October 2013

Why Shareholders Want Gates Out

The big Microsoft shareholders who are happy about CEO's Steve Ballmer imminent exit – and now want his mentor, company co-founder and chairman Bill Gates to follow him out the door -- seek one thing: improved capital allocation.

"If both Gates and Ballmer are out, and better capital allocators are in, Microsoft's stock will hit $40 within the next several months," predicts Dan Ferris, investment analyst at Stansberry & Associates Investment Research. The dissatisfied shareholders are most probably upset that Gates would likely stay the course that he and Ballmer have established by pushing for a Ballmer clone to replace his college buddy. The shareholders who want Gates to follow Ballmer out the door very likely view poor capital allocation as one of Microsoft's primary problems.

How the industrial Internet will help you to stop worrying and love the data

[Commentary] We are at the cusp of another metamorphic change that will spawn new business models, new jobs and new operational efficiencies: The industrial internet, the convergence of contextual data, people and brilliant machines. Whether we’re discussing the consumer internet or the industrial internet, a new challenge arises with the seemingly endless proliferation of connected devices and intelligent machines: Big data.

The next leap forward for industry will be all about more agile development, mastering data science and becoming proficient at repeatable processes. There is a need to create software and a platform that is equivalent, if not better, than what current consumer companies have built. Because industrial data is growing at two times the rate of any other big data segment, integration and synchronization of data and analytics, often in real-time, are needed in industry more than in other sectors. Industrial businesses require a big data platform with common software and hardware standards, optimized for these unique characteristics.

There are six capabilities that industrial companies must adopt as part of their business strategy to be successful in this new era:
1) Data collection and aggregation
2) Advanced analytics at the point of need
3) Cloud-agnostic, deployment independence: a highly flexible deployment architecture that allows them to mix and match technology deployment methods – and avoid vendor lock-in
4) Extensibility and customizability
5) Orchestration
6) Modern user experience

[Ruh is VP of GE’s Software and Analytics Center]

What the US Media Are Ignoring in Government Shutdown Coverage

[Commentary] Writing in It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein argue: “[T]he Republican Party continues to demonstrate that it is an insurgent force in our politics, one that aspires to rewrite the social contract and role of government developed and affirmed over a century by both major political parties.” Mann and Ornstein contend that media "continues, for the most part, to miss this story." It's not just that media miss key elements of the story, it's how media frame the story; after all, research shows that words and tone do shape opinion.

No Consensus Among Scholars on Media Violence

[Commentary] The notion that media violence plays even a partial role in mass shootings is scientifically dead. Whether young or old, male or (rarely) female, it is severe mental illness, not media exposure that is the commonality among mass shooters. Speaking as a researcher in the field, the evidence linking violent media to even mild acts of aggression is inconsistent. Evidence for a causal effect, even in part, on serious societal violence is generally lacking. So why does this social narrative persist? Part of it has been the poor historical performance of professional advocacy groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association in faithfully communicating the research to the general public.

[Dr. Ferguson is Department Chair of Psychology at Stetson University]

User-Generated Content Is Here to Stay

[Commentary] User-generated content (UGC) has completely changed the landscape of social interaction, media outreach, consumer understanding, and everything in between.

Today, UGC is media generated by the consumer instead of the traditional journalists and reporters. This is a movement defying and redefining traditional norms at the same time. Current events are largely publicized on Twitter and Facebook by the average person, and not by a photojournalist hired by a news organization. In the past, these large news corporations dominated the headlines -- literally -- and owned the monopoly on public media. Yet with the advent of smartphones and spread of social media, everything has changed. The entire industry has been replaced; smartphones have supplanted how information is collected, packaged, edited, and conveyed for mass distribution. UGC allows for raw and unfiltered movement of content at lightning speed. With the way that the world works today, it is the most reliable way to get information out. One thing that is for certain is that UGC is here to stay whether we like it or not, and it is driving much more of modern journalistic content than the average person realizes.

[Azeem Khan is co-founder of Supshot, a Beta-app developer]

Sequestration Slows IT Hiring for Months; Shutdown Stops It Entirely

A new analysis by ComputerWorld found a drop in the number of IT jobs posted by federal agencies each month since sequestration went into effect in March. Before sequestration, agencies were posting well over 200 IT jobs per month, but that number has since dropped to about 150 per month, according to the analysis, which looked at USAJobs.gov each month for listings coded in the Information Technology 2200 series.

These Massive Data Facilities Could Be Targets of Government Spying

Ordinary citizens might never know what their government is up to security-wise, but it is possible to guess where it's conducting nefarious snooping activities. That's because when spooks eavesdrop on web communications, they're targeting Internet infrastructure with a very physical presence. It might be Internet exchange points through which floods of information pass among networks, for instance, or sprawling "server farms" that allow cloud computing to exist. Google operates one of the latter in the city of Lenoir, North Carolina, and the amount of data-handling equipment it contains is stunning.

What inner city kids know about social media, and why we should listen

[Commentary] Are actual teachers -- that is, those employed by the school system -- tapped into the wealth of information from their students made available through social media? Likely not.

The teachers I know are often discouraged, and sometimes downright forbidden from, interacting with their students on social media. While these policies are in place to help protect both teachers and students from all manner of things, this wall of separation may be keeping teachers from truly knowing their students in a time when teens need a mentor more than ever. At a six-week workshop at Chicago’s first “Civic Innovation Summer,” a summer program designed to keep inner city kids off the streets and to learn technology skills, the adult techies learned that these teenagers were extremely savvy with privacy on social media, sometimes to the point of bafflement. And they know we’re all watching; according to their exit surveys, most students were happy to hand over their Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/SnapChat names, saying they felt comfortable with adults learning more about the realities of their teenage lives. Whether our teens will eventually regret the things they post online is the wrong debate to have—or, at least, it’s a debate we should have later on. Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we, as a society, discourage the real teachers, counselors, and principals from seeing a full picture of what their students are up to and what can be done to help.

[Cheng is Editor at Large at Ars Technica]

Government shutdown closes websites, affecting data journalists

Tourists, leaf-peepers and rambunctious World War II veterans weren’t the only people inconvenienced by the partial government shutdown that began: Journalists who deal with government data found themselves in a tough spot when they couldn’t download files or pull the most up-to-date data for their projects.

Have the Media Failed Us on Climate Change?

September 2013 should have been the biggest month for climate change journalism in six years. With the release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in Stockholm, there were a wealth stories for journalists to pursue. But recently, we've seen a flood of media coverage advancing dubious claims pushed by global warming skeptics. There's a long history of the press relying on phony "balanced" coverage to cast doubt on what scientists know about the climate. That was the case even before the major cutbacks in science and environmental reporting at many media outlets over the past decade.

At SXSW Eco, the acclaimed environment and sustainability conference, Climate Desk is convening a panel of top climate journalists to diagnose and address the media's chronic failings in covering this issue. The event, part of the Mother Jones Climate Desk Live series, will be at 4:30 pm Central Time on October 8, 2013, at the Austin Convention Center.

Benton

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