Working in the cloud...November 20, 2013, 8:30 am at CAMACOL TOWER

Tecnología y Administración: El último desastre de Yahoo (BusinessWeek)

Management

Yahoo's Latest HR Disaster: Ranking Workers on a Curve

By Joshua Brustein                                                                             November 12, 2013

 

Marissa Mayer at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 conference

 

If Marissa Mayer is as good at identifying winning startups as she is at embracing contentious human resources practices, Yahoo! (YHOO) is going to be just fine. Several months after the great work-at-home kerfuffle of 2013, Yahoo employees were up in arms about a new policy that forces managers to rank employees on a bell curve, then fire those at the low end. According to AllThingsD, Marissa Mayer reportedly told Yahoo workers that the rankings weren’t mandatory, but many people disagree. The company hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

 

With its embrace of rankings, Yahoo has waded into the “third rail of human resource management.” Forcing managers to rank their employees along a bell curve was popularized in the 1980s (thanks, Jack Welch), but lately it has fallen out of favor. The Institute of Corporate Productivity says the number of companies using either a forced ranking system or some softer facsimile is down significantly from previous years. Companies performing well were less likely to be using forced ranking systems than those that weren’t. Just over 5 percent of high-performing companies used a forced ranking system in 2011, down from almost 20 percent two years earlier.

 

Basically, many people have lost faith that ranking employees works, and some research suggests that employee performance doesn’t follow a bell curve at all. Instead, most people are slightly worse than average (PDF), with a few superstars. And while a bit of pressure can motivate people, constantly pitting employees against one another is terrible for morale. In a company that is going through layoffs, this gets worse over time (PDF), wrote several MIT professors in a study of forced rankings in 2006. “As the company shrinks, the rigid distribution of the bell-curve forces managers to label a high performer as a mediocre. A high performer, unmotivated by such artificial demotion, behaves like a mediocre.”

 

STORY: Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings. Does Anyone Do Employee Reviews Right?

 

This can have a particularly bad impact on innovation, arguably the thing Yahoo most needs now. When employees worry about being ranked at the bottom of the pile, they take fewer risks, said Cliff Stevenson, who studies workforce issues for i4cp.

 

However, rankings also suggest increased data about employees, which plays into Silicon Valley’s weakness for hard numbers. In Stevenson’s study, tech companies were over three times as likely to implement a forced ranking system than the respondents overall—although he cautioned that the sample size was too small to make any authoritative declarations.

 

The continued appeal is largely that rankings appear to take the “human” out of human resources. Rigidly formatted evaluations generate a stockpile of crunchable information that can be used to run various types of systematic analyses. Even this will work only if the seemingly objective information is valid. Stevenson has his doubts.

 

STORY: Performance Reviews: Why Bother?

 

“Inherently the problem in ranking is that, unless it’s based purely on objective data—which you rarely see outside of a call center, it brings in a human element. There’s no way to data-fy that,” says Stevenson. In other words, managers’ prejudices and stray opinions get transformed and codified in what appears to be raw data. This seems to be one of the specific complaints being made by Yahoo employees: The rankings are both high-stakes and completely arbitrary.

 

As the techies say, garbage in, garbage out.

 

STORY: Yahoo! Tries to Get Workers to Walk 100 Miles

 

BLOG: When Social Media at Work Don't Create Productivity-Killing Distractions

 

Brustein is a writer for Businessweek.com in New York.

El secreto de Twitter (BusinessWeek)

Opening Remarks

The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge

By Paul Ford                                                                November 07, 2013

 

 

Consider the tweet. It’s short—140 characters and done—but hardly simple. If you open one up and look inside, you’ll see a remarkable clockwork, with 31 publicly documented data fields. Why do these tweets, typically born of a stray impulse, need to carry all this data with them?

 

While a tweet thrives in its timeline, among the other tweets, it’s also designed to stand on its own, forever. Any tweet might show up embedded inside a million different websites. It may be called up and re-displayed years after posting. For all their supposed ephemerality, tweets have real staying power.

 

Once born, they’re alone and must find their own way to the world, like a just-hatched sea turtle crawling to the surf. Luckily they have all of the information they need in order to make it: A tweet knows the identity of its creator, whether bot or human, as well as the location from which it originated, the date and time it went out, and dozens of other little things—so that wherever it finds itself, the tweet can be reconstituted. Millennia from now an intelligence coming across a single tweet could, like an archaeologist pondering a chunk of ancient skull, deduce an entire culture.

 

VIDEO: How Hot Is the Twitter IPO?

 

 

Twitter’s (TWTR) Nov. 7 initial public offering marks the San Francisco-based company’s coming-out party, the moment when it graduates from its South of Market beginnings and takes its place as one of the Internet’s most valuable properties, without ever turning a profit. What’s perhaps most remarkable about Twitter’s rise is how little the service has evolved from the original core concept of the 140-character tweet—which is to say, not at all. It’s tempting to view tweeting as silly and trivial, and Twitter itself as overhyped and overvalued. But there’s some sophisticated, supple, and even revolutionary technology at work. Appreciating Twitter’s machinery is key to understanding how an idea so simple changed the way millions of people advertise their existences to the world.

 

How do you look inside a tweet? It’s easy; the structure of a tweet is a matter of public record. Twitter, as a modern Web company, reveals to the world some of the technology it uses, in the form of an application programming interface—an API—which allows external software developers to build tools on top of the service, making it more widely used and thus more valuable for everyone.

 

All tweets share the same anatomy. To examine the guts of a tweet, you request an “API key” from Twitter, which is a fast, automated procedure. You then visit special Web addresses that, instead of nicely formatted Web pages for humans to read, return raw data for computers to read. That data is expressed in a computer language—a smushed-up nest of brackets and characters. It’s a simplified version of JavaScript called JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. API essentially means “speaks (and reads) JSON.” The language comes in a bundle of name/value fields, 31 of which make up a tweet. For example, if a tweet has been “favorited” 25 times, the corresponding name is “favorite_count” and “25” is the value.

 

STORY: Want to Buy Twitter Shares? Check Out These Charts First

 

You know how the National Security Agency collects “metadata” about the phone calls Americans make? Well, that’s what these fields are, except instead of metadata about phone calls, this is metadata about tweets. In fact, those 140 characters are less than 10 percent of all the data you’ll find in a tweet object. Twitter’s metadata is publicly documented by the company, open for perusal by all and available to anyone who wants to sign up for an API key.

 

This metadata contains not just tidy numerals like “25” but also whole new sets of name/value pairs—big weird trees of data. A good example is in the “coordinates” part of the tweet. This value contains geographical information—latitude and longitude—in a format called GeoJSON, a dialect of JSON that’s used to describe places. This can seem complicated at first, but it’s actually awesome, because it means that simple-to-understand formats such as JSON can express some pretty complex ideas about the world. GeoJSON isn’t controlled by Twitter; it’s a published, open standard. Twitter has added another field, called “place.” Places are not just dots on a map but “specific, named locations.” They include multiple coordinates—they actually define polygons over the surface of the earth. A tweet can thus contain a very rough outline of a given nation. A few tweets can, with some digital fiddling, serve as a primitive atlas. And through some slightly complex math, they can reveal how far one tweeter is from another. Tweets also have a “created_at” field, which indicates the exact time at which they were posted.

 

VIDEO: Is the Twitter IPO Already Oversubscribed?

 

This is where things get interesting. With just the places and the times, you can do some database work and learn when people in every corner of the world are in the strange, receptive state of social media engagement. Could be valuable! This information might tell you the best time to update a blog post or communicate with the most human beings at once, or when to release an advertisement. Maybe we learn that certain people tweet most assiduously right before leaving for work, a fine time for an advertiser to pitch them some orange juice or a new car to ease their commute.

This is the sort of combinatorial work that defines the modern Web: There’s so much data that there’s a very good chance that you will be the first of all humankind to find something interesting or unexpected. Whether you find something valuable is another question. But it’s surprisingly easy to become an expert in a very tiny niche as a developer—to become a world-leading expert in Android video or a specialist in Twitter geography—and charge accordingly for your services.

For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, “withheld_copyright,” if set to “true,” lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The “withheld_in_countries” field can provide a list of the nations in which the tweet is banned. Another field has a telling name: “possibly_sensitive.” It’s set to either true or false. The field indicates whether a tweet links to potentially offensive things such as “nudity, violence, or medical procedures.” (If ever you wanted a snapshot of our world’s anxieties in three terms, there you have it.) As a user you can check a box on your profile so that the media you link to is automatically flagged this way. If you don’t, you risk having your pictures of your medical procedure marked as objectionable by an offended reader and thus put “in review,” the Twitter version of limbo.

 

VIDEO: What Is the Value of a Twitter User?

 

A field like this indicates the inherent difficulty of managing an enormous platform like Twitter. The only way the company survives is if it can safely ignore most of what’s said on Twitter. If it had to use employees to monitor tweets, it wouldn’t last a day. But in order to attract as many users as possible, it must find ways to avoid horrifying them.

 

There’s a great deal of hedging in both the words “possibly” and “sensitive.” The end result is that Twitter is putting the moral burden on the user. One person’s art is another person’s smut, and Twitter is not going to decide which is which—nor is it going to force you to look at the stuff. This position is both somewhat noble for its acceptance of the range of human expression and also highly expedient, putting the responsibility back on the user: We told you the picture was “possibly sensitive,” so why did you look at it?

 

Much of the rest of the metadata contained in a tweet is familiar: The number of times people have starred, or “fav’d,” a tweet, the number of times it’s been retweeted. The value for “user” contains a whole huge bundle of stuff—the user’s name, a link to an avatar image, the user’s number of followers, the number of people the user follows, and whether the user is “verified” and deserves one of those blue checkmarks. It’s a pretty full portrait of an individual, given that this portrait is attached to every tweet.

 

VIDEO: Meet the Trillion-Dollar Dealmaker of Twitter's IPO

 

From a single tweet and with no other information, you can extract a sense of social influence—how big a voice an individual has, the number of people they reach, the number of people who engaged with this particular tweet. Tweets themselves are just regular text (although text on a computer is anything but regular; there are dozens of abstractions that make it possible for an “a” to appear on a screen—but it’s safe to gloss over that). Here it is, 140 characters, a plain little beastie. You might be fooled into thinking there’s hardly anything there.

 

That’s the genius of Twitter. All of this scaffolding has emerged around a very basic human impulse. A tweet is the manifestation of the human desire to communicate with many other humans at once—to exercise some influence, to inform, amuse, or outrage. Of course, people have been informing, amusing, and outraging each other forever. It’s been said that Twitter is more of a discovery than an invention. What did it discover to make its insane growth possible?

 

VIDEO: Is Twitter Changing the Business of Hollywood?

 

First, Twitter discovered that blogging is hard. At the time of its birth in 2006, many people in traditional media mistakenly thought that blogging was too easy, and would lead to a profligacy of voices and perhaps even the downfall of polite society. But creating and maintaining an old-fashioned blog took time, effort, and an audience. Twitter democratized blogging by redefining it—the term “microblogging service” is today as meaningless as “microcomputer,” but that’s what Twitter was. It gave millions of people voices they might not have known they possessed—and now is in position to sell a place among those voices to advertisers.

Another of Twitter’s discoveries was that mobile phones could work as a broadcast platform. This was something of a miracle of timing: A massive proportion of its traffic today comes from mobile devices. The short length of the tweet was perfect for celebrities in limousines to communicate with thousands, and later millions, of followers. The tiny payload of tweets could be easily jammed into narrow mobile phone data streams, giving people a real-time flow of information.

Twitter started with a very simple form—a single box on the Web with a limit that kept people from inserting too many characters—and through tens of billions of repetitions became a network unto itself. It’s embedded within the Web’s culture, but it’s also so large that it’s separate from the rest of the Web. The technologies that go into building Twitter today are not the same technologies one uses to build a typical website. The tweet is the social network’s building block in the way that Web pages built the Web in the mid-1990s.

BLOG: Twitter’s IPO Defies Economics

 

Twitter’s founders recognized that encouraging people to use a very small number of very tightly controlled forms, billions of times over, creates huge, deeply interconnected, highly creative, and potentially profitable new spaces. It’s as if you could, with exactly the right kind of bricks, build a skyscraper that was infinitely tall. Twitter, like its half-sibling Facebook (FB), became so powerful that people now use it to log on to other websites; your Twitter identity is a major component of your Web identity. And today major news properties and blogs increasingly look like Twitter: infinite streams of data, tags, and voices.

The history of Twitter, as it’s been told so far, doesn’t offer a moment where various youngish men rise up from their desks and run naked through San Francisco yelling “Eureka!” It was created, like most things, in meetings. Somewhere in those meetings, Twitter uncovered a latent aspect of human life that had never before been so clearly articulated and turned it into a product that has altered, to various degrees, hundreds of millions of lives. That much of what is tweeted is trivial or silly is an obvious truth—but that’s not Twitter’s fault. That’s on us

Ford is a programmer and the creator of SavePublishing.com.

Los Militares están fabricando un traje de IRON MAN...(BusinessWeek)

High-Tech Warriors

The U.S. Military Is Building an Iron Man Suit

By Justin Bachman                                             November 04, 2013

 

 

While some may view the Mark series of suits in the Iron Man comics and movies as science fiction, the Pentagon sees a real-world goal.

 

A program to incorporate several technologies in a futuristic suit for U.S. special operations forces has started soliciting technical designs to help deploy the first one as soon as next year. The aim of the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (Talos) is to give special ops fighters greater protection inside armor that can withstand bullets, all while downloading live video data from drones and other sources. The suit would have a powered exoskeleton that could help a soldier move quickly while carrying heavy weight. “It also would carry a built-in oxygen supply in case of poison gas, a cooling system to keep soldiers comfortable, and sensors to transmit the wearer’s vital signs back to headquarters,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

 

The suit won’t imitate the movies in one critical way, at least for many, many years: There will be no zooming around the globe at jet speeds. Flight is a fanciful, Herculean technical hurdle, and isn’t core to the suit’s primary goals. A more practical challenge shared with the fictional Tony Stark is perfecting the proper battery to power such a suit, given the perennial conflict between size and weight and the need to keep the suit flexible and not burdensome.

 

STORY: Businesses Bet on Iron Man-Like Exoskeletons

 

The project is being overseen by the U.S. Special Operations Command, based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Unlike a traditional defense contracting program, the Special Operations Command is gathering technologies required for the project and will itself integrate them into a final suit prototype. A second demonstration of various components for the suit is scheduled for Nov. 20, roughly four months after the initial session in Tampa. About 60 products have been submitted so far, although no funds have been allotted to any company, said Lieutenant Commander Li Cohen. The first fighters assigned to the suits will likely be on “kinetic missions,” she said, where there’s a high probability of combat and weapons fire.

 

The program is on track to have a “first-generation capability” by summer 2014, according to a video produced by the command. “I am very committed to this because I’d like that last operator that we lost to be the last one that we ever lose, in this fight or in the fight of the future,” Admiral William McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command, says in the video.

 

The program has attracted interest from dozens of mostly smaller firms, although Raytheon (RTN) is one of the larger Pentagon contractors that’s expressed interest in Talos and similar efforts. The company declined to comment because the work is competitive. One technology that Raytheon has been working on for several years is an exoskeleton system that would allow a soldier to move heavy weights.

 

VIDEO: Wearable Technology Focuses on Concussion Impact

 

Clark Gregg, the agent who plays Agent Phil Coulson in the Iron Man and Avengers movies and on the ABC (DIS) television show S.H.I.E.L.D., visited Raytheon’s research facility in Utah in 2010 to observe and test the exoskeleton. Raytheon posted a video on its YouTube channel. Consider it a teaser trailer of sorts.

 

VIDEO: Broadcom CEO Sees Growth in Wearable Technology

Bachman is an associate editor for Businessweek.com.

Para los adictos al Internet...(from Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

 

Tech

Digital Detox, a Tech-Free Retreat for Internet Addicts

By Claire Suddath                                                                                             October 31, 2013

 

Julia Test, a 28-year-old freelance photographer, can’t stop checking Facebook (FB). Her last relationship failed partly because she and her ex kept fighting over texts instead of talking things out in person. “It wasn’t a long-distance relationship or anything,” she says. “It’s just easier to say something mean in a text than watching someone’s face when you say it.” Jen McDowell, a director of entertainment at the travel company Olivia, says her bosses have told her she’s too tethered to her job. “I never took vacation,” she says. “Finally, they came to me and said, ‘We’ll have legal problems if you don’t take at least three days off. Please leave.’ ” A woman named Monika, who says only that she works for “a very large company in Redmond, Wash.,” also never takes vacation.

 

Unfortunately for her, her bosses are fine with that.

This isn’t a group therapy session. It’s Digital Detox, a three-day retreat at Shambhalah Ranch in Northern California for people who feel addicted to their gadgets. For 72 hours, the 11 participants, who’ve paid from $595 for a twin bed to $1,400 for a suite, eat vegan food, practice yoga, swim in a nearby creek, take long walks in the woods, and keep a journal about being offline. (Typewriters are available for anyone not used to longhand.) The ranch is two-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco, so most guests come from the Bay Area, although a few have flown in from Seattle and New York.

 

They’re here for a variety of reasons—bad breakups, career troubles—but there’s one thing everyone has in common: They’re driven to distraction by the Internet.

 

Isn’t everyone? Checking e-mail in the bathroom and sleeping with your cell phone by your bed are now considered normal. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007 only 58 percent of people used their phones to text; last year it was 80 percent. More than half of all cell phone users have smartphones, giving them Internet access all the time. As a result, the number of hours Americans spend collectively online has almost doubled since 2010, according to ComScore (SCOR), a digital analytics company. Teens and twentysomethings are the most wired. In 2011, Diana Rehling and Wendy Bjorklund, communications professors at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, surveyed their undergraduates and found that the average college student checks Facebook 20 times an hour.

 

GRAPHIC: We're All Addicted

 

Some are starting to rebel against this constant compulsion to connect. Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, an advocate of unplugging, self-corrects by instituting one technology-free day each week. “It’s the slowest day in the world,” she says. Shlain lectures frequently about the benefits of her “technology shabbats.” Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of Alone Together, which explores the way the Internet constrains offline relationships, has also observed this shift. “I don’t want to say it’s a movement just yet, but it does seem like a lot of people have gotten to the point with technology where common sense is starting to kick in,” she says. “We’ve finally realized that we have to start making healthier choices.”

 

That’s what happened to Digital Detox’s co-founder, Levi Felix. In 2009, Felix, now 29, was a vice president at a Los Angeles Internet startup, Causecast, working 80 hours a week and sleeping with his cell phone under his pillow. He was diagnosed with an esophageal tear that doctors told him was “related to too much stress, too much coffee, too much work, and too much Thai takeout.” So he and his girlfriend, Brooke Dean, quit their jobs and traveled the world for nine months, eventually landing at a communal farm in Cambodia. When they returned, they noticed their friends had grown even more attached to social media. “I couldn’t figure out why people were staring down at their phones all the time,” Felix says. He read Turkle’s Alone Together and came up with the idea of Digital Detox.

 

Felix and Dean hosted the first retreat in June 2012. Since then their venture has grown to a series of vacation-esque unplugging seminars in places such as Costa Rica and Cambodia. Earlier this year they hosted an adult summer camp where 300 professionals made lanyards and performed talent show routines. The program’s core remains small, 10- to 15-person retreats in the redwoods. Digital Detox feels kind of like a camping trip with some particularly touchy-feely California friends.

 

VIDEO: Finding a Retreat for a Digital Switch Off

 

Minus the pot. There’s not even alcohol or coffee, just some weak black tea to stave off caffeine headaches. When guests arrive, Felix takes their digital devices and stores them in paper bags, along with any watches and clocks. Shambhalah Ranch is surrounded by redwoods—at one point, participants actually hug a tree—but since cameras are gadgets, detoxers aren’t allowed to take pictures. When they want to remember an experience, they make a square with their thumbs and index fingers, bring it up to their eyes, and say, “Click!” They’re ordinarily forbidden from discussing ages or jobs (exceptions are made for nosy reporters). That way everyone from the recent college grad to the company executive will feel as if he’s among peers.

On the second day of Digital Detox, Anna Trautman, a quality-control lab assistant at Gordon Biersch Brewing, spends several hours sitting quietly by a lake contemplating whether she has the guts to quit her job and travel alone. “I’d never make the time to sit and think about this if I had my phone,” she says later that night. “I would’ve just spent hours looking at strangers’ photos on Instagram instead.” 

 

“It feels like the 1990s again!” says Laura Monfredini, 39, an in-house lawyer for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “Things were so much slower back then. I used to be able to read a whole book at a time. Now I can only do one or two chapters before I think, Oh, what’s on Facebook?” While Monfredini appreciates getting her attention span back, she’s not sure that reverting to a pre-Web lifestyle is better. The Internet makes our lives more convenient, she argues.

 

STORY: Put Down Your Smartphones and Enjoy the Show

 

She’s not the only one struggling to live without technology, even for just a few days. One attendee keeps feeling phantom cell phone vibrations. Another misses texting her best friend. Monika from Washington has the hardest time: She spends the weekend making a mental list of things she wants to Google when she gets back online. Still, she and everyone else say they end the weekend refreshed. “You know when a computer is on too long, and it starts overheating and making those whirring noises?” says Evan Kleiman, who works in business development and lives in Los Angeles. “I feel like my brain had been doing that. This weekend I finally managed to turn it off.”

 

On the last morning everyone discusses how long they think they’ll last before turning their phones back on. They wonder if being bombarded with three days of e-mail is really the best way to reenter the world. Kleiman says he feels as if he doesn’t even need his phone anymore, though he admits he won’t get rid of it. McDowell says she still won’t take any of her vacation days, but from now on she vows to go device-free every morning before work. (A month later, she confesses she hasn’t kept this promise.) “I know it’s not PC to say this here, but I miss my phone,” Monfredini says. When she leaves the ranch, the first thing she does is turn it back on.

VIDEO: Mobile Addiction: Becoming One With Our Phones

 

Suddath is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.