Categories
Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: HBR Guide to Remote Work

HBR Guide to Remote Work by Harvard Business Review. The ‘HBR Guide’ series offers articles addressed in multiple sections. This is not a single author’s interpretation.

HBR Guide to Remote Work by Harvard Business Review

This title was published during the pandemic when employees were already remote. This guide is addressing a very large change in human behavior and the need for organizations to respond.

More importantly, this addresses new, unique challenges when confronting the simple day to day aspects of working outside the office. Perhaps within your family, the new remote office is the kitchen. For managers, your direct reports are certainly confronting new challenges in delivering their workflows.

Enter the Zoom era. New organizational elements were quickly changing. How to ensure employees are staying focused despite all the new distractions from home.

This Guide is indeed providing insightful tips and advice. So, how does an organization shift their operations from 100% face to face to the new remote work? Many employees quickly embraced working remote in casual clothing. In fact, this helped their bottom line saving money on gasoline and lunches.

Categories
Blockchain Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Tracers in the Dark

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg. Andy a senior technology writer at Wired. He previously worked as a staff writer at Forbes magazine and as a contributor to their online website.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

Indeed, with every great advancement or popular service, criminals manage to insert themselves to commit new types of crime. Cryptocurrency (aka Bitcoin) is the latest example of a digital advancement under exploitation, creating black markets that hide financial transactions.

Yet this powerful technology allows criminals to actually conduct business right out in the open instead of hiding drug transactions, money laundering, and human trafficking in the analog world. In fact, during the pandemic, crypto’s value simply exploded but the damage had already been done.

Internet culture quickly baked the idea on social media sites and technology blogs, especially on the digital underground (Dark web) that this technology was in fact a digital, anonymous, private money source. And more importantly to criminals it was untraceable.

This is attributed to blockchain ledgers which are deployed anonymously. Andy reveals how digital criminal empires are built on crypto. Yet we also learn of their simple mistakes resulting in their takedown. Well….kinda of a takedown.

Categories
Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: Crypto

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy. He is the former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. Today he is an editor at Wired, and author of eight books. Crypto, won the Frankfurt E-book Award for the best non-fiction book of 2001.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government - Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

If you’ve ever made an e-commerce purchase with your credit card, then you have used cryptography.

Steven guides the reader into learning about the history of cryptography. This book begins with Whitfield Diffie. He authored initial developments of cryptographic keys. He was then joined by Martin Hellman in 1976.

From this point, Steven reveals how Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, teaching at MIT also furthered cryptography research. Their development led to the formation of their company, RSA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) certainly interpreted these cryptography developments as a threat and began working to thwart their developments.

Categories
Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: The Science of Storytelling

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. A British author, journalist and former photographer, Will has been a contributing editor at Esquire and GQ Australia.

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

Will has been featured in The Guardian Weekend, The Telegraph Magazine, The Times Magazine, The Observer Magazine, and The Sunday Times. Will has been named New Journalist of the Year, Feature Writer of the Year and has won a National Press Club award for excellence.

Storytelling is the true cornerstone of a presenter. Since the launch of PowerPoint this narrative shifted to the digital era. In fact, too many presenters forgot about storytelling and spent too much time playing with fonts and bullets.

In order to recapture the audience, it is critical for anyone to understand the craft of storytelling. There have been a good set of references that can guide you to present effectively. Most ask you to move beyond fiddling with fonts and bullets.

Will is able to move this effort forward. So this book reveals the essence of storytelling as a science, focusing on a topic that not many others have attempted. So Will is going deep inside our minds to help us learn how to achieve via psychological research and neuroscience to deliver powerful stories.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work?

What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist and physicist. He was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science.

What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram

He holds a PhD in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology. Steven then began teaching at Caltech and was the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship at age 21.

In 1987 he created Wolfram Research and continues to serve as CEO developing both Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. Recently the company announced that Wolfram Alpha would integrate with ChatGPT.

In short, this book is perhaps the first worthy book to address ChatGPT with a full understanding of AI technology. Plus, Steven holds the ability to explain AI, algorithms and equations which will help the reader gain a much better (perhaps the best) understanding of ChatGPT.

Since the first public introduction in late 2022, many have simply asked how does this AI service function? Stephen in fact, lays out in very readable form, the background and basic understanding of neural net technologies. As a scientific discovery, this AI technology has certainly holds great potential to change computing with a potential huge downstream impact to society.