One of the reasons I enjoy the MAcc program so much is because it allows me the flexibility to take elective classes that spark my professional interests. As a student who one day aspires to be the CFO of a company, I wanted to take extra HRM (human resource management) classes to understand more about … Continue reading "Intro to Organizational Business Coaching"

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Legal Research Digest 16: Procurement of Airport Development and Planning Contracts provides guidance on how to determine which requirements apply to any given procurement process. The report also includes an overview of the consequences for noncompliance with procurement laws or regulations in order to help airports better understand the inherent risks associated with various funding sources.

A report from the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Transportation

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of its annual awards for distinguished service in the field of genetics. The awardees were nominated and selected by their colleagues and will be recognized with presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), held April 22-26, 2020, in the metro Washington, DC area.

From a friend: Please explain to me your enthusiasm for controlled digital lending. Please let me know what you think...

One of the key points we've been making concerning Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ's eager support for the terrible EARN-IT Act, is that much of it really seems to be to cover up the DOJ's own failings in fighting child porn and child exploitation. The premise behind the EARN IT Act is that there's a lot of child exploitation/child abuse material found on social media... and that social media companies should do more to block that content. Of course, if you step back and think about it, you'd quickly realize that this is a form of sweeping the problem under the rug. Rather than actually tracking down and arresting those exploiting and abusing children, it's demanding private companies just hide the evidence of those horrific acts.

And why might the DOJ and others be so supportive of sweeping evidence under the rug and hiding it? Perhaps because the DOJ and Congress have literally failed to live up to their mandates under existing laws to actually fight child exploitation. Barr's DOJ has been required under law to produce reports showing data about internet crimes against children, and come up with goals to fight those crimes. It has produced only two out of the six reports that were mandated over a decade ago. At the same time, Congress has only allocated a very small budget to state and local law enforcement for fighting internet child abuse. While the laws Congress passed say that Congress should give $60 million to local law enforcement, it has actually allocated only about half of that. Oh, and Homeland Security took nearly half of its "cybercrimes" budget and diverted it to immigration enforcement, rather than fighting internet crimes such as child exploitation.

So... maybe we should recognize that the problem isn't social media platforms, but the fact that Congress and law enforcement -- from local and state up to the DOJ -- have literally failed to do their job.

At least some elected officials have decided to call the DOJ's bluff on why we need the EARN IT Act. Led by Senator Ron Wyden (of course), Senators Kirsten Gillbrand, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown and Rep. Anna Eshoo have introduced a new bill to actually fight child sex abuse online. Called the Invest in Child Safety Act, it would basically make law enforcement do its job regarding this stuff.

The Invest in Child Safety Act would direct $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target the pedophiles and abusers who create and share child sexual abuse material online. And it would create a new White House office to coordinate efforts across federal agencies, after DOJ refused to comply with a 2008 law requiring coordination and reporting of those efforts. It also directs substantial new funding for community-based efforts to prevent children from becoming victims in the first place.

Basically, the bill would do a bunch of things to make sure that law enforcement is actually dealing with the very real problem of child exploitation, rather than demanding that internet companies (1) sweep evidence under the rug, and (2) break encryption:

• Quadruple the number of prosecutors and agents in DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 30 FTEs to 120 FTEs;
• Add 100 new agents and investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Innocent Images National Initiative, Crimes Against Children Unit, Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Teams, and Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Forces;
• Fund 65 new NCMEC analysts, engineers, and mental health counselors, as well as a major upgrade to NCMEC’s technology platform to enable the organization to more effectively evaluate and process CSAM reports from tech companies;
• Double funding for the state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces;
• Double funding for the National Criminal Justice Training Center, to administer crucial Internet Crimes Against Children and Missing and Exploited Children training programs;
• Increase funding for evidence-based programs, local governments and non-federal entities to detect, prevent and support victims of child sexual abuse, including school-based mental health services and prevention programs like the Children’s Advocacy Centers and the HHS’ Street Outreach Program;
• Require tech companies to increase the time that they hold evidence of CSAM, in a secure database, to enable law enforcement agencies to prosecute older cases;
• Establish an Office to Enforce and Protect Against Child Sexual Exploitation, within the Executive Office of the President, to direct and streamline the federal government’s efforts to prevent, investigate and prosecute the scourge of child exploitation;
• Require the Office to develop an enforcement and protection strategy, in coordination with HHS and GAO; and
• Require the Office to submit annual monitoring reports, subject to mandatory Congressional testimony to ensure timely execution.

A couple of months ago, a records request revealed a private surveillance contractor had access to nearly every piece of surveillance equipment owned and operated by the state of Utah. Banjo was the company with its pens in all of the state's ink. Banjo's algorithm ran on top of Utah's surveillance gear: CCTV systems, 911 services, location data for government vehicles, and thousands of traffic cameras.

All of this was run through Banjo's servers, which are conveniently located in Utah government buildings. Banjo's offering is of the predictive policing variety. The CEO claims its software can "find crime" without any collateral damage to privacy. This claim is based on the "anonymization" of harvested data -- a term that is essentially meaningless once enough data is collected.

This partnership is now on the rocks, thanks to an investigation by Matt Stroud and OneZero. Banjo's CEO, Damien Patton, apparently spent a lot of his formative years hanging around with white supremacists while committing crimes.

In grand jury testimony that ultimately led to the conviction of two of his associates, Patton revealed that, as a 17-year-old, he was involved with the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On the evening of June 9, 1990 — a month before Patton turned 18 — Patton and a Klan leader took a semi-automatic TEC-9 pistol and drove to a synagogue in a Nashville suburb. With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building’s administrative offices, which were next to that of the congregation’s rabbi. No one was struck or killed in the shooting. Afterward, Patton hid on the grounds of a white supremacist paramilitary training camp under construction before fleeing the state with the help of a second Klan member.

If you're wondering where the state of Utah's due diligence is in all of this, there's a partial explanation for this lapse: the feds, who brought Patton in, screwed up on their paperwork.

Because Patton’s name was misspelled in the initial affidavit of probable cause filed in Brown’s case — an FBI agent apparently spelled Damien with an “o” rather than an “e” — any search of a federal criminal court database for “Damien Patton” would not have surfaced the affidavit.

Now that his past has been exposed, the state of Utah has announced it won't be working with Banjo.

The Utah attorney general’s office will suspend use of a massive surveillance system after a news report showed that the founder of the company behind the effort was once an active participant in a white supremacist group and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue.

The AG's office can only shut down so much of Banjo's surveillance software. Other government agencies not directly controlled by the state AG are making their own judgment calls. The University of Utah is suspending its contract with Banjo, but the state's Department of Public Safety has only gone so far as to "launch a review" of its partnership with the company. City agencies and a number of police departments who have contracts with Banjo have yet to state whether they will be terminating theirs.

And the AG's reaction isn't a ban. The office appears to believe it might be able to work through this.

“While we believe Mr. Patton’s remorse is sincere and believe people can change, we feel it’s best to suspend use of Banjo technology by the Utah attorney general’s office while we implement a third-party audit and advisory committee to address issues like data privacy and possible bias,” Piatt said. “We recommend other state agencies do the same.”

It's refreshing to hear a prosecutor state that it's possible for former criminals to turn their lives around and become positive additions to their communities, but one gets the feeling this sort of forgiveness is only extended to ex-cons who have something to offer law enforcement agencies. Everyone else is just their rap sheet for forever, no matter how many years it's been since their last arrest.

The other problem here is the DA's office's tacit admission it did not take data privacy or possible bias into account before granting Banjo access to the state's surveillance equipment, allowing it to set up servers in government buildings, and giving it free rein to dust everything with its unaudited AI pixie dust.

These are all steps that should have taken place before any of this was implemented, even if the state had chosen to do business with a company with a less controversial CEO. This immediate reaction is the right step to take, but a little proactivity now and then would be a welcome change.

The coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdown in most countries has forced major changes in the way people live, work and study. Online learning is now routine for many, and is largely unproblematic, not least because it has been used for many years. However, online testing is more tricky, since there is a concern by many teachers that students might use their isolated situation to cheat during exams. One person's problem is another person's opportunity, and there are a number of proctoring services that claim to stop or at least minimize cheating during online tests. One thing they have in common is that they tend to be intrusive, and show little respect for the privacy of the people they monitor.

As an article in The Verge explains, some employ humans to watch over students using Zoom video calls. That's reasonably close to a traditional setup, where a teacher or proctor watches students in an exam hall. But there are also webcam-based automated approaches, as explored by Vox:

For instance, Examity also uses AI to verify students' identities, analyze their keystrokes, and, of course, ensure they're not cheating. Proctorio uses artificial intelligence to conduct gaze detection, which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens.

It's not just in the US that these extreme surveillance methods are being adopted. In France, the University of Rennes 1 is using a system called Managexam, which adds a few extra features: the ability to detect "inappropriate" Internet searches by the student, the use of a second screen, or the presence of another person in the room (original in French). The Vox articles notes that even when these systems are deployed, students still try to cheat using new tricks, and the anti-cheating services try to stop them doing so:

it's easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services. Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop. It's also easy for these remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods, so they're constantly coming up with countermeasures. On its website, Proctorio even has a job listing for a "professional cheater" to test its system. The contract position pays between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

As the arms race between students and proctoring services escalates, it's surely time to ask whether the problem isn't people cheating, but the use of old-style, analog testing formats in a world that has been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to move to a completely digital approach. Rather than spending so much time, effort and money on trying to stop students from cheating, maybe we need to come up with new ways of measuring what they have learnt and understood -- ones that are not immune to cheating, but where cheating has no meaning. Obvious options include "open book" exams, where students can use whatever resources they like, or even abolishing formal exams completely, and opting for continuous assessment. Since the lockdown has forced educational establishments to re-invent teaching, isn't it time they re-invented exams too?

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Australia bit barn outfit NEXTDC adds classic film reference to usual mix of resilience, connectivity and security

Australian serial entrepreneur Bevan Slattery has revealed that he told the architects of a data centre he funded to make it resemble the sets used in classic submarine flick The Hunt for Red October.…

It's over, Amazon, we have the high ground (and all you had was a high price) says Redmond

Updated Amazon.com has filed a second, secret, appeal against the decision to award Microsoft the Pentagon's $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract.…

An in-depth understanding of immune escape mechanisms in cancer is likely to lead to innovative advances in immunotherapeutic strategies. However, much remains unknown regarding these mechanisms and how they impact immunotherapy resistance. Using several preclinical tumor models as well as clinical specimens, we identified a mechanism whereby CD8+ T cell activation in response to programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) blockade induced a programmed death ligand 1/NOD-, LRR-, and pyrin domain–containing protein 3 (PD-L1/NLRP3) inflammasome signaling cascade that ultimately led to the recruitment of granulocytic myeloid-derived suppressor cells (PMN-MDSCs) into tumor tissues, thereby dampening the resulting antitumor immune response. The genetic and pharmacologic inhibition of NLRP3 suppressed PMN-MDSC tumor infiltration and significantly augmented the efficacy of anti–PD-1 antibody immunotherapy. This pathway therefore represents a tumor-intrinsic mechanism of adaptive resistance to anti–PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy and is a promising target for future translational research.

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) results from expression of the full-length double homeobox 4 (DUX4-FL) retrogene in skeletal muscle. However, even in cases of severe FSHD the presence of DUX4 is barely detectable. In this issue of the JCI, Bosnakovski et al. used an inducible, muscle-specific human DUX4 to reproduce the low-level, sporadic DUX4 expression of human FSHD muscle as well the myopathology seen in human FSHD disease. Notably, dysregulated fibroadipogenic progenitors accumulated in affected muscles, thus providing a mechanism for the replacement of muscle by fibrosis and fat.

Lamin A is a component of the inner nuclear membrane that, together with epigenetic factors, organizes the genome in higher order structures required for transcriptional control. Mutations in the lamin A/C gene cause several diseases belonging to the class of laminopathies, including muscular dystrophies. Nevertheless, molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of lamin A–dependent dystrophies are still largely unknown. The polycomb group (PcG) of proteins are epigenetic repressors and lamin A interactors, primarily involved in the maintenance of cell identity. Using a murine model of Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy (EDMD), we show here that lamin A loss deregulated PcG positioning in muscle satellite stem cells, leading to derepression of non–muscle-specific genes and p16INK4a, a senescence driver encoded in the Cdkn2a locus. This aberrant transcriptional program caused impairment in self-renewal, loss of cell identity, and premature exhaustion of the quiescent satellite cell pool. Genetic ablation of the Cdkn2a locus restored muscle stem cell properties in lamin A/C–null dystrophic mice. Our findings establish a direct link between lamin A and PcG epigenetic silencing and indicate that lamin A–dependent muscular dystrophy can be ascribed to intrinsic epigenetic dysfunctions of muscle stem cells.

Hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) is strikingly upregulated in many types of cancer, and there is great interest in applying inhibitors of HIF as anticancer therapeutics. The most advanced of these are small molecules that target the HIF-2 isoform through binding the PAS-B domain of HIF-2α. These molecules are undergoing clinical trials with promising results in renal and other cancers where HIF-2 is considered to be driving growth. Nevertheless, a central question remains as to whether such inhibitors affect physiological responses to hypoxia at relevant doses. Here, we show that pharmacological HIF-2α inhibition with PT2385, at doses similar to those reported to inhibit tumor growth, rapidly impaired ventilatory responses to hypoxia, abrogating both ventilatory acclimatization and carotid body cell proliferative responses to sustained hypoxia. Mice carrying a HIF-2α PAS-B S305M mutation that disrupts PT2385 binding, but not dimerization with HIF-1β, did not respond to PT2385, indicating that these effects are on-target. Furthermore, the finding of a hypomorphic ventilatory phenotype in untreated HIF-2α S305M mutant mice suggests a function for the HIF-2α PAS-B domain beyond heterodimerization with HIF-1β. Although PT2385 was well tolerated, the findings indicate the need for caution in patients who are dependent on hypoxic ventilatory drive.

Apple's plan to release an updated version of AirPods later this year has been delayed due to the global health crisis, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.


This lines up with a recent report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said that mass production of third-generation AirPods will begin in the first half of 2021, followed by mass production of second-generation AirPods Pro between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. Kuo also expects Apple's rumored high-end over-ear headphones to enter mass production at some point in mid-2020.

Kuo did acknowledge rumors of new AirPods coming in the second half of 2020, but he said they are "more likely to be the new Beats model." Last month, leaker Jon Prosser claimed that Apple was planning to release so-called "AirPods X" around September or October with a BeatsX-like design for sports and running.

Apple's second-generation AirPods launched in March 2019, while the AirPods Pro were released at the end of October.

SANDERS: ... there is more coverage about the political gossip of a campaign, about raising money, about polling, about somebody saying something dumb, or some kid works for a campaign sends out something stupid on Facebook, right? We can expect that to be a major story. But what your job is, what the media's job is, is to say, look, these are the major issues facing the country. We're a democracy. People have different points of view. Let's argue it. Continue reading →

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Grimaldi of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered the Clinton Foundation for years, looks at the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and what it would be if she became president. Newly released State Department emails include exchanges between top members of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s top State Department advisers, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. The FBI reportedly wanted to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, but U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch pushed back. Continue reading →

The sweetheart deal that Governor Malloy and his fellow Democrats in the General Assembly cut with state employee unions, the so-called SEBAC agreement, is protected by contract for a full decade —leaving meaningful reforms waaay down the road. The contract is the mother of all can-kicks. Continue reading →

As climate change accelerates, IBM is galvanizing the global science community with a massive infusion of computing resources, weather data, and cloud services to help researchers examine the effects of climate change, and explore strategies to mitigate its effects. IBM pledges to help direct the equivalent of up to $200 million for up to five climate-related projects judged to offer the greatest potential impact, and will then broadly share the experiments' results.

Sci-Tech Daresbury and IBM today announced the opening of a new building for the collaborative research facility at The Hartree Centre in Daresbury. The building, opened by the Duke of York, is the latest evolution of the long-running collaboration between Sci-Tech Daresbury and IBM.

IBM announced today a new experimental laboratory for nanotechnology research in Brazil. The NanoLab is part of a $4M investment within the recently upgraded IBM Research-Brazil lab in Rio de Janeiro and will focus on projects related to research in Oil & Gas, Agriculture and Health across Latin America.

IBM and Sesame Workshop today announced that Georgia’s Gwinnett County Public Schools, one of the nation’s top urban school districts, has completed an initial pilot of the industry’s first cognitive vocabulary learning app, built on the IBM and Sesame intelligent play and learning platform. The new platform, powered by IBM Cloud, enables an ecosystem of software developers, researchers, educational toy companies, and educators to tap IBM Watson cognitive capabilities and Sesame Workshop’s early childhood expertise to build engaging experiences to help advance children’s education and learning. The cognitive vocabulary app is one of the first of many cognitive apps, games, and educational toys that will be built over time on this new platform, as a result of the two companies’ collaboration announced last year.

Earlier this week I predicted the demise of conventional IT caused by the wide adoption of SD-WAN and SASE, accelerated by the emergency demands of everyone working from home. Now that Congress has passed a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 bail-out, let’s throw-in the implications of that legislation to see what effect it is all likely to have on what used to be IT. The short version is to expect an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever. Please understand that some version of this bloodbath was going to happen anyway. What matters right now is how we respond to it. While my previous column was generally about turning lower-level IT nerds into Uber drivers, this one goes a little further […]






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Millions of consumers depend on The Weather Channel and weather.com for their daily forecasts, breaking weather news, and the latest in health and travel. And, on August 21, they will be able to experience a solar eclipse like never before. The Weather Channel digital properties and Twitter have teamed up for a live stream of this once-in-a lifetime celestial event, which will allow consumers to chase the total solar eclipse in real time as it moves from coast-to-coast.

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group have joined an initiative launched by UBS and IBM in 2016 to build a new global trade platform based on blockchain technology. This new platform, called Batavia, is built to be openly accessed by organisations of all sizes anywhere in the world, and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade, whether goods are being transported by air, land or sea.

IBM today announced it is building an industry-first insurance platform on the IBM Cloud that aims to improve the processes and economics for new product development, underwriting, and benefits delivery.

El actual entorno tecnológico impulsa a las empresas a transformar sus modelos de negocio en un escenario en donde, según la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), el 25% de la economía mundial será digital en los próximos cinco años. De esta forma, el uso de nuevas tecnologías se vuelve la pieza clave para asegurar tanto competitividad, como su alto desempeño.

IBM fue reconocido como líder de software de almacenamiento en el Cuadrante Mágico de Gartner para Software de Recuperación y Respaldo en Centro de Datos1. En sus “cuadrantes mágicos”, los analistas de Gartner evalúan tecnología y soluciones con la “capacidad de ejecución” y una “visión completa”.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) anunció hoy que está trabajando con más de 300 universidades y más de 400 instituciones educativas en toda Latinoamérica para respaldar la inminente necesidad de desarrollar habilidades asociadas a los requerimientos de la transformación digital, ya que el 60% de los ejecutivos se esfuerza hoy por mantener las habilidades de la fuerza laboral actualizadas y relevantes frente al rápido avance tecnológico.

PROESAH – asociación civil formada por un grupo de doctores, profesores y alumnos de la Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero-, anunció el día de hoy el lanzamiento de una aplicación llamada LUZi, que utiliza tecnología de Inteligencia Artificial (IA) de IBM para analizar el riesgo obstétrico. El objetivo del proyecto es reducir la mortalidad materna e infantil en las comunidades rurales de Guerrero, México.

IBM has replaced Auckland University of Technology (AUT)’s core IT network as part of a new five year services contract. The new network, which went live in March, gives AUT great flexibility for deploying equipment to meet the changing needs of the university and enables it to capitalise on future enhancements in technology, such as video and data centres.

Unitec today announced that the number of people employed in two Delivery Centres at its Mount Albert campus now exceeds 500, and continue to drive benefits for Unitec students and the Auckland economy.

Cisco e IBM Security anunciaron hoy una magna colaboración para abordar la creciente amenaza global de la delincuencia cibernética. Mediante un nuevo acuerdo, las compañías trabajarán juntas de forma más abierta en productos, servicios e inteligencia de amenazas.

El 67% de los usuarios en todo el mundo se siente actualmente cómodo utilizando tecnologías biométricas (lectura de huella dactilar, escaneado de retina y reconocimiento facial o de voz) para acceder a sus aplicaciones, según el estudio IBM Security Future of Identity elaborado por IBM.

IBM Security anunció hoy los resultados de su informe 2018 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, en donde se muestra que la cantidad de registros infringidos cayó casi un 25% en 2017 a medida que los cibercriminales cambiaron el enfoque en el lanzamiento de ransomware y ataques destructivos que buscaban retener o destruir información a menos que la víctima pagara algún rescate.

El Tecnológico de Monterrey e IBM en México abrieron hoy el Innovation & Digital Marketing Center en el Campus Santa Fe de esta institución, un espacio único en su tipo en Latinoamérica que ofrecerá a la comunidad universitaria y a los emprendedores herramientas de Analítica y Smarter Marketing.