How to Make Workplaces More Inclusive For People with Invisible Disabilities
Globally, one billion people live with a disability. To put that into perspective, that’s one person out of every seven. While some disabilities are visible, others — including chronic illnesses, food (or other) allergies, eating disorders, and mental health issues, among other conditions — are not obvious to onlookers. In the U.S., at least 10% of the country has a medical condition that could be considered an invisible disability. Continued here |
Marcos Salazar: 5 steps to building a personal brand you feel good about
Whether you realize it or not, you have a personal brand, says social entrepreneur Marcos Salazar -- and you have the power to shape what it is. Here's how you can create a brand that captures who you are, who you'd like to be and how you want to make an impact on the world. Continued here |
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The Missing Link Between ESG and Corporate Innovation
Experts from Wharton and Penn Engineering outline a framework for transforming ESG from a corporate obligation to an innovation engine for growth that can benefit all stakeholders.The following article was written by Scott A. Snyder, a senior fellow at Wharton, adjunct professor at Penn Engineering, and chief digital officer at EVERSANA; and Sanjay Macwan, adjunct professor at Penn Engineering and chief information officer at Vonage. Continued here |
Did the dinosaurs reach their maximum possible size?
In 2001, paleontologists Kristina Curry Rogers and Catherine Forster found a single rib bone in Madagascar that was nearly 3m (9.84 ft) long, roughly the length of a ping pong table. They had discovered a new species of titanosaur – a kind of colossal, plant-eating dinosaur – that was later named Rapetosaurus krausei. "One of the great things about working with titanosaurs is their 'titanic ' proportions," says Rogers, a DeWitt Wallace professor of biology and geology at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA. "[But] this makes titanosaurs tough to excavate – a single skeleton can take an entire field season or more to extract from the rocks." Continued here |
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How Athletes and Leaders Drive Success No matter the obstacles, if we persist in our goals, know when to ask for help, and build that support through reciprocity, we can achieve anything. Continued here |
Science Has New Ideas about 'Oumuamua's Weirdness
Our first known interstellar visitor is now long gone, but new research has some ideas about why it moved the way it did while it was in our cosmic neighborhood.Lee Billings: Hey there and welcome to Cosmos, Quickly, this is Lee Billings. Today we’re talking about the curious case of ‘Oumuamua, which became the first known interstellar visitor to our solar system when it swooped by Earth and around the Sun back in October of 2017. Continued here |
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What Do Your Customers Want in 2023?
The New Year is often a time of optimism, hope, and change. But how do consumers’ shifting priorities affect businesses? The authors share findings from a recent survey exploring how U.S. consumers are thinking about their New Year’s Resolutions this year and offer seven strategies to help businesses attract and retain customers in this critical time: Help your customers build healthy habits, reach out to new customers, introduce new products, foster consumer loyalty, help customers meet their financial goals, prioritize value, and help your customers do good. Ultimately, the authors argue that retailers must understand how the New Year’s mindset may impact their business — and make their own resolution to anticipate customers’ evolving needs and provide the value that today’s buyers are looking for. Continued here |
This Student Is Taking On 'Biased' Exam Software
Robin Pocornie brought a lamp with her to court. It's nothing special, just a basic Ikea floor lamp. But for the masters student, the lamp was a useful prop to help explain how she believes her university's exam supervision software discriminated against her based on the color of her skin.Pocornie and her lamp stood in front of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, a court focused on discrimination claims, in October 2022. But the first time she encountered remote-monitoring software was two years earlier, during the pandemic, when her course at Dutch university VU Amsterdam was holding mandatory online exams. To prevent students from cheating, the university had bought software from the tech firm Proctorio, which uses face detection to verify the identity of the person taking the exam. But when Pocornie, who is Black, tried to scan her face, the software kept saying it couldn't recognize her: stating "no face found." That's where the Ikea lamp came in. Continued here |
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This Part of the U.S. Will Suffer Most from Climate Change
A new index that rates 70,000 U.S. communities on their climate vulnerability finds that parts of the Gulf Coast subject to flooding and economic and racial inequities are most under threatCLIMATEWIRE | Industrialized communities in the Deep South are the most vulnerable in the U.S. to climate change, according to a new index created by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University that analyzes climate impacts and neighborhood conditions such as poverty and health. Continued here |
Personality Can Change from One Hour to the Next
Studies show that people may experience enormous variability in personality traits throughout the course of the dayPsychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterizing typical patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change. Continued here |
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What’s Wrong with the Private Equity Market -- and How to Fix It
Wharton’s David Erickson explains the current challenges facing the private equity market and potential ways to overcome them.The following opinion piece was written by Wharton senior fellow and finance lecturer David Erickson. Erickson is also co-director of the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. Prior to teaching at Wharton, he worked on Wall Street for more than 25 years, helping private and public companies strategically raise equity. Continued here |
Research: How People Feel About Paying for Social Media
Social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have implemented pay-for-subscription services (Twitter Blue, Snapchat Plus, and Meta’s bundled Facebook and Instagram Blue Badges). The buzz from users, long inundated with a large number of advertisements but now also facing subscription fees, is passionate and increasing. We asked a nationwide sample of 1,056 users for their opinions of these subscriptions (with a sampling margin of error of less than 3 percent). We analyzed 1) what users expect, 2) the quality of features, 3) prices given the quality, 4) ideal social media services, and 5) how likely the users are to subscribe. Continued here |
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What Managers Need to Do When a Team Member Quits
Research shows that counteroffers are less effective than we think — 50% of employees who accept one end up quitting a year later. By the time a valued team member announces their intent to leave, they’ve usually made up their mind. As manager, new or seasoned, what can you do in this situation? Continued here |
This Is Actually Quite Bad
The Manhattan district attorney’s charges underscore how profoundly unsuited Trump is for the office he is now again seeking.The crimes Donald Trump is charged with are a strange fit for the drama and solemnity that ought to accompany the first-ever criminal charges to be filed against a former president. They concern payments allegedly coordinated by Trump to silence women who, in advance of the 2016 election, otherwise might have spoken publicly about their past sexual relationships with him. One of the women paid off is Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model; the other, Stormy Daniels, is an adult-film star. Also involved is a former Trump Tower doorman who allegedly received $30,000 to stop talking about his claim—for which years of reporting have failed to produce any evidence—that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child. The whole business is pure New York–tabloid absurdity. Continued here |
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Case Study: Should a Dollar Store Raise Prices to Keep Up with Inflation?
Discount retailer Dollar Bill’s has been struggling to maintain its margins over the past two years because of inflationary pressures, delays on imported goods, and decreased foot traffic. Now the board has asked CEO William Fisher Jr. to develop a strategy for raising prices. William worries that raising prices will hurt the company’s reputation and alienate customers, but he recognizes that something has to change. Continued here |
NASA's Perseverance Rover May Already Have Evidence of Ancient Martian Life
A half-kilogram’s worth of samples gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover for eventual return to Earth holds weighty implications for life on MarsIf life ever existed on Mars, we may already have the answer at hand. In January NASA’s Perseverance rover deposited 10 tubes on the surface of Mars. Each contains a sample of Martian rock that was carefully selected for its potential to clarify chapters of the planet’s still-murky history. Those tubes “are capable of telling us whether Mars was habitable,” says Mitch Schulte, Perseverance’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We see evidence of particular minerals that tell us there was water. Some of these minerals indicate there was organic material.” 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 |
TikTok creators are being arrested for violating religious laws in Nigeria Over the past two years, Nazifi Isa Muhammad and his friend, Mubarak Muhammad, had collectively built a TikTok following of nearly 1 million. The duo was known for popular videos that often satirized and questioned influential figures.They told Rest of World that because of the nature of their videos, they sometimes received threats of arrest. But they had never considered their content political or controversial — and never imagined it would land them in jail for 11 days. “We thought what we were doing was apolitical,” Nazifi said. “We’ve called out dignitaries and leaders from different political parties.” Continued here |
What happens to a person's sense of self after a face transplant?
Faces are crucial for social interaction and our sense of individuality. We recognize others primarily by their faces, and the ability to recognize one’s own face in the mirror is used as a test of self-awareness in children and animals. Faces are so special that the brain contains areas and networks that are believed to be specialized for processing them. Viewing other people’s faces activates a small region of the visual pathway known as the fusiform face area, whereas self-face recognition activates a much wider distributed network. Continued here |
How Briogeo's Nancy Twine Chooses Vendors The founder and CEO talks about thinking about what her customers would want Continued here |
Briogeo's Nancy Twine Talks About What She Sees Holding Businesses Back The founder and CEO shares how important it is to develop resiliency Continued here |
Why the Alps are a haven for rare butterflies
In summer 2021, Bernhard Auckenthaler was preparing an evening aperitif at his organic herb farm in the northern Italian Alps, when he spotted a mysterious woman with a net walking through a nearby meadow. She turned out to be a biologist monitoring butterflies in the area, and had just made an exciting discovery among the wildflowers next to his farm: a species called the 'large blue', an endangered butterfly.The European Alps have been described as a "butterfly diversity hotspot", with more than 250 species including threatened ones such as the apollo (Parnassius apollo), the hermit (Chazara briseis) and the damon blue (Polyommatus damon). Some, such as the zephyr blue (Plebejus trappi), are endemic to the Alps. Continued here |
Why Business Leaders Must Resist the Anti-ESG Movement
U.S. business leaders are increasingly being exposed to the culture wars, with company decisions around issues like DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and even ESG investing being attacked by right-leaning politicians and pundits. Instead of retreating to the sidelines, this article argues that leaders can’t avoid these topics and that they have a business and moral obligation to address them head-on with courage. Continued here |
ChatGPT and How AI Disrupts Industries
ChatGPT, from OpenAI, shows the power of AI to take on tasks traditionally associated with “knowledge work.” But the future won’t just involve tasks shifting from humans to machines. When technology enables more people to complete a task, with help from a machine, the result is typically entirely new systems with new business models and jobs and workflows. AI will be no different: To truly unlock the potential of ChatGPT, the world will need new and different kinds of organizations. Continued here |
A Mug Shot Could Play Right Into Trump's Hands
Much discussion around the Trump indictment has focused on whether the former president's mug shot will be taken and released to the public. Such attention to a relatively routine part of criminal procedures reflects how much Americans value the mug shot, a contemporary digital artifact that causes intense public shame for most but for Trump could serve to further his agenda. What often renders other people powerless in an ecosystem of digital punishment could actually help Trump regain control over his indictment. We love mug shots. The images are symbols of the guilty people in society who break the rules, pique our voyeuristic tendencies by offering a look into the often opaque workings of the criminal legal system, and once released are routinely used to generate profits through extortion and clickbait. Continued here |
Engaged Employees Create Better Customer Experiences
It’s time for leaders to double down on the idea that the employee experience (EX) is now the key driver of the customer experience (CX) and find smarter, strategic ways of connecting the two. According to PwC, companies that invest in and deliver superior experiences to both consumers and employees are able to charge a premium of as much as 16% for their products and services. So how do leaders design EX to better align with CX? First, identify where the biggest gaps exist. Second, find creative ways to directly connect employees and customers regardless of whether “customer service” is in their job description. Third, integrate customer and employee journey maps to identify and diagnose customer problems. And finally, provide visibility into CX and EX performance together, putting measurements of success in a single view. Continued here |
Ask an Expert: What Skills Do I Need to Become a Great Manager?
What do great managers do differently? Though we each have unique qualities, there are a few key traits that all good managers focus on: clarity, trust, and openness. As you make your first foray into management, here are some actions you can adopt that will help you work towards these qualities. Continued here |
Expand Your Pricing Paradigm
With inflation high, a global recession possible, and consumers spending carefully, many companies are concerned about preserving profit margins. In this article, pricing consultant Rafi Mohammed argues that instead of simply adjusting prices, firms should consider adding new ways to charge customers. He outlines 18 different pricing tactics that can be used for various purposes: to accommodate buyers with different usage needs, to appeal to people on a tight budget, to spur purchases by customers who love a good deal, to achieve favorable prices when the value of an offering is uncertain, and to increase business efficiency. Continued here |
3 Ways to Make Friends Remotely
The Covid-19 crisis has forced masses of people into work-from-home scenarios and just about every university student into a study-from-home experiment. Six months into the pandemic, it’s clear that virtual offices and classrooms have become the “new normal” for many of us — at least for the foreseeable future. Continued here |
The 'Little Bang' Helping Physicists Study the Infant Universe
Our universe started with a bang that blasted everything into existence. But what happened next is a mystery. Scientists think that before atoms formed—or even the protons and neutrons they're made of—there was probably a hot, soupy mix of two elementary particles called quarks and gluons, churning through space as a plasma. And because no one was around to observe the first moments of the cosmos, a coalition of researchers is trying to re-run history.Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, they have essentially created a "Little Bang" and are using it to probe the properties of that quark-gluon plasma. The findings will help cosmologists refine their still-fuzzy picture of the early universe, and how the oozy, blistering state of infant matter cooled and coalesced into the planets, stars, and galaxies of today. Continued here |
Don’t Indict Trump With This
The defeated president of the United States incited an attack on Congress in hopes of preventing a transfer of power. Hundreds of his supporters were prosecuted and sentenced for joining a violent mob. Yet the first indictment in U.S. history of an ex-president arose from his scheme to pay two alleged sexual partners and one witness for their silence about Donald Trump’s sordid personal life.From the moment rumors swirled that the Manhattan district attorney would move against Trump, many of us felt an inward worry: Did Alvin Bragg have a case that would justify his actions? The early reports were not encouraging. Many Trump-unfriendly commentators published their qualms. Over a week of speculation, though, it seemed wise to withhold judgment until the actual indictment was available to read. Now the document has been published. The worriers were right. Continued here |
We Need an Operation Warp Speed for Long COVID
With millions of people affected and at least $1 trillion of economic value at stake, long COVID is our next national health emergencyLong COVID is a multifaceted condition that can follow SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection and affects the neurologic, cardiovascular, pulmonary, hematologic and endocrine systems, leading to anything from mild to debilitating disease. From a public health perspective, the effects of long COVID are massive; a recent review published in Nature estimated that at least 65 million people worldwide have already experienced it. Continued here |
She Quit a Job at Goldman Sachs to Follow Her Bliss. Then Sephora and the Wella Company Came Calling Nancy Twine of Briogeo Hair Care, in conversation with Beatrice Dixon, shares how she got her fledging beauty brand off the ground -- and in front of all the right people. Continued here |
The Crypto Hype Cycle Explained Why is it that some days financial analysts say crypto is the next big thing and other days they advise you to invest elsewhere? Continued here |
Operation Cookie Monster: Feds seize "notorious hacker marketplace"
An international law enforcement operation shut down a "notorious hacker marketplace" that sold access to infected devices and stolen account credentials, the US Department of Justice and Europol announced today. The operation targeting Genesis Market involved 17 countries, seized the platform's infrastructure, and resulted in "119 arrests, 208 property searches, and 97 knock-and-talk measures," Europol said. Continued here |
Research: How Price Changes Influence Consumers' Buying Decisions
Whether on retailers’ own platforms or through third-party price tracking services, today’s consumers often have access to detailed information regarding changes in a product’s price over time. But how does this visibility influence their purchasing decisions? Through a series of studies, the authors found that buyers are more likely to buy now if they see a single large price decrease or a series of smaller price increases, because they’ll assume that the price will go up if they wait. Conversely, they’re more likely to hold off on buying if they see a single large price increase or a series of smaller decreases, because they’ll assume the price will fall. As such, they argue that sellers should consider this effect when pricing their products, while buyers should recognize and question this natural tendency — to expect price streaks to continue and single large changes to reverse — before acting on it. Continued here |
How Marc Lore Spun Wonder's $100 Million Loss Into a Path Toward Profitability After switching to a brick-and-mortar model earlier in 2023, Marc Lore's food delivery startup Wonder noted a $100 million loss. He says it's for the best. Continued here |
What Importers Should Know About Section 321 Leveraging this U.S. Customs law could save you money and time. Continued here |
Conspiracy Theories Can Be Undermined with These Strategies, New Analysis Shows
A new review finds that only some methods to counteract conspiracy beliefs are effective. Here’s what works and what doesn’tWhen someone falls down a conspiracy rabbit hole, there are very few proved ways to pull them out, according to a new analysis. Continued here |
How to Seed Organic Marketing in a Video-First World
Early direct-to-consumer companies relied on plentiful capital and low-cost digital marketing to power growth. But as this sector has matured, capital is more constrained, social media is more cluttered, and customer acquisition costs are rising. DTC companies need new marketing techniques to find customers today, and the 4Cs — content, consumers, creators, and celebrities — can help. Continued here |
3 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Business Find out how these mobility trends could help you lower costs. Continued here |
Wealthy Countries Have Blown Through Their Carbon Budgets
Some countries have used up far more of the world’s carbon budget—the amount we can emit and still avoid more extreme climate disruption—than othersMore than a century of burning fossil fuels has unleashed fiercer heat waves and droughts, heavier downpours that cause massive floods and other extreme climate disruptions. If we want to avoid even worse effects of climate change in the future, humans need to keep the rise in global temperatures as far below two degrees Celsius as possible. To meet that target, we can only emit a certain amount of additional carbon dioxide. This is called the world’s “carbon budget.” Continued here |
The Humiliation of Donald Trump
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. He shuffled quietly into the courtroom and took his seat at the defense table. He looked strangely small sitting there flanked by lawyers—his shoulders slumped, his hands in his lap, his 6-foot-3-inch frame seeming to retreat into itself. When he spoke—“Not guilty”—it came out hoarse, almost a whisper. Pundits and reporters had spent weeks trying to imagine what this moment would look like. How would a former president—especially one who prided himself on showmanship—behave while under arrest? Would he act smug? Defiant? Righteously indignant? Continued here |
How Briogeo's Nancy Twine Approaches Paying Herself The founder and CEO warns not to expect it to happen overnight Continued here |
Why leadership training fails — and how to fix it
Last year, the value of the global corporate leadership training market was estimated to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5%. The potential benefits an organization stands to gain from leadership development explain why — it can impact the bottom line in terms of retention, productivity, risk management, and more. Having strong leaders also inspires employees to live out their organization’s vision, mission, and values. But many organizations aren’t getting as much out of leadership training as expected. Continued here |
4 steps to take control of your own destiny at work
Some people just seem to have this work thing figured out, don’t they? They go to a job that they love and love doing. It allows them to express themselves, be creative, or do something that they are good at doing. It’s like they were destined to do this job, and they enjoy the privilege of doing it.Others, not so much. They go to work but have little say over what, how, and when they do their jobs. The work doesn’t align with who they feel they are or their values, and the path forward doesn’t build to anything that excites them. They feel like an imposter waiting for their destiny to arrive so they can finally do what they were always meant to. Continued here |
After the death of Stadia, VP Phil Harrison has left Google
Google Stadia and all its associated projects are dead, and that means it's finally time for the division's leader, Phil Harrison, to move on. Business Insider reports Harrison has left Google. The report claims he left in January, but Harrison's Linkedin was only updated in the last few days to say he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working on Stadia. Continued here |
Dark Matter Hunters Need Fresh Answers
The hunt for dark matter is in crisis, and it’s time for radical new ideas to explain our universeDecades ago, astrophysicists brimmed with hope of discovering dark matter, the unseen mass that lets galaxies spin far faster than their stars’ gravity would allow by itself. But underground traps set on Earth to capture supposed dark particles have now spent years measuring nothing but subterranean silence. Continued here |
How Pink Floyd inspired research into medieval monks and volcanology
Sébastien Guillet, an environmental scientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, was rocking out to Pink Floyd's classic Dark Side of the Moon album one day when he made a prescient connection. The darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions. And astronomers know the exact days of those eclipses. So medieval historical accounts of lunar eclipse sightings should be able to help scientists narrow down the time frame in which major eruptions occurred during the High Medieval period spanning 1100 to 1300 CE. Guillet collaborated with several other scientists to conduct such a study, combining textual analysis with tree ring and ice core data. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature. Continued here |
America Is Missing Out on the Biggest EV Boom of All
Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.Across Asia, many daily trips are made on three wheels. The auto rickshaw is more or less a motorcycle in the front and a party in the back in the form of benches, seats, or cargo space. Rickshaws—derived from hand-pulled carts via a bicycle-based version—come in a range of styles, from fully enclosed boxes to more open options topped with a simple shade canopy. Made for low speeds and urban settings, they are typically run like taxis, operated by drivers who take people and things from place to place for a fee. They can weave in and out traffic in cities where a car would make little headway. Continued here |
The priest who proved Einstein wrong
This is the fifth article in a series on modern cosmology. We encourage you to read installments one, two, three, and four.In 1929, Edwin Hubble confirmed that the Universe is expanding. With that question settled, a far older one came back to haunt scientists: Did the Universe have a beginning? If so, what was going on before? Was there space, and was there time? Continued here |
There's No Such Thing as a One-Size-Fits-All Web
Of the many passages in Ellen Ullman's 1997 memoir Close to the Machine that stuck with me, one of the most memorable is about spreadsheets. Ullman, a programmer, was describing her experiences working with end users in the early days of the web. "When I watch the users try the Internet," she writes. "It slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." She describes the way users would click around, struggling to retrieve the information they needed—and when they failed to find it, rather than blame the tools, they blamed themselves.  Continued here |
How to Market in a Downturn
Because no two recessions are exactly alike, marketers find themselves in poorly charted waters every time one occurs. But guidance is available, say Quelch and Jocz, who have studied marketing successes (by Smucker, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, and others) as well as failures throughout past recessions and identified patterns in consumer and company behavior that strongly affect performance. Understanding consumers’ changing psychology and habits, the authors argue, will enable firms to hone their strategies so they can both survive the current downturn and prosper afterward. Continued here
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