When you think of the perfect candidate for a data science role, a few preconceived notions come to mind. You want someone who is analytical, detail-oriented and intuitive -- all important qualities in a data scientist. But there is more to data science than being good with numbers -- the core of a data scientist's role involves influencing decision-makers within the business and guiding the future of the company.While there are a lot logical traits that make a good data scientist, there are plenty of skills data scientists need that don't fall under the category of data. Ziad Nejmeldeen, senior vice president and chief scientist at the Infor Dynamic Science Labs, knows this better than anyone, having hired his own data scientists and helped guide the data strategies of numerous businesses at Infor. If you hold common misconceptions about data scientists, it might be time to reevaluate your strategy, according to Nejmeldeen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This Saturday was like most every other day for me. I opened my RSS Internet of Things (IoT) news feed and there were three more articles telling me that consumers don’t trust IoT security. IoT security alerts have been so frequent and regular for so long now that just like a “check engine light” in an old car I am beginning to ignore them. Recently I have seen a slight pivot in the stream of warnings in the form of survey data: Data is good. More than once I have heard “In God we trust” all others bring data. But data requires analysis so let’s look at a few recent figures:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No matter how progressive, open and casual your workplace, there are some conversations that should be off-limits no matter what. A new study from corporate and leadership education and training firm VitalSmarts found that of 775 respondents to a recent VitalSmarts survey on workplace behavior, 83 percent of employees witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Website hosting platform Wordpress.com will automatically enable HTTPS for all the custom domain names that its users have associated with their websites.Run by Automattic, WordPress.com allows users to easily create and manage websites based on the hugely popular WordPress content management system. Users of the free service get a subdomain under wordpress.com to use as an address for their website, but paid plans allow hosting a custom domain.Implementing HTTPS for wordpress.com subdomains was fairly easy and Automattic did this in 2014. However, turning on encryption for hosted websites with custom domain names requires individual certificates for each of those domains, which posed management and cost-related problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Open Source Vulnerability Database shut down this week posed yet another security challenge for developers who routinely inject massive amounts of free off-the-shelf code into new software.As the name suggests, OSVD was a resource where non-commercial developers could look – free - for patches to known vulnerabilities.+More on Network World: 10 best cloud SLA practices+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Continuing what should be but hasn’t been our weekly series highlighting the better tech-related memes … Reddit
Having used the thumbprint reader on my iPhone for some time now, it has become a habit of the muscle-memory variety, meaning that I quite regularly have unlocked my phone before I have completed reading an alert that had caught my attention. So, too, a user of Reddit who submitted the above meme.I am guessing that there’s probably an easy solution. But since this certainly must be among the most First World of First World Problems ever encountered, I’ve yet to invest the time to search it out. Meanwhile, it’s oddly comforting to know that I am not alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tuesday marks the end of support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and that means companies relying on it are just about out of time. There will be no more updates from Microsoft, so staying with the software could open you up to a host of risks.Microsoft encourages users to move to SQL Server 2014 or Azure SQL Database, but those aren't the only options. Either way, the transition is going to take some time. If you haven't already been working on it, the most important thing now is to act quickly to minimize the amount of time your company is left exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. ClearSlide for Gmail Key features: Available to all ClearSlide users, ClearSlide for Gmail is an easy-to-install Google Chrome app that is designed to increase salesperson productivity and improve the quality of CRM data by automatically logging all outbound emails, prospect views, and content engagement directly back to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every time you access your phone via fingerprint reader, you’re using biometric identification technology. So, while biometrics on the consumer side has become commonplace, a number of barriers have blocked widespread biometric adoption in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA (SATA). With the advent of the solid state drive (SSD), new interfaces have come into play designed to speed up throughput, because the SATA interface has rapidly become the bottleneck in drive speed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Buildings were evacuated at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Friday afternoon after a threat was made against the company.No one was injured and there was no damage to buildings, Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said. The incident involved a few buildings, beginning around 3:30 p.m. and concluded shortly before 5 p.m. Both police and Google security responded.Google didn't immediately have more information to provide. Police didn't comment on the nature of the threat and said they responded out of caution.While the campuses of Silicon Valley companies aren’t normally considered terrorist targets on the scale of federal buildings or major sporting events, major companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook are prominent symbols of U.S. economic and cultural power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.The cloud is the promised land when it comes to storage. A recent 451 Research report said AWS and Azure will be two of the top five enterprise storage vendors by 2017 with AWS as number two overall. But the challenge with using the cloud for primary storage is the latency between that storage and users/applications. To take advantage of the economics, scale, and durability of cloud storage, it will take a combination of caching, global deduplication, security, and global file locking to provide cloud storage with the performance and features organizations require. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.I’m an aerospace engineer by degree and an IT executive by practice. Early in my career, I worked on missile hardware and simulators with some of the smartest minds at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. An adage from those days still drives me today: “Better is the evil of good enough.”In rocket science, an astronaut’s life is literally in the balance with every engineering decision. Being perfect is mission critical. But along the way, NASA engineers realized while perfection is important, it was not to be universally adopted, for several key reasons: It is very expensive, it draws out timelines, and it can result in extreme over-engineering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. If you happen to be driving around California roads this summer, don't be surprised if a car with no driver pulls up next to you at an intersection. Google expects to be road-testing its prototype of a driverless car soon. If all goes well with this and other tests, BI Intelligence believes there could be 10 million cars with self-driving features on our roads by 2020.Fully autonomous cars – those that don't need any interaction at all from a driver, like Google's – still seem futuristic to most of us, but there are plenty of semi-autonomous cars sharing our roads today. This latter category includes all sorts of features to increase safety and convenience, everything from lane-keeping assist systems designed to keep a car in an open lane, to adaptive cruise control that matches the car's speed to that of the vehicle ahead,To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting and enforcing a service level agreement is paramount when employing cloud services – that was the chief conclusion reached in a report out this week by the federal watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.“Purchasing IT services through a provider enables agencies to avoid paying for all the assets such as hardware, software and networks that would typically be needed to provide such services.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+This approach offers federal agencies a means to buy the services faster and possibly cheaper than through the traditional methods they have used. To take advantage of these potential benefits, agencies have reported that they plan to spend more than $2 billion on cloud computing services in fiscal year 2016,” the GAO stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft promised a lot of nifty new features for Windows 10 at the Build conference, and one week later it has delivered a new build—number 14316—to the Fast Ring of its Windows Insiders who get the first crack at new builds for testing.At the Build show, Microsoft announced an “Anniversary update” slated for June, which was when a big update codenamed Redstone was thought to arrive. It now looks like the two are one in the same.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past two and a half years, cybercriminals have managed to steal over $2.3 billion from thousands of companies worldwide by using little more than carefully crafted scam emails.Known as business email compromise (BEC), CEO fraud or whaling, this type of attack involves criminals impersonating an organization's chief executive officer, or some other high-ranking manager, and instructing employees via email to initiate rogue wire transfers.According to an alert issued earlier this week by the FBI, between October 2013 and February 2016, 17,642 organizations from the U.S. and 79 other countries have fallen victim to BEC attacks. The combined losses amount to over $2.3 billion, the agency said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The TomTom VIA 1505M 5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator receives an average of 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews). With a list price of $169.95, this substantial 47% discount knocks the price down to just $89.99.Clean, clear and intuitive maps are displayed on the VIA's bright 5" inch touchscreen. Pre-installed points of interest and Advanced Lane Guidance help you find what you need quickly, and guide you there without confusion. This device comes with free map upgrades for the life of the unit, so you stay up to date with the inevitable changes. An integrated mount attaches to your windshield or dashboard and quickly folds away for increased portability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference.
That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation. Had I not been clued in ahead of time, I never would have realized Andrew wasn't human.
Therein lies x.ai's value proposition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In early February, a thief broke into several offices in Olympia, Washington to steal anything he could grab that was worth selling. In one locked drawer, the thief found a couple of external hard drives that he added to his haul of cash, cameras, electronics and laptops.The hard drives belonged to the local office of the Administration for Children and Families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and contained between two and five million records related to child-support audits.As of Thursday morning, the City of Olympia police department did not know what happened to the drives, even though two people have been arrested in connection with the theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here