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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.

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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.

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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.

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Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: The Attention Merchants

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu. He holds an undergrad in biophysics from McGill University and a JD from Harvard Law School. He served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy. Today he teaches at Columbia Law School.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

So, do you know how Madison avenue hijacked the web? Ever consider a time when you searched online for a product, a lawn mower for example. And before you realize that it was only minutes before your facebook feed started popping lawn mower ads into your feed?

Perhaps a Youtube channel is promoting a certain lawn mower vendor is a link pushed into your social media accounts? How many times have you noticed an online brand working into your internet life? In fact, have you even noticed that family, coworkers and friends are also falling victim to the attention merchants? Look deeper with your social media links to and from family and friends.

Tim is revealing for some the very idea that your internet life is under assault. He believes that American business actually depends on how much attention you pay to their messages. From advertising, branding, and even sponsored social media profiles.

Their focus is to gain your attention and put your eyes and mouse clicks on their internet sites. All to sell you that lawn mower.

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Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: We See It All

We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance by Jon Fasman. Jon is a senior reporter at The Economist for 15 years. He holds a Master of Philosophy from Oxford. His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and The Washington Post.

We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance

Jon is revealing how current laws and policies are too far behind the times regarding next generation technologies. Ultimately, Jon asks for the public to hold government at the federal, state, and local levels accountable to protect privacy rights and liberty of their citizens.

In fact, this book’s investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how law enforcement, including courts utilize surveillance systems confronts the citizen of any country reveals that citizens may live in a free country in the name of safety.

This has certainly escalated rapidly since 9/11. Issues of next generation system already deployed impact privacy and the rights of citizens.

Jon is addressing such topics as moral, legal, and political that are now generating data by advanced tools. For example scanning technologies including facial recognition, license-plate readers are triggering activity by law enforcement.

This certainly book draws similar outcomes to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine. Law enforcement use of technologies results in higher ticket and arrest data in unique zip codes across major metropolitan areas.