We come across a lot of stories every week that aren't exactly in the Techwire wheelhouse, but which we find interesting or funny or odd and worth mentioning. Here's our latest crop:
More state job openings, fewer applicants: The number of state government job postings across the U.S. rose 11 percent from 2013 to 2017, but the number of applicants for those jobs dropped by 24 percent, according to a study.
“The chief administrative officers who were surveyed blame this workforce dilemma on several issues: 85 percent said states can't offer salaries that are competitive with the private sector; 55 percent said there's a negative public perception about working for the government; and a third cited the lack of recruitment tools at their disposal as one of the biggest barriers to hiring,” says an article in Governing magazine, a sister publication of Techwire and Government Technology.
Using software to find hardware: When it’s final exam time at UC San Diego, the Geisel Library is one of the hot spots on campus among scholars who want to study up, because that’s where the most available computers and workspaces are found. To ease the students’ increasingly stressful quest for a place to study, the IT folks were called in.
The UC IT Blog picks up the narrative: “Since August 2017, the UC San Diego Library had been beta testing a program called Waitz that installed occupancy sensors on each floor. Waitz sensors are unique in that they provide occupancy estimates by measuring mobile device signals (similar to bluetooth/wi-fi beacons). This information was put on the library’s homepage to try to drive student traffic to less occupied areas for study space. However, the Waitz data didn’t help with the availability of actual workstations, and we knew this was a common frustration for students. …” You can read the rest of the story online.
Advice to CIOs — Nail the basics first: Rock Regan, former state CIO for Connecticut and a former president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, says that with limits on one’s time and with expanding technological demands, any state CIO should follow these seven steps. Regan, who's now in the private sector, says: "The next generation of new CIOs must demonstrate these abilities if they are to succeed in this hugely important role."
Is this Dante’s Eleventh Circle? You work for a tech giant in Silicon Valley, or maybe San Francisco. Your job brings in six figures but it comes at a cost. This is the premise for a short, entertaining blog post on Medium.com: "What It's Like to Work for a Tech Giant."
“An email arrives,” it says. “It’s from HR. The email reminds you that there’s an optional training session after work tomorrow from which your absence would look strange. It’s about mental health in the tech industry. Your email application, whatever it is, automatically adds a reminder to your calendar. Your phone vibrates to confirm that it has received this reminder.”
The buzz on blockchain: “At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Dubai show, Oracle showed a demonstration of how natural honey can be verified by blockchain,” begins a blog post on the company’s site. “You may wonder, ‘Well, why would anyone need honey verified by blockchain?’ You may be surprised to learn that honey is one of the most frequently impure or mislabeled foods.”
So the company has developed a solution with help from the World Bee Project Hive Network. The technology helps identity which beehives have been harvested. That data is pulled into an Oracle blockchain platform. And the rest is pure science.
Reading List: State Jobs, Study Space, and Honey and Blockchain
In our search for tech news, we comb through hundreds of stories a week. For most, we swipe left, but others are worth a second, longer look. Here's that reading list.
