Ideas – Jay Collier

Education Technology and the Future of Academic Freedom

It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant… If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even…

Can a 20-Minute Test Tell Employers What a College Degree Cannot?

When it comes to hiring, many employers still lean toward graduates from name-brand institutions. Yet … too many graduates “don’t get a shot at the high-value jobs they should be getting,” says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education. “That’s a big deal in a liberal democracy.”… Companies and others spend $1…

Why Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education

“Many of the builders of technology today haven’t spent enough time thinking about the implications for the world.”

The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation

The authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades. “We felt it was really stunning, since we are underestimating the probability of automation,” said Johannes Moenius, the director of the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at…

A Skills Gap From College to Career Doesn’t Exist. It’s the Awareness Gap We Need to Fix.

Excerpt from EdSurge — April 2017 A popular narrative in the employment market today is that a “skills gap” exists between the abilities employers seek in candidates and the capabilities that new college graduates gain through postsecondary education. Beyond skills readily demonstrable from college curriculum (primarily cognitive skills and technical skills), employers complain about the lack…

Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace

People seek a holistic life: they want to work with intelligent people on exciting and rewarding projects where they can be creative and left alone to get the job done; values and purpose are as important as money; working for social good is an option; and they want to be a part of ‘the next…

Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)

From McKinsey Quarterly — July 2016 The hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that involve managing and developing people (9 percent automation potential) or that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work (18 percent). These activities, often characterized as knowledge work, can be as varied as coding software, creating…

Aligning the Organization for its Digital Future

Excerpt from the MIT Sloan Review — July 2016 Many companies are responding to an increasingly digital market environment by adding roles with a digital focus or changing traditional roles to have a digital orientation. The list of “digital” business roles and functions is extensive and growing. There are now digital strategists, chief digital officers,…

Star Spangled Geeks: The US Digital Service

he USDS has worked on thirteen major projects involving eleven agencies, and claims to have saved the government many times its $14 million budget. It has charters to place full-blown teams in seven different agencies, with more to come before the end of the year.

IDEXX CIO Ken Grady on Nontraditional Career Paths

Ken Grady has always been an animal lover. You can find him traveling across the country to visit farmers and their cows and chickens, or with veterinarians and the puppies, cats, guinea pigs, and all sorts of beloved pets in their care. But while his work involves caring for animals of all shapes and sizes, Grady…

How US Government Workers Collaborate Virtually

From 18F 18F is an office inside the General Services Administration that helps other federal agencies build, buy, and share efficient and easy-to-use digital services. We’re a team of technology experts that work with agencies to diagnose problems and then work alongside agency teams to find the right solutions. Headquartered at 18 and F streets…

Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers

Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…

These Will Be The Top Jobs In 2025 (And The Skills You’ll Need To Get Them)

It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued. Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow…

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science and Machine Learning

Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about. In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the…

Learning To Be A Data Scientist

Don’t Start with the Data. Do Start with a Good Question Don’t think one person can do it all. Do build a well-rounded team Don’t only use one tool. Do use the best tool for the job Don’t brag about the size of your data. Do collect relevant data Don’t ignore domain knowledge. Do consult…

Visualizations of Data about Maine

Through advanced data analytics and visualization, DataUSA tells stories about: places in America—towns, cities and states; occupations, from teachers to welders to web developers; industries — where they are thriving, where they are declining and their interconnectedness to each other; and education and skills, from where is the best place to live if you’re a…

Tips for Future Data Scientists

Be flexible and adaptable – There is no single tool or technique that always works best. Cleaning data is most of the work – Knowing where to find the right data, how to access the data, and how to properly format/standardize the data is a huge task. It usually takes more time than the actual analysis. Not…

The Minecraft Generation

Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked…

5 Skills and Tools Every Data Scientist Must Master

“Data Scientist” is the hottest job of 2016. According to Network World, the median base salary for a Data Scientist is $116,840. This fact shouldn’t be big news. In 2011, McKinsey predicted there would be a shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts “with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make…