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Monthly Archives: March 2020

SiriusXM to Launch New Full-Time Female-Only Comedy Channel: She’s So Funny

March 31, 2020   Humor

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NEW YORK — March 31, 2020 — SiriusXM announced today the launch of “She’s So Funny,” a new hand-curated full-time comedy channel showcasing a spectrum of female comedic talent, from newcomers to superstars launches April 1.   On “She’s So Funny,” SiriusXM listeners can tune in and hear from their favorite female comedians, including artists like Tiffany Haddish, […]

The post SiriusXM to Launch New Full-Time Female-Only Comedy Channel: She’s So Funny appeared first on The Humor Mill.

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A Peak into DevOps with Dynamics 365

March 31, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav A Peak into DevOps with Dynamics 365

This blog aims to discuss three essential tools of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement / CRM and the functions they serve in the DevOps process. However, before we introduce these three magic tools, we are first going to understand what DevOps and Dynamics CRM are, independently and together.

What is DevOps?

The term DevOps was coined more than a decade ago by Patrick Debois. He combined two business terms, “development” and “operations,” to come up with this widely acknowledged business philosophy. DevOps represents an ideology that believes in bringing about change in the IT industry by adopting agile and lean processes in the “context of a system-oriented approach” – as Gartner puts it.

In layman’s terms, DevOps is an ideology that focuses on improving collaboration between the operations and development teams. DevOps uses various technologies to ensure a dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective. The DevOps umbrella spreads over processes, ideologies, and culture, along with a mindset that aims to shorten the overall software development life cycle (SDLC). By incorporating multiple automation features, DevOps tries to speed up operation and development processes like feedback, fixes, and updates, ensuring that a culture of efficiency is prevailing.

How Does DevOps work?

DevOps is described as a culture, and like all cultures, it has adopted many practices within itself. However, like all cultures, there are a few “norms” that remain stagnant. The following capabilities are native to all DevOps cultures adopted:

  • Collaboration
  • Automation
  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • Continuous Monitoring
  • Rapid Remediation

The basic idea that DevOps has promoted is to employ agile functionality in the people first, then in the process, and then in the product. For the purpose of this blog, we are mostly focusing on the process element of DevOps and seeing how Dynamics 365 CRM tools are helping empower the process of DevOps further.

What is Dynamics CRM?

CRM basically stands for customer relationship management. Dynamics is Microsoft’s Business Applications product line of ERP and CRM software. The aim of this software is to improve interactions between customers and clients by ensuring that users can track sales leads, investigate marketing activities and agendas, and focus on actionable data using one robust platform.

Dynamics 365 is a customizable solution that is designed to meet business needs. Companies can opt to select a stand-alone application that fits their needs or opt for multiple CRM tools that work as a powerful unified solution.

Why go with a CRM solution?

Employing a CRM software in your company will do wonders for your profitability by streamlining administrative processes in each department. CRM software ensures that you have a positive relationship with your clientele. An integrated CRM software helps focus on growth opportunities, increasing revenue, and retaining customers quickly.

  • Enhanced Marketing Strategies
  • Workflow Productivity
  • Efficient Data Analytics
  • Unified View of all Operations
  • Positive Customer Relationships
  • Ease of access
  • Streamlined Invoicing
  • Scalable CRM Solutions

Dynamics CRM and DevOps

For a software development process to be considered successful or agile, it is essential to ensure that it has a short development lifecycle and has a faster time to market ratio. DevOps adoption allows companies to achieve an effective and agile software procedure.

Dynamics CRM, despite its many benefits, comes with specific challenges, particularly when it comes to consistency in integration and deployment (CI/CD process). There are many companies that are utilizing DevOps for CRM to enhance their agile cycle velocity. This helps them ensure maximum value is delivered through new CRM features.

The Three Microsoft SDK Tools:

The tools that I will be discussing today are prepackaged with Microsoft Dynamics Software Development Kit, aka Microsoft SDK. These tools are:

  1. SolutionPackager.exe
  • This tool is used to deconstruct a Dynamics 365 compressed solution file (reversibly) into multiple XML files and other files so that a source control system can manage the data.
  • A CRM solution is compressed into multiple files when we export it. However, each file is crammed with a lot of content. For tracking purposes, we need to keep our records well-structured under source control.
  1. Configuration Migration (DataMigrationUtility.exe)
  • This tool is used to move configuration data and user data between Dynamics 365 instances and organizations.
  • Please Note: Configuration data is not the same as end-user data.
  • The configuration migration tool also uses the data’s GUID. Some people often confuse GUIDs as being the same across various CRM instances. This is not the case, and it is vital to keep a note of this.
  • For example, if you have a workflow that refers to some data, it is using GUID of that very data. On the other hand, if you have the same data in two CRM instances, the GUID will not be the same. Hence, they will not work.
  1. PackageDeployer.exe
  • This tool, as the name suggests, is simply for deploying packages in Dynamics 365.
  • For those of you, who do not know what a package is the following information will be helpful:
    • A package may be comprised of one or several Dynamics 365 solution files.
    • It contains CSV files or exported configuration files that are extracted from the Configuration Migration tool.
    • It has a custom code that can run prior to the package being deployed, during deployment, and even after it.
    • An HTML page that can be displayed both at the end of the beginning of the process

All these tools have a significant impact on agility and functionality. It increases process efficiency and allows for an efficient procedure life cycle that is time and cost-efficient.

There we have it. The three magic tools that help organizations implement DevOps in their processes through agile functionality and automation. It is important to note that this is one single side of DevOps and Dynamics 365 that we have explored. There is a lot more to these concepts, both independently and together, that we are going to explore further with time.

Conclusively incorporating a DevOps culture in company practices, procedures, and norms will help the company maximize its potential and reap gains to its fullest.

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Babylon Health claims its AI accurately triages patients in 85% of cases

March 31, 2020   Big Data

A team of researchers at Babylon Health, the well-funded UK-based startup that facilitates telemedical consultations between patients and health experts, claim that they’ve developed an AI system capable of matching expert clinician decisions in 85% of cases. If it holds up to scrutiny, the system could lift a burden off of the overloaded U.S. health care system, which is anticipated to face a shortfall of between 21,000 and 55,000 primary care doctors by 2023.

Triaging in this context refers to the process of uncovering enough medical evidence to determine the appropriate point of care given a patient’s presentation. Clinicians plan a sequence of questions in order to make a fast and accurate decision, inferring about the causes of a condition and updating their plan following each new piece of information.

The Babylon Health team sought an automated approach built upon reinforcement learning, an AI training paradigm that spurs software agents to complete tasks via a system of rewards. They combined this with judgments from medical experts made over a data set of patient presentations, which encapsulated roughly 597 elements of observable symptoms or risk factors.

The researchers’ AI agent — a Deep Q network — learned an optimized policy based on 1,374 expert-crafted clinical vignettes. Each vignette was associated with an average of 3.36 expert triage decisions made by separate clinicians, and the validity of each vignette was reviewed independently with two clinicians.

At each step, the agent asks for more information or makes one of four triage decisions. And at each new episode, the training environment is configured with a new clinical vignette. Then the said environment processes evidence and triage decisions on the vignette and returns a value, such that if the agent picks a triage action, it receives a final reward.

 Babylon Health claims its AI accurately triages patients in 85% of cases

To validate the system, the researchers evaluated the model on a test set of 126 previously unseen vignettes using three target metrics: appropriateness, safety, and the average number of questions asked (between 0 and 23). During training on 1,248 vignettes, those metrics were evaluated over a sliding window of 20 vignettes, and during testing, they were evaluated over the whole test set.

The team reports that the best-performing model achieved an appropriateness score of .85 and a safety score of 0.93, and it asked an average of 13.34 (0.875). That’s on par with the human baseline (0.84 appropriateness, 0.93 safety, and all 23 questions).

“By learning when best to stop asking questions given a patient presentation, the [system] is able to produce an optimized policy which reaches the same performance as supervised methods while requiring less evidence. It improves upon clinician policies by combining information from several experts for each of the clinical presentations.” wrote the paper’s coauthors, who point out that the agent isn’t trained to ask specific questions and can be used in conjunction with any question-answering system. “This … approach can produce triage policies tailored to health care settings with specific triage needs.”

Controversy

It’s worth noting that Babylon Health, which is backed by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), has flirted with controversy. Nearly three years ago, it tried and failed to gain a legal injunction to block publication of a report from the NHS care standards watchdog. In February, it publicly attacked a UK doctor who raised around 100 test results he considered concerning. And it recently received a reprimand from UK regulators for promoting misleading advertising.

The thoroughness of its studies has also been called into question.

The Royal College of General Practitioners, the British Medical Association, Fraser and Wong, the Royal College of Physicians issued statements questioning claims in a 2018 paper published by Babylon researchers, which asserted that its AI could diagnose common diseases as well as human physicians. “[There is no evidence] can perform better than doctors in any realistic situation, and there is a possibility that it might perform significantly worse,” wrote the coauthors of a 2018 paper published in The Lancet. “Symptom checkers bring additional challenges because of heterogeneity in their context of use and experience of patients.”

In response to the criticism, Babylon said that “[s]ome media outlets may have misinterpreted what was claimed” but that it “[stood] by [its] original science and results.” It described the 2018 test as a “preliminary piece of work” that pitted the company’s AI against a “small sample of doctors,” and it referred to the study’s conclusion: “Further studies using larger, real-world cohorts will be required to demonstrate the relative performance of these systems to human doctors.”

In this latest paper, Babylon disclosed that the chief investigator and most coinvestigators were paid employees.

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3 Tips to Improve Collaboration Across Distributed Marketing Teams

March 31, 2020   CRM News and Info

While many 1-to-2-person marketing teams dream of having a few extra people on board to help them execute their marketing efforts, having more people in the mix often leads to many challenges. Unless they have a very clear structure and protocols in place, companies with larger teams often find it difficult to determine which efforts to prioritize and encounter major roadblocks throughout the project management process. 

shutterstock 566877226 3 Tips to Improve Collaboration Across Distributed Marketing Teams

These challenges become even more difficult when you’re dealing with distributed marketing teams that are spread across multiple offices, marketing to different regions, and often doing so in different languages. Because of these added factors, distributed marketing teams can also find it more difficult to collaborate, ensure brand consistency, and report on their collective success. 

Unfortunately, when companies fail to address and resolve these challenges, the consequences can be devastating. For example, you might find that some marketing units have no trouble achieving their goals while others are struggling to implement a multi-channel marketing strategy that works. Lack of control over these efforts can also result in campaigns and efforts that are all over the place and not on brand, which can severely damage your brand reputation.

Effective and efficient organizations have systems in place to help their teams work together regardless of where they are in the world. Successful organizations have found a way to centralize their efforts, improve visibility and communication, and equip their teams with the tools they need to launch effective marketing efforts. 

Today, we’re going to walk you through a few tips and tools to help you implement a system that will empower your distributed marketing team to collaborate and improve results across the board.

Improve Visibility and Collaboration by Adopting a Solution With Parent/Child Account Capabilities

You need to have a good foundation in place before you can improve efficiency and collaboration across your distributed marketing team. That means you need the right processes and tools to help facilitate communication, consolidate data and insights, and empower your team with the tools they need to execute your campaigns to the fullest. 

While many companies let each marketing unit choose their marketing automation platform , this offers subteams little-to-no visibility of what their peers are doing. It also opens the door for them to surpass any type of approval process before launching their marketing efforts, leading to disjointed and off-brand marketing efforts. (Our friends at Sharp Europe actually came to us in an effort to solve this problem, which you can learn more about here.) 

Adopting a marketing automation platform that supports a marketing network (also known as parent/child account capabilities) allows you to get your entire team on the same page. Marketing networks allow you to assign a “parent” or central account to manage the “child” accounts across your organization. The parent account is responsible for specifying which users have access to certain accounts, campaigns, and templates — as well as managing the approval process. 

This model allows you to centralize your efforts, providing key stakeholders with improved visibility into your marketing initiatives and results across the organization. Using one platform also enables team members to collaborate on projects even if they’re working miles away from each other and paves the way for your team to share best practices and improve processes across the board. 

Leverage Templates to Streamline Marketing Processes and Ensure Brand Consistency

One of the biggest challenges for large and distributed marketing teams is maintaining brand consistency. When your different marketing units are working on distinct projects with different priorities and deadlines, it can be easy to bypass an established approval process in an effort to get things out the door as soon as possible. 

The problem with this approach is that it often results in messaging and design that don’t accurately represent your brand and do very little to build your trust and credibility. As a result, many of your leads will lose interest early on, even if your product or services are superior to those of your competitors.

Creating pre-approved templates for emails, forms, and landing pages to share across your distributed marketing team helps you eliminate this challenge and streamline processes — especially since it saves so much extra work for your team while also eliminating the potential for human error.

The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to easily build, store, and share these templates with your team. Act-On has easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools that enable you to build professional and eye-catching templates that your distributed marketing team can leverage without having to know HTML. 

Consolidate Your Data to Enhance Your Strategy Across the Board

Consolidating your data and then analyzing it into actionable insights is a challenge for many companies, especially those using multiple platforms and dealing with disconnected systems. But to improve collaboration and work with your entire distributed marketing team to enhance your marketing strategy, you need to gain visibility into your collective results. 

Knowing which of your efforts are working and which need improvement enables you to come together to share best practices and identify what you can do to strengthen your marketing strategy. Tracking and consolidating your results in real-time also allows you to take immediate action to remediate any efforts that aren’t generating results. All of this allows your team to spend their time and effort on tasks that will yield the best results for your organization. 

The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to measure your marketing ROI and analyze performance. Act-On’s Data Studio, for example, allows you to consolidate your data from across your organization in one place and provides you with tools to easily dissect your results. 

Our platform also integrates with leading CRMs and BI tools to make it easy for you to share data with other distributed marketing teams across your organization. 

Choose a Tool That Enables Your Distributed Marketing Team to Implement an Effective Multi-Channel Strategy

In addition to searching for a solution with parent/child capabilities, you should look for a tool that allows you to streamline processes and enhance your marketing.

Act-On is designed to empower teams of all sizes with the resources they need understand their customers’ pain points, anticipate their needs, deliver targeted and effective multi-channel campaigns, and measure their marketing progress for consistent improvement and great ROI. 

If you’d like to see our platform in action and learn how it can help your distributed marketing team achieve their goals, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

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CHINESE WU-FLU KUNG-FLU PHUNNIES

March 31, 2020   Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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Model-driven Power Apps and Permission issues

March 31, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As a Model-driven Power App designer you might be already familiar with the Manage Roles option to associate security roles to a Model-Driven App. You can do this from apps page,  https://<orgname>.crm.dynamics.com/apps

4370.ModelDrivenapppermission Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

or “Manage security roles” drop down in Power Apps maker portal App share Dialog.

1348.ModelDrivenapppermission0 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

What could possibly be wrong when your App is not visible to a user despite his/her role is assigned to the App by either of above steps? Well, if there are custom security roles created from scratch and user roles doesn’t include Read privilege for Model-driven App, user wont’ be able to the see the App.

5545.ModelDrivenapppermission0 2D00 1 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

If a user has Read, Create, and Write privileges to the Model-driven App then they would have access to all Apps in the environment, even when they’re not part of any role that has access to the App.

This requirement for Read privilege and behavior with Create and Write privileges is documented here on docs site.

Minimum Privilege Security role

While creating a custom security role, a set of minimum privileges must be included in the Security Role for the app to run. To ease out picking individual privileges and avoid chances of missing important system privileges, Power Platform provides a solution that includes a security role with the required minimum privileges. Refer this docs site that has the solution download link.

When you import the MinprivilegeSecRole_1_0_0_0 solution it creates the min prv apps use security role in the target environment. You can use copy role functionality to use this min prv apps as a base to build your own custom security role. This would easily help avoid missing out on important system privileges.

Troubleshooting missing Privileges:

In some scenarios, missing user privileges are surfaced in application as “Access Is Denied” error like below example. Some of you who’s worked for a while on Dynamics might miss the download log file option1f642 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues.

4667.ModelDrivenapppermission 2D00 2 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

One can quickly find missing privileges in response to HTTP request for the operation. This technique requires basic knowledge of web traffic debugger like Fiddler or Browser Developer Tools (F12). Once Browser Dev Tools loads, click Network->Right pane Response body. Response body has the error and the missing privilege name.

For example, users trying to assign a record which they don’t have assign privilege for.

You can see few sample screenshots of such errors:

 4721.ModelDrivenapppermission1 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

6052.ModelDrivenapppermission3 Model driven Power Apps and Permission issues

Hope this helps!

Bhavesh Shastri

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Folding@home crowdsourced computing project passes 1 million downloads amid coronavirus research

March 31, 2020   Big Data

Folding@home software for donating compute for medical research passed 1 million downloads, director Greg Bowman said in a tweet today. The Folding@home Consortium is made up of 11 laboratories around the world studying the molecular structure of diseases like cancer, ALS, and influenza. Research into COVID-19 started earlier this month. The crowdsourced effort is now powered by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and tens of thousands of AMD GPUs.

There are now over 1M devices running @foldingathome ! This includes over 356K @nvidia GPUs, over 79K @AMD GPUs, and over 593K CPUs! Thanks to all our volunteers! We’re planning more blog posts on our #COVID19 work/results this week, please stay tuned.

— Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) March 30, 2020

According to an Nvidia blog post about the milestone, nearly 400,000 gamers donated GPUs to the effort in recent days.

Last week, Folding@home said it crossed the one exaflop in compute power milestone, or collectively larger than any supercomputer ever assembled. By comparison, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has repeatedly ranked first in Top500 supercomputing ranks and is able to muster 148 petaflops of compute power.

The compute is being used to simulate “potentially druggable protein targets” and understand how the virus that causes COVID-19 interacts with the ACE2 receptor, according to the Folding@home website.

 Folding@home crowdsourced computing project passes 1 million downloads amid coronavirus research

“While we will rapidly release the simulation datasets for others to use or analyze, we aim to look for alternative conformations and hidden pockets within the most promising drug targets, which can only be seen in simulation and not in static X-ray structures,” organizer John Chodera said in a March 10 blog post to launch a series of protein folding projects into production.

In another recent initiative at the intersection of gaming and medical research, earlier this month the University of Washington introduced FoldIt, a puzzle to solve protein folding challenges. In work at the intersection of protein folding and AI, Google’s DeepMind released predictions of understudied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2 generated by the latest version of AlphaFold.

A number of open source projects are underway to accelerate progress toward a cure. Cloud computing providers in China like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, as well as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure in the U.S. are also lending compute to researchers. The CORD-19 data set is made up of tens of thousands of scholarly works and was made available last week for both medical and NLP researchers by a group including Microsoft Research, the Allen AI Institute, and the White House.

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The need for Collecting Cash Fast to build a Successful Recurring Business

March 30, 2020   CRM News and Info

Accounts Receivables processes can take up valuable time and energy in any organization. This is why “Collecting Cash fast” is one of the key metrics for building a successful recurring business. Very often the longer it takes to collect cash the higher the risk of collecting that cash correctly. You need to ensure that you are collecting the payment as quickly as possible.

Work 365 supports the typical billing frequencies – Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual billing. Some of the data we see with users of the application and the billing frequencies:

xBilling Frequencies 294x300.png.pagespeed.ic.ZXwgQkn6SY The need for Collecting Cash Fast to build a Successful Recurring Business

More than 70% of the invoicing is on a monthly basis. Monthly billing is the most common way of billing CSP and cloud services. Annual billing tends to be used by ISV’s and other solution providers that bundle their products or package their solutions through CSP.

Collecting cash through automated systems lowers the risk of non-payment, and reduces your DSO (Days of Sale Outstanding).mUsing manual processes like check payments is not practical for monthly payments. Typically, you want to keep your DSO to 30 days and lower than 7 days for monthly billing contracts.

Work 365, maintains the schedules for your billing relationships and using the integrated payment solutions can provide a convenient way to collect cash either through credit cards or direct debit solutions through Global leaders in payment solutions like Stripe, Authorize.net, and GoCardless.

The video above demonstrates how you can leverage these integrated payment providers directly into Work 365.

So, what’s your DSO? Let us know your thoughts schedule a demo to discuss these options.

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5 TIBCO Tech Talks Podcasts You Need to Listen to Now

March 30, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCOTechTalks3 scaled e1584553319155 696x365 5 TIBCO Tech Talks Podcasts You Need to Listen to Now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We’re back with another roundup of our latest TIBCO Tech Talks podcasts, the series that examines the innovative use of trending technologies in today’s businesses. In the last few months, we’ve enjoyed talking with our customers about how they’re putting the user first, and with our thought leaders who share the tools that any digital business needs to succeed today. 

Grab a pair of headphones and tune into these episodes of TIBCO Tech Talks.

How Panera Breads Bakes the Perfect Customer Experience

Enjoy this snack-sized segment featuring Noel Nitecki, Director of Enterprise Services Panera Bread and Christophe Barriolade, SVP at TIBCO. The two tech-junkies discuss Panera Bread’s MDM strategy across more than 2,000 physical locations, empowering franchise owners to ideate and apply their data in unique ways to deliver personalized customer experiences. Noel shares Panera Bread’s journey of implementing TIBCO EBX and what’s cooking for the restaurant chain moving forward. See how Panera manages its growing data pantry. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud

Keep on Innovating

Innovation, in a nutshell, means doing things differently from how you’re doing them today. So says Martha Bennett, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, in this exciting discussion with Nelson Petracek, Global CTO at TIBCO. The two will explore why organizations should continue to innovate, whether that’s to keep the customers you have, or to stay ahead of the competition. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud

Air France-KLM and its Passenger First Approach

In this episode of the TIBCO Tech Talks podcast, Ed Hill, General Manager for the UK and Ireland at TIBCO, and Stijn Bannier, Product Manager for Open API at Air France KLM, discuss how Air France KLM is using its API-enabled strategy and the customer pain points to put the customers at the center of everything they do. Stijn also shares what’s next for Air France KLM in terms of its passenger first policy and the customer experience. Check out how Air France-KLM soared to new heights with an API-first approach. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud 

The Changing World of E-Commerce

In this episode, Darren Crowder Head of Solution Engineering for UKI & Netherlands at TIBCO sits down with Frits Snijder, IT Integration Manager at PostNL, a TIBCO customer that uses TIBCO integration solutions, to discuss the changing world of e-commerce and the complexities that come with it. He will discuss changes to PostNL’s ecosystem, the growing number of carriers, increasingly complicated deliveries and responding to high expectations regarding customer service and customer experience. Learn how PostNL has created new and innovative services for people and businesses. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud 

Everyone’s Going Cloud Native, But Why?

In a world where customer buying patterns are moving faster, businesses are having a hard time keeping up because their backend architectures can’t scale to support the increased demand. Companies need to adapt their digital processes and backend technology to make sure that their experiences can compete in the modern digital world. In this podcast, TIBCO’s Kevin Larsen and Derek Birdsong talk about the technology that companies can implement to make this a reality, starting with a cloud-native architecture.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud 

Don’t forget to subscribe to TIBCO Tech Talks on your favorite podcasting platform to stay informed of new episodes. 

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Sexual Harassment

March 30, 2020   Humor

Saturday, my favorite political site Electoral Vote published a question from one of their readers asking about Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden. Here’s the question and their answer:

Q: I was wondering if you might comment on the recent failed anti-Biden propaganda push related to sexual assault. Whoever is pushing the story is currently failing to get oxygen because of COVID-19 news, but they do successfully inundate Twitter and Reddit and Facebook every night. Do you think this indicates a pre-scheduled propaganda schedule? If so, did they have to go through with it, even though they knew they wouldn’t get traction? Or are Republicans just trying to get this into the news so they can start pretending it’s real? Is the current failure an instruction that the best way to deal with obvious Republican propaganda is to just ignore it? I would love to hear your thoughts. M.A., Washington, DC

A: Just so everyone is on the same page, the story being referenced is Tara Reade’s claim that she was sexually assaulted by Joe Biden back in 1993, while she was working for him. Here is the key portion of her narrative:

“He just had me up against the wall. I was wearing like a skirt, a business skirt. I wasn’t wearing stockings. It was kind of a hot day that day, and I was wearing heels…I remember I was wearing a blouse, and he just had me up against the wall. And the wall was cold. It happened all at once…his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. Yeah, and he went down my skirt but then up inside it, and he penetrated me with his fingers, and he was kissing me at the same time, and he was saying something to me. He said several things. I can’t remember everything he said.“

Biden, of course, has denied this.

It does not appear to be centrally coordinated; in fact, it started on one end of the political spectrum and then jumped to the other. You’re right that the story definitely did not gain traction, despite the fact that many mainstream outlets took a look at it. Here are some guesses as to why:

The “#MeToo Moment” Has Passed: There was a period of time there, right after the Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby stories broke, that the mere whiff of sexual impropriety was career-ending. Perhaps the most obvious person caught up in this was former senator Al Franken, who was compelled to resign his office before an investigation could be conducted. It is the case that sexual assault claims are taken much more seriously these days than they used to be, as well they should. But we seem to have exited the time in which a mere accusation was seen as proof of guilt.

Is Reade Trustworthy?: The general progression of events does not increase confidence in Reade’s account. The first problem is that she didn’t tell anyone at the time that she was assaulted, and she did not come forward with the story until a quarter-century had passed. Second, she came forward previously, and was one of the women who accused Biden of inappropriate hugging/touching, but didn’t mention anything beyond that. Third, she has been an outspoken anti-Biden and pro-Sanders voice on social media (and, in fact, when she made the assault allegations, she did so to a staunchly left-leaning website, The Intercept). None of this proves she is lying, but it certainly does raise some concerns about her veracity and her motivations.

Out of Character for Biden: There is no question that Biden grew up with a 1950s/1960s sense of boundaries, a sense out of step with where we’re at today. But, unlike Bill Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh, Anthony Wiener, and other plausibly accused alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, Biden’s never been associated with any misconduct beyond that. There is a huge chasm between “inappropriate hug” and “violent sexual assault.” It’s highly unusual for someone to jump over that chasm with no intermediate/gateway steps. It’s even more unusual for it to happen exactly one time. And thus far, nobody else has come forward with claims like Reade’s.

Right Wing Framing: After The Intercept ran the story, right-wing media grabbed it and ran with it. Interestingly, most of them had a headline or a lede that included the formulation “Joe Biden Said He Believes All Women. Does He Believe Tara Reade?” That’s a very unusual framing, one that downplays the more serious crime of sexual assault, and plays up Biden’s alleged hypocrisy (which is, of course, not a crime). Framing things in that way certainly makes it seem like even the right-wingers don’t really think Biden assaulted Reade, and instead they’re trying to use this as a “gotcha.”

Going to the Well Too Many Times: Shamefully, a number of folks (most commonly hacky right-wing operatives) have tried to use 100% fabricated claims of sexual misconduct to smear political opponents. The most notable case of this is probably the comically inept Jacob Wohl, who tried to smear special counsel Robert Mueller in this manner, and then tried it again with Pete Buttigieg. This has undoubtedly put the idea in people’s minds that when a sexual assault claim seems like in might fail the smell test, it might just be a political hit job.

Anyhow, these are our guesses. We think it’s instructive that Donald Trump has yet to deploy this against Biden. If there was any chance it could stick, and was going to become an element of the 2020 campaign, surely the President would have tossed it out there already.

And yes, propaganda is best ignored.

This is an issue I have quite a bit of interest in. I am extremely happy that (finally!) people are now taking accusations of sexual harassment seriously, but that doesn’t mean that all accusations are automatically true. They must be investigated and vetted.

I strongly agreed with their answer to the question, including that Biden had an overly touchy feely behavior toward women in the past, but that is a far cry from sexual assault. However, I had a couple of comments, so I wrote a response to them for use in their Sunday mailbag, and they published it. Here’s my response:

I.K. from Olympia, WA, writes: I really appreciate you answering the question about Tara Reade and the anti-Biden propaganda push. You make excellent points, but I have two comments.

First, You left out what happened with the Time’s Up fund, who declined to fund legal and PR fees for Reade because the appearance of them being political would threaten their 501(c)(3) status. In response, some sites have cried “coverup”. However, Time’s Up could have safely helped Tara Reade (despite Joe Biden being a presidential candidate) as long as they used their normal procedure to decide whether to help. Doesn’t it make more sense that they used their normal procedure to evaluate Reade’s claims, and (they, like you) found them unconvincing?

Second, you say that this story did not gain traction, and you also say that it is instructive that Trump has not deployed this against Biden, but you ignore something important. Does Trump know a better way to harm Biden with this than using it against him directly (and appearing to be the pot calling the kettle black).

In the last week, I have been inundated with messages from my relatives and friends who are Sanders supporters, all of them saying exactly the same thing: that because of this one accusation of sexual assault, they refuse to vote for Biden for president. So this is splintering the Democrats, which can only help Trump. I have no idea who is spreading this, but it seems to be working, and there are plenty of actors (Republicans, Sanders supporters, Russians, etc.) who would benefit. Plus, this is eerily similar to the way that fear, uncertainty, and doubt was used against Clinton during the 2016 election.

(My only regret is that I didn’t add some cute snark, and say “the despot calling the kettle black”).

 If you liked this, you might also like these related posts:
  1. Sexual Politics
  2. Groping for Irony

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