Tag Archives: those
The Lincoln Project: darn those never-Trumpers
A cadre of neocon and conservative critics of Trump have decided to organize an effort to remove Trump in 2020.
“Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.”
Some of the most prominent NeverTrump Republicans — Steve Schmidt, George Conway, Rick Wilson and John Weaver — have formed what they dub the “Lincoln Project” to defeat President Trump and Trumpism. In a New York Times op-ed, they explain:
Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character. . . . Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line.
That means working to defeat Trump and electing “congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.”
Given Republicans’ slavish loyalty to Trump throughout the impeachment process, they are justified in concluding that the party is now as much of a problem as its leader. “Congressional Republicans have embraced and copied Mr. Trump’s cruelty and defended and even adopted his corruption,” they write. “Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.”
The Greater Boston Food Bank Poised to Distribute Three Meals a Day to Those in Need
Posted by Ian McCue, Content Manager
The Greater Boston Food Bank’s goal to end hunger in Eastern Massachusetts has not changed since founder Kip Tiernan started passing out food from the back of her station wagon in 1974.
But like any other organization, it has grown and evolved over the last 40 years. The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) has turned into one of the biggest food banks in the U.S., distributing 61 million pounds of nutritious food to people across 190 cities and towns last year alone. GBFB partners with 530 food pantries, meal programs and shelters to get healthy food to people in need.
GBFB has come a long way since its humble beginnings, but it is not taking its foot off the pedal. In the past 10 years, GBFB’s distribution has doubled in size. The organization’s output will continue to grow as it strives to provide three meals a day to every person struggling with hunger in Eastern Massachusetts.
With that expansion come obvious challenges. How can GBFB scale up its operations to handle that much food moving through its warehouse? How can it support a bigger roster of agencies and more orders? GBFB needed a way for agencies to self-serve so it could reach more people without increasing overhead.
“With our aggressive growth goals, we realized our monolithic, legacy systems just wouldn’t do the job,” GBFB Senior Director of Information Systems Richard Ghiz said. “We needed to invest in a solution that could adapt and scale to our evolving needs and support us for many years to come.”
Ghiz led an extensive evaluation process for over a year and eventually chose NetSuite. It was a true cloud platform that gave the food bank a single solution to support the entire organization, unifying accounting, inventory and order management, warehouse management and ecommerce. The solution also had the flexibility and scalability to grow and evolve with the nonprofit.
Today, it’s faster and easier for GBFB to receive donated or purchased food in the warehouse, and it can allocate inventory to different agencies before it even arrives. Employees are more productive because the cloud platform can be accessed anywhere, from any device, and all the data is in one place with a common user interface.
GBFB has enjoyed less tangible gains as well. Users are more autonomous because they can create new reports, dashboards and automated emails without the help of IT.
“The users are definitely more empowered and there’s much less involvement with IT,” Ghiz said. “I know of some people in the food acquisition group who are able to run purchase orders on their smartphone and add an item, do something with the product order that before would have required a computer, logging in through the VPN and so on.”
The nonprofit organization set up a new ecommerce website that allows volunteers and employees for agencies to shop for multiple organizations they oversee (a food pantry and a meal program, for example) through one login. They can now search for items or filter by price, storage type and more. Agencies can also view an online calendar to schedule a time to pick up their food.
Customer, order, inventory and financial information from NetSuite feeds into the ecommerce platform, so the site will only show the items an agency is eligible to receive and applies rules for minimum/maximum order sizes. Additionally, these organizations can initiate returns and see detailed account information online, including invoices, order history and saved orders.
“The ecommerce aspect is awesome,” Ghiz said. “The agencies were a little intimidated at the beginning, but we hosted dozens of training sessions for them here at our food bank. They’re now able to place orders for food before that food has even arrived at GBFB.”
The food bank also took advantage of that large network of partners, implementing a warehouse management system (WMS) from AGI to handle order fulfillment at its 117,000 square-foot facility. AGI’s WMS has voice picking (employees receive instructions about item locations and confirm the item and quantity via a headset, eliminating RF devices) to maximize efficiency in the warehouse.
This is the first significant software upgrade GBFB has made in 20 years and they are poised to maintain their increasing distribution. Agencies can now place orders faster and receive fresher food. Employees have the insights to make smarter decisions. These improvements are not about increasing the bottom line – every efficiency gain by the nonprofit represents more food for people at risk of hunger.
Technology can be much more than a way to drive down operational costs that boost the bottom line. It can help humanitarian organizations like GBFB make a lasting impact on the lives of people in need.
Learn more about how NetSuite has through our Social Impact program.
by NetSuite filed under
Ecosystems In The Digital World Parallel Those In The Natural One
Ecosystems: Everyone in the software industry talks about them, yet there’s surprisingly little agreement as to what actually constitutes one. Is it a digital network? Is it an integrated supply chain? Is it your Twitter following?
How can we maximize value from ecosystems when consensus on a definition remains elusive?
In my native Montana, where squirrels outnumber SQRLs and lynx run nearly as fast as Linux, no such confusion exists. Ecosystems are everywhere! Growing up amid the Rockies and the glaciers in the western part of the state, I observed how the streams feed the forest, which shelter the grasslands, which nourish the waterfowl, which in turn forage at the feet of the bison herds. All these intricate connections rely on the same habitat, yet no single system directs the complex interrelationships among the flora and fauna residing there.
Perhaps that’s why, as an outdoorsman, I’ve always felt at home in the software business. An ecosystem, such as that launched ten years ago by Apple connecting application developers with consumers, clears fertile ground for participants to collaborate, innovate, and trade. Is it any wonder that the world’s five most valuable companies — Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — all thrive within robust ecosystems?
Yet few visitors to Apple’s App Store seek to purchase products developed by the company itself. Instead, they log on to download their favorite song, game, or movie. While the value it adds is undeniable, Apple nonetheless remains a conduit. A conduit, interestingly, takes its original meaning from the waterways that give life to a habitat. In nature, an ecosystem represents more than the sum of its plants and animals. Its distinct features — climate, terrain, elevation — reinforce the sustaining interactions among its resident species, extending, in an evolutionary sense, the competitive advantage of each.
Digital ecosystems — not only business-to-consumer platforms such as Apple’s App Store, but also business-to-business marketplaces such as SAP Ariba — operate much the same way. Though sometimes thought of as merely a network of buyers and sellers connecting to do business, in reality, a digital ecosystem entails much more than that. In addition to facilitating commerce, networks should enable trading partners to collaborate on innovations that open new operating models and revenue streams. Participants should be able to transform product design and delivery, align cross-border operations, and drive mutually beneficial business processes. And when surrounded by a robust ecosystem, they can.
Just as in the natural world, an elegantly designed ecosystem in the digital one confers yet another advantage: attractiveness to newcomers. Out in Big Sky country, it’s amazing how the tranquility and abundance of the environment lures visitors — and I don’t just mean city slickers seeking refuge from the bustle of modern life, though there are plenty of those. I’m referring to migrating species. When an ecosystem works as intended, whether in the wilds of Montana or the thickets of the digital economy, word gets around. The best flock to join in, and the benefits accrue to existing participants. As the saying goes, there’s strength in numbers.
Consider the growth of SAP Ariba’s own ecosystem. Our delivery partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM, to name a few, provide invaluable expertise ranging from consulting to implementation to integration. Meanwhile, just this past April, Vertex — the leading provider of tax technology — wrapped its solutions within SAP Ariba through an application programming interface (API). A year earlier, Thomson Reuters introduced its Onesource solution to help companies using SAP Ariba cloud services to calculate and comply with taxes associated with global transactions. By visiting SAP Ariba’s app center, the more than 3.4 million buyers and suppliers connected to the Ariba Network can harness these innovations to simplify the complex process of invoice reconciliation and maximize their existing procedures and investments. And they are rapidly doing so. That’s the power of an ecosystem.
What’s next for ecosystems? Back home in Montana, the neighbors whisper concerns about overcrowding. But in a cloud-based network, the physical space is limitless — and so is the opportunity.
For more on digital ecosystems, see Rethinking Your Value Chain In Today’s Digital Ecosystem.
Shiplap and Artificial Intelligence: Why AI is Important for Everyone, Not Just Those in Silicon Valley
I want to discuss the urgent need to advance AI for all American business, not just Silicon Valley insiders. But first I have a confession to make. Like millions of others, I’m a fan of the HGTV show “Fixer Upper.” Don’t judge! It’s a nice way to unwind after work. Now entering its fifth and final season, fans of the show know that most episodes follow a simple format: Agreeable hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines take potential homebuyers to three ugly houses around Waco, Texas, and explain how the wrecks could be renovated into modern dream homes within the parameters of the buyer’s budget. Tours of dilapidated farmhouses and garish bachelor pads ensue. A fixer-upper is selected, redesign details are conveyed, crummy cabinetry and inconvenient walls are demolished, setbacks and obstacles are dispatched, and the episode closes with a tour of the now-stunning homestead transformed into a showpiece by JoJo’s creative vision and Chip’s physical labor. Catharsis achieved.
While this home improvement pageant may seem far removed from the technology space, I propose that the show’s formula mirrors our digital evolution. And the present burgeoning of AI capabilities and solutions form a key component in that journey from awful to awesome.
For example, the ugly homes selected for renovation on “Fixer Upper,” with their Congoleum floors and Formica countertops, were once paragons of modern convenience. Times change, as do lifestyles, and what worked architecturally in the Reagan era seems absurdly awkward now. Put in technology terms, there is very little similarity between the way you currently use your smartphone and the way your parents used their wall-mounted landline phone back in the analog day. And just try to imagine using all your now-essential mobile apps on the once vaunted BlackBerry 7230.
Conversely, old houses sometimes contain desirable and time-tested features worth saving or repurposing: apron sinks, oak floors, shiplap. The same is true in technology. Witness the recent surge in artificial intelligence development: Anyone of a certain age will recall that the kinds of artificial neural networks currently powering Siri and Alexa were also hot way back in the 1980s. They’re important again today because we’ve lately been unburdened by the kind of resource constraints that prevented AI fruition in the 20th century.
Back then, the AI dream was stymied by expensive and restricted access to compute capacity coupled with a paucity of data. That blight was largely solved by the rise of the cloud, which allowed vast numbers of researchers and innovators almost unimaginable storage for data and power for computation from pretty much anywhere.
For example, Libratus, the poker AI that recently beat some of the world’s best Texas Hold ’Em players, was built with more than 15 million core hours of computation. While that project was powered by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, something like AWS gives anyone the ability to cheaply spin up the equivalent of 100 high-power machines for about 150 bucks. Or consider the pace and volume of trades on Wall Street today: such commonplace and widespread algorithmic trading would have been unimaginable even with state-of-the-art technology just a few short years ago.
An exponential leap in resource availability, coupled with open source and APIs, also enabled the mobile revolution, which now lets us interact on the go with our little hand-held extensions of more powerful systems on the cloud. Add to all that the emergence of IoT and you start to see that pretty much every “thing” you can think of can now become a point of computation.
Which is all well and good, but has resulted in new challenges to comfortable human habitation—the unbridled proliferation of applications.
Time was, the average working person would deal with a few primary software packages and become expert in those applications. Nowadays, nearly everything you do requires use of a distinct application, while the concept of mastering any one of them grows more elusive by the minute. The way we schedule, organize, travel, pay our bills, create products, purchase or provide goods and services, communicate personally or professionally, consume news or acquire new skills—everything, everywhere is prefaced by some interface to technology that requires mental investment on your part to maneuver. Everything is an app and the cognitive load is crushing us as a people.
In our technology and in our homes, what we need today is different from what we built yesterday. Our old architecture no longer suits our way of life.
Hence, the hype around AI. The investment and development and deployment of new solutions utilizing machine learning and advanced analytics and autonomous everything is driven by the need to simplify and simultaneously expand our technologically dense existence, to reduce that cognitive load, to alleviate the friction between us and our machines. In the context of “Fixer Upper,” we are at the stage where we are standing in a smelly, cramped, derelict kitchen while JoJo maps out the possible vista of bright stainless steel, subway tile, and stupendous stone-topped islands opening on a vast and welcoming living space. I can almost touch the shiplap accent wall…
The point is that we are just starting to visualize what can be done to reimagine our way of life with the expanded resources we have at our disposal, and this is an important phase in making our technology meet our new needs. We can now use natural language processing engines and machine vision and edge intelligence to ease the burden and unlock new potential. This visualization is necessary to spur us toward obtaining that “dream kitchen,” so I won’t criticize all the AI hype. It’s a necessary motivator. We have yet to deal with demolition (legacy systems). We’re still going to face foundation issues (security). We’ll still have to solve our plumbing problems (integration). But the vision of that open, frictionless existence makes all the impending labor worthwhile no matter where you live.
There will undoubtedly be things that don’t work well, which we won’t discover until after we’ve moved into our technological fixer upper and started living in it. But if it’s anything like the vision, it will be a lot better than the ramshackle wreck we’re starting with.
I also believe the Discovery Channel’s “Fast N’ Loud” served up great lessons about enterprise integration, but that’s another story.
Google commits up to $4 million to help those impacted by Trump’s immigration order
As part of the largest crisis campaign of its company history, Google is expected to raise $ 4 million in support of people affected by President Trump’s immigration order, which was announced Friday.
News of Google’s campaign follows statements against the controversial ban by company CEO Sundar Pichai and the participation of its co-founder Sergey Brin in a protest at San Francisco International Airport, USA Today reports.
The $ 4 million — a composite of a $ 2 million fund put up by Google, and up to $ 2 million more in employee donations — will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the International Rescue Committee and the United Nation’s refugee agency (UNHCR.)
According to Pichai, Trump’s controversial order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. affects 187 members of Google’s staff alone.
“We’re concerned about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the U.S.,” he said in a statement. “We’ll continue to make our views on these issues known to leaders in Washington and elsewhere.”
Google is not the only tech company to speak out against Trump’s order.
Facebook, Apple, Lyft, and Uber have voiced varying degrees of alarm, Fortune’s Tory Newmyer reported Sunday.
Executives at Tesla Motors, Netflix and Airbnb (airbnb) have also denounced the policy. The latter announced this weekend it would offer free accommodation for refugees and others affected by the clampdown.
“Barring refugees and people who are not a threat from entering America simply because they are from a certain country is not right, and we must stand with those who are affected. The doors to America shall remain open, and any that are locked will not be for long,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote on a note to employees posted on the company’s website Sunday.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com. Copyright 2017
Applying functions to some columns in a Dataset and keeping only those
Take the following example Dataset:
data = Table[Association["a" -> i, "b" -> i^2, "c" -> i^3], {i, 4}] // Dataset
Picking out two of the three columns is done this way:
data[All, {"a", "b"}]
Now instead of just returning the “a” and “b” columns I want to map the functions f and h to their elements, respectively, and still drop “c”. Based on the previous result and the documentation of Dataset I hoped the following would do that:
data[All, {"a" -> f, "b" -> h}]
As you can see, the behavior is not like the one before. Although the functions are mapped as desired, the unmentioned column “c” still remains in the data.
Do I really need one of the following (clumsy looking) alternatives
data[All, {"a" -> f, "b" -> h}][All, {"a", "b"}]
data[Query[All, {"a", "b"}], {"a" -> f, "b" -> h}]
Query[All, {"a", "b"}]@data[All, {"a" -> f, "b" -> h}]
to get:
or is there a more elegant solution?
“I Don’t Believe In All Those Machines”
Edward Albee, one of the best playwrights America has ever produced, just died.
At the end of his privileged youth, the future dramatist worked delivering telegrams and selling music albums at Bloomingdale’s, and he didn’t care to advance much technologically beyond the record player and the typewriter. Albee despised Digital Era tools, never wanting to own a smartphone or look at the Internet, haughtily sneering at them the way intelligentsia in an earlier age derided TV as the “idiot box.” His New York Times obituary includes this 2012 quote from the writer: “All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done.” Whether or not that applies to his defiant technophobia or not depends on your perspective. At any rate, it worked for him.
From Claudine Ko’s 2010 Vice Q&A:
Question:
Do you have a specific writing space?
Edward Albee:
I do my writing in my head. There are tables around for whenever I feel like writing something down. I don’t care where I do it. It’s called a manuscript, so I write by hand.
Question:
That’s pretty old school.
Edward Albee:
I don’t believe in all those machines.
Question:
And the internet?
Edward Albee:
I know it exists. I don’t use it.
Question:
Do you have a cell phone?
Edward Albee:
No. It’s a waste of time. I might as well watch television. I walk along the streets of New York and I find people bumping into each other, bumping into things, and they have these things in their ears or in their face. They’re not seeing anything of the real world.•
Get Those Power BI Tiles Embedded in Your CRM Dashboards
For several years now, we have had the powerful analytics capability of Power BI. First as Excel add-ins and the Power BI Desktop tool since 2015. With the original Power BI service in Office 365, we were able to insert Power BI Excel reports using Dashboard iFrames and the SharePoint
Read More
So You Got Leads: Now Nurture Those Suckers!
Congratulations, you’ve got leads! Now what do you do with them? That is an excellent question, and one that we’ll discuss today. First, let’s define a lead as someone who may be interested in your services, products, or content, but is not yet “sales-ready.” More and more, leads are spending
Read More
So You Got Leads: Now Nurture Those Suckers!
Congratulations, you’ve got leads! Now what do you do with them? That is an excellent question, and one that we’ll discuss today. First, let’s define a lead as someone who may be interested in your services, products, or content, but is not yet “sales-ready.” More and more, leads are spending
Read More