November 15, 2022 - 'Persuasion Fatigue' Is a Unique Form of Social Frustration

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‘Persuasion Fatigue’ Is a Unique Form of Social Frustration When people argue, a kind of frustration called persuasion fatigue can cloud their judgment and harm relationships The holiday season is upon us again. With it, many of us brace for dinner-table debates. In an era of social discord, viral misinformation and pandemic-induced stress, arguing with other people is an invitation to exasperation. One common scene plays out as follows. You want to convince a friend or a family member of something you know they disagree with you about, so you share information and walk through your reasoning with them. They reject your case. Undaunted, you brush up on the issue and try again, optimistic that more facts will shift the other person’s thinking. You repeat yourself—maybe more loudly and slowly. But your audience remains unmoved. Continued here

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Why a good sense of humor is an essential life skill This article was first published on Big Think in April 2019. It was updated in November 2022. Mark Twain said that “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” He’s certainly not wrong. Humor may very well be the great thing. It touches upon nearly every facet of life — 90% of men and 81% of women report that a sense of humor is the most important quality in a partner, it’s a crucial quality for leaders, and it’s even been shown to improve cancer treatments. Continued here

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Meet the Rare Gender-Neutral Kitten With No Sex Organs A cat charity in the United Kingdom was surprised to discover that a homeless kitten they took in was neither male nor female. Veterinarians originally thought Hope, the tabby and white kitten, was female when the animal arrived at the Cats Protection rescue center in Warrington, England, according to a blog post from the organization. Upon examination, veterinarians realized the cat had no internal or external sex organs. This rare condition is likely a case of agenesis, the absence or failure of organ development, says Fiona Brockbank, Cats Protection’s senior field veterinary officer, in the blog. She and her colleagues have never seen a cat with this trait, and Brockbank also has not found any documentation of a cat born without sexual organs in scientific literature, reports The Telegraph’s Joe Pinkstone. This has lead veterinarians to think Hope may be the world’s first documented case of a gender-neutral cat. Continued here

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Beyond the bottle: Solutions for recycling challenging plastics Although demand for recycled plastics continues to accelerate—driven, in part, by commitments from brand owners to incorporate recycled content into their products—the US Environmental Protection Agency indicates that the US recycling rate remains at around 9 percent. 1 1. “National overview: Facts and figures on materials, wastes and recycling,” US Environmental Protection Agency, July 31, 2022. Together, several factors limit US recycling: consumer behavior, lack of access to recycling, the sortation of challenging plastics, and insufficient recycling capacity. 2 2. “Accelerating plastic recovery in the United States,” McKinsey, December 20, 2019. Here, we focus on an important opportunity to resolve challenges regarding the sortation of so-called challenging plastics, which refers to non-bottle packaging materials such as films and flexible items, foams, and small-format items. Films, in particular, are sought by recyclers for use as feedstock for new technologies called “advanced recycling.” 3 3. For more on advanced recycling, see Zhou Peng, Theo Jan Simons, Jeremy Wallach, and Adam Youngman, “Advanced recycling: Opportunities for growth,” McKinsey, May 16, 2022. Although significant quantities of challenging plastics are available from the waste-management industry, only a limited volume is actually recycled today because of market disconnect: the quality of material available does not meet the input requirements for recyclers. Continued here

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The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit. "We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon." This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade. Continued here

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The International Community Must Prioritize COVID Treatment and Test Access Decades of international collaborative research, much of it funded or conducted by governments including that of the United States, enabled the rapid development of highly effective COVID mRNA vaccines. The substantial public contribution to this scientific triumph has, however, not persuaded governments to treat the vaccines as global public goods—resulting in starkly inequitable distribution that should be remembered as an epic failure for humanity. Vaccines have been available for almost two years, yet only 20 percent of people in low-income countries have had a first shot. And almost no people in low- and middle-income countries have access to the most effective mRNA vaccines, because their production and distribution are under the monopoly control of BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, companies to which governments have granted numerous patents and other intellectual property protections. The result has been a stark vaccine apartheid: shots and boosters of mRNA vaccines are easily available to people in wealthy nations while many people in the Global South continue to suffer the pandemic with no vaccines at all. Governments are eager to be done with COVID, but continued outbreaks around the world—including in regions where populations of immune-suppressed people with HIV can harbor extended infections—mean a more deadly global variant could be just a few mutations away. Continued here

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How the EPA’s Methane Rule Would Target ‘Super-Emitters’ Updates to an EPA draft rule would allow third parties to report large methane leaks, requiring oil and gas operators to promptly fix equipment that emits plumes of the potent planet-warming gas A new "super-emitter" provision in EPA's proposal to regulate methane emissions would empower third parties to identify large leaks of the greenhouse gas, putting more pressure on oil and gas operators to quickly fix any problems. EPA released the updated proposal on Friday, coinciding with President Joe Biden's remarks at the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (Climatewire, Nov. 11). The new proposal, which updates the methane draft rule unveiled at last year's U.N. talks, includes a program that would require oil and gas operators to respond to large-emission events identified by EPA-approved third parties. Continued here

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‘If you're going to build something from scratch, this might be as good a time as in a decade' Bill Gurley is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. As a general partner at Benchmark, Gurley has backed a blessing of unicorns, including Grubhub, Liveops, Nextdoor, OpenTable, and, most famously, Uber. Gurley has often been a voice of reason amid Silicon Valley overexuberance and has tweeted regularly in 2022 about the need for start-ups to be realistic about the current economic environment. While many venture firms have a lot of money to invest, dealmaking has slowed considerably this year. Average valuations of some fundraising rounds have dropped asinvestors adjust to an economic slowdown and look warily ahead. But being realistic doesn’t necessarily mean being pessimistic: in some ways, says Gurley, this may be a great time to launch a start-up. Gurley recently joined Quarterly editorial director Rick Tetzeli for a wide-ranging discussion. An edited version of their conversation follows. Continued here

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Report: Apple’s mixed reality headset is just a few months away Apple is wrapping up development of its long-rumored, long-delayed mixed reality headset, and is gearing up for a launch as soon as early next year, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman's weekly newsletter. Recent job listings posted by Apple suggest that the company is looking to fill content creation roles for the device, suggesting that the core technology is set enough that developers, producers, artists, and the like work confidently with it. That's in contrast to the product's state not that long ago, when differing opinions about the product's feature set, specs, and design led to shifting goalposts that would have been a headache for content creators. Among those content creation roles is at least one that would focus on "the development of a 3D mixed-reality world," not dissimilar in some respects to Meta's Horizon Worlds. But while Horizon Worlds' spaces exist entirely in VR, an Apple job listing describes "connected experiences in a 3D mixed-reality world," suggesting that augmented reality may also play a part. Continued here

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Communicating headwinds and tailwinds The old, apocryphal curse about “living in interesting times” seems more pertinent now than ever. Over the past several years, companies have had to confront seismic developments—including the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, supply chain stresses, social protests, accelerating climate change, and inflation at its highest in decades. It’s no wonder that investor relations would address the effects of external events on business performance. Even during the relatively tranquil years before COVID-19, investors wanted (and regulators required) executives to explain how broader material forces affect company performance. When global events dominate headlines, it’s almost impossible not to highlight them in investor communications. One might, however, expect more balance in discussing positive and negative forces. After all, depending on particular conditions, the performance of some companies may actually receive a boost during challenging times. For example, large discount retailers outperformed during the Great Recession of 2008–09. More recently, stock prices of energy companies rose after Russia invaded Ukraine. Continued here

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Living longer in better health: Six shifts needed for healthy aging Today, the vast majority of adults across the world can expect to live decades past retirement age. The number of older adults 1 1. The term “older adults” refers to those aged 65 and older. will more than double to an estimated 1.6 billion by mid-century, 2 2. UN Population Division Data Portal, United Nations, 2022 revision. marking one of the most profound demographic shifts in human history. However, while global society should celebrate having, on average, an additional 20 years of life expectancy since 1960, 3 3. “Life expectancy at birth, total (years),” World Bank, 2020. it has not been as successful in extending the span of healthy life. A person on average will live ten more years in medium or poor health, impacting the ability to live life fully and leading to increases in care and dependency. These are real and profound challenges. The McKinsey Health Institute (MHI), however, believes this shift is too often framed in the negative, neglecting the opportunities presented as the shape of society transforms. We suggest expanding from the legacy framing of three phases of life—childhood, adulthood, and old age to encompass healthy aging. Instead, our analysis recognizes the reality that many people will live from two to three decades past their retirement age, where one could choose to be in school at 50 and choose to be employed at 80. Society should focus on capacity, not age, recognizing the potential for many to contribute as volunteers, advisers, community leaders, workers, board members, active family members, and innovators. Continued here

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Ovid’s tales of mutual love show he was more than a poet of rape | Psyche Ideas Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art/Washington Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art/Washington is a Classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter has just been published by Penguin Classics. Continued here

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Your Phone Can Determine If a Bridge Is Busted Because you’re a very responsible person who doesn’t text and drive, when you roll over a bridge your smartphone is stuck to the dash, where it is perhaps giving you directions while streaming a WIRED podcast. But in the background, your device is also gathering reams of accelerometer data. One day, this could help diagnose problems with the very bridge you’re speeding across. Every bridge has its own “modal frequency,” or the way that vibrations propagate through it—then subsequently into your car and phone. (Tall buildings, which sway in the wind or during an earthquake, have modal frequencies too.) “Stiffness, mass, length—all these pieces of information are going to influence the modal frequency,” says Thomas Matarazzo, a structural and civil engineer at MIT and the United States Military Academy. “If we see a significant change in the physical properties of the bridge, then the modal frequencies will change.” Think of it like taking a bridge’s temperature—a change could be a symptom of some underlying disease.  In the US, much of the bridge infrastructure was built to support car culture after World War II, and it’s getting old and unsound. Irony among ironies: Earlier this year, a bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed hours before President Joe Biden was scheduled to visit the city to talk about infrastructure. A 2007 collapse in Minneapolis killed 13 and injured 145, and the 1993 failure of a railroad bridge near Mobile, Alabama, killed 47 and injured over 100. Continued here

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What it's like living as a female psychopath Victoria knew about her boyfriend's wife, but after a couple of years she suspected that he had other lovers. There was no proof, but his body language was giving him away, she says. His stories weren't lining up. His face looked different when he lied. "I happen to have superb memory when it comes to conversations," she says. "He was not at all a good liar. I'm not sure why his wife never caught him." A mental flipboard of ways to punish him flipped in Victoria's mind until she landed on one. It would take a little time, and she'd have to act like she knew nothing. Over the course of several months, while still seeing him, Victoria sent naked photos of her boyfriend to his wife. Continued here

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Toward a sustainable, inclusive, growing future: The role of business How should the world confront its most pressing environmental and social challenges? An answer lies in sustainable, inclusive growth—that is, economic growth that provides the financial resources needed to contain climate change, promote natural capital and biodiversity, empower households, and promote equitable opportunity. Any effort to usher in such growth will need many stakeholders, but businesses, which drive more than 70 percent of global GDP, will be a key player. The challenges to sustainability and inclusion are large and urgent. On the sustainability side, energy efficiency is reducing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in some countries, but worldwide emissions continue to rise, accelerating climate change and its attendant physical risks. The world is therefore on track to exhaust its “carbon budget,” the amount of greenhouse gases it can emit without triggering dangerous levels of warming, by 2030. As for inclusion, though in some ways the world has become more inclusive over the past few decades, billions of people still live in countries that could do far better on such measures as life expectancy, child mortality, and gender parity in labor force participation. The current decade will determine whether we opt for sustainable, inclusive growth or for dangerous warming and large segments of society left behind. Continued here

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How Generative AI Is Changing Creative Work Generative AI models for businesses threaten to upend the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. These models are able to produce text and images: blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. Companies need to understand how these tools work, and how they can add value. Continued here � S30 How people crossed the Atlantic Ocean before commercial aviation The 2014 documentary series I was a Jet Set Stewardess by the Smithsonian Channel recounts a bygone time when traveling by airplane was a glamorous experience, even when you rode economy class. Today, commercial air transport is anything but. After American president Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, igniting a price war, cocktail parties and seven-course meals gradually made way for peanuts, pretzels, and overpriced beer. Where travelers used to board planes wearing their Sunday best, now they prefer to fly in sweatpants and worn-out t-shirts.  The extravagance seen in Jet Set Stewardess echoes another earlier period in the history of cross-continental travel. Long before Orville and Wilbur Wright managed to take to the skies, people were traveling back and forth between Europe and America by ships. The commercial ocean travel industry emerged in the 1870s. Its development was spurred in part by the American Civil War, which saw the introduction of new technologies to move men and military supplies across the country’s coastlines. As Mark Rennella and Whitney Walton explain in “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”: Continued here S36 How researchers used CRISPR gene editing to send immune cells after cancer Last week, researchers published the results of a clinical trial that used CRISPR gene editing to create a large population of cancer-targeting immune cells. The trial was short, and the reprogrammed immune cells weren't especially effective against the cancer. But the technology, or something similar, is likely to be used in additional attempts to attack cancer and potentially treat a variety of diseases. So, the trial provides a good opportunity to go through and explain what was done and why. But if you go back and re-read the first sentence, a lot was going on here, so there's a fair amount to explain. Cancers and the immune system have a complicated relationship. The immune system apparently eliminates many cancers before they become problems—people who are on immunosuppressive drugs experience a higher incidence of cancer because this function is inhibited. And, even once tumors become established, there's often an immune response to the cancer. It's just that cancer cells evolve the ability to evade and/or tamp down the immune response, allowing them to keep growing despite the immune system's vigilance. Continued here S24 The wheat field that could change the world Crop physiologist Guntur V. Subbarao and his team have developed an antibiotic-infused strain of wheat that naturally combats harmful, fertilizer-eating bacteria -- a "monster" contributor to climate change. Learn more about how this breakthrough could once again revolutionize agriculture, increasing crop yields and protecting our planet at the same time. Continued here S28 Twitter’s SMS Two-Factor Authentication Is Melting Down Following two weeks of extreme chaos at Twitter, users are joining and fleeing the site in droves. More quietly, many are likely scrutinizing their accounts, checking their security settings, and downloading their data. But some users are reporting problems when they attempt to generate two-factor authentication codes over SMS: Either the texts don't come or they're delayed by hours. The glitchy SMS two-factor codes mean that users could get locked out of their accounts and lose control of them. They could also find themselves unable to make changes to their security settings or download their data using Twitter's access feature. The situation also provides an early hint that troubles within Twitter's infrastructure are bubbling to the surface. Not all users are having problems receiving SMS authentication codes, and those who rely on an authenticator app or physical authentication token to secure their Twitter account may not have reason to test the mechanism. But users have been self-reporting issues on Twitter since the weekend, and WIRED confirmed that on at least some accounts, authentication texts are hours delayed or not coming at all. The meltdown comes less than two weeks after Twiter laid off about half of its workers, roughly 3,700 people. Since then, engineers, operations specialists, IT staff, and security teams have been stretched thin attempting to adapt Twitter's offerings and build new features per new owner Elon Musk's agenda. Continued here S34 When is a Porsche not a Porsche? When it’s a 2022 Audi RS e-tron GT Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda. More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes. But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform. Continued here S22 Do Chimps Share Cool Stuff Just for Fun? Uganda Forest Study Provides a Hint That They Might Could a sighting by researchers in Uganda’s Kibale National Park be a clue that chimps share just for the sake of sharing? Whether it’s a college student playing a roommate their favorite song or a child showing their parent a dirty rock they found on the ground (“Not again!”), humans love sharing things we find fascinating just for the sake of it. The desire to sit your loved ones down and force them to watch your favorite movie has long been thought to be distinctly human— an inclination not shared by our primate relatives. Still, that might not keep an animal behavior researcher from wondering from time to time whether an activity considered unique to humans might turn up in some form in chimps, orangutans, bonobos or gorillas. Continued here S25 The $6 Billion Shot at Making New Antibiotics—Before the Old Ones Fail Dustin Brown, a slight, dark-haired guy who lives in southwest Indiana, is 36, married, and a stay-at-home dad. He never expected to achieve any of those milestones: wife, toddler son, moving away from his family in Kentucky. Not even adulthood. Brown has cystic fibrosis, an inherited disorder that clogs major organs with sticky, sludgy mucus and makes them breeding grounds for infections. When he was born, newly diagnosed patients weren’t expected to survive past elementary school. That the roughly 40,000 CF patients in the US have managed to beat that prediction is due to better treatments—just three years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fast-tracked a new drug combination to address the effects of the underlying genetic mutation—but also to hard work. Every day, Brown follows a tailored regimen of exercises, supplements, and pharmaceuticals to keep down the disease’s worst effects. That includes antibiotics: inhaled, in pills, and several times a year, through a catheter threaded up a vein into his heart. Brown calls taking care of his health “a full-time job.” Still, he’s losing ground. The mucus in Brown’s lungs harbors Pseudomonas aeruginosa, bacteria that cause serious infections in people whose immune defenses are impaired. If that simmering occupation flares up into pneumonia, the results could be deadly, because tests by his doctors have shown that Brown’s strain of Pseudomonas is fully resistant to four antibiotics and partially resistant to two more. Brown has already tried the one remaining antibiotic the organism responds to. It triggered a life-threatening anemia. Continued here S35 Hungry for AI? New supercomputer contains 16 dinner-plate-size chips On Monday, Cerebras Systems unveiled its 13.5 million core Andromeda AI supercomputer for deep learning, reports Reuters. According Cerebras, Andromeda delivers over one 1 exaflop (1 quintillion operations per second) of AI computational power at 16-bit half precision. The Andromeda is itself a cluster of 16 Cerebras C-2 computers linked together. Each CS-2 contains one Wafer Scale Engine chip (often called "WSE-2"), which is currently the largest silicon chip ever made, at about 8.5-inches square and packed with 2.6 trillion transistors organized into 850,000 cores. Cerebras built Andromeda at a data center in Santa Clara, California, for $35 million. It's tuned for applications like large language models and has already been in use for academic and commercial work. "Andromeda delivers near-perfect scaling via simple data parallelism across GPT-class large language models, including GPT-3, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX," writes Cerebras in a press release. Continued here S29 See Hubble's most beautiful star-forming image ever This spectacular Hubble composition captures 520 light-years of its full 32,000 light-year extent. The cyan-colored regions highlight superheated oxygen, with temperatures exceeding 50,000 K. Light reflects off of ejected gas, powered by a solitary star 200,000 times the Sun’s brightness. Continued here S10 89% of surveyed Twitter employees say the company will fail under Musk As last week’s massive tech sector layoffs hit tens of thousands of employees at Twitter, Meta, and beyond, workers are pouring onto anonymous workplace discussion forum Blind to vent. Over the last few weeks, Blind, which allows employees to post their unvarnished feelings about their workplaces anonymously, has been abuzz with anxiety, rumors, and discontent.  Founded in 2013 in South Korea, the now California-based Blind was initially conceived as a response to South Korea’s intensely hierarchical work culture. The company now operates across both countries and counts over 7 million users from 300,000 companies. Blind investors include SoftBank Ventures Asia and Mainstreet Investment.  In addition to hosting open forums and private channels, Blind often runs surveys for its users about their experiences at particular companies and within their industries. Last week, Blind conducted a survey of over 400 Twitter and 1,100 Meta employees. The findings were grim: only 2% of Twitter employees said they’d recommend the workplace to their friends or family — and just one 1% said the recent layoffs had been carried out in a respectful and dignified manner. Meta fared a bit better: a third of respondents said the company’s recent layoffs were conducted in a respectful way.  Continued here S20 Rule-Breaking Particles Pop Up in Experiments around the World Andreas Crivellin is a theoretical physicist at the University of Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Credit: Nick Higgins Andreas Crivellin is a theoretical physicist at the University of Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Credit: Nick Higgins Breaking the rules is exciting, especially if they have held for a long time. This is true not just in life but also in particle physics. Here the rule I’m thinking of is called “lepton flavor universality,” and it is one of the predictions of our Standard Model of particle physics, which describes all the known fundamental particles and their interactions (except for gravity). For several decades after the invention of the Standard Model, particles seemed to obey this rule. Continued here S9 Startups find a new way to grow: loaning out their own VC money “Everything is going so badly that even my customers have run out of customers,” said Freddy D’Ortiz, who runs a hair salon in a red light area in Bogotá. He is now considering taking out a loan to buy hair products to stay in business. It’s not ideal, he told Rest of World, but instead of making one payment upfront for all his products, credit could allow him to pay in installments, as his customer base stabilizes. Small business owners in Colombia and Mexico are used to juggling their finances in challenging times. Willing lenders in Latin America are few and far between, even in the best of times. Almost 62% of all medium-to-small businesses in Colombia lack any access to even the most basic financing, and that number is over 80% in Mexico. As the regional economy stalls, one type of company does seem to have money to lend: tech startups linked to the so-called Rappi mafia.  Rappi, a Colombian multibillion-dollar tech company, began as a last-mile delivery startup and became the largest across many Latin American countries. Its close-knit group of former employees and investors have gone on to rapidly create a whole new roster of regional startups, in part because the Rappi name is so influential among investors. The group is known in business and venture capital circles in Latin America as the Rappi mafia. Continued here S7 Hackers are using a years-old Microsoft vulnerability to attack governments around the world In July 2019, hackers gained access to dozens of computer servers in Vienna and Geneva belonging to the United Nations. In one of the largest-ever breaches of U.N. information, the hackers had what was estimated as tens of thousands of staff records, contracts, databases, and passwords at their fingertips. After technicians discovered the attack, they had to work through at least two weekends to isolate more than 40 compromised computers. Twenty computers had to be completely rebuilt. The hackers accessed the U.N.’s servers by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint, a collaborative file-sharing software that acts as an internal network for hundreds of thousands of clients, many of them multinational corporations, banks, insurance companies, and government agencies. Microsoft had issued a fix for the SharePoint vulnerability earlier in 2019, but it’s unlikely those updates had been installed on the U.N.’s servers. Rest of World spoke to four experts who said that hundreds of thousands of SharePoint users around the world could still be exposed to similar hacks if they’ve failed to install the software updates. Earlier this year, Iranian state-backed actors likely used the same vulnerability to target Albanian government servers over a period of several months. After the hack’s discovery, Albania broke off diplomatic ties with Iran. Continued here S2 Startups Need an ESG Strategy Startups are often just trying to survive — do they have time to worry about ESG? Yes. That’s because they must be aware of the material risks and opportunities in their given industry, which is essentially what a careful ESG strategy provides. Startups should start by identifying their purpose, then marry that purpose to ESG considerations — for instance, by identifying risks to avoid and manage. All startups should consider their carbon footprint, make sure they treat their employees well, and have diverse boards overseeing them. Continued here S4 Research: In Supplier Negotiations, Lying Is Contagious Being deceptive — or not totally honest — in negotiations is fairly common. But two experiments found that it can have a harmful effect: It can spread in an organization. This article discusses the research findings and offers measures that can curb the practice of potentially contagious excessive deception. Continued here S23 Climate Change Is Fueling a Public Health Crisis. Doctors Need to Address This It’s time for doctors to recognize the growing effects of climate change on people’s health During the most recent conference of my professional organization, my colleague Amanda Dilger and I encouraged our fellow clinicians in attendance to offset the carbon cost of their travel. This was in addition to a panel in which we explained to a small crowd of surgeons that climate change is a health issue. Amanda and I are otolaryngologists, but we are also climate activists. Before starting the panel, I was unsure about how it would be received by my fellow surgeons, as climate change had rarely been discussed at these meetings. But my colleagues who walked up to the mic after our talk asked the kinds of questions that told me they understood this environmental health issue and the need for hospitals to be more sustainable. As for offsetting the carbon cost of their travel, which admittedly has its own limitations as a climate mitigating action, the responses were more varied. Most of the people gave us a smile or thumbs-up as they walked away. We took that as passive support for climate action. A few gave encouraging verbal responses of “we need more of this,” while some just said the word “no” and quickly escaped. Continued here S13 On the cusp of a new era? The past two and a half years have been extraordinary. What we are seeing is surely more than the progression of just another business cycle. The unnerving combination of a global pandemic compounded by energy scarcity, rapid inflation, and geopolitical tensions boiling over has people wondering what certainties are left. Today’s events might even feel like a cluster of earthquakes that is reshaping our world. We have been here before. Similar “earthquakes” have struck the past: in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1944–46), during the period around the oil crisis (1971–73), and at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989–92). Like a real earthquake, each of them changed the global landscape with the sudden release of powerful underlying forces that had been building up around a fault line over time—but in these cases, unfolding over a few years rather than in a big bang. Each of them ushered in a new era: the Postwar Boom (1944–71), the Era of Contention (1971–89), and the Era of Markets (1989–2019). Are we now on the cusp of a new era presaged by today’s earthquakes? Continued here S3 How Do I Adapt My Leadership Style as My Team Grows? He’s had fast success in a sales-driven industry and enjoys leading his expanding team. But as his responsibilities grow, he needs to learn how to delegate to his team more and empower his direct reports. Host Muriel Wilkins coaches him through how to adapt his leadership style as his team grows. Continued here S8 Gig workers in India are uniting to take back control from algorithms On October 17, Santosh Kumar, an Uber driver in the south Indian city of Hyderabad was wrapping up an almost 12-hour shift and struggling to find a last ride in the direction of his home. The app showed him a message that destinations in that area weren’t available. Frustrated, he turned to a Telegram group called CCDA, or Commercial Cab Driver’s Awareness, where he shared his woes with over 5,000 fellow drivers. Within minutes, his peers offered a jugaad — a cheap hack — to game the system: Keep trying to book a ride in the direction of your home, and the algorithm will eventually oblige. Two days later, in the same group, another distressed Uber driver posted screenshots of a “miscellaneous” fee of over 5,000 rupees ($61) that Uber had levied on him. The screenshot indicated that if he didn’t make the payment, he would lose access to his Uber account. He didn’t really understand how Uber calculated this amount and wondered how he would be able to afford the hefty payment. Continued here S18 Is Space-Based Solar Power Ready for Its Moment in the Sun? Around the world, researchers are betting that beamed power from space could be the next big thing for clean energy on Earth When inventor Charles Fritts created the first crude solar photovoltaic cells in the 1880s, one might have thought the achievement would rapidly revolutionize global electricity production. There is, after all, no power source cheaper, cleaner and more ubiquitous than sunlight. Yet despite enormous (and ongoing) technical advances making solar power ever more capable and affordable, some 140 years on it still supplies less than 5 percent of the world’s electricity. For all its benefits, solar power does have drawbacks that can limit its use—chief among them the fact that half the planet’s surface is in darkness at any given time. In 1968 U.S. aerospace engineer Peter Glaser detailed a potential solution to these problems that was not only “outside the box” but entirely outside Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of building gigantic solar farms across vast, ecologically vulnerable tracts of land, Glaser proposed to loft the photovoltaics into orbit on fleets of solar power satellites. In orbit—unattenuated by clouds and freed from planetary cycles of day and night—sunlight could be harvested with optimum efficiency, then beamed as microwaves to ground-based “rectifying antennas” (rectennas). Back on Earth, the microwaves would be converted to electricity and channeled into power grids across the globe. Continued here S27 Nike Will Let People Design and Sell Sneakers for the Metaverse The iconic brand’s latest venture is a metaverse play called .Swoosh, a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. It’s essentially a marketplace, which makes sense because the breathlessly hyped internet of the future is much like the internet of the present: dominated by commerce. The platform will initially focus on community building and present members with “challenges” to get a sense of what they want to see. The brand’s first virtual collection—of footwear, apparel, and accessories—will launch on Swoosh in January 2023, shaped through activities such as interactive voting. Members will subsequently be able to collect and trade these digital-only products; the platform will use cash (USD), not cryptocurrency, though all transactions will be recorded on the Polygon chain. Virtual clothing from brands is nothing new, but Nike has teased that Swoosh’s community challenges will expand next year to include competitions in which members can win a chance to codesign virtual Nike products with the brand’s designers and earn a percentage of royalties. Continued here S5 Working While Managing Your Child's Mental Health When your child is struggling, whether it’s with anxiety or anger management or depression, focusing on anything but how they’re doing can be difficult to nearly impossible. Yet so many parents are straining day after day to support their children while trying to keep up at work. And so many lack enough flexibility, understanding, and paid time off from their employer to take care of everything they need to do, from finding their children a therapist to taking them to appointments. Continued here S31 "This time feels different": Is Iran on the verge of another revolution? For many of the Iranians who have been protesting across their nation since mid-September, this has become a common refrain. It’s maybe no wonder. The ongoing protests represent the largest and most unified public challenge to the government in years, and the demonstrations are being led by women and schoolgirls who have been marching—and burning their hijabs—on Iranian streets in the weeks since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died suspiciously in police custody. Their slogan, adopted from the Kurdish women’s slogan for independence, is Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom).  What began as public outcry against Iran’s so-called morality police (in actuality, Gasht-e-Ershad, or “guidance patrols”) has snowballed into a mass movement targeting the very essence of the Islamic republic. And unlike previous protests, both organized and spontaneous, many Iranians feel this one will turn out differently. But will it? Over the past century, the Iranian people have struggled multiple times to bring about representative democracy, and women have been at the forefront all along the way. The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 had women fighting alongside men for a representative Majles, or parliament. In 1953, women publicly protested in support of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who attempted to impose on a reluctant monarch the constitution won in 1906. The 1979 revolution, which overthrew the Shah, had women marching on streets and donning the chador out of respect for the revolution’s leader. And the Green Movement in 2009 saw girls and women publicly demanding that their votes be counted in what they alleged was a stolen election.  Continued here S29 See Hubble's most beautiful star-forming image ever This spectacular Hubble composition captures 520 light-years of its full 32,000 light-year extent. The cyan-colored regions highlight superheated oxygen, with temperatures exceeding 50,000 K. Light reflects off of ejected gas, powered by a solitary star 200,000 times the Sun’s brightness. Continued here S30 How people crossed the Atlantic Ocean before commercial aviation The 2014 documentary series I was a Jet Set Stewardess by the Smithsonian Channel recounts a bygone time when traveling by airplane was a glamorous experience, even when you rode economy class. Today, commercial air transport is anything but. After American president Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, igniting a price war, cocktail parties and seven-course meals gradually made way for peanuts, pretzels, and overpriced beer. Where travelers used to board planes wearing their Sunday best, now they prefer to fly in sweatpants and worn-out t-shirts.  The extravagance seen in Jet Set Stewardess echoes another earlier period in the history of cross-continental travel. Long before Orville and Wilbur Wright managed to take to the skies, people were traveling back and forth between Europe and America by ships. The commercial ocean travel industry emerged in the 1870s. Its development was spurred in part by the American Civil War, which saw the introduction of new technologies to move men and military supplies across the country’s coastlines. As Mark Rennella and Whitney Walton explain in “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”: Continued here S31 "This time feels different": Is Iran on the verge of another revolution? For many of the Iranians who have been protesting across their nation since mid-September, this has become a common refrain. It’s maybe no wonder. The ongoing protests represent the largest and most unified public challenge to the government in years, and the demonstrations are being led by women and schoolgirls who have been marching—and burning their hijabs—on Iranian streets in the weeks since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died suspiciously in police custody. Their slogan, adopted from the Kurdish women’s slogan for independence, is Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom).  What began as public outcry against Iran’s so-called morality police (in actuality, Gasht-e-Ershad, or “guidance patrols”) has snowballed into a mass movement targeting the very essence of the Islamic republic. And unlike previous protests, both organized and spontaneous, many Iranians feel this one will turn out differently. But will it? Over the past century, the Iranian people have struggled multiple times to bring about representative democracy, and women have been at the forefront all along the way. The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 had women fighting alongside men for a representative Majles, or parliament. In 1953, women publicly protested in support of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who attempted to impose on a reluctant monarch the constitution won in 1906. The 1979 revolution, which overthrew the Shah, had women marching on streets and donning the chador out of respect for the revolution’s leader. And the Green Movement in 2009 saw girls and women publicly demanding that their votes be counted in what they alleged was a stolen election.  Continued here S32 Why a good sense of humor is an essential life skill This article was first published on Big Think in April 2019. It was updated in November 2022. Mark Twain said that “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” He’s certainly not wrong. Humor may very well be the great thing. It touches upon nearly every facet of life — 90% of men and 81% of women report that a sense of humor is the most important quality in a partner, it’s a crucial quality for leaders, and it’s even been shown to improve cancer treatments. Continued here S33 The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit. "We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon." This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade. Continued here S34 When is a Porsche not a Porsche? When it’s a 2022 Audi RS e-tron GT Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda. More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes. But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform. Continued here S35 Hungry for AI? New supercomputer contains 16 dinner-plate-size chips On Monday, Cerebras Systems unveiled its 13.5 million core Andromeda AI supercomputer for deep learning, reports Reuters. According Cerebras, Andromeda delivers over one 1 exaflop (1 quintillion operations per second) of AI computational power at 16-bit half precision. The Andromeda is itself a cluster of 16 Cerebras C-2 computers linked together. Each CS-2 contains one Wafer Scale Engine chip (often called "WSE-2"), which is currently the largest silicon chip ever made, at about 8.5-inches square and packed with 2.6 trillion transistors organized into 850,000 cores. Cerebras built Andromeda at a data center in Santa Clara, California, for $35 million. It's tuned for applications like large language models and has already been in use for academic and commercial work. "Andromeda delivers near-perfect scaling via simple data parallelism across GPT-class large language models, including GPT-3, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX," writes Cerebras in a press release. Continued here S36 How researchers used CRISPR gene editing to send immune cells after cancer Last week, researchers published the results of a clinical trial that used CRISPR gene editing to create a large population of cancer-targeting immune cells. The trial was short, and the reprogrammed immune cells weren't especially effective against the cancer. But the technology, or something similar, is likely to be used in additional attempts to attack cancer and potentially treat a variety of diseases. So, the trial provides a good opportunity to go through and explain what was done and why. But if you go back and re-read the first sentence, a lot was going on here, so there's a fair amount to explain. Cancers and the immune system have a complicated relationship. The immune system apparently eliminates many cancers before they become problems—people who are on immunosuppressive drugs experience a higher incidence of cancer because this function is inhibited. And, even once tumors become established, there's often an immune response to the cancer. It's just that cancer cells evolve the ability to evade and/or tamp down the immune response, allowing them to keep growing despite the immune system's vigilance. Continued here S37 Report: Apple’s mixed reality headset is just a few months away Apple is wrapping up development of its long-rumored, long-delayed mixed reality headset, and is gearing up for a launch as soon as early next year, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman's weekly newsletter. Recent job listings posted by Apple suggest that the company is looking to fill content creation roles for the device, suggesting that the core technology is set enough that developers, producers, artists, and the like work confidently with it. That's in contrast to the product's state not that long ago, when differing opinions about the product's feature set, specs, and design led to shifting goalposts that would have been a headache for content creators. Among those content creation roles is at least one that would focus on "the development of a 3D mixed-reality world," not dissimilar in some respects to Meta's Horizon Worlds. But while Horizon Worlds' spaces exist entirely in VR, an Apple job listing describes "connected experiences in a 3D mixed-reality world," suggesting that augmented reality may also play a part. Continued here S38 Ovid’s tales of mutual love show he was more than a poet of rape | Psyche Ideas Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art/Washington Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art/Washington is a Classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter has just been published by Penguin Classics. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2023 (542) ►  December (2) ►  November (33) ►  October (27) ►  September (37) ►  August (45) ►  July (30) ►  June (73) ►  May (3) ►  April (33) ►  March (17) ►  February (84) ►  January (158) ▼  2022 (387) ►  December (84) ▼  November (41) Gain hands-on coding experience in NUS Business Sc... November 16, 2022 - Biden says it's 'unlikely' the... November 16, 2022 - Ivana Trump’s Penthouse On Man... November 16, 2022 - Ivana Trump’s Penthouse On Man... November 16, 2022 - Ivana Trump’s Penthouse On Man... November 16, 2022 - The director of Will Smith's n... 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