Going the consulting path, on your own, is no small feat. Do you have what it takes to persist, survive, and thrive?
Army of One – Not only do you need to perform your CONSULTANCY role, but you also have to be bookkeeper, sales and marketing, looking for new opportunities.
The Gap Between Gigs – To all recruiters and hiring managers – it’s not a bad thing to have gaps in a candidate’s resume. Its the way of life in our gig economy. We are constantly hunting for just the right opportunity in a sea of hundreds or thousands of candidates per role.
Keeping Up With Market Trends – Online learning platforms such as Pluralsight, keep their content fresh, relevant, and in line with your career path.
Networking, Networking, Networking – at every opportunity, build your network of contacts and keep them in the know
Machine learning and deep learning are two subsets of artificial intelligence which have garnered a lot of attention over the past two years. If you’re here looking to understand both the terms in the simplest way possible, there’s no better place to be..
— Read on morioh.com/p/78e1357f65b0
Remember when you could make free mobile calls after 9:30 PM weeknights, and all weekend? For awhile the mobile carriers competed on the time when “off-peak” started, from 10 PM to 8:30 PM. A whole hour and a half! These days we have unlimited domestic calling all the time.
So, now we have varying degrees of data plans, such as AT&T Wireless 3 GB, 9 GB, or unlimited per month, but there are caps where after 22 GB data transfer speeds are slowed down. 22 gigs seem like a lot until you have kids using Snapchat and TikTok.
When you think about it, data peak is when you may not be in a hot spot. At night, you’re at home using your own WiFi, or at an establishment with their complimentary WiFi. Weekends and weekdays are a bit scattered. Your work may have WiFi, but weekdays “on peak” are mostly commuting times, the “rush hour(s)”,
Can wireless carriers bring back on and off-peak for data? The simplest approach: “turn off the meter” during off-peak data periods. Maybe on-peak the consumer can elect 5G, when available, and off-peak at 4G LTE? Our Smartphones can identify low consuming bandwidth opportunities, e.g. when the phone is locked, text messages without graphics and email are semi-passive states. Maybe users are able to prioritize their apps data usage? What about those “chatty” apps that you rarely use? Smartphone settings may show you those apps bandwidth consumption as opportunities to prioritize them lower than your priority apps.
Skeptic, and think there are no Peak or Off-Peak periods with data? Check the business analytics. I’m sure wireless carriers have a depth of understanding for their own business intelligence (BI).
Animals could provide a new source of training data for AI systems.
To train AI to think like a dog, the researchers first needed data. They collected this in the form of videos and motion information captured from a single dog, a Malamute named Kelp. A total of 380 short videos were taken from a GoPro camera mounted to the dog’s head, along with movement data from sensors on its legs and body.
They captured a dog going about its daily life — walking, playing fetch, and going to the park.
Researchers analyzed Kelp’s behavior using deep learning, an AI technique that can be used to sift patterns from data, matching the motion data of Kelp’s limbs and the visual data from the GoPro with various doggy activities.
The resulting neural network trained on this information could predict what a dog would do in certain situations. If it saw someone throwing a ball, for example, it would know that the reaction of a dog would be to turn and chase it.
The predictive capacity of their AI system was very accurate, but only in short bursts. In other words, if the video shows a set of stairs, then you can guess the dog is going to climb them. But beyond that, life is simply too varied to predict.
Dogs “clearly demonstrate visual intelligence, recognizing food, obstacles, other humans, and animals,” so does a neural network trained to act like a dog show the same cleverness?
It turns out yes.
Researchers applied two tests to the neural network, asking it to identify different scenes (e.g., indoors, outdoors, on stairs, on a balcony) and “walkable surfaces” (which are exactly what they sound like: places can walk). In both cases, the neural network was able to complete these tasks with decent accuracy using just the basic data it had of a dog’s movements and whereabouts.
The investment of $500 million annually signals the importance of the so-called Internet of Things to the future of manufacturing.
G.E. expects revenue of $6 billion from software in 2015, a 50 percent increase in one year. Much of this is from a pattern-finding system called Predix. G.E. calls its new service the Predix Cloud, and hopes it will be used by both customers and competitors, along with independent software developers. “We can take sensor data from anybody, though it’s optimized for our own products,” Mr. Ruh said.
[Competitive solutions from IBM, Microsoft, and Google] raises the stakes for G.E. “It’s a whole new competition for them,” said Yefim Natis, a senior analyst with Gartner. “To run businesses in a modern way you have to be analytic and predictive.”
G.E. is running the Predix Cloud on a combination of G.E. computers, the vast computing resources of Amazon Web Services, and a few [local] providers, like China Telecom.
China, along with countries like Germany, [are] sensitive about moving its data offshore, or even holding information on computers in the United States.
The practice of “Ring fencing” data exists in dozens of jurisdictions globally. Ring fencing of data may be a legal and/or regulatory issue, that may inhibit the global growth of cloud services moving forward.
Is there any traction on ‘Data Only’ wireless plans which augment your primarily carrier?
E.g. when you reach the allocated capacity of the primary plan, one of N secondary wireless providers may be selected ‘on the fly’ or in settings. Each wireless provider may offer their own competitive ‘data only’ plan. The subscriber may choose a “10 GB for 10 USD.”
Alternatively, the consumer may direct traffic of a certain type, e.g. Network packets for movies to ABC wireless.
Prime example, my family shared plan offers 10 GB to share among the 4 of us. One of us, for the last two months, chewed up our data plan. At 75%, 90%, and 100% AT&T sent us warning notifications, which was very good.
After we bust the quota, we are automatically charged one GB for 15 USD. It may be just me, but that sounds pricey. Both months I stopped the data component for one of the phones. Also, a great feature AT&T, but it doesn’t go far enough, block only streaming movies when not in WiFi. I’d prefer if the middle tier, the wireless solutions management implement the feature. The kids don’t have access to it as would a device implementation.
A cap on the amount of shared data each person in the plan is allowed to use should be adjustable at any point in the billing cycle. Good Use Case: my kids are on my family plan, and I want to limit their data usage. They always use more than my wife and I.
Another possible use case, from a small business perspective, if you add a few lines on your plan, then you may allocate to specific type of employees, such as sales reps., specific amounts of data. There are several types of widgets can be used, such as a pie chart, and the total pie represents the total data package, and each slice represents an allocation to each member of the shared plan.
Update: I stand corrected, and do see an AT&T Smart Limits for 4.99 USD per month:
I do not believe the disclosure of consumer information collected by mobile applications to provide mobile app transparency should be the only disclosure channel of consumer data collected. I think that all of the web browsers should have an option to see, for the current web site, or application, the chart, or similar as mentioned in the NYT article, which is similar to nutrition details of food from the FDA. That would allow for a majority of the disclosure, and would satisfy the consumer lobby groups.
Consumer collected data from all electronic sources should be disclosed in a simple manner similar to the ingredients label from the FDA.
Smart Solutions
Definition: Product Owner (PO)
The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining Stories and prioritizing the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components for the team.
