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Wednesday, January 11, 2023

How to Move Forward When You Feel Frozen



S3

How to Move Forward When You Feel Frozen

Fear is manifesting itself in a wide range of ways in corporate hallways and virtual channels. Alarm paralyzes us and leads to counterproductive behaviors. We postpone taking action because we’re afraid of making things worse. We focus our attention on short-term demands because we don’t want to confront the future.

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S2
Is Bad Onboarding Stifling Your New Senior Leaders?

Onboarding is traditionally an exercise in orienting new employees to the status quo: the existing people, rules, culture, norms, processes, procedures, and behaviors that they will need to be successful in their new job. But leaders today are brought into organizations to create change. The typical orientation process can stifle the new leader’s innovative spirit. To set up a new leader to create change, build their onboarding process around a specific near-term challenge, customize it around a particular question, or ask them to regularly report critical observations of what they learn to a group of stakeholders.

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S1
Life At Every Scale

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In the 1500s, a Belgian alchemist named Jan Baptist van Helmont planted a willow sapling in 200 pounds of earth. After five years of dousing the plant in water, the tree grew 34 times in size, but the soil’s mass remained nearly the same. “Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark, and roots have come up from water alone,” he wrote.

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S32
Work Insights from the World's Longest Happiness Study

It’s the start of a fresh year, and optimism is in the air. But if you want happiness to extend far beyond your New Year’s resolution, Robert Waldinger says you can take some inspiration from the longest-running study of happiness out there. He’s a psychiatrist who runs the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The longitudinal research has followed individuals and their families for nine decades. He shares what makes people happiest in the long run and how their work factors into that. Waldinger is the author of the new book The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

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S33
Managing Your Team's Emotional Dynamic

Collective emotion, when a group of people shares an emotion, is often stronger than a single individual feeling that same emotion alone. So, how can leaders manage emotions, particularly negative ones, from taking over a team? Four strategies from psychology — situation modification, shifting attention or creating distraction, reappraisal, and response modulation — can help bring down the temperature.

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S14
Navigating the Data Deluge - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM NTT DATA

In our increasingly digitized world, today’s most successful businesses are driven by data. They gather and analyze information from a myriad of sources, using what they learn to optimize operations, accelerate innovation, and make informed strategic decisions. Limitless opportunities to harness the power of data exist across the business spectrum, but perhaps no other industry can use it more meaningfully than the life sciences and health care sector.

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S18
How to Work for a Boss Who Has Unrealistic Expectations

It can be frustrating to work with a boss who has unrealistic expectations. Instead of just caving in or deciding it’s time to update your resume, there are a few approaches you can try to preserve your sanity and forge a stronger relationship with your boss. First, calm yourself so you can gather your thoughts and take measured, appropriate action, rather than reacting impulsively. You might try grounding techniques (also known as anchoring), which bring the overly reactive mind back to the body. Then, keep in mind that your boss and you presumably have shared goals. Showing that you’re on the same page may give you the leeway to explain some of the practical realities. You can acknowledge the requests without labeling them as unrealistic. Check to be sure you understand and are delivering on what your boss actually wants. Ask questions and lay out iterative plans that you feel are realistic. You might say something like, “Take a look at these scenarios, and let me know which aspects match your sense of things, and then I can build them out.” This approach can feel time-consuming, but it keeps you from straying far off-base and fosters a sense of partnership that will help you develop trust for the future.

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S12
How Maersk Designed a More Resilient Supply Chain

Maersk, the global shipping giant, created an innovation center in 2021 to help it contend not only with the supply disruptions caused by the pandemic but also long-term challenges such the need to decarbonize and further digitize its operations, deploy and leverage AI capabilities, and address endemic staffing and retention issues. In doing so, Maersk adhered to three principles, which other companies can employ to address supply chain problems as well as others.

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S9
From Prediction to Transformation

While the popular view is that insights are the key benefit of artificial intelligence, in truth AI creates value by improving the quality of decisions. The good news is, the opportunities for it to do that in business are countless. But because decisions in one area of an organization usually have an impact on decisions in other areas, introducing AI often entails redesigning whole systems. In that way, AI is similar to groundbreaking technologies of the past, like electricity, which initially was used only narrowly but ultimately transformed manufacturing.

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S4
Why Trust Makes Innovation Happen Webinar - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Mastercard

On September 28, in a live, interactive webinar, Alex Clemente of HBR-AS shared insights from this research about innovation and trust. He then discussed innovation challenges organizations face, and the importance of trust in transactions and purchasing decisions, with Ken Moore, chief innovation officer at Mastercard, and Kate Wilson, CEO of UN Foundation’s Digital Impact Alliance. The panel shared their perspectives on:

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S70
Controversy erupts over non-consensual AI mental health experiment

On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

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S8
What's Stopping You from Reinventing Your Career?

In the authors’ work teaching and coaching thousands of managers, they have identified four traps – self-sufficiency, overthinking, procrastination and searching for the answer – that prevent leaders from taking the first steps necessary for considering and exploring possible new versions of themselves for the future. The authors have found ways to help leaders recognize which traps they are falling into and start imagining a way out — largely inspired by design thinking principles such as rapid prototyping, making ideas visual, and getting quick feedback.

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S39
'Breakthrough' Obesity Drugs Are Effective but Raise Questions

Drugs that reduce excess weight linked to chronic health problems have shown striking results in trials and in practice

The hotel ballroom was packed to near capacity with scientists when Susan Yanovski arrived. Despite being 10 minutes early, she had to manoeuvre her way to one of the few empty seats near the back. The audience at the ObesityWeek conference in San Diego, California, in November 2022, was waiting to hear the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial.

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S20
If You're Not Outside Your Comfort Zone, You Won't Learn Anything

Public speaking. Attending a networking event. Confronting a coworker. These are uncomfortable tasks, but sometimes need to be performed for us to grow professionally. So how do you move out of your comfort zone? It’s simple: be honest about your excuses; recognize your strengths and take advantage of them; and finally, jump in. If you make a few mistakes along the way, don’t worry. It’s just another part of the learning process.

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S55
3 steps to cure your money anxiety

Talking about money, especially how much you earn, is often considered taboo. But talking about money can sometimes be a good thing.

It’s not exactly known why talking about money is taboo, but one hypothesis is that it highlights inequality or causes resentment.

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S6
How LinkedIn Redesigned Its HQ for Hybrid Work

More than half of people who can work remotely expect or prefer to do so at least part of the time. Organizations of all types must therefore make hybrid work more viable and sustainable. The design and construction of LinkedIn’s new headquarters offers three important lessons. First, the office has to be optimized for all use cases, from heads-down work to social gatherings. It also has to accommodate a more diverse workforce, accepting a more relaxed professionalism. Finally, those designing workspaces must constantly test, retest, and adapt them to suit changing needs.

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S51
A Widespread Logic Controller Flaw Raises the Specter of Stuxnet

In 2009, the computer worm Stuxnet crippled hundreds of centrifuges inside Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant by targeting the software running on the facility’s industrial computers, known as programmable logic controllers. The exploited PLCs were made by the automation giant Siemens and were all models from the company’s ubiquitous, long-running SIMATIC S7 product series. Now, more than a decade later, Siemens disclosed today that a vulnerability in its S7-1500 series could be exploited by an attacker to silently install malicious firmware on the devices and take full control of them.

The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at the embedded device security firm Red Balloon Security after they spent more than a year developing a methodology to evaluate the S7-1500’s firmware, which Siemens has encrypted for added protection since 2013. Firmware is the low-level code that coordinates hardware and software on a computer. The vulnerability stems from a basic error in how the cryptography is implemented, but Siemens can’t fix it through a software patch because the scheme is physically burned onto a dedicated ATECC CryptoAuthentication chip. As a result, Siemens says it has no fix planned for any of the 122 S7-1500 PLC models that the company lists as being vulnerable. 

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S27
There's a Lot to Be Learned From Bad Examples

The circus now known as Congress is providing entrepreneurs with a good model of how not to lead.

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S10
The Ideas That Inspire Us

Harvard Business Review published its first issue 100 years ago with a mission to help leaders put the best management thinking into practice. To mark our centennial, we asked eight current and former CEOs from some of the world’s top companies to describe the ideas that have propelled their own careers and organizations.

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S25
3 Ways to Strengthen Your Memory Recall

We rely on our phones to store contact details, virtual calendars to remind us of peoples birthdays, and with Google, we rarely need to stretch our memory muscles in the way we once did. But memory tricks can be a powerful tool for impressing clients, peers, and important stakeholder at your company — especially if you’re new to the workforce and trying to build a good reputation. From remembering names to retaining detailed knowledge of their wants and needs, having excellent recall indicates respect, attentiveness, and intelligence.

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S30
Today's Most Critical Workplace Challenges Are About Systems

Critical workplace issues — e.g., the problematic quality of leadership within organizations, the threats to employee mental health and well-being, and the lack of belonging and inclusion — are primarily attributable to systemic factors embedded in organizational cultures and processes. And yet, many of these and other issues are still mainly addressed on the individual level. Why do organizations keep investing in remedies that don’t work and have little chance of working? An automatic bias in how we perceive and explain the world is a likely culprit. The author explains how that “superbias” manifests — and what leaders can do to combat it in their organizations.

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S38
Here's What We Know about Stuttering

Stuttering is a complex neurodevelopmental condition, and learning about its causes will hopefully reduce the stigma surrounding it

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

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S15
Trust Gives Businesses in Australia and New Zealand a License to Innovate - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Mastercard

Innovation is a global imperative. In 2021, a survey for a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, “The Value of Experience: Customer Needs Top the Innovation Agenda,” found that the Covid-19 pandemic had accelerated innovation efforts, as 53% of executives said their organizations placed a high priority on innovation—up from 47% a year earlier—and 42% had responded by increasing their innovation budgets.

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S69
Meta ends support for original Quest headset after less than 4 years

While Quest headset owners will still be able to use the device and all available apps, they will no longer be able to "create or join a party," according to the email. Access to Meta's Horizon Home features will also be cut off on March 5, the company wrote. And while Meta will no longer be "delivering new features" to Quest 1 users, the company says it will continue to provide "critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024."

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S49
Netgear's Orbi 860 Series Mesh Router System Is Too Expensive

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If you need a mesh system capable of serving fast Wi-Fi to a large property, Netgear’s Orbi range should be on your list. But the 860 Series is a tri-band mesh system that sits awkwardly in Netgear’s lineup. It lacks the Wi-Fi 6E support you’ll find in the 960 Series, but it boasts a 10-Gbps Ethernet port—and a price hike over its predecessor. The cost isn’t quite as unpalatable as Netgear’s flagship mesh, but the 860 is still a whopping $1,100 for a three-pack. 

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S34
What parents get wrong about childhood 'milestones'

Scroll through parenting feeds on social media, and you'll soon come across so-called milestone cards: pastel-coloured cards marking a baby's first attempt at crawling, sitting up, or walking, along with their age. It's not just on social media that developmental milestones have become something to celebrate – or stress over. One recent poll, for example, found that around six in 10 US parents worried about their babies meeting their developmental milestones. But few knew what should happen, when.

Other parents may take the opposite approach and pay little attention to the timing of new skills, trusting that a child will develop at their own pace.

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S22
Becoming a Better Ally: Our Favorite Reads

But as time went on, I realized I didn’t feel included. Oftentimes, I was told I was too young to understand how things worked. Story ideas stemming from my experience as an African American or a woman were dismissed as not “mainstream” or “relevant,” and eventually, I felt discouraged, obstructed, and excluded. To take my mind off things, I did what lots of writers do. I wrote. During my downtime, I habitually worked on news stories, even though no one published them.

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S66
Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on COVID vaccine "consistent with the value"

Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent—from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose—according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

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S19
How to Control Your Emotions During a Difficult Conversation

When you’re in the middle of a conflict, it’s common to automatically enter into a “fight or flight” mentality. But it’s possible to interrupt this response and clear a path towards entering into a more productive discussion. Start by taking a deep breath and focusing on your body. Repeat a mantra to yourself such as “This isn’t about me,” “This will pass,” or “This is about the business.” And try to distance yourself from the negative emotion you’re feeling by labeling it: “He is so wrong about that and it’s making me mad becomes I’m having the thought that my coworker is wrong, and I’m feeling anger.” And don’t forget the value of taking a break. The more time you give yourself to process your emotions, the less intense they are likely to be.

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S37
It's winter, not doomsday

Words like “layoffs,” “shutdowns,” and “funding crunch” have become synonymous with the tech startup world in recent months. As data about startup funding in 2022 trickles in, these trends have only been reinforced.

In 2022, startup funding in India fell by 40% year on year, according to Inc42’s startup funding report. Pakistan’s startup funding fell to $15.15 million during Q4 of 2022, making it the worst quarter since Q1 of 2020, according to Data Darbar, a Pakistan-based data intelligence platform.

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S13
4 Techniques for Developing Strategy Insights

Strategies only work if you can figure out how to position your organization on the strategic factors most relevant to your organization’s key stakeholders. And doing that requires what we call insight, a recognition that no-one else has had about what your stakeholders really want. This article identifies four techniques to develop the insight you need to crack open your competitive advantage: introspection, looking at other perspectives, observing actual behavior, and looking at what happens in other domains.

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S64
Kang the Conqueror is shattering timelines in new Quantumania trailer

Marvel has been notably restrained about its marketing for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The film will be released in February, and we've had just a few sneak peeks and exactly one trailer over the last few months that told us very little about what to expect. Now we finally have the latest trailer, and it's an eye-popping visual extravaganza in which Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) faces off against Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) in an epic battle in the Quantum Realm. And we catch a glimpse of MODOK for good measure.

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S42
Double Disaster: Wildfires Followed by Extreme Rainfall Are More Likely with Climate Change

Editor’s Note (1/10/23): This story is being republished because the town of Montecito, Calif., was evacuated on Monday following concerns that torrential rains from atmospheric river storms might trigger deadly mudslides in the burn scar of the Thomas Fire like those that happened exactly five years prior.

At 3:30 A.M. on January 9, 2018, half an inch of rain poured down on the charred slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains in coastal southern California. The flames of the Thomas Fire—at the time the largest wildfire in state history—had swept through the previous month, leaving the soil and vegetation scorched and unable to soak up the onslaught of water. The destabilized ground gave way in a devastating landslide. Boulders crashed into houses in the town of Montecito, Calif., and a highway was buried under several feet of mud. The disaster killed 23 people and caused an estimate of around $200 million in damage.

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S26
Four of The Most Anticipated Business Books You Need to Read in 2023

A look at four highly anticipated titles to inspire a successful new year.

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S5
Tech Companies Innovate at the Edge. Legacy Companies Can Too.

Technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, and low and no code software design tools are changing how companies need to approach innovation. Specifically, they look to the edge of the organization where the business interfaces with its customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, and where small-scale innovations are happening. Companies should adopt three practices: 1) free up small teams to act independently, 2) feed these teams with the systems, resources, and tools they need, and 3) funnel the best innovations back through the company.

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S68
How will 2023 TVs address OLED's biggest flaws?

OLED TVs are the premium focal point of many modern-day home theaters, but they're still imperfect technology. As usual, last week's CES in Las Vegas featured a smattering of upcoming TVs, plenty of them OLED-based. We saw bigger sizes and increased competition among OLED panel makers; however, the most interesting development was claims of boosted peak brightness.

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S7
4 Types of Innovators Every Organization Needs

Every company strives to be innovative, but most are missing key ingredients. How can you identify which ingredients your organization needs — and which employee styles can fill in the gaps? The authors’ research distills four key innovation styles that can lead to success — generators, conceptualizers, optimizers, and implementors — and explains how common they are across sectors. Then, they outline a four-part framework for ensuring your team or organization has all four styles represented.

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S43
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Went Up Again in 2022

Though renewable energy surpassed coal generation for the first time in 60 years, causing U.S. power emissions to decline, emissions from buildings and transportation went up in 2022

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions grew by 1.3 percent in 2022, according to a report released Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.

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S11
How One Company Used Data to Create Sustainable Take-out Food Packaging

Digital technology has made it commercially possible for companies to offer an alternative, more sustainable, and deposit-free recyclable packaging system for take-out food. Suppliers rent their packages to restaurants and end users simply pick up their desired take-out and then return the packaging within a specified period free of charge. The restaurant cleans the used packaging and then reuses it. This article explores how one of the pioneers of this new approach, the German company Vytal, makes the new system work and offer five lessons from its experience.

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S35
Amazon finally authorized Pakistani sellers. A wave of scammers followed

In May 2021, Amazon fulfilled a long-standing demand of Pakistani businesses by allowing sellers from the country to list their products on its platform. The decision set off a frenzy. “People have gone crazy about selling on Amazon,” Islamabad-based seller Tahir Farooq, who sold goods worth $45 million on Amazon in 2022, told Rest of World. “Pakistanis were actually desperate. They were waiting for this opportunity.”

Within a year of its official launch, Pakistan became the country with the third-highest number of sellers registered on Amazon, behind only the U.S. and China, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

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S67
RIP Surface Duo--Microsoft reportedly gives up on the weird form factor

Windows Central's Zac Bowden is the go-to reporter for any Microsoft Surface rumors, and his latest report is that Surface Duo 3 is dead, or at least, a device in the same mold as the Surface Duo 1 and 2 has been canceled. There might someday be a Microsoft device branded "Surface Duo 3," but the Surface Duo form factor—a dual-screen device with a 360-degree hinge—is dead. The report says Microsoft is now working on a "more traditional foldable design, with a 180-degree hinge, internal foldable screen and external cover display"—so in the same vein as a Galaxy Fold.

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S50
The Best Laptop Backpacks for Work (and Life)

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The number of backpacks out there is endless, and they range in price from under $50 to several hundred dollars, but finding a life-changing bag isn't easy. Whether you're once again commuting to an office or school, working from coffee shops, or going on a weekend trip, a good backpack will carry your stuff and keep it organized. It's also easier on your neck and shoulders than an overstuffed purse, duffle, or briefcase.

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S57
Need to find your focus? Take some time to lose it.

Excerpted from Attention Span © 2023 by Gloria Mark, used with permission by Hanover Square Press.

Why do people lose focus and get distracted? It’s a common conception that people might be deeply focused on something, then along comes an interruption, and afterward, it’s hard to focus again, leading to boredom. But what if a person’s particular attentional state makes them susceptible to distractions?

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S23
How to Pitch Yourself to an Employer

Before becoming a news anchor, I received hundreds of rejection emails. There was one particular news station in Seattle that I wanted to intern for, and every summer, I dutifully filled out an online application and emailed my resume to their HR department only to be met with radio silence. When I realized this job-search strategy wasn’t working, I followed the popular internet advice and took more initiative, emailing individual reporters at the company to inquire about open roles.

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S29
How Much Social Media Use Is Too Much At Work?

And three other tricky workplace dilemmas.

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S53
Right-to-Repair Advocates Question John Deere's New Promises

Early this week, tractor maker John Deere said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural trade group, promising to make it easier for farmers to access tools and software needed to repair their own equipment.

The deal looked like a concession from the agricultural equipment maker, a major target of the right-to-repair movement, which campaigns for better access to documents and tools needed for people to repair their own gear. But right-to-repair advocates say that despite some good points, the agreement changes little, and farmers still face unfair barriers to maintaining equipment they own.

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S36
"Everybody is not an entrepreneur -- and that's okay"

India is among the world’s top three startup ecosystems. The country has witnessed a massive entrepreneurial boom, registering an eye-popping 15,400% rise in the number of startups — from just 471 in 2016 to 72,993 in mid-2022. This growth has been supported by several government initiatives, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship program called Startup India.

But the startup euphoria is also leading many entrepreneurs to ignore the risks and pitfalls of starting a business, Shrijay Sheth, founder of Legalwiz.in, which offers business professional services and legal compliance assistance to startups, told Rest of World. Globally, data shows that most startups don’t succeed — some estimates say that nine out of every 10 startups fail. Sheth, whose company has over 7,000 clients, says the Indian government can play a role in ensuring that people think twice before diving into this risky territory.

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S24
My Burnout Nearly Cost Me Everything. Now I Help Other Physicians Overcome It.

Seventy-six percent of physicians report moderate to severe burnout, with the risk significantly higher among female than male physicians. While the reasons behind these findings may vary depending on the impacted person, many are rooted in the fact that the culture of medicine is still male-dominated and has yet to adapt to support the needs of women who also disproportionately shoulder caregiving responsibilities at home. If you’re considering entering this field, what can you do to avoid burnout?

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S28
How to Negotiate Like an NYC Diamond Dealer

Expert Diamond dealer Mike Nekta shares some of his most effective techniques for negotiating.

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S40
Why COVID's XBB.1.5 'Kraken' Variant Is So Contagious

A new variant of the virus that causes COVID has mutations that make it more transmissible, but vaccines are still likely to protect against severe disease

A new, rapidly spreading variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, means a rise in new infections could be around the corner. And while it likely won’t skirt immunity completely, the variant could dodge some of our defenses thanks to a mutational boost.

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S44
Does a Woman’s Biological Clock Have a Price?

Research by Wharton’s Corinne Low examines the economic trade-offs women face in balancing career and family timing, and the need for more gender-equitable policies.

For every year a woman ages, she must earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive to potential romantic partners, according to new research from Wharton professor Corinne Low that calculates the economic trade-off for women between career and family investments.

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S41
Are Quantum Computers about to Break Online Privacy?

A new algorithm is probably not efficient enough to crack current encryption keys—but that’s no reason for complacency, researchers say

A team of researchers in China has unveiled a technique that—theoretically—could crack the most common methods used to ensure digital privacy, using a rudimentary quantum computer.

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S52
Astronomers May Have Just Spotted the Universe's First Galaxies

Scientists just announced that they've detected what might be some of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe, a tantalizing discovery made thanks to NASA's new flagship James Webb Space Telescope. 

"This is the first large sample of candidate galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope," astronomer Haojing Yan said yesterday at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Yan, who is at the University of Missouri, led the newly published study. Because the more sensitive JWST can see further into deep space than its predecessor Hubble does, it essentially sees further back in time. In the new catalog of 87 galaxies astronomers have spotted using it, some could date back to about 13.6 billion years ago, just 200 million years after the Big Bang. That's when the galaxies emitted the light that we're seeing today—although those systems of stars, gas, and dust would have changed dramatically since then, if they still exist at all.

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S46
What’s Ahead for the U.S. Housing Market?

After a year of rising mortgage rates and shortages in both supply and demand, the best option for prospective homebuyers and homeowners is to bide their time, says Wharton’s Susan Wachter.

The U.S. housing market last year bore the brunt of higher mortgage rates that rode spiraling inflation in the broader economy, but that will change this year, according to Susan Wachter, Wharton professor of real estate and finance.

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S31
How to Answer "Tell Me About a Time You Failed" in a Job Interview

While no one expects job candidates to have perfect records, you also don’t want to give prospective employers reasons for doubt. So how should you answer this common behaviorial interview question?: “Tell me about a time you failed.” In this piece, the author outlines eight tips and offers advice on what to say (and what to avoid). If you respond to the question in a way that highlights your resilience and commitment to learning and progress, your interviewer will likely remember how you prevailed, not how you failed.

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S45
How This Psychological Effect Skews Home Prices

People list homes at a premium to avoid selling a house for less than they bought it, thereby reducing market liquidity, according to research co-authored by Wharton's Lu Liu.

Everyone considers their home as an investment that gains value over time, and that explains why homeownership makes up most of household wealth both in the U.S. and globally. So it’s natural for homeowners who want to sell their house to expect more than what they paid for it — even if its current market value is lower.

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S47
The US Far Right Helped Stoke the Attack on Brazil's Congress

As rioters stormed government buildings in Brazil's capital, Brasilia, over the weekend, Leticía Cesarino, a professor of anthropology at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, watched a YouTube livestream by Brazilian right-wing influencer DiDi Red Pill. On the stream, the former reality TV participant filmed a mob pushing past a police line protecting Brazil's Congress, and then into the building itself. The video stayed up for hours before being taken down. DiDi Red Pill's account is still active. 

For months, researchers and advocates have warned that Brazil was poised for its own version of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol should the now former president Jair Bolsonaro lose his reelection bid in October. Now that an attack on Brazil's Congress has come to pass, those same researchers are accusing tech platforms—especially YouTube and Meta—of failing to stem the flow of dangerous disinformation. Those platforms are propagating extreme views held by the US far right across the globe, people tracking developments in Brazil say.

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S65
FCC's new broadband map greatly overstates actual coverage, senators say

Nevada's US senators say the Federal Communications Commission's new, more detailed broadband maps have tens of thousands of mistakes in their state alone.

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S54
JWST's "most distant galaxies" might be fooling us all

Somewhere out there, in the distant recesses of the expanding Universe, is the farthest galaxy we’re capable of seeing. The farther away an object is, the more time it takes light to travel through the Universe to reach us. As we look to greater and greater distances, we’re seeing objects as they were farther and farther back in time: closer back toward the start of the hot Big Bang. The Universe, because it was born hot, dense, and relatively uniform, requires lots of time — hundreds of millions of years, at least — for those first galaxies to form; beyond that, there’s nothing to see.

We’ve known there needed to be galaxies out there beyond the limits of what Hubble was capable of seeing, and the JWST was designed with precisely the specifications needed to find what Hubble cannot. Even in the very first science image released by JWST scientists, showcasing the gravitationally lensed galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, a large number of objects that had all the properties an ultra-distant one would have were identified, despite taking up just a tiny region of the sky. If all of these ultra-distant galaxy candidates were real, we’d have too many of them too early, forcing us to rethink how galaxies begin forming within the Universe. But we might be fooling ourselves completely, and we won’t know for sure with only our current data. Here’s why.

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S48
What This Fearsome Weapon Reveals About Early Americans

Nearly 16,000 years ago, Canada was covered by great ice sheets, the type you’d find today in Greenland. Any humans heading north from the present-day United States would have seen “a very dramatic transition in the landscape,” says Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University. “As you move north through Idaho and Washington, you would have come to a wall of ice.” 

It was all very Game of Thrones, only instead of a frosty wall holding back an army of the dead, this ice blocked some of the tributaries that would normally flow to the Columbia River. Periodically, though, that water would break through, releasing the equivalent of one of the smaller Great Lakes. “So it caused these catastrophic floods to surge across the landscape in the interior Northwest,” says Davis.

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S61
Machu Picchu has changed Peru — for better and for worse

Counted among the New Seven Wonders of the World, Machu Picchu is one of the most visited tourist destinations on Earth. For centuries, however, the existence of the abandoned Inca city was known only to a small number of Andean villages. It was “rediscovered” in 1911 by an American named Hiram Bingham. Bingham, a politician and explorer, originally ventured into Peru in search of Vilcabamba, the fabled stronghold from which the Incas made their last stand against the Spanish Empire.

Bingham never found Vilcabamba, but he did find Machu Picchu. The ruined city, hidden between the mountaintops, consisted of more than 150 buildings, all of which have been incredibly well-preserved. Because the Incas did not have a written language, it’s difficult to say why Machu Picchu was originally constructed. In fact, we don’t even know what the Incas themselves used to call it; the name “Machu Picchu” — Quechua for “old peak” — refers not to the city itself but to the mountain on which it rests.

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New physics? Ultra-precise measurement in particle physics confounds scientists

Modern physics is in an unsettling state. The Standard Model is the name of the best theory ever devised to explain subatomic physics, and it is wildly successful, with many measurements agreeing extremely well with predictions. However, there remain some very big mysteries. For instance, current theory cannot explain why antimatter isn’t observed in nature, nor can it provide an explanation for dark matter or dark energy. So, it is clear that the Standard Model is incomplete.

Despite decades of experimentation using large particle accelerators, researchers have not found any discrepancy that points them in a promising direction. However, particle accelerators are not the only way to study the laws of nature. Other scientists use tabletop experiments to measure fundamental constants extremely precisely, hoping to find disagreements between predictions and measurements that will allow scientists to develop better theories. 

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S58
Your circadian rhythm influences how well your medication works

All living organisms on Earth are exposed to a 24-hour day-night cycle. This cycle is the reason why people rest during the darkness of night and are active during the light of day. Consequently, all human body functions also follow this daily rhythm, and the timing of behaviors like exercise or food intake can significantly influence your health. For example, eating at night can lead to weight gain over time because while daytime food intake is used for activities, food intake at night leads to increased fat storage because the body expects to be at rest.

When you take your medications is also influenced by your circadian rhythm. Many drug targets in the body follow a 24-hour cycle. This means that the specific proteins a drug is designed to modify can react differently to the medication over the course of a 24-hour time period. Because how the body responds to a medication can differ depending on whether it is taken during the day or at night, it logically follows that taking medications at specific times could help increase their effectiveness and reduce unwanted side effects.

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Report: Apple plans to use its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in future iPhones

For years now, Apple has wanted to replicate its success in processors with its own in-house cellular modems. The company spent $1 billion to buy Intel's modem technology in 2019, and since then the company has perennially been just a year or two away from replacing Qualcomm's modems in new iPhones (alleged 2021 and 2022 timelines have come and gone, and Qualcomm seems to think that 2023 won't be the year either).

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S60
If we live in a capitalist world, why is it taboo to talk about money?

From weekly episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians to the outrageously expensive costumes and jewelry displayed at the MET Gala, mainstream media is full of reminders that our culture mostly revolves around money and consumerism. But while we are taught from a young age that one of our primary goals in life is to amass as much wealth as possible, talking about our own income with other people is considered inappropriate. 

Before we discuss how this blatant contradiction came into being, it’s important to recognize that the so-called “money taboo” is a bit more nuanced than we tend to give it credit for. As Joe Pinsker wrote in The Atlantic, it’s okay to ask somebody how much they spent on lunch, but not how much they set aside for their retirement. Both timeliness and size, it appears, help determine whether the purchase in question is suitable for conversation. 

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S62
A humble request for more weird Nintendo Switch controllers

Nyxi's product page makes a lot out of the Wizard's special features, including "adjustable turbo and mapping functions," light-up face buttons, and Hall Effect joysticks that they promise will "never develop drift in a lifetime." But it's the unique GameCube-style button layout that caught our eye, complete with a huge, central green A button orbited by weird, bean-shaped X and Y buttons and a tiny auxiliary B button.

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S59
What's better than maps or stamps? Maps on stamps!

What’s better than maps or stamps? Maps on stamps! Call it a peanut butter-meets-jelly moment — when cartophiles and philatelists discover they love the distinct flavor of their disciplines overlapping.

There’s even a club for people who have bitten into this particular nerd sandwich: the CartoPhilatelic Society. They have been around since 1955, but they’re still a lively bunch, with plenty of publications, projects, and events on the calendar.

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