A Speech to remember...

           March 13, 2015 was a memorable day for me that widened my horizon and directed me in a whole new direction. It was the spring semester at USF and I was just attending another one of my classes, basic marketing. However, as soon as I stepped into the big lecture hall, I noticed more students had attended than usual and I see cameramen in the back and others gathered near the stage wearing formal suits.

            Glad I brushed my hair that morning, I took a seat in the auditorium and I pulled a notebook and a pen, just as one of the men took the stage and introduced us to Jordan Zimmerman.

The Name sound familiar?

The Zimmerman school of Advertising! Zimmerman Advertising.

            Jordan Zimmerman graduated from USF in 1980 and went to build an advertising empire. He took us on his exciting and humble journey of growing up in an average home and attending USF, to founding a $4 billion company. Through the success of his agency, Zimmerman Advertising is one of the largest in the world. They make the best commercials we see on TV! A sense of relevation lifted me when he spoke about his achievements. Furthermore, Mr. JZ, as he wishes to be called, donates back to his community and offers USF the leading advertising curriculum in the nation. He thinks the same way I do and I could feel his sincerity when he speaks. His time is extremely valuable and people in his position sleep about 4 hours a day and have huge responsibility so he is funny in a serious way.  

            He is muscular and loud, his energy is boot camp like, and he is so passionate about his company. He walked the stage in a fairly fast paced as he indulged us through their departments and their different approaches to motivation, in offices planted across the country, filled with the most advanced technology and creative opportunities. The best part was when his team played us an incredible presentation that resonates and enriches my imagination. Top notch quality: the coolest videos, and funniest commercials, perfect imagery combined with exciting background music. My world lit up and I was in disbelief: I want to work there!

            Mr. Zimmerman strongly believes in the power of dreams and his insisting tone instills hope and encouragement. I was able to relate to him because deep down I have never been afraid of dreaming as big as he did and I know I would never give up on it. Some will tell you your dreams are too big, JZ wants me to dream even bigger. However, he challenged my view on time and its value. I am an active person but I don’t think I could live under that much pressure with only 4 hours of sleep. Yet I am sure if I am doing what I love, I can sleep when I die.  

Do you love Architecture?

The beauty of Architecture! 

 There are many reasons why buildings from one era look different from buildings of another. Sometimes those differences reflect developments in materials, building processes, or other technologies. Sometimes the differences arise from cultural or economic shifts. Sometimes the differences reflect an evolution in what is happening on the inside such as the buildings’ functions.

            Iron was a product of the Industrial Revolution and it was used for civil engineering to build bridges and factories. Britain led the way in the architectural adaptation of iron. The use of iron freed buildings and civic structures from historicism because ‘form’ became determined by the material and by engineering principles. With the rise of railroads, builders employed iron for train sheds as well. The first shed was London’s Euston Station and the grandest was London’s St. Pancreas Station. Although we label this era a "revolution," its title is somewhat misleading. The movement that first took root in Great Britain wasn't a sudden burst of advancement, but rather a buildup of breakthroughs that fed off one another.

            Without all those creative minds, many of the basic goods and services we use today wouldn't exist. Therefore, the revolution changed the lives of many people. Building the infrastructure to support the Industrial Revolution wasn't easy. The demand for metals, including iron, spurred industries to come up with more efficient methods for mining and transporting raw materials. Over the course of a few decades, iron companies supplied an increasing amount of iron to factories and manufacturing companies. 

            Train sheds were nothing more than small-scale pieces of bridges and the regularized repetition of arches is itself symbolic of mass production, reflecting the ability of industry to churn out an endless supply of the same exact product at a constant rhythm. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nation was housed in the famous Crystal Palace to showcase the product development, technological advances, agriculture improvements, and fine and applied arts of the industrial nations. It celebrated Western industrialization. The building was essentially designed to be a giant greenhouse but the form resembled an English Cathedral, a cathedral of industry, which had become the new religion. Unfortunately, the building was destroyed in a fire in 1936. All that remains are the listed Italian-style terraces and they will be incorporated in the new scheme.
            Crystal Palace was named after its innovative use of plate glass, and it was a breathtaking symbol of the British Empire and the crowning achievement of the Industrial Revolution. It stood in another part of the capital, Hyde Park, where the exhibition was held. About a year ago, Chinese billionaire Ni Zhaoxing unveiled his £500million vision for a new Crystal Palace, which will put a missing piece of British history back in place. The vast glass structure, the original of which was home to the Great Exhibition of 1851, will house his priceless art collection plus a hotel, conference center and ‘other commercial space’.

            The Crystal Palace was conceived as a nontraditional building and it had a strong technological look. It hosted an exposition dedicated to technology and industry. Generally, such buildings were not built of iron; instead, they were executed in stone to be representational. Iron was reserved for industrial buildings like food markets and urban shopping malls.

Little did anyone know in 1871 that Chicago’s devastating Great Fire would launch modern architecture and make American architects for the first time the most advanced in the world. Iron is not fire-resistant and intense heat makes it soften, bend, and if hot enough, melt. Chicago had been growing rapidly and there was a need to maximize land use by building vertically. This was made possible by the invention of the safety elevator. Young designers abandoned the historicism of revival architecture and designed abstract structures as they allowed form to follow function. The abstraction of the Marshall Field Wholesale Store provided an intellectual challenge to the new generation of Chicago architects. The buildings were massive, made of stone and highly textured. They were also quite simplified, emphasizing volumetric forms.

           

Architecture is the art of designing and constructing buildings and it has always been closely intertwined with the history of art, for many reasons. First, many public works, especially religious buildings, were designed with aesthetics in mind, as well as functionality. They were built to inspire as well as serve a public function. Second, in many of these buildings, the exteriors and interiors acted as showcases for fine art painting such as the Sistine Chapel, or sculpture like European Gothic cathedrals and other artworks like mosaics and metalwork. Thirdly, public building programs typically went hand in hand with the development of visual art, and most major 'arts' movements like the Renaissance.

  

Is the Internet bad for you?

            Is the Internet bad for you?

             The Internet is very useful. We use it for research, banking, shopping, and social networking. I also use it to gather and store information, but mostly to stay in touch with people all around the world. Social Media is the number one activity on the web. And since I can access the Internet very easily from my mobile devices, I rely on it for almost everything. I can’t remember the last time my smart phone wasn’t next to me. The Internet is established as a very important medium in our lives. I am a big user of computers and I am a huge fan of technology. And luckily, technology is no longer for a small minority. Various social networks appeal to different parts of the population. Almost every member of my family has a Facebook account, from the youngest of them to the oldest. It is a great way for all of us to stay in touch, especially that we live on different continents. I choose to keep my profile private even though I sense that privacy is lost in social networking. I tend to refuse requests from strangers and I don’t request friends I do not know. Nevertheless, I enjoy participating in family affairs, even if it is virtually.

            Lately, I began to realize that I am having a lot of trouble concentrating. I noticed it particularly when I’d sit down to study. Throughout my life, reading a book came naturally to me, but now I notice that after a couple of paragraphs or pages, I begin to have this overwhelming urge to get up and check the net. I start checking my email and clicking on links to all kinds of things. There is a correspondence between my increasing use of the web and the use of digital media. Over the last few years, the Internet expanded with the introduction of all these powerful networking applications. I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and so on (Follow me). And there are hundreds of million other active users on a global basis. My inability to focus on one thing for more than a few minutes concerns me the most. Apparently, there is too much of an attachment to surf the web and it has become addictive. Our intellectual technologies influence the way that we think. For example, years ago, we needed a map to travel, and now we a have a Global Positioning System that provides “location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth.” 

Nowadays, looking for a map is an endless process; bookstores have scaled back in their selection in recent years. Some stores have stopped selling maps altogether. They claim that maps are pointless today. I consider printed maps a fun experience when travelling because it requires the travelers to work together and become a team. It tests our ability to get along and solve problems while the GPS removes that entire interpersonal dynamic. Driving by map engages us actively in our surroundings while the GPS encourages a passive form of journeying.  Up until the map was invented, the only way to perceive location was through direct sensory, and that’s how people got around. Suddenly, we replaced our direct sensory apprehension of the world with an abstract representation of the world. On one hand, it allowed us to do a whole lot more of practical things like going to places we’ve never gone to before with certainty. On the other hand, more broadly, it gave us a more abstract way of thinking in general, and there are some deep cognitive and intellectual consequences. We are hooked up to every form of communication, but we’re not actually engaging and interacting with people. We have the social skills of a microwave dinner and the more time we are spending online the more we are getting incompetent at the area of sociability and social dynamics. How we receive and deal with people is a skill that we are losing. Real world social interactions diminished drastically.

            Because the majority of our time is spent online, it definitely has some effect on the way we think and act. We have become too dependent on it that we can’t go a day without disconnecting from reality to check the Internet. We live in incredibly information-rich environment and we want to know everything that is going on around us; therefore, it is promoting a compulsive behavior in which we constantly check our smart phones. Moreover, we’re living in this perpetual state of distraction and interruptions that is blocking our abilities to learn properly. Thus, we are not building knowledge. Nicholas Carr wrote that the Internet is making us “superficial thinkers,” in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Our humanity is at stake because we lack the ability to pay attention and control our mind.

            There is no doubt that the Internet offers a variety of benefits to anyone who is willing to effectively use it. There is more to it than social networking and watching silly videos. It undoubtedly offers a powerful educational source through the enormous amount of information available. It has been my electronic library.  However, the fact remains that too much of anything is never good for you and the best thing we can do for our mind is to find time everyday to unplug, calm down and focus on one thing at a time, especially that all the information will still be there when we get back. The solution is to have more purpose in our communication. We have to set ourselves the challenge of not having the Internet in the palms of our hands all-day and everyday.

Data Management

Data Management

There is a mind-boggling amount of data floating around our society. Big data is an elusive concept that represents an amount of digital information, which is uncomfortable to store, transport, or analyze. Big data isn’t new. Fifty years ago, data was stored in a single mainframe computer that filled an entire building. To analyze the data, physicists from around the world traveled to connect to the enormous machine. In 1989, the Internet took off and physicists could then access the terabytes of big data remotely from around the world, generate results, and write papers in their home institutes. Then, they wanted to share their findings with all their colleagues. To make this information sharing easy, the web was created in the early 1990s, and physicists no longer needed to know where the information was stored in order to find it and access it on the web. This idea caught on across the world and has transformed the way we communicate in our daily lives. During the early 2000s, the continued growth of big data outstripped the capability to analyze it, despite having buildings full of computers. They started distributing the petabytes to collaborating partners in order to employ local computing and storage at hundreds of different institutes. 

Big data is so voluminous that it overwhelms the technologies of the day and challenges us to create the next generation of data storage tools and techniques. An alternative, more business-like approach for accessing on-demand resources has been flourishing recently, called cloud computing, which other communities are now exploiting to analyze their big data. It might seem paradoxical for a lab focused on the study of the unimaginably small building blocks of matter, to be the source of something as big as big data. As the old metaphor explains, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and this is no longer just science that is exploiting this. The fact that we can derive more knowledge by joining related information together, and spotting correlations, can inform and enrich numerous aspects of everyday life, either in real time, such as traffic or financial conditions, in short-term evolutions, such as medical or meteorological, or in predictive situations, such as business, crime, or disease trends.

We can have a lot of data and that causes information chaos. Organizations are struggling to manage the growing volume, velocity and variety of enterprise data. In today’s information-driven economy, data centric initiatives such as data governance and business intelligence are the forefront of many organizations’ strategic priorities. Traditionally, we would be talking about databases, but we are seeing lots of variety of data: image files, audio files, videos, and the speed at which this information is coming through as well. We are now sampling data down to the millisecond, from different sites, from different systems, and as we move into the future, from individual meters in homes as well. This explosion of information within the organization is preventing people from being able to find the right information at the right time. We know the data is out there somewhere, but how do we get the right bit within an acceptable time window? Once we have that data in this organization, what do we do with it? How long do we keep it for? Does regulation say we have to keep it for a certain amount of time? Can we let go of it at certain times, and if we can, why shouldn’t we? It is costing us in terms of storage and space. All those thing roll up into increasing costs, less confidence in the data that we hold, which is all adding risk to the organization.

Data runs our business, whether it is making strategic decisions based on quality information or making data management more efficient to save time and cost, data modelers play a critical role at the center of these initiatives, providing a collaborative data modeling environment that helps ensure that data is managed efficiently and with higher quality. With increasing demand for information from a variety of stakeholders, the need for collaboration is greater than ever before, but resources in most organizations are decreasing, with fewer staff to manage this ever-growing array of data sources. Companies have begun to understand that their data has the potential to provide a greater competitive advantage than traditional assets such as inventory, property, equipment and cash. However, without an understanding of where data has come from, how it was delivered and what it contains, the insight that this data can deliver is still limited. Through effective use and management, metadata will become the glue that holds together your organization’s information infrastructure. Metadata supports analytics, reporting, data quality prediction, dash ball integration, and business processes making it a key asset.

Objects that hold value are generally classified as assets. This could include information, software, reputation, people and services, in addition to IT equipment and infrastructure. Ideally, organizations would track every asset, but this generally proves to be too costly. And since they can’t track everything, the institutions usually decide what to track based on how important the asset is, by determining a number of factors like the sensitivity, criticality, value and compliance requirement of that asset. It is clear that business networks demand a robust enterprise management strategy. We start at the core of the enterprise, operational data, financial data, and plant material data. These are the lifeline and lifeblood of our core systems. We look at data as a strategic asset, and most importantly what sits behind that data is the metadata and we can use it to drive out hidden value. Data is pulled from many different sources and it comes into the analytical environment to rationalize key assets that can help explore an array of internal data, such as demographics, sales, revenues and customer behavior.

Traditionally, companies thought of their assets in two ways: one being the people that they’ve got as human capital, and that includes the skills, the experience and the expertise that they have within the organization. The other side of things is assets, where management is concerned with money, people, property, and inventory. But now, people realize that the data that they’ve got within the company is as important as the other two. Moreover, this information capital includes access to data, control of data and the ability to drive insight from that data. A well-designed information management governance collects, manages, analyzes and interprets data, while creating visual tools and technologies using industry tools and technologies. It helps us collect the right data to make the right decisions to respond faster to changes at less cost, leading to better business performance.

Data management is very important to business analytics. Recognizing the importance of information quality as a key business asset, organizations manage their complex enterprise data environment to allow disparate users to work together in an efficient way, saving time and money. A presentation model should be easy to understand and provide all the necessary data points for the business users to complete their analysis. The main focus is to formulate a strategy to outline the company’s key information assets, standards, quality assurance, ownership and governance of assets. “Master data management establishes the capabilities for defining the capabilities for defining and maintaining the company’s critical core data, and big data management captures very large amounts of business data from various sources and refine the data to be used in decision0making, to automate business processes and functions, to control some business assets automatically and provide automated or more adaptive services for the service consumes” (Arja Julin-Nurmi, 2013). Once data is managed, we can communicate this information to the diverse audiences and business units across the organizations in a format that users will understand in order to manage corporate data.

Data classification allows companies to apply appropriate safeguards, higher protection for sensitive data and wider access for general data. Leveraging data as a corporate asset drives greater efficiency and value. Once we have a better understanding of the type of data, we start to build up that confidence again. Moving from an information chaos perspective to information controlled perspective, we see the value of metadata, we reduce the cost, we reduce the risk, and we increase the trust we have in that data. Most importantly, there are a lot of models to understand how customers work and the sort of things they’re doing, and they come up with maturity models around these things to run a business. By understanding the data that we have within the organization, we realize the impact that it has allowing us to use that information as a strategic asset. We manage our data as strategic assets to achieve efficiency, gain insight, maintain flexibility, innovate and grow. Technology and data strategy and analytics, consumer behavior analytics, product marketing, data interchange, information integration, and information governance help companies to integrate and improve, consolidate and rationalize. Data across traditional and alternative asset allows for institutional investment screening, monitoring and peer comparison with advanced query capabilities to search traditional and alternative fields.

Virtually every field is turning to gathering big data, with mobile sensor networks spanning the globe, cameras on the ground and in the air, archives storing information published on the web, and loggers capturing the activities of Internet citizens the world over. The challenge is on to invent new tools and techniques to mine these vast stores, to inform decision making, to improve medical diagnosis, and otherwise to answer needs and desires of tomorrow’s society in ways that are unimagined today.