AM signals: supply-chain management for education, FPGA workshop
It looks as if Apple is trying to discourage iPhone repair by third parties. Some repaired iPhones display an Error 53 message after software upgrades. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple attributes the error to security issues related to screen or fingerprint sensor replacement. The Journal quotes Kyle Wiens, head of electronics-repair site iFixit.com, saying the policy is ridiculous: ““That’s the same as Ford saying we’re not going to let any mechanics work on our cars because they’ll change the key.”
The 24th annual ACM International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA 2016) will take place February 21 through 23 in Monterey, CA, and organizers have issued a call for participation. The event will feature a panel discussion assessing the impacts of the recent acquisition of Altera by Intel. Panelists include Derek Chiou of Microsoft and the University of Texas at Austin (moderator); Hemant Dhulla, VP of data center and wired communication, Xilinx; Alex Grbic, VP of product marketing and planning, Intel Programmable Solutions Group (formerly Altera); Prabhat (PK) Gupta, director of cloud platform technology, Intel; H. Peter Hofstee, distinguished research staff member, IBM; and Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley bureau chief, EE Times. The event is co-located with the 2nd International OLAF (Overlay Architectures for FPGAs) Workshop.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to inject its view of quality assurance into higher education to address a skills gap between what employers want in a recent graduate and what the current academic environment provides. The Chamber has been viewing employers as the end customers of talent supply-chain partnerships with universities, and it now wants to “…designate preferred providers for sourcing talent.” The Chamber investigates strengthening employers’ voice in existing accreditation systems and establishing an employer-led quality-assurance and supplier certification system. Stuart M. Butler at Brookings describes an employer-led certification as “…a powerful—and positive—disruptive influence on a higher education system that is long overdue for redesign.”
