Example of speeding up training with AR and IOT

StaceyOnIOT has a nice post on how AR and IOT are used to improve the training process during these times of Covid.

The end result is good.

Wileman said that the company hires some 50 new people a year and saves about $1,200 per employee in training costs. So while PBC still has a hiring challenge, it is able to use IoT, robotics, and AR to get new staff trained more quickly and at a lower cost, which makes it less painful when those staff members eventually leave.

And the nice thing is the AR is being used to harvest the knowledge of the experienced.

AR helps scale the expertise held by an older employee or the maker of the machine by turning that expertise into software and sharing it, via heads-up displays, to any new worker.

With Covid AR and VR are all getting more traction.

Another shift for Gen Z thinking, files and folders are old concepts

The Verge has a post making the observation that the Gen Z as a group do not use files and folders the way past have done. The last paragraph highlights the change.

His advice to fellow educators: Get ready. “This is not gonna go away,” he says. “You’re not gonna go back to the way things were. You have to accept it. The sooner that you accept that things change, the better.”

What is the change? Many more students do not think like paper processes which has files and folders. The concept of a file cabinet is obsolete like a fax machine.

Professors have a hard time with this issue.

It’s a difficult concept to get across, though. Directory structure isn’t just unintuitive to students — it’s so intuitive to professors that they have difficulty figuring out how to explain it. “Those of us who have been around a while know what a file is, but I was at a bit of a loss to explain it,”

There are so many things that Gen Z does differently than the older people and getting Gen Z to do things the way things have always been done will just get harder.

Example of Gen Z difference - Phone on vibrate

My kids are 19 and 17 and they both have their phones on vibrate so I am aware of this habit, but until The Guardian put this article out I did realize how big this habit is.

A survey has found only a fraction of 16- to 24-year-olds think phone calls are remotely important - so they’ve put their phones on vibrate

…

Well, actually, loud ringtones are over. A survey by the tech analyst Sensor Tower has shown that the number of ringtone downloads slumped by almost a quarter in the UK between 2016 and 2020 – from 4.6m to 3.7m.

The data shows less ring tones. And also part of the vibrate is hiding the amount of time they r being contacted.

Analysts also said teenagers prefer to have their phone on vibrate or get messages and calls via their smartwatches or Fitbits, so their parents – or their teachers – don’t know what’s going on.

Who remembers phone numbers any more? Remember when you had to dial phone numbers. Now you tell your phone who to dial or you use another app that has your contacts in it.

What seems to be coming soon is a time when you will get a phone with no phone number. You will have a data connection. Are Telcos ready for that? How much of their business is built on the regulatory issues of phone numbers?

And some of the earliest adopters of phones without phone numbers are the Gen Z and younger.

Microsoft announces its latest Green Data Center efforts July 2021

Microsoft has a blog post on its latest green data center efforts here.

The document is pretty long.

Reading the document it has elements of what Google has done with its data centers and what Apple has done in its supply chain.

It was good to see that Axios picked up on the blog feed and wrote their own piece to spread the news.

Microsoft pledges to run global data centers on zero-carbon energy by 2030

Microsoft Teams for mobile collaboration, most Microsoft employees cannot use the feature

Yesterday I had a video call with a construction executive. When interacting with construction people it is a safe bet to use Microsoft Teams as they standardize on the Microsoft platform and teams is part of their IT environment.

Here are a few problems that we had and the choices we decided to make to resolve the issues.

First problem is I had sent the meeting link and he was driving in the car so wanted to join with an audio bridge. He could not find the audio bridge, and that is when I realized I had not added the audio bridge service to the Microsoft Teams environment. This gives you the toll free number and meeting id, etc. to join. Digging through the documentation and how to add the audio conferencing service. But, chatting with one of our other team members who is also a system administrator, we decide not to add the audio bridge.

Eventually the executive got to his home office and was able to join the Microsoft Teams meeting. All was good. And in discussions he wanted to share pictures of construction work that he had on his phone. He has an iPhone and Windows PC so he has does not the ease of sharing pictures on his phone to a Teams call. so he was holding up his phone to the PC camera. The next day realized what is much better is to have his iPhone join the Microsoft Teams call and he can share directly from his phone and use the camera on the phone to show other things. And this is how he can use the audio only feature when he is in the car.

Microsoft Research had developed the phone device joining a Teams call feature 3 years ago and here is their Youtube Video

When I was chatting about this feature to a Microsoft employee they said oh most of us cannot use that feature because only managed devices can join the internal Microsoft Teams environment. No personal devices can join, iPads, iPhones, Androids.

Luckily my construction friend should not have this problem. So If he has Microsoft Teams on his iPhone he can click on the link and join audio only or add screen sharing and camera sharing. This makes so much more sense to young people who would be puzzled why would you try to dial in a number to get in a meeting. Just get the app on your phone and click on the link.

Gen Z looks at phone calls and email as old school. And an audio bridge seems a strange way to join a call.