Thursday, November 3, 2022

Sustainable spaces: Countering climate risk in capital projects

S7
Sustainable spaces: Countering climate risk in capital projects

To manage the risk inherent in long-life-span building projects, infrastructure players have traditionally sought predictable revenue streams. Now, governments, investors, and other industry stakeholders face extreme uncertainty—even as they work to build infrastructure that can meet ambitious net-zero and decarbonization goals for mitigating climate change. In this episode of McKinsey Talks Operations, host Daphne Luchtenberg joins Alex Guy, a partner at the international law firm Ashurst, and Brodie Boland, a McKinsey partner and a leader on climate risk in real estate and infrastructure, to discuss how the sector can become more resilient and sustainable, both economically and environmentally. Their conversation has been edited for clarity.

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S1
6 Behavioral Nudges to Reduce Bias in Hiring and Promotions

In today’s talent marketplace, everybody is looking for new ways to make the best hiring and promotion decisions. In this article, building on decision intelligence and evidence-based solutions that drive scalable change, the author lays out six behavioral nudges that can help companies develop practices that reduce bias, boost diversity, and create the best possible talent pools.

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S2
Consumer Pressure Is Key to Fixing Dire Labor Conditions in the Clothing Supply Chain

The plethora of different audit systems and standards for assessing labor practices in factories in the apparel supply chain continues to produce disappointing improvements in working conditions. An approach under development would change that by using data from different audit methods to create simple information that consumers could easily understand. By doing so, it would harness the voice of the consumer in the effort to improve labor practices.

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S3
The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader

While leaders have always performed emotional labor, this demand has increased dramatically over the last few years. Organizations need to stop dismissing this substantial emotional burden. In this piece, the authors explain why organizations need to start offering more support and outline practical strategies to try: 1) Recognize emotional labor as labor. 2) Promote self-compassion from the top down. 3) Provide training on handling others’ emotions. 4) Create peer support groups. As the adage goes and the research proves, it’s lonely at the top. By recognizing emotional labor and providing proper education, training, and support, organizations can help leaders effectively handle this essential but often overlooked requirement of their role.

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S4
A carbon-free future starts with driving less

Can we use less energy from fossil fuels while also meeting our transportation needs? Enter shared electric micromobility: the transition away from dependence on cars and towards lightweight transport options like electric scooters, which release a fraction of the carbon emissions of conventional transport. Helping people get around on the world's largest shared electric vehicles system, entrepreneur and Lime CEO Wayne Ting shares how his company redesigned their scooters so parts can be reused and recycled, ultimately reducing their direct and indirect carbon output. "We have to work at building a future of transportation that is shared, affordable, but most importantly, carbon-free," says Ting

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S5
Jen Gunter: Do you really need 8 hours of sleep every night?

When you can't sleep, you're desperate for help. And there's a booming industry waiting to tell you all the ways a lack of sleep can ruin your health -- and to sell you fancy gadgets to help you finally doze off. Shedding light on this flawed doomsday messaging, Dr. Jen Gunter explains why you shouldn't lose sleep over sleep -- and what to do instead. (For more on how your body works, tune in to her podcast, Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter, from the TED Audio Collective.)

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S6
Federal funding may boost social determinants of health infrastructure

Social determinants of health (SDoH)—the conditions in which people live and the systems that shape those conditions—are increasingly receiving attention. The COVID-19 pandemic, by exacerbating inequities and highlighting the prevalence of unmet basic needs, 1 1. Patrick Drake and Robin Rudowitz, “Tracking social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Kaiser Family Foundation, April 21, 2022. has accelerated efforts to address SDoH. 2 2. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced health equity is a strategic priority, the US Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) has prioritized strengthening equitable access to care and strengthening social well-being, and the Biden administration is focusing on health equity and complementary data capacity, such as through the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities. State Medicaid agencies, payers, providers, vendors, community-based organizations (CBOs), and other stakeholders have taken up the torch and are laying the foundations for long-term SDoH programs (see sidebar “What are social determinants of health?”).

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S8
Tracking diversity, equity, and inclusion data in private markets

Tracking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has gained traction among private equity (PE) firms and institutional investors (IIs). This development is part of a larger societal trend. In recent years, global social movements centered on DEI have sparked reexamination in every part of society, including business. And research shows that DEI is good for business, regardless of geography. 1 1. Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle, Kevin Dolan, Dame Vivian Hunt, and Sara Prince, “Diversity wins: How inclusion matters,” McKinsey, May 19, 2020. In the private markets industry, IIs are placing increasing importance on PE firms’ diversity metrics in making allocation decisions. The PE industry is already making steady progress on improving the diversity of its workforce. 2 2. Alexandra Nee and David Quigley, “The state of diversity in US private equity,” McKinsey, March 30, 2022.

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S9
Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion'

Business leaders often misunderstand the actual meaning of strategy, Richard Rumelt argues in his new book, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists (Public Affairs, May 2022). In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, the long-time professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and former president of the Strategic Management Society talks with McKinsey senior partner Yuval Atsmon about the parallels between mountain climbing and strategy, the difficulty in committing to choices, and strategy sessions as “success theater.” This is an edited transcript of the discussion. For more conversations on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

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S10
The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet

The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 internet cable travels 15,500 miles along the seafloor, connecting Hong Kong to Marseille, France. As it snakes through the South China Sea and toward Europe, the cable helps provide internet connections to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable was cut on June 7, millions of people were plunged offline and faced temporary internet blackouts.The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed where it briefly passes across land through Egypt. One other cable was also damaged in the incident, with the cause of the damage unknown. However, the impact was immediate. “It affected about seven countries and a number of over-the-top services,” says Rosalind Thomas, the managing director of SAEx International Management, which plans to create a new undersea cable connecting Africa, Asia, and the US. “The worst was Ethiopia, that lost 90 percent of its connectivity, and Somalia thereafter also 85 percent.” Cloud services belonging to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were all also disrupted, subsequent analysis revealed.

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S11
The Unintended Consequences of Apple's Fertility Tech

When the new Apple Watch was unveiled this fall, it came with an intriguing feature: the ability to estimate whether someone had ovulated by measuring their temperature from their wrist. Apple said that the feature could help people understand their bodies, or help people know the optimal time to try to get pregnant. It also warned that this information should not be used as a form of birth control. Problem is, Apple says one thing and people do another.The new feature, which is available on the Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra, comes at a time when similar tech has emerged as a replacement for birth control. It's a trend that has led some medical experts to worry that fertility predictions provided by tech companies could be misused, resulting in unwanted pregnancies by people who don't understand how complicated fertility can be. And those fears are compounded by recent restrictions on abortion rights in the United States that make it not only more difficult to terminate unwanted pregnancies but also make collecting and storing data about one's menstrual cycles a precarious or even dangerous choice.

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S12
'Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova' Breaks an Infamous Video Game Curse

Tie-in games get a bum rap. Often, deservedly so. They can be amazing, but too frequently they’re rushed efforts that seem developed just to make a buck off fans. Some don’t even coalesce with the canon of the franchise they’ve allegedly been created to expand upon. (Don’t forget the notorious E.T. title, which was not only one of the worst video games of all time but also so poorly received that many cartridges were buried in a landfill.)Set between the first and second half of Star Trek: Prodigy's premiere season, the franchise’s all-ages animated series, Supernova succeeds where so many others failed. It’s got solid game mechanics (save for some slightly frustrating camera controls) and fantastic characters (many of them voiced by their TV counterparts), and it actually feels like a story arc that could happen on Prodigy itself. You don’t need to play it to appreciate the show, but you can appreciate the show more if you do.

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S13
The Strange Death of the Uyghur Internet

On the wall of his office were pictures of his role models: Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Jack Ma. As a minor celebrity in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, Asat, also known as Mr. Bagdax, was invited to provincial government events and to the offices of China’s tech giants. Even if the platform had to adhere to China’s strict censorship rules—at one point, four police officers were tasked with monitoring it—its base quickly grew to over 100,000 users.Within a year, Bagdax and other popular Uyghur websites—such as Misranim, Bozqir, and Ana Tuprak—permanently stopped updating. And they weren’t the only ones. As Beijing’s crackdown in the Xinjiang region unfolded, the vast majority of independent Uyghur-run websites ceased to exist, according to local tech industry insiders and academics tracking the online Uyghur-language sphere.

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S14
The "Viral" Secure Programming Language That's Taking Over Tech

Whether you run IT for a massive organization or simply own a smartphone, you're intimately familiar with the unending stream of software updates that constantly need to be installed because of bugs and security vulnerabilities. People make mistakes, so code is inevitably going to contain mistakes—you get it. But a growing movement to write software in a language called Rust is gaining momentum because the code is goof-proof in an important way. By design, developers can't accidentally create the most common types of exploitable security vulnerabilities when they're coding in Rust, a distinction that could make a huge difference in the daily patch parade and ultimately the world's baseline cybersecurity.There are fads in programming languages, and new ones come and go, often without lasting impact. Now 12 years old, Rust took time to mature from the side project of a Mozilla researcher into a robust ecosystem. Meanwhile, the predecessor language C, which is still widely used today, turned 50 this year. But because Rust produces more secure code and, crucially, doesn't worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support.

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S15
30 Gift Ideas for Outdoorsy People

Got friends and loved ones who love to camp, hike, trail run, fish, or hunt? The experience is the whole point, but many outdoorsy people love to geek out over all the cool gear released every year. Not every gift has to be useful in the backcountry (although those are certainly appreciated). Their favorite gift may be a trinket that simply reminds them that being a lover of the Great Outdoors is a core part of who they are. In this guide, we've got recommendations ranging from a cat tent to a durable flask. I know, I know. We often urge campers and hikers to go lightweight, but sometimes it's a luxury or two slipped into the pack that makes the trip really special. If your loved one's chief complaint of the Great Outdoors is the lack of an open bar, give them these powdered cocktail mixes. There are several flavors, including Old Fashioned, Gin & Tonic, and Moscow Mule, and each tin makes three drinks. They don't come with alcohol, so they'll either have to provide their own or enjoy them non-alcoholic.

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S16
Twitter Had a Plan to Fix Social Media. Will Elon Musk Follow It?

There are a hundred ways in which Elon Musk might attempt to reshape Twitter after he bought it on October 28. Thanks to the publication of the entrepreneur’s personal messages in September, one thing is clear: Its future will involve decentralization. In a message to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in March, Musk said he wanted to turn the platform into “something new that’s decentralized.” And in conversation with his brother Kimbal, he tossed around the idea of a social network “based on a blockchain,” before realizing it might be too complicated.Since it was set up under Dorsey in 2019, Bluesky has tried to create a system that lets users see how algorithms serve up content and control their personal data, and allows them to use a single profile across several social apps. Dorsey, who bonded with Musk over a shared enthusiasm for crypto, effectively pitched him the idea of using Bluesky earlier this year when he proposed that Twitter be turned into “an open source protocol.” Musk’s response? “Super interesting idea.”

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S17
The Hubble tension: Is cosmology in crisis?

While the expansion of the cosmos is accepted nearly universally among the scientific community, two very precise estimates of the rate at which the Universe is expanding disagree with one another. This is called the “Hubble tension,” and it may be the first significant inkling that cosmologists have overlooked something in their theory of the creation and evolution of the Universe. While the explanation of the disagreement might be ascribed to an error in one or both of the estimates, recent measurements suggest that the discrepancy is real, leaving scientists to take a hard look at the entire situation.The expansion rate of the Universe can be a confusing concept that is perhaps best introduced by analogy. Suppose you have a rubber band that is two units long, with a mark at the center. You attach one end of the band to an unmovable hook and hold up the other end to ensure that it is straight. Thus, the end you are holding is two units away from the hook, while the mark is one unit away.

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S18
Is IQ a load of BS?

At the turn of the 20th century, people were falling over themselves trying to make the test to objectively measure intelligence. It was based on the common assumption that all kinds of intelligence — verbal reasoning, spatial awareness, memory, and so on — were simply manifestations of some central, basic general intelligence. The first test to measure this general intelligence was well intentioned. It originated in France and was designed to identify which children would need extra help at school. This test, known as the Binet-Simon test, eventually became the model on which all IQ tests today are based.It wasn’t long, however, before the tests were turned to ill. Children as young as three are told they are of below-average intelligence based on a series of questions inspired by a century’s old psychology. Racists have long used IQ as an “objective” measure of racial superiority. The Nazis used versions of these tests to “prove” that certain ethnicities were subhuman. They used it to justify forcible sterilizations or the murder of children considered of an insufferably low IQ.

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S19
10 employee training programs that are low-cost and effective

Despite often being used interchangeably, “coaching” and “mentoring” are not synonymous. Mentors and coaches use many of the same interpersonal skills, but for different purposes. Mentoring has the broad aim of professional growth for the mentee. Coaching, on the other hand, is intended to develop the skills and knowledge of an employee (the “client”) in a particular area, to meet specific goals established by the client. Oftentimes external coaches are brought in to work with senior leaders and executives, but many organizations are finding that the expertise needed for successful coaching already exists in-house. Leaders throughout an organization can coach individual employees in specific skills to improve job performance and in broadly applicable skills, such as interpersonal communication. Peer coaching programs, in which employees on the same organizational level help each other grow, can also be highly effective. 

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S20
Mentors change lives. Find one, be one

Who has not been confused, unsure of the way to go, stuck between choices that would take you in very different directions? We may want to go a certain way and cannot, for any variety of reasons. Life demands commitment, and often commitments are obstacles. Maybe your parents don’t want you to pursue the career you love. Maybe a choice seems too risky. Maybe someone needs you and you don’t have the freedom to go your own way. There are many ways your circumstances can hold you back, against your will. Maybe this is why some say that to be free is to be able to choose your commitments. Choice is paradoxical — any time you choose to go in a certain direction, you miss the experience of going in another.Like many young students, I went through a crisis when I got to university. In fact the crisis started even before that, when my father “suggested” that I should go into chemical engineering instead of physics. It was a safer bet for the future, he argued — worried, as parents do, about my wellbeing. I see this conflict often with my students at Dartmouth. They come geared up for a degree in pre-med or pre-law, only to find out a year later that their passions lie in philosophy or drama. 

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S21
Why don’t evergreens change color and drop their leaves every fall?

As temperatures begin to dip, broad-leafed temperate trees – think maples and oaks – withdraw the green chlorophyll from their leaves. That’s the pigment that absorbs sunlight to power photosynthesis. Trees store the hard-won minerals, chiefly nitrogen, they’ve invested in chlorophyll in their wood for reuse in a future growing season. Yellows and oranges and reds are left fleetingly visible before the leaves drop for winter.The best way to understand the benefit of evergreenness is by considering the construction costs of leaves. Needles are really just modified leaves, after all. How do trees balance the energy it takes to grow a leaf with the energy that leaf produces via photosynthesis? In other words, how long do the leaves take to repay their construction costs and offer the tree a return on its investment?

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S22
There is an unseen smuggling operation between fiction and reality | Psyche Ideas

Disclaimers like this at the beginning of a book or a movie reassure us that there is a sharp boundary between the fictional and the real – a distinction we first learned in early childhood. Back then, we were taught that witches fly on broomsticks and that dragons spit fire, but also that they may do so only in our imagination. In other words, if we are to get by in the real world, our fantasies must not spill over and contaminate our beliefs concerning reality. It is not only our parents who taught us these lessons. Starting in the late 1980s, many psychologists and philosophers – such as Alan Leslie, Josef Perner, and Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich – have argued that our imaginings take place in some sort of quarantine. Nowadays, this view is widely accepted in the field.Although this idea sounds plausible in theory, in practice things are much more complicated. After all, if fiction and reality were sealed off from one another, governments would not ban movies or books, and concerned citizens would not worry about the negative influence of video games or song lyrics on children and young people. Rather than appealing to quarantine, we believe there’s a need for a better metaphorical framework – one that acknowledges the potentially manipulative power of fiction. We suggest that fiction and reality interact through some sort of trade exchange with all its dark sides and complexities. Some transactions occur in the light of day, while others happen under the table – we unconsciously import beliefs, desires and biases into fiction, and we unconsciously export ideas, worldviews and perspectives from fiction back into the real world.

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S23
Afro-Latina Representation is Growing, But Not For Dark-Skinned Black Women

Manu of the people who have capitalized off of Afro-Latine identity have been light-skinned Black Latines who have been given space to be the face of all Black Latines. And some of us believe that representation to be enough. It’s not.

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S24
I Have Sickle Cell Disease & My Pain Is Ignored

“It’s hard to get people to understand the pain sufferers like me go through. I’m not visibly ill, so people often assume I'm healthy and well, and because I look fine my pain is downplayed."

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S25
Apple’s own 5G modems might come to iPhones later than expected

Nikkei reported in 2021 that Apple was looking to introduce its own 5G modem in partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in 2023, and Qualcomm had previously assumed that it would account for 20 percent of modem orders of the 2023 iPhones. However, on Wednesday’s call, Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that the company now expects to “have the vast majority of share of 5G modems for the 2023 iPhone launch.”Apple bought “the majority” of Intel’s smartphone modem business three months after its surprise 2019 settlement with Qualcomm, so it’s not exactly a secret that the company is working on its own modems. After the success of its many custom chips for things like iPhones, Macs, and Apple Watches, it’s not surprising that Apple would want to make its own version of one of the most important pieces of a smartphone.

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S26
Elon Musk could enable Twitter’s edit button for everyone

He’s also pressing to launch a new $8 Twitter Blue package

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S27
Meta is testing a way to mint and sell NFTs on Instagram

Meta has announced that it’s testing minting and selling NFTs on Instagram, like you can with many traditional NFT marketplaces, with a “small group of creators in the US” getting access to the feature first. The company’s also expanding Instagram’s NFT showcase feature, which it recently made available to users in over 100 countries. The announcement comes among news of several new ways for creators to make money on its platforms.Meta says its digital collectibles toolkit will let people create NFTs on the Polygon blockchain (as always, no relation to Polygon the video game news outlet) and then sell them either on Instagram or off the platform. When it comes to displaying NFTs that you’ve purchased elsewhere, the company says you can now show off ones from the Solana blockchain, in addition to the Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow blockchains that the feature already supported. It’s also adding some metadata from OpenSea to the display, similar to what Twitter does for its NFT profile picture feature.

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S28
Excavating My Dad's Life

Not long after, we decided to sell the old, grand house I grew up in—a home my dad fell in love with in the 1990s and bought before my mom had even stepped inside. As our family organized the house to put it on the market, I decided to excavate my father’s study as if I were an archaeologist surveying a site that would soon be lost to development.

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S29
What Ended This Hub of Ancient Maya Life?

Archaeologists led by Carlos Peraza Lope, of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico, and Marilyn Masson, of the University at Albany–State University of New York, have been investigating the ruins of Mayapán intensively since 1996 and 1999, respectively. Intermittent work has been going on at the site since the 1950s.

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S30
When Changing Jobs Changes Your Identity

Studies show that somewhere around half of all new hires fail in their roles, with lack of “fit” being cited as a key reason. In this piece, the author argues that “fit” doesn’t always stem from a fundamental incompatibility, but rather can come from a failure to complete the psychological transition from one identity to another. She explains why nailing this identity leap may be the secret to succeeding in a new role, and offers advice for how to ease the transition.Thanks to major shifts in the labor market, workers are switching organizations, functions, and even industries much more frequently than past generations. But as our careers take these dramatic leaps, we ourselves are not wholly reinvented. We often bring pieces of our past work experiences with us, making our work selves more like a palimpsest than a whiteboard that can be wiped clean with each new role. In my published research, I’ve coined the term “lingering identities” to describe these ghostly traces of the past.

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S31
Coming soon to a job near you: Knowing what it pays

A series of local and state laws, both newly adopted and soon to be in effect, will force companies to divulge what a job pays when posting an open position. Besides being common sense, the intent of these laws is to shrink the persistent wage gap that divides white men from women and people of color. Lowering the pay gap would be an important step forward for equality in the US, affecting everything from Americans’ quality of life to how they see themselves. But while pay transparency is a much-needed improvement, a lot more is needed to truly create balance for all Americans. In the US, women and people of color get paid less than white men, regardless of job or experience. Pay gaps often begin at the start of careers, then compound over a lifetime as women and people of color are less likely to get raises. A variety of other factors contribute to the gap as well, like the motherhood penalty, wherein women who take time off paid work to care for kids are paid nearly 40 percent less than those who don’t. There’s occupational segregation, in which jobs that are filled predominantly by women or people of color, like home health aides or food service workers, are paid less. (The pay and prestige of computer science, for example, rose only as more men entered the field.) Women and people of color are also seriously underrepresented in leadership positions, which are paid the most. In sum, that means the median hourly wage for women is 86 cents per hour for every dollar a man makes. Black women make 68 cents. There’s been little progress on closing the pay gap in the last three decades.

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S32
EXPLAINER: How and why do crowd surges turn deadly?

“As people struggle to get up, arms and legs get twisted together. Blood supply starts to be reduced to the brain,” G. Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England, told NPR after the Astroworld crowd surge in Houston last November. “It takes 30 seconds before you lose consciousness, and around about six minutes, you’re into compressive or restrictive asphyxia. That’s a generally the attributed cause of death — not crushing, but suffocation.” “Survivors described being gradually compressed, unable to move, their heads ‘locked between arms and shoulders ... faces gasping in panic,’” according to a report after a human crush in 1989 at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, England, led to the death of nearly 100 Liverpool fans. “They were aware that people were dying and they were helpless to save themselves.”

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S33
4 Questions to Measure -- and Boost -- Customer Trust

Customers who give a brand high trust scores are three times more likely to stick with it through a mistake. Eighty-eight percent say they’re more likely to buy from that brand again, and 62% will buy almost exclusively from the brand. The authors have developed a simple, four-question survey that any brand can use to measure — and improve — their levels of consumer trust. Here, they explain how it works and offer an example of how The Wall Street Journal used it in practice.

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S34
Overcoming the Financial Barriers to Building Resilient Supply Chains

A major barrier to making supply chains more resilient is making the financial case for the investments. That’s because it’s hard to measure resilience, projecting the future cash flows from such investments are plagued by uncertainties, and the challenges in obtaining the data required to estimated the discounted cash flows are immense. This article examines those issues and offers some remedies.

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S35
Marie Curie: A Case Study in Breaking Barriers

Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska from a poor family in Poland, rose to the pinnacle of scientific fame in the early years of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Prize twice in the fields of physics and chemistry. At the time, women were simply not accepted in scientific fields. So Curie had to overcome enormous obstacles in order to earn a doctorate at the Sorbonne and perform her pathbreaking research on radioactive materials.

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S36
To Craft a Better Employee Experience, Collect the Right Data

When rethinking their employees’ experience at work, leaders need tools that allow them to efficiently and effectively learn what their diverse group of employees actually needs so that they can craft policies accordingly. For the past 10 years, in their respective work, the authors have been applying techniques and tools typically used to understand users and customers to the design of employee experiences. In this article, they share a selection of these tools, illustrated with examples taken from the case of “ComCo”: a global communications agency that asked one author’s firm to help rethink the design of their regional offices as part of their “Workplace for the Future” initiative.

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S37
Why Some of Your Salespeople Are Dragging -- and How to Fix It

Sellers experiencing drag are plagued by workday boredom and distraction. They procrastinate. They “go through the motions” to satisfy activity-tracking requirements. Meanwhile, progress on true priorities languishes. Essentially, drag is demotivation away from work. But it’s more than just an unpleasant experience: Drag is statistically associated with lower quota attainment and higher levels of active job searching. The authors’ research suggests that leaders who properly diagnose and address drag will see greater improvements in seller retention and commercial performance.

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S38
The marvels and mysteries revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope

From favorite moons to the search for alien life, astronomer Heidi Hammel discusses the latest in astronomy and the breakthrough innovations behind her work with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. In conversation with science journalist Nadia Drake, Hammel shares how scientists are studying objects that are farther away and older than ever before, searching for answers to how our universe evolved -- and what else might be out there.

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S39
A devilish duality: How CEOs can square resilience with net-zero promises

What a difference a year makes. In November 2021, business leaders showed up in force in Glasgow at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), pledging to take on the challenge of reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas-emission goals by 2050. While no one believed that the path to net zero would suddenly become easy, commitments made to target nearly 90 percent of CO2 emissions for reduction signaled that the private sector was truly engaged. Then major new headwinds began swirling: surging inflation, war in Europe, energy insecurity, and a potential global recession. Still, governments pressed ahead, passing major climate legislation packages in Europe and the United States. More than 3,000 companies have made commitments on net-zero pathways.

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