Month: September 2016

SAN FRANCISCO — LinkedIn finally pulled the Lynda.com library of more than 9,000 online training courses into its main service and gave the content the prominence it’s been lacking. The move comes nearly 18 months ago after the social network acquired the training site for $1.5 billion. LinkedIn Learning is now available to all of LinkedIn’s premium subscribers. The company also plans to make the service available to enterprises, so they can give their employees access to a variety of courses and training materials.

“The dream is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner during a press event at the company’s new San Francisco offices. “The idea that you can acquire skills once and have a job for life, those days are over.”LinkedIn Learning is one of a few new offerings designed to create more value for LinkedIn’s users, he said.

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In the world of medical device security, success comes down to having the capability to fail gracefully.

This is not as oxymoronic as it might seem, Kevin Fu told an audience at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday. What is more important than bulletproof security, he said, is the ability to contain or “localize” breaches or infections so they don’t disrupt the continuity of operations.

Fu, CEO and cofounder of Virta Laboratories. whose opening keynote was titled, “Your Fly is Down: Managing Medical Device Security Risk,” was just one of multiple experts who said the security of those devices could be drastically improved just by practicing basic security hygiene.

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“Speak to Lana, she saw something like that last year,” or “Ask Louis to do it, he’s seen that a million times.” We’ve all heard similar phrases within business — phrases that are uttered when something unusual happens, linking people together to help them get more experience in order to solve the challenge of those unusual circumstances. Imagine an 18-year-old being thrown directly into Major League Baseball, facing the best pitcher in the league: Everything that he is about to see is unusual, and the odds of failing are massive. The unusual is what trips us up and can cause us to fail.

While some folks still talk about the three V’s — velocity, variety and volume — with regard to big data, I think we are well beyond worrying about what makes data big. Instead the focus is “Why bother with big data?” For me, it comes down to a very simple statement:

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Developing a computer that can be as decisive and intelligent as humans is on IBM’s mind, and it’s making progress toward achieving that goal.

IBM’s computer chip called TrueNorth is designed to emulate the functions of a human brain. The company is now running tests and benchmarking TrueNorth to demonstrate how fast and power efficient the chips can be compared to today’s computers.

The results of the head-to-head contest are impressive. IBM says TrueNorth can engage in deep learning and make decisions based on associations and probabilities, much like human brains. It can do so while consuming a fraction of the power used by chips in other computers for the same purpose.

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