Sociologists of education increasingly highlight the role of opportunity hoarding in the formation of Black-White educational inequalities. Informed by this literature, this article unpacks the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the hoarding of educational resources emerges within schools. It develops a qualitatively informed agent-based model which captures Black and White students' competition for a valuable school resource: advanced coursework. In contrast to traditional accounts -- which explain the emergence of hoarding through the actions of Whites that keep valuable resources within White communities -- simulations, perhaps surprisingly, show hoarding to arise even when Whites do not play the role of hoarders of resources. Behind this result is the fact that a structural inequality (i.e., racial differences in social class) -- and not action-driven hoarding -- is the necessary condition for hoarding to emerge. Findings, therefore, illustrate that common action-driven understandings of opportunity hoarding can overlook the structural foundations behind this important phenomenon. Policy implications are discussed.

Jayaram Bhat, CEO, Squelch in this article writes about the evolution of customer experience and what marketers can accept in the coming year 2020. As co-founder and CEO of Squelch, I've gotten to know leaders from across the customer experience industry -- from world-class analysts to visionary founders of professional organizations and fellow CEOs of the support and success platforms that make top-notch CX possible. I've also talked with countless agents, managers, and executives who are engaging with customers on the front lines every day. Welcome to the 2019 edition of The Modern Content Marketer's Buyer Guide. About 10 years ago, marketers realized that content is a critical piece of their pie, and have since been working overtime to generate content to help win the prospect's attention.

Electronic data can be a powerful tool and is not expensive to store, but it's only useful if you have a strategy behind it, speakers said during this week's Insurance Analytics Canada Summit. "If you don't have a data strategy, that's usually a pretty huge red flag," said Steve Holder, national strategy executive, analytic ecosystems, for the Canadian subsidiary of software vendor SAS Institute Inc. "Data that is not leveraged or analyzed or used is just data hoarding." Analyzing data can give companies insights on their customers, Cindy Forbes, executive vice president and chief analytics officer for Manulife Financial Corp., said during the summit. That would be my data strategy." Forbes and Holden were co-panelists during a session titled Realizing the Promise of AI. Fifteen years ago, what information technology professionals called "data" was "very structured, like tables and columns and so on – anything that you could consume in Excel," Achraf Louitri, director of research and development at Intact, said Tuesday during the summit. Today, data also includes images, voice conversations and email, Louitri said during a separate presentation, titled From an Idea to a Working Business Solution. He added it is very inexpensive to capture data. There is a lot of talk in the insurance industry about artificial intelligence, Louitri said, noting that consumers can find AI models on the Internet that can compose classical music for example. "AI is no longer that future far far away.

On the west coast of Australia, Amanda Hodgson is launching drones out towards the Indian Ocean so that they can photograph the water from above. The photos are a way of locating dugongs, or sea cows, in the bay near Perth--part of an effort to prevent the extinction of these endangered marine mammals. The trouble is that Hodgson and her team don't have the time needed to examine all those aerial photos. There are too many of them--about 45,000--and spotting the dugongs is far too difficult for the untrained eye. Deep learning is remaking Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Microsoft is joining Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. But this race is much bigger than some gadgets that sit on your coffee table. The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter--and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything. OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all racing to build systems that recognize and truly understand natural language--how you and I talk.

Ask the Google search app "What is the fastest bird on Earth?," and it will tell you. "Peregrine falcon," the phone says. "According to YouTube, the peregrine falcon has a maximum recorded airspeed of 389 kilometers per hour." That's the right answer, but it doesn't come from some master database inside Google. When you ask the question, Google's search engine pinpoints a YouTube video describing the five fastest birds on the planet and then extracts just the information you're looking for.

Google is building a new artificial intelligence lab in Montreal dedicated to deep learning, a technology that's rapidly reinventing not only Google but the rest of the internet's biggest players. Hugo Larochelle will run the new lab after joining Google from the Twitter, where he was part of the company's central AI team. It's a homecoming for Larochelle, who earned a PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal and remains a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. Yoshua Bengio, one of the founding fathers of the movement, calls him "one of the rising stars of deep learning." Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent At the moment, Larochelle is the new lab's sole hire, but the idea is that he will build a sizable team inside Google's existing engineering office in Montreal.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.