Dealing With Human Error

As Smith outlines in his written testimony, the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) sent Equifax (alongside many other companies) a notice on March 8th, 2017 about the vulnerability in certain versions of Apache Struts. Equifax sent out an internal mass-email, which...
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Honesty Works Well But Only With Practice

Two days after the board of directors issued a statement that its members had no idea of the allegations of abuse by Weinstein, TNY today quoted board member Lance Maerov admitting he had heard of multiple settlements. Even though he added he believed they were...
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Is It Faux Agile Or Just Uninspired?

I remember the first time it happened to me. I’d been an agile developer for less than a year. We were having our morning stand-up, and something felt off. The room was oddly crowded. The scrum master was having a heated discussion with a developer....
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What Problem?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and quizzed the company over how it was responding to Skylake problems. “Lenovo was confused,” claims Thurrott. “No one was having any issues.” It appears Microsoft’s own problems were the result of the company’s unique approach...
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What Value Do You Bring To Your Project?

According to [Ashlee] Vance, the assistant, Mary Beth Brown, asked Musk for a significant raise after she’d been working with him for 12 years. In response, Musk told Brown to take two weeks off, during which he would assume her responsibilities and see if she...
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Doing The Impossible By Using Simple Math

This is not to say Musk will realize his most ambitious goals: landing on Mars, electrifying much of the world’s transportation fleet, and accelerating the transition from a fossil-fuel to a carbon-free economy. But each is closer than most thought possible in such a short...
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Take the Time to Explain and to Understand

Take time to explain why you believe something — not just what you believe and why your opponent is wrong. So how did Bastian switch over from home birth advocate to home birth critic? It started with conversations with researchers in Sydney, who were compassionate...
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Take Your Moonshot

“We grew up,” says Verily Chief Executive Officer Andy Conrad. The middle-aged geneticist has adopted the Silicon Valley T-shirt and-flip-flops wardrobe of eternal youth, but he’s given up on a lot of the jargon, including Google’s onetime favorite word. Like some other Alphabet holdings, 500-staffer...
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Lies, Damn Lies, and Project Statistics

Harvey’s term for torturing the data until it confesses is “p-hacking,” a reference to the p-value, a measure of statistical significance. P-hacking is also known as overfitting, data-mining—or data-snooping, the coinage of Andrew Lo, director of MIT’s Laboratory of Financial Engineering. Says Lo: “The more...
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