3 Ways to Build Trust with Your Suppliers

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3 Ways to Build Trust with Your Suppliers Trust is crucial to build and sustain strong supplier relationships. But one challenge has been measuring the level of trust. The authors developed a tool to help companies quantify it. They used it to study 15 relationships, which provided valuable insights into how to turn a low-trust relationship into a high-performing partnership. Continued here

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What the Next Era of Globalization Will Look Like Rana Forhoohar, a columnist at the Financial Times, makes the case for less global, more local supply chains. In her view, the last few decades of globalization hasn’t worked for most people. And more localized economies can provide more resilience, more sustainability, and less inequality. Continued here

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3 Strategies to Earn Consumer Trust in Email Marketing Research shows that most Americans are troubled by companies’ usage of their personal data. Perhaps paradoxically, however, consumers also prefer personalized marketing — which requires data. The author suggests three strategies for brands to use in email marketing to personalize messaging while earning and maintaining consumer trust: 1) Make your privacy and opt-in policies clear, 2) Optimize for humans, and 3) Create, test, learn, repeat. Continued here

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Free Yourself from Shame at Work We’ve all had situations that have caused us to feel shame at work. Maybe you got a bad review from your boss, or you dropped the ball on a project, or you got laid off. Feelings of shame can send us into a spiral of despair, creating a sense of unworthiness. But shame isn’t entirely bad. Emotions like guilt and shame can inspire you to change for the better, like when you’ve caused someone pain and feel remorse. It’s human nature to crave connection, and shame can motivate you to act in ways that link you more closely to your community. But when we feel ashamed, we often want to hide, and the combination of self-isolation and feeling badly can lead to a range of emotional problems, including social anxiety, substance abuse, self-harm, and a lessened ability to generate solutions. This article offers five tools used by clinical psychologists to deal with shame more effectively so that you can show up for your life and your work as your best self. Continued here

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How Executive Teams Shape a Company's Purpose To shape an enduring purpose that sets a company apart both competitively and as an employer, leadership teams must pave the way. An effective, aligned, and committed executive team — the governance mechanism that shapes the story of an organization unlike any other team — is central to shaping and sustaining impactful corporate purpose. In a post-pandemic workplace where talent retention and productivity have become top executive priorities, clearly purposeful organizations come out on top. Leaders must create a culture of radical trust, in which people not only understand and believe in the purpose the company serves, but also feel safe to act on it for the good of the organization. From that combination of clarity and trust comes exceptional innovation and growth. The authors present five strategies for leaders to put their company’s purpose into practice. Continued here

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How Bullying Manifests at Work -- and How to Stop It The term workplace bullying describes a wide range of behaviors, and this complexity makes addressing it difficult and often ineffective. For example, most anti-bullying advice, from “anger management” to zero-tolerance policies, deals with more overt forms of bullying. Covert bullying, such as withholding information or gaslighting, is rarely considered or addressed. In this piece, the authors discuss the different types of bullying, the myths that prevent leaders from addressing it, and how organizations can effectively intervene and create a safer workplace. Continued here

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How Fossil Fuel Divestment Falls Short Divesting from fossil fuel assets makes a big statement. Its impact, however, is murkier. Selling off an asset requires someone else to buy it, which, in the case of fossil fuels, can mean breathing new capital into the exact assets companies are trying to choke. But there’s another approach: running those assets into the ground. By holding onto fossil fuel assets, investors can resist efforts to improve their output and extend their lives. By planning to sunset these assets, they maintain control and can ultimately have more of an impact than if they simply washed their hands and dumped these investments from their books. Continued here

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To Sustain DEI Momentum, Companies Must Invest in 3 Areas Organizations of all sizes and across industries pledged their support to DEI initiatives in 2020, including building more diverse and equitable companies, and to using their power for good. Now, with the spotlight no longer shining quite so brightly on corporate DEI, how much progress have organizations made against their promises? To understand the state of DEI efforts since 2020, the authors looked at aggregated, self-reported data collected from a subset of 48 of their clients, along with their experiences consulting with additional organizations. Overall, they find evidence of some positive progress. But they also find that organizations could be making better, faster progress if they were more intentional about how they craft their DEI strategies. They’ve identified three areas where organizations need to focus and invest to keep DEI momentum going: connecting a good strategy to the right accountability; collecting and analyzing the right data; and truly empowering DEI leaders. Continued here

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Is there a role for carbon credits in the transition to a fair, net-zero future? In June 2022, TED's climate initiative, Countdown, launched its Dilemma Series: events designed to look at some of the "knots" in the climate change space, where diverging positions have stalled progress and solidified into an inability to collaborate across differences. The event focused on the question: Is there a role for carbon credits in the transition to a fair, net-zero future? Through TED Talks and conversations featuring scientists, CEOs, activists, politicians, artists, frontline community leaders, investors and more, this film offers a 360-degree view of carbon credits -- a contentious subject that prompted some discomfort, disagreement and, ultimately, a renewed sense of possibility. It's an invitation to listen deeply, keep an open mind and get a little wiser on a complex topic. (Featuring, in order of appearance: Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, John Kilani, Nat Keohane, Julio Friedmann, Donnel Baird, Nili Gilbert, Al Gore, Inés Yábar, James Dyke, Tom Rivett-Carnac, Lindsay Levin, David Biello, Gilles Dufrasne, Kavita Prakash-Mani, Susan Chomba, Gabrielle Walker, Derik Broekhoff, Annette Nazareth) Continued here

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Chief performance officers can be a secret ingredient for private equity success. Here's why Most leaders, and by extension, most companies, talk about people being their greatest asset. In the fast-moving world of private investments, executive talent is even more crucial. Due diligence decisions in private equity (PE) can often hinge on talent issues. Growth equity, likewise, is grounded in questions of human capital, as investors work to turn good companies into great companies. The success of venture capital investments can be even more reliant on the quality of the existing leadership team. Across the sector, private investment firms conduct ongoing audits of top executives’ performance and may take swift action when it falters, consistent with their fiduciary obligation to their investors. Continued here

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Author Talks: What poker pro Annie Duke can teach you about quitting on time In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Molly Liebergall chats with former professional poker player Annie Duke about her new book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (Penguin Random House, September 2022). Annie Duke retired from professional poker with more than $4 million in winnings by knowing when to stick out a hand and when to cash in her chips. Much like a poker career, life, she says, is “one long game,” and the biggest winners are also the most strategic quitters. An edited version of the conversation follows. Continued here

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Refining in the energy transition through 2040 While the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine have triggered extreme volatility and uncertainty in the refining product and fuel markets, the transition to a low-carbon economy continues to bring significant challenges and opportunities to the refining sector. Increasing national and industry climate commitments and technological improvements, as well as changing consumer preferences, will shape the outlook for refining in the next two decades. 1 1. This analysis is based on the market outlook that preceded the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and thus does not factor in any disruptions of global crude and product flows emanating from Russian sanctions (only changes to market demand, supply, and flows persisting after 2025 would be materially relevant for the outcomes of the analyses presented in this article; alternative scenarios are available on demand). Continued here

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The UN Climate Talks Are About to Face Maddening Uncertainties For years, the world has known what it has to do about climate change: hold the line at 1.5 degrees Celsius to stave off the worst effects of warming. To do so we need to make serious cuts to carbon emissions, fast—at least 42 percent from 2019 levels by 2030. That’s been the aim since 2015, when world leaders came together to sign the Paris Agreement. So around this time last year, when global climate negotiators arrived at the United Nations’ annual Conference of Parties meeting, known as COP26, they came with a clear mandate. Yet by the end of the marathon negotiations, they left Glasgow with the carbon arithmetic far from solved.One year later, the math still isn’t pretty. The margin of error? Somewhere between 0.9 and 1.3 degrees C past 1.5, according to a UN report released shortly before COP27, the next stop on the annual carousel of global climate talks, which begins on Monday. That stubborn overshoot is disappointing, says Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s lead authors. Since Glasgow, there’s been a year of haggling. Negotiators should be coming back this year in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, armed with more ambitious promises that they couldn’t make before: Perhaps their country has found a new way to trim methane emissions or to save a carbon-sucking forest or has passed legislation that funds renewables. And yet, despite promises to the contrary, only a handful of countries have pledged more cuts, which together represent only 0.5 out of the 13 gigatons of CO2 scientists say must be slashed by 2030 to meet the Paris goal. Continued here

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China Is Now a Major Space Power It’s a significant accomplishment for China’s rapidly growing space program, which plans to build a base on the moon, deploy a lunar rover, and send new landers and orbiters to Mars. It’s also the first long-term neighbor the International Space Station has had since Russia’s Mir station was deorbited in 2001. (China flew two Tiangong experimental prototypes between 2011 and 2019, but they are no longer orbiting.) “This is important for the Chinese space program. The International Space Station won’t run for much longer. You may well end up with only one orbiting space station—the Chinese one,” says Fabio Tronchetti, a space law professor at Beihang University in Beijing and the University of Mississippi.The Chinese space program plans to have Tiangong last for 10 to 15 years, with the possibility of extending its lifespan, Tronchetti says. The much larger ISS, operated by the United States, the European Space Agency, Russia, and other partners, could be retired as soon as 2030—that’s the end date the Biden administration gave it after extending its mission last year. (Earlier this year, Russia threatened to pull out by 2024, thanks to the ongoing geopolitical tensions that followed its invasion of Ukraine. But space analysts now expect Russia to continue its support until 2030 as well.) Continued here

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Want a Better PC? Try Building Your Own It can be daunting for a lot of reasons—it’s expensive, it’s complex, it can get messy. But I want to be clear: If you can build an Ikea table, bookshelf, bed, or anything that comes in more than one of those deceivingly heavy flat packs, you can build a PC. The tricky part? I can't tell you how to build your PC. Not really. Not unless I know exactly which hardware you're using. I can, however, explain what each component does and what my recommendations are for each category. For several years now, we've been in the midst of a PC hardware shortage. First, cryptocurrency miners bought up all the GPUs to farm crypto, then we got hit by a worldwide silicon shortage exacerbated by the pandemic. Now an event called the Merge has brought GPU prices back down. What that means for you, the prospective PC builder, is that it's now easier than it has been in the past few years to buy all the parts you need to put together a good work or gaming PC. That is very welcome news. Continued here

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Worms, the Internet, and the End of Reality Heidi Klum stretches out on the floor, prone on a red carpet that’s actually blue while photographers angle for their shots. It would be a traditional step-and-repeat, except she can barely walk. She’s covered in tubular folds of skin that look almost raw. Yet, when Entertainment Tonight puts a microphone in front of her, the accent is unmistakable as she exclaims, “I’m amazing!” Nearby, her husband, musician Tom Kaulitz, is in full fishing regalia, pretending to use her as bait.No doubt, this line of thought is prevalent now following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The Tesla CEO hasn’t installed his content moderation council yet, but the idea that the platform could become a haven of falsehoods and trolling looms large. Every tweet now served up with a grain of salt. That worm smiling at an ET microphone could’ve been a 4chan meme as easily as it was one of the most famous models in the world. Continued here

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What Is Apple One, and Should You Subscribe? big tech companies are always looking for new ways to tie us into their ecosystems, but there is something to be said for the simplicity of a single monthly subscription. Apple One bundles several Apple services into one payment that is cheaper than subscribing to the same services individually. If you already subscribe to the likes of Apple Fitness+ and News+, it’s a great deal for you. The question is whether it can entice anyone currently using a mix of first- and third-party services to switch completely to Apple and lock that walled garden gate. Naturally, cost savings only apply if you're subscribed to all of these services separately. If you only currently subscribe to Apple Music and nothing else, for example, then you're not going to save money by switching to Apple One's Individual plan. That said, compared to the usual pricing for the included services, the Individual plan saves you $6 per month, the Family plan saves you $8, and the Premier plan saves you $25.  Continued here

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New Mexico Is a Great Place for Sci-Fi The book is set in Snodgrass’ home state of New Mexico, a place where science and superstition clash in a particularly striking way. “It’s a very weird place, where you have Los Alamos laboratory, Sandia laboratories, high-tech, high-energy centers,” Snodgrass says, “Some of the finest scientific minds in the world come here to lecture and study and commune with each other, and then on the other side you have people who will balance your aura and sell you a crystal to deal with your cancer.”New Mexico is home to an unusually high concentration of science fiction writers, a group that Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin has jokingly dubbed “the New Mexico mafia.” “Sadly we’ve lost two of our greats,” Snodgrass says. “We lost Roger Zelazny and we lost Fred Saberhagen, but Suzy McKee Charnas is here, Steve Stirling, Stephen R. Donaldson is here, Walter Jon Williams. It’s a very prolific group of writers here.” Continued here

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Strange scientific theory predicts a second type of liquid water The physicists and chemists who study the various states of matter plot them on a chart known as a phase diagram. A generic one is shown below. On the Y-axis is pressure, and on the X-axis is temperature. The diagram shows what we all know intuitively to be true: As temperatures get colder, things tend to become solid; as the temperature increases, things tend to turn to liquid and eventually gas. This is true not just of water but of every substance.Most notably, there are several different kinds of solid forms; that is, water makes many kinds of ice crystals. The ice that we are all familiar with is known as Ih (“one h”), and the water molecules are arranged as a pattern of repeating hexagons. But if we drop the temperature even further, to about -100° C (-148° F), the molecules in the ice crystal re-arrange into a new pattern: a lattice of cubes. This is ice Ic (“one c”). If we keep getting colder, the atoms re-arrange yet again, forming ice XI. This phase has a crystal structure called orthorhombic, a cube stretched so that each side is of a distinct length. If we begin applying pressure, we get yet different types of ice crystals. In all, there are at least 15 forms. Continued here

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What people fail to understand about the dangers of loneliness But there is a way in which such arguments miss the point. They focus on the side-effects of being lonely, not the harm of loneliness itself. We could ask instead how it feels to be lonely. Functional MRIs show that the region of the brain activated by social rejection is the same as that involved in physical pain. But we don’t understand why loneliness is bad for us if all we can say is that it hurts. Why does it hurt? And what does that pain tell us about how to live? These are philosophical questions, not social-scientific ones. They are about the nature of human flourishing and the role of sociality in shaping it, questions that go back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who devotes two books of his Nicomachean Ethics to “philia,” which is commonly translated “friendship.” Aristotle saw that human beings have social needs, and when those needs are frustrated, we suffer. “Loneliness” names our suffering; and what we need is, basically, friends.  Continued here

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Does consciousness change the rules of quantum mechanics? This is the fourth article in a four-part series on quantum entanglement. In the first, we discussed the basics of quantum entanglement. We then discussed how quantum entanglement can be used practically in communications and sensing. In this article, we take a look at the limits of quantum entanglement, and how entanglement on the large scale might even challenge our very basis of reality.We can all agree that quantum entanglement is weird. We don’t worry too much about it, though, beyond some of its more practical applications. After all, the phenomenon plays out on scales that are vastly smaller than our everyday experiences. But perhaps quantum mechanics and entanglement are not limited to the ultra-small. Scientists have shown that macroscopic (albeit small) objects can be placed in entanglement. It begs the question: Is there a size limit for quantum entanglement? Carrying the idea further, could a person become entangled, along with their consciousness?  Continued here

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Three places on Earth where life might have started Our planet is the only place in the Universe known to harbor life, and from the microscopic to the gargantuan, it is positively teeming with it. Yet despite life’s ubiquity, we still aren’t certain where exactly it began. Looking at the chemical makeup of life, we can surmise that the first life required basic ingredients and some sort of “spark.” Here are the three likeliest origins:1. Hydrothermal vents. At the bottom of the ocean, there are cracks in the seafloor from which spew a scalding slurry of water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen compounds, and more. It was around these fissures that billions of years ago nitrogenous oxides in seawater could have reacted in the mishmash of up to 400° C heat with copious elements to create life’s molecular building blocks: amino acids and proteins. Continued here

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These Black Women Moved To Europe For A Better Life — Did They Find It? For the Black women like me who live abroad (I live in Portugal), it’s more than just a pursuit of the “soft life” that’s become ubiquitous online these days. To find out more about why so many people are moving abroad, I spoke to six Black women who decided to make this massive life change. Continued here

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The Election Day Lunar Eclipse Marks A Personal & Political Revolution This lunar eclipse occurs on the same day as the midterm elections in the U.S. Continued here

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The Secret Sauce To A Successful Budget Is Ending Up With $0 It's never too early to care about your personal finances, but it’s also never too late to start. Continued here

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This iPhone-Only Editor Tried Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip4 For A Month Dear iPhone user, have you ever been tempted to switch to the other side? This new phone from Samsung might just be the thing that gets you. Continued here

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Westworld’s reality has officially ended So it’s not surprising HBO has pulled the plug. HBO is currently owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, and its CEO, David Zaslav, is a man who likes to save a buck. “I believe that the grand experiment of chasing subscribers at any cost is over,” he said on an earnings call yesterday. He then mentioned canceling expensive shows if they couldn’t do as well as reruns of The Big Bang Theory. By Westworld’s final season, it was averaging less than half a million live viewers per episode. Big Bang Theory reruns on TBS do more than double that.Westworld is on HBO Max if you want to catch up. But personally, I’d suggest watching the final season of The Good Fight on Paramount Plus, as that show has similar cyber dystopia vibes but with a clear sense of how we got from our present to that awful future. You could also check out Humans, which aired on BBC America around the same time Westworld first premiered. Like Westworld, it’s about how we use robots to enable our own chronic dehumanizing behavior, but it’s centered on robots and a family you can root for. Or you could go watch Person of Interest, which was created by much of the same creative team as Westworld and explored many of the same concepts but did it in a much more comprehensible way. Continued here

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We finally have an idea of what kind of stuff David Zaslav wants Warner Bros. Discovery to make. The swiftness with which Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav began canceling shows and entire movies as part of his plan to boost the company’s revenue was cause for much alarm earlier this year. As series like Infinity Train and Summer Camp Island began disappearing from HBO Max, that alarm only intensified and led many to wonder just what Zaslav hoped to gain by essentially killing off pieces of its catalog just months ahead of its fusion with Discovery Plus. But in a recent WBD earnings call, Zaslav said that he’s confident those cuts were all the right decision because none of those series were performing in a way that benefited the company.“We haven’t had a Superman movie in 13 years,” Zaslav said. “We haven’t done a Harry Potter movie in 15 years. The DC movies and the Harry Potter movie provided a lot of the profits of Warner Bro.s Motion Pictures over the last 25 years, so focus on the franchises.” (The last Superman movie was Man of Steel in 2013, and the last film set in the Harry Potter universe was Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which came out... this year.) Continued here

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Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now If you know where to look, there are often some great discounts available on Apple’s popular — yet oftentimes expensive — AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods last year, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model drop from $159 to $129. And now that you can buy the second-gen AirPods Pro and Black Friday is just around the corner, we’ll likely start seeing even better discounts on the last-gen Pro and other models.Last year, Apple lowered the list price of the second-gen AirPods — now the entry-level model — from $159 to $129. It now only sells the model with a wired charging case, however, which charges via a standard Lightning cable. Despite their age, we found that the easy-to-use, second-gen AirPods still offer great wireless performance and reliable battery life, making them a great pick if you can live without a wireless charging case. Continued here

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Apple settles with former employee accused of stealing trade secrets “Despite over a decade of employment at Apple, Lancaster abused his position and trust within the company to systematically disseminate Apple’s sensitive trade secret information in an effort to obtain personal benefits,” Apple wrote in its original complaint. “He used his seniority to gain access to internal meetings and documents outside the scope of his job’s responsibilities containing Apple’s trade secrets, and he provided these trade secrets to his outside media correspondent.”Lancaster and the unnamed correspondent first made contact in November 2018, according to Apple’s complaint, and the company accused Lancaster of sharing details of unreleased hardware, unannounced feature changes, and future product announcements with the correspondent. Apple also alleged that Lancaster downloaded confidential documents just before leaving the company in November 2019 that would “assist his new employer,” Arris Composites. (Lancaster left Arris in 2021, according to his LinkedIn.) Continued here

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The execs behind the MoviePass debacle are now facing criminal charges Chris Bond, a spokesperson for Farnsworth, said in a statement emailed to The Verge that “The indictment repeats the same allegations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Commission’s recent complaint filed on September 27th against Mr. Farnsworth, concerning matters that were publicly disclosed nearly three years ago and widely reported by the news media. As with the SEC filing, Mr. Farnsworth is confident that the facts will demonstrate that he has acted in good faith, and his legal team intends to contest the allegations in the indictment until his vindication is achieved.”MoviePass eventually shut down at the end of 2019 but is now relaunching with its original co-founder, Stacy Spikes (not named in today’s charges), who had sold a majority stake in the company to HMNY before buying it back in 2021. According to the site for the MoviePass 2.0 beta, invites will go out to people on the Chicago waitlist starting next week as it relaunches the service with three pricing tiers: $10, $20, and $30. Wisely, there’s no promise of unlimited movie viewing in the new service: “Each level will get a certain amount of credits to be able to use towards movies each month.” Continued here

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Starlink is getting daytime data caps Starlink is about to feel a little more like other ISPs, with a new data policy that mimics Anytime Minutes from the bad old days of highly restricted cellphone service. The satellite internet division of SpaceX will start throttling home internet for customers who use more than 1TB of Priority Access data per month during peak hours beginning in December. The change is being rolled out as part of a new “Fair Use policy” in the US and Canada.Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of “Priority Access” data that tracks what you’re using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you’ll be moved to “Basic Access” data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. Continued here

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Apple has finally approved a MagSafe car mount charger, and it only costs $99.95 I know what some of you may be thinking: “wait, Amazon is flooded with MagSafe car chargers, and they’re nowhere even close to $100. What makes this one special?” The answer is that this one is actually MagSafe, where the rest are MagSafe compatible. That means that they use a ring of magnets to hold your phone, and standard Qi charging that can’t pump as much power into your phone — because Apple won’t let it. (Some really suspicious listings say they can do 15W charging, but it seems like they mean that the coil in it is technically capable of fast wireless charging for phones that aren’t iPhones.) But one that has the iPhone maker’s official blessing is finally here... and it seems a bit difficult to recommend.The Belkin’s extremely wordy name basically spells out exactly how it works: you clip it onto your car vent, and it holds your iPhone up so you can see whatever maps or music controls are on it (in theory, anyways — a lot of car vents struggle to stay in place under the weight of a phone and mount). It'll also provide 15W of charging power, more than iPhones can pull from standard Qi chargers. Continued here

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Unsung Native Collaborators in Anthropology Growing up a Brown girl and aspiring anthropologist, my idea of success was represented by a gallery full of White scholars. It was in the stern face of U.S. anthropologist Margaret Mead, braving her way across the Pacific Ocean on route to Samoa. It was in cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s crazy hair, flailing as he ran away from the Balinese cops who raided an illegal cockfight he took part in. Continued here

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Heritage Forensics Is Tackling Devastating New Forms of Cultural Erasure Atop the tallest hill in Nakhchivan city, the capital of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, stands a rhapsodic monolith to the nation-state. The Square and Museum of the National Flag is reached by a grand stairway that rises across terraces of orderly, geometric landscaping. The museum exhibits the paraphernalia of the state—historic flags, coins, and maps—while atop the square waves an enormous Azerbaijani flag. It is a blaring monument. Continued here

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The smart way to learn from failure In today’s motivational literature, failure is often viewed as something to be celebrated. Disappointments are an essential stepping stone to success; a turning point in our life story that will ultimately end in triumph. Rather than falling into despair, we are encouraged to “fail forward”.If only it were so simple. In the past decade, a wealth of psychological research has shown that most people struggle to handle failure constructively. Instead, we find ways to devalue the task at which we failed, meaning that we may be less motivated to persevere and reach our goal. This phenomenon is known as the “sour-grape effect”. Alternatively, we may simply fail to notice our errors and blithely continue as if nothing has happened, something that prevents us from learning a better strategy to improve our performance in the future.Inspirational speakers are fond of quoting the words of the novelist Samuel Beckett: “Fail again. Fail better”. But the truth is that most of us fail again and fail the same.Recent research shows there are ways to avoid these traps. These solutions are often counterintuitive: one of the best ways of learning from your mistakes, for example, is to offer advice to another person who may be encountering similar challenges. By helping others avoid failure, it turns out, you can also enhance your own prospects of success. Continued here

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The Best National Parks in the World, From Norway to Taiwan America's national parks are having their moment. Forty-four National Park Service (NPS) sites broke all-time visitation records in 2021, and attendance rose by sixty million over 2020. But dozens of international destinations also host enormous tracts of stunning, preserved parklands that deserve some time in the spotlight—many ripe with flora and fauna you'd never spot closer to home.In a country steeped with ancient Bedouin culture, Wadi Rum stands out for its undulating sand dunes, rust-tinted folds of sedimentary sandstone, and the vermillion cliffs of Khazali Canyon. The terrain is so remote and alien, it's often referred to as "Valley of the Moon." From the 2,000-year-old Alameleh Inscriptions to locally-run multi day camel tours, a trip to Wadi Rum feels like being transported far back in time. Fly into Aqaba on the Red Sea, book a private driver to the reserve, and stay at the Bubble Luxotel for unforgettable stargazing when the sun goes down. Continued here

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The Rise of the Millionaire LinkedIn Influencer By this year, he’d gained more than 300,000 followers. Along the way, he noticed a shift in the inquiries he received. No longer were people mostly asking for software advice. “They were asking me about how I was using LinkedIn,” he said. Today, Welsh is a full-blown LinkedIn influencer who teaches other people to use the platform as well as he does, and his one-man LinkedIn-focused business now brings in nearly $2 million annually, he said.After years of being known as a place to share resumes and search for jobs, LinkedIn has quietly transformed into a center for a different sort of influencer—the ROI-obsessed go-getter. It is, in many ways, ground zero for hustle culture and what some have deemed “toxic positivity,” an aspirational place for people more concerned with self-care and cash flow than wisecracks and unattainable beauty.  Continued here

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This scientist is trying to create an accessible, unhackable voting machine Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished—to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine.After nearly two decades in the election space, Gilbert knew he was jumping feet-first into perhaps the most contentious debate over election administration in the United States—what role, if any, touch-screen ballot-marking devices should play in the voting process. Federal law requires polling sites to have at least one voting machine on-site that can serve voters with disabilities, and at least 30% of votes were cast on some kind of machine in the 2020 general election, as opposed a hand-marked ballot. Continued here