Tuesday 7 August 2018

Interesting Reads – 2018-08-06


Interesting Reads – 2018-08-06

Contents

Articles

  • Apple co-founder who sold his 10 per cent share for $800 lost out on $100 billion
  • Huge List of 65 Computer and IT Certifications
  • Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure
  • Critical Infrastructure Sectors
  • Tim Berners-Lee is Depressed about the Web
  • 10 must-read books: Broaden your perspective, leaders
  • How Virtual Reality Will Impact Businesses In The Next Five Years
  • Incontinence affects more than 200m people worldwide, so why isn’t more being done to find a cure?
  • Drink, drank, drunk: what happens when we drink alcohol in four short videos
  • Healthcare Is Only The Beginning: 15 Big Industries CRISPR Technology Could Disrupt

Events / Announcements

  • International Conference on “Emerging Trends in Librarianship: Role of Libraries in the Learning Environment”
  • ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data (CoDS-COMAD) 2019
  • World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing
  • Web seminar and panel discussion on IEEE's Blended Learning Program (IEEE-BLP)
  • InfoComm India Show


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Articles

Apple co-founder who sold his 10 per cent share for $800 lost out on $100 billion

Owning a tenth of Apple today would net you $US100 billion ($A135 billion). But Ron Wayne sold that same share for just $US800 four decades ago.
The little-known Apple co-founder sold his 10 per cent stake in the company back in 1976 — never guessing that the company would be worth its August 2018 high of $US1 trillion ($A1.35 trillion).


Huge List of 65 Computer and IT Certifications

Becoming IT certified in a specific skill or product is a way to prove that you have the necessary knowledge to perform a job in a given field or a job that uses specific technologies. Earning certification is a good way for computer science graduates and entry-level IT professionals to improve their resume. Employers often look at a candidate's computer and technology certifications in order to assess whether or not the individual is a viable candidate for a position. From Official Microsoft certifications to cyber security and Linux exams, Webopedia compiled this alphabetical list of different certifications related to computer technologies with a brief explanation of each certification and links to help interested learners find additional information.


Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history, and extraordinary any way you slice it. Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire. He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times over. He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, 50 times as much as Oprah, and perhaps 100 times as much as President Trump. (Who knows!) He has gotten $50 billion richer in less than a year. He needs to spend roughly $28 million a day just to keep from accumulating more wealth.

This is a credit to Bezos’s ingenuity and his business acumen. Amazon is a marvel that has changed everything from how we read, to how we shop, to how we structure our neighborhoods, to how our postal system works. But his fortune is also a policy failure, an indictment of a tax and transfer system and a business and regulatory environment designed to supercharging the earnings of and encouraging wealth accumulation among the few. Bezos did not just make his $150 billion. In some ways, we gave it to him, perhaps to the detriment of all of us.


Critical Infrastructure Sectors

The Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP) leads and coordinates national programs and policies on critical infrastructure security and resilience and has established strong partnerships across government and the private sector. The office conducts and facilitates vulnerability and consequence assessments to help critical infrastructure owners and operators and State, local, tribal, and territorial partners understand and address risks to critical infrastructure. IP provides information on emerging threats and hazards so that appropriate actions can be taken. The office also offers tools and training to partners to help them manage the risks to their assets, systems, and networks.

There are 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof. Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21): Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience advances a national policy to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure. This directive supersedes Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7.


Tim Berners-Lee is Depressed about the Web

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t like the web any more. As his creation celebrates its 29th birthday, TBL laments its lifestyle choices.

Unlike the happy, carefree, dancing and singing cool kid it once was, today’s web is mean-spirited, overweight, snoopy, and obsessed with money. Hallmark web  projects like Wikipedia – all about donating free labor for the benefit of humanity – are unthinkable today.

While the web was once a decentralized, anarchic mess of quirky little sites with dozens (or maybe hundreds if you were lucky) of visitors each day, it’s now a fiefdom. A handful of dominant firms have messed it all up:

The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.

TBL wants those platforms and gatekeepers off his lawn, but they’re not going anywhere. And we wouldn’t like it if they did.


Related story:   Saving the Web from Humanity

10 must-read books: Broaden your perspective, leaders

Here are ten picks that will help CIOs and other leaders gain new perspective on topics including Silicon Valley's "brogrammer" culture, AI, blockchain, team building, and navigating culture change.  


How Virtual Reality Will Impact Businesses In The Next Five Years

Although not yet in the hands of everyday consumers, virtual and augmented reality are gaining traction.

From the Oculus Rift becoming a well-known name to other products showcasing at major conferences, VR and AR are finding their place in the market. And from virtual meetings to robust new ways of prototyping, both have the potential to impact the business world in the near future.

To learn what we can expect, 13 technology executives from Forbes Technology Council offer their insights into the next five years of VR and AR technology.


Related story: 9 Powerful Real-World Applications Of Augmented Reality (AR) Today

Incontinence affects more than 200m people worldwide, so why isn’t more being done to find a cure?

For a chronic health condition that causes shame and misery for countless people and costs billions, urinary incontinence keeps a low profile.

Media reports about chronic health conditions appear with alarming regularity, but it is rare to read about the debilitating impact of the involuntary leakage of urine. Nevertheless, urinary incontinence is a condition which, next to Alzheimer’s or strokes, is reported as most negatively affecting “health-related quality of life”.

The reasons for this are not too hard to fathom. Urinary incontinence, of course, elicits some embarrassment. And there also seems to be a feeling this is a low priority condition: urinary incontinence does not directly bear up against the terrible impacts of life threatening conditions and illnesses.

But to those who suffer urinary incontinence, it can be a tragedy. This condition is often associated with shame, loss of self-confidence, and low quality of life. It is a condition that increases with older age – approximately half of nursing home residents suffer from urinary incontinence.

The financial cost to society is also great. The total cost of urinary incontinence in the US is estimated to exceed US$80 billion by 2020, according to one report. Another study shows that the treatment costs associated with incontinence in general exceeds those connected to treating pneumonia, influenza and breast cancer.


Related story: Urinary incontinence: Treatment, causes, types, and symptoms

Related story: Technology for incontinence hasn't developed that much since ancient Egyptian times

Related story: Why we need to talk about incontinence

Drink, drank, drunk: what happens when we drink alcohol in four short videos

Alcohol is a depressant, a diuretic, and a disinfectant. These generally aren’t pleasant attributes, but people have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years – some of the earliest written texts mention or contain recipes for beer, and pottery shards from China show people may have been making alcohol as far back as 7,000BCE.

So what is this special chemical that we’ve loved to drink for so long?

Well, there are many types of alcoholic drinks – fizzy and flat, hot and cold, fermented and distilled – but all of the alcohol we drink as humans is ethanol based.


Healthcare Is Only The Beginning: 15 Big Industries CRISPR Technology Could Disrupt

Gene-editing tool CRISPR is changing the ways we develop new medical treatments, power our vehicles, and even brew our beer. Here are the industries this cutting-edge technology could disrupt.

From treating diseases like HIV and sickle cell to designer babies and custom-made pets, CRISPR has the potential to affect nearly every area of our lives.

While still in the fairly early stages of development, the gene-editing tool’s price tag and flexibility makes it widely accessible and applicable, allowing scientists to edit genes with unprecedented ease and precision. Essentially, researchers can use CRISPR (often in the form of CRISPR-Cas9) as a pair of “molecular scissors” to cut into and alter DNA.

While the most well-known applications of CRISPR are in the medical field, with the first human trials for CRISPR focused on cancer, the technology’s applications are much further-reaching than just healthcare.

Below, we highlight 15 industries — from fertility to biofuel to food preservation to bioweapons — that could be fundamentally altered by CRISPR.


Related story: What Is CRISPR? A primer.

Events / Announcements

International Conference on “Emerging Trends in Librarianship: Role of Libraries in the Learning Environment”

IIM Trichy is organising the MANLIBNET 2018 International Conference on “Emerging Trends in Librarianship: Role of Libraries in the Learning Environment” in collaboration with theMANLIBNET from December 10-12, 2018 at IIM Trichy.


For details pl. contact:  Dr. K. Elavazhagan, Librarian & Chief Knowledge Officer, IIM Trichy.                 
Email : manlibnet2018@iimtrichy.ac.in  Phone : 0431 2505045/46

ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data (CoDS-COMAD) 2019

ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data (CoDS-COMAD) 2019 (6th ACM iKDD CoDS and 24th COMAD)  will be held in Kolkata, India, during January 3-5, 2019.

For details relating to Call for Papers, Registrations & Travel Grats, pl. visit the conf. website at http://www.cods-comad.in/2019/

World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing

10th World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2018) is being  held at VIT University, Vellore, India during December 6-8, 2017. NaBIC 2018 is organized to provide a forum for researchers, engineers, and students from all over the world, to discuss the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence, and address various issues on building up human friendly machines by learning from nature. The conference theme is “Nurturing Intelligent Computing Towards Advancement of Machine Intelligence”.

Paper submission due: September 30, 2018

For more details pl. visit the conf website at http://www.mirlabs.org/nabic18/

Web seminar and panel discussion on IEEE's Blended Learning Program (IEEE-BLP)

IEEE's Blended Learning Program (IEEE-BLP) is an initiative in the direction of technical education from IEEE in conjunction with industry thought leaders. The IEEE-BLP is a set of skill-based training in the field of VLSI, IOT, IPR, POSH and alike. The first web seminar and panel discussion will be held on 24th Aug 2018 at 3 p.m. (IST).  

The Event number is 630 516 938 & the Event password is 123abc


InfoComm India Show

InfoComm India Show will be held at Mumbai during 18-20 Sep 2018. The exhibition will showcase 200 + Global companies & their cutting-edge Pro-AV & Integrated Experience Technology solutions. The 3-­day Summit program highlights industry trends and expert share valuable knowledge. For more information please visit: http://www.infocomm-india.com/


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With regards
HR Mohan