... Two elderly Queenslanders have been injected with four times the recommended dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at an aged care home. <🇳🇴 Norway news>
Do birth subsidies lead to more babies? (NYT)
From Data to Insights
Having a wealth of data is one thing, but drawing meaningful and useful insights from this data in another thing altogether.
The observation tells us the what.
The insight tells use the why.
The Insight Driven Organisation
Seduced by analytics and big data, companies are overlooking the compelling power of qualitative judgement. Alessandro Di Fiore calls for a re‐think.
- In today’s knowledge society competitive advantage derives from the capability to generate novel insights and ideas with the potential to change the game in your market
- Unfortunately, most companies are not able to harness their full creative power and consider innovation as the specialized job of a few experts in the company (e.g. marketing, R&D) who typically rely on analytics and benchmarks rather than on first hand qualitative observations.
The Management Idea
- Go beyond the traditional belief that insight generation is the responsibility of a few people in the organization
- Make the insight generation process more democratic and inclusive of all employees
- Encourage, protect and nurture the best insights until they become solid concepts and business ideas (avoid killing them in the cradle)
- Make this routine practice by developing the needed organizational capabilities.
The Results
- Build a competitive advantage (an Innovative DNA instilled in the organization)
- Higher Innovation ROI due to more and better ideas being propelled into the innovation funnel
If you’ve read the marketing collateral from any analytics or business intelligence vendor, you’ve no doubt come across the phrase “actionable insights.” Every analytics or business intelligence solution promises to unlock a tidal wave of them for your business—maybe even in “real-time” if you’re lucky. With many companies struggling to make sense of their data and create value with their big data investments, the promise of actionable insights sounds wonderful. Forrester reports 74% of firms say they want to be “data-driven,” but only 29% are actually successful at connecting analytics to action. Actionable insights appear to be the missing link for companies that want to drive business outcomes from their data.
Downplaying data breaches, escalating ransomware tactics and “there’s something in the water”
Summary: The Office of the Australian Privacy Commissioner (OAIC) isn’t happy about delays in the assessment of and notification of data breaches by a growing number of organisation
Some relative optimism from YouYang Gu. And from Trevor Bedford.
Profile of Youyang Gu, data scientist
In mid-April, while he was living with his parents in Santa Clara, Calif., Gu spent a week in building his own Covid death predictor and a website to display the morbid information. Before long, his model started producing more accurate results than those cooked up by institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and decades of experience.
“His model was the only one that seemed sane,” says Jeremy Howard, a renowned data expert and research scientist at the University of San Francisco. “The other models were shown to be nonsense time and again, and yet there was no introspection from the people publishing the forecasts or the journalists reporting on them. Peoples’ lives were depending on these things, and Youyang was the one person actually looking at the data and doing it properly.”
The forecasting model that Gu built was, in some ways, simple. He had first considered examining the relationship among Covid tests, hospitalizations, and other factors but found that such data was being reported inconsistently by states and the federal government. The most reliable figures appeared to be the daily death counts. “Other models used more data sources, but I decided to rely on past deaths to predict future deaths,” Gu says. “Having that as the only input helped filter the signal from the noise.”
The novel, sophisticated twist of Gu’s model came from his use of machine learning algorithms to hone his figures.
Here is the full Bloomberg piece by Ashlee Vance, I am especially pleased because Youyang was an Emergent Ventures winner. Here is Youyang Gu on Twitter.
New York Times op-ed: I Actually Like Teaching on Zoom, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC)
In subcontracting of certain life and death services we trust:
Healthcare Australia, which employed the doctor, could stand to lose its contract if further issues occur and the Department of Health is double-checking whether all contracted healthcare workers have completed the vaccine training.
“The doctor involved did the wrong thing and that is a case of human error, a case of unacceptable human error,” the Health Minister said on Wednesday afternoon.
“I have asked the department to take action against the company and the doctor, from what is a clear breach on both fronts.”
Speaking of contract breaches, Indian Based Infosys scores another $40m for Centrelink payments engine build
Lucas Ropek - What We Know About the Hackers Behind the Accellion Data Breach
What is a darknet store and why are people who run them so hard to catch?
How are bitcoin created?
The Hustle – “An illustrated guide to bitcoin mining, blockchains, and the “minting” process of cryptocurrency’s most popular coin. Bitcoin has had a banner start to the year. Less than 2 months after breaking the $20k barrier for the first time, the digital currency more than doubled in price, hitting a high of $49,344 this week. Every time bitcoin is proclaimed to be dead, it seems to surge back, buoyed by bullish investors, favorable legislation, and tech titans’ tweets. At this point, nearly everyone has heard of bitcoin. But many folks still don’t quiteunderstand how the currency is created. It’s not printed like cash. It’s not a physical object like a gold bar. It’s not stored on a piece of plastic like a debit card. It just existssomewhere in a vast digital expanse until it’s excavated into circulation by a so-called bitcoin miner. In this illustrated guide, we’ll cover the following:
- How bitcoin is created (a process called mining)
- How the economics of mining have changed over time
- The effects this process has on power consumption…”