Modern utility companies face an imperative for transformation of their operations as they grapple with increasing energy demands, environmental concerns and the evolving technological expectations of consumers. There’s also a raft of legislation that needs to be observed, plus an omnipresent need to modernise infrastructure. Finally, geopolitical events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and economic uncertainties are introducing unpredictability into energy supply chains.

Data, analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) can be harnessed to enhance operational efficiency and deliver customers a more sustainable and responsive service. The adoption of these technologies by utility companies can also improve safety, enhance the employee experience and uncover new revenue streams.

Prioritisation is key in this situation; after all, funds are not infinite. But utilities also have the potential to be massive data gatherers, from their plant and infrastructure, their delivery methods, consumers, end-users and business operations.

Source: Shutterstock

In some cases, there needs to be a shift in mindset with regard to the information gathered and used by utility companies. TechHQ recently spoke to Wipro – a company in multiple partnerships with UK utilities – about the challenges and approaches their consultants and architects see daily.

The company’s Director of Digital Transformation, Sampathkumaran Hariharan, said: “The data gathered from the field is impacted by the kind of equipment and sensors that have been deployed over a long period of time. Many of the utilities have not refreshed the data-gathering mechanisms from the field. But even from an operational point of view, the information about the customer is also maintained in multiple systems.”

Sampathkumaran Hariharan. Source: LinkedIn

“The customer has not been the centre of data acquisition over a long period of time. Utilities have traditionally been an asset-centric organisation. The emphasis on being a customer-centric organisation is heavily emphasised by the regulator and the frameworks the regulator has. So there is a transitioning that is happening within the industry.”

All over the UK, water companies are becoming more responsive to their customers’ demands for less water wastage from existing pipe infrastructures. Wipro’s use of advanced machine learning algorithms helps one UK water utility monitor 600 DMAs (Digital Metered Areas) to identify those zones where leaks are a substantial issue. IoT devices monitor flow rate and pressure, and with data on the geometrical structure of the network (routes, pipe diameters, existing gate valves, etc.), software can predict pipe burst events and detect major leakage anomalies in pilot the utility’s sites.

Proactive maintenance and infrastructure replacement mean less water is lost to leaks, and critically, water supplies are better ensured to customers at home and in the workplace.

Further up the chain, the combination of OT (operational technology) and IT helps translate collated data and convert it for use by distribution network operators. This amalgamation of new technology with legacy infrastructure combines localised DCS (distributed control system) and geographically widespread SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) data to create next-generation ADMS (advanced distribution management system) solutions.  These solutions are more suited to the highly flexible approach to electricity distribution required for future generations.

Technology also elevates both the customer and employee experiences; utility personnel benefit from streamlined workflows and data-driven insights, while customers receive more personalised services and access to real-time information through smart home utility meters. Furthermore, integrating state-of-the-art technologies creates the potential for new revenue streams, such as energy efficiency consulting and water quality certification services, increasing the longevity of these critical sectors.

Data is the lifeblood of transformation in the utility, transport & distribution (T&D) and water sectors. It powers informed decision-making, bespoke services for customers and efficient resource allocation, to name just a few benefits. However, this data is next to useless if the company does not have the capability, facilitated by a robust data platform, to turn it into actionable insights.

Data-driven approaches can lead a company to embrace ‘Industry 4.0’, or the integration of IT systems with business processes. For example, say a utilities company installed advanced sensors across its power grid infrastructure; it could then apply predictive maintenance models that identify potential equipment failures before they occur. These insights could be integrated into its IT systems, allowing for automated alerts and maintenance scheduling.

Traditional operational threat (OT) practices in the utilities industry primarily focus on monitoring and managing industrial processes and equipment. However, recent technological advancements offer new benefits, particularly in the context of real-time remote sensor data. These sensors provide authorities with detailed and reliable information about damaged locations or faulty equipment, which is especially crucial during emergencies when swift action can be a matter of life and death.

The introduction of hydrogen into the UK’s power infrastructure is an area that’s being pioneered by some companies in collaboration with Wipro. It’s a critically important player in this type of research that has the ability to change the ways in which power and heat are delivered to UK homes and businesses.

Ankit Sharma. Source: LinkedIn

Ankit Sharma, Account Executive at Wipro, said: “Recently, we brought together a number of industry bodies, Ofgem, and a lot of network players, retailers, and so on, all to talk about hydrogen and how we were going to help support [its] use, how we were going to integrate, how that would work, how we use that heat in all forms in the industry.”

“But it’s really important that we look at how to integrate [hydrogen] and other renewable energy sources – wind, solar, and so on – and reduce the reliance on the carbon-intensive power generation that we currently have to support our net zero commitments.”

As IT methods are applied to the management of OT environments in enterprise, including utility sectors, further possibilities are opening up thanks to data collection and digitisation in general.

“I think what utility companies have to now look at is how we have efficient workforce management as well,” said Mr Sharma. “That means how they are geared up for the challenge from a grid maintenance perspective, and also how they are looking out for the new skills that are coming within the market. How do you upskill workforces on that?”

For utility T&D and water companies specifically, industrial IOT (IIoT) and the power of data lakes enable the shift from periodic or manual analysis to real-time monitoring of significant assets and processes, like transformers, pipelines and water treatment facilities, plus a host of other operational factors, from financing, accountancy, HR and logistics. These are just a few examples of how the incorporation of carefully chosen IT opens up more efficient and cost-effective work practices.

The future of utility companies relies on data, analytics and the IIoT. As conditions become more challenging, through growing energy demands and environmental concerns, embracing digital innovation is essential. With the integration of IT and OT and business goals that dictate technology choices, utility companies can adapt, thrive, and remain competitive in an evolving yet challenging landscape.

You can listen to the full podcast here, and check out the show notes for links and more information on Wipro’s work in the sector in the UK and abroad.

In the interim, visit Wipro’s website to find out more about its work within the utilities industry.

The post Future-proofing utility companies: The role of data, analytics and IoT appeared first on TechHQ.

• An SEO optimization checklist is unavoidable in web publishing.
• Using older posts can breathe new life into rankings
• Don’t fall into the ‘AI’ trap.

One of the realities of website publishing today is that the visibility of your content is determined to a large degree by the algorithms that surface a site in an online search. Optimizing your website for the best results is, therefore, a part of online publishing as integral as good grammar and an attractive writing style. Using an SEO optimization checklist can help you achieve reliable results.

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Google search sucks, thanks SEO

And while it’s true that ‘Google is not the internet,’ SEO has to be embraced if you’re at all interested in as many people as possible reading your content and absorbing your message. Google and many other search engines have their own agenda in terms of what they surface most readily, but among the carefully constructed caveats and provisos designed to shape the modern internet’s content to their own ends, many SEO ‘rules’ comprise aspects of a page that include readability, legibility for assistive web tools, relevancy, popularity and the freshness of information. Taken objectively, these are generally positive influences on websites’ content.

It’s easy to fall too far into the website optimization pit. Sites written primarily with SERP (search engine results pages) in mind are easy to spot – repetitive use of keywords in body text and sub-headings, plus very little interesting content, are key indicators. However, it is possible to strike a balance between the value of your content to actual human readers and its perceived value for search algorithms. One way to help achieve this is to ensure that older content is refreshed.

Source: Fosstodon.org

Refreshing content should not necessarily mean re-spinning it, (that is, rewriting each sentence, swapping out adjectives for synonyms, swapping main and subordinate clauses, and so on).

Content creators should consider refreshing content as a revision process with particular emphasis on bringing the page’s pertinent information up-to-date. In that way, your readers learn from text and media that are more timely, and Google et al. see refreshed content that will, hopefully, be of more interest to readers today.

Finding stagnant pages on websites is a relatively trivial task. Content creation dates supplied by your website’s back end are the obvious metric to begin with, and these can be correlated with analytics from your internal analysis tools.

Most articles receive a spike in interest on publication, then fade away. For news-based content, that’s the natural order of things. Less time-dependent pages could be good targets for a virtual spring clean and spruce-up.

Here’s our search engine optimization checklist for revitalizing the dusty corners of your website.

Updating links and resources

One of the basic tenets of HTML is that text can be represented as hypertext, one aspect of which is that documents are linked. Finding more relevant, up-to-date references and restructuring the sentences around the reference is a great way to bring content forward to the present. Additionally, if what’s being referenced is a field that changes (academic research, for example), readers will appreciate the latest information.

Similarly, it’s worth refreshing your content to reflect changing opinions, either your own or those of the vertical about which you are writing. This type of edit can be made obvious, with clear demarcation, using italics or indented text to tell readers that the article has been updated.

The changing rules

All search engine optimization is guesswork where self-proclaimed experts attempt to backward engineer the closed algorithms used by large search engines. Like any form of guesswork, there are specialists out there whose guesses are better than others, the quality determined by long experience and dedicated testing of changes to content.

But rules of SEO evolve, and it’s worth re-approaching your text and media with a fresh eye that’s informed by some research into what is, as of the present, current practice. It may be that previously optimized web pages need to be changed to reflect current guidelines for best SERP rankings – at which point, you need to update your SEO optimization checklist.

A prime example is readability. Because much web consumption now takes place on mobile devices, ‘readability’ can mean that shorter paragraphs interspersed with carefully chosen media have the advantage over thick walls of text (which are difficult to read on a moving bus, for example). Changing your pages’ structure may be advantageous within the limits of house style.

Here’s one. “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks” by Fouquier ॐ is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Not using large language models

Like any other tool, using a large language model (Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.) can be effective in certain circumstances. LLMs act as relatively useful proxies for web searches, so if you’re looking to find supporting materials for your pages, LLMs can unearth nuggets of information that would otherwise take much longer to find using ‘traditional’ search.

But if we consider the text output of LLMs to be an amalgam of available information online, their output should not be used to create original content. By pulling together many thousands of websites for learning, LLMs produce literally average output. The models are poor at differentiating useful information from third-rate content, and so produce something in the middle: the sum mean.

Given that your content should be unique and informative rather than only readable, using ChatGPT to write for you is wrong on every level.

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Journalists and writers are facing redundancy in swathes as short-term profits are prioritized by companies that are happy to embrace second-rate content. If you’re happy with human expression being replaced by algorithms that regurgitate other people’s work (or, more accurately, predict what the next word in a sentence is likely to be, based on other people’s work), then LLMs are a fine choice. You may also want to use the phrase artificial intelligence incorrectly.

Conclusions

Whether your web pages promote a commercial product or express your inner life, it’s worth bearing in mind that the ’web was, and should be, concerned with the dissemination of information. While going through an SEO optimization checklist for best SERP rankings is, in 2024, an undeniable necessity, that fact need not reduce the overall quality of your offerings.

A giant roadside billboard may begin to look dated in terms of its color palette, font choices, strapline, or imagery. Changing those elements to bring a billboard into present relevancy need not change its message. Websites’ pages can be considered similarly.

The post Teaching old dogs new SEO tricks appeared first on TechHQ.

• Observability solutions are key to making sound tech choices in 2024.
• In particular, without observability solutions, it can be hard to gauge the success of your GenAI investments.
• Dynatrace at Vegas announced its latest solutions to the problems enterprises are facing.

Last week the world went to Las Vegas – where Dynatrace held its annual conference. If you missed it, don’t worry too much: we can’t quite recreate the atmosphere of the main stage, but there were a ton of exciting announcements to share.

Dynatrace started out as just a product but over the years has grown into the giant it is today, making waves as an all-purpose business analysis and business intelligence platform. After a year of huge digital transformation and industry-wide tectonic shifts, it was only logical to make this year’s conference theme “Make waves.”

It’s easy to broadly gesture at the changes the past year saw, but Rick McConnell, Dynatrace CEO, summarized some megatrends that the whole industry bought into.

Rick McConnell explains why Dynatrace is different.

Cloud modernization. We’ve all established cloud services – kinda. The tech industry is, as of right now, 20% cloud-based. Outside of that, the world is only 10% there; the scale of cloud services at this stage has seen a reduction in cost and improved customer satisfaction and user experience.

Hyperscaler growth. Having grown by 50%, it’s no wonder that tis area has hit $200bn annual revenue.

Artificial Intelligence. Yup, unsurprisingly. Dynatrace’s insights aren’t unsurprising, though: AI became as ubiquitous as digital transformation in 2023, growing to be an essential pillar in business.

Threat protection. AI is crucial to driving this. Threat protection is paramount in the current climate borne of exploding workloads and ways of accessing them: many professionals don’t realize that their business is operating on a huge great threat landscape.

It shouldn’t need explaining why cloud management is so important, then. Not only should it be closely monitored but optimized, too. Optimizing cloud cost isn’t only an economics game as the climate emergency makes environmental cost key to the bigger picture.

Bernd Greifeneder, Dynatrace CTO, admitted that often, environmental impact is the concern of younger engineers. That doesn’t mean they should be left alone to their green coding!

With stats like this, shouldn’t older engineers be worried too?

Optimized sustainability is enabled by visibility; you can’t change what you can’t measure. Observability solutions solve the visibility issue, but what else can be done?

That’s where the first big announcement comes in: Dynatrace is teaming up with Lloyds Banking Group to reduce IT carbon emissions. Using insights and feedback from Lloyds Banking Group, Dynatrace will further develop Dynatrace® Carbon Impact.

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The app translates usage metrics – the likes of CPU, memory, disk, and network I/O – into CO2 equivalents (CO2e). That measurement is unique to Dynatrace, which stands out above other offerings that use only vague calculations to deliver a number representing CO2 usage.

With Dynatrace, energy and CO2 consumption is detailed per source, with in-app filters allowing users to narrow focus to high-impact areas, and actionable guidance provided to help reduce overall IT carbon footprint.

Our interview with Bernd details this more closely.

Observability solutions for artificial intelligence

We all expected AI announcements to some extent. What Dynatrace revealed, though, is a market-first: observability for AI.

So far, Dynatrace has stood out from the pack with its own AI usage: the Davis Hypermodal AI model with a core of predictive and causal AI has established user trust, something that the industry in general has seen lost to the hallucinations of generative AI.

The new Davis copilot, which utilizes GenAI, is offered alongside the existing core to let customers ask questions in natural language and get deep custom analysis in under 60 seconds.

Not all companies have applied AI capabilities in such a thoughtful way. In fact, in the rush not to be left behind, businesses have utilized AI – for lack of better phrasing – willy-nilly.

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More from the Digital Transformation Conference spring edition

So, the leader in unified observability and security has stepped in to offer an extension of its analytics and automation platform to provide observability and security for LLMs and genAI-powered applications.

There’s money in AI, but businesses have no way of measuring return on their AI application – how can you tell whether GenAI is providing what your company needs?

Dynatrace AI Observability uses Davis AI to deliver exactly the overview necessary to ensure organizations can identify performance bottlenecks and root causes automatically, while providing their own customers with the improved user experience that AI offers.

With the not-so-small issue of privacy and security in the realm of AI, Dynatrace also ensures users’ compliance with regulations and governance by letting them to trace the origins of their apps’ output. Finally, costs can be forecast and controlled using Dynatrace’s AI Observability by monitoring token consumption.

Organizations can’t afford to ignore the potential of generative AI. Without comprehensive AI observability solutions, though, how can their generative AI investments succeed? How else would they avoid the risk of unpredictable behaviors, AI “hallucinations,” and bad user experiences?

If you’re skeptical about accepting this truth from the company selling the product, Eve Psalti from Microsoft AI gave her own advice on adopting the new technology: start small! Application needs to be iterated and optimized – by definition, LLMs are large! It’s literally the first L of the acronym. Observability, then, is the answer.

Achieving observability with Dynatrace

Ensuring that observability is complete means that any question should be answerable, near instantly. Scale should be adoptable in an easy, frictionless way. In the business of trust, Dynatrace provides low-touch automated response.

The complexity of the current environment and struggles with data ingest, including maintaining consistency, security, and keeping cost down have a solution: Dynatrace OpenPipeline.

The third announcement, saved for day two of proceedings, aims to be a data pump for up to 1000 terabytes of data a day. The new core technology provides customers with a single pipeline (hence the name, funnily enough) to manage petabyte-scale data ingestion into the Dynatrace platform.

Hey, you, get onto my cloud… Things the Rolling Stones never knew.

Gartner studies show that modern workloads are generating increasing volumes of telemetry, from a variety of sources. “The cost and complexity associated with managing this data can be more than $10 million per year in large enterprises.”

The list of capabilities is extensive: petabyte scale data analytics; unified data ingest; real-time data analytics on ingest; full data context; controls for privacy and security; cost-effective data management.

One particularly exciting offering, though, is the ease of data deletion. Few appreciate how difficult complete data deletion is, but with Dynatrace they may never have to learn. Data disappears at a click.

All external data that goes onto the Dynatrace platform is also vetted for quality, so observability comes with the assurance that everything is of high enough quality.

Customers can vouch for Dynatrace solutions

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Even more from the Digital Transformation Conference

Don’t just take it from us, though. Throughout the event – peppered, by the way, with Vegas vibez – we heard from Dynatrace customers to get an idea of how companies can benefit from the various packages on offer.

One such client is Village Roadshow Entertainment – the name might ring a bell for movie lovers. The Australia-based company had been using disparate tools and was “plagued” by background issues; unable to identify what was causing system implosions, a ‘switch it off and on again’ approach meant almost weekly IT catastrophes.

Luckily, by the time the Barbenheimer flashpoint hit cinemas globally, Village Roadshow had Dynatrace’s help. The platform helped truncate unnecessary data, speeding up processes and allowing things to run smoothly – for cinema staff and customers – on the biggest day for the industry in years.

Just as importantly, onboarding with Dynatrace was smooth and didn’t require too much upskilling – a side of IT that is critical to businesses, but not acknowledged by many departments.

The Grail unified storage solution at Dynatrace’s core provides not just a way to visualize data but to make data exploration accessible to everyone, regardless of skill level and work style.

With templates enabling users to build an observability dashboard that makes sense to them, Dynatrace’s new interactive user interface coupled with Davis AI means deep analysis is available even to novices.

Segmentation allows data to be split into manageable chunks and organized contextually. Decision-making is thus accelerated, and the enhancements offered by Dynatrace speed up onboarding.

We were also lucky enough to speak to Alex Hibbitt of albelli Photobox, another Dynatrace client – he was awarded Advocate of the Year on the final day of the conference.

Five years ago, when he joined Photobox, the company was using a cloud platform that was primarily lift and shift. Now, Alex says the company’s on the road to building a truly cloud-native ecommerce platform to power what Photobox does.

“As an organization who sells people’s memories… the customer journey, the customer experience is really, really important to us, [and] drives fundamentals of how we make money.”

Before Dynatrace, huge amounts of legacy technology coupled with efforts to go cloud native created a behemoth that only a few engineers – Alex being one of them – had the context necessary to understanding it.

For the sake of his sanity, something had to change: Alex “couldn’t be on call 24/7 all the time – it was just exhausting.”

What Photobox needed was a technology partner that could cover the old and the new but, beyond the traditional monitoring paradigm, provide something truly democratized and take some of the strain off engineers.

Having already covered Dynatrace’s observability solutions – newly announced and not – it should be clear why they were the solution for Photobox’s issues and why Alex advocates for Dynatrace!

There’s more coverage on Dynatrace Perform on its way: come back for interviews with Bernd Greifeneder and Stefan Greifeneder.

The post Dynatrace Perform: here’s what you missed appeared first on TechHQ.

AI may be threatening to wipe out jobs like a ten-pin bowler chasing a perfect score, but there are applications that even union leaders would agree are a force for good. And one of those is the ability of deep learning models to steer container ships away from the perils of giant waves.

If you’ve ever seen a shipping container up close, it’s hard to imagine how such a thing – weighing over two tons empty and capable of carrying a maximum payload of more than 28 tons – could tumble from its bay into the ocean. However, 2,301 containers were lost each year on average (from 2020 to 2022), according to World Shipping Council records [PDF].

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One of the reasons for these losses is structural failure, but the biggest culprits are so-called rogue waves arising from natural ocean phenomena. What’s more, shipping captains can have little warning that conditions are about to become dangerous.

The master of the Queen Elizabeth 2 reportedly said that an almost 100 ft high wave ‘came out of nowhere and looked like the White Cliffs of Dover’, while sailing across the North Atlantic in 1995.

Freakishly large waves form when wave systems cross each other and trigger a process dubbed linear superposition. “If two wave systems meet at sea in a way that increases the chance to generate high crests followed by deep troughs, the risk of extremely large waves arises,” explains Dion Häfner – a Senior Research Engineer at Pasteur Labs in New York, US.

AI as a force for good

Häfner is first author in a study titled ‘Machine-Guided Discovery of a Real-World Rogue Wave Model’ submitted to arXiv in November 2023 and published in PNAS. And together with colleagues at the Institute for Simulation Intelligence –which is staffed by ‘industry-hardened experts in AI and computational sciences’ from organziations such as Deepmind, Cerebras, CERN, NASA, and other centers of excellence – they wondered whether AI could be used as a force for good to enable safer shipping.

At any given time, there can be as many as 50,000 cargo vessels navigating the waters around our planet and the goods that they carry are essential to global supply chains. The team’s goal was to provide shipping operators, and anyone with an interest in conditions out at sea, with an accurate prediction of the likelihood of giant waves.

Underpinning the group’s work, is a framework known as a causal directed acyclic graph, which takes a series of environmental conditions and relates them to sea state parameters. In turn, those sea state parameters give rise to physical effects, which can be converted into observations.

“The probability to measure a rogue wave based on the sea state can be modelled as a sum of nonlinear functions, each of which only depends on a subset of the sea state parameters representing a different causal path,” write the researchers in their paper.

Neural networks are able to model these nonlinear functions beautifully. And the group was able to feed its many-layered architecture with training data to adjust all of the various parameters. There’s a wealth of measurements and historical records that can be used to teach the model what inputs are likely to result in dangerous conditions.

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The team made use of its Free Ocean Wave Dataset, which had been prepared previously for exactly this task and involved processing a buoy data catalog containing information on 4 billion waves. Of those, around 100,000 fall into the category of being potentially deadly rogue waves, which translates to around one per day occurring somewhere out at sea.

AI’s ability to spot patterns and encode the underlying causality into hidden layers that form deep neural networks becomes a force for good when directed at problems such as the prediction of supply chain disruption.

“As shipping companies plan their routes well in advance, they can use our algorithm to get a risk assessment of whether there is a chance of encountering dangerous rogue waves along the way. Based on this, they can choose alternative routes,” Häfner points out.

The post AI giant wave predictor – a force for good appeared first on TechHQ.

• Pick a broadband provider with care.
• Which of the most popular providers in the UK has the most complaints?
• Welcome to the Xbox Pass “glitch.”

In the mood to change your broadband provider? After some gossip? We’ve got you sorted.

In the UK, BT customers have been taking to the broadband provider’s online forums for months to complain that they’ve been signed up to – and charged for – an Xbox Game Pass. An additional £10 per month appeared on their bills – despite their not requesting the subscription.

Some customers noticed the extra charge by checking their bills, while others received emails thanking them for activating the subscription.

The email “confirmation” that some customers received for an Xbox pass they didn’t want.

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“We’re very sorry that the customers mentioned in this article have had Xbox Game Pass Ultimate added to their account without their knowledge,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

Having apologized, BT advised customers to stay alert to similar problems.

“We recommend that all of our customers remain vigilant and if they notice changes to their account that are suspicious, to contact us as soon as possible to report this.

“We will support and guide them on how to take steps to ensure their account is secure.”

Which isn’t all that reassuring. It puts the emphasis for vigilance clearly on the customer, rather than the provider.

The reason the charges are being added is unclear, although you’d need a fair amount of anti-capitalist degree of paranoia to come up with a solid reasons why it might be happening maliciously. The scale of the issue is also unknown. One person discovered the extra charge as recently as Tuesday, while there’s evidence of complaints as far back as October 2023.

A BBC employee who was affected by the issue was informed by customer services that it was a “known issue.”

Also affect by the issue, Sue, contacted BT after noticing the discrepancy in her internet bill. “Xbox Game Pass had been added to my accounts without my consent – I thought that’s so odd, because I don’t even have an Xbox.”

She assumed she’d been hacked and called the broadband provider, who informed her that it was a BT issue. Sue was refunded but worries that less vigilant customers will pay for the service unknowingly.

Craig in Aberdeen said he found out about the charge when he received an email from BT and contacted the firm over its webchat service.

He was told the error was an issue between BT and Microsoft, “where this was being kind of randomly enabled and activated on people’s accounts,” he said.

“It says in the terms and conditions that there’s no free period with this – you are immediately charged. My concern is this might not just be me, this might be lots of other people who perhaps don’t really notice you get an email through.”

The surreptitious additions may have worked in BT’s favor, as Virgin Media takes top spot as the most complained about broadband, landline phone and pay-tv service in the UK, getting 32 complaints per 100,000 broadband customers between July and September 2023.

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Ah, so before the whole BT Xbox pass thing, then.

According to Ofcom, a factor in Virgin Media’s high number of complaints was the regulator’s announcement in July 2023 that it was launching an investigation into difficulties cancelling contracts with the firm – and how it handled complaints.

“As well as engaging fully with Ofcom’s ongoing investigation, we are investing in every area of our business to give our customers the best possible experience, with a real focus on resolving any issues at the first time of getting in touch and making it easier for them to get support when they need it,” a Virgin Media O2 spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Sky was the best-performing broadband provider, only receiving five complaints per 100,000 customers. NOW broadband and TalkTalk were with Virgin Media in getting higher-than-average numbers of complaints for their landline services. NOW broadband also got an above average number of broadband complaints – although Fergal Farragher, Ofcom’s consumer protection director, said there had been an overall “slight increase in complaints” compared with the previous quarter.

The next quarter’s report will be an interesting one: does an unwanted Xbox pass warrant a higher complaint rate? If it doesn’t come with the console too, we’d imagine so.

The post Bad broadband isn’t just about WiFi speed appeared first on TechHQ.

IT networks have grown increasingly sophisticated over time, but – when it comes to efficiency and performance – plants and fungi remain leaders in the field of advanced communications. Not only that, nature’s IT network is self-assembling and fully biodegradable, and there are plenty of lessons to be learned for developers.

Researchers have been delving into the mechanisms at work, which allow crops to communicate with each other, and even recruit other living creatures to come to their aid when covered in predators. Literally rooted to the ground, plants have to face up to their attackers with no option of fleeing and seeking cover.

Nature’s IT network in action

Recently, entomologists have shown how tomato plants seek help using the transmission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). “When a caterpillar chews on a leaf, the plant sends out a signal that calls out to the caterpillar’s predators,” said Erinn Dady – first author in a study that reveals some tomato varieties to be more capable communicators than others. “It’s like a billboard that tells them where lunch is.”

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In the late 1990s, workers at the US Department of Agriculture discovered that corn seedlings could recruit parasitic wasps – capable of laying deadly eggs inside caterpillars attacking the maize – on demand. But that’s not all, as distress signals can be deciphered by multiple crops such as tobacco, chili peppers, beans, and cucumbers – to list just a few examples.

Plants can warn their neighbors if they become threatened, giving other plants more time to react. Electrical signals within an individual plant can propagate internally – a process that’s been found to be linked to an increase in calcium levels – so that connected leaves can release chemicals to deter unwanted bugs.

What’s more, when leaves in adjacent canopies touch, electrical signals can flow from one plant to another – particularly if there is water in the air and leaves are moist. The phenomenon has been dubbed network acquired acclimation and is just one example of plant connectivity.

Below the soil, plants strike a deal with mycelium – a fungal root network that can extend for kilometres – and receive a stream of nutrients in exchange for sugars derived from photosynthesis. The combination is a powerful one and has been shown to help stabilize heavy metals such as lead, which may otherwise pollute groundwater – a process known as phytoremediation.

Plus, there’s evidence that plants sharing common mycorrhizal (a term combining the Greek words for fungal and root) networks can eavesdrop on defence signals sent by their pathogen-challenged neighbours. Again, this buys plants more time to mount defenses before being attacked themselves.

Fungal computing

Mycelium has other properties too – arguably the most fascinating of which is being able to generate bursts of electrical spikes resembling neural signaling in the brain – which have captured the imagination of unconventional computing experts such as Andrew Adamatzky in the UK. And fungi are by no means the only ones transmitting within nature’s IT network, which also supports wireless broadcasts.

In 2023, using microphones capable of detecting frequencies beyond human hearing, agtech experts in Israel and the US discovered that plants emit ultrasonic airbourne sounds when stressed. And those sounds tell a story. “We developed machine learning models that succeeded in identifying the condition of the plants, including dehydration level and injury, based solely on the emitted sounds,” writes the team in the journal Cell.

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And, if you are curious to hear what talking tomatoes sound like, there’s a sound clip available here (via CNN), which has been sped up and treated to make it audible to the human ear.

Being able to listen and respond to plants – for example, when they are demanding more water – has obvious appeal in food production and could avoid the use of excess nutrients, saving resources. Also, monitoring the release of VOCs could signal when it’s time to apply pesticides or even distribute natural predators.

There’s a vast amount that we can learn from nature’s IT and those solutions will be a breath of fresh air given how much energy conventional computing infrastructure consumes and the difficulty in neutralizing the environmental impact of such technology.

The post Internet of tomatoes: how nature’s IT network could help agtech appeared first on TechHQ.

• A report on children’s online habits shows how important parental controls can be.
• Kids in America and the UK use TikTok for over two hours every day. 
• Parents are more concerned about their child’s online safety than ever before.

Qustodio’s report on children’s use of technology was released today, providing insight into the habits of the generation that’s adapting fastest to emerging technologies. The report investigates how young people use technology, analyzing the apps they use to provide insight into daily habits, as well as emerging trends and ongoing interests.

This year, the title of the report is Born connected: the rise of the AI generation. It looks into how kids and teens used online tools and apps across 2023, comparing their most-loved applications over a three-year period from 2021 to 2023.

The research focuses on children’s app use over five categories: online video, social media, gaming, education, and communication. The report also includes findings from the adults of the family, taking note of their and their kids’ views on how parental controls and technology fit into daily family life.

Qustodio is a global leader in online safety and digital wellbeing for families, and was founded in 2012 by cybersecurity experts Eduardo Cruz, Josep Gaspar, and Josh Gabel.

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We are living in a time with no distinction between on and offline; constant access to connectivity means that the internet is no longer confined to the family computer in the corner of the living room. That means technology is now much more convenient – but navigating the dangers that come with it is tricky.

Never before have children been raised with such constant access to the digital world. Children who can carry the internet with them wherever they go – and without a second thought.

The report is based on anonymous app and online tool usage provided from over 400,000 families with children aged 14-19 around the world.

Devices

The iPad kid is often conjured as an example of the way children interact with tech: completely zoned in on headache-causing graphics, grubby and absolutely inconsolable should the device be taken away.

As it turns out, having children in your home makes you more likely to own a tablet. 75% of US families with children under five have one, compared with just 57% among those without kids.

Keep taking the tablets…everywhere you go.

Parental controls are as much a part of family life as the devices that make them necessary, and just over one in four parents think parental controls should be implemented from when a child is under three – the age many toddlers are introduced to screentime in the form of TV, tablets, and YouTube.

Almost 25% of parents believe 7-9 is the right age to start using parental controls with their children, while 22% believe 10-12 is the ideal, coinciding with the average time a child is now given their own cell phone.

To put into context the speed at which technology use is changing for kids, in 2015 less than half (41%) of children owned a phone by age 12. Now, 75% of kids have a phone by 12, and 25% of 10-year-olds have their own phone.

A is for Apple… Photo: The Bump.

Parents ranked the risks that most made them want parental controls in order of most to least worrying. Exposure to adult content or pornography was the main concern, followed by online predation. In the US, 51% of teens report being exposed to porn accidentally by clicking a link, while in the UK online grooming crimes rose by over 80% between 2017 and 2022.

The third most concerning issue for parents was online addiction. 76% of parents assert that parental control tools give them more visibility over their child’s digital life. A further 76% acknowledge that using parental controls helps encourage healthier screen time habits and routines for their family.

Notably, 89% of families use parental controls to filter and block inappropriate content on children’s devices, and 85% to monitor overall screentime. Still – does that stand in for a more collaborative use of the internet?

42% of parents co-watch content with their kids, while only 18% co-play video games. Only 10% of parents sit with their child while they’re using the internet. Just under a third of parents follow their children on social media, and only one in five has ever logged into their child’s social media profile to ensure their online safety.

Carefully treading the line between fair oversight and a child’s privacy, only 7% of parents thought children 15 or younger should use devices with no form of online monitoring. The vast majority feel that 18+ is the age to stop.

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In the classroom, 72% of children now use some form of digital device for school: 28% bring their own device from home to school, while 44% use one provided by their school. Classroom technology use growing means there’s increasing need for a school-home connection that keeps kids’ use of educational devices safe and productive.

Changes are evidence of efforts to do this: in Spain an effort has been made to install Digital Wellbeing Coordinators in schools and the UK’s Department of Education has set specific filtering and monitoring standards for students.

Watching online video

Despite streaming price hikes and crackdowns on password sharing, kids’ time on online video platforms increased by 27% compared to 2022. Where they watched shifted too: Netflix use dropped 4%, Disney+ by 23% and Hulu by 12%. All three platforms upped their subscription prices during 2023.

Free services like YouTube and YouTube Kids beat records as screen time on both platforms rose – especially true for content geared towards younger children, with watch time for YouTube Kids rising globally by 14% and hitting a staggering daily average of 96 minutes, the highest number seen since Qustodio’s research began in the Before-Times of 2019.

France and Spain saw the highest YouTube usage (70% and 71% respectively), while only 58% of Australia’s children engaged with the platform.

Popular apps with children and teens – from Qustodio’s annual data report 2023.

Although it lost some loyalty, Netflix remains the most popular paid service among children – a bummer for Disney, presumably. All others, including Disney+, Amazon Prime and Hulu, experienced a popularity dip.

For the second year running, YouTube was the most blocked by parents. Treated by the report as an online video platform, we’d imagine the social side of it is partly why parents are more suspicious of it than Netflix. That and the self-upload capacity; it’s much more difficult to monitor the slew of content that near anyone can post.

Social media – are parental controls enough?

2023 had social media companies in the headline more often than not. TikTok testified in the US court and its Shop feature was banned in Indonesia. With child safety lawsuits presented in the US against both Meta and ByteDance, the UK’s new Online Safety Act, and parental consent legislature for social media in France, the biggest names in social media are up against social and governmental change.

Much of that change is primarily aimed at the younger generations – not that kids seemed to take note of shifting rules around them.

Unsurprisingly, TikTok was the most popular app globally and in almost all countries individually, save Australia, where it drew with X for the number one spot.

44% of children worldwide used TikTok, and even more so in Europe: 1 in 2 children in France and the UK were fans of the eternal scroll, while Spanish children were its biggest users – 61% of under-18s in Spain use TikTok.

As many as 1 in 2 Spanish children use Instagram, which came in second to TikTok in France and Spain but dropped to fifth place globally, with just 32% of kids using it. Still, since the introduction of reels in 2020, the time kids spend on Instagram has risen year on year, rising 40% in the last year from 45mins/day to 63mins/day.

That’s a huge amount of time scrolling, but pales in comparison to the time young people spend on TikTok.

Children worldwide spent 112 minutes on TikTok per day, while in the US, this rose to two hours on TikTok daily – that’s over 180 40-second videos a day, or over 240 30-second clips.

And in the UK, children scrolled for 127 minutes on TikTok every day, almost 100% more than on YouTube in the same year. If you’ve ever looked over a kid’s shoulder while they’re on TikTok, you probably still struggle to imagine how utterly brain-rotting is the content the algorithm serves them.

@d_andrew_g

Family Guy Content #familyguy #familyguymemes #fyp #funny #content #sludge #shipost #quagmire #subwaysurfers #slime #satisfying #brickbreaker #minecraft #minecraftmemes

♬ original sound – D_Andrew_G

Think scene-cut graphics from 2000s TV crossed with slot machine-style gameplay imagery and a robotic voice reading an inane Reddit post aloud – all at once, three times over – for TWO HOURS a day. For the second year in a row, TikTok was the most blocked content provider among families.

Speaking of Reddit, the platform only got about nine minutes of use per day, the same as X. In Spain, new entry BeReal beat Reddit for those almost-ten minutes a day.

Communication

Arguably the hardest thing for a parent to deny their child is the ability to chat online with their peers. While once being allowed, a later curfew was what kids bargained for. Now there’s less impetus to leave the house – but God forbid you turn off the WiFi or don’t allow your child to download Facebook Messenger.

Parental controls are all very well – but you have to be able to deal with the tsunami of accusation that comes with them.

WhatsApp came in as the most popular communication platform for the third year in a row, with European countries being most WhatsApp-friendly: 67% of Spanish children use it as their preferred method of communication. Meanwhile, in Australia and the US, kids were torn between Snapchat and Discord as their top platform.

Children and AI – the blind leading the blind?

The advent of AI. In the alleged words of Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?”

There’s also a huge area we’ve neglected to mention: AI. This is, after all, the “AI generation,” but what does that actually mean?

Despite the sudden boom and media frenzy surrounding AI, 2023 was still a year of adoption and discovery for most. Out of the 200 10-13 year-olds surveyed by the report, only 6% said that they actively used AI.

Even at this early stage, it’s undeniable that AI is here to stay; between 2023 and 2030, growth of AI tools is expected to increase by almost 40% per year, and it’s just too universally useful to burn to the ground. However, it’s also impossible to gauge the way children’s digital experience will be affected by it quite yet.

Globally, almost 20% of kids accessed OpenAI in 2023, putting it in 18th place overall for the year’s most-visited websites.

The main takeaway

We can’t begin to cover the full scope of the report. It’s available to read here, where you can also gain some insight into the gaming and educational use of technology among kids. Why would you bother? Well, as parents it’s worth staying ahead of the curve – your kids are already as tech-savvy as you, if not significantly moreso.

This kid’s ability to detect AI lies might be better than most of silicon valley….

The habits of the next generation are also a way of forecasting how the world will look in ten, or even just five years’ time.

When Qustodio’s research began, screen time was the main concern for families. Over time, it’s taken a backseat and allowed worries about online safety to take over. Concerned about the long-term effects of technology, families are talking more about mental health, accompanying kids more closely on their digital journeys, and using tools to keep them safe.

The post How children navigate the internet and technology appeared first on TechHQ.

• How much is Facebook worth to its users?
• Utility of large social platforms and services determined.
• $5 or $100 a month to stop using Instagram?

A mainstay of any product or service for sale today is its value to the end-user, considered as a key component of its offered price. If product X brings value Y to the lives of the K people who buy it, then we have an immediate idea of its price at the point of sale (Z), where Z is affected by the cost of production and distribution over the product’s lifetime.

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But, if goods or services are distributed for free, that is, a series of zeroes on the price tag to the consumers, what value does the item or service provided actually have? That’s the question asked in a working paper titled The digital welfare of nations: new measures of welfare gains and inequality, authored by Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, and Asad Liaqat, among others, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research [pdf download]. The paper attempts to measure the welfare gains from 10 digital platforms in 13 countries. It asked over 40,000 Facebook users what they would need to be paid monthly to abstain from using a range of digital platforms. With these figures collated, the authors surmised that the perceived value from digital goods globally was worth more than $2.5 trillion each year.

That’s around 6% of total world GDP.

The experiment showed that those living in more developed countries placed less value on the likes of Snapchat, X, and Facebook than those in the developing world and that X was ranked lowest in perceived value overall (despite its recent growth into a live news source above and beyond many traditional outfits). Facebook ranks somewhere in the middle of the list of values, while Google Search, it turns out, is given a higher worth than ‘meeting friends.’

How much is Facebook worth in terms of value gained?

The survey group was drawn from active Facebook users; those who had used the social media platform in the last 30 days, and measured the relative willingness to stop using the ten digital services or goods, in addition to “not meeting friends in person.”

“Cash Money – 100 Euro Notes” by viZZZual.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The chosen platforms (or pastime) were, in order of perceived value, Google Search, Meeting Friends in Real Life, YouTube, Google Maps, WhatsApp, Amazon Shopping, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and X. The least valued option was Snapchat, and other activities were measured against that platform’s low popularity taken as a baseline.

The survey found a “highly significant negative relationship” between the value of the digital services as a percentage of the participants’ per capita GDP. Those in Mexico, for example, valued Facebook higher as a percentage of their country’s GDP than those in the US. Yet relatively wealthy individuals in their respective countries (well-off Mexicans and well-off US citizens, for example) considered Facebook to have lower value overall than their poorer fellow nationals.

Despite the huge accrued wealth of social media operators and other digital platforms, the working paper shows that end-users quantify their gains from using the platforms in monetary terms as much higher than the companies’ incomes. In short, users get more value from Google Search than Alphabet (Google’s ownership vehicle) earns from those users.

The paper’s authors admit that compared to the fairly concrete GDP figures available for each country, the survey’s methods produced “relatively noisy” results, yet the authors were “confident” that digital goods create trillions of dollars-worth of value to users. The paper also states that some estimates of value placed on using services are skewed due to “digital addiction,” but it also points out that estimates of GDP are likewise subject to “irrational […] externalities” – that is, the concepts of worth or value in the opinion of individual consumers.

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Now solve for X

For the survey, respondents were asked: ‘Would you be willing to stop using [service] for one month in exchange for [N]?” where N was chosen randomly from a range of nine values from $5 to $100, using localized currencies of equivalent value, relative to GDP of the nation of the citizen. In the case of Facebook, three-quarters of respondents would forswear the platform for the top stipend of $100 a month (or local equivalent), and fewer than 20% would go Facebook-cold-turkey for a mere $5. The question of how much is Facebook worth to users, therefore, had a statistically sound monetary value.

The survey’s findings suggest that current GDP estimates do not consider the value gained by end-users of the goods and services provided by the selected platforms for ‘free.’ Additionally, they quantify the relative amount of money users feel they would need to not give Meta, X, and Google data about themselves and their online activities. On that issue, the revenues from digital platforms, while huge, are not indicative of the true value of that data. Those in developing countries gain the most utility and presumably offer the least monetary reward to the like of Meta, as data from users with less disposable income is not valued as highly on the open data market as that of US citizens, for example.

The key takeaway though is that the utility users feel they gain from using digital platforms dwarfs the platforms owners’ incomes.

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3D printers enable industrial designers to realize all kinds of shapes and intricate patterns by forming custom parts layer by layer. Topologies produced include model weights for optical neural networks, which highlights some of the cutting-edge applications being explored. Most recently, researchers in Europe have successfully used the versatile manufacturing technique to fabricate 3D printed ice crystals.

The tiny non-spherical 3D printed ice crystals open the door to much more accurate weather forecasting when used in combination with a high-speed camera setup capable of capturing their motion as they tumble through the air. Small particles, known as aerosols, have a profound effect on weather systems, particularly on cloud dynamics – which is a major source of uncertainty in weather forecasting.

On TechHQ, we’ve written about how massive supercomputers enable meteorologists to run ensemble models and make probabilistic forecasts based on those results. By clicking on a weather app, smartphone users can quickly see information such as the percentage chance of rain and have probabilistic forecasts to thank for that guidance.

However, the results of those meteorological models are only as good as the assumptions that underpin them. And, in the case of aerosols, some of those assumptions can be quite crude, which is where having 3D printed ice crystals (and other airborne particles) could turn out to be a big help.

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In their work, the group – based in France, Germany, and Sweden – showed how non-spherical particles tumble down in the air, rotating first one way, and then the other, in an oscillatory fashion. Weather scientists have long been puzzled as to why dust in the sky is able to travel so far and why the particle size distribution of a column of air doesn’t match up with their theoretical predictions. And it’s noteworthy that models often assume that aerosols are spheres.

“The orientation of nonspherical particles in the atmosphere, such as volcanic ash and ice crystals, influences their residence times and the radiative properties of the atmosphere,” point out the researchers in their paper.

The thinking is that adding more detailed and accurate descriptions of how particles move could improve forecasting. The Earth’s atmosphere is, in essence, a giant fluid, and the evolution of that fluid can be described by physics – the tricky part is getting the inputs right. Even a small error in particle data can dramatically change calculations of how much water clouds carry, how far they travel, and whether that rain falls as a drizzle or a downpour.

3D printed ice crystals in motion

The motion of 3D printed ice crystals revealed using high-speed video cameras could play a role in improving weather forecasts and – given how sensitive supply chains can be to flooding, storms, and other climate events – those gains could buy businesses more time to make contingency plans. Companies are already making greater use of climate data in their longer-term planning, and providers are always looking for opportunities to enhance their offerings to firms.

Better weather forecasting also impacts the energy grid too. Electricity providers are keen to know how much wind and sun to expect so that they can make the most of renewable sources. More accurate meteorological models also help with demand forecasting – for example, by prompting operators to bring more power online to balance increased demand for air-conditioning during a heatwave.

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Also, when floods and other disruptive weather events are forecast, energy providers have the opportunity to protect key infrastructure and have maintenance crews on standby to minimize outages.

Weather has been a talking point for centuries, with people picking out colors in the sky and seeing how birds behaved for clues. Today, the anatomy of an atmospheric model has become very complex indeed – so complex that it takes a supercomputer to make sense of the various physical and dynamic elements.

What’s more, adding to the list of necessary equipment could be a 3D printer – if data from 3D printed ice crystals turns out to have merit.

The post 3D printed ice crystals could improve weather forecasts appeared first on TechHQ.

• The pandemic’s Great Resignation has slowed.
• Employees stay put for the Big Stay.
• Economic outlook means the risks are too high to jump ship. 

The Covid-19 pandemic changed all aspects of life for the vast majority, but one of the most profound impacts was on how we work. While many had to adopt a remote routine, the pandemic marked a pivot point for the careers of millions. Remote and hybrid work became, if not normal, then at least a possibility, and the ‘Great Resignation’ saw an unprecedented number of workers leaving their jobs to pursue other avenues. 

This trend continued through 2022, albeit at a reduced level, and it seems the tide is changing further. Economists are witnessing a shift as workers with itchy feet are more prepared to bide their time for better roles, instead of resigning with no concrete plans.

It seems it’s time for the Great Resignation to give way to the ‘Big Stay.’

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The Great Resignation slows

The Great Resignation forced many organizations to adjust their work environments to retain employees, ensuring they became healthier, more positive places to work. After a mass migration of talent, workplace satisfaction and stability became a priority for all businesses. Many viewed the period as an evolution fuelled by economic uncertainty and a latent need for more flexible working arrangements. Now, companies strive to create people-first cultures, partly as a result of the cost of staff turnover, and the ensuing better places to work seem to be a significant factor contributing to the Big Stay.

Yet despite this apparent trend, 2023 saw large swathes of resignations, too. It is estimated that workers resigned from around 50 million jobs last year. While this is the highest number since tracking began in 2000, the overall quit rate has been falling since the height of the pandemic. The percentage of workers quitting their jobs was 5% lower in the first three months of 2023 compared to the last three months of 2022. Compared to the quit rate of the first three months of 2022, the percentage of employees leaving a job was down 10%. 

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One reason why we could be entering an era of employee retention is that labor markets are slowly getting back to their pre-pandemic levels. Many workers who switched jobs during the pandemic enjoyed large increases in pay, with the peak of pay increases at 16.4% in June 2022. In April 2023, pay gains for those switching jobs decreased to 13.2%, marking the lowest growth since November 2021.

Currently, there seems to be a trend of workers biding their time for better opportunities to arise or deciding on staying with the same employer. Employees who were previously a part of the Great Resignation have since settled into new roles and are looking for long-term benefits. Perhaps the regular job changes we have witnessed for three years are coming to an end. Over the last year, workers have been prioritizing work-life balance, job stability, and meaningful employment instead of pursuing higher salaries and fresh opportunities.

Economic instability

Throughout this discussion, the elephant in the room, and a fact that simply can’t be ignored when considering employment trends, is economic instability. Rising interest rates lead to higher costs, so workers are increasingly reluctant to risk their current employment for the unknown. Not only that, but various conflicts and geopolitical tensions have resulted in increased wariness, with economists predicting instability to continue for some time. And instability means less risk-taking by company owners and boards of directors, so fewer new roles are on the table.

“Matching jobseekers with employers in Lao PDR” by ILO in Asia and the Pacific is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

While the global outlook is unpredictable, workers are playing it safe and maintaining stable positions. For both employers and employees, it’s a matter of choosing certainty over risk in an unpredictable future.

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The disgruntled worker

A recent EY survey found that 34% of workers would like to leave their jobs in the next three months. That seemingly high figure should be taken in context: in 2022, the percentage unhappy enough to want to leave was 43%. 

The Great Resignation made it clear what employees want from their careers. The Big Stay may be caused by employers improving conditions to keep workers on board. Or have things changed so little that it’s the economic downturn that’s keeping people at their desks? Companies have certainly been listening to their employees’ wants and needs, but if they want to avoid another surge of mass resignations in the rosier times we hope are around the corner, organizations will have to persist in addressing their workers’ expectations.

The post Employment 2024: the ‘Big Stay’ movement appeared first on TechHQ.