CalMatters asks the tough questions: CalMatters.org ran a remarkably comprehensive package of stories this week dealing with the fallout from PG&E’s recent (and widely reviled) Public Safety Power Shutoffs. Among the questions addressed:
- Why don’t we bury all the powerlines?
- Why don’t we move to microgrids?
- Why don’t we force utilities to better target blackouts?
- Why don’t we beef up California’s alert system?
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Can tech sniff out fake news? The University of California IT Blog (UCIT Blog) examines whether — and how — technology can help a reader determine the veracity of a news article through the use of natural language processing. NLP, as it’s known, is a component of chatbots, personal home assistants, telephony and other technologies. The UCIT post (a reprint of a piece that first ran on a different UC site) reports that UC Santa Barbara computer scientist William Wang has a three-year project, “Dynamo: Dynamic Multichannel Modeling of Misinformation,” that can make sense of the morass of online information that might be real, might be fake, and might be a little of both. And what then? Wang answers: “The question is, given a post, how would you be able to understand whether this is specifically misleading or if this is a genuine post, and, given the structure of the network, can you identify the spread of misinformation and how it is going to be different compared to standard or nonstandard articles?” Wang’s team, together with computer science Ph.D. student Jiawei Wu, developed a method called “reinforced co-training,” which employs an efficient system of labeling a few hundred articles that are then used to train a machine-learning classifier to label what it thinks may be clickbait in an enormous, million-story data set.
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Fireside chat about ... fires: California’s wildfires, climate change and energy policy — and potential short- and long-term solutions — are the topic next week when former Assemblymember Lloyd Levine appears at Wonk Wednesday in Sacramento. The Nov. 20 event — dubbed a “fireside chat” — is one of a series of monthly Wednesday gatherings that draw “policy wonks, planners of all shades, developers, urban designers and concerned citizens; leaders and followers alike to join an ongoing conversation about smart growth, urban planning, and climate change,” according to the host venue, New Helvetia Brewing Co. “People will agree, people will disagree, bonds will form, feelings will get hurt, and hopefully we will emerge with a slightly better understanding of the problems we collectively face,” the promoting venue says in its announcement.
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Who makes the most in IT? A website focusing on career data wondered which IT professional positions pay the most. As reported in USA Today, the website Comparably surveyed over 12,000 employees in top-level positions, and produced a list of 10 highest-paying ones, with salaries all over $150,000. Among the considerations were gender. “Comparably’s findings indicate that men make up to $16,000 more than women who share the same title,” the story says. “Women, however, were shown to make more than men in upper-level jobs in engineering departments, such as director and vice president.” The research factored in geography, too: “It also pays to be on the West Coast. Of the 10 jobs on Comparably’s list, seven of them reported the highest salaries in San Francisco and Seattle. The 10 best-paying jobs, according to Comparably:
1. VP, Sales — $300,724;
2. VP, Marketing — $219,985;
3. VP, Engineering — $215,906;
4. VP, Business Development — $204,345;
5. VP, Operations — $196,623;
6. Director, Engineering — $182,881;
7. Director, Product — $176,423;
8. Director, Finance — $159,600;
9. Director, Security — $158,905;
10. Principal Engineer — $157,036.
