Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 138
June 9, 2017
Lowe’s lays off over 120 tech workers in Mooresville, will send jobs to India
Amid efforts to improve its profitability, Lowe’s has laid off about 125 corporate tech workers, primarily at its headquarters in Mooresville.
The home-improvement retailer informed affected employees Wednesday morning through early afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter.
Many of the affected information technology job functions are being sent to Bangalore, India, where Lowe’s employs approximately 1,000 people in information and technology and analytics.
Lowe’s eliminated 96 corporate tech jobs in October, then in January cut another 2,400 full-time jobs, mostly at the store level. In February, it followed with more than 500 corporate layoffs, including 430 at its headquarters in Mooresville and 70 support staffers in Wilkesboro.
“Everybody’s kind of like, ‘When’s the next wave coming?’” said one former IT employee who has been laid off by the company. He asked to remain anonymous to protect business relationships.
In a memo to IT workers Wednesday, Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay said the staffing reductions are part of planning effort that began “several years ago” to build a more diverse, global team to respond better “in this highly competitive 24/7 retail environment” and more quickly to “evolving consumer needs.”
“It is always incredibly hard to make decisions such as these that directly impact our people and our teams,” Ramsay said. He added that the company will be providing a competitive severance package and outplacement services, including a job fair with local IT employers.
Bangalore has been described as the “Silicon Valley of India.” Other major corporations have a growing presence in the IT hub, including Oracle, Dell, IBM and GE, according to a recent Wired story. Another is Wipro, an outsourcing firm used by Observer parent McClatchy.
The latest staffing changes come at a critical time for Lowe’s. Last month, the company posted disappointing sales and earnings numbers for the first quarter. Lowe’s has been working to catch up to its larger rival, Atlanta-based Home Depot, which has consistently outperformed it.
Lowe’s recent performance is at odds with the improvements in the overall economy that should provide it a tailwind: Solid job growth has pushed the national unemployment rate down to its lowest level in a decade in April, property values are rising and mortgage rates remain relatively low.
Along with layoffs, to improve profitability, Lowe’s has been working to boost its offerings for its lucrative professional base, which includes customers such as contractors, who reliably and frequently place bigger orders than the average customer. Last month, for instance, the company purchased a Houston company called Maintenance Supply Headquarters for $512 million.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article154829054.html#storylink=cpy
June 8, 2017
A Men’s Label, Born on Instagram
Two men — one in Miami, the other in New York, both passionate about suits — stumble upon each other on Instagram. They feel a connection. Mutual respect on social media turns into real-life camaraderie. They meet, they click, they draw up a plan.
A business is born.
That is the origin story of Musika Frère, a label that specializes in custom suits that often come in unusual colors or patterns, and has drawn a clientele that includes Jay Z, Michael B. Jordan, Stephen Curry, Kevin Hart and even Beyoncé.
Its founders, Aleks Musika, 32, and Davidson Petit-Frère, 27, are somewhat famous in their own right: Mr. Petit-Frère has over 200,000 followers on Instagram, and Mr. Musika more than 178,000.
“Guys in suits and guys taking pictures of themselves really didn’t happen back then,” Mr. Musika said of the period when he and Mr. Petit-Frère first started their pages, about five years ago.
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Mr. Petit-Frère said: “We had a following. We just didn’t have a product.”
The brand they eventually came up with, at a Miami public library in 2013, reflects their particularities and interests. “We take inspiration from the ’20s, ’30s, and remix it,” Mr. Petit-Frère said. “We call it neo-classical tailoring.”
Mr. Petit-Frère added, “It’s a small detail, but it’s also a big detail.”
Neither designer comes from a traditional fashion background. Mr. Petit-Frère, a native New Yorker, began working in real estate at 18. “I was wearing polo shirts and pants and square shoes to the office,” he said. “I realized I wasn’t a sharp dresser.” One of his co-workers referred him to his tailor, Badger & Welsh Bespoke, in Midtown. “As I made more money, I started to buy more suits,” he said, “and I realized my business was getting a big boost from that.”
Mr. Petit-Frère sent friends to Badger & Welsh, and he was eventually offered a line of his own, P. Frère, under the company’s umbrella. “In the beginning, I was more of an apprentice,” he said. “I learned about measuring, tailoring, the construction of suits. I learned the lingo and the history.”
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Musk predicts AI will be better than humans at everything in 2030
In response to an article by New Scientist predicting that artificial intelligence will be able to beat humans at everything and anything by 2060, Elon Musk replied that he believed the milestone would be much sooner – around 2030 to 2040.
Probably closer to 2030 to 2040 imo. 2060 would be a linear extrapolation, but progress is exponential. https://t.co/e6gyOVcMZG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2017
The New Scientist Study based its story from a survey of more than 350 AI researchers who believe there is a 50% chance that AI will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years.
At a high level, the data is not shocking, but more of an interesting tidbit from the future. Dive into the details of when those very same AI experts believe machines will be better at specific tasks than humans and things get a little creepy. Experts believe they will be better at translating languages than humans by 2024 – something that is already being done on-the-fly by Google for webpages and for spoken word via Google Translate.
High school students everywhere will be outclassed by AI that is estimated to outperform them in essay writing by 2026. AI moves in to takeover truck driving by 2027 thought we believe this will happen much sooner based on the progress Tesla is making with autonomous driving. Tesla has a fully autonomous cross-country trip planned for later this year that, if successful, will pave the way for autonomous vehicle technology to go mainstream.
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The estimates get stranger with AI predicted to be able to write a bestselling book better than humans by 2049 and to perform extremely complex, dynamic surgery by 2053. All human jobs are expected to be automated within 120 years which is admittedly quite a bit farther out than 2060 but that is representative of the long tail of increasingly smaller tasks.
Elon is not all rainbows and sunshine with AI which is why he created the non-profit OpenAI organization. He co-founded the organization specifically to map out a path forward for AI research and development, and to ensure that AI is created in an intentional and safe manner.
OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.
While the individual tasks or groups of tasks that comprise each automated industry from trucking to making tacos at your local taqueria, OpenAI is looking beyond that to the first Artificial General Intelligence. This is an intelligence that will have the ability to adapt dynamically to a situation, learn new tasks, creatively apply itself to the new conditions and to perform much like a human would. OpenAI believes that a dynamic AGI will far surpass the AI implemented in any specific industry and will be a game-changer in AI packing the power to change the world in ways we never imagined.
With that goal in mind, OpenAI is pushing the envelope in an attempt to define the cutting edge of AI and to thereby earn the right to define the future of AI for the world. As famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Elon surely has his finger on the pulse of AI and believes that it is highly likely that it will have a massive impact on humanity. OpenAI carries this belief forward, stating that,
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be the most significant technology ever created by humans.
Though Elon is confident AI is moving forward at a far faster pace than scientists believe and is actively work to shape its future, he still fears the technology.
I hope I’m wrong
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2017
https://www.teslarati.com/musk-predicts-ai-will-better-humans-everything-2030/
Electronic Setups of Driverless Cars Vulnerable to Hackers
Any part of a car that talks to the outside world is a potential opportunity for hackers.
That includes the car’s entertainment and navigation systems, preloaded music and mapping apps, tire-pressure sensors, even older entry points like a CD drive. It also includes technologies that are still in the works, like computer vision systems and technology that will allow vehicles to communicate with one another.
It will be five to 10 years — or even more — before a truly driverless car, without a steering wheel, hits the market. In the meantime, digital automobile security experts will have to solve problems that the cybersecurity industry still has not quite figured out.
“There’s still time for manufacturers to start paying attention, but we need the conversation around security to happen now,” said Marc Rogers, the principal security researcher at the cybersecurity firm CloudFlare.
Their primary challenge will be preventing hackers from getting into the heart of the car’s crucial computing system, called a CAN (or computer area network).
While most automakers now install gateways between a driver’s systems and the car’s CAN network, repeated hacks of Jeeps and Teslas have shown that with enough skill and patience, hackers can bypass those gateways.
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And the challenge of securing driverless cars only gets messier as automakers figure out how to design an autonomous car that can safely communicate with other vehicles through so-called V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle, communication.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed that V2V equipment be installed in all cars in the future. But that channel, and all the equipment involved, open millions more access points for would-be attackers.
It’s not just V2V communications that security experts are concerned about. Some engineers have imagined a future of vehicle-to-infrastructure communications that would allow police officers to automatically enforce safe driving speeds in construction zones, near schools or around accidents.
Given the years long lag time from car design to production, security researchers are also concerned about the shelf life of software deeply embedded in a car, which may no longer be supported, or patched, by the time the car makes it out of the lot.
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Walmart Is Testing a Giant Grocery Vending Machine
Not to be outdone by Amazon, Walmart is now piloting a pick-up grocery service.
The retail giant has started testing the new service with a self-serving kiosk stationed in the parking lot of its Warr Acres, Okla., store. Customers order groceries online and, after entering a special five-digit code, can pick them up at the kiosk, Business Insider reported.
While there is no extra cost to using the service, customers must purchase at least $30 worth of groceries to use the new option. More than 30,000 products are available for purchase through the self-service option, and freezers and fridges are used in the kiosk.
The new option from Walmart comes just after Amazon launched a self-serving grocery pick-up service in Seattle, called AmazonFresh Pickup. Like Walmart’s service, customers can order their groceries online then travel to a store for pickup. Amazon’s service differs from Walmart’s in that the groceries will be brought to the car (a license plate scanner identifies the vehicle).
In an effort to bolster its presence online, Walmart also recently launched a home delivery service that uses its in-store employees to deliver items to customers while on their commute home. That service, however, doesn’t include the delivery of perishable groceries.
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Source:
http://time.com/money/4810543/walmart-grocery-pick-up/
Snapchat downloads are dropping off a cliff
Snapchat’s growth has slowed sharply during the past two months as Facebook and its Instagram app continue to knock off the disappearing-photo app’s features, according to an analyst report.
Downloads of the app operated by Venice, Calif.-based Snap Inc. are down 22 percent year-over-year through the first two months of this year’s second quarter, according to Instinet.
That’s a sharp about-face from the first quarter, when Snapchat downloads rose 6 percent. In the last two months, the slowdown has been steepest with iPhone users — down a drastic 40 percent, according to the report published Wednesday.
The analyst noted that Instagram has been copying Snap’s features, for example allowing users to create “stories,” or series of video clips grouped together in a single post.
On its first-ever quarterly earnings call last month, Snap management downplayed fears about Facebook copying Snapchat’s features. CEO Evan Spiegel also noted that the second and third quarters are slowest when it comes to advertising for Snapchat.
“We are surprised that a newly public company, supposedly early in its growth cycle, would see near-term results impacted by broader seasonal ad market trends,” Instinet’s DiClemente wrote Wednesday.
Earlier this year, a former Snapchat employee sued the company, claiming that Snapchat was inflating its user stats and growth metrics in marketing materials it distributed to advertisers.
In response, Snapchat’s lawyers called the claim a “musty, two-year-old allegation about a minor metrics deviation.”
Source:
http://nypost.com/2017/06/07/snapchat-downloads-are-dropping-off-a-cliff/
Why Is Google Digitising the World’s Fashion Archives?
For years, Google allowed its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects they thought would ultimately benefit the company. The tech giant has since scaled back on the policy, replacing it with a more focused approach to innovation, but Google’s famous “20 percent time” gave rise to some of its most successful products, including Gmail and AdSense.
Back in 2010, a Bombay-born engineer named Amit Sood used his “20 percent time” to kickstart the Google Art Project, an effort to digitise the world’s museums, making cultural artefacts accessible in extraordinary detail to millions of internet users. It was a Google-sized ambition that fit the company’s mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
The project has since grown into the Google Cultural Institute, a non-profit arm of the company, now housed in a grand hôtel particulier in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, that has partnered with over 1,300 museums and foundations to digitise everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Marc Chagall’s ceiling at the Opéra Garnier, making them accessible on a platform called Google Arts & Culture.
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Now, Google is turning its attention to fashion.
Encouraged by the volume of fashion-related online search queries and the rising popularity of fashion exhibitions, Google’s Cultural Institute has partnered with over 180 cultural institutions — including The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Kyoto Costume Institute — “to bring 3,000 years of fashion to the Google Arts & Culture platform.”
Called “We Wear Culture,” the initiative, which launches today, is based on the premise that fashion is culture, not just clothes. Led by Kate Lauterbach — a Google program manager who began her career at Condé Nast in New York and later worked for J.Crew’s Madewell — it aims to digitise and display thousands of garments from around the world, stage curated online exhibitions, invite non-profit partners like museums and schools to script and share their own fashion stories, and leverage technologies like Google Street View to offer immersive experiences like virtual walkthroughs of museum collections.
For end users, it’s a cultural rabbit hole and research tool. For partners, it’s a way to reach a much wider audience online, furthering both their educational mandates and marketing objectives. But the benefit to Google is more complex.
After a day’s immersion at Google’s Cultural Institute and associated Lab in Paris, BoF caught up with Lauterbach at the company’s London King’s Cross campus to learn more about the thinking behind the initiative and how digitising the world’s fashion archives unlocks value for the tech giant.
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BoF: Tell me about the genesis of the Culture Institute’s fashion project.
KL: Well, starting from art we expanded into culture. We did something around performance art, we did something around natural history; so very different, but the same idea: you take Google technologies, you apply them to this facet of culture and you produce something, you push the bounds, you do something different.
I worked in fashion pre-MBA and I just felt like it was a really interesting subject matter. We were starting to see fashion cropping up in different partners’ collections; it’s a personal passion of mine; and it’s also relevant and interesting and searched for online. It’s a conversation I thought we could bring some value to. We started thinking about it almost two years ago now and began having conversations with places like the V&A and the Costume Institute at the Met.
BoF: The project is named “We Wear Culture.” What does that mean?
KL: We wanted to show that fashion is much deeper than just what you wear; that there’s a story behind it, there’s people behind it, there’s influences that come from art, that come from music, that come from culture more broadly; and, in turn, what we wear influences culture. We really wanted to put fashion on a par with art and artists. You look at their influences, you look at their inspiration, you look at their process, you look at their materials. And we thought that if you can have this kind of singular resource online where all of this was starting to be discussed — and hear it from the authority, I think that’s really critical — it would be valuable.
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Facebook inserts itself into politics with new tools that help elected officials reach constituents
Facebook this year has launched a number of features that make it easier for people to reach their government representatives on its social network, including “Town Hall,” and related integrations with News Feed, as well as ways to share reps’ contact info in your own posts. Today, the company is expanding on these initiatives with those designed for elected officials themselves. The new tools will help officials connect with their constituents, as well as better understand which issues their constituents care about most.
Specifically, the social network is rolling out three new features: constituent badges, constituent insights, and district targeting.
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Constituent badges are a new, opt-in feature that allow Facebook users to identify themselves as a person living in the district the elected official represents. Facebook determines whether or not someone is a constituent based on the address information provided either in Town Hall, or as part of the process used to turn on the badges.
While anyone could enter a fake address and pretend to be a constituent, Facebook has put controls in place to limit those bad actors. For starters, Facebook users can only be a verified constituent based on one address at a time – and, if a person changes their address, their badge is removed from prior posts. Facebook also limits the number of times an address can be changed, we understand.
The idea with the badges is to make it easier for elected officials to determine which Facebook comments, questions and concerns are being shared by those they actually represent. Whether or not they’ll treat these sentiments with the same degree of importance as they would a phone call, email, or letter remains to be seen.
Facebook users will be prompted to turn on constituent badges when they like or comment on posts by their reps through a unit that appears on the page. Alternately, users can go to the Town Hall section on Facebook to turn on the badge themselves.
Once enabled, badges will appear anytime a person comments on content shared by their own representatives.
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A second feature called Constituent Insights is designed to help elected officials learn which local news stories and content is popular in their district, so they can share their thoughts on those matters.
This will be available to the reps through a new Page Insights feature, available to Page admins, which includes a horizontally scrollable section where locally trending news stories appear. Here, the elected officials can click a link to post that story to their Facebook Page, along with their thoughts on the issue.
Additionally, constituents will be able to browse through these same stories on a new Community tab on the official’s Facebook Page.
The third new feature – District Targeting – is arguably the most notable.
This effectively gives elected officials the means of gathering feedback from their constituents through Facebook directly, using either posts or polls that are targeted only towards those who actually live in their particular district.
That means the official can post to Facebook to ask for feedback from constituents about an issue, and these posts will only be viewable by those who live in their district.
Of course, this also means that the elected official would be taking an active – even proactive – role in engaging with their community and constituent base, rather than waiting for constituents to reach out to their office with their thoughts, as is often the case today.
Overall, the combination of Town Hall with these new features aimed at government officials represent a growing effort at Facebook to become more involved in the political process and the dialog surrounding policy issues.
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June 7, 2017
Apple’s advances in augmented reality highlight its real advantage over Google
For the multiple times Apple executives mentioned “machine learning” at the company’s developers conference Monday, they also emphasized an older theme that could be more important: Unified software.
Apple’s mobile operating system, or iOS, works the same and runs the same on every iPhone. That’s why app developers often prefer building for Apple before they build for Google’s Android, an operating system that’s splintered across different kinds of hardware. While the latest versions of Android consistently run on higher-end phones like the Google Pixel, cheaper and older phones often only run previous versions.
Apple’s control over both its operating system and the hardware on which that software runs came up throughout the keynote. That highlights what Google really needs to worry about when competing with Apple: The fragmentation of Android. This matters even when Google has a technical advantage.
Apple’s latest announcements in augmented reality are where the company’s advantage with a unified platform showed the most.
The ability to quickly deploy software to devices immediately differentiates Apple’s AR from Google AR computing platform Tango, which only runs on select newer-model phones.
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“When you bring the software together with these devices, we actually have hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads that are going to be capable of AR,” Apple’s head of software, Craig Federighi, said. “That’s going to make overnight the AR kit the largest AR platform in the world.”
In general, only a portion of Android phones tend to run the latest version of the mobile software at any given time. While Google builds its own hardware now — such as the Pixel phone — it still relies largely on third-party manufacturers and carriers to deliver Android updates to hardware that runs it.
Update: Google said it has made efforts to lessen the fragmentation of software across Android devices, including rolling out a program to make it easier for device makers to upgrade to newer versions of Android, and ensuring software in Google Play Services is updated frequently across devices. Google reports 93 percent of users ahave the latest version of Google Play Services.
Federighi brought up hardware and platform advantages again when he announced a new set of machine learning software tools for developers.
Developers that used Apple’s new machine learning tools would be able to execute their use with “tremendous performance on-device,” he said, and have access to “all the data privacy benefits and all of the carefully tuned compatibility with all of our platforms.”
What he didn’t seem to emphasize was what made the tools themselves interesting. That’s probably because Apple is known to lag behind Google, Microsoft and others in machine learning.
The iPhone didn’t publish its first artificial intelligence research paper until December. By comparison, Google had 44 papers accepted this year to the International Conference on Machine Learning while Microsoft had 33, according to a Medium post by a researcher at AI think tank OpenAI.
And Apple’s new machine learning offerings are also not all drawn from Apple technology. “Some of the pre-trained machine learning models that Apple offers are open-sourced Google code, primarily for image recognition,” noted Quartz reporter Dave Gershgorn. Google confirmed this.
Source:
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15749860/apple-ar-toolkit-highlights-ios-advantages-unified-software
