Baap Rey !!: Most Popular Editorials: Sick of data leaks, Indonesians are siding with a hacker who exposed 1.3 billion SIM card details

Sick of data leaks, Indonesians are siding with a hacker who exposed 1.3 billion SIM card details

Indonesians woke up to the breach in confusion, which quickly turned into anger. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, or Kominfo, responded by telling citizens they were responsible for regularly changing their passwords; popular meme accounts reposted the advice with bitter jokes. An official pleaded haplessly with Bjorka at a press conference: “If you can, please don’t attack.” “Stop being an idiot,” Bjorka jeered back on their Breach account. In a twist, many Indonesians have even sided with the hacker, who claimed to have executed the breach to expose sloppy data governance. Along with the mammoth citizen data leak, the gleefully chaotic Bjorka appeared to dox Kominfo Minister Johnny G. Plate on his own birthday. “Happy birthday,” they reportedly posted in their Telegram channel, Bjorkanism, followed by intimate details ranging from his address to home telephone number to vaccine ID.

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Indiaâ€™s tech outsourcing giants are not happy about employees taking up second jobs. Hereâ€™s what the law says

On September 16, Infosys sent an email to its employees, reminding them that they were not allowed to hold dual employment. On September 21, Wipro fired 300 employees over allegations of moonlighting. Meanwhile, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, came out in support of the practice, saying, “This is the age of employee-entrepreneurs and companies must now understand there has been a structural shift in the minds and attitudes of the young Indian tech workforce.” Tech Mahindra, a mid-sized IT firm, has said it might consider framing a policy that allows dual employment, as long as “someone is meeting the efficiency and productivity norms.”With respect to the IT industry, the Shops and Establishment Acts regulate the hours of work, terms of services, leave and holidays, payment of wages, and working conditions, among other things. The Act, in some states, says that an employee cannot work with another organization on a day on which they have been given a holiday. It is fair from a human rights standpoint that these are days given to the employee to rest and recuperate.

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WhatsApp is now a spammersâ€™ paradise in India

That day, the first 10 messages on her WhatsApp were all boilerplate outreach from corporations, promoting products, deals, and discount coupons. Rao told Rest of World that she first began noticing business outreach messages on WhatsApp at the end of 2021, but, in the past six months, it has become incessant. Verified handles, bearing green check marks, from businesses such as shopping app Flipkart, retail chain Croma, delivery app Zepto, fashion store Lifestyle, insurance provider BankBazaar, and others are flooding her personal WhatsApp chats.Meta’s WhatsApp is wildly popular in India, with around 550 million users in the country. Over the past year, the company has aggressively expanded its WhatsApp Business services in the country, allowing brands to reach out to customers, offer support, receive payments, and even verify documents. Direct access to customers over WhatsApp is an exciting proposition for Indian businesses since a reported 80% of messages sent on the app are seen within five minutes, making the platform an incredibly more efficient outreach channel than email or SMS.

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How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors

These Chinese social media users aren’t expressing a nascent interest in all things Dutch. They’re talking about recent protests over frozen bank deposits in the province of Henan. Ordinarily, discussions about a controversial topic like this would be censored on Chinese social media, and posts containing the word “Henan” could be blocked or deleted. But “Henan” (河南) sounds a lot like “Helan” (荷兰), the Mandarin word for the Netherlands. By swapping the names around, people were able to get past the censors and keep the conversation going.In China, people have perfected this kind of language play online as a way to discuss an ever-lengthening list of banned or controversial topics, creating an eternally shifting lexicon of online slang. “The play on puns and homophones has been a long existing literary and cultural tradition,” Shaohua Guo, author of The Evolution of the Chinese Internet, told Rest of World. “The prevalence of Internet use, particularly social media, further popularizes the practice.”

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This AI startup analyzes how shoppers move through a store to increase sales

Retail analytics is not something new, but why hasn’t it gotten popular? One problem we pinpointed is that this type of products require[s] you to install new hardware, be it new sensors, new cameras or new servers. For most small and medium enterprises or retailers, having new installations brings tremendous trouble. One of the biggest features of Cyclops is we can plug and play with their existing surveillance cameras. We can feed their camera streams into our cloud for analysis. We also cover the consultation part, providing recommendations and insights. We can analyze what the cameras have captured; for example, how many people pass by your shop. Knowing that helps you understand how good the shop position is. We can also understand the number of people coming in, which would get us the conversion or walk-in rate. It shows whether or not your display has been effective in bringing people into the shop. We can do A/B testing on which display works better.

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Ditching tech is the new tech fad

Way back in June, something crystallized for me as we covered the Colombian elections: Tech alone is never enough. Candidate Rodolfo Hernández bet everything on an innovative system of social media campaigning; it got him past the first round, but he got crushed in the second. There are many factors behind his loss, but I am still astounded that the man would not go out and press the flesh — shake hands, kiss babies or whatever politicians do as they knock on doors. The same is true of companies that have prioritized tech over the human touch. In 2019, a panel of Latin American fintech gurus, there to extol the virtues of all-digital finance, sat alongside a top official from the Bank of Mexico. The fintech mantra of “cash is the competition” was already beginning to get clichéd, so the panel and audience were duly unsettled when the official argued that his priority was to facilitate the installation of ATMs in the more rural parts of the country. To be openly supporting the continuation and — shock — expansion of cash solutions was seen as a step away from the digitalized utopia that fintech fans had in mind.

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Colombia banned the iPhone 14. Apple says it will sell it anyway

In a small footnote in a recent press release, Apple announced it would release the iPhone 14 Plus in Colombia later this month. The problem was, the iPhone 14 has been banned in Colombia since its launch, due to Apple’s ongoing litigation with Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson, around 5G networks. Carlos Olarte, Ericsson’s attorney in Colombia, was unaware of the announcement when Rest of World reached out. “I suspect it’s a mistake,” he said, underscoring that such a course of action would directly violate the ban.In July, a judge banned the importation and sale of any of Apple’s 5G devices after Ericsson filed a patent lawsuit against Apple in Colombia and many other countries. Ericsson wants Apple to pay for the use of its patented 5G technologies, though the network has yet to be deployed in the country. Its asking price is a $5 fee per iPhone, but Apple has refused to pay. So far, Colombia is the only country to have banned Apple’s 5G devices as a precautionary measure until a final verdict is reached.

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Engineering the Treatment of Early-Stage Lung Cancer [SPONSORED]

This interview with Hannah McEwen, PhD, the head of engineering sciences for the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson, will discuss novel procedures that offer minimally invasive solutions to aid in the identification, diagnosis and treatment of early-stage lung lesions. These include robotic bronchoscopes that help oncologists diagnose difficult to reach lung nodules, and treatments that may one-day be used to deliver therapy directly to early-stage tumors.Megan Hall: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the world. Why? Because it’s difficult to detect in its early stages and hard to treat once it’s discovered. The Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson is working to reverse that trend. And to do so, it needs not just doctors and researchers, but engineers. Hannah McEwen is the Head of Engineering Sciences for the group.

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U.S. Secretary of the Interior: Satellites Will Help Us Fight Climate Change

At the beginning of 2021, President Joe Biden exclaimed that “science is back” as we continued our efforts to address the COVID emergency. That phrase continues to ring true across the federal government. Science and its applications are being used at every agency—to address public health challenges, build new transportation infrastructure, inform policy decisions and tackle the climate crisis.Recently, the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assumed operations of Landsat 9 from NASA, which built and launched it last year. This satellite helps to monitor Earth’s land, water and other natural resources. Landsat missions support environmental sustainability and climate resiliency through high-resolution satellite imaging. The Landsat program isn’t new; in July we celebrated 50 years of the NASA and USGS Landsat partnership that has helped us understand our planet and the changes that are occurring on it. That partnership has propelled research and observation forward over the years through the launch of successive Landsat satellites, each replacing its predecessors and working in tandem with new capabilities and strengths.

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This Indigenous Scientist Helped Save Lives as Covid Devastated the Navajo Nation

“The Navajo Nation is the size of West Virginia, but yet there's only 13 grocery stores that lie within the reservation. Housing is overcrowded within and among Navajo households, and then you talk about preexisting health conditions, chronic diseases, also other infectious diseases. And in combination with the outbreak of COVID, it really hit our community extremely hard,” Lee said.

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Ancient Panda ‘Thumb’ Matches Modern Version

A bear that roamed what is now China about six million years ago is the oldest bamboo-eating panda ancestor yet found—and it had the same stubby pseudo thumbs that jut from the wrists of today's pandas alongside their five fingers. Fossils of the new species suggest such “thumbs,” which helped the animals grip and strip bamboo, maintained their peculiar shape to facilitate the beast's four-legged locomotion.The fossils, found in the province of Yunnan and described in Scientific Reports, also push back the date that pandas' ancestors likely transitioned from eating meat to chomping bamboo—from two million to six million years ago. “Giving up on a carnivorous diet means trading the volatile life of a carnivore for quiet consumption of the plentiful bamboo,” says paleontologist and study lead author Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, adding that it was “not a bad deal.”

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How the Pandemic Shortened Life Expectancy, and New Drugs on the Horizon: COVID, Quickly, Episode 40

The data come from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which recently published provisional data for 2021. Elizabeth Arias and her NCHS colleagues calculated something called a life table. It basically takes a hypothetical group of infants born in 2021, and applied the real-world death rates of every age group to those infants across their whole lives. The result is an estimate of the total population’s life expectancy. Fischman: And that’s precisely the problem. These mabs were configured to fit that early virus, like a key fitting into a lock. But now there are 5 or so newer variants making the rounds—BA.5 is still the dominant one—and those have mutations that essentially change the shape of the lock. So most of the mabs don’t fit anymore. One, called bebtelovimab, still does a pretty good job, but most of the others that have been authorized by the FDA do not.

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A Supersmeller Can Detect the Scent of Parkinson’s, Leading to an Experimental Test for the Illness

A Scottish woman named Joy Milne made headlines in 2015 for an unusual talent: her ability to sniff out people afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative illness that is estimated to affect nearly a million people in the U.S. alone. Since then a group of scientists in the U.K. has been working with Milne to pinpoint the molecules that give Parkinson’s its distinct olfactory signature. The team has now zeroed in on a set of molecules specific to the disease—and has created a simple skin-swab-based test to detect them.Milne, a 72-year-old retired nurse from Perth, Scotland, has hereditary hyperosmia, a condition that endows people with a hypersensitivity to smell. She discovered that she could sense Parkinson’s with her nose after noticing her late husband, Les, was emitting a musky odor that she had not detected before. Eventually, she linked this change in scent to Parkinson’s when he was diagnosed with the disease many years later. Les passed away in 2015.

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‘Bit of Panic’: Astronomers Forced to Rethink Early JWST Findings

Astronomers have been so keen to use the new James Webb Space Telescope that some have got a little ahead of themselves. Many started analysing Webb data right after the first batch was released, on 14 July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers—but are now having to revise them. The telescope’s detectors had not been calibrated thoroughly when the first data were made available, and that fact slipped past some astronomers in their excitement.Figuring out how to redo the work is “thorny and annoying”, says Marco Castellano, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome. “There’s been a lot of frustration,” says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “I don’t think anybody really expected this to be as big of an issue as it’s becoming,” adds Guido Roberts-Borsani, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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These Technologies Help You Live Lightly on a Fragile Planet

Carbon emissions are driving the biosphere toward a three-degree-Celsius rise in average temperature, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently noted in its Sixth Assessment Report. Intense and frequent droughts, flooding, wildfires and food insecurity are already devastating parts of the world. The usual “clean technology” solution to reduce carbon emissions has serious ecological and social costs, however.Renewable energy threatens to generate mountains of waste and destruction. Just replacing fossil-fuel-powered cars with fleets of electric vehicles, for example, requires vast amounts of new materials. These include critical minerals and rare-earth elements, all of which involve controversial extractive practices that damage ecosystems and people. In short, the clean-tech pathway threatens to exaggerate the exploitation of our precious living planet and fails to account for the uneven burdens felt by the poor and vulnerable, who cannot afford price hikes or the purchase of new “eco-friendly” appliances and devices. Similarly, burgeoning markets for carbon offsets (also called carbon credits) allow the wealthy to pollute at the expense of the poor, as demonstrated by the record of the United Nation’s carbon-offset program for forests.

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Drones Sample Rare Specimens from Cliffs and Other Dangerous Places

On a knife-edge ridge on Kauai, a delicate little plant with a tuft of yellow flowers sprouts from the rock. The only sounds are the wind, the murmur of waves far below—and the hum of drone propellers. The whine gets louder as another drone suspended from the first encloses the plant with two arms, a blade slicing through the stem. The device then gently lifts the plant, a member of the genus Schiedea, part of the carnation family. As the tiny specimen’s leaves flutter in the air, the drone descends and delivers it directly to researchers waiting below.This scene—repeated dozens of times with various plants on the Hawaiian island’s tropical cliffsides as part of a new study—shows how drones can help scientists pluck rare and endangered plants from spots that would otherwise be dangerous, if not impossible, for humans to reach. Collecting samples is often necessary to better understand the plights of these species, and how to save them. “It’s a fabulous development and use of technology to get a lot more information than a person trudging around,” says Warren Wagner, a research botanist at the Smithsonian Institution. He was not part of the study but serves on the board of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, one of the institutions involved.

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DART’s Smashing Success Shows Humanity Can Divert Asteroids

Determining whether the mission succeeded relied on more than a half dozen telescopes around the world. Ground-based optical telescopes can’t resolve Didymos and Dimorphos, which are millions of kilometres from Earth and only a few hundred metres across; they instead see the pair as a single point in the night sky. But the telescopes can measure dips in brightness as Dimorphos cycles in front of and behind Didymos. Observers tracked these movements and compared them to pre-collision orbit times to tabulate DART’s impact.Although the orbit reduction is larger than expected, it still falls within the range of possibilities that scientists modelled. Researchers think the manouevre succeeded to the extent that it did because Dimorphos is more a loose collection of rocks than a solid chunk that would be harder to deflect. Another reason for the dramatic orbit change is that when DART hit, a lot of debris shot out from the asteroid into tails, each one thousands of kilometres long, and their recoil probably accentuated DART’s impact, researchers said at the press conference.

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Do Vaccine Lotteries Work? Maybe

Katy Milkman, a Wharton professor and co-director of the Behavior Change For Good Initiative (BCFG) at Penn, is the lead author of the study published this month in the journal Nature Human Behavior. A team of scientists at BCFG partnered with city officials to design and fund the sweepstakes, which was unique from other vaccine incentive programs that were rolling out across the country in 2021. Instead of winning free food, scholarships, gift cards, and other items, Philadelphia residents were treated to a “regret lottery” in which they were automatically entered if they lived in the city (whether or not they’d been vaccinated). They were then contacted if their name was selected and could win up to $50,000, but only if they could prove that they’d taken the shot before the drawing.The university and the city worked to spread the news about the Philly Vax Sweepstakes through local media and social networks, with a clear message that residents of three particular randomly selected ZIP codes (one picked every two weeks) would have a 50 to 100 times greater chance than other Philadelphians of winning cash. The researchers randomly chose these three ZIP codes from among 20 with the lowest vaccination rates in the city, hoping the boost would incentivize more residents in those ZIP codes to get vaccinated. But the bigger grab at cash did nothing.

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Preventing Burnout: The Demand-Control-Support Model

Even before the pandemic, burnout was labeled as an epidemic. It’s the persistent work-related stress that’s exhausting and impairing. In the U.S., over half of employees feel burned out at least some of the time — and it can lead to what has recently been termed “quiet quitting”: reduced engagement that manifests in apathy and disconnection. Evidence shows that burnout can result in mistakes on the job, fuels thoughts of quitting, and can be contagious in organizations. Burnout is also linked to depression, memory loss, sleep problems, weakened immune systems, and cardiovascular disease — estimates suggest that it costs over $100 billion in annual health care spending in the U.S. alone.As a high school teacher in Philadelphia, Conrey Callahan was burning out; her school was broke, and about half of her students dropped out before graduation. While working about 100 hours a week, she started a local chapter of a mentoring program for high-achieving low-income students — and then volunteered as a mentor. It sounds counterintuitive, but working with highly motivated students restored her sense of control, and the renewed sense of efficacy inspired her to stay on the job for several more years.

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How Banks Crowd Out Commercial Lending During Real Estate Booms

The crowding-out effect was more pronounced among banks “that are more constrained to begin with,” said Goldstein. He pointed out that “smaller banks are more financially constrained” than others. “When a bank is more financially constrained, it can’t raise deposits as easily as others,” he said. And so, when such banks channel their resources into mortgages, their commercial and industrial (C&I) lending will decline, he added.Also, the phenomenon of reduced investment was pronounced for firms that were more capital constrained than others or that borrowed from more-constrained banks. The researchers interpreted that to mean that “commercial loans were crowded out by banks responding to profitable opportunities in mortgage lending,” instead of changes in demand for those loans. “The results suggest that housing prices appreciations have negative spillovers to the real economy, which were overlooked thus far,” their paper stated.

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Meet the Authors: Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten on The Prepared Leader

During a Wharton School Press LinkedIn Live event, Wharton Dean Erika James and Simmons University President Lynn Perry Wooten discussed the key takeaways from their new book, The Prepared Leader. Hosted by Wharton management professor emeritus Michael Useem, the conversation included crisis management and leadership, real-world examples of leadership in action, management through the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.

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When Will Housing Prices Fall?

The Federal Reserve raised benchmark interest rates by 75 basis points last week in its latest attempt to curb inflation, which is still above 8% despite dropping gas prices. The move also pushed up the mortgage interest rate to nearly 7%, tightening the grip on potential homebuyers who are already squeezed by a real estate market offering historically high prices across the country. Wharton real estate and finance professor Susan Wachter joined Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM to explain the contradictory forces acting on the housing market and how the market is affected by the wider economy. Housing prices eventually will fall, she said, but not without a significant rise in unemployment.The purpose of raising the basis points, of course, is to slow down the hot market, to get the reset that Chairman [Jerome] Powell is talking about. But in the short run, it has a countervailing, unintended effect of locking in more homeowners. Ninety percent of mortgage holders are below 5% interest, and two-thirds have mortgages below 4%. They are not going to sell to borrow at 6.3% for a new home. So, we’re seeing inventory not increasing and still way too low for a supply-demand balance. Housing prices are not falling. In many markets, they’re rising. In some of the hottest markets, we’re seeing stalling and slight slowdown. But in the U.S. as a whole, housing prices are still rising and therefore rents are, too. We’re in an ironic position here, unfortunately, where the CPI (Consumer Price Index) continues to rise despite the Fed’s actions, because of housing.

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Why Presidential Influence Over Monetary Policy Should be Checked

In a recent paper titled “The Monetary Executive,” she wrote that the president has “far more influence over money in the economy — and levers for ‘fiscal dominance’ — than the Constitution arguably allows, casting a long shadow over the Federal Reserve’s ability to properly rein in inflation.” According to her, those powers could potentially be used to further political agendas and to unfairly disadvantage sections of the economy. Among the remedies she suggested are Congressional actions to scale down those presidential powers or limit those granted in emergency, a more assertive Fed, and a more vigilant public.“Economists, and in particular, monetarists tend to believe that inflation is fundamentally a problem that results from a rapid increase in the money supply, suggesting that the cause lies with the Fed and failing to curb the rate of growth of the money supply through its traditional monetary policy tools,” Skinner said in a recent interview on the Wharton Business Daily radio show on SiriusXM. “That view implicitly presumes that the Fed is making decisions in a world of perfect central bank independence.” In other words, that view presumes that the Fed’s decisions about money supply and how to use its interest-rate and balance-sheet tools are not guided by “a president’s desire to have a hotter economy, which is to say easier money or more government spending,” she explained.

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ESG and Cybersecurity Compliance Are Every Employeeâ€™s Concern

In late spring 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an elite investment adviser for “misstatements and omissions” about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations related to its managed mutual funds. This same financial firm has also faced myriad cybersecurity problems over the past fifteen years, including a data breach and deficient cybersecurity practices. It’s not a unique scenario: companies large and small, public and private, are facing increased challenges in managing the requirements and responsibilities of ESG and cybersecurity. Both fields, besides maintaining a stronghold on news headlines and cutting-edge tech entrepreneurs, demand not just constant attention, but also transparency. As various federal agencies have demonstrated, audits and investigations will determine when quality reviews and compliance certifications are not accurate. Every level, from the C-Suite to the new entry hire, must be trained on ESG and cybersecurity as relevant to their work roles. Furthermore, corporate culture should strive to maintain awareness of the significance of ESG and cybersecurity: two buzzy sectors that cut across all work departments.ESG refers to three types of factors: environmental (having to do with the natural world), social (pertaining to the lives of humans), and governance (involving countries, jurisdictions, or broad stakeholder groups). The concept evolved from John Elkington’s 1994 “triple bottom line” approach that recognized the importance of the three elements in generating sustainable financial returns in the world of investing. ESG is becoming increasingly significant within the world of finance and beyond, due in large part to pressure from clients and individuals who emphasize a desire for responsible investing.

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'Best Countries' 2022: Who's Number One?

Switzerland has claimed the top spot for five of the seven years the rankings have been complied, regaining the position after slipping last year to No. 2 behind Canada. But it’s more than just gorgeous mountain vistas, delicious chocolates, and precision watches that make Switzerland seem like utopia. The country of nearly 8.7 million people has a robust economy, very high standard of living, extremely low crime, and a sense of social harmony.Reibstein produces the rankings annually in partnership with U.S. News & World Report and BAV Group, a unit of global marketing communications company VMLY&R. The 2022 list measures perceptions about 85 nations chosen because they contribute most to the world’s GDP. More than 17,000 people around the world were asked to evaluate the countries based on 73 attributes ranging from political stability to racial equity to health consciousness. One-third of the survey respondents were business leaders; one-third were college-educated individuals who were middle class or higher; and one-third were from the general population.

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Why Arenâ€™t More People Claiming Government Benefits?

When the Biden administration expanded the Child Tax Credit in 2021 with direct cash payments of up to $3,600 to alleviate child poverty, millions of the most vulnerable families never received the automatic payments because they didn’t have a digital connection with the Internal Revenue Service through a previous income tax filing online. The burden was on those families to seek out the public benefit.A new study led by Wharton marketing professor Wendy De La Rosa pinpoints the reason why so many Americans left money on the table: The large amount seemed like an abstraction because people don’t think about money on a yearly basis. Through a series of experiments, the researchers found that people were more likely to collect the money if it was conveyed as a monthly or weekly amount — $300 or $69 — similar to how they budget.

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What the Andes Miracle Teaches about Adaptive Leadership

When a plane carrying a team of Uruguayan rugby players and their relatives disappeared over the frosty peaks of the Andes Mountains on October 13, 1972, authorities assumed all passengers onboard had perished. Seventy-two days later, the enfeebled silhouettes of Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa appeared in the Chilean foothills leading to the rescue of 16 total survivors. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Andes miracle. It is an extraordinary tale of human resilience and organizational ingenuity that offers unconventional leadership lessons for our own times.These autobiographical accounts challenge dystopian views of leadership and group dynamics epitomized in William Golding’s popular novel Lord of the Flies. Taught widely in schools and universities since its publication in 1954, Golding convinces readers that in scenarios when people are left to their own devices, we can expect only brutal anarchy and collective failure. In contrast, testimonies by survivors of the Andes crash point to cooperation and productive leadership, not chaos, to accomplish goals in the face of extreme adversity.

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The Chinese Market Is More Than Just Its Urban Centers

Multinationals are exiting China in record numbers — and much of this is due to geopolitical uncertainty. But not all failures can be blamed on politics; poor strategic choices are also to blame. Too many multinational companies start by targeting China’s rich urban markets. But as a few, such as chip manufacturer AMD, have discovered, along with many of China’s most successful homegrown companies like Pinduoduo, starting in China’s rural communities cities may be a better entry strategy.

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How Nonprofits Can Keep Strategy Front and Center

Nonprofits boards are notoriously bad at strategy, in part because when they meet they tend to focus all of their time and energy on operational details and routine reporting. To do their work effectively, however, boards need to make strategy a priority — all the time. The author, a consultant to nonprofits, lays out several ways that nonprofit boards can and should overhaul their agendas to put strategy front and center.

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The Rise Of Post-Pandemic Exhaustion

The panoply of upheavals that 2020 brought, from existential and economic to social and environmental, was a rollercoaster of storm clouds and silver-linings.. The shift to remote work that stirred chaos and left many feeling isolated simultaneously created flexibility in how, when and where people worked, giving them space back to care for themselves and their loved ones. The decrease in smog and traffic that brought back wildlife and blue skies contrasted raging wildfires and orange haze. The openness and vulnerability between people catalyzed by shared existential threat existed against a backdrop of heightened social tension and police brutality.Just when many leaders are starting to feel out of the woods, a “great burnout” appears to be on the horizon. The unpredictable and unprecedented challenges and changes of the last two years contribute to vast levels of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of inefficacy—three key dimensions of burnout. And with that burnout, we have seen worsened employee health, increasing absenteeism, and greater interpersonal conflicts in the workplace.

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How to Move Forward When You Feel Frozen

Fear is manifesting itself in a wide range of ways in corporate hallways and virtual channels. Alarm paralyzes us and leads to counterproductive behaviors. We postpone taking action because we’re afraid of making things worse. We focus our attention on short-term demands because we don’t want to confront the future.

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To Build a DEI Program That Works, You Need Metrics

The authors’ recent and ongoing research describe several situations where data has moved the needle in helping companies make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion. At one law firm, DEI advocates wanted to change the firm’s system for allocating work opportunities to make it more equitable. They ran into a brick wall, until skeptics saw the data that showed that white male associates were getting significantly more billable hours than women or employees of color. And two tech firms are using metrics to pinpoint where their hiring processes needed fixing. As the authors conclude: If your company’s DEI program isn’t based on metrics, you’re throwing money into the wind in the hopes it will blow back into your pocket.

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Ukraine war: Putin's off ramp and why he is unlikely to take it

It is coming to be understood that the war in Ukraine needs to be prevented from assuming proportions that are dangerous for the entire world – and not just for Ukraine. One argument advanced by US president Joe Biden last week is that the west should offer the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, an “off ramp” – that is, a way out for him so that he can call a ceasefire that appears to offer Russia a degree of military success in Ukraine that Putin can take to his people and sell as a “victory”. But it seems to be a pious hope. Putin, it is becoming increasingly clear, will have to be forced onto an off ramp rather than merely being offered one.Since then it has been a vital artery – not only for the economy of Crimea but also, from the beginning of the current war, a crucial logistical link supporting the war effort. For it to be damaged in the way that it has and so publicly was a personal blow for a Russian president who already appears to be under significant domestic pressure because the war is not going Moscow’s way. Hard-line elements within the country are increasingly questioning Putin’s leadership and his perceived weakness in dealing with Ukraine.

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Nobel prizes most often go to researchers who defy specialization â€“ winners are creative thinkers who synthesize innovations from varied fields and even hobbies

Many of these laureates discover problems by looking at topics in new ways, or they solve them by transferring skills, techniques and materials from one field to another. They often use conceptual tools such as making analogies, pattern recognition, body thinking, playacting and modeling. In one notable example, Alexis Carrel won his Nobel Prize in medicine in 1912 by adapting lace-making and embroidery techniques to transplant surgery.Another research study found that having a persistent, intellectually challenging hobby – such as musical performance, acting, visual art exhibition, competitive chess or computer programming – is a better predictor of career success in any field than are grades, standardized test scores or IQ. Similarly, our own research has found that science professionals with persistent crafts hobbies are significantly more likely to file patents and set up new companies than those without.

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Heat and Humidity Are Already Reaching the Limits of Human Tolerance

As heat waves grow hotter and more frequent, research has suggested some places will begin to see events that reach that limit of human tolerance in the coming decades. But now a new study shows they already have. The findings, published on Friday in Science Advances, underscore the need to rapidly curtail emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and develop policies that will help vulnerable populations stay cool.Previous analyses using climate models suggested that parts of the Persian Gulf region, the Indian subcontinent and eastern China would regularly see heat waves breaching this limit by later in the century. But they looked at broad areas over several hours, which can mask more localized, shorter-term spikes in extreme conditions. To see what other researchers might be missing, “we decided to zoom in a little bit closer,” says Colin Raymond, who conducted the new study when he was a Ph.D. student at Columbia University.

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The Government Is Racing to Put Your Toilet Under Surveillance—For a Good Reason

In September 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) with the goal of collecting and testing local levels of the virus that causes COVID at treatment plants across the country. While the idea of turning to poop for data might seem desperate, the process is fairly high-tech: wastewater treatment facilities pump out small samples, which are then shipped to public and private labs for further examination.At one such place, Biobot Analytics, technicians sift out the viral particles using nanoscale magnetic beads and then run them through a PCR machine—the same device used for the most accurate type of COVID testing. Algorithms parse the results, factoring in local wastewater flow rates and other viral markers, while filtering out the noisy outliers to produce a crystal-clear concentration of COVID-causing virus in each sample.

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What's the right age to get a smartphone?

As a parent, you'd be forgiven for thinking of a smartphone as a sort of Pandora's box with the ability to unleash all the world's evils on your child's wholesome life. The bewildering array of headlines relating to the possible impact of children's phone and social media use are enough to make anyone want to opt out. Apparently, even celebrities are not immune to this modern parenting problem: Madonna has said that she regretted giving her older children phones at age 13, and wouldn't do it again.Data from Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, show that the vast majority of children in the UK own a smartphone by the age of 11, with ownership rising from 44% at age nine to 91% at age 11. In the US, 37% of parents of nine- to 11-year-olds say their child has their own smartphone. And in a European study across 19 countries, 80% of children aged nine to 16 reported using a smartphone to go online daily, or almost daily.

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The life-changing effects of hallucinations

The cactus, called peyote, is cut into discs and chewed raw to release a hallucinogen. A peyote trip starts with a "growing sense of euphoria", followed by a heightened sense of the noises around, before the tipper is plunged into a world of vivid dreams – at least that is how anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff described her experience after taking peyote with members of a Huichol tribe in western Mexico in her book Peyote Hunt.Peyote contains mescaline – a psychedelic compound that can produce hallucinations similar to the effects of taking magic mushrooms. The discs taste "unspeakably bitter-sour" and "revolting" explains Myerhoff, but she adds that she lost her awareness of time, and instead started to skip from one vivid, self-contained dream to another. "Although I discovered that I couldn't move, I was able to remain calm when it occurred to me that this was of no consequence because there was no other place that I wanted to be," she writes, noting that she found the experience not in the least scary, but deeply moving.

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How halal e-commerce became a $160 million business in Indonesia

As a practicing Muslim, Tiandarinie did not want to buy just any clothing. She wanted them to be halal — adhering to Islamic ethics and laws — or at least, as close as possible to halal. “Of course I want [to consume] good stuff, things that have the same values as mine,” she told Rest of World. “I would want to know things like the fashion brand’s values, who its founders are, or whether they have been involved in scandals.” But even in Muslim-majority Indonesia, it can be hard to find out if a garment meets that standard. For a product to be certified halal, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), Halal Inspection Agency, and Halal Certification Agency have to determine that it doesn’t include ingredients, such as pig products or alcohol, which are prohibited in Islam. This certification is well-established for food and beverages, but not for fashion.

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How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors

What Does Paleo Parenting Look Like?

From a Darwinian perspective, human reproduction is pretty idiotic. “We are terrible at getting pregnant,” writes the American-born British archaeologist Brenna Hassett, “then when we do we undercook the baby and end up with a ridiculously helpless infant.” That doesn’t even account for the nightmare of human childbirth, the biological equivalent of the old sofa-in-the-stairwell dilemma. Then there’s the absurdly long time it takes us to reach maturity. Many chimpanzees breastfeed from their mother until about age 4, then shoot up into adults who are fecund by 10 and reproducing by 13. By contrast, many human babies in developed countries wean by age 1, but then reproduction doesn’t happen for two or three decades after that.Hassett’s project looks anew at what we’ve largely taken for granted. Her latest book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood, helps explain that last strangeness: why human childhood is so long. But she is also interested in entering a conversation about just how much we should apply our prehistoric ancestors’ ways of dealing with these oddities to contemporary child-rearing. Hassett is not pleased with what has essentially become a sort of paleo-parenting style—including trendy practices such as “attachment parenting”—that is supposedly drawn from how we nurtured humans in their early years before modern life took over.

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What Afghans Want the Rest of the World to Know

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.Faryal is a 14-year-old girl in Kabul. As with many of the women I spoke with for this story, I’m using only her first name to protect her privacy. She should be in ninth grade this year at Hussain Khail High School, where she loved her classes, even though the students had no chairs or tables and studied in hot, overcrowded tents. She used to wake up every morning and leave for school with her 12-year-old brother, but now she watches from the window as he boards the bus. She stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books.

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The Ivorian immigrant elected to Italyâ€™s conservative parliament

He is the only Black lawmaker in the lower chamber of 400 deputies and one of a handful ever elected in Italy’s history.When Aboubakar Soumahoro was a teenager in his native Ivory Coast, he used to clean shoes and dream of going to Italy, filling a scrapbook with pictures of Italian fashion designs that he cut out of magazines.He made it to Rome in 1999, aged 19, but was shocked by the harsh reality of migrant life in a country he had idolised.“Sleeping rough in the streets was traumatic, especially when I realised that this was the result of a political decision that targeted the migrants,” Soumahoro told Reuters news agency.

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ESG and Cybersecurity Compliance Are Every Employeeâ€™s Concern

'Best Countries' 2022: Who's Number One?

6 ways to address menopause's impact on the workplace

Menopause isn’t an event that can be singularly addressed. In fact, according to Dr. Neel Shah, instead of viewing menopause as a switch that’s flipped, we should acknowledge it as a “multi-phase medical journey that takes place over several years.” That journey can negatively impact women, and Shah believes that “no one should have to tamp down their career ambitions because they have menopause, the same way they shouldn’t have to when they’re pregnant.” Digital health, a multidisciplinary concept at the intersection of technology and healthcare, has helped remove geographical barriers to healthcare. It also helps increase patient involvement in their care, navigate the healthcare system, and collaborate across providers. Shah indicated that “employers were real innovators” in offering mental health services in this way during the pandemic. With telehealth, he says, “women can quickly get to experts they need to manage hot flashes, and everything else that comes with Menopause too.”

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Gen Z can handle stress -- they're just brave enough to say it's unacceptable | Bruce Daisley

Steven Bartlett, the entrepreneur and superstar podcaster, ruffled a few younger feathers recently when he described Gen Z as "the least resilient generation I have ever seen". He added: "I just fear that when I'm hiring people in that generation, I almost need to go an extra length just to check they can cope with a high-intensity culture where demands might come on a Saturday - because the world doesn't just stop on a Saturday and Sunday."Complaining about the younger generation is nothing new, but I think we also need to recognise the extraordinary pressures to which Gen Z are subject. At school, according to a 2020 World Health Organization report, they're subject to a regime that makes the English education system the third most stressful out of 45 countries surveyed (from Europe plus Canada). They live in a world of instant online judgment (in 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that one in eight young girls in the UK who reported suicidal thoughts attributed their poor mental health to social media). Their induction into the world of paid employment is also no picnic: unpaid internships, student debt to service, and a work environment that impinges more and more on what would once have been viewed as leisure time.

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Can SoftBank convince more restaurants to use robots?

SoftBank Robotics America, a subsidiary of SoftBank, has partnered with Gausium, a Chinese robotics startup, to expand its autonomous cleaning and service robots to the US. With the purpose of automating certain tasks, the Scrubber 50 Pro can scrub, sweep, dust, mop, and sanitize. The XI robot, which is equipped with three serving trays that hold up to 66 pounds altogether, can serve several tables at a time. Currently, a fleet of XI robots is being used in a 12,250-square-foot full-service food hall outfitted with nine restaurants in Orlando, Florida, according to the company.In 2016, SoftBank Robotics America was launched to find a way to combine customer service with robotics. The company manufactured Pepper, a human-looking robot, which served as a receptionist in stores and offices. But the popularity of Pepper fizzled out, and the production of Pepper was halted in 2020. (SoftBank Robotics said it has sold that side of the business.) After that, SoftBank Robotics turned to commercial cleaning, which was facing its own labor shortage, and partnered with Brain, a company that makes software for autonomous mobile robots in 2017 to scale-up cleaning robots.

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World Cup 2022: Qatar's frantic countdown to a football tournament full of controversy

When it comes to logistics too, Qatar has been practising. It has hosted several high-profile, mass-attendance events to establish its level of preparedness, including the Fifa Club World Cup in 2019 and the Fifa Arab Cup in 2021. Both tournaments were staged without major incidents. But a recent test event at the Lusail Iconic Stadium (which is due to stage the final match on December 18) was less encouraging, with water shortages, faulty air conditioning, and the need for hour-long walks to the stadium in 35℃ heat.For a country with a population of 3 million, this is a huge influx which will test the resilience of critical infrastructure, including roads, public transport, water supply and sewage capacity. Already, some immigrant workers have been told to leave Qatar and only return once the tournament is over. Government workers have been told to work from home during the World Cup, and schools, colleges and universities will be closed.

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Are You a People First Leader? What CEOs Should Be Asking of Their CHROs | Visier Inc.

Do you measure your organization’s “leadership capital index” score? Do you know the market capitalization value of your leadership team? Investors are already starting to ask for the leadership quality of an organization to be quantified in a valid and reliable way. This is just one example of where people analytics can be linked to the bottom line performance of a business, but it goes much further. When making major workforce planning, strategic capital expenditures, and large scale acquisitions, if your organization is not using people data to help drive these decisions, then you are likely making ill-informed decisions that are unlikely to be in the interests of your customers, colleagues, or shareholders. The reality is, while people analytics has been around for a while, most C-suite executives are yet to realize the strategic importance of it. What is the business value of people analytics and why do you need to put this higher up your agenda?

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What to Do When Your Boss Wonâ€™t Advocate for You

A boss who doesn’t advocate for you can stunt your growth and block your career opportunities. And you might not even know that you have an unsupportive boss. Most advocacy happens behind the scenes. When you found out you have one, the knee-jerk reaction is to self-promote. But that can backfire in the workplace. You need to start by understanding why your boss isn’t advocating for you. Proactively solicit the gift of your boss’s feedback. Consider getting a coach. You just might not have earned your boss’s advocacy yet. Assuming your performance is strong, here are three steps you can take. First, release your boss from your unmet expectations. You can’t shame someone into being your advocate. Second, find another advocate. The ideal sponsor is a powerful, high-ranking ally within your organization. Third, build your network inside and outside of the organization. We all need champions.You might not even know that you have one. Most advocacy happens behind the scenes and in conversations to which you yourself are not privy. As the adage goes, 80% of what’s said about you is said when you’re not in the room. Non-advocating bosses can refuse to bring up your name favorably in the promotion conversation. They can withhold critical developmental feedback and stunt your growth. And they can even overtly undermine you and attempt to sabotage your long-term career prospects.

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How to Say No to a Client and Do it Politely - StartUp Mindset

It can be challenging when you start a new business to say “no” to a potential client or customer. Still, there are times when saying “no” is necessary. Saying “yes” to things you’re not adept in, don’t have time to do, or something you don’t want to do can reflect poorly on you and your business. You want positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, but telling a client that you can’t do something can equal less than glowing reviews when that client speaks about you to others.It is a tough decision to say “no” when it’s work you want to do but genuinely don’t have the time to do it right. One way to deal with this is to simply offer a time when you can complete the work. This is better than trying to squeeze the work in around other clients. You’re not going to do justice to your current customers or the ones you’re cramming in by overdoing it.

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What Happens When a Company (Like Patagonia) Transfers Ownership to a Nonprofit?

Patagonia will now be run by a nonprofit foundation. The shift generated a lot of headlines, but outside of the U.S. this form of ownership is not new. “Shareholder foundations” have quietly prospered for decades in continental Europe, particularly in Denmark where a quarter of the largest 100 firms are foundation-owned, including the three largest firms in the country: Carlsberg, Maersk, and Novo Nordisk. The authors’ analysis of these firms suggests they can succeed as businesses, and that the arrangement helps simplify some of the tradeoffs that for-profit companies typically face when considering social responsibility.

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Explained | What is an 'everything app' and why does Elon Musk want to make one?

The question arose on Tuesday after the billionaire chief executive of Tesla Inc. reversed course on his earlier decision not to buy Twitter Inc. Musk is now willing to proceed with his original plan to buy the social media company for $44 billion and late on Tuesday, he tweeted: "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app."

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Is Your Organization Inclusive of Deaf Employees?

Talented deaf people are everywhere. They are CEOs, doctors, Fortune 500 executives, NASA engineers, mayors, lawyers, scientists, gaming champions, athletes, and Presidential appointees. Still, this minority remains largely overlooked by most employers today. The experiences of the deaf community build an abundance of innate skills that are invaluable to every workplace. They enhance communication and can also provide a competitive advantage by better understanding your market and customers. Deaf employees on your team, if embraced, supported, and empowered, can improve the quality of your products, services, and the overall customer and user experience. Equity and belonging are cornerstones of achieving inclusive excellence. These values foster environments where differences are embraced as catalysts for growth, learning, innovation, and competitive advantage. To hire and retain deaf and diverse talent, organizations must commit to a culture of belonging and inclusive excellence. Employers who open doors and engage with this sizable population will discover a deep pool of talent that will enhance and advance their organizations.

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3 Reasons Subscription Services Fail

A subscription business is about more than recurring revenue. A successful subscription business is a function of the strength of the habits they create. The author, who has studied the fundamental attributes of habit-forming products, has identified three reasons why these businesses typically fail: 1) There are too many steps to psychological relief; 2) They don’t offer enough novelty; or 3) They don’t offer enough “stored value” to build a long-term relationship with the customer.

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What Kara Swisher Has Learned From Decades Covering Tech

No industry has had more impact than technology over the past few decades. Tech companies have changed the way we live, work, and interact with each other. They’ve helped us in a lot of ways, but they’ve also created some big problems. Kara Swisher is a journalist, entrepreneur, and host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher. She’s had a front row seat to the tech industry’s evolution and interviewed all of its biggest players. She speaks with us about key trends — past, present, and future — and the lessons she’s learned as not just an observer but also a media entrepreneur herself along the way.

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How to Help an Employee Figure Out Their Career Goals

It’s not always possible to help the people we supervise identify and work toward their career goals. But having a sense of purpose and a feeling of momentum in achieving our career goals is powerful — so when we can assist our employees in getting there, it’s a meaningful way we can make a difference in their lives and their professional success. In this piece, the author offers three strategies managers can use if they’re managing someone who is unsure of their career path: 1) help them analyze patterns, 2) expand their worldview, and 3) don’t steer too hard.

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Research: Simple Writing Pays Off (Literally)

Financial writing is full of jargon and complexity. But a series of research suggests that investors are drawn to simple, clear writing with short sentences. The simple reason is that complex writing is off-putting — people tune out and find it dull, a fact confirmed by neuroscience research. The author reviews a series of studies on the financial value of good writing and offers a few tips to companies looking to communicate more clearly with investors, or with anyone else.

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Do these 3 things to stand out in a job interview

Now more than ever, finding people with the right work ethic has become far more critical than finding people with the right job skills. Sure, there’ll be times when companies need someone to fix a specific problem; in those instances, they will probably prefer candidates with hard skills.

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In a reversal, the Education Dept. is excluding many from student loan relief

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appeared alongside President Biden when he announced his student loan relief plan on Aug. 24. On Thursday, the administration quietly changed its guidance around which borrowers qualify for this relief. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

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Taiwan says China looking at Ukraine war to develop 'hybrid' strategies

TAIPEI, Oct 12 (Reuters) - China is looking at the experience of the war in Ukraine to develop "hybrid warfare" strategies against Taiwan including using drones and psychological pressure, a senior Taiwanese security official said on Wednesday.Taiwan has been carefully studying the lessons of the Ukraine war to inform how it may react should China, which views the democratically ruled island as its own territory, ever makes good on threats to use force to enforce its sovereignty claim.China mounted military exercises around Taiwan in August to express its anger at a visit to Taipei by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and it has maintained its military activities since then, though at a scaled-back pace.Speaking in parliament, Taiwan's National Security Bureau Director-General Chen Ming-tong said China was also paying attention to what was happening in Ukraine.

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Inside the chess cheating scandal and the fight for the soul of the game

It's 12:56 p.m. in the chess capital of America, four minutes before the start of the U.S. Chess Championship at the Saint Louis Chess Club. In the past half hour, most of the 13 other Americans competing in the championships arrived, some with coffee in hand, others with bags of fruit, and were escorted to the tournament hall. But the teenage prodigy at the center of a bombshell cheating controversy? Will he even show?

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False calls about active school shooters are rising. Behind them is a strange pattern

In response to a false call about an active shooter, police and emergency workers descended on Robert Anderson Middle School in Anderson, South Carolina, on Oct. 5. Parents rushed to pick up their children, causing a traffic jam in front of the school. Ken Ruinard/USA TODAY Network/Reuters hide caption

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How Patagonia's ownership bombshell changes the game for American business

In moving all ownership of the company to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective, the Chouinards have once again forced other companies and their leaders to confront just how they will reconcile their own company structures with their stated goals of addressing the climate catastrophe. And guess what? No matter what they do, their customers are going to confront them on it. Just as Patagonia has helped move the goalposts on sustainability in the supply chain, and speaking out on social and environmental issues, it has now established a new standard for how a company can truly walk the walk on its values far beyond an ESG or CSR strategy.

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Remote work could be the reason you don't have a job in 10 years

That fear has been well-documented for over a decade, according to an October 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper by Baldwin and his research partner Jonathan Dingel. In the paper, titled “Telemigration and Development: On the Offshorability of Teleworkable Jobs,” they categorize jobs into one of four groups: highly offshoreable, offshoreable, hard to offshore, and non-offshoreable. © 2022 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell My Personal Information | Ad Choices FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Terms & Conditions. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions.

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12 Habits Of Happy And Calm People

Do you ever notice how some people always seem to have it together? They're calm and happy with both feet firmly planted on the ground, even amidst turmoil. Like a mountain that stands tall and strong, they weather the many storms that come their way. They seek out blessings and uncover them like the beautiful hidden gems that they are. Magic seems to find them each day, inviting an authentic smile to cross their lips.

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The Nord Stream pipelines have stopped leaking. But the methane emitted broke records

This is one of several leaks in the Nord Stream pipelines running between Russia and Germany. Methane from the leaks could have a powerful warming effect on the Earth's atmosphere. AP hide caption

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This prestigious Bay Area high school didn't rank in the U.S. top 100

In the public school category, no Bay Area schools made the top 20 nationwide, as determined by the school information website Niche, which bases its annual rankings on a number of criteria, including data from the U.S. Department of Education, standardized test scores, graduation rates, Advanced Placement enrollment, college admissions and survey results submitted by Niche users.

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Who built Marilyn Monroe?

In 1953, Alfred Kinsey published his highly anticipated new report “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.” The first edition of Playboy magazine hit newsstands. And three new movies made their premiere, one right after the other, all starring Playboy’s very first cover girl: Marilyn Monroe.

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The Instagram capital of the world is a terrible place to be

This time last week I was wandering the stony streets of Positano, a small village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. Positano rests almost vertically on the steep cliffside, with peachy pastel houses stacked on top of one another against zigzagging streets where local vendors sell sips of limoncello and colorful ceramics. At the bottom there is a pebbly beach where, if it’s warm enough (which it usually is), you can swim in the clear, turquoise waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

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This ancient AC system will cool your house without electricity

The Nave Air Conditioning system is a wall that can cool a room without drawing any power whatsoever. Its design that arose from the mind of Yael Issacharov, an Israeli designer who thought there had to be a better way to cool down a home than blasting an AC unit and getting a helluva utilities bill.

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When Does Intelligence Peak?

When does cognitive functioning peak? As we get older, we certainly feel as though our intelligence is rapidly declining. (Well, at least I do!) However, the nitty gritty research on the topic suggests some really interesting nuance. As a recent paper notes, "Not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak on all cognitive tasks, there may not be an age at which humans perform at peak on most cognitive tasks."In one large series of studies, Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine presented evidence from 48, 537 people from standardized IQ and memory tests. The results revealed that processing speed and short-term memory for family pictures and stories peak and begin to decline around high school graduation; some visual-spatial and abstract reasoning abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in the 30s; and still other cognitive functions such as vocabulary and general information do not peak until people reach their 40s or later.

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The 5 Rules of Stoicism to Make You a Better Leader and a Better Human

Curiously, you'd think that with the progress of modern psychology and clinical psychiatry that there would have been more of a selective pressure to do away with all that garbage self-help. Not so. The Secret, as just one example, has maintained its popularity since its original publication in 2009. To date, it has sold more than 35 million copies, has been translated into 50 languages, has had a movie made in its likeness starring none other than Katie Holmes, and even had a successful sequel, The Greatest Secret. Stoicism is one of the great ancient Greek/Roman theories of knowledge, the first "life philosophy" in which the teachings permit its students to maximize positive emotions and reduce negative emotions, and through the virtues of emotional intelligence and self-regulation (our modern terms, not theirs), allow people to achieve the enduring state of "eudaimonia," or a life of flourishing and fulfillment.

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Why left-handed people are likelier to be mentally ill

Left-handed people (who we will call “lefties” for brevity) are those people who write with their left hand or are physically dominant on the left side of their body. Despite making up only about 10% of the population, they constitute as much as 40% of cases of psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. These are some of the most severe types of mental illness, characterized by hallucinations, bizarre beliefs, and losing touch with reality. Why are lefties likelier to be mentally ill?Lateralization — that is, localization of a function or behavior to one side of the body or brain — occurs across species. For instance, some species of spiders primarily use their left legs more when handling pray, and honeybees primarily use their right eye when learning food associations. We humans have been around 90% right-handed since at least the Paleolithic period, over 10,000 years ago.

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The fight against money laundering: Machine learning is a game changer

The volume of money laundering and other financial crimes is growing worldwide—and the techniques used to evade their detection are becoming ever more sophisticated. This has elicited a vigorous response from banks, which, collectively, are investing billions each year to improve their defenses against financial crime (in 2020, institutions spent an estimated $214 billion on financial-crime compliance). 1 1. True cost of financial crime compliance study, LexisNexis, 2020. What’s more, the resulting regulatory fines related to compliance are surging year over year as regulator’s impose tougher penalties. But banks’ traditional rule- and scenario-based approaches to fighting financial crimes has always seemed a step behind the bad guys, making the fight against money laundering an ongoing challenge for compliance, monitoring, and risk organizations.Now, there is an opportunity for banks to get out in front. Recent enhancements in machine learning (ML) are helping banks to improve their anti-money-laundering (AML) programs significantly, including, and most immediately, the transaction monitoring element of these programs. Moreover, US regulators are strongly backing these efforts. Including the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 and the subsequent National Illicit Finance Strategy, US agencies are reducing obstacles from existing regulations, guidance, and examination practices to encourage banks to test and adopt innovative approaches for fighting financial crimes. 2 2. See “Treasury announces 2022 National Illicit Finance Strategy,” US Department of the Treasury press release, May 13, 2022; “Treasury’s FinCEN and federal banking agencies issue joint statement encouraging innovative industry approaches to AML compliance,” Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), US Department of the Treasury, December 3, 2018; and “FinCEN’s Innovation Initiative,” FinCEN, accessed September 27, 2022

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Why We Do Things We Know Weâ€™ll Regret

“We have willfully sinned,” millions of Jews around the world prayed in their Yom Kippur Viduy, or confession, over the past week—confession of sin being a core tenet of Judaism (as it is in many faiths). “We have committed evil … we have gone astray, we have led others astray. We have strayed from Your good precepts and ordinances, and it has not profited us.” For all people, Jews and gentiles alike, this prayer lays bare one of the greatest puzzles of human behavior: We voluntarily commit transgressions for which we are truly regretful, and they don’t even benefit us.If you observed the holy Day of Atonement, I doubt you said, “I am sorry for the sins I committed this year. But I still chuckle when I think of the lies I told and the people I hurt. And the coveting—that was the best!” It almost seems like a glitch in the matrix of life, a faulty algorithm programmed into us that makes us think we will be happy if we commit certain acts, when in fact they make us miserable.

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â€˜How Do You Know If Youâ€™re With the Right Person?â€™

I recently ended my first relationship, and I’m dealing with a lot of regret. I had never dated anyone, and had only recently discovered I was a lesbian. When I did start dating, I set out to explore a lot, because I didn’t have the college or high school or even early 20s experiences so many of my peers did. I almost immediately ended up in a relationship with a woman. We dated for a couple of years, starting just a few months before the pandemic.This spring, it felt like each of us was busy doing our own thing, and we were growing apart. I successfully ended things with the understanding that we would stay friends. It seemed to be working and like I was (maybe unfairly) getting to have my cake and eat it too. I mentioned to a friend that I hoped we could be together when we were older and wiser (which makes me think I did actually see a future for us but didn’t realize it until too late).

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Why airline carbon offsets are mostly a sham

Many airlines now offer their customers the chance to buy carbon offsets along with their ticket. The premise is that the money will go toward a third-party project that prevents an equivalent volume of carbon from reaching the atmosphere as the per-person emissions of the flight. But the offset credits that airlines buy with the money are mostly cheap and of low quality, according to an Oct. 10 analysis of eight European airlines by the non-profit research group Carbon Market Watch. The hazard of flight offsets has always been that airlines will be content to rack them up in the accounting of their corporate carbon footprint, rather than reducing emissions directly through operational and technological efficiency improvements. But Carbon Market Watch’s study suggests that not only are airlines failing to truly offset flight emissions, they may also be prolonging the transition to cleaner flying.

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How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany

“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is,” Iris Murdoch wrote in a 1970 masterpiece — a radical idea in her era and in her culture, counter to the notions of individualism and self-actualization so foundational to Western philosophy. Today, practices like metta meditation and mindfulness — practices anchored in the dissolution of the self, which remains the most challenging of human tasks even for the most devoted meditators among us, offering only transient glimpses of reality as it really is — flood the global mainstream, drawn from the groundwater of ancient Eastern philosophy and carried across the cultural gulf by a handful of pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s.Chief among them was the great Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022), who arrived in America in 1961 to study the history of Vietnamese Buddhism at the Princeton Theological Seminary, bringing what he learned back to his native Vietnam two years later and devoting himself to the project of peace, for which the South Vietnamese government punished him with a four-decade exile. Half a lifetime later — having been nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize, having founded the fount of civilizational optimism that is Plum Village in France, having survived a stroke that left him unable to speak or walk — he was finally allowed to return to his motherland, leaving the West that celebrated him as the father of mindfulness.

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The big idea: do we all experience the world in the same way?

It may seem as though the world just pours itself directly into our minds through the transparent windows of our eyes and our ears. But psychologists have long known that perception is not simply a “read out” of sensory information. We are strongly influenced by context. From the effect of shadows on how we perceive the brightness of a surface, to our tendency to interpret facial expressions depending on what we think is happening, context permeates all our conscious experiences, and it does so in a way that we are typically never aware of.Some researchers, myself included, go even further. Instead of context merely influencing the contents of perception, the idea here – which builds on the legacy of the great German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz – is that perceptual experience is built from the top down, with the incoming (bottom-up) sensory signals mostly fine-tuning the brain’s “best guesses” of what’s out there. In this view, the brain is continually making predictions about the causes of the sensory information it receives, and it uses that information to update its predictions. In other words, we live in a “controlled hallucination” that remains tied to reality by a dance of prediction and correction, but which is never identical to that reality.

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How to make networking events less awkward: Be a croissant, not a bagel : Life Kit

This summer, I went to my first in-person work conference since before the pandemic. As an extrovert, I was excited by the prospect of meeting new people in my field of journalism, rubbing elbows with the best and brightest and trading tips with other reporters. That's what networking expert Robbie Samuels calls the tight clusters of people who gather in seemingly impenetrable circles at networking events, who seem to already know each other and don't want to let newcomers in.To me, that's what makes networking so intimidating. But Samuels, author of the book Croissants Versus Bagels: Strategic, Effective and Inclusive Networking at Conferences, says it doesn't have to be this way. If we all adapted a more croissant-like attitude – that is, a spirit of openness, like the pastry's shape – he says people would understand that networking is about being generous with our professional knowledge and helping each other succeed in our careers. So while I may have fallen into a crowd of bagels at my career event, that shouldn't stop me from projecting a sense of openness to other professionals. "Ask yourself what you can do to be the croissant, to welcome people into your space," he says.

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Body neutrality: what it is and how it can help lead to more positive body image

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.While this way of thinking is very similar to body neutrality, the two aren’t entirely the same. One way of thinking about this is that body neutrality is a sort of stop on the path towards positive body image. While both emphasise an appreciation of what our bodies do for us (rather than what they look like), positive body image involves a more active care, appreciation and respect for our bodies.

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These melting mountain peaks could kill thousands. Can science help?

On the majestic Marmolada, the Queen of Italy’s Dolomites, the first Sunday of July was a beautiful day for hikers—the sky almost cloudless, a warm 82 degrees Fahrenheit in the valley. But for the mountain, even the 50°F near the 11,000-foot peak was sweltering. From its glacier, the largest in the mountain range, a section the size of two football fields broke off. Ice and debris thundered down with the force of a collapsing skyscraper. Eleven people—two of them experienced mountain guides—never made it home.Mountain ranges cover a quarter of all the planet’s land, and the millions of people who call them home have always lived with their natural hazards. But now, global warming is fundamentally changing their makeup. Their temperatures have risen up to 50 percent faster than the global average, and even when summiting the peaks of the Himalayas, alpinists now ditch their expedition suits for lighter jackets—a small comfort amid elevated dangers.

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The Sky Needs Its ‘Silent Spring’ Moment

Darkness was falling at Kitt Peak National Observatory outside Tucson, Ariz. At this hour Michelle Edwards, the observatory's associate director, would usually be inside prepping for a night on the telescope. But on this evening last December she stood alongside me in the twilight, watching two worlds collide. As the stars came out, electric lights dotting the landscape below turned on, too, leaving a diminished Milky Way arcing above the brighter civilization. “Holy crap,” Edwards said, taken aback by the enormous city glow.All that light is an existential threat to high-grade stargazing on Kitt Peak. Over the decades astronomers have taken urgent steps to slow or even reverse its spread. For them, the boundary of each glowing dome was a battle line, expanding or shrinking with each skirmish won or lost; the imperfect darkness overhead was a testament to local policy and millions of collective actions—or collective shrugs and proliferations of gleaming billboards and streetlights.

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This ancient AC system will cool your house without electricity

Issacharov found inspiration in the Palestinian “‘jarrah”’, a traditional drinking water container made of terra-cotta that is hung in a room to cool both the water and the living space itself. The clay in these containers, which can be traced all the way back to the neolithic and Bronze Age across all the Mediterranean, is full of small pores. The water filters out of those pores very slowly, evaporating using the heat in the water. That heat gets transferred to the air and that makes the water progressively cooler, similarly to how your body sweats. When the atmosphere is dry and the temperature is high, this process is very efficient, lowering the temperature of the water several degrees—which is why it is traditionally used by many cultures to store drinking water during the hot summer months.She thought that there had to be a solution that could use this same cooling phenomenon, but integrated more seamlessly within the building itself. “I wanted to make the walls active and beneficial to the space,” Issacharov says. That’s when she got her second inspiration: the work of architect Hassan Fathy, who brought back traditional building methods using adobe and mud to modern Egyptian architecture. Through centuries of experience, traditional cultures developed methods that resulted in energy efficient construction techniques to provide thermal comfort in all regions across the globe, all built with locally available materials in a sustainable way. Fathy proposed using these techniques rather than modern Western methods and materials—which result in needless waste and energy consumption.

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What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?

With the demonstration of his impressive prototype Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) in 2012, Palmer Luckey managed to instantly erase the poor image VR had garnered from ‘90s movies like The Lawnmower Man and woefully premature commercial curios like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. This led the Kickstarter campaign for the first Oculus developer kit to balloon past its $250,000 funding goal on the way to a final haul of $2.4 million. Two years later, Oculus accepted a $2 billion buyout offer from Facebook.The lead-up to the 2016 launch of the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift (the CV1) only raised consumer VR’s profile further. Analyst predictions were bullish, going so far as to say that the VR market would be worth $150 billion in just five years. Oculus’ co-founders were breathlessly profiled in glossy magazines, with Luckey landing on the cover of Time in August 2015. Google even partnered with Disney to give away its low-tech paper Cardboard sleeves, enticing fans of Star Wars and other mega properties with themed mobile experiences. Decades removed from the hangover of failed VR arcades and gimmicky consumer trinkets, things would be different this time.

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From Poe to Mao: piecing together the evolution of detective stories

Many literary critics trace the development of the modern detective story back to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a 1841 short story by the American author Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s writing often centers around mysterious or macabre subject matter, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue is no exception. Published in a magazine that Poe edited himself, the story begins when two Parisian women are brutally murdered by an unseen subject speaking an unknown language.The Murders in the Rue Morgue has shaped the detective genre in more ways than one. The most obvious of these has to do with character. The story’s unlikely protagonist, an armchair detective named Auguste C. Dupin who solves the case by thinking outside the box, was a major inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s own Sherlock Holmes. The story’s narrator, a friend of Dupin’s who never ceases to be amazed at the detective’s deductive reasoning, found a spiritual successor in Doyle’s Dr. Watson.

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Crackdowns, lawsuits and intimidation: the threat to freedom of expression in India

A clamorous public square has long been a point of national pride. But the pressure on unfettered speech is palpable.

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WhatsApp is now a spammersâ€™ paradise in India

"The toxic cycle in restaurant kitchens needs to end"

After a week, the executive chef calls me to his office, sits me down and asks me a few questions about food, which I answer in accordance with my experience. Later he says, "I don't approve of your hiring, it's because of you that I couldn't get one of my guys, hence I am transferring you out of the kitchen and I will let the people who hired you decide what they want to do with you." Hearing this, my heart sank. I tried reasoning with him, but he paid no heed to my requests. Immediately, I started thinking about the time spent sharpening my skills and the money spent on my education in this field. It felt like a massive waste if this was what I had to show for it. I was in a dark place and tried to prove him wrong. I worked hard, but every day I was left questioning my life's choices. I felt like quitting and heading back home and I almost did. I spoke to the chef again and asked him to just let me do what I had come there to do instead of wasting my skill and talent.I worked in the restaurant for 1.5 years under his scrutiny. At each step of the way, I was shamed for not working up to his expectations but at the same time, I would see all my ideas being implemented in the menu. It was a troubling time, to say the least, but not an uncommon experience for those in the industry. This was not a problem of my worthiness or talent (or lack of it) but that of his ego. I quit the job when I reached a breaking point.

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The Worldâ€™s Destination Dishes

They become so associated with a specific place — listed on every chalkboard menu in town, recommended by every bartender, raved about in every travel guide — that no visitor can leave without a taste. Travelers can’t miss the gooey cheese pull from a square of pizza alla pala in Rome; the satisfying slurp of perfectly chewy noodles from unctuous shoyu ramen in Tokyo; the shot of adrenaline exploding from a tangy, spicy golgappa in New Delhi; or the sweet zing of a taco al pastor in Mexico City. These foods are interwoven into a city’s fabric, and while the word “destination” has been overused (applied unthinkingly to Michelin-starred tasting menus and neighborhood brunch spots), it’s a fitting term for meals that draw visitors as much as landmark architecture or museum exhibits.When tourists plan a trip around a cebicheria in Lima, a barbecue joint in Kansas City, or a patisserie in Paris, they’re entering an ongoing conversation among local chefs, bakers, and diners about enduring culinary practices. In these cities, a piece of lime-tinged fish, a burnt end, or a delicate choux pastry is a totem used to establish, reinforce, and challenge a shared identity — it’s also an invitation.

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7 Foods That'll Give You a Happiness Boost

Let's admit it. We spend most of our lives chasing happiness. We constantly try new things to improve our mental well-being like therapy, new exercise routines and meditations. But did you know eating certain foods can lift your spirits? Studies linking nutrition and mental well-being have emerged in the past decade, and certain foods are associated with increased serotonin in our brains. Serotonin, also known as the "happy hormone," is a chemical that plays an important role in regulating our mood. Low serotonin levels can cause mood instability. You know the typical scene in movies where a girl sits on her couch in sweats, eating a tub of chocolate ice cream. Turns out Hollywood was on to something. A systematic review found that dark chocolate can positively affect one's mood. There are three main components found in chocolate that are associated with the feeling of happiness: tryptophan, theobromine and phenylethylalanine. Tryptophan is an amino acid the brain uses to produce serotonin. Theobromine is a weak stimulant that can improve your mood. Meanwhile, phenylethylalanine is another amino acid used by the body to produce dopamine, which acts as an antidepressant.

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65 years ago, â€œsimple satelliteâ€ Sputnik redefined space science â€” and sent a sinister message

Sputnik launched during the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month-long international scientific initiative that took place between 1957 and 1958. The Year ultimately signified the end of a period of noncooperation between the East and the West during the early years of the Cold War that had lasted through the death of Soviet leader Stalin in 1953. It involved scientists from 67 different countries. But it was not all rosy teamwork — the Cold War may have defrosted slightly with Stalin’s death, yet it was still chilly at best.In 1955, then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed an “Open Skies” policy that would allow any nation to conduct aerial reconnaissance on any other. After the Soviet Union rejected the proposal in 1955 and following the approval of the National Security Council, the U.S. announced its intention to develop a science satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year. The Soviet Union made a similar declaration shortly thereafter.

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Why does time go forwards, not backwards?

The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch."The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."

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Riding Alongside One of the World's Last Whaling Tribes

Baleo! Baleo! â€” "The hunt is on!" The cry resounded through the village. A minute before, a motorboat had raced into the bay, and its crew had screamed the signal to the men on the beach, who themselves had taken up the cry. Now every man, woman, and child who had heard their alarm was adding a voice to the shouted relay, until all fifteen hundred souls in the ramshackle houses and surrounding jungle chorused that the sperm whales had been sighted. When the clamor reached Yohanes "Jon" Demon Hariona in the decaying home he shared with his grandparents and sisters on the cliffs above Lamalera, he grabbed a baseball cap with frayed threads tasseling its brim, a battered plastic water jug, and a pill bottle stuffed with tobacco confetti and dried palm- leaf rolling papers. Then he dashed down steps chiseled into the stone of this Indonesian island, pushing aside hallooing children as he went.

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The First Global Vaccination Expedition Set Sail in 1803

The world was riddled with smallpox, which killed one-third of all infected. Though Edward Jenner had discovered in 1797 that pus from a cow’s cowpox blisters could be used as a vaccine, the majority of the world had no access to the inoculation. Cowpox was such a local disease, mostly found in England and occasionally France or Italy, that it was unclear how anyone could scale vaccination to more people.Scientists had yet to discover germ theory, so no one knew what a virus was. They did know that they needed to spread cowpox in order to keep the vaccine alive, but prior methods, like putting active disease material (in other words, pus) from an infected person onto cloth or in a vial and rubbing that into the wound of a recipient, didn’t work over long distances. Taking a whole cow to disease hotspots was equally impractical. Today, such viral material is kept alive by refrigeration — technology and know-how scientists just didn’t have back then.

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The Time a Russian Empress Built an Ice Palace and Forced Her Jester To Get Married In It

It was 1740 and one of the coldest winters St. Petersburg, Russia, had ever seen. But few residents mentioned the bitter winter in letters or accounts. They were, understandably, distracted. While the rest of Europe shivered through the deep freeze, Russians were busy—building a palace. On the orders of Empress Anna Ioannovna, numerous craftsmen were charged with constructing an elaborate, fairy tale–esque castle, one made entirely of ice.Rising 66 feet from the surface of the frozen Neva River and nearly 165 feet long, the Ice Palace was built “according to all the rules of the most current architecture,” noted Russian mathematician Georg Wolfgang Krafft. And everything, as in everything, was carved from ice. Ice windows, furniture, tables, doors, even playing cards, and everything was painted to look like the real thing. An exact, frigid replica of the empress’s bed chamber, complete with an ice bed, ice canopy, ice pillows, and ice sheets was painstakingly recreated. (Nothing beats snuggling up under a frozen comforter.) Verdant, luscious gardens blossomed from the frozen tundra. Green-painted ice bushes surrounded the palace, and colorful ice birds perched on ice trees. A steam bath, or bania, built from ice sat beside the palace. Decorative ice dolphins blew fire. A life-sized ice elephant’s raised trunk served as a fountain by day and as a stunning torch by night.

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What Makes an Effective Executive

An effective executive does not need to be a leader in the typical sense of the word. Peter Drucker, the author of more than two dozen HBR articles, says some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs he has worked with over his 65-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They ranged from extroverted to nearly reclusive, from easygoing to controlling, from generous to parsimonious.What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices: They asked, “What needs to be done?” They also asked, “What is right for the enterprise?” They developed action plans. They took responsibility for decisions. They took responsibility for communicating. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems. They ran productive meetings. And they thought and said “we” rather than “I.”

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The Power of Listening in Helping People Change

Feedback is one of the most common ways we help others learn and develop. But it can backfire when people become defensive. Researchers explored whether a more subtle intervention — asking questions and listening — could be more effective. Whereas feedback is about telling employees that they need to change, listening to employees and asking them questions might make them want to change. The research findings suggest that attentive and non-judgmental listening seems to make an employee more relaxed, more self-aware of his or her strengths and weaknesses, and more willing to reflect in a non-defensive manner. This can make employees more likely to cooperate (versus compete) with other colleagues, as they become more interested in sharing their attitudes, but not necessarily in trying to persuade others to adopt them, and more open to considering other points of view. The researchers explain the main barriers to high-quality listening and offer tips to help anyone become a better listener.Giving performance feedback is one of the most common ways managers help their subordinates learn and improve. Yet, research revealed that feedback could actually hurt performance: More than 20 years ago, one of us (Kluger) analyzed 607 experiments on feedback effectiveness and found that feedback caused performance to decline in 38% of cases. This happened with both positive and negative feedback, mostly when the feedback threatened how people saw themselves.

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How to Get Empathetic Marketing Right

Empathetic marketing reached an intense crossroads in 2020, when the pandemic prompted many brands to respond to collective grief — some with success, and many coming off as utterly tone-deaf. That doesn’t mean that brands need to shy away from channeling empathy in their marketing, however; authenticity and genuine connection are more important than ever. To this end, the author recommends three strategies for brand to forge genuine customer connections: 1) Keep one ear to the ground, 2) give customers the power of choice, and 3) set the tone with visuals.

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Ensuring Your Products Aren't Used for Discrimination

Discrimination is both a societal and a business issue. And, the extent to which discrimination is allowed to affect a company is a decision that is made by business leaders. Fortunately, there is a growing toolkit for leaders who want to create a more inclusive company — and society. Here, the authors lay out four steps every leader should take to work toward this goal.

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Project Leaders Will Make or Break Your Sustainability Goals

Sustainability transformation is on every CEO’s agenda, but many organizations lack a sense of urgency in their implementation and are struggling to meet these ambitious and complex goals. Bringing the sustainable future into our grasp will rely upon the successful execution of thousands of well-conceived projects. CEOs should empower a new kind of sustainability-focused project manager to push organizational transformation forward. Project leaders should begin by embedding sustainability elements into every project, using four key practices outlined in this article. Finally, they should use the Project Canvas, a project management tool, to ensure that sustainability remains embedded throughout each project’s life cycle. Organizations that build these capabilities today will be best positioned to rethink and remake their businesses as triple-bottom-line goals continue to be a top priority in the years ahead.

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An end to doomerism

"The issue is that people mistake optimism for 'blind optimism' - the blinkered faith that things will always get better."Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It's no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly get a middle-page snippet. It's why doomsday thinkers get respect and accolades. They're the smart ones that can see what the rest of us can't. They're the ones that speak truth to power.I've fallen into this trap myself. I saw cynicism in other people and mistook it for intelligence. To look smart, I tried to do the same. I went through a period of playing life like a game of whack-a-mole. Any idea - promising or not - had to be smashed out of sight. It was doomed to fail.There is an "optimism stigma" that is pervasive throughout society. It's why I often feel embarrassed to admit that I'm an optimist. It knocks me down in people's expectations.But the world desperately needs more optimism to make progress, so I should stop being so shy about it.

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How the War in Ukraine Might End

Hein Goemans grew up in Amsterdam in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, surrounded by stories and memories of the Second World War. His father was Jewish and had hidden “under the floorboards,” as he put it, during the Nazi occupation. When Goemans came to the United States to study international relations, he recalled being asked in one class about his most formative personal experience of international relations. He said that it was the Second World War. The other students objected that this wasn’t personal enough. But it was very personal for Goemans. He recalled attending a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Amsterdam by Canadian forces, in May of 1985. Many of the Canadian soldiers who took part in the liberation were still alive, and they re-created the arrival of Canadian troops to liberate the city. Goemans remembers thinking that the people of Amsterdam would be too blasé to attend the commemoration, and being moved that he was wrong. “The entire city was packed with people by the roadside,” he told me recently. “I was really surprised at how deeply it was felt.”Goemans, who now teaches political science at the University of Rochester, wrote his dissertation on war-termination theory—that is, the study of how wars end. A great deal of work, Goemans learned, had been done on how wars start, but very little on how they might conclude. There were, perhaps, historical reasons for this oversight: the nuclear armament of the United States and the Soviet Union meant that a war between them could end human civilization; not just some dying, but the death of everything. The study of war during the Cold War thus gave rise to a rich vocabulary about deterrence: direct deterrence, extended deterrence, deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial. But the Cold War ended, and wars kept happening. Goemans saw an opportunity for an intellectual intervention.

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$620 for an HIV diagnosis: Russians buy their way out of military service on Telegram

On Monday, Dima and his friends each paid a minivan driver $170 for a perilous, nearly 250-mile journey from a Russian city close to the border to Tbilisi. It’s estimated that as many as 10,000 Russians are crossing the Georgia border every day — just one stream in a massive exodus out of Russia over the last two weeks. More than 260,000 people have fled the country since the announcement of the partial mobilization.Telegram is now home to a cottage industry of services designed to help reservists like Dima avoid military service, offering everything from transportation to falsified HIV and hepatitis diagnoses, and other forged documents, sometimes sold in exchange for bitcoins. These groups have also become a place where people hawk services ranging from $34,100 flight tickets out of Russia to currency exchange, accommodation, job opportunities, and even permanent residency in popular destinations such as Kazakhstan.

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Asking one simple question can entirely change how you feel | Psyche Ideas

The pursuit of happiness is many people’s primary goal in life, and a subject that’s occupied countless philosophers and psychologists over the millennia. It is usually painted as an effortful and difficult aim to accomplish, especially in trying times. Indeed, it’s through their promises to help us reach a happier place that many self-help gurus pay for their mansions on the beach. However, taking the first step to being happier could be a lot simpler than many people realise.Logic dictates that happiness relies, at least in part, on a person’s ability to regulate their emotions. After all, emotion regulation is the process of trying to change one’s current emotions to reach a more desired emotional state. For example, I hate crying at sad movies, so whenever I feel the sadness creeping up, I usually crack a joke to ward it off. Many of the emotion-regulation strategies people commonly use might be familiar to you, such as doing fun things, talking with a friend, and trying to think about the situation differently.

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Baap Rey !!

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Most Popular Editorials: Sick of data leaks, Indonesians are siding with a hacker who exposed 1.3 billion SIM card details

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