Posts

Extended SSO for Discourse with IdentityServer3

Background In our business we operate a number of customer-facing web services which use an IdentityServer3 identity provider as the single source of identity. We have customised our setup to allow two sources of federated identity, and to pull certain claims from our CRM. We have a new requirement to integrate a hosted instance of the excellent Discourse discussion forum, also using the same single source of identity. Discourse does not support OpenId Connect, rather its own particular form of SSO.

Dynamics 365 User Group Reading 14/11/2017

This week I made my first visit as a new member to the Dynamics 365 User Group UK chapter meeting. I’d been invited to speak about our experiences in using Dynamics 365 and Thunderhead ONE together – my slides embedded below. Overall I found the day valuable and enjoyable, especially the review of new features in Dynamics Version 9 from Sarah Critchley, and Ben Walker detailing his experience with setting up a CI/CD environment for Dynamics.

Only Humans

Harold Jarche has posted a brief review of “Only Humans Need Apply” by Thomas H Davenport . In his review Harold has added the main attributes that he sees as being needed to meet the book’s criteria for human adaptation to a world of automation: Step-up: directing the machine-augmented world (creativity) Step-in: using machines to augment work (deep thinking) Step-aside: doing human work that machines are not suited for (empathy) Step narrowly: specializing narrowly in a field too small for augmentation (passion) Step forward: developing new augmentation systems (curiosity) I challenge any UK-based educator or politician to identify where we are systematatically encouraging those attributes in our young people.

The rise of the machines (continued)

Following on from The machines may eat your job, but that might not be a bad thing, I notice that Joanne Jacobs has written Who will work? Education, automation and jobs in which she references the (Obama) White House report “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy” , which in turn was informed by the Frey and Osborne paper I referenced. Joanne goes on to highlight from that White House report that an increasing proportion of US high-school students are not “college-ready” at the end of high school.

The machines may eat your job, but that might not be a bad thing – are any politicians acknowledging this?

Introduction There are a growing number of indicators that the nature of employment will change radically in our lifetimes, but politicians are all ignoring this. Background On BBC Breakfast this morning there was a piece about robots, themed on the forthcoming exhibiton at the Science Museum, In the piece they interviewed Michael A. Osborne , Associate Professor in Machine Learning, University of Oxford in which he repeated the research estimate that robots would replace 35% of UK employment by 2030, e.

Comment on “Stop Blaming the Tools when Collaboration Fails”

Another “down the rabbit hole” post and comment stream from Luis Suarez with a great contribution in the comments from Martin White There are some interesting papers to follow up in the comments (as an aside, shame how much of academic publishing is still locked behind paywalls) Martin comments: I think it is more about a view that academic research is not of value together with an inability or unwillingness to find the research.