This talk is about things that may make many non-QA people uncomfortable, but that are integral to our success as testers and in QA. This is about how we do what we do, and why, and what often sets us apart from the rest of the crowd. It has little to do with tests, or how to create the deliverables we leave behind.
There is an ineffable quality around people who are “born testers”. We end up in testing not because of the fame, fortune, and gratitude we get (although those would be nice!). We do this because it fascinates us, it draws us in, and lets us poke, and prod, and challenge the circumstances we find ourselves in. Having said that, it also forces us to have some very different attitudes than others in our organizations that set us apart.
You go to meetings. You process your inbox. You might make a presentation here and there. You certainly seem busy. But I bet if I asked your team what it is you do all day long, most of them would say, “I have no idea”. And come to think of it, do you know how exactly they spend every day?
In today’s new generation of tech company, leadership and responsibility is more distributed than ever before. People are expected to get the job done, without someone watching or directing every move all along the way. Teams are focused on results, not roles.
So as leaders in increasingly flat organizations without the traditional hierarchy and process of the past, how can we make sure we are still leading effectively? What’s the balance between too hands-on and too hands-off?
Your job as a leader is to let your team do what they’re good at, but you can only give over autonomy once you’ve given them the tools they need and trust that they can execute without you watching over their shoulder. The talk will cover strategies to help you build trust with your team and set up the right guard rails to loosen your grip on the steering wheel and give people what they want in a leader.
Smart people enjoy being smart. But in order to grow you have to push yourself out of this comfort zone and be (momentarily) not smart. You have to take risks.
And being great at operations means much more than being technically competent.
To be truly successful you have to understand people. Every one of your teammates and everyone one of your customers is a person. And to get what you want, you have to build trust and meaning with those people.
As developers, we often make things happen but can’t explain exactly how.. Computing ultimately comes down to 1s and 0s, but we seldom think of our work that way. It is the powerful abstractions provided by software that drive technological progress. But what happens when these abstractions become too magic? This talk will explore the pitfalls of “abstraction magic”, and promote the successes that full stack understanding can bring to your projects, and even career.
The Science of a Great Career in Data ScienceKate Matsudaira
A data scientist's job is all about details, but a data scientist's career path is much more ambiguous. When you're working in a hot, brand new field, the traditional career ladder just doesn't apply.
So how do you succeed when there is no clear path for success? How can you be amazing at your job when "amazing" is still being defined? It starts with knowing exactly why your job is so different from others (there are no right answers), and learning how to explain your complicated work in an uncomplicated way.
In this talk, you'll learn how to achieve success by leveraging your unique role to create the career you really want.
Responsive Branding: Making Your Brand Interactive on the Web Kate Matsudaira
You know the importance of your brand and logo.
When you extend your brand online, a static logo isn’t enough. With the new world of interactivity and app-like experience you want to create a brand language that reinforces your values and personality.
From integrating secondary graphics to bringing elements alive, the way a brand is presented has the power to engage or lose an audience. Join us for examples and lessons you can use to think differently about your brand on the web.
The document discusses Apache Flink, an open source stream processing framework. It provides high throughput and low latency processing of both streaming and batch data. Flink allows for explicit handling of event time, stateful stream processing with exactly-once semantics, and high performance. It also supports features like windowing, sessionization, and complex event processing that are useful for building streaming applications.
Trust Me - the science of trust in technology leadershipKate Matsudaira
No matter where you are in your organization, you want to be trusted by your boss, your team, and your friends. You want to be trusted to do a good job. You want to be someone who others can count on when things go wrong (and in operations roles, they frequently do). However, building trust isn't always so straightforward. Sure, you can earn someone's trust over time, but in the devops world, where you are bridging different disciplines and communication is key, how can you be sure you come off as trustworthy right away to the many people who depend on you? This talk will cover some of the science behind why people trust one another and give you some specific strategies to help you build trust and level up your career.
You go to meetings. You process your inbox. You might make a presentation here and there. You certainly seem busy. But I bet if I asked your team what it is you do all day long, most of them would say, “I have no idea”. And come to think of it, do you know how exactly they spend every day?
In today’s new generation of tech company, leadership and responsibility is more distributed than ever before. People are expected to get the job done, without someone watching or directing every move all along the way. Teams are focused on results, not roles.
So as leaders in increasingly flat organizations without the traditional hierarchy and process of the past, how can we make sure we are still leading effectively? What’s the balance between too hands-on and too hands-off?
Your job as a leader is to let your team do what they’re good at, but you can only give over autonomy once you’ve given them the tools they need and trust that they can execute without you watching over their shoulder. The talk will cover strategies to help you build trust with your team and set up the right guard rails to loosen your grip on the steering wheel and give people what they want in a leader.
Smart people enjoy being smart. But in order to grow you have to push yourself out of this comfort zone and be (momentarily) not smart. You have to take risks.
And being great at operations means much more than being technically competent.
To be truly successful you have to understand people. Every one of your teammates and everyone one of your customers is a person. And to get what you want, you have to build trust and meaning with those people.
As developers, we often make things happen but can’t explain exactly how.. Computing ultimately comes down to 1s and 0s, but we seldom think of our work that way. It is the powerful abstractions provided by software that drive technological progress. But what happens when these abstractions become too magic? This talk will explore the pitfalls of “abstraction magic”, and promote the successes that full stack understanding can bring to your projects, and even career.
The Science of a Great Career in Data ScienceKate Matsudaira
A data scientist's job is all about details, but a data scientist's career path is much more ambiguous. When you're working in a hot, brand new field, the traditional career ladder just doesn't apply.
So how do you succeed when there is no clear path for success? How can you be amazing at your job when "amazing" is still being defined? It starts with knowing exactly why your job is so different from others (there are no right answers), and learning how to explain your complicated work in an uncomplicated way.
In this talk, you'll learn how to achieve success by leveraging your unique role to create the career you really want.
Responsive Branding: Making Your Brand Interactive on the Web Kate Matsudaira
You know the importance of your brand and logo.
When you extend your brand online, a static logo isn’t enough. With the new world of interactivity and app-like experience you want to create a brand language that reinforces your values and personality.
From integrating secondary graphics to bringing elements alive, the way a brand is presented has the power to engage or lose an audience. Join us for examples and lessons you can use to think differently about your brand on the web.
The document discusses Apache Flink, an open source stream processing framework. It provides high throughput and low latency processing of both streaming and batch data. Flink allows for explicit handling of event time, stateful stream processing with exactly-once semantics, and high performance. It also supports features like windowing, sessionization, and complex event processing that are useful for building streaming applications.
Trust Me - the science of trust in technology leadershipKate Matsudaira
No matter where you are in your organization, you want to be trusted by your boss, your team, and your friends. You want to be trusted to do a good job. You want to be someone who others can count on when things go wrong (and in operations roles, they frequently do). However, building trust isn't always so straightforward. Sure, you can earn someone's trust over time, but in the devops world, where you are bridging different disciplines and communication is key, how can you be sure you come off as trustworthy right away to the many people who depend on you? This talk will cover some of the science behind why people trust one another and give you some specific strategies to help you build trust and level up your career.
What is an RPA CoE? Session 1 – CoE VisionDianaGray10
In the first session, we will review the organization's vision and how this has an impact on the COE Structure.
Topics covered:
• The role of a steering committee
• How do the organization’s priorities determine CoE Structure?
Speaker:
Chris Bolin, Senior Intelligent Automation Architect Anika Systems
HCL Notes and Domino License Cost Reduction in the World of DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-and-domino-license-cost-reduction-in-the-world-of-dlau/
The introduction of DLAU and the CCB & CCX licensing model caused quite a stir in the HCL community. As a Notes and Domino customer, you may have faced challenges with unexpected user counts and license costs. You probably have questions on how this new licensing approach works and how to benefit from it. Most importantly, you likely have budget constraints and want to save money where possible. Don’t worry, we can help with all of this!
We’ll show you how to fix common misconfigurations that cause higher-than-expected user counts, and how to identify accounts which you can deactivate to save money. There are also frequent patterns that can cause unnecessary cost, like using a person document instead of a mail-in for shared mailboxes. We’ll provide examples and solutions for those as well. And naturally we’ll explain the new licensing model.
Join HCL Ambassador Marc Thomas in this webinar with a special guest appearance from Franz Walder. It will give you the tools and know-how to stay on top of what is going on with Domino licensing. You will be able lower your cost through an optimized configuration and keep it low going forward.
These topics will be covered
- Reducing license cost by finding and fixing misconfigurations and superfluous accounts
- How do CCB and CCX licenses really work?
- Understanding the DLAU tool and how to best utilize it
- Tips for common problem areas, like team mailboxes, functional/test users, etc
- Practical examples and best practices to implement right away
How information systems are built or acquired puts information, which is what they should be about, in a secondary place. Our language adapted accordingly, and we no longer talk about information systems but applications. Applications evolved in a way to break data into diverse fragments, tightly coupled with applications and expensive to integrate. The result is technical debt, which is re-paid by taking even bigger "loans", resulting in an ever-increasing technical debt. Software engineering and procurement practices work in sync with market forces to maintain this trend. This talk demonstrates how natural this situation is. The question is: can something be done to reverse the trend?
zkStudyClub - LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Application...Alex Pruden
Folding is a recent technique for building efficient recursive SNARKs. Several elegant folding protocols have been proposed, such as Nova, Supernova, Hypernova, Protostar, and others. However, all of them rely on an additively homomorphic commitment scheme based on discrete log, and are therefore not post-quantum secure. In this work we present LatticeFold, the first lattice-based folding protocol based on the Module SIS problem. This folding protocol naturally leads to an efficient recursive lattice-based SNARK and an efficient PCD scheme. LatticeFold supports folding low-degree relations, such as R1CS, as well as high-degree relations, such as CCS. The key challenge is to construct a secure folding protocol that works with the Ajtai commitment scheme. The difficulty, is ensuring that extracted witnesses are low norm through many rounds of folding. We present a novel technique using the sumcheck protocol to ensure that extracted witnesses are always low norm no matter how many rounds of folding are used. Our evaluation of the final proof system suggests that it is as performant as Hypernova, while providing post-quantum security.
Paper Link: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/257
"Frontline Battles with DDoS: Best practices and Lessons Learned", Igor IvaniukFwdays
At this talk we will discuss DDoS protection tools and best practices, discuss network architectures and what AWS has to offer. Also, we will look into one of the largest DDoS attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure that happened in February 2022. We'll see, what techniques helped to keep the web resources available for Ukrainians and how AWS improved DDoS protection for all customers based on Ukraine experience
Dandelion Hashtable: beyond billion requests per second on a commodity serverAntonios Katsarakis
This slide deck presents DLHT, a concurrent in-memory hashtable. Despite efforts to optimize hashtables, that go as far as sacrificing core functionality, state-of-the-art designs still incur multiple memory accesses per request and block request processing in three cases. First, most hashtables block while waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. Second, open-addressing designs, which represent the current state-of-the-art, either cannot free index slots on deletes or must block all requests to do so. Third, index resizes block every request until all objects are copied to the new index. Defying folklore wisdom, DLHT forgoes open-addressing and adopts a fully-featured and memory-aware closed-addressing design based on bounded cache-line-chaining. This design offers lock-free index operations and deletes that free slots instantly, (2) completes most requests with a single memory access, (3) utilizes software prefetching to hide memory latencies, and (4) employs a novel non-blocking and parallel resizing. In a commodity server and a memory-resident workload, DLHT surpasses 1.6B requests per second and provides 3.5x (12x) the throughput of the state-of-the-art closed-addressing (open-addressing) resizable hashtable on Gets (Deletes).
Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots - like ChatGPT - can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots - the focus of this paper - are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Like any other software, task-oriented chatbots need to be properly tested, usually by defining and executing test scenarios (i.e., sequences of user-chatbot interactions). However, there is currently a lack of methods to quantify the completeness and strength of such test scenarios, which can lead to low-quality tests, and hence to buggy chatbots.
To fill this gap, we propose adapting mutation testing (MuT) for task-oriented chatbots. To this end, we introduce a set of mutation operators that emulate faults in chatbot designs, an architecture that enables MuT on chatbots built using heterogeneous technologies, and a practical realisation as an Eclipse plugin. Moreover, we evaluate the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on open-source chatbots, with promising results.
Driving Business Innovation: Latest Generative AI Advancements & Success StorySafe Software
Are you ready to revolutionize how you handle data? Join us for a webinar where we’ll bring you up to speed with the latest advancements in Generative AI technology and discover how leveraging FME with tools from giants like Google Gemini, Amazon, and Microsoft OpenAI can supercharge your workflow efficiency.
During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
Main news related to the CCS TSI 2023 (2023/1695)Jakub Marek
An English 🇬🇧 translation of a presentation to the speech I gave about the main changes brought by CCS TSI 2023 at the biggest Czech conference on Communications and signalling systems on Railways, which was held in Clarion Hotel Olomouc from 7th to 9th November 2023 (konferenceszt.cz). Attended by around 500 participants and 200 on-line followers.
The original Czech 🇨🇿 version of the presentation can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/hlavni-novinky-souvisejici-s-ccs-tsi-2023-2023-1695/269688092 .
The videorecording (in Czech) from the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/WzjJWm4IyPk?si=SImb06tuXGb30BEH .
"Choosing proper type of scaling", Olena SyrotaFwdays
Imagine an IoT processing system that is already quite mature and production-ready and for which client coverage is growing and scaling and performance aspects are life and death questions. The system has Redis, MongoDB, and stream processing based on ksqldb. In this talk, firstly, we will analyze scaling approaches and then select the proper ones for our system.
How to Interpret Trends in the Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart.pdfChart Kalyan
A Mix Chart displays historical data of numbers in a graphical or tabular form. The Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart specifically shows the results of a sequence of numbers over different periods.
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift.pdfTosin Akinosho
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift
Overview
Dive into the world of anomaly detection on edge devices with our comprehensive hands-on tutorial. This SlideShare presentation will guide you through the entire process, from data collection and model training to edge deployment and real-time monitoring. Perfect for those looking to implement robust anomaly detection systems on resource-constrained IoT/edge devices.
Key Topics Covered
1. Introduction to Anomaly Detection
- Understand the fundamentals of anomaly detection and its importance in identifying unusual behavior or failures in systems.
2. Understanding Edge (IoT)
- Learn about edge computing and IoT, and how they enable real-time data processing and decision-making at the source.
3. What is ArgoCD?
- Discover ArgoCD, a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, and its role in deploying applications on edge devices.
4. Deployment Using ArgoCD for Edge Devices
- Step-by-step guide on deploying anomaly detection models on edge devices using ArgoCD.
5. Introduction to Apache Kafka and S3
- Explore Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and Amazon S3 for scalable storage solutions.
6. Viewing Kafka Messages in the Data Lake
- Learn how to view and analyze Kafka messages stored in a data lake for better insights.
7. What is Prometheus?
- Get to know Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, and its application in monitoring edge devices.
8. Monitoring Application Metrics with Prometheus
- Detailed instructions on setting up Prometheus to monitor the performance and health of your anomaly detection system.
9. What is Camel K?
- Introduction to Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built on Apache Camel, designed for Kubernetes.
10. Configuring Camel K Integrations for Data Pipelines
- Learn how to configure Camel K for seamless data pipeline integrations in your anomaly detection workflow.
11. What is a Jupyter Notebook?
- Overview of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application for creating and sharing documents with live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.
12. Jupyter Notebooks with Code Examples
- Hands-on examples and code snippets in Jupyter Notebooks to help you implement and test anomaly detection models.
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
2024 State of Marketing Report – by HubspotMarius Sescu
https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing
· Scaling relationships and proving ROI
· Social media is the place for search, sales, and service
· Authentic influencer partnerships fuel brand growth
· The strongest connections happen via call, click, chat, and camera.
· Time saved with AI leads to more creative work
· Seeking: A single source of truth
· TLDR; Get on social, try AI, and align your systems.
· More human marketing, powered by robots
ChatGPT is a revolutionary addition to the world since its introduction in 2022. A big shift in the sector of information gathering and processing happened because of this chatbot. What is the story of ChatGPT? How is the bot responding to prompts and generating contents? Swipe through these slides prepared by Expeed Software, a web development company regarding the development and technical intricacies of ChatGPT!
What is an RPA CoE? Session 1 – CoE VisionDianaGray10
In the first session, we will review the organization's vision and how this has an impact on the COE Structure.
Topics covered:
• The role of a steering committee
• How do the organization’s priorities determine CoE Structure?
Speaker:
Chris Bolin, Senior Intelligent Automation Architect Anika Systems
HCL Notes and Domino License Cost Reduction in the World of DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-and-domino-license-cost-reduction-in-the-world-of-dlau/
The introduction of DLAU and the CCB & CCX licensing model caused quite a stir in the HCL community. As a Notes and Domino customer, you may have faced challenges with unexpected user counts and license costs. You probably have questions on how this new licensing approach works and how to benefit from it. Most importantly, you likely have budget constraints and want to save money where possible. Don’t worry, we can help with all of this!
We’ll show you how to fix common misconfigurations that cause higher-than-expected user counts, and how to identify accounts which you can deactivate to save money. There are also frequent patterns that can cause unnecessary cost, like using a person document instead of a mail-in for shared mailboxes. We’ll provide examples and solutions for those as well. And naturally we’ll explain the new licensing model.
Join HCL Ambassador Marc Thomas in this webinar with a special guest appearance from Franz Walder. It will give you the tools and know-how to stay on top of what is going on with Domino licensing. You will be able lower your cost through an optimized configuration and keep it low going forward.
These topics will be covered
- Reducing license cost by finding and fixing misconfigurations and superfluous accounts
- How do CCB and CCX licenses really work?
- Understanding the DLAU tool and how to best utilize it
- Tips for common problem areas, like team mailboxes, functional/test users, etc
- Practical examples and best practices to implement right away
How information systems are built or acquired puts information, which is what they should be about, in a secondary place. Our language adapted accordingly, and we no longer talk about information systems but applications. Applications evolved in a way to break data into diverse fragments, tightly coupled with applications and expensive to integrate. The result is technical debt, which is re-paid by taking even bigger "loans", resulting in an ever-increasing technical debt. Software engineering and procurement practices work in sync with market forces to maintain this trend. This talk demonstrates how natural this situation is. The question is: can something be done to reverse the trend?
zkStudyClub - LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Application...Alex Pruden
Folding is a recent technique for building efficient recursive SNARKs. Several elegant folding protocols have been proposed, such as Nova, Supernova, Hypernova, Protostar, and others. However, all of them rely on an additively homomorphic commitment scheme based on discrete log, and are therefore not post-quantum secure. In this work we present LatticeFold, the first lattice-based folding protocol based on the Module SIS problem. This folding protocol naturally leads to an efficient recursive lattice-based SNARK and an efficient PCD scheme. LatticeFold supports folding low-degree relations, such as R1CS, as well as high-degree relations, such as CCS. The key challenge is to construct a secure folding protocol that works with the Ajtai commitment scheme. The difficulty, is ensuring that extracted witnesses are low norm through many rounds of folding. We present a novel technique using the sumcheck protocol to ensure that extracted witnesses are always low norm no matter how many rounds of folding are used. Our evaluation of the final proof system suggests that it is as performant as Hypernova, while providing post-quantum security.
Paper Link: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/257
"Frontline Battles with DDoS: Best practices and Lessons Learned", Igor IvaniukFwdays
At this talk we will discuss DDoS protection tools and best practices, discuss network architectures and what AWS has to offer. Also, we will look into one of the largest DDoS attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure that happened in February 2022. We'll see, what techniques helped to keep the web resources available for Ukrainians and how AWS improved DDoS protection for all customers based on Ukraine experience
Dandelion Hashtable: beyond billion requests per second on a commodity serverAntonios Katsarakis
This slide deck presents DLHT, a concurrent in-memory hashtable. Despite efforts to optimize hashtables, that go as far as sacrificing core functionality, state-of-the-art designs still incur multiple memory accesses per request and block request processing in three cases. First, most hashtables block while waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. Second, open-addressing designs, which represent the current state-of-the-art, either cannot free index slots on deletes or must block all requests to do so. Third, index resizes block every request until all objects are copied to the new index. Defying folklore wisdom, DLHT forgoes open-addressing and adopts a fully-featured and memory-aware closed-addressing design based on bounded cache-line-chaining. This design offers lock-free index operations and deletes that free slots instantly, (2) completes most requests with a single memory access, (3) utilizes software prefetching to hide memory latencies, and (4) employs a novel non-blocking and parallel resizing. In a commodity server and a memory-resident workload, DLHT surpasses 1.6B requests per second and provides 3.5x (12x) the throughput of the state-of-the-art closed-addressing (open-addressing) resizable hashtable on Gets (Deletes).
Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots - like ChatGPT - can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots - the focus of this paper - are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Like any other software, task-oriented chatbots need to be properly tested, usually by defining and executing test scenarios (i.e., sequences of user-chatbot interactions). However, there is currently a lack of methods to quantify the completeness and strength of such test scenarios, which can lead to low-quality tests, and hence to buggy chatbots.
To fill this gap, we propose adapting mutation testing (MuT) for task-oriented chatbots. To this end, we introduce a set of mutation operators that emulate faults in chatbot designs, an architecture that enables MuT on chatbots built using heterogeneous technologies, and a practical realisation as an Eclipse plugin. Moreover, we evaluate the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on open-source chatbots, with promising results.
Driving Business Innovation: Latest Generative AI Advancements & Success StorySafe Software
Are you ready to revolutionize how you handle data? Join us for a webinar where we’ll bring you up to speed with the latest advancements in Generative AI technology and discover how leveraging FME with tools from giants like Google Gemini, Amazon, and Microsoft OpenAI can supercharge your workflow efficiency.
During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
Main news related to the CCS TSI 2023 (2023/1695)Jakub Marek
An English 🇬🇧 translation of a presentation to the speech I gave about the main changes brought by CCS TSI 2023 at the biggest Czech conference on Communications and signalling systems on Railways, which was held in Clarion Hotel Olomouc from 7th to 9th November 2023 (konferenceszt.cz). Attended by around 500 participants and 200 on-line followers.
The original Czech 🇨🇿 version of the presentation can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/hlavni-novinky-souvisejici-s-ccs-tsi-2023-2023-1695/269688092 .
The videorecording (in Czech) from the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/WzjJWm4IyPk?si=SImb06tuXGb30BEH .
"Choosing proper type of scaling", Olena SyrotaFwdays
Imagine an IoT processing system that is already quite mature and production-ready and for which client coverage is growing and scaling and performance aspects are life and death questions. The system has Redis, MongoDB, and stream processing based on ksqldb. In this talk, firstly, we will analyze scaling approaches and then select the proper ones for our system.
How to Interpret Trends in the Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart.pdfChart Kalyan
A Mix Chart displays historical data of numbers in a graphical or tabular form. The Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart specifically shows the results of a sequence of numbers over different periods.
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift.pdfTosin Akinosho
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift
Overview
Dive into the world of anomaly detection on edge devices with our comprehensive hands-on tutorial. This SlideShare presentation will guide you through the entire process, from data collection and model training to edge deployment and real-time monitoring. Perfect for those looking to implement robust anomaly detection systems on resource-constrained IoT/edge devices.
Key Topics Covered
1. Introduction to Anomaly Detection
- Understand the fundamentals of anomaly detection and its importance in identifying unusual behavior or failures in systems.
2. Understanding Edge (IoT)
- Learn about edge computing and IoT, and how they enable real-time data processing and decision-making at the source.
3. What is ArgoCD?
- Discover ArgoCD, a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, and its role in deploying applications on edge devices.
4. Deployment Using ArgoCD for Edge Devices
- Step-by-step guide on deploying anomaly detection models on edge devices using ArgoCD.
5. Introduction to Apache Kafka and S3
- Explore Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and Amazon S3 for scalable storage solutions.
6. Viewing Kafka Messages in the Data Lake
- Learn how to view and analyze Kafka messages stored in a data lake for better insights.
7. What is Prometheus?
- Get to know Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, and its application in monitoring edge devices.
8. Monitoring Application Metrics with Prometheus
- Detailed instructions on setting up Prometheus to monitor the performance and health of your anomaly detection system.
9. What is Camel K?
- Introduction to Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built on Apache Camel, designed for Kubernetes.
10. Configuring Camel K Integrations for Data Pipelines
- Learn how to configure Camel K for seamless data pipeline integrations in your anomaly detection workflow.
11. What is a Jupyter Notebook?
- Overview of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application for creating and sharing documents with live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.
12. Jupyter Notebooks with Code Examples
- Hands-on examples and code snippets in Jupyter Notebooks to help you implement and test anomaly detection models.
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
2024 State of Marketing Report – by HubspotMarius Sescu
https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing
· Scaling relationships and proving ROI
· Social media is the place for search, sales, and service
· Authentic influencer partnerships fuel brand growth
· The strongest connections happen via call, click, chat, and camera.
· Time saved with AI leads to more creative work
· Seeking: A single source of truth
· TLDR; Get on social, try AI, and align your systems.
· More human marketing, powered by robots
ChatGPT is a revolutionary addition to the world since its introduction in 2022. A big shift in the sector of information gathering and processing happened because of this chatbot. What is the story of ChatGPT? How is the bot responding to prompts and generating contents? Swipe through these slides prepared by Expeed Software, a web development company regarding the development and technical intricacies of ChatGPT!
Product Design Trends in 2024 | Teenage EngineeringsPixeldarts
The realm of product design is a constantly changing environment where technology and style intersect. Every year introduces fresh challenges and exciting trends that mold the future of this captivating art form. In this piece, we delve into the significant trends set to influence the look and functionality of product design in the year 2024.
How Race, Age and Gender Shape Attitudes Towards Mental HealthThinkNow
Mental health has been in the news quite a bit lately. Dozens of U.S. states are currently suing Meta for contributing to the youth mental health crisis by inserting addictive features into their products, while the U.S. Surgeon General is touring the nation to bring awareness to the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The country has endured periods of low national morale, such as in the 1970s when high inflation and the energy crisis worsened public sentiment following the Vietnam War. The current mood, however, feels different. Gallup recently reported that national mental health is at an all-time low, with few bright spots to lift spirits.
To better understand how Americans are feeling and their attitudes towards mental health in general, ThinkNow conducted a nationally representative quantitative survey of 1,500 respondents and found some interesting differences among ethnic, age and gender groups.
Technology
For example, 52% agree that technology and social media have a negative impact on mental health, but when broken out by race, 61% of Whites felt technology had a negative effect, and only 48% of Hispanics thought it did.
While technology has helped us keep in touch with friends and family in faraway places, it appears to have degraded our ability to connect in person. Staying connected online is a double-edged sword since the same news feed that brings us pictures of the grandkids and fluffy kittens also feeds us news about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the dysfunction in Washington, the latest mass shooting and the climate crisis.
Hispanics may have a built-in defense against the isolation technology breeds, owing to their large, multigenerational households, strong social support systems, and tendency to use social media to stay connected with relatives abroad.
Age and Gender
When asked how individuals rate their mental health, men rate it higher than women by 11 percentage points, and Baby Boomers rank it highest at 83%, saying it’s good or excellent vs. 57% of Gen Z saying the same.
Gen Z spends the most amount of time on social media, so the notion that social media negatively affects mental health appears to be correlated. Unfortunately, Gen Z is also the generation that’s least comfortable discussing mental health concerns with healthcare professionals. Only 40% of them state they’re comfortable discussing their issues with a professional compared to 60% of Millennials and 65% of Boomers.
Race Affects Attitudes
As seen in previous research conducted by ThinkNow, Asian Americans lag other groups when it comes to awareness of mental health issues. Twenty-four percent of Asian Americans believe that having a mental health issue is a sign of weakness compared to the 16% average for all groups. Asians are also considerably less likely to be aware of mental health services in their communities (42% vs. 55%) and most likely to seek out information on social media (51% vs. 35%).
AI Trends in Creative Operations 2024 by Artwork Flow.pdfmarketingartwork
Creative operations teams expect increased AI use in 2024. Currently, over half of tasks are not AI-enabled, but this is expected to decrease in the coming year. ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool currently. Business leaders are more actively exploring AI benefits than individual contributors. Most respondents do not believe AI will impact workforce size in 2024. However, some inhibitions still exist around AI accuracy and lack of understanding. Creatives primarily want to use AI to save time on mundane tasks and boost productivity.
Organizational culture includes values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits that influence employee behaviors and how people interpret those behaviors. It is important because culture can help or hinder a company's success. Some key aspects of Netflix's culture that help it achieve results include hiring smartly so every position has stars, focusing on attitude over just aptitude, and having a strict policy against peacocks, whiners, and jerks.
PEPSICO Presentation to CAGNY Conference Feb 2024Neil Kimberley
PepsiCo provided a safe harbor statement noting that any forward-looking statements are based on currently available information and are subject to risks and uncertainties. It also provided information on non-GAAP measures and directing readers to its website for disclosure and reconciliation. The document then discussed PepsiCo's business overview, including that it is a global beverage and convenient food company with iconic brands, $91 billion in net revenue in 2023, and nearly $14 billion in core operating profit. It operates through a divisional structure with a focus on local consumers.
Content Methodology: A Best Practices Report (Webinar)contently
This document provides an overview of content methodology best practices. It defines content methodology as establishing objectives, KPIs, and a culture of continuous learning and iteration. An effective methodology focuses on connecting with audiences, creating optimal content, and optimizing processes. It also discusses why a methodology is needed due to the competitive landscape, proliferation of channels, and opportunities for improvement. Components of an effective methodology include defining objectives and KPIs, audience analysis, identifying opportunities, and evaluating resources. The document concludes with recommendations around creating a content plan, testing and optimizing content over 90 days.
How to Prepare For a Successful Job Search for 2024Albert Qian
The document provides guidance on preparing a job search for 2024. It discusses the state of the job market, focusing on growth in AI and healthcare but also continued layoffs. It recommends figuring out what you want to do by researching interests and skills, then conducting informational interviews. The job search should involve building a personal brand on LinkedIn, actively applying to jobs, tailoring resumes and interviews, maintaining job hunting as a habit, and continuing self-improvement. Once hired, the document advises setting new goals and keeping skills and networking active in case of future opportunities.
A report by thenetworkone and Kurio.
The contributing experts and agencies are (in an alphabetical order): Sylwia Rytel, Social Media Supervisor, 180heartbeats + JUNG v MATT (PL), Sharlene Jenner, Vice President - Director of Engagement Strategy, Abelson Taylor (USA), Alex Casanovas, Digital Director, Atrevia (ES), Dora Beilin, Senior Social Strategist, Barrett Hoffher (USA), Min Seo, Campaign Director, Brand New Agency (KR), Deshé M. Gully, Associate Strategist, Day One Agency (USA), Francesca Trevisan, Strategist, Different (IT), Trevor Crossman, CX and Digital Transformation Director; Olivia Hussey, Strategic Planner; Simi Srinarula, Social Media Manager, The Hallway (AUS), James Hebbert, Managing Director, Hylink (CN / UK), Mundy Álvarez, Planning Director; Pedro Rojas, Social Media Manager; Pancho González, CCO, Inbrax (CH), Oana Oprea, Head of Digital Planning, Jam Session Agency (RO), Amy Bottrill, Social Account Director, Launch (UK), Gaby Arriaga, Founder, Leonardo1452 (MX), Shantesh S Row, Creative Director, Liwa (UAE), Rajesh Mehta, Chief Strategy Officer; Dhruv Gaur, Digital Planning Lead; Leonie Mergulhao, Account Supervisor - Social Media & PR, Medulla (IN), Aurelija Plioplytė, Head of Digital & Social, Not Perfect (LI), Daiana Khaidargaliyeva, Account Manager, Osaka Labs (UK / USA), Stefanie Söhnchen, Vice President Digital, PIABO Communications (DE), Elisabeth Winiartati, Managing Consultant, Head of Global Integrated Communications; Lydia Aprina, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Nita Prabowo, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Okhi, Web Developer, PNTR Group (ID), Kei Obusan, Insights Director; Daffi Ranandi, Insights Manager, Radarr (SG), Gautam Reghunath, Co-founder & CEO, Talented (IN), Donagh Humphreys, Head of Social and Digital Innovation, THINKHOUSE (IRE), Sarah Yim, Strategy Director, Zulu Alpha Kilo (CA).
Trends In Paid Search: Navigating The Digital Landscape In 2024Search Engine Journal
The search marketing landscape is evolving rapidly with new technologies, and professionals, like you, rely on innovative paid search strategies to meet changing demands.
It’s important that you’re ready to implement new strategies in 2024.
Check this out and learn the top trends in paid search advertising that are expected to gain traction, so you can drive higher ROI more efficiently in 2024.
You’ll learn:
- The latest trends in AI and automation, and what this means for an evolving paid search ecosystem.
- New developments in privacy and data regulation.
- Emerging ad formats that are expected to make an impact next year.
Watch Sreekant Lanka from iQuanti and Irina Klein from OneMain Financial as they dive into the future of paid search and explore the trends, strategies, and technologies that will shape the search marketing landscape.
If you’re looking to assess your paid search strategy and design an industry-aligned plan for 2024, then this webinar is for you.
5 Public speaking tips from TED - Visualized summarySpeakerHub
From their humble beginnings in 1984, TED has grown into the world’s most powerful amplifier for speakers and thought-leaders to share their ideas. They have over 2,400 filmed talks (not including the 30,000+ TEDx videos) freely available online, and have hosted over 17,500 events around the world.
With over one billion views in a year, it’s no wonder that so many speakers are looking to TED for ideas on how to share their message more effectively.
The article “5 Public-Speaking Tips TED Gives Its Speakers”, by Carmine Gallo for Forbes, gives speakers five practical ways to connect with their audience, and effectively share their ideas on stage.
Whether you are gearing up to get on a TED stage yourself, or just want to master the skills that so many of their speakers possess, these tips and quotes from Chris Anderson, the TED Talks Curator, will encourage you to make the most impactful impression on your audience.
See the full article and more summaries like this on SpeakerHub here: https://speakerhub.com/blog/5-presentation-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers
See the original article on Forbes here:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2016/05/06/5-public-speaking-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers/&refURL=&referrer=#5c07a8221d9b
ChatGPT and the Future of Work - Clark Boyd Clark Boyd
Everyone is in agreement that ChatGPT (and other generative AI tools) will shape the future of work. Yet there is little consensus on exactly how, when, and to what extent this technology will change our world.
Businesses that extract maximum value from ChatGPT will use it as a collaborative tool for everything from brainstorming to technical maintenance.
For individuals, now is the time to pinpoint the skills the future professional will need to thrive in the AI age.
Check out this presentation to understand what ChatGPT is, how it will shape the future of work, and how you can prepare to take advantage.
The document provides career advice for getting into the tech field, including:
- Doing projects and internships in college to build a portfolio.
- Learning about different roles and technologies through industry research.
- Contributing to open source projects to build experience and network.
- Developing a personal brand through a website and social media presence.
- Networking through events, communities, and finding a mentor.
- Practicing interviews through mock interviews and whiteboarding coding questions.
Google's Just Not That Into You: Understanding Core Updates & Search IntentLily Ray
1. Core updates from Google periodically change how its algorithms assess and rank websites and pages. This can impact rankings through shifts in user intent, site quality issues being caught up to, world events influencing queries, and overhauls to search like the E-A-T framework.
2. There are many possible user intents beyond just transactional, navigational and informational. Identifying intent shifts is important during core updates. Sites may need to optimize for new intents through different content types and sections.
3. Responding effectively to core updates requires analyzing "before and after" data to understand changes, identifying new intents or page types, and ensuring content matches appropriate intents across video, images, knowledge graphs and more.
A brief introduction to DataScience with explaining of the concepts, algorithms, machine learning, supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, statistics, data preprocessing, real-world applications etc.
It's part of a Data Science Corner Campaign where I will be discussing the fundamentals of DataScience, AIML, Statistics etc.
Time Management & Productivity - Best PracticesVit Horky
Here's my presentation on by proven best practices how to manage your work time effectively and how to improve your productivity. It includes practical tips and how to use tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Hubspot, Google Calendar, Gmail and others.
The six step guide to practical project managementMindGenius
The six step guide to practical project management
If you think managing projects is too difficult, think again.
We’ve stripped back project management processes to the
basics – to make it quicker and easier, without sacrificing
the vital ingredients for success.
“If you’re looking for some real-world guidance, then The Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management will help.”
Dr Andrew Makar, Tactical Project Management
4. The 5 Traits
Building Bridges
Daring to Disagree
Building on
Limitations
Being Wrong
Seeing as Forgetting
the Names of Things
5. Building Bridges
Brian Goldman, ER physician, TEDxToronto 2011
http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that.html
7. Daring to Disagree
Margaret Heffernan, TEDGlobal 2012
http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree.html
8. Willful Blindness @ 85%
Margaret Heffernan, TEDxDanubia (2013)
http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_willful_blindness.html
9.
10. For Argument’s Sake
Dan Cohen, philosopher, TEDxColbyCollege
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_h_cohen_for_argument_s_sake.html
11. Scott Berkun: How to give and receive criticism
There are four fundamental assumptions bad critics
make:
• There is one universal and objective measure of
how good and bad anything is.
• That the critic is in sole possession of the skill for
making these measurements.
• Anyone that doesn’t possess this skill (including
the creator of the work) is an idiot and should be
ridiculed.
• That valid criticisms can and should always be
resolved.
http://scottberkun.com/essays/35-how-to-give-and-receive-criticism/
12. Scott Berkun: How to give and receive criticism
crit•i•cal (adj.)
1. Inclined to judge severely and find fault.
2. Characterized by careful, exact evaluation and
judgment: a critical reading.
-
Before you speak, know the goals
Good and bad != Like and dislike
Talk as much about the positive as the negative
Try the “PNP” sandwich (for sensitive or new
participants)
http://scottberkun.com/essays/35-how-to-give-and-receive-criticism/
13. Being Wrong
Kathryn Shulz, “Wrongologist”, TED2011
http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
16. Seeing in Art
Lawrence Weschler: “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (artist)
19. Diverse Explanations
• Jerry Weinberg / Virgina Satir (via Dale
Emery): Rule of Three Interpretations
• Miller’s Law (also from Dale Emery): "To
understand what another person is saying,
you have to assume that it is true and try to
imagine what it might be true of."
http://dhemery.com/articles/untangling_communication/
Melissa Marshall, TEDGlobal2012
http://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.html
20. The Single Story
Chimamanda Adichie, Storyteller, TEDGlobal 2009
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
21. Limits = Opportunity
• Asking others for help, being willing to “go
into debt”
• Admitting what you don’t know by asking
about it
• Building respect, showing confidence
• Respecting your unique voice
I am here today to talk about things that make most people uncomfortable, but that are integral to our success as testers and in QA. This is about how we do what we do, and why, and what will set us apart from the rest of the crowd. It has little to do with tests, or how to create the deliverables we leave behind. There is an ineffable quality around people who are born testers. We end up here not because of the fame, fortune, and gratitude we get. We do this because it fascinates us, it draws us in, and lets us poke, and prod, and challenge the circumstances we find ourselves in. I have been incredibly fortunate in my explorations of my career to have experienced and learned many things. I hope to share at least one thing with you today that will make a difference in your work. It will be something different for each of you, and I have no way of knowing which of the things I talk about that it will be. It may be something completely different from what I have learned, and I hope that perhaps you will share it with me, or someone else, at some point in your career.Who I consider extraordinary & whyMichael BoltonJames & Jon BachCemKanerLisa Crispin & Janet GregoryGojkoAdzicMarkus GaertnerElisabeth HendricksonRob SabourinBrian MarickPaul HollandHarry RobinsonJerry WeinbergDale EmeryJohanna RothmanEsther Derby& many new people from this weekend
My education: many different degrees- learned more about business from theater than I did in business school in some waysMy jobs: retail, to medicine, to academia, to consultingGraduate school: learning how to BUILD frameworks – discovering that I am a pattern matcherPersonally, I have tried to get out of QA, multiple times, because I hate doing counts of bugs, and test executions, and having arguments about what is and isn't a bug. But I have this problem. I seem to keep landing back in testing. It is how I see the world, and I have a passion for it. I also have a quirk that I am ALWAYS thinking, and building connections between things I see and hear. I spent a lot of time in graduate school learning about others' theories and how to build them myself, but theories are hard to apply for most people. Since then I have spent a lot of time listening to stories that illustrate the same ideas in ways that people can connect to. I have pulled together ideas from a half dozen TED talks and biographies in areas as different as communication, medicine, business and conflict, and art that explain why we need to do more to speak out and celebrate our 'oddness' as testers ad QA advocates. I am going to ask your indulgence on this talk. It has been largely written when my head was quite literally in the clouds, on my trips to and from San Diego for my client. Why do I think it is okay to ask you to do this? Because this is a place where there are a lot of people who are good at what they do; I believe that they can become more than good, and be extraordinary. I wish someone had told me these things years ago to make my journey a little less uncomfortable.
Turning shame that hides mistakes in to lessons that can be shared in loving, supportive ways so that others do not make the same mistakes that we did
Bringing communication to the disparate audiencesUsing stories over demandsBringing about change through experiencesMaking connections and checking linkagesBuilding acceptance and 360° confidence in the systemEstablishing trust creates a safe environment that permits others to be wrong, dare to disagree, and admit their limits.Scott Berkun: Bad criticism uses the opportunity provided by someone else’s work to make the critic feel smart, superior or better about themselves: things that have nothing to do with helping the recipient of the critique (Or in the case of movie reviews, the reader of the critique). Given the difficultly of creative work, it would seem that giving and receiving useful feedback should be an important part of what designers, writers, programmers and others are taught to do.
In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem and solve it. The problem she chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancer. Most diseases correlate with poverty, but the childhood cancer of the time was affecting mainly affluent children. She had difficulty getting funding, so she knew that she had only one shot at collecting data. She had to ask every question she could think of.In a blizzard of data, one thing stood out, says Heffernan, “with a statistical clarity most scientists could only dream of.” By a ratio of 2 to 1, the children who had cancer were born to mothers who were x-rayed when pregnant.That flew in the face of the conventional theory, that x-rays were safe up to a point. It also flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that new technology doesn’t harm people, and that doctors definitely don’t harm people. And no practicing doctor, it turned out, wanted to hear it. It was 25 years before x-raying pregnant women was abandoned in the US and UK.“The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying but nothing changed. Openness alone can’t drive change.”How did Alice know she was right? Heffernan tells us about Alice’s collaborator, a statistician named George. He was the oposite of her in all ways. But, Heffernan points out, he said an amazing thing for a collaborator: “My job is to prove that Dr. Stewart is wrong.” He actively tried to find ways of crunching the data that would “create conflics around her theories,” to do everything he could to show she was wrong. This is what gave her the confidence that she was right.
Openness isn't the end, it's the beginning. When we dare to speak up, to point out things people know, we begin a discussion that allows us to do our very best thinking. 85% of people know things are wrong and don't speak up. We fear we will be seen as whistleblowers, and become outcasts. What we become, though, are leaders.
Dan Cohen: In this talk, Cohen unpacks why the argument-as-war metaphor is so limiting — because it creates an adversarial relationship. It puts the focus on tactics (knock down your opponent’s argument) rather than real thought (do they have a point?), and shuts off the possibility of negotiation, compromise or collaboration. Because after all, who is the real winner in an argument? According to Cohen, it’s whoever has their worldview expanded. There’s no reason that needs to be limited to one person. In the ideal situation, everyone in a debate could come out with a greater understanding.
Bad criticism uses the opportunity provided by someone else’s work to make the critic feel smart, superior or better about themselves: things that have nothing to do with helping the recipient of the critique (Or in the case of movie reviews, the reader of the critique). Given the difficultly of creative work, it would seem that giving and receiving useful feedback should be an important part of what designers, writers, programmers and others are taught to do.
(R)espect and ridicule don’t mix well. To offer good criticism must be an act of respect: an act of communication with the intention of helping the other people do better work, or understand their work better. If you are shaping sentences and remarks to be snide, snarky, or sarcastic, the intention of being helpful is unlikely to be served (Unless you know the recipient of the criticisms well enough to be comfortable razzing or joking with them about their work). It’s entirely possible to offer criticism, commentary and advice without any negative energy attached: it’s just so rare that we see it done properly that most of us don’t realize it’s possible, much less more effective.
I question everything. I have lived long enough to learn the depths of my ability to jump to erroneous conclusions, and to crave the confidence in my observations enough to resist the urge to give in to that siren call of the critical flaw.Frees us from perfection & promotes empathyWe find fraud when we expect to see it, including in ourselvesShulz:Distinguish between the sinking feeling of finding out you are wrong and the actual consequences of being wrong- see the value in finding out what isn't true – her picnic table storyGoldman: Do you remember…. Doctors who make mistakes- 'I do remember... And I learned one thing that I can teach someone else, in a loving, supportive way, so that they won't make the same mistake that I did’
To truly see what is there, you have to let go of your preconceived notions of what you expect to see.You also have to develop confidence in your singular VOICE, no matter what “everyone else” says.
How rocks get their ‘color’Asking for help when you are in need
Untangling CommunicationOriginally published in STQE Vol. 3 No. 4, July/August 2001When communications get tangled, a helpful principle for untangling them is Jerry Weinberg’s Rule of Three Interpretations: If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean. Before responding to any one meaning, think of at least two other possible meanings.Also helpful is Miller’s Law, which says, "To understand what another person is saying, you have to assume that it is true and try to imagine what it might be true of." To apply Miller’s Law, ask yourself, "If what the person said were true, what else would have to be true? Under what circumstances would it be true? In order for me to believe that, what else would I have to believe?" The answers you get are presuppositions — the unstated, but implied, meanings in the message. Identifying the presuppositions helps you to fill in the information that the sender left out of the message.Melissa Marshall, TEDGlobal2012 http://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.htmlMelissa Marshall brings a message to all scientists (from non-scientists): We're fascinated by what you're doing. So tell us about it -- in a way we can understand. Talk NERDY to me, but:Ditch the jargon, explain the context, let your passion show through. Your science is Sexy and fascinating. Make your ideas accessible by using stories, examples, and analogies to engage us.
I question everything. I have lived long enough to learn the depths of my ability to jump to erroneous conclusions, and to crave the confidence in my observations enough to resist the urge to give in to that siren call of the critical flaw.Adichie: When we rely on a single story for our perception, we are blinded, handicapped, and subject to critical misunderstandings.
Asking others for help to build relationshipIt's easier to give help than ask for it, but that is true of the other side too! Be willing to go in debt first.Admitting what you don't know and posing it as a question asks them to explore their understanding to explain it to youNo one likes a know it all!Builds respect and can provide confidence (freedom from having to know everything!)Initially thought I was slow to grasp things before discovering that I am a pattern matcher who sees things holistically
After talking to many testers over the last year in interviews, I have come to see these traits as more our untapped strengths than as something that applies to a select few famous innovators. Theextraordinary testers I have met in my travels understand these ideas and have incorporated some number of them. I have seen them building bridges and trust, intentionally forgetting things that "everybody knows", being willing to be wrong and admit their limits, seeing the positive in our destructiveness, and challenging the comfortable confidence of their team in order to deliver even stronger, more solid confidence. I started with the easiest of these: building bridges. This is the most comfortable, and positive, of these ideas in some ways. But the others have their positive sides if we step away from common prejudices and see the value in what many of us already do quite normally.I asked your indulgence on this talk since it was literally composed when my head was in the clouds, on my trips to and from San Diego for my client. I believe it was okay to ask you to do this because this is a place where there are a lot of people who understand some of these traits and are good at what they do; I also believe that they can become more than than and become extraordinary.I hope that some little idea in here tempts you to look a little further at not what you test, but how and why you do what you do. I hope that some of the things that have had such surprising impacts in my work over the years may pay off for you as well. Let me know – I would love to hear.