25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'Most Important' Statistic to Identify Truly Great Leaders "And when you have great people, the most important thing to do is to not lose them." Continued here |
The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols
Thirty-four years ago, near the crest of the crack-cocaine-fuelled crime surge of the early nineteen-nineties, two F.B.I agents began a novel investigation of threats to police. One agent was a former police lieutenant in Washington, D.C. The other was also a Catholic priest with a doctorate in psychology. Together, they plunged into the prison system, interviewing fifty convicted cop killers. Most criminologists today call such research pseudoscience. A sample size of fifty was almost anecdotal, and why should anyone trust a cop killer, anyway? The agents also had no benchmark—no comparable interviews with criminals who had complied. Yet the sweeping conclusions of their study, “Killed in the Line of Duty,” made the front page of the Times, and, through decades of promotion by the Department of Justice, became ingrained in the culture of American law enforcement. At the top of an inventory of “behavioral descriptors” linked to officers who ended up dead, the study listed traits that some citizens might prize: “friendly,” “well-liked by community and department,” “tends to use less force than other officers felt they would use in similar circumstances,” and “used force only as last resort.” The cop killers, the agents concluded from their prison conversations, had attacked officers with a “good-natured demeanor.” An officer’s failure to dominate—to immediately enforce full control over the suspect—proved fatal. “A miscue in assessing the need for control in particular situations can have grave consequences,” the authors warned. Continued here |
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Scientists use CRISPR to insert an alligator gene into a catfish
By inserting an alligator gene into catfish, Alabama scientists radically increased their disease resistance — but more work is needed before the genetically modified fish could find their way into farms or onto your plate. The challenge: Catfish are the most popular species raised by farmers in the U.S., but growing them isn’t easy — globally, 40% of the catfish hatched in farms die from disease before they can be harvested. Continued here |
Emotionally Intelligent People Use 2 Simple Words to Build Confidence and Work Better (and Get Others to Work Better, Too) These two words will not only change the way you see yourself and others, they'll turn you into 'self-fulfilling prophecies'--and inspire you to do great work. Continued here |
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Our Favorite Products Made of Upcycled and Recycled Materials
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Humans haven't been kind to the planet. Climate change is out of control, and microplastics are poisoning our oceans. But even when we try to reduce our footprint, we still need to wear shoes and clothes and occasionally drive vehicles. So it's important that we all make eco-friendly choices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the spread of plastic waste. Luckily, some companies have figured out how to use that waste to make new products. Continued here |
The American West's Salt Lakes Are Turning to Dust
This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last summer, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed dust blowing 85 miles from its source, Lake Abert and Summer Lake, two dried-up saline lakes in southern Oregon. This has happened before: Saline lakebeds are some of the West's most significant sources of dust. California's Owens Lake is the nation's largest source of PM10, the tiny pollutants found in dust and smoke, while plumes blowing off the 800 square miles of the Great Salt Lake's exposed bed have caused toxin-filled dust storms in Salt Lake City. Continued here |
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The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, January 29, 2023
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What happens when regular porn watchers abstain for a week?
A team of psychologists based out of Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom and HELP University in Malaysia explored whether regular pornography users experience withdrawal symptoms when asked to abstain for one week. Their paper detailing this effort was recently published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The researchers recruited 176 psychology undergraduates in Malaysia, about two-thirds female, to take part in the research. They received class credit and $7.00 for fully participating. All were regular porn consumers, viewing sexual content at least three times per week. One-half of subjects were randomized to an abstinence group — that is, they were asked to refrain from viewing pornography for seven days. The other half was assigned to a control group and told to continue their habits as usual. Continued here |
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Three years ago, a fake April Fool’s Day joke transformed Sega's best series
The Yakuza series has a reputation for being full of hijinks in addition to its melodramatic story of gangsters. This image reached its height in what was originally thought to be an April Fool's joke announcing a turn-based RPG entry in the series. But instead of a joke, Yakuza: Lika a Dragon was a groundbreaking soft reboot for the franchise that leans hard into the humor of the series, earning it newfound appreciation in the west. Setting up the joke — In 2016, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio seemingly ended the story of longtime series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu with Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (although Kiryu will be coming out of retirement soon). When it came time to work on the next entry in the franchise, the studio wanted to branch off in a new direction that changed the protagonist and mechanics of the franchise. This game would become Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Continued here |
Startup's bladeless flying car is designed to reach Mach 0.8
Seattle-based startup Jetoptera is designing vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles with bladeless propulsion systems — potentially making the future of urban flight quiet, safer, and faster. The challenge: The proportion of the global population living in cities is expected to increase from 50% today to nearly 70% by 2050, meaning our already crowded urban streets are likely to become even more congested. Continued here |
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Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk
Medieval monks were, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such was her dedication to her faith. James prayed so intently during a snowstorm that he was buried in snow and had to be dug out by his neighbors. But none of these early devotees could ward off distraction like Pachomius. The 4th-century monk weathered a parade of demons that transformed into naked women, rumbled the walls of his dwelling, and tried to make him laugh with elaborate comedy routines. Pachomius didn’t even glance in their direction. For early Christian writers, Pachomius and his ilk set a high bar for concentration that other monks aspired to match. These super-concentrators were the first millennium embodiment of #workgoals, #hustle, and #selfimprovement. Continued here |
The mind-bending physics of time
In this Big Think interview, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the concept of time and the mysteries surrounding its properties. He notes that while we use the word “time” frequently in everyday language, the real puzzles arise when we consider the properties of time, such as the past, present, and future, and the fact that we can affect the future but not the past. Carroll also discusses the concept of entropy, which is a measure of how disorganized or random a system is, and the second law of thermodynamics, which states that there is a natural tendency for things in the Universe to go from a state of low entropy to high entropy — in other words, from less disorganized to more disorganized. He explains that the arrow of time, or the perceived difference between the past and the future, arises due to the influence of the Big Bang and the fact that the Universe began in a state of low entropy. Continued here |
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5 Sentences the Best Leaders Never Say, According to Career Experts Employees may think you're out of touch, lack empathy, are setting a bad example, or all three. Continued here |
The Auckland floods are a sign of things to come - the city needs stormwater systems fit for climate change
The extraordinary flood event Auckland experienced on the night of January 27, the eve of the city’s anniversary weekend, was caused by rainfall that was literally off the chart. Over 24 hours, 249mm of rain fell – well above the previous record of 161.8mm. A state of emergency was declared late in the evening. Continued here |
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Strategy for Start-ups
In their haste to get to market first, write Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern, entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify. They can improve their chances of picking the right path by investigating four generic go-to-market strategies and choosing a version that aligns most closely with their founding values and motivations. The authors provide a framework, which they call the entrepreneurial strategy compass, for doing so. Continued here |
The neuroscience of loving music
The oldest record of notated music, the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, is more than 3,000 years old. But in a sense, our relationship with music is far more ancient than that. As Michael Spitzer, a professor of music at the University of Liverpool, told Big Think, humans have been making and learning to recognize music from the moment our species learned to walk on two legs, creating a predictable beat. Continued here |
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How you breathe affects your brain
If you’re lucky enough to live to 80, you’ll take up to a billion breaths in the course of your life, inhaling and exhaling enough air to fill about 50 Goodyear blimps or more. We take about 20,000 breaths a day, sucking in oxygen to fuel our cells and tissues, and ridding the body of carbon dioxide that builds up as a result of cellular metabolism. Breathing is so essential to life that people generally die within minutes if it stops. It’s a behavior so automatic that we tend to take it for granted. But breathing is a physiological marvel — both extremely reliable and incredibly flexible. Our breathing rate can change almost instantaneously in response to stress or arousal and even before an increase in physical activity. And breathing is so seamlessly coordinated with other behaviors like eating, talking, laughing and sighing that you may have never even noticed how your breathing changes to accommodate them. Breathing can also influence your state of mind, as evidenced by the controlled breathing practices of yoga and other ancient meditative traditions. Continued here |
Most criminal cryptocurrency is funneled through just 5 exchanges
For years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with black market sales, theft, ransomware, and money laundering—despite the strange fact that in that economy, practically every transaction is written into a blockchain’s permanent, unchangeable ledger. But new evidence suggests that years of advancements in blockchain tracing and crackdowns on that illicit underworld may be having an effect—if not reducing the overall volume of crime, then at least cutting down on the number of laundering outlets, leaving the crypto black market with fewer options to cash out its proceeds than it’s had in a decade. Continued here |
New blood types are often discovered following medical disasters
Over the last 120 years, scientists have discovered 44 blood typing systems. These discoveries, which have saved millions of lives, often follow tragic and disastrous medical events. In the 17th century, scientists uncovered the inner workings of the circulatory system and, before long, began injecting animal blood into people for a variety of reasons. As you might suspect, a lot of people died. By the 19th century, an English physician named James Blundell suspected animal blood wasn’t the best option. He proposed that blood is not universally compatible. That is, dogs can only tolerate dog blood, humans can only tolerate human blood, and so on. Continued here |
How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions
For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually do and how they create value. To pull the curtain back, Paul Gompers of Harvard Business School, Will Gornall of the Sauder School of Business, Steven N. Kaplan of the Chicago Booth School of Business, and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School conducted what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of VC firms to date. In this article, they share their findings, offering details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. These insights into VC practices can be helpful to entrepreneurs trying to raise capital, corporate investment arms that want to emulate VCs’ success, and policy makers who seek to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities. Continued here |
Chairing ASEAN: what does it mean for Indonesia in 2023?
Despite many obstacles and challenges, including the Russia-Ukraine war and global recession, host nation Indonesia managed to ensure that the high-level conference held in Bali on November 15-16 2022 produced a joint declaration, known as the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration. It shows how Indonesia, under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, has tried to be a unifying force in the midst of global uncertainty. Now Indonesia has shifted focus and attention to its next significant challenge: chairing ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 2023. Continued here |
The weekend's best deals: Apple computers, Kindles, 4K TVs, charging cables, and more.
Another weekend, another Dealmaster. In this week's roundup of the best tech deals on the web, we have deals on a range of Apple computers―desktops and laptops alike. Co-headlining the Apple computer sale are the just-released 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros and the 2021 iMac. Continued here |
Nadhim Zahawi sacked: today's Tory scandals are similar to 1990s sleaze stories in more than one way
The 1990s are everywhere right now. From the fashion trends making a comeback in 2023 (I’m told), to the hotly anticipated return of the flashback mystery-box thriller Yellowjackets, it’s starting to feel like the millennium never happened. And where pop culture leads, politics inevitably follows. Events swirling around prime minister Rishi Sunak are more than a little reminiscent of the sleaze that dogged John Major’s Conservative government for most of his tenure between 1992 and 1997. So much so that I was recently reminded of a passage written by political scientist Tim Bale: Continued here |
The best mystery thriller on Netflix ignores a basic fact about hydrogen energy
Could a solid hydrogen crystal really power our homes today? Experts weigh in on Glass Onion. The most entertaining science fiction starts with a kernel of real science and grows it into something far beyond the boundaries of our current reality. Continued here |
Warren Buffett Says 3 Major Decisions in Life Will Be the Difference Between Success and Failure Avoiding failure requires making some new decisions. Continued here |
Finding your essential self: the ancient philosophy of Zhuangzi explained Zhuangzi – also known as Zhuang Zhou or Master Zhuang – was a Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE. He is traditionally credited as the author of the ancient Taoist masterpiece bearing his name, the Zhuangzi. The work of Zhuangzi has been described as “humorous and deadly serious, lighthearted and morbid, precisely argued and intentionally confusing”. On the surface, his teachings can seem outright nonsensical. He maintains that “listening stops with the ear”, that we should “hide the world in the world”, and that a person on the right path is “walking two roads”. Continued here |
Your Overall Happiness in Life Really Comes Down to 5Â Simple Words Money alone doesn't lead to sustainable happiness. So what does? Continued here |
Israel’s Anti-Democratic Practices Against Palestinians Are Infecting Its Political System
Early Thursday morning, Israeli soldiers and police conducted a raid against what they said were Islamic Jihad militants that left nine Palestinians, including a sixty-year-old woman, dead. The operation, in the city of Jenin, also wounded dozens, according to Palestinian officials. The Israeli Army contended that most of the dead were militants who had shot at or hurled Molotov cocktails at security forces. The death toll was one of the highest single-day tallies in the West Bank in years. On Friday night, a Palestinian gunman killed seven Israelis and wounded three others in an attack near a synagogue in East Jerusalem. Among the dead were three elderly, two women and a man. Three others were injured. On Saturday, a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy, police said, shot and wounded two people near Jerusalem's Old City. Continued here |
'Persona 3 Portable' requests guide: How to complete every Velvet Room errand
One of the most time-consuming activities players can pursue in Persona 3 Portable are the requests given to the protagonist by the Velvet Room attendant, either Elizabeth or Theodore. While players will already spend plenty of time trying to romance side characters and get the highest grade in class, these requests are essential to maxing out your relationship with the Velvet Room attendant. Still, they aren’t always clear about how you can fulfill the myriad of requests. Here is a complete guide on all of the 80 requests from Elizabeth and Theodore in Persona 3 Portable. Defeat the Reaper enemy who appears by remaining on any one floor of Tartarus for too long. Continued here |
Garmin's Forerunner 255 Is Jam-Packed With Features
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Garmin’s Forerunner line of GPS-enabled fitness trackers is bewilderingly complex. Also, the company updates Forerunner models so often even those of us who test them for a living sometimes have trouble keeping up. That’s a good thing—new features are almost always a plus—but it does make picking the right model a challenge. Continued here |
Death, Sex and Aliens: A Surprising History of Slime
Sublime slime, sprawling light pollution, harnessing the bioelectricity in our body, and more books out this month Slime: A Natural Historyby Susanne WedlichTranslated by Ayça TürkoğluMelville House, 2023 ($27.99) Continued here |
Labs Are Scooping Up Animals Killed by Wind Turbines
“This is one of the least smelly carcasses,” says Todd Katzner, peering over his lab manager’s shoulder as she slices a bit of flesh from a dead pigeon lying on a steel lab table. Many of the specimens that arrive at this facility in Boise, Idaho, are long dead, and the bodies smell, he says, like “nothing that you can easily describe, other than yuck.” A wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency dedicated to environmental science, Katzner watches as his lab manager roots around for the pigeon’s liver and then places a glossy maroon piece of it in a small plastic bag labeled with a biohazard symbol. The pigeon is a demonstration specimen, but samples, including flesh and liver, are ordinarily frozen, cataloged, and stored in freezers. The feathers get tucked in paper envelopes and organized in filing boxes; the rest of the carcass is discarded. When needed for research, the stored samples can be processed and sent to other labs that test for toxicants or conduct genetic analysis. Continued here |
'Nasty' Geometry Breaks a Decades-Old Tiling Conjecture
One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire plane without gaps or overlaps. And yet, "not a lot has been known until fairly recent times," said Alex Iosevich, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Continued here |
65 dank things on Amazon that are so freaking cheap
It’s always a little bit surprising when you find something that you actually love and it didn’t cost you a fortune. However, Amazon has made that a more frequent occurrence. It’s actually made it a little too easy to find cheap things that you want to keep forever and that’s why I’ve compiled these 65 ingenious products. There’s everything from skincare to tools to kitchen utensils. And instead of expecting your choice to break after a week of having it or another charge to pop up on your credit card, just add to your cart and enjoy them for all their affordable and high-quality glory. Continued here |
You need to watch the most experimental dinosaur movie on HBO Max ASAP
With director Joe Johnston replacing Steven Spielberg, the beloved franchise upped the ante on monsters... and little else. Nothing can touch Jurassic Park. Even Steven Spielberg swung and missed with his 1997 sequel The Lost World, fumbling the rare blessing of Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. There was no way a third film, sans Spielberg, could dazzle audiences like the first time they saw a roaming brontosaurus. But an attempt was made, and the result is as fascinating as it is baffling. Continued here |
ChatGPT could help students cheat — but it could also revolutionize education
ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has the ability to generate human-like text, making it capable of engaging in natural language conversations. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers, and it has already begun to be integrated into various industries. However, the implementation of ChatGPT in the field of higher education in the U.K. poses a number of challenges that must be carefully considered. If ChatGPT is used to grade assignments or exams, there is the possibility that it could be biased against certain groups of students. Continued here |
Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament
Lucy, when I die, I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes of Virginia Beach. Here I’ve come every summer for three and a half decades. Here you and Eleanor learned to swim in the ocean waves and bodysurf. Here your mother and I once walked hand in hand for miles and made love among warm sand dunes by starlight when we were young. We grew apart. Argued or kept silent. Your grandmother and grandfather died here. Until the end, they could hear the surf breathe and sigh as wind does through deciduous trees. Seagulls crying. I keep inhaling the healing salt air and tasting the salt of saltwater. After I leave this spindrift life, the Atlantic Ocean will continue. Children will keep chasing its waves as the surf withdraws. They will run from the waves as the surf comes thundering in. They play tag with infinity. Middle-aged couples will walk their black labs and golden retrievers on these sands that the surf pounds flat like a drunken fist pounding a smooth oak bar to underscore some obscure convoluted point that neither the fist nor the bartender can truly grasp. For the truth is far beyond our reach. The truth is that on the day I die a man will be flying a kite in the shape of a red Chinese dragon. It will fly so high he can barely see it. Baby spotted sharks with their leopard skin wash up dead on the shore, their gills clogged with sand after storms. Teenage boys keep hurling footballs back and forth as if their muscled bodies are metronomes for the music the ocean makes. Shy teenage girls will keep singing their pop songs, so full of unfulfilled desire, to the doo-wop, doo-wah of the surf. They will dye their hair pink or pale blue as cotton candy. All of it will continue as it always does, almost the same. When I die, families will still keep pitching their pastel-colored awnings, shade tents, and sun umbrellas like giant dahlias and make their nomad encampments on the sand. They will stay a week or two and then depart for more permanent shelters inland. Lucy, I like nothing better than walking with you for hours on the beach. First, north as far as Fort Story’s No Trespassing signs. Then south three miles from 81st Street toward the boardwalk and hotels. A boy holds a girl, whose long legs wrap around him. He carries her into the surf while she screams ecstatically as the cold waves buffet them. He staggers but does not fall. You are recovering from twenty-eight-hour shifts during surgical rotation at medical school. You tell me that your sole patient yesterday had cancer. It has metastasized to lungs, kidney, spleen, spine, brain. “It is inoperable,” you say. “There’s nothing I can do, except make her comfortable.” You mean more oxycontin, then morphine. Yard-high letters in the sand spell STEPH HEARTS DOLLY. All our thousands of naked footprints crisscross the sand. A sandcastle stands with terraces, towers, winding staircases, a moat, and the most delicate of arches over the moat. Nothing is all the more beautiful because it is fragile. The tide is either coming in or going out. I don’t know which. With its bent, outstretched wings, a lone brown pelican dive-bombs the ocean, skims low, only a few inches above the waves, looking for fish. Continued here |
A Debut Novel That’s Not to Be Missed
Clint Smith’s culture picks include Fatimah Asghar’s first book of fiction and a sad song by Boyz II Men. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here |
'SNL' Is Excelling in One Particular Way
The defining quality of Saturday Night Live throughout its staggering 48 years on the air has been its live factor. Where other sketch or variety shows have had the benefit of post-production—namely planning and polish—SNL’s spirit has most often emerged under the pressure of live television. You see it in the little things, like unexpected wardrobe gaffes and uncontrollable laughter; like when the actors in a Disney World–themed “Debbie Downer” sketch labored to deliver their lines in the face of her outrageous observations. Yet this season, the live sketches are where SNL has struggled most for a spate of reasons: underdeveloped premises, writing that misses the mark, a lack of recurring characters outside of the “Weekend Update” desk, and a relatively new cast still learning to work together. The show’s pretaped segments have shouldered a lot of the heavy lifting, delivering consistently notable comedy and commentary. Last night, SNL’s post-production team—which recently authorized a strike after contract negotiations with its newly formed union stalled—assembled two of the strongest sketches. An announcement from Southwest Airlines sarcastically apologized for canceling more than 16,000 flights during the busy holiday travel season, and a State Farm commercial pursued a delightful twist featuring the fictional company rep Jake from State Farm. These sketches were so fully developed that they highlighted the ways this season’s live sketches have steadily fallen short of that goal line. Continued here |
The Ambidextrous Organization
This mental balancing act is one of the toughest of all managerial challenges—it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities—and it’s no surprise that few companies do it well. But as every businessperson knows, there are companies that do. What’s their secret? Continued here
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