Saturday, October 28, 2017
Solve Tough Data Problems. Get Flooded With Job Offers.
An excerpt from Wired -
SOLVE THESE TOUGH DATA PROBLEMS AND WATCH JOB OFFERS ROLL IN
By Tom Simonite
LATE IN 2015, Gilberto Titericz, an electrical engineer at Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras, told his boss he planned to resign, after seven years maintaining sensors and other hardware in oil plants. By devoting hundreds of hours of leisure time to the obscure world of competitive data analysis, Titericz had recently become the world’s top-ranked data scientist, by one reckoning. Silicon Valley was calling. “Only when I wanted to quit did they realize they had the number-one data scientist,” he says.
Petrobras held on to its champ for a time by moving Titericz into a position that used his data skills. But since topping the rankings that October he’d received a stream of emails from recruiters around the globe, including representatives of Tesla and Google. This past February, another well-known tech company hired him, and moved his family to the Bay Area this summer. Titericz described his unlikely journey recently over colorful plates of Nigerian food at the headquarters of his new employer, Airbnb.
Titericz earned, and holds, his number-one rank on a website called Kaggle that has turned data analysis into a kind of sport, and transformed the lives of some competitors. Companies, government agencies, and researchers post datasets on the platform and invite Kaggle’s more than one million members to discern patterns and solve problems. Winners get glory, points toward Kaggle’s rankings of its top 66,000 data scientists, and sometimes cash prizes.
https://www.wired.com/story/solve-these-tough-data-problems-and-watch-job-offers-roll-in/?mbid=nl_102817_daily_list1_p1
SOLVE THESE TOUGH DATA PROBLEMS AND WATCH JOB OFFERS ROLL IN
By Tom Simonite
LATE IN 2015, Gilberto Titericz, an electrical engineer at Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras, told his boss he planned to resign, after seven years maintaining sensors and other hardware in oil plants. By devoting hundreds of hours of leisure time to the obscure world of competitive data analysis, Titericz had recently become the world’s top-ranked data scientist, by one reckoning. Silicon Valley was calling. “Only when I wanted to quit did they realize they had the number-one data scientist,” he says.
Petrobras held on to its champ for a time by moving Titericz into a position that used his data skills. But since topping the rankings that October he’d received a stream of emails from recruiters around the globe, including representatives of Tesla and Google. This past February, another well-known tech company hired him, and moved his family to the Bay Area this summer. Titericz described his unlikely journey recently over colorful plates of Nigerian food at the headquarters of his new employer, Airbnb.
Titericz earned, and holds, his number-one rank on a website called Kaggle that has turned data analysis into a kind of sport, and transformed the lives of some competitors. Companies, government agencies, and researchers post datasets on the platform and invite Kaggle’s more than one million members to discern patterns and solve problems. Winners get glory, points toward Kaggle’s rankings of its top 66,000 data scientists, and sometimes cash prizes.
https://www.wired.com/story/solve-these-tough-data-problems-and-watch-job-offers-roll-in/?mbid=nl_102817_daily_list1_p1
Adding Insult to Injury
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/columnist/bell/2017/10/27/nfl-owners-texans-bob-mcnair-need-sensitivity-training-race/807958001/
Autism Breakthrough?
An excerpt from the Sacramento Bee -
UC Davis researchers test drug that may reverse symptoms of autism
By Molly Sullivan
Researchers at UC Davis MIND Institute may have found a drug that can reverse symptoms of a rare genetic condition associated with autism.
The 16p11.2 deletion syndrome – caused by the deletion of a small piece of chromosome 16 – is present in one-third of people with autism. People who have this condition are missing certain genes, resulting in impaired communication and social skills and delayed intellectual development, said Jacqueline Crawley, the lead researcher in the study.
The drug that may help is called R-baclofen. It interacts with a specific kind of neurotransmitter to inhibit neurons from firing, she said.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article181379671.html#emlnl=Breaking_Newsletter#storylink=cpy
UC Davis researchers test drug that may reverse symptoms of autism
By Molly Sullivan
Researchers at UC Davis MIND Institute may have found a drug that can reverse symptoms of a rare genetic condition associated with autism.
The 16p11.2 deletion syndrome – caused by the deletion of a small piece of chromosome 16 – is present in one-third of people with autism. People who have this condition are missing certain genes, resulting in impaired communication and social skills and delayed intellectual development, said Jacqueline Crawley, the lead researcher in the study.
The drug that may help is called R-baclofen. It interacts with a specific kind of neurotransmitter to inhibit neurons from firing, she said.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article181379671.html#emlnl=Breaking_Newsletter#storylink=cpy
How to Be a CEO
An excerpt from the New York Times -
How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
Adam Bryant has interviewed 525 chief executives through his
years writing the Corner Office column. Here’s what he has learned.
By ADAM BRYANT
It started with a simple idea: What if I sat down with chief executives, and never asked them about their companies?
The notion occurred to me roughly a decade ago, after spending years as a reporter and interviewing C.E.O.s about many of the expected things: their growth plans, the competition, the economic forces driving their industries. But the more time I spent doing this, the more I found myself wanting to ask instead about more expansive themes — not about pivoting, scaling or moving to the cloud, but how they lead their employees, how they hire, and the life advice they give or wish they had received.
That led to 525 Corner Office columns, and weekly reminders that questions like these can lead to unexpected places.
I met an executive who grew up in a dirt-floor home, and another who escaped the drugs and gangs of her dangerous neighborhood. I learned about different approaches to building culture, from doing away with titles to offering twice-a-month housecleaning to all employees as a retention tool.
And I have been endlessly surprised by the creative approaches that chief executives take to interviewing people for jobs, including tossing their car keys to a job candidate to drive them to a lunch spot, or asking them how weird they are, on a scale of 1 to 10.
Granted, not all chief executives are fonts of wisdom. And some of them, as headlines regularly remind us, are deeply challenged people.
That said, there’s no arguing that C.E.O.s have a rare vantage point for spotting patterns about management, leadership and human behavior.
After almost a decade of writing the Corner Office column, this will be my final one — and from all the interviews, and the five million words of transcripts from those conversations, I have learned valuable leadership lessons and heard some great stories. Here are some standouts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront
How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
Adam Bryant has interviewed 525 chief executives through his
years writing the Corner Office column. Here’s what he has learned.
By ADAM BRYANT
It started with a simple idea: What if I sat down with chief executives, and never asked them about their companies?
The notion occurred to me roughly a decade ago, after spending years as a reporter and interviewing C.E.O.s about many of the expected things: their growth plans, the competition, the economic forces driving their industries. But the more time I spent doing this, the more I found myself wanting to ask instead about more expansive themes — not about pivoting, scaling or moving to the cloud, but how they lead their employees, how they hire, and the life advice they give or wish they had received.
That led to 525 Corner Office columns, and weekly reminders that questions like these can lead to unexpected places.
I met an executive who grew up in a dirt-floor home, and another who escaped the drugs and gangs of her dangerous neighborhood. I learned about different approaches to building culture, from doing away with titles to offering twice-a-month housecleaning to all employees as a retention tool.
And I have been endlessly surprised by the creative approaches that chief executives take to interviewing people for jobs, including tossing their car keys to a job candidate to drive them to a lunch spot, or asking them how weird they are, on a scale of 1 to 10.
Granted, not all chief executives are fonts of wisdom. And some of them, as headlines regularly remind us, are deeply challenged people.
That said, there’s no arguing that C.E.O.s have a rare vantage point for spotting patterns about management, leadership and human behavior.
After almost a decade of writing the Corner Office column, this will be my final one — and from all the interviews, and the five million words of transcripts from those conversations, I have learned valuable leadership lessons and heard some great stories. Here are some standouts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront
Friday, October 27, 2017
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Brown Corn Pop
hey @KelloggsUS why is literally the only brown corn pop on the whole cereal box the janitor? this is teaching kids racism. pic.twitter.com/Nh7M7IFawW— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) October 24, 2017
Powerful Videos
From the New Yorker -
We Are Witnesses
A portrait of crime and punishment in America today.
In partnership with The Marshall Project
The impact of America’s punishment policies is often measured in numbers: there are now 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; one in a hundred and fifteen adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is four times larger than it was in 1980. “We Are Witnesses,” a collection of short videos, offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises nineteen videos, each between two and six minutes long. Taken together, they present a rare 360-degree portrait of the state of crime and punishment in the United States.
“We Are Witnesses” eschews politicians and professors in favor of other kinds of experts: people who have had firsthand experience with the criminal-justice system. Two police officers, a prison guard, two judges, two parents of a murder victim, four ex-prisoners—each one stares straight at the camera, recounting his or her story. Created and produced by the Marshall Project, a newsroom covering the criminal-justice system, “We Are Witnesses” delivers first-person testimonials that are intimate, honest, and revelatory.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/we-are-witnesses-portrait-of-crime-and-punishment-in-america-today#video
We Are Witnesses
A portrait of crime and punishment in America today.
In partnership with The Marshall Project
The impact of America’s punishment policies is often measured in numbers: there are now 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; one in a hundred and fifteen adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is four times larger than it was in 1980. “We Are Witnesses,” a collection of short videos, offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises nineteen videos, each between two and six minutes long. Taken together, they present a rare 360-degree portrait of the state of crime and punishment in the United States.
“We Are Witnesses” eschews politicians and professors in favor of other kinds of experts: people who have had firsthand experience with the criminal-justice system. Two police officers, a prison guard, two judges, two parents of a murder victim, four ex-prisoners—each one stares straight at the camera, recounting his or her story. Created and produced by the Marshall Project, a newsroom covering the criminal-justice system, “We Are Witnesses” delivers first-person testimonials that are intimate, honest, and revelatory.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/we-are-witnesses-portrait-of-crime-and-punishment-in-america-today#video
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
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