Daily Archives: April 17, 2017

Advances in technology pose huge challenges for jobs. Productivity levels have never been higher in the United States, for example, but income for the bottom 50% of earners has stagnated since 1999 (see 'Job shifts'). Most of the monetary gains have gone to a small group at the very top. Technology is not the only reason, but it is probably the most important one.

A report published on April 13by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine details the impacts of information technology on the workforce1. We co-chaired the report committee and learnt a great deal in the process including that, over the next 1020 years, technology will affect almost every occupation. For example, self-driving vehicles could slash the need for drivers of taxis and long-haul trucks, and online education could enrich options for retraining of displaced workers.

Most important, we learnt that policymakers are flying blind into what has been called the fourth industrial revolution or the second machine age. There is a remarkable lack of data available on basic questions, such as: what is the scope and rate of change of the key technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI)? Which technologies are already eliminating, augmenting or transforming which types of jobs? What new work opportunities are emerging, and which policy options might create jobs in this context?

At best, this paucity of information will lead to missed opportunities. At worst, it could be disastrous. If we want to understand, prepare for and guide the unpredictable impacts of advancing technology, we must radically reinvent our ability to observe and track these changes and their drivers.

Fortunately, many of the components of a fit-for-purpose data infrastructure are already in place. Digital knowledge about the economy is proliferating and has unprecedented precision, detail and timeliness. The private sector is increasingly adopting different approaches to generating data and using them in decision-making, such as A/B testing to compare alternatives. And technologies that protect privacy while allowing statistical summaries of large amounts of data to be shared are increasingly available.

We call for the creation of an integrated information strategy to combine public and privately held data. This would provide policymakers and the public with ways to negotiate the evolving and unpredictable impacts of technology on the workforce. Building on this, we call for policymakers to adopt an evidence-based 'sense and respond' approach, as pioneered by the private sector.

These are big changes, but the stakes for workers and the economy are high.

Much of the data needed to spot, understand and adapt to workforce challenges are not gathered in a systematic way, or worse, do not exist. The irony of our information age is that despite the flood of online data, decision-makers all too often lack timely, relevant information.

For instance, although digital technologies underpin many consumer services, standard US government data sources such as the Current Population Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics don't accurately capture the rise of the contingent or temporary workforce because they do not ask the right questions. Researchers and private-sector economists have tried to address this by commissioning their own surveys2, but these lack the scale, scope and credibility of government surveys. Government administrative data, such as tax forms, provide another potentially valuable data source, but these need to be integrated with government survey data to provide context and validation3.

Similarly lacking are metrics to track progress in the technologies and capabilities of AI. Moore's law (that microprocessor performance doubles every two years or so) captures advances in the underlying semiconductors, but it does not cover rapid improvements in areas such as computer vision, speech and problem solving. A comprehensive index of AI would provide objective data on the pace and breadth of developments. Mapping such an index to a taxonomy of skills and tasks in various occupations would help educators to design programmes for the workforce of the future. Non-governmental groups, such as the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California, are taking useful steps, but much more can and should be done at the federal level.

Happily, we are in the middle of a digital data explosion. As companies have come to understand the power of machine learning, they have begun to capture new kinds of data to optimize their internal processes and interactions with customers and suppliers. Most large companies have adopted software and data infrastructures to standardize and, in many cases, to automate tasks from managing inventories and orders to handling staff holidays. Internet companies such as Amazon and Netflix routinely capture massive amounts of data to learn which products to show customers next, increasing sales and satisfaction. These lessons about real-time data collection and the data themselves can also be valuable to governments.

For example, websites for job-seekers contain data about millions of posts, the skills they require and where the jobs are. Universities have detailed information about how many students are taking which courses, when they will graduate and with which skills. Robotics companies have customer data showing demand for different types of automated assembly system. Technology-platform companies have data about how many freelance workers they employ, the hours they work and where. These sorts of information, if connected and made accessible in the right way, could give us a radically better picture of the current state of employment.

But hardly any such data are being shared now between organizations, and so we fail to capture their societal value. Reasons include the unwillingness of companies to divulge data that might be used by competitors. Privacy issues, cultural inertia and regulations against sharing are other obstacles.

Taking advantage of existing data needs a change in mindset4. Over the past decade, many corporations have moved from a 'predict and plan' approach to a 'sense and respond' one, which allows them to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing environment. By continuously collecting massive volumes of real-time data about customers, competitors, suppliers and their own operations, companies have learnt how to evolve their strategies, product offerings and profitability. The number of manufacturing firms adopting a data-driven approach to decision-making has more than tripled since 2005, reflecting the improvements it can bring to profitability and effectiveness5.

The most nimble firms run real-time experiments to test different policies and products. For example, Internet companies routinely run A/B tests: presenting customers with different interfaces, measuring which is most effective, then adopting the most successful. We discussed this approach with Sebastian Thrun, founder of the online education provider Udacity. In this way, the company learnt that it can dramatically improve retention of people on its courses by requiring students to apply for admission before beginning the course. Counter-intuitively, it also found that raising its prices in China tripled overall demand for its services.

Governments can and must learn the lessons of data-driven decision-making and experimentation. In the face of rapid and unpredictable changes that have unknown consequences, they need to be able to observe those changes in real time, and to quickly test policy responses to determine what works. For example, the best policy for retraining displaced workers could be decided after trialling several different policies for workers within one region. The policies' different impacts on employment could be observed for a year before moving forward with the one that produces the greatest re-employment. Authorities could continue to experiment to accommodate future changes.

One example of such an experiment was actually an accident. In 2008, the state of Oregon used a lottery process to randomize which of its citizens would be granted access to government health insurance (Medicaid), after an unexpected shortfall in state funding required funds to be rationed. The process provided invaluable information about the causal effects of the programme on health and well-being, and showed that Medicaid coverage led to an increase in preventive screening, such as for cholesterol6. There are many opportunities for more deliberate experimentation in government programs. Because many are implemented in a phased process, some randomization can be done at little or no cost.

Digital data should not be treated as a substitute to information that is collected in more conventional ways by the government. It often makes government data more valuable, not less. Typically, the 'digital exhaust' data trail that is generated as a by-product of digitizing an organization's processes, goods and services does not fully capture or represent the underlying phenomena. For example, according to our analyses, Java programmers are well represented in databases of the employment-networking platform LinkedIn, but truck drivers are not. Not everyone has a smartphone, let alone a particular app. The use of digital payment tools, social networks or search engines varies across demographic categories and other variables of interest.

Although terabytes and exabytes of data are now available, they need to be calibrated and validated. The best way to do that is often through the kinds of systematic survey (such as a national census) and administrative data that the government collects. And, like industry, government should leverage more types of digital data that are collected as a by-product of its operations for instance, automatic toll collections or taxes.

Collecting truly representative data will at times require the force of law for compliance and anonymity. It might also require new modes of publicprivate partnerships including ways to incentivize the collection of data that are of great value to society but of little direct value to the private organization that is best positioned to collect them. This reflects the fact that information, which can often be shared at close to zero marginal cost, is the ultimate public good7. For example, job-placement websites might have little reason to publish statistics about which laid-off workers from one economic sector are getting new jobs of a certain type owing to skills obtained from a particular retraining programme. This holds true even if such trends are visible in their data, cost no money to share and are valuable to newly displaced workers.

We have spoken to leaders at private organizations including human-resource consultants Manpower in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; LinkedIn of Mountain View, California; and job-market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies in Boston, Massachusetts. All have expressed an openness to such data sharing.

A rational public strategy for managing the jobs revolution calls for a clear and comprehensive picture of the changes. Obtaining that picture will require three things. First, we must find ways to collect data and statistical summaries from diverse sources, including private organizations. Second, a trusted broker is needed to protect data privacy, access, security, anonymity and other rights of data providers, and to provide summaries for the public (much as the US Census and other statistical agencies currently do). Third, we need ways to integrate data from sources that reflect different statistical sampling skews and biases, normalizing the data where possible and flagging any remaining biases.

This new information infrastructure should be integrated with existing core indexes that track key measures such as employment, earnings, recruitment, lay-offs, resignations and productivity and combined with powerful data sources from the private sector. This will enable statistics and analysis to shed light on standard key indicators of the economy in the context of ongoing change.

Perfection here is not a prerequisite for utility anything is better than flying blind. Investing in an infrastructure that enables continuous collection, storage, sharing and analysis of data about work is one of the most important and urgent steps any government can take.

This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon April 13, 2017.

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We Must Track How Technology is Changing Work - Scientific American

Credit: Illustration by Kotryna Zukauskaite for Advertising Age

You've surely seen those eye charts trying to organize hundreds of marketing technology vendors by category. There are the iconic Lumascapes by Terence Kawaja. And there's my own Chiefmartec.com marketing technology landscape, which last year organized 3,874 martech solutions on a single slide. (Spoiler alert: the upcoming 2017 edition will have more.)

These charts provoke a visceral reaction of shock ("How can there be so many?") followed by fear, uncertainty and doubt ("How do I pick the right ones?"). One marketing executive referred to my landscape as a kind of graphic horror novel for CMOs.

Instinctively, perhaps as a coping mechanism, most people conclude that a martech marketplace of such scale is unsustainable. It's bound to consolidate, and soon. And then, thank goodness, we will have a manageable number of marketing software choices.

But what if that didn't happen?

Before you start sputtering or twitching, hear me out. Because not only is that scenario plausible, it actually could be a good thing.

First, let's clarify what we mean by consolidation. People often frame consolidation as a reduction in the number of vendors in the spacei.e., the number of tiny logos on that marketing tech slide. So going to 50 martech companies from 5,000 would constitute major consolidation.

While that's an easy metric to count, however, it ignores the relative scale of those vendors. A more realistic view would show the distribution of revenue among them. Adobe, with $1.63 billion of revenue for its Marketing Cloud in 2016, is 1,000 times bigger than a martech startup that just made its first $1 million.

Through that lens, the market is already consolidating. It looks like a pyramid: a few billion-dollar giants on top, dozens of firms earning $100 million or more at the next level down and thousands of companies with less revenue below that.

But interestingly, at the same time that the ones on top are growing larger, the number of companies on the bottom is still increasing. So by revenue distribution, the industry is consolidating. But by number of firms, it's expanding.

Is that a paradox?

No, it's actually a fairly common market structure in the age of digital platforms known as a "long tail"a small number of blockbusters and a seemingly infinite trail of ever-more-niche offerings. We see this with Netflix (movies), Amazon (books) and Spotify (music).

In fact, platforms draw their strength from the vibrant ecosystems that blossom on their foundations. For instance, Apple with iOS and Google with Android have "consolidated" the mobile market while simultaneously enabling a long tail of millions of mobile apps.

Martech is a little different, because most of the large vendorswith the notable exception of Salesforceinitially downplayed the platform opportunity and positioned themselves as "all in the box" solutions instead. (In their defense, Steve Jobs was initially reluctant to open up the iPhone to third-party developers too.)

However, that's changing. Adobe, HubSpot, IBM, Marketo, Oracle and others now each support and promote integrations with dozens or hundreds of other marketing technology products. And new technologies such as customer data platforms and integration-platform-as-a-service providers are emerging as platform-like alternatives.

There's growing competitive pressure for who will amass the biggest and best ecosystem. They're motivated by the virtuous cycle that successful platforms can achieve. A large ecosystem attracts more customers, and more customers attract a larger ecosystem.

Stable platforms reduce the cost and risk of adopting third-party products. This encourages more of them to be adopted and, in turn, more to be developed. (How many apps have you installed on your smartphone? Martech won't be that simple, but the principle is the same.)

The result could be a market that is effectively consolidated at the platform level, yet splendidly diverse in the number of specialized products available to plug into those platforms. Some third-party developers will be big, with category-leading, horizontally-applicable applications. Others will be small and narrowly-focused on more vertical solutions. It will be a lengthy long tail market.

You'd have the benefits of stability and plug-in compatibility that good platforms offer, including a common backbone for unifying customer data. But you'd also have the benefits of augmenting those platforms with creative third-party products that best fit your particular business needs, harness the latest innovations and give you the freedom to differentiate in a digital world.

The charts full of logos won't get any less busy, but for marketers, it could be the best of both worlds.

Scott Brinker is the author of "Hacking Marketing" and editor of Chiefmartec.com.

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Marketing Technology May Never Consolidate (But That's a Good Thing) - AdAge.com (blog)

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Aerial Technology Gives Cities New Perspectives on Old Problems Wall Street Journal (subscription) In dozens of urban centers across the globe, city planners are putting eyes in the sky to help them make more-informed decisions about improving city life. Using advanced technology in digital aerial photography, laser imaging and analytics, cities are ...

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Aerial Technology Gives Cities New Perspectives on Old Problems - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

FLORENCE As the nations obesity rate continues to climb, so does the number of larger patients who need emergency medical help.

We are in a larger society, and because of that EMS is seeing more and more bariatric patients, said Lauderdale County 911 Director George Grabryan.

Shoals Ambulance Service has added new technology to be better equipped to care for larger patients.

Unfortunately, across America the obesity rate has climbed and this is a tool that we need to handle that growth in our patient care, said Blake Hargett, operations manager for Shoals Ambulance.

Shoals Ambulance, which is based in Florence, has provided emergency medical services for the city and Lauderdale County since 2012.

Hargett said the company has added an automated Transafe ramp system that will allow emergency medical technicians and paramedics to move bariatric patients easier and safer.

Amanda Jennings, director of marketing and communications for Priority Ambulance, the parent company of Shoals Ambulance, said Specialized EMS technology for bariatric patients is becoming increasingly necessary.

She said Alabama ranked second in the country in adult obesity in a recent study released in 2016.

Hargett said the new equipment includes a bariatric stretcher, which is motorized and can be raised and lowered. He said the stretcher is rolled to the ambulance and then put on ramps that are winch-controlled and gently pulls the stretcher onto the ambulance as EMTs and paramedics walk beside it.

(Shoals Ambulance) is taking advantage of what is available and putting it to use, Grabryan said. We appreciate them doing this. Its going to mean a lot to our citizens.

Jennings said EMTs and paramedics have completed training on the new technology.

This allows our EMTs and paramedics to treat bariatric people with decency and modesty in a safer manner and to improve the safety of our crews, Hargett said.

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Taking advantage of technology - Times Daily

In the new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, high schooler Hannah Bakers suicide note is divided into seven cassette tapes, and each episode is split up by which side of the cassette is being listened to: side A or side B. When her co-worker Clay first receives the box of cassettes, they show up on his doorstop in a heavy shoebox, slathered shut with paper and tape. His first task is figuring out how to actually listen to Hannahs cassettes: he tries his dads old boom box (did they actually call it that? he asks his father when asking permission), then steals his friends Walkman. As the series continues, Clay fuses technologies from different eras together: The click and spin of the cassette tape delivers Hannahs story to Clays ears through black-and-red Beats Headphones.

There is something particularly intimate about listening to Hannahs reasons over seven tapes. The physical presence of the tapes exists in stark contrast to the lack of physical presence of Hannah. Throughout 13 Reasons Why, Hannah is a ghost that Clay is desperately searching for as he tries to understand why his friend and crush would take her own life. The tapes are clunky, heavy and hard to carry around they exist in the series as a constant physical connection to Hannah, even after she is gone. Each artifact, covered in deeply feminine doodles of flowers and labeled with a number painted in deep blue nail polish, is a concrete reminder of who she was.

But the cassettes also seem to tap into our current nostalgia for 80s tchotchkes, from the big clunky computers and TV sets in the world of The Americans to the glorious video game consoles and old-school card catalogues in Stranger Things. As someone who grew up thinking knowing! that CD technology was superior to cassettes, its fascinating to see a technology that was once maligned as schlocky and unsophisticated upheld now as a rich source of intimacy between creator and listener.

And that evolution is constant. Today we are constantly and rapidly ushered into using new modes of communication, which unlike the clunky VHS tapes and video rental stores of the past can also disappear without leaving a trace. When Google makes the decision to dissolve the classic messaging system Gchat in favor of Google Hangouts, for example, most users simply accept the adoption of the new technology as a natural and necessary step.

This passive trust in companies to enable us to communicate better can end up minimizing the diverse and creative ways that people actually use technology. Shortly after Twitter dissolved the short-form social video platform Vine, for example, numerous articles came out highlighting the ways Vines disappearance is a kind of cultural loss, especially for young black artists. Vine was easily accessible and inexpensive, something that young people with a phone could easily use to craft narratives with art and humor.

The question of who gets to continue using a kind of technology is a question of power who gets to claim that a communication tool is meaningful or who gets to cast it off as pointless is more and more a decision that is made by corporations rather than people. Were not supposed to mourn the death of Vine, just as we werent supposed to mourn the death of MySpace when Facebook went into wide use. Were supposed to see all texting as the same, even though texting from my Nokia was an entirely different experience than texting on my iPhone. We diminish the emotional nature of these near constant correspondences, pretending that daily messaging does not also inspire a potent kind of intimacy, one that isnt exactly the same as letter writing and one that isnt exactly the same as sharing a phone call.

Appreciating these daily forms of communication is also about more than preservation. In 30 years well probably have a slew of TV shows that highlight the unique ways in which the primitive technologies we use today inspired real connection. But in a world full of interchangeable and disposable things, there is value not only in unplugging from an overly connected world but from actually valuing the specific ways that we are plugged in to one another, too. This means recognizing that Facebook stickers and Snapchat posts actually do mean something to the person on the other end of a screen.

In the final scenes of 13 Reasons Why, Hannahs parents are given Hannahs tapes as 13 digital audio files with the instructions to listen to them in order. By the time Hannahs parents hear their daughters voice, we in the audience have heard the first line of Hannahs tapes many, many times, and can tell how, even though the files allow the Bakers a glimpse at their daughters story, the full impact seems a bit gentler and more muted from the experience her peers had of opening the box and pulling out those cassettes her hands had touched.

Of course, this difference is imperceptible to Hannahs parents, even though her mother has been searching for a physical and emotional connection to her daughter from the very beginning of the series. In one of the most moving scenes, we see Mrs. Baker paint a blue stripe on one of her fingernails using her daughters favorite blue nail polish the same one Hannah used to write numbers on her tapes.

In the final scene of 13 Reasons Why that features Hannahs parents, we see her mother and father prepare to listen to their daughters last words together. They hold hands as they click on the first of many nondescript wav files on their nondescript Dell computer, frightened of what they may be about to hear, but also eager to connect in any way they can.

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The human cost of a forced upgrade: What we lose when technology platforms fade away - Salon

CROGHAN,N.Y. - the American Maple Museum is pleased to announce they are a recipient of a 2017 MUSE Award for their Maple Audio Tour.

The American Maple Museum will receive the MUSE Award during a champagne recep-tion on Sunday, May 7, 2017, at the 2017 American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. Executive Director Christine Colon, will receive the award. This award recognizes the American Maple Museums high achievement in the application of media and technology to Gallery, Library, Archive, and Museum [GLAM] programs.

The Maple Audio Tour is comprised of first-hand interviews with 14 maple experts, many of whom are currently serving on the museums board of directors. The recordings and post production were done by John Aviste of Daystar Productions, Black River, NY. It all got started with a grant from New York State Agriculture & Markets which paid for most of the original recordings. In 2016, a $5,000 grant from Humanities New York (formerly known as the New York Council for the Humanities) paid for the post production, audio equipment, and a webpage for audio streaming. Ultimately, this was a turnkey project by Daystar.

I think what really sets our audio tour apart is that the tracks feature conversations and commentary from nu-merous maple experts, as opposed to hearing from a single narrator. John really went that extra mile by vis-iting sugar houses, to record the sounds of boiling sap and the crackling of wood, burning inside of an evapora-tor. Instead of just looking at an exhibit of evaporators, you are transported to the sugar house.

When designing the tour, it was very important to the Museum that the listening devices be very user friendly. We wanted it to be accessible to virtually anyone. It was Daystar Productions that took that idea of accessibility and ran with it, making the audio tour not only accessible from the museums audio devices, but from a visitors own smartphone, and even from anywhere in the world, by visiting our website http://www.americanmaplemuseum.org American Maple Museum, Executive Director, Christine Colon.

The MUSE Awards competition received more than 200 applications from a wide variety of institutions in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. This years entries included videos and films, interactive kiosks and installa-tions, VR experiences, applications and APIs, digital communities, websites, audio tours, and more.

Over 90 GLAM professionals from across the globe participated as jurors in the process of reviewing and scoring en-tries. Winning programs were expected to demonstrate outstanding achievement in their content, interface, design, technical merit, innovation, utility, and appeal.

Now in its 28th year, the MUSE awards competition recognizes outstanding achievement in GLAM media and technol-ogy efforts. The competition is administrated by the American Alliance of Museums Media & Technology Professional Network.

It is an honor and a privilege for the Media & Technology Professional Network to host the 28th annual MUSE Awards. The quality of this years entries demonstrates an ever increasing sophistication in the way GLAMs are leveraging both traditional and cutting edge technologies in service to their public audiences.

Neal Johnson, Chair, AAM Media & Technology Professional Network

The American Maple Museum is open Monday, Friday, and Saturday from 11am-4pm. Summer hours will begin July 1 and will be Monday-Saturday from 11am-4pm. The Maple Audio Tours are free with paid admission.

CONTACT: Christine Colon (work) 315-346-1107 (cell) 315-489-9290

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AMERICAN MAPLE MUSEUM WINS PRESTIGIOUS MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY AWARD - InformNNY