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- In 2023, organizations will battle a more complex threatscape than ever as web application breaches continue to rise, credential theft and credential stuffing remain a concern, and ransomware demands hit the big players. It’s no wonder that CISOs and security practitioners are more concerned than ever before. Join threat researchers and leading CISOs as they discuss the latest cyber threats on the horizon for 2023 and share how businesses can effectively ‘horizon scan’ to make themselves as secure as possible for the coming year.
- Digital transformation is essential for companies to survive and thrive among today’s volatile market and the proliferation of hybrid workforces. IT leaders need guidance on how to best digitize their environments in a way that ensures they are utilizing the right technology, and all areas of the business will reap the benefits. Join expert thought leaders for the three-day Accelerating Digital Transformation summit to hear digital transformation success stories, how advancing technologies like AI and RPA can enhance transformation efforts, and proven tips to integrate these new practices.
Re: Your Brains
Halloween is just around the corner, a festival that, in the U.S. at least, is well on its way to becoming the most important holiday of the year, readily eclipsing Christmas. This isn’t that surprising: in a world where streaming media has led may consumers to cut the cord and where pandemics and war have roiled supply chains, Christmas presents have dwindled to a few plastic cards, Q-Codes, and email notifications – the boxes themselves that were ordered in September finally make their way to houses and apartments sometime in April. Santa Claus has been replaced by an army of Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and USPS elves dressed in tan and green.
On the other hand, Halloween has mutated in its own right to a weeks-long celebration of adult witches and werewolves, wizards and warriors, and incarnations of media creations drawn from anime and western techno-fantasy. The annual zombie walk here in Issaquah has become as popular as the Salmon Days festival, a day inspired by the local Salmon hatchery to help keep a critical commercial fish species from going extinct as post-industrialization and global warming cause streams and rivers to disappear or become too polluted for these fish to survive otherwise. The juxtaposition of zombie humans and zombie fish would be amusing if it weren’t so worrying.
That Cosplay – costume play, from Japan – has managed somehow to survive the Pandemic should indicate how significant a social force it is becoming. Instagram and TikTok would both collapse overnight without it. Indeed, the practice of “trick or treating” itself has all but disappeared, yet Halloween accounts for a larger revenue of merchandising than Christmas. This is because a whole generation of young adults are signaling that the corporate world of their parents and grandparents is simply no longer of interest to them. Malls and bars, both artifacts of this world, are no longer places to see or be seen. Instead, the cryptically labeled GenZ is inhabiting cyberworlds and interacting via live-streaming at one remove from the physical world.
Ironically, this process is causing the birth rate to climb again (or at least to bottom out after an eighteen-year decline). Young (and not-so-young) couples working from home can now do other things from home as well, as the relentless time grab of their corporate masters is being weakened by a growing desire to take back that personal time for, well, personal time.
Corporations tend to look at themselves (and society) through a very conservative lens. This is a mistake. There are zombies in the boardrooms, and the distrust of institutions of all sorts (corporate and governmental) is at an all-time high. Older managers and pundits tend to view these efforts as a form of escapism, but they should be asking themselves what, precisely this generation is escaping from.
T’is time now for ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.
In media res,
Kurt Cagle
Community Editor,
Data Science Central
DSC Editorial Calendar: November 2022
Every month, I’ll update this section with many topics I’m especially looking for and are more likely to be featured in our spotlight area. If you are interested in tackling one or more of these topics, we have the budget for dedicated articles. Please contact Kurt Cagle for details.
- ESG (Environment-Social-Governance)
- Digital Privacy
- The Electric Economy
- VUCA (Volatility-Uncertainty-Complexity-Ambiguity)
- Labeled Property Graphs
- Inferential Machine Learning
- Geospatial Data
- Drone Traffic Control
- Linguistic Intelligence
- Ethical AI
If you are interested in posting something else, that’s fine too, but these are areas that we believe are hot right now.
DSC Featured Articles
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