Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian, Innovator, Micromanager

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Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian, Innovator, Micromanager After years as a stand-up performer, Jerry Seinfeld conquered 1990s television with his eponymous sitcom. Two decades later he’s again drawing viewers and accolades, this time for his inventive online talk show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee—even as a new generation discovers Seinfeld on streaming video. Continued here

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3 Ways To Give Your Company What It Needs in 2023 Work smarter, not harder. Continued here

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The Founder of the Biotechnology Company Trying to Bring Back the Dodo Looks for This One Thing in New Hires Colossal Bioscience's Ben Lamm on the top quality he wants to see in a new hire, interview tactics, and hallmarks of an interview gone south. Continued here

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Why Your PITA Customer Is Your Best Friend You can learn something from every customer, even the bad ones. Continued here

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Vaccine Makers Are Preparing for Bird Flu Although most experts say bird flu is not an immediate threat to humans, efforts are underway to produce vaccines for H5N1 or another potential pandemic virus Minks in Spain, seals in Scotland, sea lions and dolphins in South America: a number of mammal species have recently been found to be infected with H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza. Avian flu is not new; epidemiologists have been studying it for decades. But the detection of the virus in mammals has many concerned about the potential that it could spill over to humans and cause a larger outbreak. Continued here

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How to Find Your Customer’s 'Why' The real value of the Net Promoter Score isn't in the number. Continued here

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Retiring at 50 Is the Most Dangerous Decision You'll Ever Make There are pros and cons to retiring early--here's what you should think about. Continued here

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What Makes Health Care Workers Stay in Their Jobs? Health care organizations continue to struggle to stop the wave of resignations by caregivers of all types and to recruit people to fill vacancies. Yes, competitive pay and other support options are essential to recruiting caregivers, but organizational culture, including a commitment to excellence, is what makes them stay, according to data from Press Ganey. What does drive loyalty and resilience among caregivers? As is true in other industries during these difficult times, getting back to basics is crucial — and in health care that means focusing organizational culture on the noble cause of reducing patients’ suffering and then supporting caregivers in that work. Continued here

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The Mystery Vehicle at the Heart of Tesla's New Master Plan Nearly four hours into Tesla's marathon Investor Day, someone in the audience tried again to bring Elon Musk, the Tesla (and Twitter and SpaceX) CEO back to the present day. From a stage at the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, Musk had announced an ambitious "Master Plan 3" to save the world. For $10 trillion in manufacturing investment, Musk said, the world could move wholesale to a renewable electricity grid, powering electric cars, planes, and ships. "Earth can and will move to a sustainable energy economy, and will do so in your lifetime," Musk proclaimed. More details will be revealed in a forthcoming white paper, he said.  But the presentation was short on specifics on the one part of the electric transition that is in Tesla's gift: the next-generation vehicle it has been teasing for years, promising something that is more affordable, more efficient, and more efficiently built than anything in its current lineup. The vehicle, or group of vehicles, will be crucial to hitting Tesla's goal of selling 20 million vehicles in 2030; it sold 1.3 million in 2022. Continued here

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The New Science of Customer Emotions When a company connects with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 “emotional motivators” and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases. First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers—desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators. Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment. Third, companies need to make the organization’s commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth—not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm. Continued here

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What Ballet Taught Me About My Body Never before have humans lived such a disembodied existence. Many of us spend our days hunched over the computer, ignoring our body until our limbs go numb. As of 2011, only about 20 percent of Americans had physically active jobs, according to the journal PLOS One—down from half in 1960. Even when we work out, it tends to be compartmentalized: a YouTube yoga session between Zoom calls, a quick run and then back to the desk. Rather than reconnecting with our body, we try to optimize the brief time we’ve allotted to exercise, tracking our pace on Strava or mimicking a pixelated teacher we’ve never met. These bursts of activity barely cut into our screen time, let alone counteract the sedentary conditions of modern life. Women are especially prone to feeling detached from our bodies. We learn early on to see ourselves from the outside, to always think about how we appear. In a 2019 BuzzFeed essay called “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,” the Millennial writer Emmeline Clein described a trend she had noticed among popular female characters—on TV shows such as Fleabag, in the viral short story “Cat Person”—as well as among her own friends: They cope with the pain and indignity of modern womanhood, of Brazilian waxing and “certain types of sex” (the kind that a woman “does not want to be having”) by simply shutting down, sometimes with the help of benzodiazepines or booze. “Aspirationally dead inside feminism,” Clein called it. Continued here

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With peer group benchmarks, Apple undercuts third-party app analytics tools Apple has introduced a new way for developers for platforms like the iPhone to track their apps' performance. It's a new dashboard called peer group benchmarks that shows percentile data on how an app compares in certain metrics to other similar apps. Continued here

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How Writing Down Your Principles Can Help You Make Better Business Decisions My new book is a guide to more purposeful planning. Continued here

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Why 2023's Venus-Jupiter conjunction won't be bettered until 2039 Like clockwork, the planets dance in the night sky, passing one another in predictable, repeating orbits: a dance that’s been ongoing continuously for billions of years. Even despite the effects of General Relativity and the gravitational influence of the other planets on one another, the simple laws of planetary motion that date back to Kepler dictating how quickly the planets move, in ellipses around the Sun, relative to one another are so perfect that they require no corrections over the timescale of many centuries to successfully predict where, at any given time, the planets will appear relative to one another. On March 1st and 2nd, 2023, Venus and Jupiter will align in a spectacular conjunction: an astronomical event where the two brightest planets in Earth’s night sky will be separated by merely half-a-degree, or about half the width of your pinkie finger’s nail when you hold it at arm’s length. Easily visible in the post-sunset skies if you have a clear western horizon, this marks the closest, most easily visible meeting of our two brightest planets since 2015, and there won’t be a better show until 2039. Here’s a guide to what you can see and the science of why, plus what you can do to make the most of this and all future conjunctions. Continued here

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Exotic bacteria species show promise as rare-earth element recyclers Demand for rare-earth elements is growing and may reach 315,000 tons by 2030. Meanwhile, more than 40 million tons of e-waste—trashed computers, cell phones, and other electronics—is generated each year. Some of that waste contains the same valuable elements that face rising demand. Continued here

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Imagination: The ability to envision what doesn’t exist is what makes us human You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from? Continued here

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Biden administration wants to hold companies liable for bad cybersecurity The Biden administration on Thursday pushed for new mandatory regulations and liabilities to be imposed on software makers and service providers in an attempt to shift the burden of defending US cyberspace away from small organizations and individuals. Continued here

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Rules for sustaining peak performance as we grow older From the book GNAR COUNTRY by Steven Kotler. Copyright © 2023 by Steven Kotler. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission. Recent discoveries in embodied cognition, flow science, and network neuroscience have revolutionized how we think about human learning. On paper, these discoveries “should” allow older athletes to progress in supposedly “impossible” activities like park skiing. To see if theory worked in practice, I put these ideas to the test on the ski hill, conducting my own ass-on-the-line experiment in applied neuroscience and later-in-life skill acquisition — aka I tried to teach this old dog some new tricks.  Continued here

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No, the Galaxy Book3 Ultra Won't Replace Your MacBook Pro 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 The Galaxy Book3 Ultra is Samsung’s answer to its archrival, the MacBook Pro (9/10, WIRED Recommends). Like Apple’s most powerful laptops, this new Ultra machine is luxe, packs a whole lot of power, and comes with a high price. Continued here

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How Ring's Jamie Siminoff navigated failure to achieve great success The CEO of of the nation's most widely known doorbell company shares his lessons and perspective from his entrepreneurial journey that led him to sell his company to Amazon for more than $1 bilion. Continued here

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How to Support Employees with Seasonal Depression As a first-time manager, or someone who is new to leading a team, you may find it surprisingly difficult to keep your direct reports feeling happy, productive, and fulfilled at work during the first few months of the year. But there are ways that you can address these challenges and use your position to lead by example. Continued here

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Believers call him "God the Father." But can God be called a “man”? Two-thirds of the Christian Trinity are masculine, and the other third is undefined. In traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology, God is referred to as male. He’s “God the Father” in the Book of Psalms, “Christ the Son” in the Gospels, and “Allah” in the Koran. (Interestingly, the feminine form of Allah — al-Lat — was a pre-Islamic goddess in her own right.) The three major monotheistic religions of the world refer to God — the metaphysical, omnipotent creator of the universe and all its contents — as being male. But does God really have a sex or gender? For the Church of England, it was a big enough problem to be raised at their General Synod earlier this year. Several bishops are calling for gender-neutral terms to be used, and there will be a debate on the topic. As you can imagine, a lot of people are furious about even the idea. Piers Morgan said the Church of England was doing “everything possible to become completely irrelevant from society with this woke BS — it’s embarrassing.” And even Vladimir Putin took time off from invading Ukraine to weigh in on the issue, implying it was indicative of a wider “spiritual catastrophe” in the West. Continued here

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We Really Recommend This Podcast Episode The modern internet is powered by recommendation algorithms. They're everywhere from Facebook to YouTube, from search engines to shopping websites. These systems track your online consumption and use that data to suggest the next piece of content for you to absorb. Their goal is to keep users on a platform by presenting them with things they'll spend more time engaging with. Trouble is, those link chains can lead to some weird places, occasionally taking users down dark internet rabbit holes or showing harmful content. Lawmakers and researchers have criticized recommendation systems before, but these methods are under renewed scrutiny now that Google and Twitter are going before the US Supreme Court to defend their algorithmic practices. This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI who studies recommendation systems online. We discuss how recommendation algorithms work, how they’re studied, and how they can be both abused and restrained. Continued here

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The 8 Responsibilities of Chief Sustainability Officers The number of companies appointing a chief sustainability officer has grown significantly over the last few years. Due to the novelty of the role, the CSO’s actual responsibilities and tasks are still vague. It’s critical for executives and boards to ensure that the CSO’s role is balanced among all three elements of ESG. The authors present a CSO’s eight distinct tasks and a visual framework to ensure that each one gets the level of effort it needs. Continued here

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US Technological Dominance Is Not What It Used to Be With everyone so mesmerized by silver-tongued AI chatbots, it’s easy to forget that most flashy breakthroughs in science and technology depend on much less glamorous advances in the fundamentals of computing—new algorithms, different computer architectures, and novel silicon chips.  The US has largely dominated these areas of innovation since the early days of computing. But academics who study advances in computer science say in a new report that by many measures, the US lead in advanced computing has declined significantly over the past five years—especially when measured against China. Continued here

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13 Rapid At-Home Covid-19 Tests—and Where to Find Them The pandemic isn't over. Regardless of how small your social circle is, it's still very possible to contract and spread Covid-19. To help prevent this, it's important to get tested regularly (along with getting vaccinated and wearing an N95 face mask). There are free testing sites across the US, but those pressed for time can trade the long lines for rapid at-home Covid tests, which can provide results in 15 minutes or so.  With hundreds of options, it's tough to know which one to buy (if they're in stock). We've rounded up options—based on FDA authorization and availability—to help make the search easier. You can order free at-home tests from the US government. Members of our team have used some, but not all, of these tests.  Continued here

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Pixel Watch bill of materials estimate can't explain the sky-high price Why is the Pixel Watch so expensive? The device's $350 and $400 price tags are well above the closest comparable products from Apple and Samsung, especially considering Google's first-generation smartwatches use slower, older parts compared to other products. The company is charging more for less, and while the Pixel Watch is a nice piece of hardware, it's hard to make the price make sense compared to faster products with better parts, like the $250 Apple Watch SE and $280 Galaxy Watch 5. Continued here

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The momfluencers helping hundreds of pregnant Russian women move to Argentina After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Julia Pepeliaeva noticed the sales of her how-to guide about living in Argentina suddenly exploded. “My clients have been growing nonstop ever since,” she told Rest of World. Pepeliaeva says her Instagram reach almost doubled in three months. Several of these new followers, and customers, were fellow Russian people arriving in Buenos Aires, where Pepeliaeva is based. She eventually realized she might have far more in common with them than she’d previously assumed. Back in 2017, a then-pregnant Pepeliaeva moved to Buenos Aires, where she delivered her twins and settled down for good. Because of the language barrier, the 28-year-old was unable to continue working as an engineer, and instead started a blog, set up an Instagram account under the name Julia Lav, and launched a Russian-language website to share tips on moving to Argentina. Unbeknownst to her, the experience of having children in Argentina as a Russian would become an unlikely — and lucrative — asset. Continued here

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Kate Ackerman: What girls and women in sports need to unlock their potential As a sports scientist, athlete and director of the Female Athlete Program at Boston Children's Hospital, Kate Ackerman understands that women athletes need more than pretty sports bras or new sneakers to achieve peak performance -- they need true investment committed to their health and well-being. Ackerman advocates for a long overdue sports medical system that's dedicated to the study and development of women athletes, supporting lifelong success on and off the field. Continued here

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If It's Fixed, Break It. The Importance of Overcoming Industry Fixedness Although there's value in institutional knowledge, staying open to new ideas will give you a long-term competitive edge. Continued here

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Developers of disabled third-party Twitter clients ask users to forgo refunds Elon Musk's "extremely hardcore" version of Twitter abruptly and unexpectedly cut off API access for popular third-party Twitter clients back in January, citing unnamed "long-standing API rules" that the apps had apparently been breaking. The company later retconned its developer agreement to prohibit "a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications." Continued here

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Reddit tells court: Film studios spewed "nonsense" in demand for users' names Reddit is fighting a film-industry attempt to identify users who discussed piracy, telling a federal court that the studios' request for users' real names should be rejected and that one of the studios' arguments is "nonsense." Continued here

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How Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff Went From Near Bankruptcy to a $1 Billion Sale to Amazon The inventor shares how his business struggles paved the way for runaway success. Continued here

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How AI Is Helping Companies Redesign Processes The idea of business process reengineering is making a comeback, this time driven by artificial intelligence (AI). In the 1990s, the implementation of enterprise resource planning systems and the internet allowed companies to make changes to broad business processes, but the expectations of the radical changes hoped for were often unfulfilled. However, AI enables better, faster and more automated decisions, allowing companies to improve efficiency and produce better outcomes. Companies — from banks to industrial firms — are already using AI to transform their processes. Continued here

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Scientists have mapped a secret hidden corridor in Great Pyramid of Giza In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century." Continued here

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Algal Blooms Have Boomed Worldwide Climate change is likely at least partially to blame for an uptick in the size and frequency of algal blooms in parts of the world’s oceans CLIMATEWIRE | Algal blooms are growing bigger and more frequent worldwide as ocean temperatures rise and circulation patterns change. Continued here

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Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness Stanford University neurosurgeon Dr. James Doty tells the story of performing surgery on a little boy’s brain tumor. In the middle of the procedure, the resident who is assisting him gets distracted and accidentally pierces a vein. With blood shedding everywhere, Doty is no longer able to see the delicate brain area he is working on. The boy’s life is at stake. Doty is left with no other choice than to blindly reaching into the affected area in the hopes of locating and clamping the vein. Fortunately, he is successful. Continued here

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What Can We Do to Make Sure the FAA and Southwest Airlines Fiascos Never Happen Again? Congress and the airline industry must reassess how they approach and fund air transportation modernization Perhaps unknowingly, airline passengers who lived through the outage of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Notice to Air Systems (NOTAM) system in January or Southwest Airlines’ meltdown in December were part of history. Continued here

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​​You Can Now Integrate ChatGPT With Your Products. Here's How OpenAI's new API puts the power of natural language processing in entrepenuers' hands. Continued here

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These Mythical Sea Monsters May Have Been Whales With Unusual Dining Habits Tales of creatures like the Norse "hafgufa" suggest ancient and medieval people may have seen whales trap feeding According to 13th-century Norse texts, when the great fish "hafgufa" goes to feed, it belches some food, then stretches its massive mouth wide. The sea monster remains still, mouth agape, as fish come to nibble on the food, not knowing that they rest in the jaws of the behemoth. When enough unsuspecting prey have made this fatal mistake, the hafgufa snaps its jaws closed, enjoying the meal it has trapped. Continued here

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Cryptographers Show How to Hide Invisible Backdoors in AI | Quanta Magazine Machine learning is having a moment. Yet even while image generators like DALL·E 2 and language models like ChatGPT grab headlines, experts still don't understand why they work so well. That makes it hard to understand how they might be manipulated. Consider, for instance, the software vulnerability known as a backdoor — an unobtrusive bit of code that can enable users with a secret key to obtain information or abilities they shouldn't have access to. A company charged with developing a machine learning system for a client could insert a backdoor and then sell the secret activation key to the highest bidder. Continued here

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5 Heart-Healthy Foods You're Probably Already Eating A heart-healthy diet doesn't need to be difficult to follow. Learn what foods are best for your blood pressure and cholesterol. Your heart plays a key role in your overall health. It's the main organ in your cardiovascular system, making it responsible for moving blood throughout the body, controlling your pulse rate and maintaining your blood pressure. You might be wondering, since the heart is such a vital organ, how can we keep it healthy? Turns out, your diet has an important job.  Continued here

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Key steps in evolution on Earth tell us how likely intelligent life is anywhere else The Universe contains approximately ten billion trillion planets where life could form. With so many places for the experiment of life to get going, it seems almost certain that evolution would lead to other intelligent, technological creatures like us. But is it really so sure? The problem with just looking at the number of so-called habitable zone planets is that you learn nothing about the odds of an intelligent species evolving on any one of them. If the probability per planet of forming intelligence is less than one in ten billion trillion, then you simply run out of planets before the experiment succeeds — the odds against intelligence forming simply overwhelm the number of places where it might. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Save on Ring home security systems before features get paywalled Despite attracting criticism and controversy for its practice of sharing captured images and videos from its product with law enforcement officials without user consent, Ring continues to be one of the easiest solutions for managing and monitoring your home security. From smart video doorbells to lighting and cameras, the company can help make your home safer and smarter. Ring even has a security system, which is easy to set up and more cost-effective than traditional alarm systems. Continued here

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New Sleeper Train Will Connect Amsterdam and Barcelona The proposed route is part of a broader push to increase cross-border rail travel in Europe Travelers hoping to visit Barcelona and Amsterdam will soon have a new way to move between the two popular cities: an overnight sleeper train. Continued here

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Pablo Escobar's 'Cocaine Hippos' Spark Conservation Fight Researchers worry the Colombian environmental ministry will side with animal-rights activists rather than curb the spread of invasive hippos once kept by drug-cartel leader Pablo Escobar Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad has triggered fear among researchers that she will protect, rather than reduce, a growing population of invasive hippos that threaten the country’s natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Although she did not directly mention the hippos — a contentious issue in Colombia — Muhamad said during a speech in late January that her ministry would create policies that prioritize animal well-being, including the creation of a new division of animal protection. Continued here

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NASA's Asteroid-Bashing DART Mission Was Wildly Successful New studies have revealed the spacecraft’s final moments and the remarkable aftermath of its impact Last September, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft smashed into an asteroid, deliberately altering the rock’s trajectory through space in a first test of planetary defence. Now scientists have deconstructed the collision and its aftermath — and learnt just how successful humanity’s punch at the cosmos really was. Continued here

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Radio Atlantic: What AI Means for Search How transformative are the new AI search tools? Are they a new Skynet or just a new Clippy? With Google and Microsoft releasing new AI tools, it feels like the future is now with artificial intelligence. But how transformative are products like ChatGPT? Should we be worried about their impact? Are they a new Skynet or just a new Clippy? Continued here

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How to Find Joy in Your Sisyphean Existence Life is full of boring, futile, absurd tasks. You’ll be happier if you can laugh at it all. “How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. Continued here

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With mindfulness, you can train your prefrontal cortex — and grow your bank account According to a recent NextAdvisor survey, the majority of Americans admit to being very or somewhat anxious about money, with one-third saying it’s their biggest source of stress. When your finances are going well, life is happy. But when the bills rack up and the spreadsheets turn red, things can quickly turn sour. As with most forms of anxiety, financial anxiety often stems from a felt lack of control. We often don’t know where money will come from or how much money a looming crisis might take from us. As we look at real or imagined financial storms appearing on the horizon, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.  Continued here

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Ancient Comb Made From Human Skull Unearthed in England Archaeologists near Cambridge, England, have identified a 2,000-year-old comb made from a portion of a human skull. Dating to the Iron Age, the hair-raising discovery offers insight into how communities preserved and handled human remains. The comb is “an incredibly rare find,” writes the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) in a statement. Only two other combs carved from bones have ever been unearthed in Britain, both within 15 miles of the newly discovered artifact. The first, found in the 1970s, has carved teeth; the second was found in the early 2000s, and it features only carved lines. Continued here

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The Moral Case Against Equity Language The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.” The guide’s purpose is not just to make sure that the Sierra Club avoids obviously derogatory terms, such as welfare queen. It seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go. Continued here

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Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar When Julius Caesar undertook his legendary military campaign in Gaul during the first century B.C.E., he wrote about small, sharpened wooden stakes that would line the fences of his camps—an ancient Roman version of barbed wire. Until this year, no examples of this military technology had ever been found. Now, for the first time, researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, have discovered an intact artifact. And in the process, they’ve dispelled a 130-year-old assumption about the area’s history. Continued here

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SBF tries to revise bail conditions after judge noted suspicious VPN use A few weeks ago, disgraced FTX founder Samuel Bankman-Fried was in danger of losing his bail package and potentially being jailed until October. The court was fed up with trying to monitor Bankman-Fried’s online activity, and United States district judge Lewis Kaplan decided that the only option left was for Bankman-Fried to recommend independent experts who could help the court set appropriate bail conditions to limit any suspicious online activity. Continued here

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16 Great Deals on Home Office Gear We recently updated our extensive guide to the Best Gear for Working From Home, and many of our favorites are on sale right now. Whether you need a new standing desk or office chair, or if you've been in the market for a nice new power strip, we've got you covered. Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. Continued here

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The Movie That Helped Kazuo Ishiguro Make Sense of the World The Nobel Prize–winning author’s work has long had a symbiotic relationship with cinema. His Oscar-nominated film, Living, is the logical next step. Before Kazuo Ishiguro published a single word, let alone collected such a series of accolades that each threatens to outdo the last—the Booker Prize, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize in Literature—he was a boy in the pleasant English commuter town of Guildford whose mother would act out the plots of Japanese movies she loved. The Ishiguros moved from Nagasaki to the U.K. in 1960, when young Kazuo was 5, for what was supposed to be a temporary stint while his father, an oceanographer, conducted research. But they ended up staying, longer and longer, until England eventually stopped being a liminal place and started being home. Continued here

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The Value of Keeping the Right Customers Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Continued here S53 The Aftermath of a Mass Slaughter at the Zoo Last year, a fox broke into a bird enclosure in D.C. and killed 25 flamingos. The zoo refused to let him strike again. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here S40 Waymo hit by second round of layoffs, has cut 8 percent of staff this year When will the Alphabet layoffs end? Layoffs are always hard, but usually you want to do these things in one big cleave, letting employees know the cuts are over so they can stop worrying and get back to work. Google had its initial big set of layoffs in January, when it cut 12,000 jobs, and employees were supposed to be quickly told of the cuts once that announcement was made. It's March now, and more cuts are still trickling in. Last week, Alphabet's "Everyday Robots" subsidiary was shut down, and the entire staff was laid off. This week Waymo is going through a second round of layoffs. Continued here S57 ‘Creed III’ and the Power of a Worthy Opponent Nobody in Creed III has much to say about Rocky Balboa. For the first two films in the series, the aged mentor (played by Sylvester Stallone) of the boxing star Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) is an important figure in the narrative, a folksy sage passing down the lessons of an entire movie franchise. In Creed III, he’s nowhere to be seen and basically forgotten. That’s partly because of off-camera disputes Stallone had about the creative direction, but his character’s absence also feels like a necessary, liberating step, allowing III to shake off the tricky label of “spin-off” and become something more robust. (Stallone is still credited as a producer on the movie.) Adonis’s connection to the Rocky films is that he’s the son of Apollo Creed, Carl Weathers’s champion-boxer character, who goes from Rocky’s heated rival to his close friend over the course of the original series. By Creed III, Adonis has stopped living in his father’s shadow: He’s solidified his own boxing career and fought the son of the boxer who killed his father in the ring. This new entry is Jordan’s directorial debut, and he has quite the incisive authorial voice, turning what could have been a phoned-in threequel into a close look at the challenges of remaining “authentic” while being famous. Along the way, he offers some new visual language for on-screen boxing, just as the first Creed movie did. Continued here S54 Does Trump Stand a Real Chance to Repeat 2016? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Well-placed Republican insiders are mobilizing to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination. For instance, Trump is conspicuously excluded from the roster of potential 2024 candidates whom the Club for Growth has invited to speak this weekend at a retreat the conservative group is hosting for its biggest donors in Palm Beach, Florida—Trump’s backyard. Likewise, the sprawling network of donors associated with the Koch brothers declared last month that it would work in the 2024 GOP primaries to elect a nominee who “will turn the page on the past several years,” an unmistakable reference to moving beyond Trump. And though they’re still a minority, a steady stream of prominent Republican strategists, donors, and elected officials are openly predicting that the party will lose in 2024 if it nominates Trump again. Continued here S59 Join The Atlantic for "Future of Democracy" Event at SXSW on March 12 Including interviews with Nancy Pelosi, Chris Sununu, Brad Raffensperger, Janai Nelson, Francisco Aguilar As part of SXSW 2023, The Atlantic is announcing a full day of interviews on Sunday, March 12, that will bring elected officials and other national leaders to the festival for conversations about the future of democracy. The official SXSW sessions, produced by The Atlantic and led by its journalists, will focus on the state of democracy in America and around the world; the evolution of the nation’s political parties; challenges to voting rights and the urgent need to ensure free and fair elections; civil rights; and the state of immigration. Continued here S62 Big Cities Are Ungovernable Lori Lightfoot’s failed bid for reelection is a sign that America’s mayors are in jeopardy. 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 S52 New York’s Rats Have Already Won Every Saturday morning when I was in high school, I would take two buses across Brooklyn to my cousin’s exterminating business, where I worked the front desk. I dispatched crews to dismantle hornet nests, helped identify mysterious bugs in Ziploc bags, and fielded panicked calls about animals—raccoons, squirrels, mice, and, of course, rats—being where animals shouldn’t be. Back in that storefront in Flatlands, I believed that pests of all kinds could be controlled. Little did I know that across the city, tunneling below my feet, one of those creatures was—litter by litter—besting man. About a month ago I Zoomed with Robert Corrigan, a fellow Brooklynite and one of the world’s foremost rodentologists. When I told him about my exterminating experience, he said, with some delight, “So, you speak the language.” A slight man with graying hair and an accent that would have been at home at my family’s dinner table, he has been studying rodents since he took a job as an exterminator, installing baits in the city sewer system, to put himself through college back in the late 1970s. Continued here S58 Photos: A Blanket of Snow for California A string of powerful winter storms rolled across California over the past week, bringing snowfall to lower elevations than the area has seen in decades, and boosting the state’s snowpack—which now stands at 189 percent of its average for this time of year. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for 13 counties, including Los Angeles County, due to the storms. Below, a collection of unusually snowy scenes from California, Nevada, and Arizona. The Hollywood sign in Los Angeles stands in front of snow-covered mountains after another winter storm hit Southern California on March 1, 2023. # Continued here S63 These Young Shrimp Can Snap Their Claws as Fast as a Speeding Bullet Juvenile snapping shrimp can achieve the fastest acceleration of any repeatable, underwater motion by a living thing, per a new study Snapping shrimp—also called pistol shrimp—might have the mightiest claws of all creatures in the ocean. Continued here S60 Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend Generative AI programs like ChatGPT threaten to revolutionize how disinformation spreads online. History has long been a theater of war, the past serving as a proxy in conflicts over the present. Ron DeSantis is warping history by banning books on racism from Florida’s schools; people remain divided about the right approach to repatriating Indigenous objects and remains; the Pentagon Papers were an attempt to twist narratives about the Vietnam War. The Nazis seized power in part by manipulating the past—they used propaganda about the burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, to justify persecuting political rivals and assuming dictatorial authority. That specific example weighs on Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer and a leading AI researcher, who tells me that the apparent AI revolution could not only provide a new weapon to propagandists, as social media did earlier this century, but entirely reshape the historiographic terrain, perhaps laying the groundwork for a modern-day Reichstag fire. Continued here S65 Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds Erythritol was not proven to cause these health problems, but some experts recommend limiting intake The artificial sweetener erythritol has been linked to a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. Continued here S61 The States That Reopened First 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. As a reward for sending so many excellent emails on your variety of religious experiences, you’re off this week so that I can finish up a feature I’m hard at work on, and so that I can run a second installment of your responses on religion this Monday. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ▼  2023 (542) ►  December (2) ►  November (33) ►  October (27) ►  September (37) ►  August (45) ►  July (30) ►  June (73) ►  May (3) ►  April (33) ▼  March (17) Your Gaming Skills Can Help You Shape Your Career Superhero films: Is this the end of the road? Esteemed Harvard Business Professor Explains the H... 4 ways to identify high-conflict people before it'... Wyze Makes Wi-Fi Slightly More Affordable With Mes... How to Grow Re-enchanted with the World: A Salve f... 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