Baap Rey !!: How to Unlock the Power of Your Mindset

Use these techniques to improve your business.

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This CEO Went Viral for Criticizing Her Employees--Then, She Apologized. It Teaches 3Â Huge Lessons in Emotional IntelligenceÂ

MillerKnoll's CEO just learned three major lessons in emotional intelligence the hard way. Here are the takeaways.

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A Message forÂ Out-of-Touch CEOs: Don't Tell Your Team to Get out of 'Pity City' and Certainly Don't Praise Employees forÂ Selling Their Dogs

Praising employees for selling their dogs so they can return to the office isn't a good look. Though CEOs may mean well, they clearly aren't thinking through what they're saying enough.

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Take Advantage of New Tech: Our Favorite Reads

I think living in a digital age can sometimes blind us to the magic of innovation. Headlines about artificial intelligence and robots stealing our jobs make it easy to feel discouraged or worried about the impact new tech will have on our careers. But there’s also a lot of opportunity during periods of rapid change. As engineer and tech leader Nahia Orduña writes: “If we go back 50 years, there was no such thing as digital marketing, social media management, or cybersecurity. Now, those industries employ thousands of people around the world.”

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Get More Value by Asking Your Technology Vendor for Less

Less is more when it comes to features, cost and efficiency.

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6 Super Fun Activities for Your Next Virtual Meeting

Research conducted in the fall of 2020 by workplace expert Jennifer Moss found that 85% of people have expressed a decline in well-being since the start of the pandemic. While laughter is not a cure-all, it is an action that decreases depression and anxiety, and one that is also a scarce commodity right now.

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Ask Ethan: Do JWST's results contradict the Big Bang?

When it comes to the science of cosmology — the history of the Universe and how it came to be the way it is today — one of the crowning achievements of the past 100 years is the development of a “standard model” of cosmology. The dominant factor in determining how the Universe evolves is gravitation, which is governed by General Relativity and accounts for the expanding Universe as well as the assembly of large-scale cosmic structure. The contents of the Universe have been determined to be dark energy, dark matter, normal matter, neutrinos, and photons. And the Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with an event known as the hot Big Bang, with density imperfections seeded by a preceding phase known as cosmic inflation.Despite all the observational evidence we have supporting this picture, it may not be fully correct. Each time we observe the Universe in a new way, we have to check that what we’re seeing is still consistent with this model. With the recent addition of JWST to the arsenal of tools astronomers have, is this picture in trouble? That’s what many, including Patreon supporter Chad Marler, want to know:

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Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever. For its reissue as a Classic, HBR asked Stephen R. Covey to provide a commentary (see the sidebar “Making Time for Gorillas”).

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How Pooja Dhingra Hustles for Her Rightful Crown as "Macaron Queen of India"

Baking was not Pooja’s childhood dream. She actually wanted to be a lawyer! Her family was interested in gastronomy and owned a Mexican restaurant in Bandra (Mumbai, India) when Pooja was about 12 years old. Pooja spent three summers running around the kitchen and tasting every new recipe. Her mother loved baking and owned a home-run chocolate business. The more she thought about a career, the more she was convinced that this industry was home. She received her graduate degree in hospitality from César Ritz College in Le Bouveret, Switzerland, and three years later began training at Le Cordon Bleu, Paris. Pooja returned to India with the ambition of opening a Parisian-style patisserie. She opened her first patisserie, Le15, in March 2010, and she has since grown her business from three to more than 100 employees. Known as the Macaron Queen of India, Pooja makes the best desserts — I can say this with confidence because I devoured two utterly delicious cupcakes while conducting this interview.

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How to Show You Care: 4 Ways for Business Leaders to Support Employees and Cultivate Loyalty

To nurture employee loyalty, entrepreneurs and business leaders need to meet modern workplace needs and enhance employee experiences.

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8 Best Practices for Creating a Compelling Customer Experience

How can a company best create a compelling customer experience? Based on the author’s research involving thousands of companies and analyses of millions of customer data points from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the eight areas that companies need to focus on are: Orchestrating the marketing ecosystem, aligning company and customer needs, delivering amazing customer convenience, reinforcing digital marketing, adjusting customer incentives, cultivating customer evangelists, handling customer complaints, and managing product returns.

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The forgotten 20th Century 'Sun engine'

The early 1900s was an age of coal and iron. Industry was noisy and filthy, spewing the smoke from burning coal far and wide.In Philadelphia, one of the hives of industry on the Eastern Seaboard of the US, things had already become intolerable. In 1904, some 50 years before the country's Air Pollution Act of 1955, the city's administrators had created their own regulation for cleaner air. It limited the amount of smoke in flues, chimneys and open spaces, and punished those who emitted fumes of a "certain degree of darkness" with fines.

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In Nigeria, the government and local VCs are helping startups weather the tech downturn

As startup ecosystems across the world reel from a funding crunch, in Nigeria — the leader in startup funding among all African nations in 2022 — the government and local investors have stepped in to offer the support the fledgling industry needs.In March 2023, the Nigerian government partnered with the African Development Bank, the French government, and the Islamic Development Bank to launch an investment initiative worth $618 million for tech and creative startups. The government has pledged a contribution of $45 million to this initiative. Earlier that month, it also inaugurated an implementation committee for the recently signed Nigeria Startup Act. With a 10 billion naira ($21.7 million) statutory fund disbursed annually, the Act will provide a consistent funding pipeline for the local startup ecosystem.

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This Florida County Ranks Highly for Solopreneurs. Here's Why

Miami-Dade County is home to many self-employed workers, according to a new report. The county's Chamber of Commerce isn't surprised.

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How Unnecessary Paper Packaging Creates the Illusion of Sustainability

As global consumers grow increasingly conscious of the environmental toll of plastic packaging, many brands have taken steps to reduce their use of plastic. But at the same time, some brands have adopted a much less productive approach to the anti-plastic movement: They’ve begun adding superfluous paper packaging on top of plastic packaging in order to make their products look more environmentally friendly without actually reducing plastic waste. The authors’ research demonstrates that this sort of overpackaging can indeed be effective in boosting consumers’ perceptions of sustainability, despite the fact that it is demonstrably worse for the environment (not to mention more expensive for manufacturers). However, they also found that simply adding a “minimal packaging” label to plastic packages can reduce the misperception that overpackaged products are more sustainable, enabling brands to attract environmentally-conscious consumers without creating unnecessary paper waste.

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How translator-influencers bring banned foreign videos onto China's internet

The Great Firewall can be breached. The barrier that blocks Chinese users from accessing international sites, from Facebook to LinkedIn, is routinely hopped by users in the country with VPNs. But even those without a technical bent can get a glimpse of what’s trending beyond the firewall, thanks to Weibo’s translator-influencers.These new influencers are dubbed “translator-creators” (译制博主). They take short videos from banned foreign social media platforms, like YouTube or TikTok, and translate, subtitle, and edit them for local consumption. Much of the content is comedic and apolitical, like cute animals, cooking videos, or thirst traps. But others go beyond lighthearted jokes to post about liberal causes and more transgressive positions that are rare on the Chinese internet: feminist content, LGBTQIA advocacy, and international news commentary about China.

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Follow Apple's 5-steps of service to create extraordinary customer loyalty

Apple's 5-step formula to turn prospects into buyers.

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The Supreme Court Preserves Abortion Pill Accessâ€”Temporarily

The US Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court's order that would have banned the abortion pill mifepristone. The action means that the drug will remain available and legal under status quo regulations until the case works its way through the appeals process, which could take months.The court's ultimate ruling could be the most consequential decision on reproductive rights since itsÂ overturning ofÂ Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

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The surprising science of climate protests

A billion people are expected to participate in some way on Saturday for this year's Earth Day.Taking place 53 years after the first Earth Day, the global event has a theme this year of "invest in our planet" which focuses on expanding the green economy.

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AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students

For the past nine years, Collins, a 27-year-old freelance writer, has been making money by writing assignments for students in the U.S. — over 8,500 miles away from Nanyuki in central Kenya, where he lives. He is part of the “contract cheating” industry, known locally as simply “academic writing.” Collins writes college essays on topics including psychology, sociology, and economics. Occasionally, he is even granted direct access to college portals, allowing him to submit tests and assignments, participate in group discussions, and talk to professors using students’ identities. In 2022, he made between $900 and $1,200 a month from this work.Lately, however, his earnings have dropped to $500–$800 a month. Collins links this to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools.

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When Scenario Planning Fails

How can organizations perform scenario planning when they are hit by shocks outside of leaders’ field of vision? Interviews with Nordic executives, who experienced both the Covid-19 pandemic and were in close proximity to Russia as the country invaded Ukraine, can provide clues. Instead of abandoning the typical “base case / best case / worst case” planning, they adapted their planning to encompass four main strategies other companies can try: stretching the types of scenarios under consideration, using vulnerabilities as a prism, building strong action guidelines an internal communication, and building crisis management into the organizational structure.

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How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge

I woke up one day last year and realized I no longer listened to music. Instead I just listened to sludge—a blur of indistinguishable songs that imitated my music taste. My sludge addiction sprang from Spotify’s algorithmically curated playlists, which promised to help me focus or find music tailored to my tastes. The app’s design was always nudging me in that direction, so I dutifully followed. It was so easy! Searching for good music takes time. But at a tap, these playlists drip-fed me endless pap that dissolved into the background. Often, it was from artists I had never heard of before and—once the playlist refreshed—would never seek out again.At some point last year, I decided: enough. I didn’t want sludge to soundtrack my life. Instead, I launched a one-woman backlash that has so far involved resisting Spotify’s call to “discover” new music weekly, following artists I like to smaller platforms like SoundCloud, and making the drastic decision to spend $50 on a vinyl album I’d already saved on my phone.

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Sleep Number's Temperature-Adjustable Bed Runs Hot and Cold

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 WIREDMost smart-home gadget manufacturers would have you believe that tapping an app is the pinnacle of convenience. Turning on a light bulb? How about your robot vacuum? What if it was a speaker that could also answer questions?

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The New Risks ChatGPT Poses to Cybersecurity

The FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report found that phishing is the most common IT threat in America. From a hacker’s perspective, ChatGPT is a game changer, affording hackers from all over the globe a near fluency in English to bolster their phishing campaigns. Bad actors may also be able to trick the AI into generating hacking code. And, of course, there’s the potential for ChatGPT itself to be hacked, disseminating dangerous misinformation and political propaganda. This article examines these new risks, explores the needed training and tools for cybersecurity professionals to respond, and calls for government oversight to ensure that AI usage doesn’t become detrimental to cybersecurity efforts.

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Who Was the Real Pope's Exorcist?

A new film dramatizes the story of Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of the Diocese of RomeBefore his death in 2016, Father Gabriele Amorth claimed to have performed over 100,000 exorcisms. Working as the official exorcist of the Vatican, he performed a service that many have never seen outside of horror films. Now, his story is the basis of such a film: The Pope’s Exorcist, starring Russell Crowe, which came out last week.

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'Under Alien Skies' Will Fuel the Next Generation of Sci-Fi

Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUHSlide: 1 / of 1.Caption: Westend61/Getty Images

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The Justices Pass on an Abortion-Pill Ban

After extending its self-imposed deadline from Wednesday to today, the U.S. Supreme Court finally weighed in on the fight to limit access to mifepristone, a pill used in more than half of all abortions. The Court stayed the ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and preserved existing access to the drug as litigation continues in the lower courts. This ruling came on the heels of those from both Texas District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and the Fifth Circuit, both of which not only second-guessed regulators’ careful parsing of scientific evidence, but also hinted that an anti-vice law from the Victorian era, the Comstock Act, had created a de facto nationwide ban on abortion.The Court stepped back in this latest order, preserving the pre-lawsuit status quo when it comes to mifepristone. But we can read only so much into the Court’s decision. For 50 years, anti-abortion-rights groups have shown that they are willing to play the long game, and with a Court as conservative as this one, they have no reason to cease their efforts.

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Coleridge on the Paradox of Friendship and Romantic Love

Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.All relationships are asymmetrical. But there are some asymmetries that fray the fabric of the relationship and maim both people involved — none more so than those of a deep friendship where one person feels the tug of romantic love and the other does not, cannot. The challenge, then, is how to preserve the sanctity of friendship from being crushed beneath the weight of unequal expectations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772–July 25, 1834) addressed this haunting paradox of friendship and romance in his marginalia while anguishing over a decade-deep chaste infatuation with his friend William Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, all the while editing his literary journal, The Friend, which he dedicated to Sara.

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The Best VR Headsets and Games to Explore the Metaverse

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 WIREDVirtual reality was supposed to be the next big thing back in 2016 when the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive launched. It was the tech whose time had finally arrived. Or so we thought. As it turned out, VR was still a little too expensive and perhaps too alienating to take over the gaming world. Then there was the hype about the “metaverse,” and now we're seeing companies that invested heavily in VR starting to jump ship, so keep that in mind when you're looking at investing in a new headset.

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Google's AI panic forces merger of rival divisions, DeepMind and Brain

Google's 'Code Red' panic over the rise of ChatGPT and its failure to excite the world with its AI products is resulting in a big merger. Alphabet's two big AI teams, the independent Alphabet company DeepMind and the "Google Brain" AI division, are merging to form "Google DeepMind." Google and DeepMind have both released blog posts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says merging the two units will "help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly."

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Brain scans hint that lonely individuals process the world differently

The brains of lonely individuals respond to video stimuli in unique ways dissimilar from their peers, while the brains of less lonely people respond similarly to others’, suggesting that lonely individuals may process the world differently, which could exacerbate or even trigger their loneliness. This finding was recently published in the journal Psychological Science.Elisa Baek, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California-Dornsife, led the investigation when she was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. She and her colleagues utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brains of college students as they watched a collection of 14 short videos during a 90-minute session. The videos included highlights from sporting events, clips from documentaries, and emotional depictions of human life, and 66 students participated. After undergoing the lengthy scans, they subsequently completed an extensive questionnaire intended to gauge how lonely they feel.

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MSI Afterburner GPU overclocking tool returns after Ukraine war paused development

Anyone who has ever attempted to squeeze a little more performance out of a graphics card is probably familiar with MSI Afterburner, software used for GPU overclocking and undervolting and performance monitoring. Despite the MSI branding, it’s actually widely compatible with Nvidia and AMD GPUs from all vendors, and for years it has been a simple-but-effective tool for people trying to get the most out of their hardware.

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Twitter stops labeling Russia's RT and China's Xinhua as "state-affiliated media"

Twitter has removed "government-funded" and "state-affiliated" labels from media accounts, including those of public broadcasters in the US and the accounts of state-controlled news organizations in China and Russia. The RT and Xinhua Twitter accounts were previously labeled "Russia state-affiliated media" and "China state-affiliated media," but those labels disappeared sometime yesterday or today.

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Scientists Update Map of How Our Brains Control Movement

The traditional diagram showed brain regions linked to specific body parts, but we might also have areas connected to whole-body controlWithin the brain’s frontal lobe lies the primary motor cortex, a sliver of neurons that coordinates movement. Beginning in the 1930s, scientists developed a map of this brain region called a homunculus map, depicting how different sections of the primary motor cortex controlled specific parts of the body.

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Jiaying Zhao: How to feng shui your fridge -- and other happy climate hacks

Is it possible for taking action on climate change to make you feel happy? Behavioral scientist Jiaying Zhao believes that's the only way we'll create lasting, sustainable change. From treat meals to feng shui fridges, she offers eight life hacks to lower your carbon emissions while increasing your joy and fulfillment.

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A Memoir About Friendship and Mental Illness

A Q&A with Jonathan Rosen, whose new book, The Best Minds, delves into a fraught friendship and the societal response to schizophreniaWhen Michael Laudor killed his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello, in 1998, it was the kind of story the tabloids eat up: a fall from great heights. Laudor had appeared previously in the press, but as a success, celebrated for having graduated from Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A movie of his life was even in the works, to be directed by Ron Howard and star Brad Pitt. But after the killing, the New York Post ran a picture of Laudor on its cover with the headline Psycho. Some saw him as the victim of a disease; others refused to accept that his disorder had anything to do with the horror he had wrought.

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The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found belongs to a woman

In the late 1920s, deep in the southern Iraqi desert, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley uncovered the most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever discovered. The 4,500-year-old skeleton was draped in gold and precious stones. Golden rings decorated each finger, a golden-looped belt lay across the waist and a golden headdress with intricately wrought leaves and standing flowers adorned the head. Three more bodies, presumably servants, accompanied the royal skeleton. But the resplendent grave goods are not the only reason the discovery rocked the world in the early 20th century: this tomb belonged to a woman.Queen Pu-abi, a name carried down through the millennia thanks to a lapis-lazuli seal pinned to her burial garment, lived at the height of Ur’s power around 2600 BC. In her time, the ancient city-state held extensive sway across Sumer, a region nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates. Trade in Ur flourished and trade routes extended from modern-day India to Sudan. As the main harbor for Indian goods, Ur garnered huge amounts of wealth. Though no contemporary documents mention Pu-abi, scholars believe she may have ruled in her own right since her seal mentions no husband.

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Seven Books to Read as a Family

A strong title can do more than entertain—it can also provoke, challenge, educate, or soothe.As soon as my kids were born, I began reading to them. They’d gurgle up at me, chewing their adorable fingers, as I chanted the words to The Real Mother Goose or When We Were Very Young. I’d loved books as a child, and I couldn’t wait to share my favorites with my new little family.

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Why Ari Aster Freaks People Out

The director of the horror films Hereditary, Midsommar, and now Beau Is Afraid invites you into his anxious fantasies.The subject of Ari Aster’s new film, Beau Is Afraid, is a living doormat played with shuffling agitation by Joaquin Phoenix. Beau is a 40-something mama’s boy who shudders at the thought of making decisions, and his extreme emotional paralysis is part of the grand joke of the movie, a three-hour epic centered on the least courageous hero imaginable. But immature, anxious cowards are rarely the protagonists of big Hollywood films, and Beau is Aster’s biggest movie by far, as well as one of the most ambitious projects ever mounted by the indie distributor A24. Did Aster worry, I wondered, that audiences wouldn’t be able to identify with such an alienating character?

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Elon Musk Revealed What Twitter Always Was

By most measures, Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter has been an abject failure. The purchase has coincided with a loss in his net worth and saddled the company with debt. His obsessions with “the woke mind virus” and his peculiar decision to act as a personal customer-service concierge for right-wing shitposters like @catturd2 have alienated the billionaire from allies and, most important, advertisers; the company’s net ad revenue is projected to drop 27.9 percent by the end of 2023, according to Insider Intelligence. He is so clueless and incurious as to the desires of his user base that his plans to boost Twitter’s bottom line involved a verification and subscription product that users aren’t just uninterested in, but find legitimately embarrassing.But Musk, who was once thought of by many as a visionary, has, in fact, accomplished something meaningful with Twitter. He’s stripped the platform down to its skeleton, giving everyone the opportunity to recognize how fundamentally embarrassing it’s always been. To observe him at work—which is to say, to watch him tweet recycled Reddit memes, feel out ill-considered company policies, and pander to far-right goobers with culture-war drivel—is to witness the platform working at its purest, basest level. Forget offensive; his behavior is cringe. It shows us what has always existed deep down in Twitter’s molten core, an elemental feeling shared by the platform’s most ardent users and that powers much of social media: shame.

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We need a new measure of evolutionary success. Hereâ€™s why.

The traditional measure of evolutionary success is a population’s ability to continue, adapt and grow. By that measure, humanity has been a huge success: our population is only getting bigger, and for a lot of countries, so is our average life-span. Biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes takes issue with this measurement. In his view, the sheer number of humans living on the planet doesn’t necessarily equate to success. In fact, the argument that humans are doing better than ever before is problematic, because it only considers a narrow perspective of Euro-American societies, ignoring other vast cultures and populations.

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Why Has History Forgotten Joseph Bologne, the Brilliant 18th-Century Composer Showcased in 'Chevalier'?

A new film dramatizes the story of a Black immigrant to France whose musical talents have long been overlookedAmong the famed 18th-century composers, one name is often missing: Joseph Bologne, also known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a classical musician whose talents rivaled Mozart’s.

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How the Gender Debate Veered Offtrack

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf 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.What is a position that you hold––or a question that you have––about any issue related to gender identity, transgender rights, gender medicine, or any of the associated cultural debates? Also welcome: reflections on relevant personal experiences, especially from trans readers.

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The real reason Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear

When the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was 35 years old, he cut off the lower half of his left ear with a razor blade. After bandaging his bleeding wound, he wrapped the severed ear in paper and brought it to a brothel in the French town of Arles, where he had been living and working with the artist Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh offered the ear to a woman, telling her to “keep this object carefully.”Later that evening he was found unconscious and taken to a nearby hospital. Although his severed ear was eventually brought there as well, the medical assistant taking care of van Gogh determined too much time had passed to reattach it. The painter immortalized his maimed appearance in two paintings: Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe.

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What Are Large Language Models (LLMs) and How Do They Work?

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is perhaps the most widely known LLM. GPT-3.5 powers the ChatGPT platform used for the examples in this article, while the newest version, GPT-4, is available through a ChatGPT Plus subscription. Microsoft also uses the latest version in its Bing Chat platform.These will undoubtedly shape the way we interact with technology in the future. The rapid uptake of models like ChatGPT and Bing Chat is a testament to this fact. In the short term, AI is unlikely to replace you at work. But there is still uncertainty about just how big a part in our lives these will play in the future.

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Baap Rey !!

Saturday, April 22, 2023

How to Unlock the Power of Your Mindset

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