Software developers at work

Agile has often had a bad reputation among top management. Its strange practices, its incomprehensible terminology and the eccentricity of some of its practitioners have been off-putting to senior leaders. IT was often treated as little more than a distraction from the serious business of running the company.

Then came the pandemic of 2020. IT was summoned from the basement to the executive suite on the twenty-fourth floor and was asked to help save the corporation. Suddenly individuals and organizations had to operate digitally and virtually as never before.

To managements surprise, many IT departments delivered. Workers went remote, and business models were reinvented on the fly. In some companies, Agile practices had laid the basis for pivoting in response to rapid shifts in signals.

Brick-and-mortar organizations and those that functioned as steep hierarchies often couldnt cope and had to close their doors with no real certainty as to when business as usual would return.

The only going option was agility, whether firms had foreseen this or not. It wasnt that they hadnt been told. In 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek had devoted a whole issue to explaining digital in words of one syllable. The lesson often fell on deaf ears.

A key reason for those firms successfully working virtually, as an article by computer science professor, Cal Newport noted, was that their firms deployed the unusually systematic approach to organizing their efforts known as Agile.

Agile principles include elaborate systems, punctuated by standup meetings and coding sprints, which help them track and assign tasks without overloading individuals or creating unnecessary interruptions or redundancies. Leveraging these systems, carefully organized teams of coders can operate smoothly without the informal productivity boosts that come from working in the same space. In effect, in these groups enable the staff to get agreed things done, rather than controlling, adjusting, interrupting, and meddling with the work. In effect, they obeyed the Three Laws of Agile.

The epitome of agility: Romania's Nadia Comaneci

Yet Newport concluded that Agile management was beyond the capability of many organizations. The extensive efforts required to accomplish this feat, of course, only help underscore the importance of offices for everyone else. In other words, for those not benefiting from Agile management, the physical office is a necessary second-best crutch to help firms get by. In effect, the challenge of working virtually is just one more area where the principles of bureaucracy cant cope.

Yet faced with imminent demise, many managements were able to make the change. Necessity is the mother of invention, and managements began to think the unthinkable and do the unimaginable. The pandemic made them grab at Agile practices as the only way forward. It remains to be seen what happens after the pandemic has passed: will they continue to embrace Agile practices and values or go back to normal and the beautiful seclusion of the twenty-fourth floor?

In some cases, the pandemic has accomplished some rethinking of corporate values. For instance, Best Buy chairman and CEO Hubert Joly has observed, All of us have to rewire ourselves for a new way of leading. Whats the purpose of work? What kind of obituary do we want to have? Whats our calling? For many years, we cut off our head from our heart and our soul.

Yet not all business leaders received the memo. In a comprehensive global survey of more than 4,000 managers and executives conducted by MIT Sloan, 72% of respondents strongly agreed that it was very important to them to work for an organization with a purpose they believe in, but only 49% strongly believed in their organizations purpose. Furthermore, only 36% of respondents strongly believed in their organizations ability to advance its purpose.

The report concludes that this purpose gap suggests that senior leaders may lack credibility when it comes to aligning their organizations around a shared vision. That lack of credibility could put their companies long-term competitiveness at risk.

Leaders need to understand and embrace the reality that effective digital transformation cant work without their own affective digital transformations.

And read also:

Explaining Agile

Why Digital Transformations Are Failing

The rest is here:

How The Pandemic Validated Agile; Only The Agile Survived - Forbes

Sarah Nyquist got her first introduction to biology during high school, when she took an online MIT course taught by genomics pioneer Eric Lander. Initially unsure what to expect, she quickly discovered biology to be her favorite subject. She began experimenting with anything she could find, beginning with an old PCR machine and some dining hall vegetables.

Nyquist entered college as a biology major but soon gravitated toward the more hands-on style of the coursework in her computer science classes. Even as a computer science major and a two-time summer intern at Google, biology was never far from Nyquists mind. Her favorite class was taught by a computational biology professor: It got me so excited to use computer science as a tool to interrogate biological questions, she recalls.

During her last two years as an undergraduate at Rice University, Nyquist also worked in a lab at Baylor College of Medicine, eventually co-authoring a paper with Eric Lander himself.

Nyquist is now a PhD candidate studying computational and systems biology. Her work is co-advised by professors Alex Shalek and Bonnie Berger and uses machine learning to understand single-cell genomic data. Since this technology can be applied to nearly any living material, Nyquist was left to choose her focus.

After shifting between potential thesis ideas, Nyquist finally settled on studying lactation, an important and overlooked topic in human development. She and postdoc Brittany Goods are currently part of the MIT Milk Study, the first longitudinal study to profile the cells in human breast milk using single cell genomic data. A lot of people dont realize theres actually live cells in breast milk. Our research is to see what the different cell types are and what they might be doing, Nyquist says.

While she started out at MIT studying infectious diseases, Nyquist now enjoys investigating basic science questions about the reproductive health of people assigned female at birth. Working on my dissertation has opened my eyes to this really important area of research. As a woman, Ive always noticed a lot is unknown about female reproductive health, she says. The idea that I can contribute to that knowledge is really exciting to me.

The complexities of milk

For her thesis, Nyquist and her team have sourced breast milk from over a dozen donors. These samples are provided immediately postpartum to around 40 weeks later, which provides insight into how breast milk changes over time. We took record of the many changing environmental factors, such as if the child had started day care, if the mother had started menstruating, or if the mother had started hormonal birth control, says Nyquist. Any of these co-factors could explain the compositional changes we witnessed.

Nyquist also hypothesized that discoveries about breast milk could be a proxy for studying breast tissue. Since breast tissue is necessary for lactation, researchers have been historically struggled to collect tissue samples. A lot is unknown about the cellular composition of human breast tissue during lactation, even though it produces an important early source of nutrition, she adds.

Overall, the team has found a lot of heterogeneity between donors, suggesting breast milk is more complicated than expected. They have witnessed that the cells in milk are composed primarily of a type of structural cells that increase in quantity over time. Her team hypothesized that this transformation could be due to the high turnover of breast epithelial tissue during breastfeeding. While the reasons are still unclear, their data add to the fields previous understandings.

Other aspects of their findings have validated some early discoveries about important immune cells in breast milk. We found a type of macrophage in human breast milk that other researchers have identified before in mouse breast tissue, says Nyquist. We were really excited that our results confirmed similar things they were seeing.

Applying her research to Covid-19

In addition to studying cells in breast milk, Nyquist has applied her skills to studying organ cells that can be infected by Covid-19. The study began early into the pandemic, when Nyquist and her lab mates realized they could explore their labs collective cellular data in a new way. We began looking to see if there were any cells that expressed genes that can be hijacked for cellular entry by the Covid-19 virus, she says. Sure enough, we found there are cells in nasal, lung, and gut tissues that are more susceptible to mediating viral entry.

Their results were published and communicated to the public at a rapid speed. To Nyquist, this was evidence for how collaboration and computational tools are essential at producing next generation biological research. I had never been on a project this fast-moving before we were able to produce figures in just two weeks. I think it was encouraging to the public to see that scientists are working on this so quickly, she says.

Outside of her own research, Nyquist enjoys mentoring and teaching other scientists. One of her favorite experiences was teaching coding at HSSP, a multiweekend program for middle and high schoolers, run by MIT students. The experience encouraged her to think of ways to make coding approachable to students of any background. It can be challenging to figure out whether to message it as easy or hard, because either can scare people away. I try to get people excited enough to where they can learn the basics and build confidence to dive in further, she says.

After graduation, Nyquist hopes to continue her love for mentoring by pursuing a career as a professor. She plans on deepening her research into uterine health, potentially by studying how different infectious diseases affect female reproductive tissues. Her goal is to provide greater insight about biological processes that have long been considered taboo.

Its crazy to me that we have so much more to learn about important topics like periods, breastfeeding, or menopause, says Nyquist. For example, we dont understand how some medications impact people differently during pregnancy. Some doctors tell pregnant people to go off their antidepressants, because they worry it might affect their baby. In reality, theres so much we dont actually know.

When I tell people that this is my career direction, they often say that its hard to get funding for female reproductive health research, since it only affects 50 percent of the population, she says.

I think I can convince them to change their minds.

View original post here:

Uncovering the mysteries of milk - MIT News

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In the Biden Administrations proposal to invest in the countrys infrastructure, $100 billion is carved out to address gaps in broadband access. According to the Federal Communications Commission, at least 19 million Americans remain without any access to broadband, and many more either cant afford it or have speeds below the 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload standard speeds set by the FCC, last changed in 2015.

Most affected by the coverage gap: rural areas across the country; tribal areas, where only half of households subscribe to broadband; and urban neighborhoods where the dominant barrier is cost or subpar service. Those affected are often low-income communities and people of color.

All of which has been made much more apparent since the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation and forced students and employees into remote instruction or work. What once might have appeared as a niche issue has gained urgency.

I think the pandemic has underscored the need for broadband in a way that is very popular, says Christopher Yoo, the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science, and director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition in the Carey School of Law. Theres been a general support for stimulus going back to the [2016] election, when both President Trump and [Hillary] Clinton supported infrastructure, and the needs for it have only increased since then. So, [the debate] is mostly about scale.

While negotiations on the broader infrastructure bill have been hot and cold for months, Yoo, who has served on the FCCs Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, is optimistic that a bill addressing broadband will eventually get passed, citing how the pandemic has moved along the debate. The timeliness has been profoundly felt in education and with the longstanding homework gap, a term that describes homework assignments that require broadband and are given to students who dont have accessoften, realistically, forcing those students into libraries or public parking lots.

Broadband has created what has long been known as the homework gap, and with the pandemic and the shift to virtual education, the gap became a chasm, says Yoo. The ability to access broadband became an outright barrier, and not just a matter of lower quality.

The problem of access, of course, extends beyond work and education to entertainment and social life, as has been demonstrated during the pandemic. Video streaming subscriptions increased by 32% in 2020, according to the Motion Picture Association. And social distancing has led to the so-called Zoom boom, in which the videoconferencing platform became popular among non-business users.

There was an era where you had to convince policymakers that broadband was an important political issue that needs addressed, and I dont think you need to address that anymore, Yoo adds. Its pretty self-evident.

Whats less self-evident, however, is how to solve the issueor even map out where it rears its head most.

Looking at internet access more broadly, an overwhelming majority of Americans do report using the internet. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in January and February found that only 7% of those surveyed do not use the internet, spread among those 65 and older and people with a lower household income or lower educational attainment. Where home broadband is lacking, mobile connections are often stand-ins. The Center further found that 85% of Americans now own a smartphone.

Aviv Nevo, a PIK professor with appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences economics department and the marketing department in the Wharton School, has been accumulating high-frequency residential broadband data from internet service providers. His team pores through the data to assess the value of broadband.

We can estimate using these data how much people value having broadband, and one thing we found was that consumers put a fair bit of weight on having fast, and most importantly reliable and consistent, internet service. Indeed, theres what economists would call large social returns to investment in internet, Nevo explains. Those returns are actually larger than the private returns a company would get on its investment.

That imbalance reinforces, he says, part of the problem: that ISPs are providing a service more socially beneficial than it is to the companies bottom line. What that means, practically speaking, is that ISPs on their own are unlikely to invest in the expansion of fiber wiring in places where population density is low and it is unlikely the ISP will receive enough of a return on infrastructure investmentespecially after accounting for the cost of operations.

In short: ISPs lack incentive to invest sufficiently in broadband infrastructure.

The problem in rural America is that consumers there value fast and reliable internet, but its costly to get it there, Nevo says. Getting fast internet to urban consumers is less costly, especially if youre taking a long-term view.

One solution, he proposes, is to target the laying of fiber to new construction and municipal projects already happening, to reduce costs.

But ultimately, he adds, the government might need to step in where supply is not meeting demand and internet access is inequitable. He describes it as akin to building roads.

In some sense, thats exactly what you can think of with broadband, Nevo says. Its the modern version of the interstate system built in the 50sthe way to facilitate commerce. The modern economy needs highways to connect just like the old economy.

But finding where, exactly, to do the digging and laying is still an obstacle. Data from the FCC is submitted by ISPs, which notoriously underestimate the scope of the problempotentially, for example, reporting highest speeds in a region rather than the average. It also doesnt paint a full picture of who lacks broadband service altogether.

The FCC recently launched an app that allows people to upload their broadband speeds, designed to help with the mapping effort. Yoo notes that the effort is flawed but any data is better than no data.

We need more information in about what people are getting for download speeds, but if were talking about coverage and where people are not getting service, by definition you cant do that with data generated by an app accessible only to people already getting service, Yoo says. And, in fact, most of the information on availability is done by subscribership, but subscribers, but whether someone subscribes depends on not just whether the service is available but the cost, ownership of an appropriate device, the digital literacy to engage with it, and whether they perceive they need it.

Some communities have taken matters into their own hands.

Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication, and core faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies, who studies digital culture, is part of Philly Community Wireless (PCW), a local activist group focused on developing what are known as mesh networks for communities with internet service that is unreliable or too expensive.

The concept recently made headlines when Amazon announced it would turn on mesh networkingostensibly to connect smart home devicesthrough existing Ring and Echo products, but thats hardly the first use of the technology. A mesh network is, at its core, a DIY network in which a single internet connection is set up that is tethered to nodes that communicate with one another to deliver a boosted sphere of low bandwidth, but functional, internet. Locally, these nodes are installed on rooftops, and PCW is also installing nodes in public parks and on commercial properties. They partner with a single ISP for service support.

Mesh is an opportunity for activist groups and groups historically left out of internet access to be able to get online and have more control over online networks, Lingel explains. They also, she adds, give users more control over price and privacy and empower people to learn more about how the internet actually worksa form of digital literacy.

Broadband expansion, she says, is a focus on how people get online more than it is whether they can get there, citing the penetration rates through smartphone access. Those still in need are often communities who need to connect through their laptop for work or school. Locally, Comcast has attempted to address this problem during the pandemic with the Internet Essentials Program, offering free or discounted connections for those who qualify. And, more broadly, Microsoft has invested in what its dubbed an Airband solution that uses the unlicensed TV wireless spectrumaka, TV channels no longer in useto deliver WiFi to rural areas and, recently, eight cities as well.

But these are all piecemeal solutions, and the mesh network approach, Lingel emphasizes, is one for basic needs, but not ideal for anyone who needs to stream. It points to the larger problem.

It is ridiculous that in a country as wealthy as we are, that is the birthplace of so many technology companies and products, that we dont have higher rates of broadband access and that people pay as much as they do, Lingel says. And really, the solution would be to go back to a moment when internet access was less privatized.

One suggestion, she says, is to take advantage of dark fiber. This refers to optic fiber cables laid in excess during the dot-com boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. These are fibers that have simply gone unlit. Lingel says municipalities could use eminent domain to offer community-led broadband services. Because these wires were mostly laid in areas that already have broadband access, this would target access by way of reducing costs.

However, Yoo notes that private ISPs still might make the most sense for broadband. He says that internet technology has proven to be more entrepreneurial than some other forms of infrastructure, like electricity. In the past, he says, the U.S. Postal Service, during World War I, took over the telephone system for one year, but uncertainty around changing phone technology risked making the Postal Service behave like it was investing in risk capital.

When you have a private venture, you get shareholders and if its risky and turns out great, they do very well, he says. If it turns out badly, they say Sorry, and the investor eats their losses. Government tax money doesnt function that way; its not set up for thinking about entrepreneurial investments.

New technology is on the horizonif its not already here. 5G speeds can rival that of WiFi and, at least, improve the quality of existing access to the internet as the network expands and 5G-enabled phones become standard.

In the broadband space, SpaceXs Starlink satellites have the potential to provide low-cost internet in spaces difficult to reach through wiring. Past iterations of satellite internet have faced obstacles of low latency, but these have also been higher-orbit satellites as opposed to Starlink satellites that are lower orbit and have quicker response times. This could, potentially, allow for a sort of patchwork version of universal broadband in which a mountainous region might rely on satellite broadband, while urban and suburban areas use optical fibers.

But, Yoo says, thats a rosy scenario and there are still hurdles to jump.

I think when veteran observers hear about a new satellite broadband system, they feel like theyve seen this movie before, he says, citing a previous venture by Google and others that fell short of its goal. And thats born from past failures rather than anything about the current attempt.

Any approach to broadband, he ultimately thinks, will need to acknowledge the evolutionary nature of broadband technology.

Broadband has created what has long been known as the homework gap, and with the shift to virtual education, the gap became a chasm. The ability to access broadband became an outright barrier, and not just a matter of lower quality. Christopher Yoo, John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science

I hope that any infrastructure package is technology-neutral, Yoo says. Some past approaches have fallen in love with one particular technology. The reality is that there are times when wireless makes more sense than fixed line, and satellite makes more sense than either of those. Favoring particular technologies has limited flexibility.

I think in a geographically diverse world, theres no one technology that will solve all problems.

Already, people who need internet have turned to the alternative internet source that lives in their pockets. Julia Ticona, an assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, studies digital work and is finishing a book that compares low- and high-wage earners that conduct what she describes as precarious, contingent work, using digital technology in similar ways to find and maintain work. Among low-wage workers, she describes scenarios of people not qualifying for programs that would give them assistance to pay for internet, a constant shopping around for better deals, and instances of running out of data or being connected for inconsistent periods of time.

In terms of social inequality and home broadband, its not that we have haves and have-nots, necessarily, Ticona says. Were not looking anymore at people on one side of a digital divide whove never had internet accessthough that does exist and is just a smaller portion of the population. More often, its people who have unstable access, people who pay way too much for internet access or have bad options for how to get it.

The reality is that people with unstable connections are Latinx, Black, and other racial minority groups. Those populations are also more likely to have jobs that make them more mobile and transient; given the choice, theyre likely to maintain a phone plan. But not because they dont also need home broadband.

Its exciting that the Biden Administration is paying attention to these issues, but the concern is, especially with politics and doing it quickly, that it will just be this massive investment in a system that hasnt really worked the way it is and has reinforced a lot of inequality that existed before, Ticona says. Thats the concernthat there will be all this investment and money going into a much-needed area and will make it better for some people and a lot worse for others. And thats why its important to think these things through.

Any new broadband expansion proposal will need to carefully balance resources spent looking to the future versus learning from the past. Yoo points out that broadband expansion was previously funded in the 2009 stimulus bill, supported with $7.2 billion in grants and loans. But because it was meant to be a fast-acting injection of stimulus into the economy, he says the money was spent before enough analysis was done to determine where it was needed.

Needless to say, that was backwards, Yoo says. Moreover, there was not a lot of funding to hold the companies that received the money accountable [and ask] Did they deliver service? Did they do it cost-effectively? In a timely manner?

New funding, he says, should learn from these mistakes. Yoo notes, however, that the FCC has recently reexamined how it reports broadband data, relying less on providers for this information. University-based researchers have also been collecting data, he says, though its not always representative of the whole population, as it tends to engage with people who are more tech-savvy than is the average.

I think were all better off with better data, he adds.

And yet, technology will keep evolving regardless of broadband progress. To use just education as an example, Ryan Baker, an associate professor of education and computer science in the Graduate School of Education, says that adaptive learning platforms, which enable students to complete homework online and receive instant feedback, are becoming increasingly adopted. While some can be used with low bandwidth, others incorporate video or other rich interactive elements that require a higher-quality connection.

That means that you have a certain proportion of students who cant access the same things their classmates can, and a certain proportion of teachers who cant assign what they want to because of bandwidth limitations, Baker says. There are equity issues around that.

He also adds that snow days will likely become a thing of the past, as the pandemic has served as a sort of proof of concept for remote learning. Virtual learning during these days will be expected.

How the FCC prioritizes broadband moving forward is still an unknown. At present, the five-person commission consists of two Democrats and two Republicans, with one open seat that will require an appointment by President Joe Biden. Jessica Rosenworcel is the current acting FCC chair, hamstringing any work that would mean bold new changes. But, Yoo explains, there is longstanding bipartisan support for reform, spanning back to the Clinton Administration.

This has been a 20-year effort to improve how we do things, he says. And I think that is likely to continue.

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The multilayered challenges of broadband expansion | Penn Today - Penn Today