Class of '06 is Lukewarm About the Hot Job Market

A reasonably strong economy combined with the first rumblings of Baby Boomer retirements is fueling the hottest job market for graduating college students in years.  According to one survey, 60% of employers surveyed said they plan to hire more college grads than last year.  The market is reportedly so hot that even liberal arts majors are in demand!  (Seriously, employers are realizing the benefit of hiring employees with diverse backgrounds)

But as we've noted before, today's young people have a healthy dose of cynicism when considering corporate careers.  Not only have today's kids seen their elders burned by downsizing and witnessed the Enron debacle, but thanks to the Internet, they have more information at their fingertips than any generation before:

[Graduating students] plot their careers like chess masters. They ask pointed questions about company ethics and finances. Parents are more involved too, quizzing recruiters and in rare cases, even sitting in on job interviews.

"Kids today are wired. They can find out almost anything in seconds about a company and the questions recruiters ask," said Mark Mehler, co-founder of CareerXroads, a New Jersey consulting firm. "If the picture you paint is not reality, this generation will quit on a dime."

Recruiter W. Stanton Smith took note of such brashness a few years ago, when promising young hires quit. "People weren't just saluting and taking orders anymore," he recalled.

In response, businesses in typically stodgy fields such as accounting are highlighting their employee-friendly corporate cultures and their positions on socially conscious issues.

The involvement of parents is another factor that sets today's youth apart from their predecessors.  With today's narrowing generation gap, kids and their parents are closer, and kids want their parents to take an active role in their life decisions.  Whereas I would have died if my parents had sat in on any of my job interviews... that is, if the interviewer didn't laugh me out of the room first.

Source:  Ypulse, LA Times

Tags: youth, employment, business

"LifeStraw" Brings Drinkable Water to the Developing World

From the innovations-so-obvious-it's-amazing-no-one-thought-of-them-before department comes the LifeStraw, a plastic tube with an iodine/carbon filter designed to allow people to drink water safely.

Created by a Danish inventor, the LifeStraw can be used in developing countries and disaster zones where potable water is rare. To use, the drinker simply sucks through it; the water passes through the filter, which kills bacteria, and blocks parasites and other contaminants. The list price is around $3.50 (though considering that many in the developing world subsist on less than a dollar a day, the cost would have to be subsidized somehow). Each filter could last from six months to a year.

Many futurists fear that the worldwide lack of fresh water will be one of the great global crises in the coming years. Already, an estimated 6,000 people die of water-borne diseases each day, and many throughout the world travel miles on foot in the search for fresh water.

Source: BBC

Tags: water, sanitation, world health

Elves, Measuring Results and Informal Learning

Brent and I have been having a nice blog discussion. Our previous posts discuss what should be measured: Intermediate Factors in Learning, Intermediate Factors - Impact Many Measure One. And we finally seem to be agreeing with one exception. And this exception relates closely to my earlier concern eLearning Technology: Informal Learning is Too Important to Leave to Chance.

This discussion makes me think back to a question that I used to ask in my Computer Science Project class (based on something I read, but I now forget who it was - Fred Brooks maybe):

If an elf appeared and offer to give you a program that met your spec, how happy would you be?

After the initial jubilation wears off, the class realizes that there is some real concern on whether the program actually works as intended and without having insight into the guts of what's going on, it feels very uncomfortable. How do I know it works? How do I know what it's limitations might be?

It turns out that you really want more than just a program. You want one that you know how and why it works.

So, back to learning and measuring results. I actually don't want "just the outputs." I want to know how and why it's working. In the case of improving customer satisfaction based on knowledge of Store Layout and Product Knowledge, I want to know whether we've increased their knowledge and whether customer satisfaction has improved. While my client only cares about customer satisfaction, if it remains the same while knowledge increases, this is an important data point. It tells us about the system.

So, on to informal learning. Brent said in From Product Focus to Audience Focus:

The process is continuous and if our “training solution” is organic, dynamic, and flexible, it is very difficult to measure using the current method of measuring learning products. My point is “who cares”. If we have set up environments that help people collaborate, and support their informal learning, we should see output improvements.

And this is our only point of remaining disagreement. I would be much more comfortable if you can explain the internals of this system, how you know it works, when it will work and when it won't. As I said in Intermediate Factors in Learning ...

If you create an "organic, dynamic, flexible" learning solution but can't explain how it impacts the end numbers, then: (a) you won't get credit, (b) you won't know if you can repeat it successfully, and (c) you won't know if its really working.

Keywords: eLearning Trends, Informal Learning

Optical Processing Could Increase Internet Speeds by 1000X

An Australian research consortium is reportedly developing a photonic chip that would process digital signals much faster than conventional silicon electronics. 

The chip would work by routing light signals, controlling the frequency of light pulses, and regulating the behavior of the light by changing its color.  Like silicon, optical circuits could be printed, leading to cost-effective mass production.

By converting much of the Internet's networking to fiber optics, such circuitry could eliminate lag times and create an 1000-fold increase in the Net's overall speed.  With such optical switching in place, even the largest downloads could be completed within a fraction of a second. 

Of course, this would depend on most all of the Internet's components being converted to optical circuitry -- a daunting task even if the technology were immediately available.  The research team, though, hopes to have a functioning optical switch ready within the coming months.

Source:  Sharkride

Tags: fiber optics, Internet, bandwidth, photonics

Forbes Summarizes "Future in Review"

Forbes has a summary of the recent "Future in Review" meeting held last week at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.  In case you missed the $4,000-per-head event in which you could have rubbed shoulders with key future-focused business leaders and consultants, the conversation reportedly ranged from the functional to the fantastic, covering topics such as space travel (SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined a plan to travel to Mars before 2020), "flex" cars that run on multiple fuel types, and Google's philanthropic efforts to fight disease in the developing world.

Tags: conferences, business

Is Cognitive Computing Poised to be an "Overnight Success"?

Can a computer chip process information the same way they human brain does? If so, how far away are we from such "cognitive computing"? It all depends on who you ask.

Palm Computing co-founder Jeff Hawkins says, "We've been trying to do this for 50 to 60 years. Artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks, the Fifth Generation project -- they've all had big moments in the sun. The reality is we've not had much success." But he's not as pessimistic as he sounds, as he has founded a company called Numenta to build a computer memory platform that mimics human thought processes.

Others, citing rapid advances in computing power and efficiency, believe we may be much closer to major breakthroughs. Says James Albus, a senior fellow and founder of the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "We are at a tipping point... analogous to where nuclear physics was in 1905. The technology is emerging to conduct definitive experiments. The neurosciences have developed a good idea of computation and representation of the brain." The most advanced supercomputers, Albus notes, are approaching the computational speed of the human brain.

The blog Responsible Nanotechnology cites recent talks by futurists Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky illustrating how major technologies such as this can appear to be going nowhere for long periods (even though work is underway), followed by an explosion in innovation and productivity, taking most everybody by surprise. It's analogous to the groundbreaking actor or musician who becomes an "overnight success" after years of hard work, practice and dashed hopes.

What excites computer scientists about cognitive computing is that it's the process that allows people to perform abstract thinking, learn, recognize patterns, and navigate spaces. It's what makes us smart, as well as giving us our personality and creativity. Besides fulfilling the promise of genuine artificial intelligence, cognitive computing may also allow us to repair certain types of brain damage and degeneration with a "bionic brain."

RELATED: To foster the development of artificial intelligence, the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies initiative has created a "virtual community" that will allow software to generate avatars that could interact and learn. Aside from helping researchers learn more about how AI cooperates and manages conflict, the environment will also help sociologists model behaviors in crisis environments.

Sources: ZDNet Australia, Responsible Nanotechnology

Tags: artificial intelligence, cognitive computing

Intermediate Factors in Learning

In Measure Intermediate or Final Factors, Brent responded to my posting: Technology: Intermediate Factors in Learning.

Brent and I (and Jay Cross and lots of others) agree that measures of butts in seats, number of completions, etc. are generally not that useful in telling what impact we are having on what matters to the business.

Where Brent and I really seem to disagree, and I've seen this other places is the importance of Intermediate Factors.

The key to almost every engagement for me is understanding how human performance drives the business. Yes, the client hires me to improve business results which is always ultimately around Revenue or Cost. Most of the time the client already measures intermediate factors such as Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, Quality, etc. All of these are known to have impact on Revenue and Cost.

Most of my clients have some understanding of how human performance impacts these measures as well, but most often they have not fleshed this out to the level that is needed. Thus, if they tell me that they care about Revenue and they really want to look at improving Customer Satisfaction because that is the biggest predictor of Revenue. Then, I will drill down to what impacts Customer Satisfaction. Some aspects I won't be able to affect, but other aspects are within our ability to influence. So, we will continue down the path.

If they are a more sophisticated organization and have Customer Satisfaction Surveys, then likely we'll already have some very interesting intermediate factors defined. In home improvement retail, associates ability to tell customers where particular products are and getting them to the product is a big factor in customer satisfaction. Together with my client I will now agree that what I'm really trying to do is to impact these further intermediate measures such as the results of the Cust Sat Surveys around Associate Help in Finding Products. Likely I will further drill down on this to break it into Knowledge and Skill Components such as (a) Knowledge of Store Layout, (b) Knowledge of Product Categories/Types, (c) Handling of Customer Questions around Product Location.

I then do the most important thing with my client. I get agreement that what they are hiring me for is not to increase Revenue (end Factor), but rather to provide mechanisms that will impact these Knowledge and Skill Components in a way that improves scores on the particular Question (all are intermediate factors). In fact, when I work with the store managers as part of the intervention, I will make sure that they understand the relationships here and understand why these intermediate factors are important. Ultimately, the Causal Relationship that we believe will result in:

• If we improve Knowledge of Store Layout, Product Categories/Types, and How to Handle Customer Questions,
  
• we will improve the customer experience (as exhibit in how they rate us on that questions),
  
• which will improve customer satistfaction,
  
• which will improve revenue.
  

Much of what we do in Learning is making sure we understand these Intermediate Factors.

Keywords: eLearning Trends, Informal Learning