How Tech Companies Can Still Grow During a Time of Layoffs Tech companies with cooler heads can prevail by valuing quality offerings, marketing, and talent retention. Continued here |
Dolphins and Humans Work Together to Catch Fish in Brazil
The partnership has endured for some 150 years, and it benefits both species, a new study finds In southeastern Brazil, local fishers wade into murky waters in search of migrating mullet. On their own, it would be tricky to find the silvery fish. But the humans get help from an unusual ally: wild bottlenose dolphins. Continued here |
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The (lost found) boy man bunny | Psyche Films
It’s possible that you’ve come across Pablo Woodward before on the streets of England, where he performs as the Disco Bunny – a one-man roving dance party dressed in flamboyant raver attire with a mission to entertain and unite passersby. Or more likely you’ve seen him in a viral video – viewed millions of times – that shows him and an elderly woman in Brighton letting loose to Twist and Shout during one of his ecstatic performances. More than a way to earn clicks, cash or even just pass time on the weekends, Woodward considers his Disco Bunny persona part of a spiritual rebirth. This new chapter has included embracing a nomadic existence, keeping just a few possessions in his storage unit (or ‘Bunny Cave’, as he calls it), and leaving the trappings of his old, more conventional, life behind. Daniel Ifans’s film The (Lost Found) Boy Man Bunny explores the person behind the meme, providing an intimate account of Woodward’s motivations for his unconventional lifestyle and street persona. Digging beneath the glittery surface, the UK filmmaker finds his subject searching to make sense of his place in the world and, especially, of what makes him happy. Standing before a backdrop of colourful lights, speakers and his few other belongings in the Bunny Cave, Woodward retraces the events that led him down such an atypical path. Born in Brazil, he spent his early childhood in an orphanage – an existence he remembers as poor but happy. When he was adopted by parents in the UK, his life became more privileged but also much more complicated. By 18, he was homeless by choice for the first time, sleeping on the streets of London in search of the joyful simplicity of his early years. Continued here |
What Should Congress Be?
Former Representative Justin Amash’s critique of the House illuminates its failures to live up to democratic ideals––and casts the fight over its rules in a new light. Representative Kevin McCarthy’s protracted fight to become speaker of the House last month raised a big, seldom-discussed question about American democracy: What sort of institution should the House of Representatives be? Should a partisan speaker control if or when a bill or amendment is introduced to advance the program of the coalition that vested the speaker with power? Should power reside in committee chairs, perhaps assigned by seniority, who develop subject-area expertise and command commensurate deference from their colleagues? Or should all 435 voting members (and thus their constituents) be on equal footing, regardless of party or seniority, such that all can introduce bills or propose amendments that succeed or fail based only on whether a given proposal commands a majority? Continued here |
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How to Disagree with Someone More Powerful than You
How exactly do you voice dissent with your superior? And is it always worth it to do so? Communication experts say that while just agreeing feels easier, it’s not always the best decision to make. First, weigh the risk of pushback or a negative reaction from a boss against the risk of not speaking up. If you do decide to voice your opinion, there are some best practices to keep in mind. State your opinions as facts, avoiding using judgment words. In addition, ask permission to dissent instead of offering an unsolicited opinion. Keep in mind that the final decision is still in the hands of your boss, but being honest and respectful will show them that they have more options. Continued here |
Montessori: The world's most influential school?
When considering the lives of the rich and famous, it is always tempting to look for the secrets of their successes. So here's a brain teaser: what do the cook Julia Child, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the singer Taylor Swift, and Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin all have in common? The answer is that they all attended Montessori schools as young children. In the US, the schools' influence in the art and tech world has long been noted. But the reach of the educational method goes far beyond that. Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi was a fan, and described how children taught with it "felt no burden of learning as they learnt everything as they played". Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-Prize-winning poet, set up a network of Montessori schools to free children's creative self-expression. Continued here |
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What Is Up With the Weight-Loss Industry?
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. In “The Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution Is a Miracle—And a Menace,” my colleague Derek Thompson grappled with the rise of the drug Ozempic, the latest in a long line of much-hyped ways to lose weight and perhaps the most effective yet. My first encounter with the weight-loss industry, as a kid, was the cultural phenomenon of Jane Fonda’s VHS workout tapes. By the time I was in college, the weight-loss industry was as strong as ever––but so was a countervailing cultural critique of unrealistic beauty standards. Later, public-health concerns about obesity were ascendant. What are your thoughts, cultural memories, or personal experiences about weight gain, the weight-loss industry, diet, exercise, beauty standards, diabetes, medical treatments for obesity, or anything related? Continued here |
Psychedelics Open Your Brain. You Might Not Like What Falls In.
If you’ve ever been to London, you know that navigating its wobbly grid, riddled with curves and dead-end streets, requires impressive spatial memory. Driving around London is so demanding, in fact, that in 2006 researchers found that it was linked with changes in the brains of the city’s cab drivers: Compared with Londoners who drove fixed routes, cabbies had a larger volume of gray matter in the hippocampus, a brain region crucial to forming spatial memory. The longer the cab driver’s tenure, the greater the effect. The study is a particularly evocative demonstration of neuroplasticity: the human brain’s innate ability to change in response to environmental input (in this case, the spatially demanding task of driving a cab all over London). That hard-won neuroplasticity required years of mental and physical practice. Wouldn’t it be nice to get the same effects without so much work? Continued here |
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'Knock at the Cabin' and the Terror of Raising Children
M. Night Shyamalan understands how to make a ludicrous horror concept work: Add in a healthy dose of tenderness. M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking career has taken many wild and woolly turns over 30-plus years, but recently, he seems to have struck on a powerful, understated plot formula: What if you went on a vacation with your children and something terrible happened? In his 2021 hit, Old, a family gets stuck on a secret beach that ages them rapidly. His new follow-up, Knock at the Cabin, proposes another Twilight Zone–esque conundrum to a family trying to enjoy a weekend away. Simply put, the world is ending, and the only way to stop it is by killing someone they love. Continued here |
Beware the Transition from an Iconic CEO
Disney, Starbucks, P&G, Microsoft, GE, Ford, Twitter, Dell, Nike, and scores of other marquee companies in their prime have stumbled painfully in CEO transitions. And we may see more stumbles to come: Almost a quarter of Fortune 200 companies are led by CEOs who’ve been in place for a decade or longer. What makes succession failures especially unfortunate is that they are largely self-imposed wounds. The authors, who have nearly three decades advising more than 1,000 companies on CEO succession, discuss the mindsets that lead boards down the wrong path, and offer seven strategies to ensure a healthy succession pipeline. Continued here |
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My Printer Is Extorting Me
The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel, even impressive ways, ultimately causing the purchase to haunt you like a malevolent spirit. So rich is the history of printer dysfunction that its foibles became a cliché in the early days of personal computing. After years of holding out, my family finally succumbed to a pandemic inkjet purchase. (Like many, we were doing a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I girded my loins for the agony of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded utterance “Driver not found.” What I did not expect, however, was for my printer to shake me down like a loan shark. Continued here |
Do This 1 Thing to Instantly Become a Better Leader Unlock the profound power of gratitude. Continued here |
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Why Some People Get Burned Out and Others Don't
Stress and burnout are not the same thing. And while we know that stress often leads to burnout, it’s possible to handle the onslaught of long hours, high pressure, and work crises in a way that safeguards you from the emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of confidence in one’s abilities that characterizes burnout. The key is tapping into your emotional intelligence. Continued here |
How to Be Smarter (and Safer!) with Your Marketing Dollars in 2023 Your instinct may be to pull back on marketing during a slower economy, but that's exactly the time you need to lean in. Here's how to make smarter choices to engage your customers--and keep business growing. Continued here |
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How the Property Brothers Get So Much Done Drew and Jonathan Scott, better known as the Property Brothers, test their collaboration skills while facing off for a game of Know Your Co. Continued here |
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What Causes Déjà Vu?
Does this all feel a little familiar? Called déjà vu, that sensation may be your brain correcting its own errors It’s an eerie feeling: You walk into a place you know you’ve never been before but are overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity—a memory you can’t quite reach. Has this all happened before? Continued here |
Not Every Atrocity Is About White Supremacy
On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim and perpetrators were all Black, leading to confusion and distress. The basketball star LeBron James tweeted, “WE ARE OUR OWN WORSE ENEMY!” This kind of self-directed criticism is familiar to anyone who has had their hair trimmed in a Black barbershop. What is novel today is the amount of anger and the specific form of critique that James’s tweet, for one prominent example, engendered. One of the more polite and reprintable responses: “i’d say white supremacy was our worse enemy but okay lebron.” White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept, denoting invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the invisible hand of all American social and political life. Continued here |
Size, Sex and Breed May Predict Dogs' Cancer Diagnosis
A study of more than 3,000 dogs finds that larger breeds, males and purebred animals tend to be diagnosed with cancer at a younger age Cancer is common in dogs. About one in four will develop cancer at some point during its lifetime—and that proportion rises to an estimate of nearly 50 percent after a dog passes its 10th birthday. A new analysis of thousands of dogs finds that traits such as size, breed and whether an animal has been fixed are associated with how soon our furry friends might get diagnosed with the disease. Continued here |
6 great philosophers and how they used their political power Even philosophers occasionally point out that members of their profession tend to discuss the world rather than change it. This doesn’t mean that every philosopher declines the opportunity to test their ideas in the political arena. Several famous thinkers entered government and tried, with more or less success, to implement their theories. Here we look at six political philosophers who held power — and what they did with it. The most important philosopher in Chinese history, Confucius is the founder of the philosophy of Confucianism. Many of his ideas are still prevalent in Chinese and East Asian culture today. His political philosophy centers on ideas of legitimacy, knowing your place in the social order, playing that part well, and the proper following of ritual. He was undoubtedly influenced by his time in office. Continued here |
Antibiotic-Resistant UTIs Are Common, and Other Infections May Soon Be Resistant, Too
Urinary tract infections are increasingly becoming resistant to first-line antibiotics, and this may be a warning for our ability to treat other microbial infections About half of women and more than one in 10 men will get a urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime, with many people experiencing recurrent UTIs. These common bacterial infections, which can lead to painful urination, have been easily treated and cured with antibiotics for decades. Continued here |
Nikki Haley Expected to Launch Presidential Bid in 2024, Challenging Trump The former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador knows a thing or two about small business--after all, her parents were once small-business owners. Continued here |
When You're Stuck in a Job You Can't Quit
What should you do when you’re stuck in the wrong job but can’t quit? Even if you can’t immediately escape your situation, there are simple ways to improve it. Here are four ways — through both thought and action — that you can alter how you feel about your job and make an imperfect situation work. Continued here |
How To Actively Learn From Customer Complaints When you're unsure how your business needs to improve, check in with your customer service department. Continued here |
Hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright's Designs Were Never Built. Here's What They Might Have Looked Like
So far, David Romero has digitally reconstructed over 20 of the famous architect’s unrealized projects Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 structures during his seven-decade career. The prolific American architect, known as one of the creators of the Prairie School, helped popularize a now-widespread style characterized by simplicity and harmony with nature. Continued here |
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How Black queer culture shaped history
Names like Bayard Rustin, Frances Thompson and William Dorsey Swann have been largely erased from US history, but they and other Black queer leaders played central roles in monumental movements like emancipation, civil rights and LGBTQ+ pride, among others. In this tribute to forgotten icons, queer culture historian and TED Fellow Channing Gerard Joseph shares their little-known stories, connecting the origins of drag in the 1880s to the present day and exploring the awesome power to choose how we define ourselves. Continued here |
Validating Product-Market Fit in the Real World
To test new products, most companies rely on creating “minimum viable products” and testing customer feedback, or conducting focus groups or marketing surveys. There’s another method companies should try: “heat-testing,” or testing consumer reaction to online advertisements. Heat-testing is revolutionary because it takes place in the real world. Unlike focus groups or surveys, which rely on what consumers say, people who click or like an ad are demonstrating actual behavior and interest, which can be a more powerful form of feedback. Continued here |
How Black Women Entrepreneurs Overcame the Odds A recent survey shows that Black women entrepreneurs find success despite lacking a leg up from capital. Continued here |
Marico's Chairman on Innovating Across Every Part of the Business
When the author launched what would become Marico as a division within his family’s business, Bombay Oil, it was with product innovation: Instead of selling edible oils in bulk to other businesses, it would sell in smaller, branded packages directly to consumers. Eventually the division became a separate entity, which is now one of India’s largest homegrown CPG companies. Its growth has depended on constant innovation—around not just products, packaging, and pricing but also supply chain, talent management, and business models. Over the past decade Marico has branched out into services with its Kaya skin-care spas, pioneered the use of premium hair oils, and added savory oats to Indian diets. Through the Marico Innovation Foundation, Mariwala also promotes innovative thinking outside the company, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs in their efforts to scale up new ideas. The key to doing that well, he says, is to be ever curious about customer needs, to create a flat hierarchy that rewards risk-taking, to learn from every failure, and to constantly prototype, experiment, refine, and retest. Continued here |
For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost
According to recent reports, women-led startups receive less than 3% of all VC investments. In response, many leaders have advocated for getting women more involved in venture financing, since studies have shown that female investors are more likely than their male counterparts to invest in female founders. However, the authors’ new research suggests that support from female investors may actually be a mixed blessing, because it can make it harder for female founders to raise additional rounds of financing. Through an analysis of more than 2,000 venture-backed startups, the authors found that women-led firms whose first round was raised exclusively from female VCs were two times less likely to raise a second round. This is because of an effect known as attribution bias: When people see that a female founder received funding from a male investor, they assume it’s because she is competent and her startup is strong. But if the same founder only has female investors, then people are more likely to assume that her success is due to her gender, rather than her competence. As such, the authors argue that while there are certainly benefits to raising capital from other women, female founders should consider the risks to their long-term success — and do what they can to ensure a more diverse cap table from the start. Continued here |
How to Preorder Samsung's Galaxy S23—and Which Model to Buy
Samsung has three new flagship smartphones to mark 2023—the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra. They're available for preorder right now and officially go on sale starting February 17. But should you upgrade? If you need a new phone, which Galaxy S23 model is best for you? We break down what's different between each model, what's new, and which one is right for you. We've also featured a few of the best Galaxy S23 promotions from Samsung and mobile carriers so you can get the most out of your purchase. Be sure to check out our Best Android Phones and Best Cheap Phones guides for more recommendations. If you're snagging last year's Galaxy S22 instead for cheap, well, we've got accessory recommendations as well.  Continued here |
5 Tips for Making a Good Impression -- Virtually
As millions of people around the world have recently moved from office to teleworking environments, due to social-distancing measures required by the Covid-19 crisis, many will be leading or joining virtual teams. In my research, I’ve identified what I call the “Big 5 E-communication Whammies” — behavioral changes associated with non-face-to-face interactions that can lead to negative consequences ranging from hurt feelings to lost jobs. In the current scenario, there is one I’d like to especially call out. Continued here |
Fake Pictures of People of Color Won't Fix AI Bias
Armed with a belief in technology's generative potential, a growing faction of researchers and companies aims to solve the problem of bias in AI by creating artificial images of people of color. Proponents argue that AI-powered generators can rectify the diversity gaps in existing image databases by supplementing them with synthetic images. Some researchers are using machine learning architectures to map existing photos of people onto new races in order to "balance the ethnic distribution" of datasets. Others, like Generated Media and Qoves Lab, are using similar technologies to create entirely new portraits for their image banks, "building … faces of every race and ethnicity," as Qoves Lab puts it, to ensure a "truly fair facial dataset." As they see it, these tools will resolve data biases by cheaply and efficiently producing diverse images on command. The issue that these technologists are looking to fix is a critical one. AIs are riddled with defects, unlocking phones for the wrong person because they can't tell Asian faces apart, falsely accusing people of crimes they did not commit, and mistaking darker-skinned people for gorillas. These spectacular failures aren't anomalies, but rather inevitable consequences of the data AIs are trained on, which for the most part skews heavily white and male—making these tools imprecise instruments for anyone who doesn't fit this narrow archetype. In theory, the solution is straightforward: We just need to cultivate more diverse training sets. Yet in practice, it's proven to be an incredibly labor-intensive task thanks to the scale of inputs such systems require, as well as the extent of the current omissions in data (research by IBM, for example, revealed that six out of eight prominent facial datasets were composed of over 80 percent lighter-skinned faces). That diverse datasets might be created without manual sourcing is, therefore, a tantalizing possibility. Continued here |
How Can I Make My Employees More Comfortable Figuring Things Out on Their Own? And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here |
Relatives abroad are driving Cuba's e-commerce boom Mara Karla Sánchez often feels compelled to send groceries to her mother and grandfather; they live in the Cuban capital of Havana and often struggle to find basic goods on the island. Sánchez, who has been living in Miami since 2015, uses services offered by Cuban e-commerce companies to deliver basic supplies to her family, a system she says is unreliable but necessary. “It’s always either a hassle, or the prices are too high, but I’m willing to pay so that my family doesn’t starve,” she told Rest of World. Despite some items often taking months to be delivered or being excessively overpriced — like $260 for a tiny leg of pork — she hasn’t stopped using the shopping platforms for the past two years. Continued here |
More Airports to Use Greener 'Glide' Approach to Landing
A growing number of U.S. airports are trying swoop landings rather than staircase descents, a method that saves fuel, cuts emissions and reduces noise Eleven more U.S. airports plan to adopt a new way of landing planes that reduces both emissions and noise — all by having incoming planes turn off their engines and glide down to the tarmac like a paraglider. Continued here |
Weird Supernova Remnant Blows Scientists' Minds
When dying stars explode as supernovae, they usually eject a chaotic web of dust and gas. But a new image of a supernova’s remains looks completely different — as though its central star sparked a cosmic fireworks display. It is the most unusual remnant that researchers have ever found, and could point to a rare type of supernova that astronomers have long struggled to explain. “I have worked on supernova remnants for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Fesen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who imaged the remnant late last year. He reported his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on 12 January and posted them in a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on the same day. Continued here |
Everything Samsung Announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2023
The pomp around smartphone launches is often deflated by one word: iterative. Too often, a shiny, just-released phone fails to add anything exciting to the list of features we saw in the previous models. If there is a crazy new trick, it's gimmicky; if there isn't, well, there's probably no need to upgrade, right? Like clockwork, Samsung has unveiled its next set of flagship smartphones: the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra. You won't find any gimmicks here, but to call these phones iterative would be an overstatement. These new Android phones—at a surface level—seem to have barely evolved beyond their predecessors. Continued here |
The Supreme Court Considers the Algorithm
When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered a lawsuit against Google in 2020, Judge Ronald M. Gould stated his view of the tech giant’s most significant asset bluntly: “So-called ‘neutral’ algorithms,” he wrote, can be “transformed into deadly missiles of destruction by ISIS.” According to Gould, it was time to challenge the boundaries of a little snippet of the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as Section 230, which protects online platforms from liability for the things their users post. The plaintiffs in this case, the family of a young woman who was killed during a 2015 Islamic State attack in Paris, alleged that Google had violated the Anti-terrorism Act by allowing YouTube’s recommendation system to promote terrorist content. The algorithms that amplified ISIS videos were a danger in and of themselves, they argued. Continued here |
How to know if you want to be a parent | Psyche Guides
Set aside everyone else’s preconceptions. Then try doing these counterintuitive exercises to understand your own desires is a marriage and family therapist, parenthood clarity mentor, and author who has been helping people resolve their parenthood indecision since 1991. She offers motherhood and fatherhood clarity courses based on the book she co-authored with Denise L Carlini, Motherhood – Is It For Me? Your Step-by-Step Guide to Clarity (2016). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Continued here |
Stoicism: How to turn your sadness into strength
It can be difficult to process sadness. People often try to numb it, avoid it, or deny that they’re even experiencing it, instead of better understanding and working through the emotion. The Stoics offer a more head-on approach. This school of philosophy is often falsely associated with the suppression of emotions. But it’s more accurate to say that the Stoics were interested in how people can respond virtuously to life’s trials and tragedies. The answer, according to general Stoic thought, is that we shouldn’t deny emotions or the things that make us feel pain or sadness, but rather strive to accept that which we cannot control and do our best to process our emotions in a way that puts us on a productive path forward. Continued here |
How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy
In order to realize AI’s giant potential, CMOs need to have a good grasp of the various kinds of applications available and how they may evolve. This article guides marketing executives through the current state of AI and presents a framework that will help them classify their existing projects and plan the effective rollout of future ones. It categorizes AI along two dimensions: intelligence level and whether it stands alone or is part of a broader platform. Simple stand-alone task-automation apps are a good place to start. But advanced, integrated apps that incorporate machine learning have the greatest potential to create value, so as firms build their capabilities, they should move toward those technologies. Continued here
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