Delivery app Hugo crushed Uber in El Salvador. So why is it shutting down?

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Delivery app Hugo crushed Uber in El Salvador. So why is it shutting down? From the moment it launched in 2017, Hugo, a last-mile delivery service that offered users everything from food and cash delivery to concert ticket collections, went toe-to-toe against Uber Eats and other global delivery giants. For a while, the Salvadoran contender came out on top. Then, on January 4, Hugo’s founders announced in a statement that the company would be shutting down on January 10. Rest of World visited Hugo’s offices in San Salvador on the startup’s final day of operation, and spoke to three delivery drivers, two corporate employees, and the company’s founder, Alejandro Argumedo. All of them agreed it was an emotional farewell, and a profound change for the last-mile delivery scene in El Salvador. Yet, while executives and many corporate employees are looking forward to cashing in or moving on to PedidosYa, the company that acquired the startup’s operations, Hugo’s delivery workers say they are the ones paying for the brunt of this change. Continued here

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Holding Onto Your Marketing Budget in a Downturn Most marketers know that when the economy turns, their budget at risk. So with today’s economic uncertainty, volatile markets, inflation, and more, what should marketers be doing now? Based on her experience in media and marketing through different economic cycles, the author offers six actions for CMOs to consider as we face a potential downturn: 1) Build a tight relationship with your CFO; 2) Zero out inefficient spend and ways of working; 3) Embrace speed and agility; 4) Stand out by staying in the market; 5) Make decisions in the context of your sector’s dynamics; and 6) Continue to drive forward digital transformation powered by data. Continued here

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Taiwan goes all in on crypto, despite the global crash The same day that disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, Taipei’s mayor-elect, Chiang Wan-an, stepped onto a stage in front of a packed auditorium to extol the bright future that blockchain technology would bring to Taiwan.  Chiang’s speech was part of Taipei Blockchain Week, which took place last month in a movie theater on the upper floors of a luxury mall, with views of the iconic Taipei 101 building. There, attendees heard Taiwan’s pitch to a shaken crypto community: The island nation should be Asia’s next crypto hub. Continued here

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A Sustainable Economy Depends on Sustainable Materials At a family gathering in August, I gave a brief tribute to my mother on the occasion of her 90th birthday. As the guests sipped their coffee in the warm summer air, I ticked off a dozen or so pieces of wisdom that she has imparted to her family over the decades. One insight that I credited to her was an aversion to waste. In our household, items such as clothes and toys would have multiple lives before being thrown out, and leftover food would be transformed into tomorrow’s lunch. In other words, my mother was an early advocate of the circular economy, in which materials and products have multiple iterations, and the waste of one process loops back and becomes the input for another. For people of her generation, these are commonly held values. But younger generations have largely strayed from these ideas, opting instead to produce and consume more and more. Some of the waste is recycled, but that only goes so far towards addressing the problem that the planet has limited resources to offer. Continued here

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Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. Continued here

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You Need an Innovation Strategy Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities. Continued here

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Meta sues "scraping-for-hire" service that sells user data to law enforcement Meta said it’s suing “scraping-for-hire” service Voyager Labs for allegedly using fake accounts, proprietary software, and a sprawling network of IP addresses to surreptitiously collect massive amounts of personal data from users of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Continued here

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Amid China's massive COVID wave, 42% of people on one flight tested positive Although China has largely abandoned COVID-19 case reporting, evidence of its massive wave of infection readily shows up in airports outside its borders. Continued here

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Google to SCOTUS: Liability for promoting terrorist videos will ruin the Internet For years, YouTube has been accused of enabling terrorist recruitment. This allegedly happens when a user clicks on a terrorist video hosted on the platform, then spirals down a rabbit hole of extremist content automatically queued “up next” through YouTube’s recommendation engine. In 2016, the family of Nohemi Gonzalez—who was killed in a 2015 Paris terrorist attack after extremists allegedly relied on YouTube for recruitment—sued YouTube owner Google, forcing courts to consider YouTube’s alleged role in aiding and abetting terrorists. Google has been defending YouTube ever since. Then, last year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Continued here

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Ars is reviewing HBO's The Last of Us series While video game adaptations into linear media have a bit of a hit-and-miss history at this point, the prestige TV treatment of this post-apocalyptic thriller is getting plenty of early buzz. That's probably thanks in no small part to the involvement of the game's creative director Neil Druckmann, who serves as executive producer and director for the TV series. Continued here

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Best Buy offers free shipping for all members, but cuts Totaltech benefits Big changes are afoot in electronics seller Best Buy's member and customer loyalty program as the company aims to generate more revenue and compete with Amazon, Best Buy announced via emails to customers this week. Continued here

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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments. Continued here

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Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong. Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent. Continued here

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A Refresher on Statistical Significance When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand. Continued here

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Why Online Shoppers Aren’t Falling for Exploding Deals Time-limited sales are a marketing staple in retail stores, but those same scarcity tactics don’t work online to move products and increase profits. Wharton marketing professor Cait Lamberton explains why. Wharton’s Cait Lamberton speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about why online consumers resist time scarcity promotions. Continued here

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The Case for ‘Kraken’ A new subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly taking over in the U.S.—the most transmissible that has ever been detected. It’s called XBB.1.5, in reference to its status as a hybrid of two prior strains of Omicron, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. It’s also called “Kraken.” Not by everyone, though. The nickname Kraken was ginned up by an informal group of scientists on Twitter and has caught on at some—but only some—major news outlets. As one evolutionary virologist told The Atlantic earlier this week, the name—a reference to the folkloric sea monster—“seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people” and serves no substantive purpose for communicating science. Continued here

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What Is Disruptive Innovation? For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. Continued here

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Research Summaries Written by AI Fool Scientists Scientists cannot always differentiate between research abstracts generated by the AI ChatGPT and those written by humans An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. Continued here

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The Discipline of Innovation In the hypercompetition for breakthrough solutions, managers worry too much about characteristics and personality—“Am I smart enough? Do I have the right temperament?”—and not enough about process. A commitment to the systematic search for imaginative and useful ideas is what successful entrepreneurs share—not some special genius or trait. What’s more, entrepreneurship can occur in a business of any size or age because, at heart, it has to do with a certain kind of activity: innovation, the disciplined effort to improve a business’s potential. Continued here

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Research: Adding Women to the C-Suite Changes How Companies Think It’s well known that firms with greater gender diversity among senior leadership perform better. But what’s less clear is why exactly that is. What are the specific mechanisms that drive the positive business outcomes associated with increasing the number of women in the C-suite? In this piece, the authors share new research that explores exactly how the addition of female executives shifts companies’ strategic approach to innovation. Based on an analysis of more than 150 companies, the authors find that after women join the top management team, firms become more open to change and less open to risk, and they tend to shift from an M&A-focused strategy to more investment into internal R&D. In other words, when women join the C-suite, they don’t just bring new perspectives — they actually shift how the C-suite thinks about innovation, ultimately enabling these firms to consider a wider variety of strategies for creating value. Continued here

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Startups, It's Time to Think Like Camels -- Not Unicorns Covid-19 and the global recession it has caused have us all girding for a long period of extremely challenging conditions in the global market. This situation is uncharted waters for the traditional Silicon Valley startup model, which is geared toward fast growth and creating “unicorns.” Instead of the unicorn, the camel is the more fitting mascot. Camels can survive for long periods in extremely adverse conditions. Startup camel enterprises offer businesses in all industries and sectors valuable lessons on how to survive and grow in adverse conditions. They do this with three strategies in mind: they execute balanced growth; they take a long-term outlook; and they weave diversification into the business model. Continued here

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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Continued here

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Gene Drives Could Fight Malaria and Other Global Killers but Might Have Unintended Consequences A new technology could wipe out whole species. Is it a magic bullet or a genetic atom bomb? Every year more than 600,000 people die from mosquito-transmitted malaria, most of them children under age five. Some insects that are disease vectors, such as mosquitoes, are currently expanding their range around the world, bringing new threats. Genetic engineering can fix this by permanently altering insect genes through what is known as a gene drive. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Arabian Oryx, Siberian Tigers, Flying Squid Dogsledding in the dark in Svalbard, a trout-catching contest in South Korea, lava in Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, tornado damage in Alabama, heavy rain and floods in California, Orthodox Christmas celebrations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an invasion of Brazil’s Congress by pro-Bolsonaro protesters in Brasilia, and much more Cashmere goats graze on foliage as they wander through brush above the beach in Bournemouth, England, on January 9, 2023. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council began a goat-grazing scheme in 2020 on the East Cliff, overlooking Bournemouth beach. The aim is to encourage British feral goats to manage vegetation along the cliff tops naturally. Grazing by livestock is seen as the only long-term and viable solution for cliff management. # Continued here

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The One Number You Need to Grow This finding is based on two years of research in which a variety of survey questions were tested by linking the responses with actual customer behavior—purchasing patterns and referrals—and ultimately with company growth. Surprisingly, the most effective question wasn’t about customer satisfaction or even loyalty per se. In most of the industries studied, the percentage of customers enthusiastic enough about a company to refer it to a friend or colleague directly correlated with growth rates among competitors. Continued here S59 Amid widespread backlash, D&D maker scales back "open" license changes For instance, WotC now says directly that any content already released under the previous version of the OGL will "remain unaffected" by the update. That contradicts language in a leaked draft of the license update suggesting that the earlier version of the OGL "is no longer an authorized license agreement." Continued here S13 The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. Continued here S55 How the ancient Greeks viewed pederasty and homosexuality As the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in his book The History of Sexuality, the things we consider acceptable and unacceptable are dictated by our cultures and, as such, are subject to change. Behavior that is tolerated in one part of the world might be completely inexcusable in another place or time period, and this is especially true when it comes to sex. For a good example, look no further than ancient Greece. The way that Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries conceived of human sexuality was fundamentally different from the way we do today. Hellenistic scholars doubt the Greeks would have been able to understand the modern distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relationships. In classical antiquity, people didn’t care if you were attracted to men or women; what mattered was whether you were the dominant (active) or submissive (passive) partner in the bedroom. Continued here S42 How Data Analytics Can Help Deliver Social Good The second of this year’s Beyond Business panels explored how data science innovations are bringing solutions to previously intractable social problems. Innovations in data science are finding uses beyond business settings to bring effective solutions to pressing social problems. In one novel exercise, analysis of data on sex trafficking provided insights on directing preventive and remedial resources to poorer areas from where victims are trapped, instead of an earlier focus on richer, urban areas where they are sold. In another instance, machine learning tools helped the Greek government to identify incoming COVID-19-infected travelers at nearly double the volume that conventional random tests would have achieved, thereby reducing the spread of the virus within its country. Analytics can also correct long-held misperceptions such as the role of media in shaping public opinion: TV broadcasts are far more pernicious than social media in peddling biased reports, another study using analytics found. Continued here S63 Collector discovered Isaac Newton's lost personal copy of Opticks David DiLaura, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, was working on his comprehensive bibliography listing every significant scientific volume on optics when he made an unexpected discovery. The copy of Isaac Newton's seminal treatise Opticks that he had purchased some 20 years before turned out to be from Newton's own personal library, believed lost for many decades. The book will go up for sale at the Rare Books San Francisco Fair, February 3–5, 2023, with a price of $375,000. Continued here S54 Thicker fluids appear to encourage cancer cell metastasis Cell migration, or how cells move in the body, is essential to both normal body function and disease progression. Cell movement is what allows body parts to grow in the right place during early development, wounds to heal and tumors to become metastatic. Over the last century, how researchers understood cell migration was limited to the effects of biochemical signals, or chemotaxis, that direct a cell to move from one place to another. For example, a type of immune cell called a neutrophil migrates toward areas in the body that have a higher concentration of a protein called IL-8, which increases during infection. Continued here S33 Pakistan's lost city of 40,000 people A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself. I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world's earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures. Continued here S61 New Sony Walkman music players feature stunning good looks, Android 12 Sony has a pair of new Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Yes, that's right, Walkmans, Sony's legendary music player brand from the 1980s. Apple may have given up on the idea of a smartphone-adjacent music player when it killed the iPod Touch line recently, but Sony still makes Android-powered Walkmans and has for a while. The first was in 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which looked like Sony just stripped the modem out of an Xperia phone and shoved it onto the market as a music player. Since then, Sony has made designs with more purpose-built hardware, and today there are a whole series of Android-powered Walkman music players out there. Sadly these new ones seem to only be for sale in Japan, the UK, and Europe, for now. Continued here S18 Why Design Thinking Works While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity. Continued here S34 Autism: Understanding my childhood habits No one knew I was autistic as a child but, looking back, there were a number of sensory clues. Apart from a tendency to repetitively stroke soft fabrics or run grains of sand through my fingers, I also found swirling and gentle rocking mesmerisingly soothing. When I was eventually diagnosed with autism much later in life – at the age of 60 – it gave me a new understanding of how and why I behave the way I do. That includes certain childhood behaviours, from fabric-stroking to the way I played with toys and insisted on specific foods. But it also raised questions, such as what might these preferences reveal about how children with autism experience the world? And how could we use this understanding to help children fulfil their potential, form friendships, and enjoy life? Continued here S41 Exxon's Own Models Predicted Global Warming - It Ignored Them Scientists working for the oil giant Exxon in the 1970s and 1980s estimated temperature increases with remarkable accuracy. Those findings could now be used as evidence in climate litigation It’s been seven years since journalists first revealed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s decadeslong efforts to undermine the scientific certainty around climate change, despite knowing how serious a problem it was. Continued here S35 Why some people can't tell left from right When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient's bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column. Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These "never events" – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right. Continued here S58 LG issues recall of 52,000 TVs due to 86-inchers' "serious tip-over" hazards LG Electronics (LGE) issued a recall of four models of its 86-inch 4K TVs on Thursday due to tip-over concerns. The recall affects 52,000 TVs sold between March and September 2022 with the model numbers 86NANO75UQA, 86UQ7070ZUD, 86UQ7590PUD, and 86NANO75UQA. Continued here S44 The U.S. Economy Is Doing Just Fine -- For Now Wharton's Iwan Barankay isn’t too worried about the possibility of a recession in America. Inflation, however, is still a threat. Wharton’s Iwan Barankay speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about how the economy is in better shape than many may assume. Continued here S31 Aligning Your Philanthropic Operating Model with Your Goals Philanthropies — be it private foundations, corporate and family funders, LLC’s, or other vehicles for giving — often struggle with the same set of fundamental questions around how to best leverage resources for greater impact. Operating Archetypes, developed by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors along with members of the Theory of the Foundation Learning Collaborative, aims to be a new framework for helping funders understand both who they are and what kind of impact they aspire to have. Each of the eight archetypes is based on a series of core attributes — such as value proposition, capabilities, equity, and audience. Different archetypes may need very different skills, capabilities, and activities. Using this framework, funders can analyze and reflect on how to align their resources and their decision making to create more effective and equitable philanthropy. Continued here S56 Here's what being filthy rich in Europe looked like in 1000 BC, 1 AD, and 1000 AD To ask what it was like to be rich in the past is about more than comparing the lifestyles of modern-day billionaires like Elon Musk to Mansa Musa or Marcus Licinius Crassus. When you study the history personal wealth, you are also learning about the history of income inequality, and the economic developments that allowed these upper-class individuals to build their private fortunes. According to the historian Peter V. Turchin, who relies on mathematical modeling to make sense of the societies past and present, those developments turn out to be cyclical rather than linear, with patterns in the global financial system repeating themselves across centuries. In other words, Musa and Musk may have more in common than you’d think. Continued here S60 Musk on trial for "funding secured" tweet--experts predict he's going to lose Elon Musk is headed to trial next week over his infamous tweet claiming he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. A 10-day civil trial with jury selection scheduled for Tuesday, January 17, is set to begin in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Continued here S28 7 Benefits You Should Offer Your Employees in 2023 Here are some of the perks your workers might expect to receive this year and beyond. Continued here S46 In the Fight Against Scams, 'Cyber Ambassadors' Enter the Chat Preetika, a 15-year-old student from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, has stopped playing her favorite mobile game, Free Fire, because of what can happen when she does.  In October, while she was tapping on her smartphone playing this game after school, a text message popped up asking her to share bank information in order to purchase more "diamonds" on the app. The diamonds are used to buy add-ons within the game, such as weapons, skins, and more. Unaware that this could be a potential scam, Preetika clicked on the link, shared her mother's bank details—then realized that 10,000 rupees ($120) were instantly debited from the account. (WIRED is using only the first names of the minors quoted in this story to protect their privacy.)  Continued here S21 A Beginner's Guide to Socially Responsible Investing If you’re new to investing and interested in putting your money into causes you care about, socially responsible investing (SRI) may be a good option. Over the past few years, a heightened public focus on issues like the climate crisis and environmental sustainability has fueled its popularity — especially with younger investors. Even so, it’s not always easy to tell which publicly traded stocks and funds truly align with your values as an investor. Here’s how to get started. Continued here S50 The Key to California's Survival Is Hidden Underground Water is urban planners' nemesis. Because the built environment is so impervious to liquid, thanks to all that asphalt, concrete, and brick, water accumulates instead of seeping into the ground. That's how you get the extreme flooding that has plagued California for weeks, so far killing 19 people and causing perhaps $30 billion in damages. Traditionally, engineers have treated stormwater as a nuisance, building out complex infrastructure like drains and canals to funnel the deluge to rivers or oceans before it has a chance to puddle. But in California and elsewhere, climate change is forcing a shift in that strategy. As the world warms, more water evaporates from land into the atmosphere, which itself can hold more water as it gets hotter. Storms in the Golden State will come less frequently, yet dump more water faster when they arrive. Stormwater drainage systems just can't get the water away fast enough. Continued here S45 Clementine Jacoby: How bad data traps people in the US justice system Right now, hundreds of thousands of people are "stuck" in the US criminal justice system. They've completed all of their requirements for release, but nobody knows it because the system is run on old databases that don't talk to each other. TED Fellow Clementine Jacoby describes how we can fix it -- bringing thousands of people home, reducing costs and improving public safety along the way. Continued here S32 A new mission to see Titanic Four-hundred miles from St Johns, Newfoundland, in the choppy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, a large industrial vessel swayed from side to side. Onboard, Stockton Rush expressed a vision for the future: "There will be a time when people will go to space for less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing is going to happen going under water." Continued here S23 Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Our Favorite Reads I recently had a small get-together with friends, all of us women. At some point in the evening, we started talking about how we were feeling about our respective professional journeys. One friend, who had just gotten into a competitive PhD program, said she felt like her acceptance was luck. Another spoke about being a first-time manager. She was unsure if she was qualified for the job. A third spoke about how scared she was to launch her new career as a freelancer. Despite her years of experience and study, she didn’t know if she’d be any good. Continued here S27 4 Tactics to Learn From Small-Business Owners to Tackle 2023 Challenges New data finds that entrepreneurs feel primed for growth despite a less-than-stellar economy. Continued here S57 39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America This article was first published on Big Think in July 2018. It was updated in January 2023. In 1954, early on in the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the Committee for State Security, more commonly known in the West as the KGB. The group came to oversee the Soviet Union’s internal security, secret police, and domestic and foreign intelligence operations. Continued here S48 Lina Khan's Plan to Liberate US Workers Well before she became chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan had her eye on the practice of employers banning workers from job-hopping to a competitor. She is no fan of noncompete clauses. Those restrictions are commonly forced on employees, sometimes without informing them. By preventing workers from taking on new, presumably higher-paid jobs, they can depress wages and opportunities for advancement. And though conservatives might believe that the FTC should keep its nose out of stuff that doesn't involve antitrust or consumer harm, one speaker in a 2020 FTC workshop about the issue noted that the very name of the problem seemed to call for action from the agency charged with ending practices that stifle competition: Noncompetes. So it was not exactly a shock last week when Khan announced a proposed rule that would ban employers from issuing noncompete restrictions. It was the kind of presumptuous move that people expect from Khan, who came to the post as an unabashed skeptic of the bromides of big business. Still, it's breathtaking how many US workers would be liberated by this rule. "One in five," she says in a Zoom call we had this week. "And that's a conservative estimate." She's even got an estimate of how much those clauses cost workers: $300 billion every year. Continued here S52 There could be life on hot, volcanic Io, Jupiter's "pizza moon" NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been studying Jupiter and its large inner moons up close for the past six and a half years, is currently humanity’s most distant planetary orbiter. The giant planet and its stormy atmosphere were initially Juno’s main focus, but in the mission’s current extended phase, close fly-bys of the Jovian satellites are on the menu as well. While Europa and Ganymede (the Solar System’s largest moon) have typically been of greater interest to astrobiologists due to their subsurface oceans, another Jovian satellite — hot, volcanic Io — has largely been dismissed as a possible abode for life now or in the past. That may be about to change, however. Juno recently passed by Io at a distance of 80,000 km, and over the course of this coming year will get much closer, within 1,500 km. Continued here S51 Ask Ethan: How can we comprehend the size of the Universe? Here on Earth, human beings exist on the scale of meters, with the average human being a little less than two meters in height. Our typical experiences might take us three or four orders of magnitude away from that scale: down to millimeter scales or a little bit smaller, and up to scales of several kilometers. Beyond that, however, we have to stop thinking of the world in scales that we experience and get very abstract; it’s simply beyond what we’re familiar with on a day-to-day basis, and beyond what our senses are capable of perceiving and making sense of. But what about the entire Universe? Is there any way, given our limitations as humans, to make sense of such impressive scales? That’s what Scott Brenner wants to know, writing in to ask: Continued here S53 Want to live a happy life? Focus on your relationships How can you live a happy life? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer because there are so many factors to account for. Is a happy life built on your career and earnings? Your standing within your community? Does it come from a photo album filled with memories of holidays and vacations? Is it predicated on your health and wellness or based on a genetic predisposition toward being happiness regardless of the circumstances? In some ways, the answer is yes to all of these, as each contributes to how you approach life and your appraisal of it. You can’t ignore any one, nor do any offer a universal panacea for the others. Continued here S26 3 Tips to Weather Turbulence in Your Business and Career Change your mindset to overcome obstacles. Continued here S24 Twitter's Latest 'Feature' Is How You Know Elon Musk Is in Over His Head. It's the Cautionary Tale Every Business Needs to Hear Musk is making changes that are actively hostile to Twitter's users. Continued here S49 'Immer, Zlaz' Reveals the Private Life of a Sci-Fi Genius Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUH Slide: 1 / of 1.Caption: Caption: Roger Zelazny, with two of his children in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980.Buddy Mays/Alamy Continued here S29 Tulsa's Big Bet on Remote Workers More than 2,000 people have moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma because of Tulsa Remote, a program that pays remote workers $10,000 to move. And two new studies suggest the program is working: the participants are experiencing a higher standard of living due to the city’s low housing costs, and are engaged in the community. But there are challenges for other cities looking to copy the model. For one thing, the cities with the most remote work are the same big “superstar” cities that dominated the pre-pandemic economy. Continued here S25 Warren Buffett's time-tested tip will change your life by helping you make better decisions Recency bias is a mental flaw that can cloud your thinking. Continued here S30 Is It Time to Shake Up Your WFH Routine? Just because your work-from-home routine isn’t terrible, doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better. In this piece, the author outlines three reasons why you might want to make a change: 1) You’re feeling bored with the same old, same old. If you’re finding yourself in the WFH doldrums and it’s impacting your motivation and productivity, it’s time to switch things up. 2) There’s been a shift in your household routines. Maybe your spouse has gone back to the office, or your kids have changed schools so the pick-up and drop-off times are different. These changes in your environment matter and mean you need to think carefully about all the parts of your day. 3) You want to establish healthier habits. For some the shift to work-from-home bumped up their self-care because they repurposed their commute time to enjoy more sleep in the morning or to fit in some evening walks. But for others not going into the office took a toll on their healthy habits. If this sounds a bit like you, try to tweak your schedule to better support your health needs. Small tweaks to your routine can make a big impact and could give you a fresh approach to the new year. Continued here S47 Why the Search for Life in Space Starts With Ancient Earth Astronomers have already used the new James Webb Space Telescope to reveal some marvels of the universe, including possible glimpses of the first galaxies. But Amber Young is looking forward to the next generation of space telescopes. She hopes they’ll identify the worlds in our cosmic neighborhood most likely to host aliens—at least of the microbial variety. Young and her colleagues have formulated a decision tree—basically a flowchart—that researchers can use to hunt for particular sets of features on other planets, to prioritize those with the most promising biosignatures, or potential signs of life. And they’re learning from Earth’s history how to do it.  Continued here S22 So, You Got Ghosted -- at Work Whether it’s a recruiter who has gone silent after extending a job offer or a connection on LinkedIn who stops responding, we’re seeing ghosting manifest in a number of ways in the workplace. Instances of sudden silence can easily shatter your confidence and leave you feeling confused and rejected. You’re left retracing your steps to see where you went wrong, or worse, in limbo, wondering if it’s appropriate to follow up. There are a few things you can do if you’ve been ghosted. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2025 (7) ►  March (5) ►  January (2) ►  2024 (4) ►  December (4) ▼  2023 (542) ►  December (2) ►  November (33) ►  October (27) ►  September (37) ►  August (45) ►  July (30) ►  June (73) ►  May (3) ►  April (33) ►  March (17) ►  February (84) ▼  January (158) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... January 31, 2023 - Strike action over Macron’s p... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... January 31, 2023 - Australia and France agree arms... Does the Best Workout Exist? Exercise Scientists A... 25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'M... This Overlooked Scientist Helped Save Washington, ... One Third of the Amazon Has Been Degraded by Human... January 29, 2023 - France produced 2 of the world'... A ChatGPT Bot Interviews a ChatGPT Bot and Demonst... January 28, 2023 - Thierry Mugler’s Show Brings ... 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