With Apple and Microsoft moving in, Vietnam bets on tech migration from China

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With Apple and Microsoft moving in, Vietnam bets on tech migration from China The coastal port of Haiphong, Vietnam, used to be famous for aromatic noodle dishes and organized crime. Nowadays, it’s better known as a burgeoning industrial region, where electronics makers set up shop to escape the crowded south. Optimism abounds in a place like this. “We don’t just sell land, we sell the future,” Hoang Vinh Tuan, a manager at real estate developer Deep C Industrial Zones, told Rest of World.It’s part of a boom in industrial infrastructure deep in Vietnam’s north, designed to lure tech manufacturers out of China and into the country. When Rest of World visited in October, Deep C staffers walked groups of visitors through their Haiphong site, displaying ready-built workshops and warehouses, an irrigation system designed to collect rainwater, even a wind turbine — which, the guides proudly informed, was the first one installed in northern Vietnam.  Continued here

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AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community Just days afterward, a former French game developer, known online as 5you, fed Jung Gi’s work into an AI model. He shared the model on Twitter as an homage to the artist, allowing any user to create Jung Gi-style art with a simple text prompt. The artworks showed dystopian battlefields and bustling food markets — eerily accurate in style, and, apart from some telltale warping, as detailed as Jung Gi’s own creations.The response was pure disdain. “Kim Jung Gi left us less than [a week ago] and AI bros are already ‘replicating’ his style and demanding credit. Vultures and spineless, untalented losers,” read one viral post from the comic-book writer Dave Scheidt on Twitter. “Artists are not just a ‘style.’ They’re not a product. They’re a breathing, experiencing person,” read another from cartoonist Kori Michele Handwerker.  Continued here

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Meet Indonesia’s Joe Rogan — part YouTube star, part magician, all controversy “If anyone compared me to Joe Rogan, I’d be flattered,” Deddy Corbuzier, one of Indonesia’s biggest YouTubers, told Rest of World with a smile. Corbuzier was in the studio, wearing his signature tight black T-shirt — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-style — and tinted glasses, slowly smoking an e-cigarette, as he often does on his show. I sat on the chair where his guests usually sit — only this time, I was the one asking questions.On June 23, singer Widy Soediro Nichlany had sat in the same chair, revealing a traumatic experience: She’d been kidnapped and nearly raped by unknown men while walking home. Nichlany was accompanied on the show by actress Cinta Laura, known for campaigning to raise awareness about sexual violence. Though Corbuzier was attempting to highlight the issue, it was equally clear that he lacked the expertise and sensitivity to bring it home; some of his more intrusive questions prompted Nichlany to break into tears, and Laura begged to stop filming for five minutes. When Laura told Corbuzier he “liked to make people feel pressured,” he brushed it off. “I’m just asking,” he said. Continued here

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What it’s like to be a woman in tech in India India’s tech sector employs significantly more women than any other private sector in the country: Around 36% of the five million employees in the tech industry are women, according to the latest available figures from Nasscom, the industry’s trade association. Yet, gender-based discrimination remains rife. According to a 2021 report, women are increasingly entering tech roles. However, while many women are employed in the sector as a whole, they are less represented in senior roles: Only 7% of them hold executive-level positions, according to a 2022 report. Sometimes, this inequality can be measured, as with unequal pay or the “glass ceiling” that occurs as women fail to progress into leadership roles. But it also manifests in the everyday culture of work life, with women reporting that they are treated differently in the office. “Such everyday sexism is often invisible; therefore, it often is ignored by those who can take action against it,” Cheshta Arora, a researcher at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, told Rest of World. However, she added, it creates an adverse impact on women’s careers and well-being.  Continued here

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India’s new telecomms bill is messed up The bill proposes that all these platforms “need to get licenses from the government to operate in India,” Anushka Jain, policy counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. The bill doesn’t state the requirements to get licensing for communications platforms. “Everybody who’s engaging with the bill right now is engaging with their eyes half-closed, because we don’t know what the licenses will require service providers to do,” Jain said.In certain cases, the new bill has reproduced provisions from the 1885 bill without any consideration for privacy, transparency, and accountability. Digital rights organizations are calling for a withdrawal of the draft telecomms bill. Even Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecomms network owned by Mukesh Ambani, has criticized the bill. The only hope is that given the monumental pushback, the government might reconsider its stance. Continued here

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Ethiopia’s ride-hailing startups face their toughest opponents: each other Feres is a giant in Ethiopia’s ride-hailing sector. Ibsa and other drivers told Rest of World that as soon as they installed the driver app for SunPick and registered, their Feres driver app stopped working, with “Duplicate Access ID” popping up on their phone screens. Drivers say they had found consistent work on Feres with its large customer base and none wanted to replace it with SunPick. A number of drivers told Rest of World that after they uninstalled SunPick, their Feres app started working again.According to one media report, SunPick accused Feres of unfair business practices. In the same report, Feres denied having anything to do with the issue and accused SunPick of having stolen confidential data, drivers’ contact lists, and source code from Feres when it hired a former Feres employee. The SunPick app doesn’t currently work. SunPick declined to respond to Rest of World’s questions about its app and current operations.  Continued here

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Facebook and Instagram ran ads violating Kenyan election law, new report reveals Kenyan law states political candidates cannot campaign in the 48 hours before an election day. Candidates for both major political parties did just that, with paid promotions on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta. Meta itself requires advertisers to abide by these blackout periods. Some ads from the opposition Azimio la Umoja party reached as many as 50,000 impressions and one gubernatorial candidate alone ran some 17 violating ads.The finding is one of several from the Mozilla Foundation’s new report on moderation failures in the days preceding and following Kenya’s August presidential election. The porousness of moderation filters during this time contributed to what Madung calls a “post-election twilight zone,” the report said. Despite public commitments to ramp up moderation resources before Kenyans headed to the polls, Meta, Twitter, and Tiktok all saw breaches in their moderation systems, according to the report. In the days after the polls closed on August 9, election rumors on social media were exacerbated by the release of 43,000 polling station results publicly by the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). Political parties and media companies released their own tallies of these votes, leading to conflicting declarations of the winner. Breaches included the circulation of misleading electoral tallies by opposing political parties and conspiracy theories about election fraud. Continued here

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On Election Day, Vote for Candidates with Science-Based Policies, Not Politicians Who Ignore Evidence “Elections have consequences,” said President Barack Obama in 2009, as he started to press for policies such as affordable health care against Republican opposition. Recently Republican leaders themselves have begun to echo his phrase as red state legislatures ban abortion, prevent the country from taking actions to combat the climate crisis, permit easier access to firearms, and oppose a vigorous public health response to the pandemic. All of that makes the consequences of this fall's vote exceptionally profound.What these issues have in common is overwhelming scientific support for pursuing one policy direction over another. They share something else, too: a choice between candidates who either follow that scientific evidence or act as if it does not exist. On your Election Day ballot you'll see local and federal candidates who endorse policies based on tested scientific evidence and others who take positions based on unsupported assumptions and biases. The scientific method has brought us vaccines, the Internet, cleaner air and water, and entire new sectors of the economy. Office seekers who use research-based evidence to inform decisions are the ones who will help our country prosper. Those who reject this evidence will increase suffering. The following survey of urgent policy issues highlights the differences: Continued here

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RSV Is Surging: What We Know about This Common and Surprisingly Dangerous Virus As flu season picks up and experts weigh concerns about another possible COVID surge, children’s hospitals are already filling with patients with another viral threat: respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Even though many people haven’t heard of RSV, pretty much everyone has had it, probably multiple times, says Anthony Flores, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and a physician at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital. RSV is the leading cause of bronchiolitis—inflammation of the lung’s small airways—in infants, and the virus is so common that nearly all children have encountered it by their second birthday.“It’s that ubiquitous,” Flores says. “Even adults are exposed to it repeatedly over time, so we develop some immunity to it.” In healthy adults and children, though, RSV typically presents as a common cold, with symptoms similar to those caused by other “common cold” viruses, such as rhinovirus, adenovirus and a couple of common coronaviruses. But that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. RSV costs the U.S. more than $1 billion each year in health care costs and lost productivity, and it can be particularly dangerous for newborn babies and adults older than age 65. Continued here

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What Scientists Are Watching at the COP27 Climate Summit It’s been a year since global leaders renewed their climate pledges at the landmark summit in Glasgow, UK. Next week, they’ll convene again in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, during the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) to carry on negotiations aimed at reining in global warming. But the world is a different place now: leaders will need to confront the energy crisis spurred by the war in Ukraine, and mounting damages from extreme weather events.But there is good news as well. Renewable-energy installations continue to rise globally. And some 26 countries have made new climate commitments this year (see ‘Commitment report’), including Australia, which pledged to curb greenhouse-gas emissions to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030. An International Energy Agency analysis suggests that new policies announced by the United States, Europe and others in response to the energy crisis are poised to spur investments in clean energy, potentially enabling a global plateau in emissions by 2025. Continued here

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Five Tensions That Could Derail the COP 27 Climate Summit President Joe Biden will make an appearance Nov. 11, about half-way through the two-week conference, along with a pared-down U.S. delegation. Two new leaders, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Brazil’s incoming president, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, will use the talks in an effort to show their climate bona fides. The leaders of China and Russia, the world’s first- and fifth-largest climate polluters, respectively, are planning to skip the event altogether, as are officials from many of the largest economies, including India and Australia.“Right now within African countries the discussion is around how to put forward a common Africa position, particularly around the energy transition and around some kind of flexibility in the use of natural gas in particular, to achieve objectives around electrification,” Zainab Usman, director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said during a recent briefing. Continued here

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Better Atmospheric River Forecasts Are Giving Emergency Planners More Time to Prepare for Flooding I was eating breakfast on a Monday morning at Sears Fine Food in downtown San Francisco, casually watching the local five-day weather forecast on a television screen behind the counter. A little symbol along the bottom showed a happy-looking sun for the rest of the day. Wednesday had a friendly-looking cloud and a few raindrops, and Thursday had a dark, threatening cloud with heavier drops. I knew Thursday's conditions would be much rougher than the symbol conveyed. I had been studying detailed satellite data and weather models, and they indicated that a major atmospheric river (AR) was likely to hit the city. The symbol was completely inadequate for communicating the threat of the approaching storm.ARs are essentially rivers of water vapor in the sky that are pushed along by strong, low-altitude winds, sometimes at hurricane speeds. The meteorological community formally defined them only in the early 2010s, after improved satellite imaging and science revealed how these storms can form far out over the remote ocean. They can grow to 2,000 miles long, 500 miles wide and two miles deep by the time they strike the western coasts of continents. An average AR brings far greater rainfall than a typical rain or thunderstorm in those parts of the world, transporting enough vapor to equal 25 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River where it pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Continued here

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What You Need to Know About Iran's Surveillance Tech Tulika Bose: This is 60-Second Science. I'm Tulika Bose. Iranians have been fiercely and relentlessly protesting against their government. This was sparked by the death of a 22-year old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini who died in the custody of the country's "morality police." The demonstrations have been led by young women, who refused to accept restrictive laws like hijab requirements, but authorities have been cracking down with violence, arrests, and with surveillance. I'm here with Sophie Bushwick, our tech editor at Scientific American. Sophie interviewed Amir Rashidi, who is the director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, an Austin, Texas based advocacy organization working to improve human rights in Iran. Bushwick: I had heard that some protesters in Iran were worried about the government using facial recognition. And I reached out to Amir to just ask them about this technology in particular, but what I learned is that the use of technology for suppression in Iran goes way beyond facial recognition. In fact, the government is actively trying to create its own nationwide intranet that would be separate from the global Internet and allow it to maintain much stricter control over what its citizens can see on the internet. Continued here

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How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence A week and a half before the midterm elections, a man broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and attacked her husband with a hammer. David DePape, charged in the attack, had posted a slew of rants that included references to a sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which claims that Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles are trying to control the world’s politics and media.With the support of former President Donald Trump, the pedophile conspiracy theory has contributed to a widening spiral of threats and violence, including the deadly January 6 Capitol insurrection. A revival of the “groomer” smear against the LGBTQ community (a reference to a pedophile) has ramped up the aggression. Right-wing media personalities and activists have created or amplified conspiracy theories about Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and others. Continued here

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Fossils Upend Conventional Wisdom about Evolution of Human Bipedalism Long before our ancestors evolved large brains and language, even before they tamed fire or made stone tools, they started doing something no mammal had done before: walking on two legs. Skeletal adaptations for traveling upright are evident in fossils of the very oldest hominins—members of the human family—which date to between seven million and five million years ago. Moving on two legs rather than four set the stage for subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage. It allowed our predecessors to expand their home ranges and diversify their diets, and it transformed the way we give birth and parent our children. This peculiar mode of locomotion was foundational to virtually all the other characteristics that make humans unique.In the iconic representation of human evolution, a procession of ancestors starting with a chimplike creature ambling on all fours gives way to a series of ever more erect forebears, culminating in a fully upright Homo sapiens striding triumphantly on two legs. First popularized in the 1960s, the March of Progress, as this image and its variants are known, has decorated countless books, T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs. Continued here

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How Do You Make a Decision When Every Option Looks Bad? While the decision to “go purpose” instead of “going public” has been heralded by many as setting a new standard in corporate citizenship, it was still not an easy one for Mr. Chouinard to make. Patagonia explored every option, he says, including selling the company privately — a decision that ran the risk of new owners not sharing his values or vision for the environment. In a statement published on Patagonia’s website, he writes: “Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility. Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.”If you’ve led an organization, a function, or a team, you’ll probably be familiar with the dilemma that faced Patagonia’s leadership. There are times and situations — oftentimes, crisis situations — where the stakes are incredibly high and none of the choices ahead of you look good. Whatever decision you make, there’ll be trade-offs to negotiate, risks to navigate; and all eyes will be on you as the person whose responsibility it is to figure out the way forward. So what do you do? How can you do as Mr. Chouinard did, and create your own solution? Continued here

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Tracking the Financial Stakes in Curbing Emissions Efforts at curbing greenhouse gas emissions could be more effective if energy companies could get a sharp grip on how investors measure climate risk in their portfolios. A recent paper by experts at Wharton and elsewhere published in Nature Energy achieves precisely that: it details how investors and financial professionals incorporate climate risk into their decisions, and how energy companies are shaping their response to climate change while addressing “transition risks,” or the legal and regulatory challenges they face in that journey.“Financial market participants such as asset managers and banks are increasingly focused on managing the climate risk exposures of their asset and loan portfolios,” the paper stated. “The increased climate risk awareness of financial market participants has first-order effects on energy companies’ financing, capital allocation, corporate governance, operational decisions, and long-term strategies.” Continued here

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Why Web3 Won’t Go Mainstream — Yet The following article was written by professors Kartik Hosanagar and Myriam Brouard. Hosanagar (@khosanagar) is a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions and  faculty co-lead of AI for Business. He is also the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence. Brouard (@professorNFT) is an assistant professor studying the intersection of technology adoption and consumer culture at the Telfer School of Management of the University of Ottawa.Crypto and Web3 have a problem. No, not the recent fall in Bitcoin’s value, the collapse of “stable coin” Terra (LUNA), the fact that early projects offered little utility and were mostly driven by asset speculations by a small but vocal community, or even the widespread accounts of fraud. This problem is of equal or greater concern, one that will outlast market fluctuations and a lack of proper regulation. It is that, for a product meant to democratize everything from investment to activism to art, Web3 — the universe of blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and cryptocurrencies — is devilishly difficult to use. Continued here

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Closing the Tenure Gap for Business Faculty of Color Wharton professor Wendy De La Rosa and Foster School of Business professor Esther Uduehi first met while pursuing their PhDs. Both took part in The PhD Project, a non-profit organization that aims to diversify the business faculty pipeline. Inspired by this approach, they’ve now created The Tenure Project to support underrepresented scholars (e.g., Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars) through the next big obstacle: obtaining tenure in a historically inequitable system.Wendy De La Rosa: We have to be really frank about the fact that many educational institutions were built by people of color, [yet] with the explicit purpose to exclude people of color. And so you’re asking people to navigate a system that, by its very foundation and creation, was set up to be exclusionary. The data reflects this. Even though underrepresented minorities (URMs) represent over 36% of the U.S. population, they represent just 7% of the faculty of business schools, according to the AACSB. Continued here

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How Digital Employment Verifications Boost Credit Access Access to consumer credit dramatically widens with digital verification of the employment credentials of loan applicants while expanding the market opportunity for lenders, according to a paper based on a study by experts at Wharton, Washington University in St. Louis, and Equifax. In the study’s sample of auto loans over a two-year period, lenders were able to save time in processing and approving a larger number of applications, including those from subprime and deep subprime borrowers, and netting profits despite higher delinquencies.The study holds significant takeaways for policymakers looking for ways to remove credit market constraints for borrowers with low credit scores and to reduce information asymmetry, according to Wharton marketing professor Zhenling Jiang, who co-authored the paper, titled “The Value of Verified Employment Data for Consumer Lending: Evidence from Equifax.” Her co-authors are Tat Chan and Xiang Hui, both marketing professors at Washington University in St. Louis, and Naser Hamdi, senior data and analytics officer at credit reporting agency Equifax. Continued here

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Navigating Microaggressions at Work Creary’s story is all too familiar to Lori Tauber Marcus, a Wharton graduate, corporate board member, and executive coach who spent decades in leadership roles at PepsiCo, Keurig Green Mountain, The Children’s Place Retail Stores, and Peloton Interactive. Marcus is co-author of the new book, You Should Smile More: How to Dismantle Gender Bias in the Workplace, written by six C-suite women who call themselves “The Band of Sisters.” In the book, the authors bring up some of the most common microaggressions committed against working women, including being relegated to the stenographer role in staff meetings (“Susan, could you take notes?”), or having their ideas dismissed and then offered up by male colleagues to enthusiastic reception (“Great idea, Greg!”).Marcus spoke to Creary during an episode of her podcast series, Leading Diversity at Work. They were joined by David Rivera, a professor of counselor education at Queens College-City University of New York, whose research focuses on cultural competency development, the effect of discrimination on the well-being of people from underrepresented groups, and microaggressions. (Listen to the podcast above. Find more episodes here.) Continued here

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How to Get the Most from Your Customer Data Fader joined forces with Bruce Hardie, professor of marketing at London Business School, and Michael Ross, chief scientist at EDITED, to coauthor The Customer-Base Audit, published by Wharton School Press in November 2022. Their book argues that companies cannot make fully informed decisions without first understanding their customers’ buying behavior and the actual health of their customer base. To help firms do that, the book sets out the tools and frameworks to assess their customer base, reassess growth objectives, understand how their customers differ in behavior and value, see how the quality of their customers has changed over time, and much more.Bruce Hardie: As we say in the book, it’s a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm’s customers using data captured by its transaction systems to summarize their actual buying behavior. We’re not interested in who these customers are, what they think, or their attitude. It’s very much a focus on their actual behavior, and providing that high-level overview for top decision-makers in the organization. Continued here

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Google Expands Flood and Wildfire Tracking to More Countries The most practical development: Google is expanding its AI-powered disaster tracking and response systems. The company rolled out a wildfire tracking tool during the apocalyptic 2020 fire season. The tool aims to track wildfire movements in real time using satellite imagery, on-the-ground data, and AI predictions. Now, the feature is expanding across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Australia. It’s aimed at providing useful info for people in areas affected by fires who need up-to-the-second knowledge about where a blaze is moving and who it might affect. The tool will appear inside Google Maps, sending alerts to users who are nearby and showing them options for evacuation and shelter. Google is also using similar AI modeling to track flooding, and it has expanded its flood warning system to include 18 new countries across Africa, South America, and southeast Asia.Google has also gotten deeper into the AI art-generation game with a new video creation tool that combines Google's Imagen image-generation platform and Phenaki's video generator. These platforms working in concert are able to spin up short bursts of high-resolution video from just a text prompt. The video-generation tool is not available to the public as a service yet, and Google hasn’t given an indication of when or if it might be. The news comes a little over a month after Meta announced a similar service called Make-a-Video. Both companies are keen to hop on the AI art craze, even if the prospect has proved controversial among artists. Continued here

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3 free will arguments, explained by physicist Sean Carroll SEAN CARROLL: It's very often that in the conversations about free will, you find people who believe in free will contrasted with determinists, who just think the laws of physics are gonna tell us what happens in the world. 'Determinism' is a statement about how the laws of physics work. It goes back to Pierre-Simon Laplace explicating the implications of classical mechanics, a la Isaac Newton. He says, "If you knew the position and velocity of everything in the world, the equations of classical physics deterministically predict what will happen next." There's no randomness: you know exactly what's gonna happen in the future. To me, this is one of the biggest mistakes we could make. Not that you should be determinist or not, but that there is some relationship between determinism versus non-determinism, and free will versus non-free will. Those are two separate questions. 'Libertarian free will' is truly an ability to make choices and do things in the world that cannot even, in principle, in any way, be explained by stuff obeying the laws of physics. Immanuel Kant and other people put it in these terms: They said, "There's no way of thinking of a human being as somehow a collection of physical things obeying the laws of physics." There is something that is inescapably human that cannot be reduced to an understanding of ourselves as just mindless pieces conglomerated together to make something with a mind.  Continued here

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"Flight shame": Not even Europe's famous rail network can replace airplanes Both terms are more than buzzwords. The example set by Thunberg and others did change travel habits, certainly in Sweden itself. At the start of 2018, 20% of Swedes said they would choose trains over flights whenever possible. By mid-2019, that figure had risen to 37%. In that year, domestic air travel in Sweden declined by 15%, while the Swedish national rail company reported a 12% rise in business travel.But “flight shame” is not limited to Sweden, nor to individual activists. Across Europe, a substantial number of public and private companies have banned short-haul flights for their staff and are discouraging long-haul ones. It remains to be seen whether, with post-pandemic air traffic well on its way to return to pre-2019 volumes, flygskam can make a long-term dent in flying habits. Continued here

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This blood test screens for multiple cancers at once Testing to look for circulating tumor DNA in the blood is not new. These liquid biopsies – a fancy way of saying blood tests – are already widely used for patients with advanced-stage cancer. Doctors use these blood tests to look for mutations in the tumor DNA that help guide treatment. Because patients with late-stage cancer tend to have a large amount of tumor DNA circulating in the blood, it’s relatively easy to detect the presence of these genetic changes.MCED tests are different from existing liquid biopsies because they are trying to detect early-stage cancer, when there aren’t that many tumor cells yet. Detecting these cancer cells can be challenging early on because noncancer cells also shed DNA into the bloodstream. Since most of the circulating DNA in the bloodstream comes from noncancer cells, detecting the presence of a few molecules of cancer DNA is like finding a needle in a haystack. Continued here

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Experimental "FLASH" cancer treatment aces first human trial There may be a faster, less-painful way to use radiation against cancer. "FLASH" delivers 300 times the dose in a fraction of a second. Continued here

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Apple’s reportedly building an advertising network around its Major League Soccer deal Apple struck a 10-year deal with the MLS in June and will start streaming soccer games through its Apple TV app in February 2023. While the company plans on introducing a separate, Sunday Ticket-like subscription dedicated to streaming every MLS game, it says it’ll make a “broad selection” of MLS and Leagues Cup matches available to Apple TV Plus subscribers, with a “limited number” available for free. It already brought more ads to the App Store, which now appear in the Today tab and “You Might Also Like” sections beneath app listings. The move drew criticism from developers, who quickly noticed ads for gambling apps appearing on App Store product pages. Apple has since paused App Store ads related to gambling and “a few other categories,” but hasn’t come forward with a plan to address this issue just yet. Continued here

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Rats with backpacks could help rescue earthquake survivors | CNN Buildings don't collapse very often - but when they do, it's catastrophic for those trapped inside. Natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes can level entire towns, and for the search and rescue teams trying to find survivors, it's a painstaking task. The project, conceived of by Belgian non-profit APOPO, is kitting out rodents with tiny, high-tech backpacks to help first responders search for survivors among rubble in disaster zones. "Rats are typically quite curious and like to explore - and that is key for search and rescue," says Donna Kean, a behavioral research scientist and leader of the project. In addition to their adventurous spirit, their small size and excellent sense of smell make rats perfect for locating things in tight spaces, says Kean. Continued here

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How a sand battery could transform clean energy The Vatajankoski power plant is home to the world's first commercial-scale sand battery. Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-grade builders' sand, two district heating pipes and a fan. The sand becomes a battery after it is heated up to 600C using electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels in Finland, brought by Vatajankoski, the owners of the power plant."My first thought was 'why didn’t I think of that?'" laughs Eva Pongrácz, vice-head of the water, energy and environmental engineering research unit at the University of Oulu in northern Finland. "Such a simple, fresh and innovative idea. Could this be the solution for the continuous supply of green energy? I don't think there will be one single answer but this is part of the solution." 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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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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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