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In 1994, Dan Pallotta founded AIDSRide — a series of fundraising bike tours that raised $108 million for HIV/AIDS research and services within the space of eight years. Later, his Breast Cancer 3-Day walks raised $194 million in an even shorter period of time. Both had their best years ever in 2002. But then, after a spate of bad press criticizing the management of the organization, both were shuttered.

Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong“350 employees lost their jobs because they were labeled overhead,” says Palotta in today’s talk, given at TED2013. “This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality.”

This wasn’t just a problem for the newly unemployed or Pallotta’s wounded sense of pride. As he explains in this talk, the real issue is that everything we have been taught to think about charity is wrong. In particular, the single yardstick generally used to measure the worthiness of a charity – how much money goes directly toward the people it seeks to help and how much is used to cover overhead — is dangerously unhelpful. According to this thinking, the “best” charities are the ones with the lowest overhead. In fact, that focus may actually be preventing charities from making a real impact.

“The things we’ve been taught to think about giving and charity and the non-profit sector are actually undermining the causes we love … Our social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them — and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny,” says Pallotta, the author of the book Uncharitable. “We have two rulebooks—one for the non-profit sector and one for the rest of the economic world. It’s an apartheid.”

It’s time to change the way we think about giving to charity, says Pallotta. “Don’t ask about the size of their overhead,” he urges. “Ask about the size of their dreams.”

Curious to hear more on this new way of evaluating nonprofits, we asked Pallotta to share his thoughts on how to find a charity to support and what questions to ask along the way. Here’s what he had to say:

I want people to consider themselves a philanthropist no matter how much or how little they are giving. Even if you are giving $25, you are still a philanthropist. I advise people to figure out what cause they want to have an impact on, and take time doing research to find out the organization they feel is doing the best work on that problem. Then, make them your charitable partner for life. Continue to follow their progress, continue to learn about them, and continue to invest in them. You make a lot of inquiries before you buy a car or before you cast your vote for president – do the same thing before you cast your vote for a charity with your contribution.

1) How do I find the right charity for me?

Start with a broad search and narrow it from there. You can use websites like GreatNonprofits.org, Philanthropedia and GiveWell.org. They each have flaws. I say—use them, but don’t rely on them.

Then, do in-person interviews with your top two or three. Call the charity and ask for a tour or overview meeting. That’s why charities have development departments — to nurture and build relationships with donors. If you are going to make a long-term commitment to an organization, even if the money isn’t huge, you owe it to yourself to do this kind of research in the same way you would go to a dealership to test-drive a car.

I also recommend looking at a charity’s annual report. Does it inspire you? Does it seem to have a sense of mission, bravery, boldness — or is it cautious and formulaic? Check out Invisible Children, Share our Strength, and Charity Water to see examples of organizations that are inspiring, right down to their materials. Though in general, don’t just rely on a website.

2) Ask: what progress is the charity making toward its goals—and what metrics does it use to measure that?

Ask the charity to provide you with program data that tracks their activities — and ask how they measure their own progress. This question may be the most important of all — it really gets at what data they collect, how serious they are about that data collection, and how they shift behavior or strategy based on what the data is telling them.

But note, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the organization is effective. Some problems can be extremely difficult to solve, and you don’t want to punish the charities working on those problems — otherwise we’ll only get charities working on easy problems. Think about if you had asked Jonas Salk how effective he was one year before he found the cure for polio. He would not have been very effective at that point, but that doesn’t mean you would not have wanted to invest in him.

Bringing cold, hard business sense to running charities can help transform the philanthropic landscape for all and for the better, says Pallotta. “Overall, for each charity I give to, I ask myself if I believe in their business model and if I feel they have a bold future ahead of them,” he says.

A group of European researchers has released the first version of a cloud computing platform for robots that will help them take advantage of powerful virtual resources. Essentially, they’re treating robots like any other device — desktop, tablet or mobile phone — running web applications, only robots can learn from each other and can do a lot more than just update screen displays.

The project, carried out by a team at ETH Zurich, is called RoboEarth and its linchpin is a cloud software platform called Rapyuta. The way it works is pretty simple at a high level: robots communicate with a cloud-based application platform that carries out computation tasks and connects to a cloud database full of information such as maps, images, language, as well as to other web services. The robots themselves are pretty much hardware terminals equipped with sensors and moving parts but limited on-board processing power or data storage.

This, of course, is an idea that has been with us since the mainframe computer and continues today via cloud computing and web and mobile applications. Why limit a device to its own physical capabilities when there’s an infinite (although, in the case of mainframes, not so much) expanse of computing power, memory, storage and data available in the ether? As long as the device has a strong internet connection, it doesn’t need a massive hard drive or the latest, greatest processor.

One thing RoboEarth does a little differently, though, is allow for databases that robots can update as they go about their business in different situations in different parts of the world. It’s machine learning, only in a much more literal sense: robots are actually learn from the experiences of other robots. That learning, in turn, should make them more useful to humans who won’t have to program them as thoroughly and perhaps can use the robots to perform a wider — and ever-expanding — variety of tasks.

Presumably, though, some statistical machine learning on the backend could make the robots even smarter as they generate more and more data and patterns begin taking shape. (We’ll be talking about unique ways to put machine learning to work at our Structure: Data conference next week in New York.)

The easy joke to make about this type of project is to say it’s the start of SkyNet and the rise of the machines, but that’s a bit of a stretch. After all, the machines themselves aren’t communicating with one another but, rather, with a centralized computing infrastructure operated by humans. It’s similar to IBM’s Watson system, which is really good at answering questions, but only as good as its information database and algorithms allow it to be.

If you’re curious to learn more about the promise and limitations of something like RoboEarth, Markus Waibel, one of the project’s researchers, has a great blog post explaining his vision of the project and where it fits into the greater ecosystem of web-based robotics.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Bruce Rolff.

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Netflix unveiled its Global Speed Index website Monday, aggregating performance results from its 33 million worldwide subscribers in one place, and allowing users to see which ISP offers the best Netflix performance in their country.

And guess which country is leading the charge, offering its citizens some of the fastest Netflix speeds? That’s right, the United States. However, U.S. broadband only came in first because of Google Fiber, whose very few actual customers saw an average Netflix speed of 3.35 Mbps in February. Second in is the U.K., where Virgin customers averaged 2.37 Mbps during the same month. At the bottom of the list is Mexico, where the fastest ISP averaged at 2.10 Mbps.

How U.S. ISPS are performing for Netflix viewing.

Of course, these speeds are far below what most ISPs advertise for their services, but the averages include lower-bitrate SD fare, network slowdowns due to poor Wifi performance and all kinds of other factors. Or, as Netflix puts it:

“The average is well below the peak performance due to many factors including home Wi-Fi, the variety of devices our members use, and the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry. Those factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs, so these relative rankings are a good indicator of the consistent performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.”

Still, the site is an interesting tool to compare broadband speeds both within the countries in which Netflix is active as well as between those markets — and for the company, it’s another way to nudge ISPs toward signing up for Netflix’s own CDN.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Sashkin.

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If unadulterated bandwidth is what you’re looking for in 4G phone, then AT&T is your best bet for a mobile provider, according to a network tests conducted by RootMetrics. AT&T continued to put distance between itself and Verizon Wireless in LTE performance, clocking average speeds of 18.6 Mbps on the downlink and 9 Mbps on the uplink.

Verizon averaged 14.3 Mbps down and 8.5 Mbps up, according to Root’s new report, but what it lacked in raw speed, Verizon made up for in coverage. Of the 77 markets in which Root performed its own measurements, Verizon had an LTE network up in every one. Meanwhile AT&T’s 4G service was present in only 47 of the 77 at the time Root performed its tests last year. These maps, compiled from Root’s crowdsourced data, show just how far Verizon’s LTE network reaches compared to AT&T and Sprint:

What’s more, Verizon’s coverage within its LTE footprint was much more consistent. When in a Verizon LTE market Root testers found themselves connected to a Verizon LTE signal 93.2 percent of the time, while for AT&T the number was 81.7 percent. We’ve started to see that trend in Root’s city-specific reports: Big Red is reaching further into the suburban and exurban regions of its launch markets than Ma Bell.

But AT&T was quick to point that it has added many more cities since Root compiled its data (Root measured different markets at different times in the second half of 2012). Of the 30 cities where Root found no LTE network, AT&T has since launched networks in 26 of them, AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom said.

Root’s most recent results for New York City, where AT&T boasts the fastest LTE connections.

Sprint only started its LTE rollout last summer so it’s still far behind AT&T and Verizon. Root’s staggered testing regime found LTE networks in only five of the 77 markets measured last year and in even in those five markets it caught an LTE signal only half the time. When Root did find LTE, Sprint averaged 10.3 Mbps down and 4.4 Mbps up. Sprint’s speeds are generally lower because it is using half the spectrum for LTE that AT&T and Verizon are tapping for their rollouts.

T-Mobile won’t launch LTE until later next year, but Root did measure its HSPA+ network performance. T-Mobile averaged 7.3 Mbps on the downlink and 1.5 Mbps on the uplink.

RootMetrics uses both crowdsourced data — drawn from smartphones loaded with its CoverageMap iPhone and Android apps — and professional testing conducted both in vehicles and indoors (For a detailed look at Root’s methodology, check out our video of a recent Root test in Chicago). Root is also working with GigaOM this week at SXSW in Austin to measure the impact that a large conference of mobile savvy users has on city’s mobile data networks.

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Why don’t more project managers sound an alarm when they’re going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when they’ll finish the job. They don’t even think it’s possible to know. Too many variables. Too much that’s out of their control.

That’s the dirty little secret of project management. As the lead developer on one big software project put it: “Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it’s done.”

It’s funny, though. Big, successful companies that manage huge projects like highways and dams and office parks have to deal with many more variables than a software development team. Yet they usually know how far along they are at any given time, and they keep their customers in the loop. That’s how they get to be big, successful companies.

Granted, they have fancy project management software to help them stay on top of the schedule. But a good project management system — one that can tell you exactly where you are in the project, when it’s likely to be done, and by how much you will overshoot or undershoot your budget — doesn’t need expensive software. At Setpoint, which builds roller coasters and factory automation systems, we used to manage multimillion-dollar projects with a whiteboard and a calculator.

The fact is, your system can be very simple as long as it helps you do the following:

Track key variables. Keep a close eye not just on milestones but also on factors that have an impact on profitability. The biggest variable to watch? Labor hours compared with budget, which gives you a pretty good idea of your percent complete at any given time. You’ll also want to track materials costs, change orders, and your subcontractors’ progress. Trouble in any of those areas can throw a project out of whack quickly, so it’s important to track them on a weekly basis.

Keep your team informed. We recommend regular weekly meetings, with the key numbers posted on a whiteboard or computer desktops so that everybody can see them. With the numbers up there, potential trouble spots surface quickly. A few years ago, we learned that one of our project managers started surreptitiously building extra time into the schedule. If we had let that continue, it would have messed up our profit projections for his projects. Team members brought the issue to our attention after the first weekly meeting — they could see that the numbers on the board didn’t square with the agreed-upon timetable.

Update your stakeholders and customers. All customers want their jobs finished on time and on budget — or preferably faster and cheaper. But if they can’t have that, and sometimes they can’t, what they really want is to be kept informed along the way. (Ditto for senior managers — they don’t like surprises, either.) Share bad news as well as good so they’re never outraged by enormous last-minute changes.

Here’s an example: Setpoint was building a small coaster for a major amusement park company. This was just one piece of a major park upgrade with a very aggressive schedule and dozens of contractors in the mix. As we got deep into our project, we ran into several issues — big (and unanticipated) coordination snags on the jobsite, changes in the specs for riders per hour, and others. We knew these issues would delay the final product by six weeks. So we immediately notified the customer and adjusted our delivery dates months ahead of time.

By the end of the project, we were behind by those six weeks. But because we had kept the customer in the loop every step of the way, we were on time as far as he was concerned. We even got an award at the end for on-time performance. The moral we took away from this? If your customer doesn’t think you’re late, then you’re not late. If you need to change the schedule, do it as early as possible and give your customer an immediate heads-up so he can adjust his expectations.

We’re not saying project management is easy. But if you have a good system, you can keep track of the difficulties and keep your customer informed and happy — even if you’re six weeks late.

This is the first post in the authors’ blog series on project management. The series draws on advice from their book Project Management for Profit.

Amid rising concern about the long-term effects of concussions, GE and the National Football League on Monday unveiled a $40 million research initiative and $20 million “open innovation challenge” aimed at improving the diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injuries.

About a month ago, in the midst of all the Super Bowl hoopla, the organizations said they would take on the issue.  But at a New York event today, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt and GE healthymagination CEO Sue Siegel will share the details.

The announcement comes on the heels of an football season full of concussion-centric headlines – the league is mired in litigation related to concussions, studies continue to connect long-term brain damage to contact sports and more companies are trying to build concussion-monitoring and -mitigating helmets.

The NFL no doubt hopes the new initiatives can help boost its reputation. But Siegel, a leading health investor who left Mohr Davidow Ventures last year to lead GE’s healthymagination division, said the research should have wide-ranging impacts. GE already has a big footprint in diagnostic and medical imaging equipment, but the field offers even more opportunity.

“What a lot of people don’t know is that [traumatic brain injury] is not specific to football,” said Siegel. “It’s a rich area for study so we can understand what it means, be able to prevent it better, be able to diagnose it in a more granular way and monitor people to help with their treatment therapies over time.”

Not only could the research contribute to applications for other athletics, like women’s soccer, race car driving and equestrian sports, it could have implications for the military and even public health efforts in emerging markets, like parts of Africa, where road accidents are a leading cause of death, Siegel said.

The four-year $40 million dollar research initiative aims to evaluate and develop next-gen imaging technologies to improve diagnosis, outcome prediction and therapy management for those with mild traumatic brain injury. The project’s advisory board includes top neurosurgeons, sports medicine leaders and brain researchers.

The $20 million open innovation challenge, which is also supported by Under Armour, focuses on technologies for identifying and managing brain injury as well as new materials that protect against and track brain injury. Siegel said the challenge is open to innovators in all fields and that previous similar challenges targeting cancer and energy efficiency attracted about 500 submissions.

As more attention turns to concussions and brain injuries, GE and sports leagues aren’t the only parties interested in developing technology to address them. In the last couple of months, startups like Brain Sentry and X2 Biosystems, which use sensors to monitor head impact, have attracted funding from investors.

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It was pretty much a given that the Copyright Alert System, better known as “Six Strikes,” would increase the use of VPNs or proxies in the U.S. Still, it’s nice to confirm our assumptions, and a report released today does just that.

TorrentFreak reports that interest in VPNs and proxies have increased dramatically over the last month as more people are now searching for ways to protect their BitTorrent transfers from the ever watchful, and quick to judge, eyes of the Internet police.

The interest was judged on a selection of Google Search trends that reveal searches for terms like “BitTorrent Proxy,” “BitTorrent VPN,” and “VPN torrent” have all increased over the last few months. The biggest spike came at the end of February/beginning of March when the CAS went live, and mainstream media started reporting on it.

Of coure, these trends are only indicative of people looking for information. Are the actual VPN providers seeing an increased interest in their products? Speaking to TorrentFreak, BeeVPN says that they have seen an increase in interest and are even starting to incorporate “six strikes” into their marketing campaigns.

Like I said at the start, it was a given that VPNs would see a surge in popularity when the Copyright Alert System went live. What’s going to prove interesting is how the CCI responds to people trying to circumvent the system.

The BlackBerry faithful got some good news today, learning that AT&T will open business for pre-orders tomorrow, March 12th. Rumor has it that the wait time will be just 10 days, with devices hitting AT&T stores, and presumably pre-order customers’ mailboxes, on March 22nd. T-Mobile opened up pre-orders for business customers today, and Verizon should start its campaign any day now. Yet there is one big question remaining for BlackBerry at these carriers.

Competition is stiff in the mobile space, not only on handset quality but also on price. In many cases carriers race for the best subsidy. The one that shaves the largest amount off the retail price often wins the most customers. It would make sense, then, for these carriers to price the BlackBerry Z10 lower than its biggest competitors. Yet that appears to not be the case. In this morning’s FierceWireless article, Phil Goldstein notes prices of $199.99 and AT&T and Verizon, and a whopping $249.99 at T-Mobile.

At Verizon and AT&T, the pricing seems quite out of line. Customers walking into either of their stores will see the Z10, an unfamiliar phone from a tarnished brand, priced at the same level as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III. With the hype surrounding those phones, it’s hard to see a justification for spending the same amount of money on the ostensibly lesser phone.

We learned recently that the BlackBerry Z10 is selling fairly well abroad. Furthermore, it is realizing a lot of defectors from other platforms. That seemed unlikely to occur in the U.S. People here seem pretty set with their operating systems. Perhaps some would consider the BlackBerry if priced even $50 below the major competitors. But at the same price point it’s unlikely that they win many converts.

That’s not to say that the BlackBerry Z10 will do poorly overall. The sense I get is that the BlackBerry faithful is excited about this device. Most plan to get either it or the Q10, which will hit carriers in a month or two. So in terms of retaining existing customers, they’ll do fine. That would have been a much more attractive proposition even two years ago, but today it’s much less exciting. The new BlackBerry line could be less attractive still after Samsung announces the Galaxy S IV this week.

The post AT&T Starting BlackBerry Z10 Pre-Orders, But Is The Price Right? appeared first on MobileMoo.

Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell is the latest public figure to lose control of their social media account.

Earlier this morning, Powell’s Facebook page was commandeered by an unknown hacker, who began to fill the page with anti-George W. Bush posts.

“BUSH IS WALKING IN HIS ROOM WITH A KUKLUXKLAN HAT ON HIS TARDED HEAD,” read one post.

“YOU ARE SUCH ASS HOLE COLIN YOU WILL BURN IN HELL FOR THE CRIMES YOU AN ALL BUSH AND ROCKFELLES AND OTHERS!” read another.

The hacker also posted Bush family photos that leaked last month to a new photo album.

Users tried to alert Powell that his account had been compromised, and eventually the page went down – presumably to fix the intrusion.

Once he regained control of the account, General Powell posted this message to his 81,000+ followers:

Dear Friends, as most of you realize, my fb page has obviously been hacked. I’m sorry you have to see all the stupid, obscene posts that are popping up. Please ignore as we are working with fb to take care of this problem. I appreciate your patience.

Reminder: Everyone has to be vigilant when it comes to password security, but if you’re a public figure you have to be extra cautious.

The New York Times is reporting that more than 2,800 dead pigs have been found floating into Shanghai in the Huangpu River, which flows through the city. The incident has raised concerns about contamination of Shanghai tap water.

The carcasses were evidently coming from somewhere upstream, and Chinese officials are currently trying to identify the source of the pigs. The Times report states that the pigs have already been traced to a province south and upstream of Shanghai.

Shanghai officials have stated that Shanghai Waterworks has been checking water quality on an hourly basis. After the first of the pigs had been noticed, Shanghai Waterworks stated that the city’s tap water still met its quality standards.

The report relays that Chinese officials are having samples of the pigs tested to determine their cause of death, which will be known within three days.

The Chinese State-run Global Times reported today that no viruses transmittable to humans have been found on the carcasses yet. Also, the ear tags found on the pigs were found to be scratched up, presumably by someone who knows it is illegal in China to dump dead pigs in a river. The report states that Shanghai authorities are now pressuring authorities from the southern province of Zhejiang to crack down on farmers who may dump dead pigs into the Huangpu rather than dispose of them properly.

Even though it’s almost 20-years old this 1995 Ferrari 512M looks remarkably fresh. Maybe it’s because it only has a scant 5,427 miles on the clock, or maybe it’s because the 512M was the best of the Testarossa lineup. Built at the end of the Tesstarossa’s 12-year life cycle, the 512M benefited from some pretty special upgrades. The flip-up headlamps for example were now gone and replaced by more modern flush mounted units, while power output on the mid-mounted flat-12 engine was bumped to 432 hp and 369 lb.ft. of torque. This particular vehicle (number 57 of 75 worldwide) is currently for sale on eBay and is located in San Francisco, CA. It also looks to be in truly spectacular condition. Click through for more photos or go directly to the eBay ad below.

Source: eBayMotors.com

Energy tech startups that can find applications for the booming natural gas industry will do well in 2013. On Monday startup Alphabet Energy, which is developing materials and devices that turn waste heat into energy, announced that Canadian natural gas giant Encana has led its new $16 million Series B financing round.

Alphabet Energy, founded in 2009 as a spin-out from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, makes a next-generation thermoelectric material, which is a semiconductor that can convert heat to electricity. When thermoelectric materials come in contact with heat it causes the electrons to move from the hot side of the material to the cold side, and the difference in temperature causes the material to produce electricity.

While most thermoelectric materials out there come from expensive, rare and exotic substances (like bismuth telluride), Alphabet Energy uses basic and abundant silicon, found in chips and solar cells. That means Alphabet’s products could be much less expensive than the current ones on the market. In addition all of Alphabet Energy’s material manufacturing can be done on existing chip production machines, so it could have much lower manufacturing costs as well.

Alphabet Energy has been working on using its material in generators that can turn waste heat into electricity, and which can tap into heat from industrial sources like exhaust pipes, or power plant flues. The startup already has one of its devices installed in an industrial facility in California that converts exhaust-gas waste heat into electricity.

Encana is interested in using these types of waste heat recovery generators for when it pulls natural gas out of the ground. Natural gas drilling and refining uses a lot of heat and that heat could be recycled into electricity.

Down the road, the holy grail of thermoelectrics is the automotive industry. Alphabet Energy could use its material in auto parts and engines that capture waste heat.

It’s a hard year to raise money for a cleantech startup. Many venture capitalists are moving away from investing in new cleantech companies, and government funds for energy innovation is tight, too. Alphabet Energy’s Series B round included existing investors Claremont Creek Ventures (Oakland-based VC firm), TPG’s venture arm TPG Biotech, CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund. Alphabet raised a $12 million series A round led by TPG in 2011, and a seed round from Claremont and CalCEF in 2010.

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IBM’s Watson has already proven it can beat human brainiacs at Jeopardy and has shown promise in cancer research. It has even gone to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Now, results of a new academic challenge at the University of Southern California may show that Watson can also suck cost out of legal proceedings and help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Winning team of USC Watson competition.

Two dozen student teams participating in the recent IBM Watson Academic Case Competition at USC had 48 hours to come up with a new use case along with a business plan that would harness Watson’s natural language processing skills and cognitive capabilities. The plans were judged by a panel of IBM execs, school officials and business leaders.

“The goal is to come up with a business plan that had to be feasible, well thought-through, come up with a go-to market, and it had to have a stable business model,” said said Steve Gold, VP of Watson Solutions for IBM. IBM provided a crash course on Watson’s capabilities, one-on-one consulting and an open Q&A — and then turned the teams loose.

IBM wanted students to work across schools and areas of expertise. Its stated goals were to expose new people to Watson’s capabilities, advance the curriculum around Watson and encourage research that could help build out Watson’s talent pool.

Putting Watson to work in law, training and PTSD research

The first-place team came up with a plan to use Watson in a legal setting, an area some would say is rife for disruption. Law firms traditionally relied on per-hour fee arrangements and those fees quickly add up. Now, law firms are “encouraged” to use a flat fee arrangement, Gold said.  The outsourcing of legal work — when a law firm ships work off to a third-party provider but bills clients for that service,  is already a $4 billion business, Gold said. All those legal documents are a perfect example of the reams of unstructured data that Watson is great at parsing. In January, GigaOM’s Derrick Harris touched on the legal discovery as a  big data application. 

This team recommended that Watson be used to conduct discovery for corporate legal departments — sifting through court documents, briefs, legal articles and related material.  The takeaway, according to IBM:

“By placing Watson in charge of research, firms can recover time and costs while delivering better legal outcomes. In turn, firms that leverage Watson’s speed and efficiency can address the legal trend towards ‘flat fee’ billing and research outsourcing.”

The second-place team recommended that corporate human resources departments use Watson to evaluate data about employee career goals and assess and recommend the training options needed to attain them. In theory, a successful application would mean better-prepared employees and a higher level of job satisfaction.

The third-place team proposed that doctors use Watson to find undiagnosed PTSD patients by sifting through military veterans’ data, including their medical histories and combat records. The problem with PTSD is that it often is not reported by the sufferer.

None of the USC teams actually had access to Watson, although that could happen down the road, Gold said. “There’s only so much you can do in 48 hours. The goal here is to find a market that needs addressing, and deliver a plan to attack it that would be applicable to Watson’s talents,” he said.

Next year, IBM and USC hope to expand the competition to 500 students across USC’s various schools. IBM has run similar Watson competitions at Cornell and the University of Rochester. One thing’s for sure: IBM will milk Watson’s success for all it’s worth and also use it as a recruiting tool. Last year, Gold’s group brought on 17 interns and plans to field 26 to 28 interns next year, including two high school students.

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Microsoft really wants students to use Office 365, it’s “new” subscription cloud-based suite of Office software. To do that, Microsoft is enlisting the help of someone lazy college students can really relate to.

Alongside its new ad campaign, Microsoft is giving away three free months of Office 365 to college students. To make the deal even sweeter, students will also get an extra 20GB of SkyDrive storage for those media heavy group projects. Microsoft will also students an extra three months for sharing the offer on Facebook. That’s a total of six free months of Office 365 for a few minutes of your time.

Of course, Office 365 is already ridiculously cheap for students. Microsoft introduced special pricing last year that reduces the price of Office 365 to $1.67 a month. The reduced cost is available to students for four years, and can be renewed at the same price for another four years if the student in question is still in school after the initial period.

You can sign up for the free three months of Office 365 here.

[h/t: Engadget]

Defending any form of gender-based violence (GBV) on the basis of tradition, culture or religion is no longer an option. Certainly, this is one of the strongest messages to emerge from this year’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York with Michelle Bachelet making it absolutely crystal clear that culture and religion must not be allowed to block proposals to eliminate violence against women and girls.

Last seen on the CSW agenda in 2003, violence against women and girls (VAWG) is quite rightly back in the spotlight. And now, more than ever, it is absolutely critical to achieve consensus on the conclusions of the session if we are to secure strong international commitment to take action. Timely also, is this renewed focus given the huge opportunity CSW has to influence how gender is incorporated and prioritised in a post-2015 framework.

At every single event I’ve attended so far at CSW social norms and how we go about transforming them is uppermost in people’s minds. Indeed, at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) we have been working for some time on building the evidence around how gender justice is invariably shaped by the formal and informal laws, norms, attitudes and practices that limit the attainment and exercise of women and girls’ capabilities. We know that just as gender inequality causes and compounds women’s poverty, so too poverty and marginalisation exacerbate gender inequality. It is a vicious circle that can only be broken by tackling the social norms and attitudes at the root which govern and shape women’s unequal position in society.

Tackling violence against women requires tackling social norms and values, as in this workshop run in South Africa by the NGO Sonke Gender Justice. Photo: Lindsay Mgbor/DFID

So in the spirit of this year’s headline topic, let’s take a closer look at how this is the case for harmful traditional practices affecting women and girls; and specifically, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C).

Harmful traditional practices include: acid violence, dowry and bride price, early/forced marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting, ‘honour’ crimes, corrective rape, female infanticide, and ritual sexual slavery. They are, for the most part, carried out without consent from the individual involved and are therefore some of the worst violations of human rights. They are a product of discriminatory social norms that aim to uphold cultural ideas about gender roles and social relations that ascribe women a lower status in society. Such practices are widespread across the globe, in some cases pandemic, and no country in the world remains unaffected.

FGM/C is a particularly controversial practice, and one that is gaining a great deal of renewed attention at the moment. Taking place in 28 countries in Africa, as well as in some countries in the Middle East and Asia, and in diaspora communities elsewhere (not least the UK), FGM/C has so far affected nearly 140 million girls and women. Its persistence is due in no small part to myths about hygiene and female aesthetics. It is also attributed to social pressures associated with control over girls’ sexuality, as well as traditional values regarding coming of age and transition to adulthood. The associated consequences can be devastating, as FGM/C increases women and girls’ vulnerability to HIV, infection, and birth complications, including fistula, a leading cause of maternal mortality in Africa.

FGM/C is also linked closely to early marriage, forced marriage and marriage by abduction. Girls from impoverished backgrounds are more vulnerable to harmful cultural practices, partially because of the link between them and girls’ perceived marriageability and associated financial pressures. Girls in these situations, as well as their female children, are unlikely to continue education or engage in other activities to enhance their capabilities beyond the domestic sphere.

Change is possible – FGC abandonment has been a relative success in Senegal. Photo: Liba Taylor/Panos.

In recent years, I’d argue that FGM/C has been approached with caution; almost reluctance. Considered to be an untouchable, immovable cultural tradition, its widespread and entrenched nature seemed to preclude action for change. Campaigns by organisations such as the Orchid Project, along with the success of Tostan’s Community Empowerment Programmes in Senegal where 5,300 villages have entirely ceased to practice FGM/C, have shown that it is possible to effect change. In the UK, concern over the 24,000 girls or so at risk of FGM/C domestically is mounting; a plea letter just this week by a young girl from Ghana desperate to avoid being cut has brought the issue to the attention of the British public.

Last week Lynne Featherstone announced at CSW the UK’s intention to invest £35 million towards ending FGM/C  in the world’s poorest countries. Encouraging as it is to see such commitment, what’s critical is to ensure that the money is spent effectively. What we need now is much clearer evidence around the types of interventions that work when it comes to tackling social norms.

So how do we even begin to change social norms? One thing that’s been reiterated time and again throughout the first week at CSW is the critical importance of involving men and boys as change-agents. Only by engaging them will men and boys recognise that gender equality benefits everyone in society and we can then begin to challenge traditional constructions of masculinity and femininity that underpin gendered discrimination and violence. Policies that encourage and normalise greater involvement of fathers in the care of their children, as well as education initiatives aimed at school age boys and girls are just a couple of examples of how this is being done.

The involvement of men and boys is critical in ending violence against women, such as in this community project in South Africa, where young men are given strong role models to help them avoid becoming involved in violence. Photo: Lindsay Mgbor/DFID.

In fact, what’s needed is an integrated approach that includes every member of society and gives individuals and communities the opportunities necessary to set the change agenda for themselves. All too often the agenda is defined at the top when in fact change is far likelier if all levels of society have had their say.

Nevertheless, it is the renewed commitment by states to women’s human rights agreements that sends the strongest to message to those that would seek to derail the hard-won gains made by the gender equality agenda. Another failure to achieve an outcome document (resistance by various conservative governments and the Vatican, which has a seat on the UN as a non-member permanent observer is already happening) is simply not an option.

If ever there was a time to stop treating the symptoms and actually tackle the cause of women and girls’ poverty – if we really want to make long-lasting and transformative progress – this is it.

As part of a four year UK aid supported study – Transforming the lives of adolescent girls – ODI have published a background note exploring the extent to which gender justice for adolescent girls is shaped by formal and informal laws, norms, attitudes and practices that limit girls opportunities and chances in life. Click here for more information.

You can add your voice to UK Aid’s pledge campaign for UN action on violence against women here

This week has been a tough one for fans of live pop music. First, singer Rihanna this weekend cancelled her show in Boston due to laryngitis. Now, it appears that Justin Bieber has cancelled a concert that was scheduled to take place in Portugal tomorrow, March 12.

CBS News is reporting that Bieber’s second Lisbon, Portugal concert has been cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances.” Current rumors are pointing to “logistical issues” with unions as the reason fro the concert cancellation. Bieber’s first Lisbon show, scheduled to take place tonight, is still a go and the singer began tweeting about the concert this afternoon:

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Justin Bieber
@justinbieber

Lisbon, Portugal today. #BELIEVEtour#SOLDOUT

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4 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the cancellation and the odd journey that Bieber endured in London last week. After being spotted walking London streets with his shirt off early last week and having shown shown up late for a concert, the pop star went on a Twitter tirade against “rumors” and “fake stories.” Rumors about the star’s “diva-like” behavior persisted, however, as he collapsed during one of his London shows later in the week. Bieber’s European tour will take him through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany in the coming weeks.

Your company’s organizational memory might be holding it back. Consider the following parable:

Two monks — one old and one young — were walking to a village far from their monastery. Along the way they saw a beautiful, young woman waiting at the edge of a stream, too afraid to cross. The young monk reminded himself of his vow not to touch women and continued walking. But to his amazement, the elder monk sped right past him while carrying the young woman, safely across the stream, on his back! When the old monk put her down on the other side of the stream, she thanked him with a respectful bow. The old monk, in turn, gave her a bright smile, and continued walking.

The young monk considered and reconsidered the old monk’s action back at the stream. He could not stop churning. His thoughts grew angrier and angrier. Finally, hours later, he ended up shouting at the old monk, “You broke your sacred vows! You are not supposed to touch a woman! How can you forgive yourself? You should not be allowed back in the monastery!”

Surprised at his outburst, the old monk replied calmly, “I dropped her hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?”

Like the young monk, many organizations carry a heavy burden, and for far too long. The result — obsolete policies and practices, outdated assumptions and mind-sets, and underperforming products and services. This organizational memory creates biases that get embedded in planning processes, performance evaluation systems, organizational structures and human resource policies. This becomes a big burden when non-linear shifts occur.

Examples of the burden of such organizational memory include Blackberry — it could not forget about the physical keyboard when the world had moved on to touch screens, and Microsoft — it could not forget about the desktop as the key computing device when the world had moved on to mobile devices on the one hand and cloud-based services on the other.

How can established organizations be more like the elder monk — and transcend the clutches of the burden of organizational memory when there is a need to respond to non-linear shifts?

Let us look at how Infosys succeeded in this transformation. Infosys initially provided only IT services. However, they noticed that their most demanding clients were frustrated by having to work simultaneously with multiple service firms, each lacking full accountability. They realized that in this frustration lay the seeds of a non-linear shift — and that they would either have to respond quickly and master the shift or become victims of it. They perceived the need for an organization that would provide management consulting services, redesign operations, and write specifications for new IT systems; then develop, test, install and maintain it; perhaps even accept responsibility for executing routine client operations such as transaction processing.

They also realized that the current organizational memory would be a burden for this new reality. So they created a parallel world with different people and distinct processes.

They focused on three key areas:

1. Strategy Making — Instead of linear extrapolation from the past using rigorous data analysis, they focused on anticipating non-linear shifts by bringing in non-traditional voices such as, for example, key clients, and youth (who would have little, if any, organizational memory).
2. Accountability — Instead of focusing on on-time, to spec, within budget delivery, they focused on disciplined experiments with the primary emphasis on learning rapidly, thus eliminating the defensiveness inherent in traditional organizations.
3. Organizational Design — Instead of optimizing the way individuals collaborate through job specifications, work processes and organizational design, they formed special teams with a good mix of “outsiders” to challenge assumptions and bring a fresh set of skills and competencies.

All these changes helped Infosys overcome the burden of the organizational memory of a very successful IT services company, while retaining all of the essential elements that were responsible for its success. As a result of this successful transformation, Infosys grew 25-fold over the decade from 2000 to 2010 — from $200 million to $5 billion.

If you too sense big non-linear shifts in your markets, remember that “organizational forgetting” may be essential to meeting the challenges successfully.