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Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor Googled her own name to find out an ad next to her name for a background check hinting that she was arrested. She dug deeper and concluded that so-called black-identifying names were significantly more likely to be the targets for such ads. She documented this in her paper , Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery. It is up to an advertiser how they pick keywords and other criteria to show their ads. Google, like most other companies for which advertising is their primary source of revenue, would never disclose details of algorithms behind their ad offerings. Google denied AdWords being discriminatory in anyway. Facebook just announced they are planning to give more options to their users to provide feedback regarding which ads are relevant to them and which ads are not. While on surface this might sound like a good idea to get rid of ads that are not relevant and keep marketers as well as users happy, this approach has far more severe consequences t...

The call for help began as a rumble. Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor, sending an army of seismic waves to the coast of Japan, a geologic event as unavoidable and uncontrollable as it was unpredictable. By the time the earth again stood still and the subsequent tsunami receded from Japanese shores, the enormity of the tragedy was left to see, even as so much of the landscape was wiped clean by the waves. Responding in Haiti Help From Above The 2010 earthquake in Haiti brought out the best in the world's desire to help, but also brought an avalanche of inter-operability issues. At the request of an Intelligence Agency and under the auspices of NCOIC, NJVC led a simulated response to the disaster, demonstrating the effectiveness of the cloud in disaster responses in 2013. Lessons learned from this event were presented on Thursday, Sept. 12, at the Gannett Building in McLea...

     When the world's next major earthquake, tsunami or other disaster hits, military, government and civilian NGA project is available on the NCOIC website. responders will need to manage and disseminate a large amount of geospatial information to collaborate and get their life-saving jobs done. An interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled, allowing the teams to supply and retrieve data across multiple domains. This technological advancement in creating interoperability can improve mission speed, cost and reliability. Based on this demo, an open process, known as the NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC™), will be made available to governments (international, federal, state and local), companies and other organizations that need to build a federated cloud environment. More information on the The NGA project began in late 2012 with Cycle One, during which the cloud infrastructure was defined and built. The NCOIC team established st...

It is fashionable to talk about talent shortage in the silicon valley. People whine about how hard it is to find and hire the "right" candidates. What no one wants to talk about is how the hiring process is completely broken. I need to fill headcount: This is a line that you hear a lot at large companies. Managers want to hire just because they are entitled to hire with a "hire or lose headcount" clause. Managers spend more time worrying about losing headcount and less time finding the right people the right way. Chasing a mythical candidate: Managers like to chase purple squirrels . They have outrageous expectations and are far removed from reality of talent market. Managers are also unclear on exactly what kind of people they are looking to hire. Bizarre interview practices: "How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?" or "can you write code with right hand while drawing a tree with left hand?" We all have our favorite bizarre interview st...

NBC 4 in Washington, DC highlighted government cloud computing today as part of their GovInnovate show. Below is just a taste of the informative public service they provided.  Go to the NBC Washington video site for much more! Casey Coleman: How the Cloud is Becoming Part of IT Spending Keith Trippie: What cloud computing does for the government, in practical terms. Stephen Warren: The cloud and our veterans NASA: How Has the Cloud Helped Space Programs? ( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article , get free updates by email or RSS - © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012 ) --> --> -->

by Ray Holloman and Kevin Jackson   In a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage.   Well, not in so many words.   Rather, OMB requested increased use of evidence in 2015 budget proposals and in evaluation of existing programs to, in the words of agency leadership, “continually improve program performance by applying existing evidence about what works generating new knowledge and using experimentation and innovation to test new approaches to program delivery.”   The memo is part of the administration's ongoing evidenced-based initiative to better use analytics to evaluate outcomes of dollars spent.   All of which makes sense. With the ebb tide of sequestration causing federal IT budgets to continue to recede, Uncle Sam’s wallet is more cobwebs than cash. This means every dollar spent must be carefully indexed for performance.   In federal IT, it’s a call for CSB, not simply for the cost savings of cloud c...

( A guest post from Ray Holloman, NJVC Corporate Communications ) Two stories sat atop baseball's marquee in the final days of July.   The first was the non-waiver trade deadline, baseball’s annual pros-for-prospects surge staffing. The second was the pending punishment of Alex Rodriguez, the former sweet-swinging shortstop turned sullen slugger turned cautionary tale and financial wild pitch of the New York Yankees.   Tucked in that double play of headlines was an impromptu lesson about the value of cloud services brokers (CSBs).   Really.   In a general sense, baseball's trade deadline is a valuable part of its own asset lifecycle.   For non-contending teams, the deadline historically is the time to exchange expensive, often past-its-prime talent (say, baseball’s legacy hardware) for cheaper, younger players. For teams in the penant race, the deadline offers an opportunity to add talent on a short-term basis to meet important objectives, say addin...