How will you know when you are successful?
Source: Here’s the CIA’s “Phoenix Checklist” for thinking about problems / Boing Boing

In each case, we face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals, and transit are facing existential questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs.
On the contrary: The price tag for all the shiny gadgets will be mass teacher layoffs and hospital closures.
Tech provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to “reimagine” our states and cities to men like Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot fix.
For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, by putting the former Google chair in charge of the body that will shape the state’s reopening, appears to have just given him something close to free reign.

Source: A High-Tech Coronavirus Dystopia

or centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

Source: The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months | Books | The Guardian

Here’s what’s coming for us now:
1. GLOBALIZATION OF WHITE SUPREMACY
2. ATTACKS ON TRUST AND TRUTH
3. BIOSECURITY
4. TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION
5. NUKES
6. CLIMATE CHANGE
7. COVID-19’S NEXT LEVEL IMPACT
8. CATASTROPHIC EARTHQUAKES
9. UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

Source: Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next. – POLITICO

Nose to the grindstone
If you’re not as good at working from home as you wish you were, take solace in the fact that few people – even those remote-working pros – are working to their full potential in stressful times. It may be hard to compartmentalise the stress around you­ – especially when you’re stuck at home – but the more you can adjust to your ‘new normal’, the better work-from-home employee you’ll be, says Pychyl.
Try not to be frustrated if others are taking to the situation better than you; the transition may come more easily to people who are naturally more organised and disciplined, says Davis. For others, “there needs to be some honest self-reflection in terms of what went well today, when did I struggle and then an attempt to identify what it was that knocked you off course”.
Practising can make perfect – but you’ll only get better at telework if you actually find strategies to create boundaries and reel yourself in in other ways. “Practice will help,” adds Davis, “but only if you have a strategy.”

Source: Why are some people better at working from home than others? – BBC Worklife

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been right about a lot. She was right in the early 1990s, when, as a fierce critic of China’s human rights record, she rejected the bipartisan faith that economic liberalization in China would inevitably lead to greater democratization. She was right again in 2003 when, as the leader of the House Democrats, she was one of the few party leaders to oppose the war in Iraq. She was right during the 2008 primary, when she rejected the entreaties of powerful allies of Hillary Clinton — Harvey Weinstein among them — to get behind a plan to use superdelegates to help Clinton take the Democratic nomination from Barack Obama.

Pelosi was right throughout Obama’s administration, when she struggled to make the president see that his fetish for bipartisanship was leading him to make pointless concessions to Republicans, who would never negotiate in good faith. In “Pelosi,” Molly Ball’s admiring and illuminating new biography of the most powerful woman in American politics, there’s a scene where Pelosi expresses her frustration to Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, over Obama’s doomed courtship of Republican support for health care reform. “Does the president not understand the way this game works?” she asks. “He wants to get it done and be beloved, and you can’t have both — which does he want?”

The House speaker would rather get it done. There’s a pattern in Ball’s book. Again and again, Pelosi is dismissed, first as a dilettante housewife, then as a far-left San Francisco kook, finally as an establishment dinosaur — and throughout, as a woman. She perseveres, driven by a steely faith in her own abilities. And more often than not, she is vindicated.

Source: Nancy Pelosi’s Brilliant Career – The New York Times

We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.

Source: A Note on Reading Big, Difficult Books…

“There was a guy, Pete Kiewit in Omaha, who used to say he looked for three things in hiring people: integrity, intelligence and energy,” Buffett said. “If they didn’t have the first, the other two would kill them, because if they don’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy.”
It makes sense — if you can’t trust someone to act with integrity in a situation that demands it, then should they really be allowed anywhere near you or your brand?

Source: Billionaire Warren Buffett to MBA students: This is the key to success

Why a Systematic Approach Works By switching our focus from achieving specific goals to creating positive long-term habits, we can make continuous improvement a way of life. This is evident from the documented habits of many successful people. Warren Buffett reads all day to build the knowledge necessary for his investments. Stephen King writes 1000 words a day, 365 days a year (a habit he describes as “a sort of creative sleep”). Athlete Eliud Kipchoge makes notes after each training session to establish

Source: Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life