In American political campaigns, the correlation between how much attention an issue gets and the actual significance of that issue is rarely strong. In 1996, Bill Clinton campaigned for reelection with a plan for mandatory school uniforms. Four years later, Al Gore's campaign spent much energy distancing itself from a blow job his boss had received. In 2004, George W. Bush used his reelection bid to highlight the threat gay rights posed to heterosexual marriage. The financial crisis diminished the frivolous style in American politics for a couple election cycles, but it's back in full force in 2016: This year's GOP debates featured roughly as much discussion of Donald Trump's penis size as they did about climate change, while, in the general election, Hillary Clinton's IT management habits have seen more coverage than the threat monopolies pose to economic growth.

Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein's models will be automatically customized for every single customer, and it will learn, self-tune, and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Most importantly, Einstein's intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks. Just as Salesforce is no longer just Software as a Service CRM, but also a complete Platform as a Service for many types of apps to run, let's venture a guess that Einstein will at some point be made available "as a Service" for other Force.com

Though it's an integral part of a properly functioning managerial relationship, feedback remains a sticky subject for many whose jobs require them to provide it. Some fear the backlash that may result, others worry that it may jeopardize their career, and still others fret that their feedback is getting completely ignored. In fact, a recent study by VitalSmarts found that 83% of employees have witnessed a colleague say something that has had a negative impact on their careers, something the study's authors referred to as "suicide by feedback." On the other hand, regular feedback is vital for employee engagement, which can lead to profitability and productivity increases of more than 20%, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll. So how can managers get over their fear of the repercussions while keeping their employees engaged?

Twenty years ago, Stuart Russell co-wrote a book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (AIMA), destined to become the dominant text in its field. Near the end of the book, he posed a question: "What if A.I. does succeed?" Today, progress toward human-level artificial intelligence (A.I.) is advancing rapidly, and Russell, a professor of computer science, is posing the same question with more urgency. The benefits of A.I. are not at issue. If improperly constrained, Russell warns, a machine as smart as or smarter than humans "is of no use whatsoever -- in fact it's catastrophic."

Quoc Le is no stranger to the indignity of translation. Whenever the Google research scientist in Mountain View, California, visits his native Vietnam, he laughs with his parents over mistranslations in the very system he is helping shape, the 10-year-old online service Google Translate. Most errors are tiny--not important enough to remember. But together, they tell a larger story: "Translation is not a solved problem," he says. But that may all change soon.

I am a big fan of the authors 1999 book on Statistical Natural Language Processing, and I and was thrilled when I found this new book online -- just search for "Information Retrieval" on Google. In these two books, they describe the theory behind a vast toolbox which can be used to construct new tools/products for the Internet. Now I can go back to them when the need arises. For starters, I appreciate the detailed theoretical explanations of topics that I could not find in other texts, and the references to related work are especially helpful. One of the other books I read was Information Retrieval by Grossman, which is an older book but has a more condensed style compared to this.

While there is the paper, the blogpost is a fun read and usually more digestible.

Tim Burton's new movie about an orphanage for fantastically gifted kids is expected to debut at the head of its class at the box office this weekend, expelling last week's victor, "The Magnificent Seven," from the top of the charts. "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," from 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment, is expected to gross 25 million to 30 million in its opening in the U.S. and Canada through Sunday, according to people who have reviewed prerelease audience surveys. That should be enough to unseat Sony and MGM's western remake (starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt) that bowed to 35 million and is expected to drop about 50% in its second go-around. "Miss Peregrine," adapted from the popular fantasy novel by Ransom Riggs, cost 110 million to make. Though it boasts high interest and parallels to the X-Men and Harry Potter series, it remains to be seen if the film will prove popular enough to start a Hollywood franchise.

"Modern Machine Learning is devoted to deriving value from data, not jamming the airlocks." The above quote from Arthur C. Clark's HAL 9000 vision is about to become a reality, thanks to Big Data enabled Machine Learning (ML). With modern computers exhibiting exceptional performance and storage devices being available within easy budgets, global businesses are increasingly indulging in Machine Learning models to tackle the petabytes of Big Data. In the recent years, Machine Learning solutions have brought Big Data to the mainstream business workflow. Big Data has signaled a new era of information, where by credible estimates, about 50-75 billion connected devices have entered the daily lives of people.

This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. Hearables are here: Apple held its "Special Event" and, among other things, officially killed the iPhone's 3.5-millimeter earbud jack, replacing it with 159 wireless AirPods. But then I read Mike Elgan's paean to this development in Computerworld. Elgan says that AirPods are actually artificial intelligence hardware. "The biggest thing going on here is the end of'dumb speaker' earbuds, and the mainstreaming of hearables -- actual computers that go in your ears," he says.