Most Popular Editorials: How far will global population rise? Researchers can’t agree

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How far will global population rise? Researchers can’t agree

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Meng Wanzhou: The PowerPoint that sparked an international row - BBC News When Meng Wanzhou's flight landed in Vancouver on 1 December 2018, she was expecting to make only a brief stopover. But after almost a three-year prolonged stay, the chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of the telecoms giant's founder is now a free woman. Continued here

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Why Exercise Is More Important Than Weight Loss for a Longer Life - The New York Times For better health and a longer life span, exercise is more important than weight loss, especially if you are overweight or obese, according to an interesting new review of the relationships between fitness, weight, heart health and longevity. The study, which analyzed the results of hundreds of previous studies of weight loss and workouts in men and women, found that obese people typically lower their risks of heart disease and premature death far more by gaining fitness than by dropping weight or dieting. Continued here

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How Machine Learning Pushes Us to Define Fairness Along with the growth of AI have come serious questions about our ability to build unbiased, “fair” algorithms. And it’s true that without intervention, machine learning algorithms will reflect any biases in the underlying data. But precisely because ML requires us to instruct it in highly precise ways about what sort of outcomes we’ll find ethically acceptable, it’s also giving us the tools to have these discussions in clearer and more productive ways. We’re defining a whole new vocabulary and set of concepts to talk about fairness. Continued here

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How to Run Slower to Run Faster But even if you know you’re running too fast—as I consistently see posted in r/running, where many runners struggle to hit a comfortable easy pace—you might not be sure just how to slow down to the right speed. Here are tricks to run slower now so that you can run faster later. Continued here

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How to Know If You Talk Too Much You may have heard the saying, “When you’re in love, smoke gets in your eyes.” Well when you’re talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears. Once you’re on a roll, it’s very easy to not notice that you’ve worn out your welcome. You may not even realize that the other person is politely trying to get a word in, or subtly signaling that they need to be elsewhere (possibly, anywhere else if you have been really boring). Continued here

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8 Tips for Conducting an Excellent Remote Interview Remote interviewing is here to stay, as the pandemic and its evolving offshoot, the Great Resignation, continue to reshape the modern workplace. Today’s job hunters aren’t just looking to boost their salaries. They’re also seeking flexibility, well-being, and a workplace culture that aligns with their own values and sensibilities. Interviews that delve into these topics can give both parties valuable information about whether a prospective employee is likely to feel fulfilled and engaged at a particular organization. We can absolutely have these conversations “face to face,” even when we’re not in the same physical room. The author presents eight tips for employers seeking to master the medium in order to identify top talent from a distance. Continued here

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India will continue to rise as an economic force, regardless of its politics

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3 Ways to Motivate Yourself When You Don’t Have a Deadline Deadlines help us prioritize our work and get it done on time. But how do you get started on a project that doesn’t have one? Try giving yourself a target end date, establishing a certain amount of time to work on the project each week, or taking one step toward completion each day. Hold yourself accountable by enlisting support. When you tell someone your time frame for completing the work and send them updates regularly, you have a greater incentive to make progress. Finally, incentivize yourself. Give yourself a reward for the work you do, take away something you enjoy if you don’t complete your task as planned, or set yourself up to enjoy your time while working. Motivating yourself to do non-deadline tasks is a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. Continued here

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Why China crushed its tech giants | WIRED UK China's ban on all cryptocurrency transactions, announced on Friday, is just the latest of a series of bombshells that over just one year have profoundly reshaped the country's technological landscape. It is not only bitcoin miners, crypto-traders, or video gamers that have suddenly found themselves in Beijing's crosshairs. By and large it is China's largest internet platforms that have been feeling the heat. One after another, tech giants like Ant, Meituan, and Didi have been targets of antitrust probes. This has intersected with a tightening of data protection regulation, which is seen as a national security issue, and a general drive to curb capitalist excess. Ride-hailing firm Didi, for instance, hasn’t just come under antitrust scrutiny: two days after its New York IPO in June, it was forced to stop accepting new users while regulators investigated suspicions it might leak user data to the US. Continued here

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Research Shows People Become Increasingly Unhappy Until Age 47.2. Here's How to Minimize the Negative Effect of the 'Happiness Curve' | Inc.com Nor are a few other socioeconomic drivers. After studying fifteen measures of unhappiness -- anxiety, despair, sleeplessness, sadness, depression, fatigue, tension, strain, etc. -- controlling for factors like employment status and education stil resulted in the inverted U-shape happiness curve.  Continued here

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Google's 7-Step Process to Delegating Tasks That Any Manager Can Use | Inc.com This idea came in at No. 2 on Google's top 10 list of effective manager traits. If you haven't heard the story, Google in an effort to prove that bosses weren't necessary, ended up finding the exact opposite -- managers not only matter, but they can significantly influence the performance of their teams. But they didn't stop there. After realizing that managers were important, they embarked on a quest to uncover all the behaviors that made some more effective than others. The initiative became known as Project Oxygen.  Continued here

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The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why The head of a large division of a multinational corporation was running a meeting devoted to performance assessment. Each senior manager stood up, reviewed the individuals in his group, and evaluated them for promotion. Although there were women in every group, not one of them made the cut. One after another, each manager declared, in effect, that every woman in his group didn’t have the self-confidence needed to be promoted. The division head began to doubt his ears. How could it be that all the talented women in the division suffered from a lack of self-confidence? Continued here

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Does Birth Order Really Determine Personality Traits? | Time One Friday afternoon at a party, I’m sitting next to a mother of two. Her baby is only a couple of weeks old. They’d taken a long time, she tells me, to come up with a name for their second child. After all, they’d already used their favorite name: it had gone to their first. Continued here

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Our Brains Were Not Built for This Much Uncertainty As the pandemic wears on, leaders across industries are feverishly trying to figure out what the “new normal” needs to look like, which seems to be constantly shifting under their feet. To stay motivated as we encounter unprecedented levels of uncertainty in every aspect of our lives, we should understand that the human brain simply was not built for this. Knowing what your brain does well — and what it does surprisingly poorly — can give you a much clearer sense of the strategies you need to not just endure, but to thrive. Whether you’re trying to keep yourself motivated and engaged, or you’re a leader trying to help those in your care, the authors present three strategies based in science that can keep the brain in a good place. Continued here

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Why Airlines, Cities, and Starbucks Need Remote Workers Back at the Office | Marker Continued here

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How to Be More Hopeful - The Atlantic During the Vietnam War, a U.S. Navy vice admiral who was held for more than seven years in a North Vietnamese prison noticed a surprising trend among his fellow inmates. Some of them survived the appalling conditions; others didn’t. Those who didn’t tended to be the most optimistic of the group. As the vice admiral, James Stockdale, later told the business author Jim Collins, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go … And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” Continued here

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How Long Can We Live? - The New York Times In 1990, not long after Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard began conducting a nationwide study of French centenarians, one of their software programs spat out an error message. An individual in the study was marked as 115 years old, a number outside the program’s range of acceptable age values. They called their collaborators in Arles, where the subject lived, and asked them to double-check the information they had provided, recalls Allard, who was then the director of the IPSEN Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. Perhaps they made a mistake when transcribing her birth date? Maybe this Jeanne Calment was actually born in 1885, not 1875? No, the collaborators said. We’ve seen her birth certificate. The data is correct. Continued here

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Australian technology start-up creates world's most efficient solar cell while replacing silver with copper - ABC News Continued here

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‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war | Books | The Guardian As the car with the blacked-out windows came to a halt in a sidestreet near Tübingen’s botanical gardens, keen-eyed passersby may have noticed something unusual about its numberplate. In Germany, the first few letters usually denote the municipality where a vehicle is registered. The letter Y, however, is reserved for members of the armed forces. Continued here

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A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek As organizations continue to explore a variety of flexible work options, one promising avenue is the four-day workweek: The standard 40 hours per week is reduced to 32 hours, with the same pay and the same productivity expectations. Research suggests reducing hours can benefit both employees and employers, but it can be difficult to go from the idea to a successful implementation. In this piece, the authors — a researcher who studies time, money, and happiness and the CEO of a global nonprofit focused on the future of work — outline a six-step guide to help leaders plan, pilot, and roll out a four-day workweek. While no change comes easily, the authors argue that companies willing to embrace models like the four-day workweek will find the experimentation well worth the effort. Continued here

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Highly Intelligent People Are Less Satisfied By Friendships In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone. Continued here

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Chart: A Global Look at How People Spend Their Time When it comes to paid work, Japan emerges the highest on this list with approximately 5.5 hours per day. However, this country also has some of the highest overtime in a workweek. In contrast, European countries such as France and Spain report nearly half the same hours (less than 3 hours) of paid work per day on average. Continued here

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3 Ways Senior Leaders Create a Toxic Culture The people at the top of an organization have a disproportionate level of influence over those they lead. If you and your fellow executives fall into bad habits, it’s likely that those further down in the organization will emulate them. There are three common habits you especially want to avoid: (1) Scattered priorities. The implications for an organization whose leadership team is poorly focused are serious: Wasted resources, wasted effort, and widespread confusion become the norm. (2) Unhealthy rivalry. Leadership teams must operate as a unified force. Shared goals must be accompanied by shared accountability. (3) Unproductive conflict. Speaking negatively behind one another’s backs, withholding honest perspectives, or vetoing decisions after they are made should be unacceptable. Continued here

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Why We Love to Hate HR…and What HR Can Do About It Complaints against HR, which are nothing new, have a cyclical quality. They’re driven largely by the business context. When companies are struggling with labor issues, HR is seen as a valued leadership partner. When things are smoother all around, managers wonder what the function is doing for them. Continued here

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Your time management won't work until you realize how little time you have Let us assume, dear reader, that you are young and healthy and lucky enough to live a total of 80 years. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Break it down into days and you get 29,200, which is such a large number that our brains tend to give up trying to process what it means. But divide 80 years into weeks, and you get 4,171. Now we're getting somewhere that sounds uncomfortably small, even for the longest-lived among us. (The current record holder, age 118, has lived less than 6,200 weeks — still a blink in the cosmic eye.) Continued here

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Instead of Laying Off 20 Percent of His Company, This CEO Made an Unusual Decision. It's a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence | Inc.com

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What Social Media Needs to Learn From Traditional Media  | WIRED On October 10, 1999, The Los Angeles Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine devoted entirely to the opening of the Staples Center arena in downtown LA. Apparently unbeknownst to the Times editorial staff, including the writers and editors who put the magazine together, the paper had struck a deal with the owners of the Staples Center to split the profits from the ads sold in the issue. Continued here

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Collaborative Overload Collaboration is taking over the workplace. According to data collected by the authors over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more. There is much to applaud about these developments—but when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Continued here

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How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity Many people believe that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, couldn’t disagree more. That notion, he says, is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs. Continued here

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How to Get a Runner’s High Without Running You’ve got your headphones on, favorite music blaring. You’re running alongside a scenic road, your steps falling in rhythm with the music. Each stride feels effortless, like you’re flying through air or walking on water. There’s this newfound energy, a second wind. All at once, your head feels clear, your entire being seems lighter, and any trace of pain or discomfort miraculously disappears. You’re in a groove, a rhythm, a flow, a zone. You don’t want to stop or come down. Continued here

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The Russian Family That Cut Itself Off From Civilization for More Than 40 Years | Mental Floss In 1978, four geologists were surveying for potential iron ore from a helicopter hovering above the mineral-rich, but ultimately uninhabitable, taiga forest of southern Siberia when the pilot spotted something out of the ordinary down below: a garden, unmistakably manmade. It was 150 miles away from the nearest glimpse of humanity and thousands of feet up a mountainside, where survival wasn’t just questionable—it was considered impossible. Continued here

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The surprising power of daily rituals - BBC Future When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the early 20th Century, he noted the elaborate preparations fishermen would make before setting out to sea. They would carefully paint their canoes with black, red and white paint, chanting spells as they did so. The vessel would be struck with wooden sticks, the bows stained with red ochre and crew members would adorn their arms with shells. Continued here

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Research: Informal Leadership Comes at a Cost Encouraging up-and-coming talent to take on informal leadership of a team or project is a great way to support both employees and their entire teams, but new research suggests that these duties can also take a toll on informal leaders’ job satisfaction and energy levels. The authors conducted a series of studies with students and professionals in the U.S. and Taiwan, and identified a significant inverse correlation between informal leadership and both energy levels and satisfaction rates. They also found that support from formal leaders can mitigate these effects: When people’s formal leaders were unsupportive, informal leaders reported energy levels 20% lower than non-leaders, but with enough support, the difference actually completely disappeared. Based on these findings, the authors offer strategies to help both formal managers and informal leaders reap the benefits of informal leadership while minimizing its negative side effects. Continued here

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Identify — and Hire — Lifelong Learners

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The Godmother of the Digital Image - The New York Times In the summer of 2010, while preparing for a long research trip to Madagascar, the mathematician Ingrid Daubechies bought a 50-inch flat-screen TV for her husband, so he could invite friends over to watch Premier League soccer games. After setting it up, the couple turned on a match, and while Daubechies’ husband, the mathematician and electrical engineer Robert Calderbank, became transfixed by the action, she got distracted. “Oh, wow!” she said. “They use wavelets!” Continued here

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The Real Reason Why You Sabotage Your Own Goals Recently, as I was clearing the dinner table, I asked my daughter if she could wash the dishes. "I was going to, Dad," she said. "But now that you've asked me to, I don't want to anymore." I should have known better. This was a classic example of psychological reactance. What is psychological reactance? Continued here

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Why Airlines, Cities, and Starbucks Need Remote Workers Back at the Office | Marker

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Scientists identify key conditions to set up a creative 'hot streak' Researchers use AI to reveal runs of artistic success are commonly preceded by an experimental phase.Whether it is the director Marta Meszaros or the artist Jackson Pollock, those in creative careers often experience a particular burst of success. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to reveal such "hot streaks" are commonly preceded by an experimental phase followed by a focus on one particular approach once the winning period has begun. The director Peter Jackson's career is, perhaps, a prime example: his hugely successful Lord of the Rings trilogy came after an eclectic range of movies such as the sci-fi comedy horror Bad Taste, the puppet film Meet the Feebles and the drama Heavenly Creatures. The new work builds on a previous study by the researchers that suggested many creatives find themselves on a roll at some point in their career, although when exactly this happens appears to be random. Continued here

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To Change the Way You Think, Change the Way You See Part of thinking differently is learning to see differently. We can learn to do that from various sources — people like Robert Taylor, who invented Softsoap after he saw how goopy bar soap became after a few uses; film directors like Jean-Luc Godard, who popularized the jump cut, literary critics such as Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote about “de-familiarization”; and even Sherlock Holmes, who made many of his discoveries while telling Dr. Watson (out loud, with great condescension) exactly what he was looking at. Seeing differently is a way of countering our built-in tendency to habituate, to sink in to the familiar way of seeing and experiencing. It’s also how the future is built. Continued here

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What are lucid dreams, and how does your brain become aware that it's dreaming? - ABC News "If you can enter a world within your own mind that feels just as real as waking reality, where you can do literally anything you want and it feels just as real as you're awake … I mean, that's a very desirable thing to be able to do," Dr Aspy says. Continued here

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5 labels with Indian roots, creating international buzz | Vogue India Fashion as we know it, is changing. When was the last time you discovered a brand on your Instagram feed? With the advent of social media and growing digital retailers, designers and brands have increased their reach multiple folds. Labels from far and wide are being seen, heard and found from the depths of social media today. With this arises a new generation of designers that are bridging cultures and blurring borders. Channeling their eternal inspiration—their Indian roots—these emerging designers around the world are creating a cultural dialogue between India and the world. At their core is a narrative of sustainability, gender inclusivity, representation and upliftment. This is a cultural collision we stan. Read on to see how these labels give voice to topics like gender fluidity, sustainability, and inclusivity while exploring their Indian heritage. Continued here

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Revolt of the NYC Delivery Workers - The Verge The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles. Continued here

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Don't Let Power Corrupt You Although power is essential to taking charge and driving change, it makes leaders vulnerable to two traps that can not only erode their own effectiveness but also undermine their team’s. Hubris—the excessive pride and self-confidence that can come with power—causes people to greatly overestimate their own abilities, while self-focus makes them less attentive to subordinates, diminishing their ability to lead successfully. The authors offer strategies for recognizing and avoiding these pitfalls. They outline how to cultivate humility and empathy as antidotes to hubris and self-focus, through actions such as establishing channels for honest input, creating visible reminders that success is fleeting, immersing oneself in other people’s jobs and experiences, and embedding interdependence in organizational systems. A balanced relationship with power can seldom be developed overnight, but in time, leaders who follow this advice will boost their own effectiveness and facilitate exceptional performance from their teams. Continued here

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'I'd rather be alone': the influencers pushing for 'relationship minimalism' | Relationships | The Guardian Ronald L Banks was just 21 when he stood in front of his closet containing 60 pairs of jeans, a huge collection of shoes, and a wardrobe full of T-shirts and thought, "this has to stop". He took out each item of clothing, examining them closely. Inspired by the Marie Kondo method, he asked himself the meaning that each held - and if he couldn't answer, he donated them. Continued here

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1 in 5 Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout While engagement certainly has its benefits, most of us will have noticed that, when we are highly engaged we can also experience something less than positive: high levels of stress. A recent survey conducted at Yale University examined the levels of engagement and burnout in over 1,000 U.S. employees. For some people, engagement is indeed a purely positive experience; 2 out of 5 employees reported high engagement and low burnout. However, the data also showed that one out of five employees reported both high engagement and high burnout. These engaged-exhausted workers were passionate about their work, but also had intensely mixed feelings about it - reporting high levels of interest, stress, and frustration. These apparent model employees also reported the highest turnover intentions in the sample - even higher than the unengaged group. Continued here

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Your Emails Are 36 Percent More Likely to Get a Reply If You End Them This Way. How you sign off on business emails seems like a small thing, but it has a big impact on their effect. As any salesperson, PR rep, or entrepreneur can tell you, the rate at which people open and respond to your emails can be the difference between accelerating your career and the pit of despair. No wonder we all spend so much time obsessing about subject lines, exact phrasings, and crafting the perfect ask. But according to research from email software company Boomerang, there's one part of your messages you're probably not putting enough thought into -- your closing. Most of us slap a pleasant-sounding "Best" or "Regards" on the end of our emails and call it a day. But when Boomerang trawled through 350,000 emails to see how particular closings impact whether a message gets a reply, they discovered how you sign off matters a surprising amount. Continued here

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Sequoia Capital's Doug Leone on Luck & Taking Risks "Always take risks. If something is working like a dream, break it. Taking risks is the only way to keep on going," shared Sequoia Capital Managing Partner Doug Leone during his Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on November 4. He also discussed the venture capital industry, what his team looks for in entrepreneurs, Sequoia's secrets of success in India and China and why things didn't work out in Brazil, among other things. Watch the video here | Read additional insights on Twitter

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Help Your Team Do More Without Burning Out Earlier in our careers, speed and energy are important components. But there comes a point where you actually can't speed up any more. You need to rely less on what you can personally achieve (your "ego-drive") and more on what you can achieve with others (your "co-drive"). Instead of being energetic, you need to become energizing. Instead of setting the pace, you need to teach others to self-propel. Instead of delegating, you need to allow people to congregate. As you shift from proving yourself to helping others perform, your key question is not "How can I push harder?" but "Where can I let go?" Continued here

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How to say the unsayable: 10 ways to approach a sensitive, daunting conversation. It's easy to put off tender discussions, but successfully addressing the most emotional subjects always starts with listening.There's a conversation you're avoiding. It feels important, the stakes are high, there are strong feelings involved and you are putting it off: "The time isn't right"; "I can't find the words"; "I don't want to get emotional". But delaying doesn't solve anything and anticipation is often far more uncomfortable than the conversation itself. Getting started might involve some awkward moments, but, after that, the situation is open for discussion and exploration. Tried and tested approaches can help to smooth the way. Here are 10 useful tips from my experience as a psychotherapist and doctor, developed while working in some of the highest-stakes discussions - the tender conversations taking place as people face the end of life. These principles apply whether you are chatting in person, over the phone or during a video call. You can even use them in text message conversations. Continued here

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Help Your Team Do More Without Burning Out Earlier in our careers, speed and energy are important components. But there comes a point where you actually can't speed up any more. You need to rely less on what you can personally achieve (your "ego-drive") and more on what you can achieve with others (your "co-drive"). Instead of being energetic, you need to become energizing. Instead of setting the pace, you need to teach others to self-propel. Instead of delegating, you need to allow people to congregate. As you shift from proving yourself to helping others perform, your key question is not "How can I push harder?" but "Where can I let go?" Continued here

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Stop Screening Job Candidates' Social Media Social media sites such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram have given many organizations a new hiring tool. According to a 2018 CareerBuilder survey, 70% of employers check out applicants' profiles as part of their screening process, and 54% have rejected applicants because of what they found. Social media sites offer a free, easily accessed portrait of what a candidate is really like, yielding a clearer idea of whether that person will succeed on the job - or so the theory goes. However, new research suggests that hiring officials who take this approach should use caution: Much of what they dig up is information they are ethically discouraged or legally prohibited from taking into account when evaluating candidates - and little of it is predictive of performance. Continued here

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Product placement is a $23 billion business and growing. Here's why brands keep betting on it Product placement is ubiquitous, but there are some tactics that work far better than others.In "The Variant," an episode from the Disney+ hit streaming show Loki, it's tough to miss the barrage of product placements, with fast-paced action and dialogue taking place in front of Charmin toilet paper, Dove soap, and Arm & Hammer deodorant. At one point, Loki barrels down an aisle with vacuum cleaners and fights off an opponent with a corded vacuum while iRobot vacuums are prominently featured on the shelf. As someone who studies such advertising techniques as product placements, I'm starting to notice them crop up more and more. With viewers migrating to streaming services and web videos, this trend makes sense. (Who actually watches the full ads that appear at the beginning of a YouTube video?) But not all product placements work as intended, and my research has shown that advertisers need to engage in a delicate dance with viewers to effectively influence them. Continued here

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How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy The essence of strategy formulation is coping with competition. Yet it is easy to view competition too narrowly and too pessimistically. While one sometimes hears executives complaining to the contrary, intense competition in an industry is neither coincidence nor bad luck. Moreover, in the fight for market share, competition is not manifested only in the other players. Rather, competition in an industry is rooted in its underlying economics, and competitive forces exist that go well beyond the established combatants in a particular industry. Customers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitute products are all competitors that may be more or less prominent or active depending on the industry. Continued here

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First GM, now Ford - why India is becoming a graveyard for world's auto giants India is a market for low-priced cars with low running costs, and global majors don't have the models to match Maruti and Hyundai's entry-level vehicles.If you leave out Hyundai, which has become a bigger car manufacturer than Ford and General Motors (by numbers, not value), the top four global makers of automobiles command barely 6 per cent of the Indian passenger vehicle market. Among them, General Motors (GM) left India four years ago. Ford's announced exit now will make little difference since it has less than 2 per cent of the market. And the global No. 1 (Volkswagen), together with its Skoda subsidiary, has barely 1 per cent. Of the big four, Toyota has been the most successful, but has barely 3 per cent of the market. And recall that even Toyota, while complaining of high taxes, announced a halt last year to further investment in India before quickly retracting. Regardless, it has stopped the production of two three-box models, the Etios and Corolla Altis. Honda on its part has stopped the production of the Civic and Accord. So why is India becoming a graveyard for the world's auto majors? One answer is that the Indian car market is no longer what it once promised to be, its global ranking expected to move from fourth to third - again, measured by vehicle numbers, not value. Instead, it has slipped to fifth (overtaken by Germany) because the market levelled off and then shrank for two years before recovering this financial year. This is part of the larger story about the loss of momentum in India's consumer markets. Continued here

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How Moderna, Home Depot, and others are succeeding with AI. When pharmaceutical company Moderna announced the first clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine, it was a proud moment but not a surprising one for Dave Johnson, the company's chief data and artificial intelligence officer. When Johnson joined the company in 2014, he helped put in place automated processes and AI algorithms to increase the number of small-scale messenger RNA (mRNA) needed to run clinical experiments. This groundwork contributed to Moderna releasing one of the first COVID-19 vaccines (using mRNA) even as the world had only started to understand the virus' threat. "The whole COVID vaccine development, we're immensely proud of the work that we've done there, and we're immensely proud of the superhuman effort that our people went through to bring it to market so quickly," Johnson said during a bonus episode of the MIT Sloan Management Review podcast "Me, Myself, and AI." Continued here

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Why Talented People Don't Use Their Strengths. Experts have long encouraged people to "play to their strengths." But based on my observations, this is easier said than done, because we often undervalue what we inherently do well. As a leader, the challenge is not only to spot talent but also to convince your people that you value their talents and that they should, too. Begin by identifying the strengths of each member of your team. You might ask them, "What compliments do you tend to dismiss?" since people often downplay what they do most easily. Once you've identified their key strengths, ask them, "Are you doing work that draws on your strengths? Are we taking on projects that make the most of your strengths?" If the answer is no, reassign people to new roles where their strengths will be put to better use. Continued here

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Try this technique to learn just about anything (even the complex stuff) To continuously expand your skill set and achieve mastery over new and complex concepts, it's crucial to have a framework for conquering puzzling problems.Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who made significant contributions in areas such as quantum mechanics and particle physics. He also pioneered quantum computing, introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He was a renowned lecturer who taught at Cornell and Caltech. Despite all of his accomplishments, Feynman thought of himself as "an ordinary person who studied hard." He believed that anyone was capable of learning with enough effort, even complex subjects like quantum mechanics and electromagnetic fields: Continued here

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Almost All of The World's Coal Is Now 'Unextractable', Scientists Warn The vast majority of the world's fossil fuels are effectively "unextractable" and must remain in the ground if we want even half a chance at meeting our climate goals, according to a new study.For nations like Indonesia and Australia, the world's leading exporters in coal, that will require abandoning 95 percent of their natural deposits come 2050, researchers at University College London have calculated. In that same time frame, Middle Eastern nations will have to leave all their coal reserves in the ground and the United States will have to leave 97 percent of its stores untouched. These are the regions that truly have their work cut out for them, but this is, of course, a team effort. Across the world, nearly 90 percent of all coal reserves will need to stay in the ground over the next three decades, including 76 percent in China and India. Any more removal than that and this combustible black rock could easily push global warming over the 1.5 degree Celsius goal, scientists warn. Continued here

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From deer and dogs to rats and mink, COVID-19 has spread to the animal world As SARS-CoV-2 spreads through some animal populations, animals may create a feedback loop as they re-infect humansFor six months out of the year, Dr. Jenessa Gjeltema has a very diverse and unusual roster of patients. The assistant professor of zoological medicine at University of California, Davis provides clinical work for hundreds and hundreds of animals at the Sacramento Zoo, from lions and giraffes to poison dart frogs and two-toed sloths. It doesn't take long to intuit that she cares very deeply for each animal, which is why she was concerned when a meerkat became very sick during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. "The meerkat presented with bloody nasal discharge coming out of its face and was in respiratory distress," Gjeltema recalled. "It was just at the start of the pandemic, when we were getting significant amounts of community spread in our local area, and I was very concerned because we didn't know as much as we do now about how the virus behaves in humans, much less all of the animals that were in our collection." Continued here