The Impact Of The Virtual Work-From-Home Workforce

Companies in traditional office spaces were forced to send their employees home to work remotely—and many of these employees will continue to work from home, long after the pandemic is over.

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There is a potential problem with new hires working remotely. According to TINYpulse, there are two important issues to be concerned with. New hires don’t know their colleagues. This has resulted in 34% less peer recognition for them than for their counterparts. Furthermore, the new hires haven’t had the opportunity to spend time at the office, unlike other employees who were there prior to the pandemic. They don’t get to “live the culture” of the company. This results in being 20% less likely to acknowledge company values. TINYpulse quotes Rolf Bax, CHRO of Resume.io, who says, “I’ve also found it more difficult to successfully orient new hires to their role remotely. I think the biggest challenge of remote onboarding compared to traditional in-person methods is that it is more difficult for a new hire to get a feel for an organization’s culture and its people from behind a screen.”

In RingCentral’s research report titled Is Remote Work Sustainable?, a focus on a “connected culture” leads to significant gains in employee productivity and well-being. Connection is more than being technologically connected. It is about conversations, activities and projects that bring people together, even if they are working from home. It’s good leadership and management working to keep employees motivated and feeling a part of the organization. It takes frequent communication, good collaboration tools and social events like virtual happy hours, peer chats and group video games. And for the employees who self-report themselves as being more productive, 71% felt more connected to their colleagues than before the pandemic.

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— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2021/02/28/the-impact-of-the-virtual-work-from-home-workforce/

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There is a major risk that most developing countries will languish for years to come- Kristalina Georgieva – P.A. Turkey

There is a major risk that most developing countries will languish for years to come- Kristalina Georgieva – P.A. Turkey

The IMF recently projected global GDP growth at 5.5 per cent this year and 4.2 per cent in 2022. But it is going to be a long and uncertain ascent. Most of the world is facing a slow rollout of vaccines even as new virus mutations are spreading—and the prospects for recovery are diverging dangerously across countries and regions.

Indeed, the global economy is at a fork in the road. The question is: will policymakers take action to prevent this Great Divergence?

As our note to the G20 meeting points out, there is a major risk that as advanced economies and a few emerging markets recover faster, most developing countries will languish for years to come. This would not only worsen the human tragedy of the pandemic, but also the economic suffering of the most vulnerable.

…
— Read on paturkey.com/news/there-is-a-major-risk-that-most-developing-countries-will-languish-for-years-to-come-kristalina-georgieva/2021/

Why do 87% of data science projects never make it into production? | VentureBeat

Why do 87% of data science projects never make it into production? | VentureBeat
— Read on venturebeat-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/venturebeat.com/2019/07/19/why-do-87-of-data-science-projects-never-make-it-into-production/amp/

How light affects your performance

Dr. Andrew D. Huberman, a neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, states that neural retina, which is mainly known for sensing the shapes and motion, has an another important feature as sensing the light in the environment. Neural retina, lying outside the skull without connected the brain, controls our alertness, patterns like sleeping and digesting through light sensing.

As opposed to the common obsession about the blue light, any light, especially bright light between 11pm and 4am impacts one’s performance as it has a punishment effect on the brain by suppressing dopamine. Dopamine is one of the brain’s rewards mechanism to reinforce neuroplasticity (brain’s ability to form synaptic connections) for achieving goals, and thus promote action and growth mindset. Furthermore, dopamine is not only released when the goal is achieved but also when any action towards that goal is accomplished.

Brain is a differential engine. It is not the light spectrum that is relayed to the brain but the contrast between blue and yellow lights during sunrise and sunset. That’s why watching the sunrise and sunrise has a regulating effect and rewards the brain.

Uncovering images in Beamer presentation

Some text
\uncover<2->{
\includegraphics[]{img}
}

does not work. Graphic is included even in the first frame. Instead use:
\onslide<1-2>{
Some text
}
\invisible<1>{
\includegraphics[]{img}
}
Reference:

• http://old.nabble.com/Uncovering-figures-td14785368.html

Lyx IEEE Journal and Conference layout

These are the steps I followed to use IEEE formatting in Lyx:

• Create IEEEtran directory
• Download the latex file IEEEtran2.tar.gz from IEEE site and extract
• Create a subdirectory named “bibtex”
• Download the bibtex file IEEEtranBST1.tar.gz from the same IEEE site to this directory and extract
• For Ubuntu, move IEEEtran directory to /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/ and run texhash (requires sudo)
• Run Lyx->Tools->Reconfigure and restart Lyx.
• You should be able to select IEEEtran from Document Settings.

References

• Adding IEEEtran to your Lyx/LaTeX setup

Changing the paragraph environment using keyboard

From Lyx Wiki Tips:

Steering the mouse pointer to the paragraph environment drop-down menu in order to get out of an enumerate or itemize environment was starting to annoy me, especially on the road without a mouse. Fortunately, there is a solution (which apparently is undocumented, at least I couldn’t find it):

Quoting Paul from the mailing list: “M-p (alt-p) followed by a space opens the environment list. From there, repeatedly typing the same letter cycles through all environment names starting with that letter.”

phpmyadmin access problem

All of a sudden I started to get the following error:

#1045 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

whenever I tried to access to mysql database through phpmyadmin. I have been using it flawless for very long time.

I modified the following file:

/var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

by changing

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';

to

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';

and everything is working fine now.

Perl DBI – Some usefull commands

Return a reference to column names

$name = $sth->{NAME};

Number of affected rows

$sth->rows();

New auto-incremented id

$latestId = $dbh->{‘mysql_insertid’}

Uploading large data. ‘INSERT INTO’ command takes long amount of time. Use ‘LOAD DATA’ command to upload bulk data from a text file.

• Be careful. If the file to be uploaded resides on the server, it still needs to be accessible by the mysql server. E.g. you can place them under /tmp
• You can specify NULL characters by ‘\N’, e.g. “9,\N,276,John…”

Perl: Some usefull tips

Some handy Perl commands that is not used as much.

Use ‘-‘ to refer to STDOUT & STDIN.

open(INP, ‘-‘) —> STDIN
open(OUT, ‘>-) —> STDOUT
$fh = IO::File->new(‘-‘,’w’) —> STDOUT

Following the filehandle with ‘-|’ opens the output of a shell command as a file.

open($fh, ‘-|’, ‘ls -l’);
open($fh, ‘-|’, ‘cat tmp.txt | sort’);

Similarly IO::Pipe can be used to get the same affect:

$fh = new IO::Pipe;
$fh->reader(qw(ls -l));

Then you can print the output

while (<$fh>) { print; }

Open a zipped file

open(INP, ‘-|’, ‘gunzip < tmp.txt.gz’);

Print the output of a subroutine inside a string

print “3+4 is @{ [addTwoNumbers(3,4)] }\n”;

Use IO::File to store filehandles into a hash array.

$fh{‘infile’} = IO:File->new(“tmp.txt”, “r”);
while (my $line = $fh{‘infile’}->getline) {
print $line;
}
$fh{‘infile’}->close;