iNsAnItY iNtEnSiFiEd: November 11, 2022 - A Brain-Inspired Chip Can Run AI With Far Less Energy

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A Brain-Inspired Chip Can Run AI With Far Less Energy | Quanta Magazine

Artificial intelligence algorithms cannot keep growing at their current pace. Algorithms like deep neural networks â€” which are loosely inspired by the brain, with multiple layers of artificial neurons linked to each other via numerical values called weights â€” get bigger every year. But these days, hardware improvements are no longer keeping pace with the enormous amount of memory and processing capacity required to run these massive algorithms. Soon, the size of AI algorithms may hit a wall.

And even if we could keep scaling up hardware to meet the demands of AI, there's another problem: running them on traditional computers wastes an enormous amount of energy. The high carbon emissions generated from running large AI algorithms is already harmful for the environment, and it will only get worse as the algorithms grow ever more gigantic.

One solution, called neuromorphic computing, takes inspiration from biological brains to create energy-efficient designs. Unfortunately, while these chips can outpace digital computers in conserving energy, they've lacked the computational power needed to run a sizable deep neural network. That's made them easy for AI researchers to overlook.

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Geometry Reveals the Tricks Behind Gerrymandering

Designing a perfect election system for multiple parties is impossible, even with mathematical tools. But if, by and large, there are only two dominant parties, as in the U.S., things should be fairly clear-cut. The party candidate with the most votes wins, right? Anyone who has followed U.S. presidential elections in recent years knows that the reality is different. One important factor is the actual shape of the voting districts. If cleverly designed, a party that is actually losing can still gain the majority of representatives—an issue that was by no means absent in the U.S. midterm elections.

Here’s a highly simplified example: suppose a state consists of 50 voters, 20 of whom vote for a blue party and 30 for a red party. Voters might live in a grid pattern, as in, say, some sections of Manhattan. Suppose there are 10 north-south avenues and five east-west streets. All the red voters live on the first two avenues, the ones furthest west. The blue voters reside on the other three avenues. Now the task is to divide the voters into five electoral districts of equal size.

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Global Human Population to Reach Eight Billion by November 15

While U.N. officials warn against "population alarmism," some experts say this milestone should be a wake-up call

The population of humans on Earth is expected toÂ reach eight billion by November 15, according to the United Nations.

The organization credits this rise to an increase in human lifespan enabled by improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. It also added that "high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries" have contributed to population growth.Â

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This Fish Eats Its Own Young

Some female cichlids counter the stress of protecting their offspring by munching on them, study suggests

In an extreme feat of parenting, some female cichlid fish carry their eggs and babies in their mouths for about two weeks. In this way, the young fish and fish-to-be are protected from predators in the outside world. The problem? Some get eaten by their own mothers.

A new study published Wednesday in Biology Letters not only reveals this cannibalism, but it suggests mother fish that eat their own young reduce cell damage caused by mouthbrooding, writes James Ashworth for London’s Natural History Museum.

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Anita Sarkeesian Hates Talking About Gamergate -- but She Has To

If you'd like to debate Anita Sarkeesian about whether or not male privilege exists, we'll make this easy for you: She's not interested. It's been a decade since her groundbreaking web series, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, kicked off a firestorm of discussion and criticism around the treatment of female characters. It's been almost as long since Sarkeesian found herself in the eye of the Gamergate storm, where she faced an onslaught of harassment for her efforts.

That's because, for Sarkeesian, historical context is important. She hears echoes of Gamergate in modern online harassment and disinformation campaigns, and to not point out those similarities would be remiss. Her new series, That Time When, is a map to the crossroads between pop culture and politics. Over its nine episodes she covers everything from Star Trek to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which she investigates in this week's episode. But it culminates with Gamergate, even if it's a period Sarkeesian would like to never revisit. "I didn't just live through this history, I was part of this history," she says. "I'm really tired of talking about it."

Hollywood, video games, TVâ€”lots of industries have evolved in the past decade. So have the politics of the day. People now understand media representation better than they did before. But there has also been fallout, like when Obi-Wan Kenobi star Moses Ingram started receiving racist messages on social media following the show's launch, or when Kiki Farms users organized stalking campaigns. These things have precedents. "Moments when pop culture and politics collide are about regressive, puritanical control over women's bodies, over culture, over challenges to the status quo or perceived progressive shifts," Sarkeesian says. That Time When, like Tropesâ€”like all of her workâ€”aims to make those connections.

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How to find great films to watch | Psyche Guides

Most people like movies. After all, 50 years before television became a dominant fixture in many homes, the cinema had established itself as the great popular medium of the 20th century. Some . myself included . go further, and refer to cinema as the previous century's greatest and most popular artform. Others, especially if their experience of movies has been limited to what's available at the local multiplex or what's on offer from Netflix or Disney, might raise an eyebrow at such a claim. Artform? Aren't movies just about entertainment, a distraction from the daily grind?

Well, no, not entirely.

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Women in the Workplace 2022

This is the eighth year of the Women in the Workplace report. Conducted in partnership with LeanIn.Org, this effort is the largest study of women in corporate America. This year, we collected information from 333 participating organizations employing more than 12 million people, surveyed more than 40,000 employees, and conducted interviews with women of diverse identities—including women of color, 1 1. Women of color include Black, Latina, Asian, Native American/American Indian/Indigenous or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, or mixed-race women. LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities—to get an intersectional look at biases and barriers.

This research revealed that we’re amid a “Great Breakup.” Women are demanding more from work, and they’re leaving their companies in unprecedented numbers to get it. Women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rates we’ve ever seen—and at higher rates than men in leadership. That could have serious implications for companies. Women are already significantly underrepresented in leadership. For years, fewer women have risen through the ranks because of the “broken rung” at the first step up to management. Now, companies are struggling to hold onto the relatively few women leaders they have. And all of these dynamics are even more pronounced for women of color.

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A defining moment: How Europe's CEOs can build resilience to grow in today's economic maelstrom

A confluence of crises and disruptions has darkened European skies. The energy crisis is already dire and could get worse. The war in Ukraine continues, an unabated humanitarian tragedy. The cost of life’s essentials has gone through the roof—prices in some countries have risen eightfold. Business signs are weakening. In July and August, purchasing managers’ indexes indicated contraction for the first time since early 2021. China, a key supplier and customer, is wrestling with its own economic problems. The effects of climate change are pronounced across the continent, with drought and extreme heat curtailing hydropower and even putting industrial production at risk. The energy crisis threatens to derail the net-zero transition. Semiconductor shortages, technological shortfalls, and labor shortages remain. The latest McKinsey scenarios, undertaken in partnership with Oxford Economics, suggest that European GDP will most likely contract overall in 2023 (Exhibit 1).

How will Europe’s business leaders respond? This is a defining moment for a generation of executives who have never been tested in quite this way. Yes, today’s leaders have faced down the global financial crisis, the euro crisis, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic. All were challenging in their way; each crisis called for ingenuity, grit, and determination. Many business leaders met these challenges exceptionally well. But today they face a unique confluence of crises that is of another magnitude. The playbooks of the past will be only moderately helpful.

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The global opportunity to accelerate Africa's sustainable future

Climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate sits down with former president of Ireland Mary Robinson for an enlightening, intergenerational conversation about the state of the climate crisis. Nakate paints a picture of life in her home country of Uganda -- which faces prolonged droughts, landslides and flooding stemming from climate change -- and clarifies the need for energy-rich, high-emitting nations to provide climate finance for Africa and accelerate the continent's sustainable future. "We cannot solve the problems that are happening right now with the very system that created them," Nakate says. "We need something new."

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This Personalized Crispr Therapy Is Designed to Attack Tumors

In a new step for Crispr, scientists have used the gene-editing tool to make personalized modifications to cancer patients’ immune cells to supercharge them against their tumors. In a small study published today in the journal Nature, a US team showed that the approach was feasible and safe, but was successful only in a handful of patients.

Cancer arises when cells acquire genetic mutations and divide uncontrollably. Every cancer is driven by a unique set of mutations, and each person has immune cells with receptors that can recognize these mutations and differentiate cancer cells from normal ones. But patients don’t often have enough immune cells with these receptors in order to mount an effective response against their cancer. In this Phase 1 trial, researchers identified each patient’s receptors, inserted them into immune cells lacking them, and grew more of these modified cells. Then, the bolstered immune cells were unleashed into each patient’s bloodstream to attack their tumor.

“What we’re trying to do is really harness every patient’s tumor-specific mutations,” says Stefanie Mandl, chief scientific officer at Pact Pharma and an author on the study. The company worked with experts from the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, and the nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle to design the personalized therapies.

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9 digital marketing tricks that nudge you toward overspending

Have you ever noticed the subtle ways your grocery store tries to get you to spend as much as possible? In the aisles, the most expensive products are strategically stocked at eye level. The staple goods are inconveniently located in the very back of the store, forcing you to walk past hundreds of products you probably don’t need just for a gallon of milk. And the most tempting products — glossy magazines and candies — line both sides of the checkout line.

These little psychological tricks are designed to get consumers to spend more — without even thinking about it.

Online stores have the same goal. Although they can’t use exactly the same strategies, digital marketers have devised a wide variety of ways to nudge customers toward overspending. The user-experience consultant Harry Brignull dubbed these strategies “dark patterns,” referring to subtle design features on websites that prey on our psychology to nudge us toward overspending.

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Scientists Translate the Oldest Sentence Written in the First Alphabet

The oldest sentence written in the world's first alphabet describes a problem that still plagues humans today: head lice. Carved into a tiny ivory comb, the words read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

The writing was inscribed in the language of the Canaanites, a group that lived between approximately 3500 and 1150 B.C.E. in what’s now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Researchers recently published the translation in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

“The inscription is very human,” co-author Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who helped direct the excavations, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “You have a comb, and on the comb, you have a wish to destroy lice on the hair and beard. Nowadays we have all these sprays and modern medicines and poisons. In the past they didn’t have those.”

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Watch Octopuses Throw Things at Each Other

Once the researchers pulled the cameras out of the water, they sat down to watch more than 20 hours of footage. “I call it octopus TV,” laughs co-author David Scheel, a behavioural ecologist at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage. One behaviour stood out: instances in which the eight-limbed creatures gathered shells, silt or algae with their arms — and then hurled them away, propelling them with water jetted from their siphon. And although some of the time it seemed that they were just throwing away debris or food leftovers, it did sometimes appear that they were throwing things at each other.

The team found clues that the octopuses were deliberately targeting one another. Throws that made contact with another octopus were relatively strong and often occurred when the thrower was displaying a uniform dark or medium body colour. Another clue: sometimes the octopuses on the receiving end ducked. Throws that made octo-contact were also more likely to be accomplished with a specific set of arms, and the projectile was more likely to be silt.

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How inflation is flipping the economic script, in seven charts

Every morning a new headline underscores growing economic concerns: Highest inflation since the 1970s. Central banks aggressively raising rates. Consumer sentiment at record lows. Commodity prices near all-time highs. Clearly inflation has, at a minimum, altered the economic mood, and potentially reset the path of global and national economies worldwide for years to come. McKinsey’s experts have examined many of the strategic implications of inflation. Here, we use the best and most recent publicly available data to offer seven charts illustrating inflation’s insidious progress.

Double trouble. In the past six months, inflation has far exceeded December 2021 expectations. In many countries, actual rates have doubled projections. European countries are particularly affected. For example, inflation in Lithuania is running at 15.5 percent annually, nearly five times the rate expected. Poland is at 11 percent and the United Kingdom at 9 percent, both well above projections. At 3 percent, Switzerland is an outlier. Asia is seeing a less severe change: Indian inflation is about 7 percent, only a bit above projections; and South Korea is at 5 percent. In China and Japan, inflation remains muted.

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A Guide to Achieving Net Zero Emissions

Many companies are falling short of their carbon pledges. A new guide defines the 4 A’s of what companies must do to deliver on net-zero commitments and avoid accusations of greenwashing. Ambition: Has the company set the right decarbonization targets? Action: Is your company prioritizing the most impactful climate actions? Advocacy: Is your company’s lobbying in line with your climate goals? And accountability: Is your company’s sustainability reporting clear and transparent?

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See Inside the Rarely Seen and Newly Reimagined CIA Museum

Off-limits to all but a few in-person visitors, the museum is starting to welcome the public, online at least

The CIA Museum has always been closed to the public; only the agency’s employees, their family members and other government officials can visit. Most of us will never see it in person—but online, the museum is beginning to allow civilians a peek inside its vast collection.

This year, in honor of the agency’s 75th anniversary, the CIA updated and restructured the physical museum space. Now, it is publishing a series of YouTube videos, which walk viewers through some of the displays. The agency is also publicizing its existing online catalog, which contains a selection of the museum’s artifacts.

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5 Ways Startups Can Prepare for a Recession

Startups face a unique challenges during economic downturns. They typically aren’t yet profitable and so are reliant on outside funding—and therefore are especially exposed when macroeconomic conditions change. To make it through a recession, startup CEOs should hit the road and talk to customers. They should also focus on preserving their company culture and retaining top employees. And they need to do whatever they can to extend their runways—including taking on a line of credit.

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Protest Is Risky at Egypt's Climate Talks. That Won't Stop Activists

In another world, Egyptian human rights activist and software developer Alaa Abd el-Fattah might have been attending the COP27 climate summit in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, on the shore of the Red Sea, which continues through next week—coinciding with el-Fattah’s 41st birthday. Instead, Egyptian security forces have imprisoned him multiple times over the past decade, following his role in the 2011 uprising that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. He has been on a hunger strike for about six months, and he began refusing water on Sunday.

El-Fattah is now one of many people unable to raise their voices during the United Nations’ annual gathering of climate negotiators. While thousands of protesters swarmed the COP26 gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, last year, and other high-profile international meetings have become the sites of activism and demonstrations, the Egyptian government has put prohibitive restrictions on would-be protesters.

Speaking out can be dangerous in Egypt, where human rights groups consider President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government to be an authoritarian regime that has presided over rampant human rights abuses, including mass arrests, the killing of protesters by security forces, and the use of military trials against civilians. His reign began in 2014 following a military coup that ousted the democratically elected, Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Mohamed Morsi. El-Sisi’s administration has a long history of stifling protests and has limited demonstrations during this climate summit, too. It has threatened protesters with fines and imprisonment, and protesters must register for permission just to hold a rally in a cordoned-off spot in the desert, separate from the conference.

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Tim Koller on the timeless truths of corporate finance

Tim Koller literally wrote the book on corporate finance as coauthor of the best-selling Valuation, now in its seventh edition. He also leads McKinsey on Finance, our journal for finance executives that just published its 20th-anniversary issue. This article combines two episodes of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast in which Koller reflects on the changes in the corporate finance and valuation landscape and the three urgent challenges facing executives today. This is an edited transcript of his conversation with David Schwartz, editor of McKinsey on Finance. For more discussions of the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

David Schwartz: You have been writing about value creation for decades. What would you tell the Tim Koller launching McKinsey on Finance in 2002 about value creation?

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The inconvenient truth of global warming in the 21st century

Back in 1990, with 110 years of temperature records behind them, the world’s top climate scientists convened to put together a report on the state of the Earth’s climate. Working collaboratively, the fruits of their labor became the very first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. It definitively showed:

Despite sounding the alarm, the past three decades have led to a far more dire situation. As identified in 2021’s 6th IPCC report, carbon dioxide concentrations now sit at 412 ppm, Earth’s average temperature is a full 1.3 °C (2.3 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and our global carbon emissions have increased to a new all-time high: nearing 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, up from 22 billion in 1990. The best time to act was long ago, but the second best time to act is now. Here are the truths of the matter that everyone who’s vested in following what the science shows should know.

1.) The Earth really has warmed since pre-industrial times, and the rate of warming is increasing with time.

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Hard choices: How Europe's start-ups can navigate the journey from centaur to unicorn

Earning a $100 million valuation is an exceptional achievement. In all of Europe, only about 850 start-ups reached this milestone between 2010 and 2017. Yet these “centaurs” have little time to celebrate. The venture capital (VC) firms that invest in them expect their value to reach $1 billion or more—and to do so quickly (Exhibit 1). Less than one in ten of them manage this feat in under four years.

Earlier this year, we surveyed and interviewed dozens of founders, top executives, and board members of 100 scale-stage European start-ups to understand the strategic decisions and best practices that differentiated the fastest growers from their peers (see sidebar “About our research”).

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When things get rocky, practice deliberate calm

In unusually difficult situations, a counterintuitive response to stress is what many leaders should aim for, say Jacqueline Brassey, McKinsey senior knowledge expert, and McKinsey senior partner Aaron De Smet as they talk about their new book, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World (HarperCollins, November 2022), on The McKinsey Podcast with host and executive editor Roberta Fusaro.

Roberta Fusaro: Over ten years ago, McKinsey senior partner Aaron De Smet was working so hard and traveling so much that he lost sight of dire circumstances at home.

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Geologic Activity Lets Microbes Mingle Deep Underground

Even a mile underground, our planet is teeming with microbes. Scientists long assumed that these subterranean microbial communities, which dwell in aquifers and geothermal wells, saw little ecological change. But recent research suggests that their populations are actually quite dynamic, shifting species composition within days rather than centuries—and geologic activity, such as when rocks split from compression or expansion, could be behind such changes.

Aquatic bacteria and viruses living below Earth’s surface are insulated from ecological disruptors such as solar radiation, changes in weather and meteorite strikes. With limited access to nutrients and sunlight, they tend to grow and evolve very slowly. Yuran Zhang, an energy resources engineer at Stanford University, was studying the flow of water between geothermal aquifers when she had the idea to use microbes as a tracer. Because pockets of subterranean water are usually isolated from one another, she and her team thought microbial DNA might act as a good “signature” to identify water from each aquifer. Through ongoing engineering work, “we [already] had access to those valuable samples” of water, Zhang says. “So it worked out.”

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Musk lays off Twitter Mexico staff. The government rejoices

Gerardo Fernández Noroña, a congressman for the Labor Party (PT), which is allied with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, tweeted on November 4: “When it comes to the workers, I regret the firings at @twittermexico; but the fact that they were snakes is undeniable.” He was referring to the layoffs of the company’s Mexico staff, which were part of Elon Musk’s new global strategy.

The jubilation about the layoffs on the platform was shared among other government officials and supporters, who have long been dismissive of social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, whose moderation practices the president once said were akin to the Inquisition’s. In 2021, after Donald Trump was banned from the platform, López Obrador proposed the creation of a national social media platform to “guarantee communications and freedom of speech” in the country.

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12 benefits of asynchronous learning

In today’s remote-first workplaces, the benefits of asynchronous learning are becoming increasingly evident, especially for organizations with global workforces. With employees dispersed across international time zones, live group training can be problematic. And bringing people together from great distances for in-person training can be a major logistical and financial undertaking.

Asynchronous learning is best understood for what it is not. It is not sitting in a classroom alongside other learners with an instructor leading a lecture. And it isn’t attending a scheduled webinar in real-time. But record a lecture or webinar and make it available for use by anyone in the organization, and it becomes asynchronous learning.

Asynchronous learning is essentially individuals learning on their own, without the direct intervention of an instructor or facilitator. Here are 12 ways asynchronous learning benefits both employees and organizations.

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The Reason for Meta's Massive Layoffs? Ghosts in the Machine

Remember Libra, Meta's ambitious plan to enter the cryptocurrency market? Or Lasso, Meta's ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? Alongside projects like Shops, Meta's ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook into e-ommerce giants; its podcast plans; Facebook Portal and a Meta smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch, they all failed.

In pursuit of becoming the everything platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has thrown a lot of stuff at the wall. Precious little of it has stuck, except for the headcount brought to work on these projects.

Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced mammoth layoffs at Meta: 11,000 people in allâ€”some 13 percent of the company and nearly three times the number let go by Twitter, which fired 50 percent of its workforce on November 4. He blamed his own decision to increase investments and an ad revenue crunch caused by Apple's decision to give users more control over how their personal information is used for advertising purposes.

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Russia's New Cyberwarfare in Ukraine Is Fast, Dirty, and Relentless

Since Russia launched its catastrophic full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, the cyberwar that it has long waged against its neighbor has entered a new era tooâ€”one in which Russia has at times seemed to be trying to determine the role of its hacking operations in the midst of a brutal, physical ground war. Now, according to the findings of a team of cybersecurity analysts and first responders, at least one Russian intelligence agency seems to have settled into a new set of cyberwarfare tactics: ones that allow for quicker intrusions, often breaching the same target multiple times within just months, and sometimes even maintaining stealthy access to Ukrainian networks while destroying as many as possible of the computers within them.

At the CyberwarCon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, today, analysts from the security firm Mandiant laid out a new set of tools and techniques that they say Russia's GRU military intelligence agency is using against targets in Ukraine, where the GRU's hackers have for years carried out many of the most aggressive and destructive cyberattacks in history. According to Mandiant analysts Gabby Roncone and John Wolfram, who say their findings are based on months of Mandiant's Ukrainian incident response cases, the GRU has shifted in particular to what they call "living on the edge." Instead of the phishing attacks that GRU hackers typically used in the past to steal victims' credentials or plant backdoors on unwitting users' computers inside target organizations, they're now targeting "edge" devices like firewalls, routers, and email servers, often exploiting vulnerabilities in those machines that give them more immediate access.

That shift, according to Roncone and Wolfram, has offered multiple advantages to the GRU. It's allowed the Russian military hackers to have far faster, more immediate effects, sometimes penetrating a target network, spreading their access to other machines on the network, and deploying data-destroying wiper malware just weeks later, compared to months in earlier operations. In some cases, it's enabled the hackers to penetrate the same small group of Ukrainian targets multiple times in quick succession for both wiper attacks and cyberespionage. And because the edge devices that give the GRU their footholds inside these networks aren't necessarily wiped in the agency's cyberattacks, hacking them has sometimes allowed the GRU to keep their access to a victim network even after carrying out a data-destroying operation.

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How reality is shaped by the speed of light

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has made me a busy guy. The amazing new pictures of galaxies at the edge of the Universe has led a couple of news organizations to keep flipping to my card on their rolodexes. (Yes, I know no one uses rolodexes anymore.) And almost every time I appear on a show, the hosts ask me about how we actually look back in time when we view these distant objects. I really love it when this topic comes up, because while it might seem like it pertains only to cosmology or astrophysics, it actually reflects a profound truth that everyone lives with, right here and now. That’s because you, me, and everyone else are all trapped in time.

When you look at a picture of a galaxy that is 75 million light-years away, you are not seeing it as it is right now, but as it was when that light you are seeing left it 75 million years ago. That means you are seeing that galaxy at a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and you were nothing but a dream in the tiny mind of the tiny mammals that existed back then.

I think everyone is familiar with this idea, and it is mind-blowing enough that everyone is happy to explore it again each time an image of a distant galaxy is released. Distance translates into time because the speed of light is finite. Therefore it always takes some time for light to cross the distance between a galaxy and your eye. A galaxy 75 million light-years away has had 75 million years to evolve since that light left and may no longer look like what we see in the image. That is incredible. (Actually, 75 million years is not enough time for galaxies to evolve much. Galaxies 10 billion light years distant are, however, another story).

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Has Trade with China Really Cost the U.S. Jobs?

How did trade with China affect the United States? In Washington, the consensus is that it cost Americans jobs. But that’s not necessarily the case. The authors review a series of research papers on the topic and document a more nuanced set of findings. Trade with China — the so-called “China Shock” — did cost some regions of the U.S. manufacturing jobs. But it may not have led to fewer jobs overall, as other studies found increased employment in services.

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Looking ahead to the next decade of accountability for care delivery

Author’s note: Since the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) released its ten-year strategy in October 2021, the agency has taken many actions to reach its objectives, including easing participation requirements in the redesigned ACO REACH (Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health) model to facilitate accelerated adoption, integrating health equity tools and measurement in its ACO models, and continuing multipayer alignment in its newest oncology model.

The McKinsey Center on US Health System Reform undertakes original research to help clients understand and navigate a complex, ever-evolving regulatory landscape. Drawing on our real-world industry expertise, proprietary research, and economic analysis, we help inform opportunities for value creation that emerge from changes in the regulatory environment.

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Amazon's New Robot Can Handle Most Items in the Everything Store

Amazon built an ecommerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliablyâ€”but a new robot called Sparrow could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines.

Sparrow is designed to pick out items piled in shelves or bins so they can be packed into orders for shipping to customers. That's one of the most difficult tasks in warehouse robotics because there are so many different objects, each with different shapes, textures, and malleability, that can be piled up haphazardly. Sparrow takes on that challenge by using machine learning and cameras to identify objects piled in a bin and plan how to grab one using a custom gripper with several suction tubes. Amazon demonstrated Sparrow for the first time today at the company's robotics manufacturing facility in Massachusetts.

Amazon is currently testing Sparrow at a facility in Texas where the robot is already sorting products for customer orders. The company says Sparrow can handle 65 percent of the more than 100 million items in its inventory. Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, says that range is the most impressive thing about the robot. "No one has the inventory that Amazon has," he says. Sparrow can grasp DVDs, socks, and stuffies, but still struggles with loose or complex packaging.

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Low-carb diets cause depression

When in a depressed mood, it is common for people to binge eat. In fact, people suffering from depression often find themselves snacking their way into eating disorders, which often further aggravates their depression. Clearly, there is some relationship between depression and diet.

There are many hypotheses for why depressed people eat a lot of carbs. One hypothesis suggests that carbohydrate-rich diets provide the brain with extra tryptophan, which is metabolized to produce serotonin, one of the “happy hormones.” Another hypothesis hints at the role played by the body’s stress response.

But scientists are still in the dark regarding causality. Are people with a carb-rich diet more prone to depression, or does depression make people eat a lot of carbohydrates? A new study published in the journal Human Behavior sheds light on this question. It has found that low-carb diets are not simply linked to depression, but actually cause depression.

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Russia's Sway Over Criminal Ransomware Gangs Is Coming Into Focus

Russia-based ransomware gangs are some of the most prolific and aggressive, in part thanks to an apparent safe harbor the Russian government extends to them. The Kremlin doesn't cooperate with international ransomware investigations and typically declines to prosecute cybercriminals operating in the country so long as they don't attack domestic targets. A long-standing question, though, is whether these financially motivated hackers ever receive directives from the Russian government and to what extent the gangs are connected to the Kremlin's offensive hacking. The answer is starting to become clearer.

New research presented at the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, today looks at the frequency and targeting of ransomware attacks against organizations based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and France in the lead-up to these countries' national elections. The findings suggest a loose but visible alignment between Russian government priorities and activities and ransomware attacks leading up to elections in the six countries.

The project analyzed a data set of over 4,000 ransomware attacks perpetrated against victims in 102 countries between May 2019 and May 2022. Led by Karen Nershi, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the analysis showed a statistically significant increase in ransomware attacks from Russia-based gangs against organizations in the six victim countries ahead of their national elections. These nations suffered the most total ransomware attacks per year in the data set, about three-quarters of all the attacks.

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How Cambodia's scam mills reel in new "cyber slave" workers

Linh says she and her colleagues worked at a fraudulent investment app operating clandestinely in Bavet, a Cambodian gambling town on the Vietnam border. The company was about to be raided by police, their boss warned them. He seemed shocked; he believed he’d maintained a close enough relationship with local authorities to avoid searches. But after a video of a worker beaten and lying motionless circulated on Facebook, Linh said, her boss thought it might have triggered the police.

Linh was trafficked into Cambodia two years ago, she told Rest of World, in an experience she described as “hell.” She said that since then, she’s worked in Bavet’s scam compounds: shadow businesses of online gambling and fraudulent apps tucked behind the town’s casinos, extorting victims based anywhere from the U.S. to neighboring Vietnam. They’re powered by a force of “cyber slaves” — many trafficked and detained under grueling conditions, but some there of their own accord.

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Here's why you should put your "calling" on hold to pursue a more "sensible" career

As a boy, Terry loved music and taught himself trombone, guitar and the tuba. Right through school and university he played in the evenings in jazz groups, musical theatre and marching bands. He started work as an accountant in his early twenties, but his wide social circle in the music world meant he was still out playing gigs every evening.

Even as his blossoming career began to take him around the world, he still found opportunities to indulge his passion. However, as time went on and his career took over, finding time for music became harder and harder. In the end, it petered out completely.

Similarly, Jenny was a gifted flautist and played with a national youth orchestra. But juggling her work as an administrator alongside her family made it hard for her to continue. For a while, she would take her children to summer music camps where they could play together. But eventually following her divorce and a sense that her music was becoming a bit “stale”, she stopped playing altogether and sold her flute. She didn’t play again for 18 years.

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