Workism Is Making Americans Miserable →

Workism offers a perilous trade-off. On the one hand, Americans' high regard for hard work may be responsible for its special place in world history and its reputation as the global capital of start-up success. A culture that worships the pursuit of extreme success will likely produce some of it. But extreme success is a falsifiable god, which rejects the vast majority of its worshippers. Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.

One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

New teamwork and security capabilities for Microsoft 365 Government →

In February 2018, we launched Microsoft 365 Government to empower government agencies to collaborate and be productive while meeting their security and compliance requirements, including FedRamp, CJIS, IRS 1075, ITAR, DFAR, and NIST. As part of our continued investment to Microsoft 365 Government, today we're pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 Government cloud environments.

While Teams has been available in the Government Community Cloud (GCC), today we are announcing the availability of Teams in GCC High and Department of Defense (DoD) environments. Teams is built to meet the enhanced security and compliance requirements of government agencies, which can now better deliver against their mission and provide services to citizens and constituents.

It sounds like corporate-speak, but this is the culmination of two years of architectural changes and infrastructure work involving new identity management systems, security scanning solutions, network architectures and capabilities, and deployment technologies in partnership with eight teams in four divisions including Azure, Office, Skype, and Teams. There are some real heros involved in all the systems integration work, documentation, security and compliance reviews, and troubleshooting that went along with deploying 60+ Azure microservices in a locked-down environment.

We're pleased that U.S. government agencies at the local, tribal, state, and federal levels now have a modern, productive, and secure communications platform.

I'm extraordinarily proud to have been part of this effort and to hopefully have helped the government run a little more efficiently. On to DEOS!

Nvidia AI turns sketches into photorealistic landscapes in seconds →

Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic:

What if All the World's Economic Woes Are Part of the Same Problem? →

Interesting hypothesis on the interconnectedness of global economic challenges.

The faces of Microsoft : Type Magazine →

More detail than you could ever want to know about the people and history behind the typography teams at Microsoft.

The Fireworks King →

Roughly 70 percent of all Chinese fireworks entering the United States come here under the control of a Chinese businessman who has used his influence to raise prices and block competitors, leaving many U.S. executives fearful of losing access to their most important Fourth of July inventories.

The Best Way To Save People From Suicide →

[Jerome Motto] was the only American to devise an experiment that dramatically reduced suicide deaths. His technique didn't involve a complicated thousand-page manual to follow or $1 billion in pharmaceutical research and development. All he did was send occasional letters to those at risk.

Study after study has shown our well-being, mental health, and ability to resist addiction correlated with our connectedness to one another or our sense of isolation. See also Rat Park.

Rembrandt in the Blood: An Obsessive Aristocrat, Rediscovered Paintings and an Art-World Feud →

An interesting detour into the world of old masters.

This is Microsoft's AI pipeline, from research to reality →

It's not enough to have brilliant researchers and a bunch of popular products. You've got to have a system - or several systems - for melding raw technology into experiences that make a difference for businesses and consumers.

Cool look into how some of the Artificial Intelligence efforts within Microsoft have taken off.

Open Federal Data is Now the Law of the Land →

Federal agencies must publish all public data in a machine-readable format and appoint chief data officers to oversee open data efforts under a new law.