Management

Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the "Universal Translator." While Gene Roddenberry's epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show. Continue Reading →

LinkedIn published its "Top 10 Emerging Jobs" list on Tuesday and -- no surprise -- most of them are tech jobs. Coming in at number one is Artificial Intelligence Specialist. Continue Reading →

Snapchat will launch on December 18 a new feature called Cameo that will allow you to put your face onto short looping videos. This is a "shallowfake," meaning that you know it's fake, and so does everyone else who is watching. There is no attempt to fool anyone. It's basically a better version of Elf Yourself. Continue Reading →

The word "hoax" has come into sharp focus recently and it has caused more than a few of my friends and colleagues to assert that the mainstream news media is "rigged." This is not a new subject, but it is newly relevant because of the current political climate. I'm not going to defend the MSM. But I am happy to explain why a certain famous media critic likes to say, "The media is rigged. Big League." Continue Reading →

In engineering parlance, getting closer to the "edge" means bringing computational resources closer to the user. To do that, you need a bunch of stuff to line up. In an ideal world, you'd combine powerful cloud resources and a low-latency high bandwidth network. That's exactly what Amazon and Verizon plan to do. Continue Reading →

Cyber Monday is supposed to be an awesome online shopping day. It is. I've seen estimates as high as $9 Billion for today. However, I've also seen estimates from NBC News and Radware that as much as 97 percent of online traffic today will be bot traffic. Continue Reading →

Machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let’s explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce. Continue Reading →

Does 5G cause cancer? No. No one knows what causes cancer. There are scientific theories, some with extraordinary supporting evidence, that clearly identify carcinogens. But when I asked Dr. Michael La Quaglia, my granddaughter’s cancer surgeon, how a 2½-year-old gets pancreatoblastoma, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “If we knew, we could prevent it. All I can do is try to remove it. And, with God’s help, I will be successful.” Those words ring in my ears to this day. So, it is with a great deal of humility, personal experience and a strong belief in the scientific method that I submit to you a reasoned rebuttal to the meme that “5G causes cancer.” Continue Reading →

How long does a digital file last? It depends how and where you save it. On a hard drive? It will last longer than 5 years, but less than 30 years. On a commercial CD, maybe 100 years, no one really knows. On a recordable CD or DVD? Less than 10 years for sure. On magnetic tape? More than 10 years, less than 100 depending upon how the tapes are stored. Sit with 100 digital archivists and you will get 100 different opinions about how to save digital files for future generations. Continue Reading →

There’s an article in today’s New York Times with the title, “The Advertising Industry Has a Problem: People Hate Ads.” It says, “the advertising industry faces an ‘existential need for change,’ according to a blunt report published on Monday by the research firm Forrester. Now the agencies must ‘disassemble what remains of their outmoded model’ or risk ‘falling further into irrelevance,’ the report concludes.” Continue Reading →