Tag Archives: curation

Articles I Like: 21 HR Jobs of the Future

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
August 13 2020

Harvard Business Review’s mailing include a link to a cool article by Jeanne C. Meister about what HR people will be doing in the future, or doing “more of” in the future, given the impact of COVID-19 and the likely enduring switch to working from home. It’s based on a think piece from one of the thousands of organizations looking at the “future of work”, and there are tons of these reports coming out, as they have for the last five years. Most of them are, quite frankly, wrong. They’re pie-in-the-sky visions of “what could be”, not very practically tied to the current environment. In order for most of the predictions to come true, we would need to see a massive disruption in the workplace and workforce.

Like COVID-19 has now done, which makes some of the more recent predictions more closely tied to reality.

The report outlines 21 different job functions that HR people expect to see in the next 10 years and plots them on a 2×2 grid of how “techy” the companies are and time. It’s an interesting idea, but my take on it is that most of the 21 functions are “options” and not necessarily cooperative ones. People will make choices, and as paradigm one leads to some successes or failures, some of those other 21 options will fall by the wayside.

Here’s what I think is valid…

Well-being – the sh** gets real

Over the last five years, while there has been a lot of talk about well-being in general, and mental health in particular, one of the biggest challenges for the field has been to crystallize a specific problem to solve. While 10-20 years ago, disability was a question-mark for physical disabilities, people figured out access to buildings, retrofitting of offices, and ergonomic assessments. There was an identifiable problem to solve and people could focus on the task to find sustainable solutions. There were false starts, false successes, ongoing challenges, special cases, everything. But it was concrete, and a field developed around disability management and what it entailed in a full entity.

Well-being hasn’t really had that zeitgeist or defining moment. Some people see mental health initiatives being about formal diagnoses while others view it as someone simply having a bad day, and everything in between. Trouble managing work/life balance? Well, that looks different for everyone, right? So no blanket solutions. Working from home has always been a question-mark, often tied to accommodations of a individual worker problem or an incentive for a specific recruitment challenge.

Now? Everyone has similar headings to group their challenges under. Work/life separation when working from home. Time-shifting work duties to deal with home responsibilities like kids when all the schools are closed, while still trying to work and maintain productivity. Technological challenges. Isolation issues.

COVID-19 made all those issues real for EVERYONE. And so every sustainable return-to-work plan has to involve not only the return portion but the ongoing home portion. We’re not in a “temporary world” that people can cope with, this is the new normal. And organizations need someone to pull that all together for them to make sure their policies drafted in the old paradigm still make sense. Even something as simple as office supplies…if your old policy was that WFH was a privilege, so no office supplies were provided, but now EVERYONE is at home and needing paper and printer cartridges, who’s looking at the rules when bottlenecks or irritants crop up?

Where I disagree is with the suggestion that there will be “new jobs” being formed such as Director of Well-being and Work from Home Facilitator. In my opinion, those are functions that will need to be addressed, but most places are just going to assign them to HR and if they do use the new titles, it will be replacing old titles that are pre-COVID. Does that mean they are new jobs or just old jobs being changed? I don’t know.

Everyone will care about health and safety

OHS used to be something only the unions and a few people cared much about, particularly in an office environment. Sure, there were people who cared about scents; others who worried the lights were killing them; others wanted juice bars. But most of it was about regulations related to chemicals or heavy equipment. Ask yourself…when was the last time you read the minutes of an OHS meeting? Do you even know who your OHS officers are? Or who chairs the committee? Probably not.

But as people return to the office, that “health” role just went through the roof. They now have to understand social distancing, local and national guidelines, best practices in internal mobility of workers in elevators or stairs. Just as retail outlets had to figure it out for grocery stores. If people return to offices, will they need shields in front of adminstrative assistants? Will that be the “minimum standard” or a “gold standard”?

The research didn’t address this directly, other than as organizational trust, but their focus went to the IT / AI side, and quite frankly, most employees aren’t going to see anything like that anytime soon.

Nobody understands privacy

Oh sure, everyone understand the basics of privacy (permission to gather) and damage (leaks and breaches). However, while the survey work focused on AI and bias in algorithms, what they didn’t see coming that is directly tied to COVID is the sheer number of people working from home. I work in government, and we have long had a policy that certain docs can only be worked on at the office and saved on secure drives. Our regs are clear. But what do you do when people have to prepare those docs from home and the infrastructure from point A to point B is NOT as secure as what we had? Do you do the work and “hope for the best” or do you refuse the work because it can’t be done securely? In a time when rules are falling by the wayside all over the world to “get the work done”, privacy rules are likely being broken hourly. They aren’t breaches or leaks, but the assets are not secure.

As we move to a fully enabled WFH culture in many industries, what does that mean now? Fully encrypted VPNs, perhaps? And how long will that take to integrate into existing systems? Where I work, things are flying through the system at lightning speeds to meet immediate needs, which is great for productivity, but the reason they can do it is basically we relaxed all the due diligence rules that have been in place for some time. Red tape, a bunch of people say. Privacy laws, other say.

Other areas I’m not sold on

You could think that emergency preparedness and business continuity people will be important in the future, and I completely disagree. We just went through a catastrophic transformation, and while some people will say that proves the benefit for the future, the short version is that all of it was unforeseen. And very few orgs were able to use their BCP for anything other than phone numbers of key personnel. There was no loss of data, no damage to the office, we just couldn’t go to work. So we dealt with it. Not cleanly, not perfectly, but we did, and mostly WITHOUT BCP offering us anything. So if it didn’t help with the big event, why would I bother with it for next time?

Others want to argue for a more “woke” work culture, with diversity, safety in the workplace, community relations. Ethics in how we use info and how we operate period. Great. Except COVID also said “Stick to what we HAVE to do now” to keep the lights on and the trains running. We have legal obligations we aren’t meeting, and they expect orgs to pony up resources for ethical operations with the community? Most of them are going to slap a BLM announcement on their website and call it a day. They’re fighting to survive financially and economically. There are few examples of successful companies doing more than the minimum in those types of crises.

I want to embrace the calls for more creativity and innovation. I do. I’ve seen it on IT, I’ve seen it in options for WFH and everything else. It’s inspiring even. But I also think there will be a snap-back at some point, and innovation is going to be one where people start getting bitten. Oh, you did a new program with no due diligence and 2 years later discover massive problems? Snapback. Oh, you had a data breach while having all of your workers access confidential info on clients from home? Stick to your knitting. Lock it down. Not everything will be a home run, there will be failures. And when they do come, many organizations have a habit of NOT learning from failure nor celebrating it and moving on, but rather circling the wagons to regroup.

I am intrigued by the idea that there will be something called a VR Immersion Counselor. I don’t know who they talked to outside the executive suites, but a lot of organizations are struggling to switch to using Zoom, yet the CEOs think they’re ready for VR? There’s some pun in there about dreaming in technicolour, I think. I do think that HR will spend SOME time (i.e. a LOT) adapting to the new e-world. Interviews entirely by Zoom, time-shifting behaviour, references by chat, etc. It will be different. It will work, but it will take time.

I confess I am also not sold on the future of AI or “human machine partnerships”, at least not any time soon. If they want to give me a robot butler and everyone gets a smartcar, sure. Until then? Not buying it. I do think we’ll have better data algorithms to spot patterns in large data sets. But that still requires a human to interpret what it means.

Still, it was an interesting forecast. And unlike the ones of the last five years, it has a strong disruptive event to base its analysis on in order to make it realistic.

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Articles I Like: How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
November 29 2018

On the rare days that I allow myself to dream that I will eventually make the time to write some more fiction, I dabble in reading interesting tidbits that resonate with me in terms of what I want to do as a writer. Not always “writing advice”, sometimes it is just about the industry, publishing, etc. Rarely do I find much in the way of real writing advice that I think, “Yes, that’s good stuff right there. I should bookmark that!”.

Way back in 2014, one of my regular feeds, The Passive Voice, shared excerpts from Gizmodo’s sub-website “i09” about science fiction writing entitled How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story. Most of the time, I wouldn’t even bother to click on a title like that…too clickbait-y, and honestly, rarely does it live up to the premise. Often the writer will include examples of their own work, and the author isn’t usually that well-known. But the excerpt was intriguing, so why not? It was a slow day.

The article was awesome, perhaps for two reasons. First, the author, Charlie Jane Anders, put a fair amount of analytical thought into the piece. I’m an analyst by nature and profession and I recognize a good framework when I see one. Props. Second, she uses real-life examples from lots of existing books and stories — not her work, not made up openings, actual openings. Some classic, some newer, but real-life examples. And while it talks about the importance of it for short-stories, it works for novels just as well.

And, like other newish writers, I can often suffer from the same problem that plagues us all…starting a story too early. One of the most common things in the “biz”, according to professional editors, is that we writers get stuck in our heads, and we want to provide all the context up to the start of the actual story. Do we need to see Luke Skywalker growing up on Tatooine? Do we need to see his whole life before we arrive? No, we need to see him meet the droids, the moment his life changes. The moment the story starts. (Unless you’re George Lucas and want to go back and write several prequels!). And professional editors frequently want to delete the first three chapters of every first novel they get. So that the story starts when the action starts, not the backstory. Drop that in later, they say. If you have to.

So her structure has seven types of openings:

  1. Scene-setting — good for setting a mood or establishing that the “place” is really important;
  2. Establishing conflict — things start with a bang, but hard to maintain that momentum, and there’s no lead-up or natural build…current TV shows LOVE this one — show a big huge scene, someone’s about to die !!!! and then, a pause, followed by a normal scene with the subtitle ’12 hours earlier! Most of the time, it doesn’t work for me, but there’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Cause and Effect” that starts with a quick series of events leading to the Enterprise being totally destroyed, and then the story resets to an earlier time. It was totally a “WTF” moment and is one of the best establishing scenes of the seven-year series;
  3. The mysterious world — starting with something somewhat fantastical for wording as if it is commonplace…this often happens with fantasy where they want to show the reader from word one that magic is normal and prevalent;
  4. Third-person narration — I’m not always fond of this one, breaking the wall between character and reader, but there are so many degrees of this, I’m not sure I would lump it together;
  5. The first-person narrator — I like this one least of all as it is often so badly done, yet when it is done well, it sings;
  6. Dialogue — risky as it has to spark immediately;
  7. Puzzler — I’m not entirely sure this is a separate category on its own, more a combination of two other elements above.

The author includes the pros and cons of each along with examples, and it has stayed with me in my bookmark folder for a long time. Worth a read if you want to jumpstart some openings…

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Articles I Like: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 13 2018

The WordPress security plugin, Wordfence, published a blog entry describing how one of its techs working on cracking malware goes about doing the various steps in a recent day, analysing and developing responses to specific threats.

While the post seems at first to be highly technical, it’s quite readable by the informed layperson, and quite interesting to see. It also dispels the cryptocurrency baitclick headline to note it could have been running anything off the site, it just happened to be doing CCs.

One of our sources of threat data at Defiant is cleaning hacked websites. In this case, Ivan, a member of our SST team had cleaned a hacked site and handed me the forensic data for analysis. The site had been hacked for months before the owner discovered that it had been compromised.

My normal routine is to start by verifying the files we already detect to check if there is any new information inside any of them. Usually there is not, and this infection did not yield any surprises in the files that Wordfence already detected.

What did surprise me is that the server had a large number of malicious files we have not seen before. The server had been infected for a long time, which may have left the attacker feeling confident enough to upload more valuable code.

For us, a server with code we have not seen before is a treasure trove, because it immediately allows us to add new detection capability to the Wordfence malware scanner. If an attacker is caught in this situation, they generally have a bad day, because many of their files that may have previously been undetected by malware scanners will now be detected by our scan.

The first thing that made this attacker different from others is that, instead of using a standard javascript code obfuscator that just scrambles the code, they were using a finite wordlist to replace variable and function names in the code. When you look at the code, the variable and function names just seem like gibberish.

I immediately searched for other similar files out of the remaining samples and found several, then proceeded to write new signatures to detect those files. That accomplished, I moved on to the next file in the list. That was a basic PHP file that selectively redirects regular users, not search engines, to a malicious website. This is a standard thing we see, so I wrote a signature to detect this updated malware variant and moved on.

WordPress: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

Even the opening approach is quite illuminating, seeing the real work of defenders, not the Hollywood version.

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Articles I Like: Focus on the Fight: Writing Action Scenes That Land the Punch

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 1 2018

Often when I read writing tips, there is very little sense of balance. Most of them come down to a single form: “Do X, not Y”, with the small caveat that you can do Y if you do it well. The classic “Show, don’t tell” is a perfect example…except in some cases, a simple exposition deals with an info gap to get people to the next plot point. In that case, a little exposition can go a long way to avoiding stopping the action, jumping somewhere else to “show it”. Another classic used to be “Don’t use multiple points-of-view”. And then someone comes out with a fantastic book where they use multiple POV to great success. Because they did it right. Which means, often the real advice is “Do X, not Y unless you’re better than average and can actually do Y well, but know that it often doesn’t work for a lot of writers”. On the other hand, there are more advanced tomes by Lawrence Block or Stephen King that avoid that problem and give you the straight goods.

In this case, Diana Gill is an executive editor with views on how to write fight scenes (well, actually, action scenes in general). Not from a technical perspective of blocking and styling, but rather what is important:

As with all writing, think about plot/pacing/tension, or as I say over and over—characters, conflict, and consequences. Action scenes should ideally work to develop those things, not just be their own shiny diamonds, so if most of your fabulous rock-climbing or ballroom dancing or whatever action scenes don’t advance the story as a whole, take them out.

Not sure how to write a fight scene that works? (I’m using fight scenes as a stand-in for action scenes as a whole, as they’re the most common). First, think about what the fight scene does. Does it advance the plot? If so, how, and why? You don’t want this to feel like a Mortal Kombat game, where you’re just progressing through bigger and bigger fights until you can fight the Big Boss at the end.

Or does it show us the character(s)? And if so, how? For example, think of the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark scene where we’re set up for a big sword fight, and Indiana Jones just shoots the other guy, or as already mentioned, the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Both scenes show Indy/Han as someone who is quick to action, wants results, and doesn’t necessarily care about niceties to get the results.

Or consider any of the many Jack Reacher fight scenes in Lee Child’s bestselling series. They all work at a technical level, but they also reinforce Reacher’s character—how he is always analyzing and planning before the fight at an almost subliminal level, because he can’t not do that. (Child’s op-ed on creating suspense is absolutely worth a read as well.)

Action scenes need a point beyond flying fists or explosions: The Terminator’s big plot goal is to stop Skynet from destroying humanity, but in the meantime, there’s the unstoppable killer robot chasing Sarah Connor…. Make sure that the action scenes work with the story as a whole.

Focus on the Fight: Writing Action Scenes That Land the Punch | WritersDigest.com

Of course, she has some good basic tips about checking the enjoyment level of the reader in reading it (not geeking out on the details) and keeping it realistic (like showing them tiring as they fight). But the rest of the message is pretty solid — what is the action scene about other than action?

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Articles I Like: Astronomy Calendar for May 2018

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
April 30 2018

For those not active in astronomy circles, there is a website called Cloudy Nights for all things astro related i.e. where astronomers can go to talk about astronomy when there are “cloudy nights”. Each month, they publish the detailed Celestial Calendar (by Dave Mitsky). Here are some of the highlights for May (times converted to Ottawa time):

May 4/5th — The peak of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower (20 per hour for northern hemisphere observers) occurs at 03h00 (May 5); the Moon, Mars, and Pluto lie within a circle of diameter 4.81 degrees at 19h00 (May 5)

May 7: Last Quarter Moon occurs at 22h09 (7th);

May 8: Jupiter is opposition (angular size 44.8”, magnitude -2.5) at 20h00

May 15: New Moon occurs at 07:48; the Moon is 8.7 degrees south-southeast of the bright open cluster M45 (the Pleiades or Subaru) in Taurus at 18:00; Venus is at perihelion (0.7184 astronomical units from the Sun) at 19:00

May 21: First Quarter Moon occurs at 23h49;

May 29: Full Moon, known as the Milk or Planting Moon, occurs at 10h19; the Moon is 8.8 degrees north of Antares at 15h00

May 29/30: Mercury is 4.5 degrees south-southeast of M45 at 03h00 (30th)

For the planets:

During May, Venus shines prominently in the evening sky. It increases in angular diameter from 11.5 arc minutes to 13.1 arc seconds while decreasing in illumination from 88% to 81% during the course of the month. Its altitude at sunset increases from approximately 24 degrees to 27 degrees. A thin waxing crescent Moon passes five degrees south of it on May 17th.

Mars doubles in brightness to magnitude -1.2 and grows in apparent size by one third to 15.1 arc seconds during May. It rises just before 1:30 a.m. local time as the month begins. Mars rises a bit after midnight by month’s end.

When Jupiter reaches opposition on the night of May 8th, it will rise at sunset and set at sunrise. A shadow transit by Io begins at 10:56 p.m. EDT on May 7th, followed by a transit of Io two minutes later. On the night of May 8th, Io, Europa, and Callisto lie to the east of the planet and Ganymede lies to the west. Io begins to transit Jupiter at 10:37 p.m. EDT on May 30th and is joined by its shadow at 11:07 p.m. EDT.

Saturn lies less than four degrees northeast of the third-magnitude star Lambda Sagittarii and 1.7 degrees north of the bright globular cluster M22 on May 1st. The Ringed Planet’s retrograde motion takes it to position 1.8 degrees northwest of M22 by the end of May. The waning gibbous Moon passes less than two degrees north of Saturn on May 4th.

And then there are general links to planning tools and challenge lists for the month:

Deep-sky object list generators can be found at http://www.virtualcolony.com/sac/ and http://tonightssky.com/MainPage.php

Top ten deep-sky objects for May: M3, M51, M63, M64, M83, M87, M104, M106, NGC 4449, NGC 4565.

May 2018 Celestial Calendar – Celestial Events – Cloudy Nights

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