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Friday, February 17, 2023

The Ideas That Inspire Us



S6

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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S57
Tesla to recall 362,758 cars because Full Self Driving Beta is dangerous

On Thursday Tesla had to issue a recall for nearly 363,000 of its electric vehicles. At issue is the company's highly controversial "Full Self Driving" Beta, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes is dangerous.

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S16
How to Focus at Work When the World Is Falling Apart

On average, most of us will spend one third of our lives at work. That’s about 90,000 hours. It’s inevitable that we’ll go through difficult periods during that time. There will be days when we suffer setbacks: a romantic break up, a fallout with a family member, the death of a loved one. There will be moments when world events break our hearts: a series of murders targeting Asian women in New York, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the war in Ukraine, mass shootings, nationwide political polarization.

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S54
Microsoft officially blesses Parallels as a way to run Windows on M1, M2 Macs

In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion. The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn't technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions.

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S23
Delta Air Lines Just Made a Big Announcement That Should Make Delta Employees Quite Happy

If you want employees to do things to benefit your company, compensate them for it.

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S38
Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs

Taryn Foster believes Australia’s dying coral reefs can still be rescued—if she can speed up efforts to save them. For years, biologists like her have been lending a hand to reefs struggling with rising temperatures and ocean acidity: They’ve collected coral fragments and cut them into pieces to propagate and grow them in nurseries on land; they’ve crossbred species to build in heat-resistance; they’ve experimented with probiotics as a defense against deadly diseases.

But even transplanting thousands of these healthy and upgraded corals onto damaged reefs will not be enough to save entire ecosystems, Foster says. “We need some way of deploying corals at scale.” Sounds like a job for some robots.

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S52
Risk of diabetes rises 58% after COVID, even amid omicron, study finds

A person's odds of getting a new diabetes diagnosis were 58 percent higher in the months following a COVID-19 infection compared with prior to infection, even amid the era of omicron, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

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S53
Doobie-us: Pot ads come to Twitter amid cannabis industry collapse

Elon Musk’s fondness for 420 jokes is well-documented on Twitter, where the CEO loves responding to tweets with comments like “420 haha.” So it makes sense that Musk is well aware of opportunities for cannabis advertisers to reach Twitter users who like tweeting about marijuana as much as he does. It comes as no surprise, then, that Twitter announced yesterday that it would become the weed-friendliest social platform and start allowing some previously restricted cannabis ads to appear in Twitter feeds of users in states that have legalized weed.

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S3
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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S21


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S50
The creepiness of conversational AI has been put on full display

The first time Captain Kirk had a conversation with the ship’s computer was in 1966 during Episode 13 of Season 1 in the classic Star Trek series. Calling it a “conversation” is quite generous, for it was really a series of stiff questions from Kirk, each prompting an even stiffer response from the computer. There was no conversational back-and-forth, no questions from the AI asking for elaboration or context. And yet, for the last 57 years, computer scientists have not been able to exceed this stilted 1960s vision of human-machine dialog. Even platforms like Siri and Alexa, created by some of the world’s largest companies at great expense have not allowed for anything that feels like real-time natural conversation. 

But all that changed in 2022 when a new generation of conversational interfaces were revealed to the public, including ChatGPT from Open AI and LaMDA from Google. These systems, which use a generative AI technique known as Large Language Models (LLMs), represent a significant leap forward in conversational abilities. That’s because they not only provide coherent and relevant responses to specific human statements but can also keep track of the conversational context over time and probe for elaborations and clarifications. In other words, we have finally entered the age of natural computing in which we humans will hold meaningful and organically flowing conversations with software tools and applications.    

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S48
The first modern brain scan happened thanks to an eccentric engineer at the Beatles’ record company

The possibility of precious objects hidden in secret chambers can really ignite the imagination. In the mid-1960s, British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield pondered whether one could detect hidden areas in Egyptian pyramids by capturing cosmic rays that passed through unseen voids.

He held onto this idea over the years, which can be paraphrased as “looking inside a box without opening it.” Ultimately he did figure how to use high-energy rays to reveal what’s invisible to the naked eye. He invented a way to see inside the hard skull and get a picture of the soft brain inside.

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S2
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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S60
America’s Teenage Girls Are Not Okay

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

American teenagers—especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning—are “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. And everybody seems to think they know why.

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S55
Mini-robot shifts from solid to liquid to escape its cage--just like the T-1000

One of the many iconic moments in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was seeing the T-1000 briefly morph into a liquid to pass through the metal bars separating him from his target: a teenage John Connor. A team of engineers mimicked that famous scene with a soft robot in the shape of a Lego minifig. The robot "melts" into liquid form in response to a magnetic field, oozing between the bars of its cage before re-solidifying on the other side. The team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Matter.

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S18
Is Your Burnout From Too Much Work or Too Little Impact?

When it comes to burnout, it’s natural to assume that by lessening our workload we can fight the culprit. On the contrary, search has shown that when people are overworked but intellectually underutilized, they most frequently report feeling “exhausted.” Simply put, burnout isn’t necessarily a function of too much work; burnout is more often the result of too little impact. To increase your impact without adding more hours:

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S22
Report: Incoming CEOs Are Trending Younger, and More Women Are Taking on the Top Role

More Young, Female Leaders Are Becoming CEOs, Spencer Stuart Report

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S4
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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S70
How Loud Was NASA's Artemis 1 Launch?

As the United States prepares to once again land astronauts on the lunar surface, other countries are seeking to explore the moon, too, with rovers and landers

The Space Launch System rocket produced crackling sounds 40 million times louder than a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal in milk, researchers say

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S41
The Best Galaxy S23 Cases and Accessories

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

Samsung phones are among the best Android handsets, and the new Galaxy S23 series is no exception. They're priced to match, which is why it's important to protect your investment, whether you have the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, or Galaxy S23 Ultra. Sure, Samsung utilizes Corning's latest Gorilla Glass Victus 2 around the device, but glass is still glass, and a single drop could be all it takes to crack the screen. A case and screen protector don't guarantee a life free from scratches and cracks, but some protection is better than none. These are our favorite Galaxy S23 cases of the dozens we've tested. We've included accessories like chargers and cables to kit out your new phone.

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S8
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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S47
When headache medications cause your headaches

Billions of people worldwide suffer from either migraine or tension-type headaches, and when these painful episodes occur, those stricken often reach for over-the-counter painkillers like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and aspirin, or prescribed medications like triptans (migraine drugs) or even opiates. The relief these treatments provide is priceless to anyone regularly afflicted with head-splitting pain.

But in some cases, when used in excess, they can lead to a peculiar disorder called “medication overuse headache.” An international team of researchers detailed this often-debilitating condition in an article recently published in Nature Reviews Disease Primers.

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S5
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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S40
Which Eero Wi-Fi Mesh Router Should You Buy?

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The promise of reliable Wi-Fi without the need for any technical knowledge or tinkering has turned Eero into a household name. Amazon’s Eero systems are some of the best mesh Wi-Fi routers you can buy, especially if you’re trying to keep costs as low as possible. But with an expanding lineup of similar-looking devices, shopping for Eero mesh routers is confusing. Should you buy three? Do you need the latest Wi-Fi 6E? Are subscriptions essential?

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S68
The (Still) Unsettled Science of Masking

A new paper casts doubt on masks as a surefire COVID precaution—and people are already fighting about it.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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S25
Video Quick Take: Karin Gilges on Digital Transformation at Bosch - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ACCENTURE

Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. Bosch India, a German multinational engineering and technology company, recently partnered with the consulting company Accenture to conduct a large-scale program called the Digital Fluency Program, covering 4,000 employees across all functions.

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S14
A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself

Many of us dread the self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in-person: Present, past, and future. You can customize this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself.

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S7
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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S27
What the Most Productive Companies Do Differently

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute finds that U.S. productivity growth has slowed in the last 15 years to 1.4% annual growth (as compared to long-term rates of 2.2% since 1948). It also found striking variations in productivity among leading and lagging firms within each sector — a gap that is only widening. Across sectors and geographies, the most productive companies follow a playbook with these four elements: 1) They capture value from digitization; 2) They invest in intangibles (such as R&D or workforce capabilities); 3) They build a future-ready workforce; and 4) They take a systems approach. If more firms followed this playbook and brought the U.S. closer to 2.2% growth, it could be worth $10 trillion in cumulative GDP by 2030.

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S67
Buttons Are Bougie Now

The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offerings in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial.

Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes. Although the cheapest models of the Amazon Kindle line are simple touch-screen slabs, the $250 Oasis features dedicated “Page Forward”/“Back” buttons, while the $370 version of the Kindle Scribe comes with a “premium pen” for note-taking that itself has a button. Or consider the Apple Watch, among the most expensive smartwatches around: All models come with a button and knob on their right side just below the bezel—plus a second button for the more expensive Ultra model. The bargain-bin knockoffs sold on Amazon, by contrast, offer nothing but a screen on a strap. Speaking of which, I recently bought an Amazon-brand smart thermostat with a touch screen that nearly burned my house down. Perhaps a dial, like the one on the primo Google Nest, could have helped.

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S10
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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S51
Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY's hedged repair bill

When New York became the first state to pass a heavily modified right-to-repair bill late last year, it was apparent that lobbyists had succeeded in last-minute changes to the law's specifics. A new report from the online magazine Grist details the ways in which Gov. Kathy Hochul made changes identical to those proposed by a tech trade association.

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S17
Does the Term "POC" Help Us or Hurt Us?

Tech companies may boast of having diverse workspaces where “people of color” can thrive, but the data shows this is not true for every group. Data by race for 57 of the biggest tech companies revealed that in 67% of firms, Black people made up less than 5% of the workforce, Latino’s made up 8%, and the category labeled “all other races” was even less. This begs the question: In an industry that notoriously under-hires Black and Latino employees, is the term POC harmful or helpful?

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S11
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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S36
Chemical Health Risks from the Ohio Train Accident--What We Know So Far

A train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed recently in Ohio. Here’s what we know about the situation—and what we can’t know yet

About two weeks after a train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed just outside a small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and filled the skies with black smoke, questions abound over the health and environmental impacts of the disaster.

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S28
Video Quick Take: Accenture's Manish Chandra on Digital Fluency and Transformation - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ACCENTURE

Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. Accenture, a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital cloud and security, recently partnered with Bosch, a German multinational engineering and technology company, on Bosch’s Digital Fluency Program, to deliver a sustainable digital transformation. Today, I’m speaking with Manish Chandra, Managing Director of Strategy and Consulting, the Supply Chain and Operations Lead in India, and Zero-Based Transformation Lead for Growth Markets, to talk about Accenture’s role in Bosch’s Digital Fluency Program and the areas where digital can deliver sustainable value for automotive and industrial companies. Manish, thank you so much for being with us today.

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S65
The Contradictions of Ron DeSantis

He has ignited so many cultural confrontations that they’re difficult to keep track of, but he has acted most aggressively on education.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.

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S9
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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S37
UFO's Look A Lot More Like Spying Than Extraterrestrials

By shunting pilot observations aside, the Pentagon likely fostered a UFO fad and overlooked Chinese intelligence technology entering U.S. airspace

At latest count, Sidewinder missiles have burst both a wayward Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” floating over the U.S. and Canada. These suspected spies cast an unexpected spotlight on a significant national security issue: balloons and drones gathering intelligence for foreign powers.

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S15
How to Write a Cover Letter

Perhaps the most challenging part of the job application process is writing an effective cover letter. And yes, you should send one. Even if only one in two cover letters gets read, that’s still a 50% chance that including one could help you. Before you start writing, find out more about the company and the specific job you want. Next, catch the attention of the hiring manager or recruiter with a strong opening line. If you have a personal connection with the company or someone who works there, mention it in the first sentence or two, and try to address your letter to someone directly. Hiring managers are looking for people who can help them solve problems, so show that you know what the company does and some of the challenges it faces. Then explain how your experience has equipped you to meet those needs. If the online application doesn’t allow you to submit a cover letter, use the format you’re given to demonstrate your ability to do the job and your enthusiasm for the role.

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S45
3 independent proofs that quantum fields carry energy

One of the biggest questions that appears right at the intersection of physics and philosophy is as simple as it is puzzling: what is real? Is reality simply described by the particles that exist, atop a background of spacetime described by General Relativity? Is it fundamentally wrong to describe these entities as particles, and must we consider them as some sort of hybrid wave/particle/probability function: a more complete description of each “quantum” in our reality? Or are there fields, fundamentally, that underpin all of existence, where the “quanta” that we typically interact with are simply examples of excitations of those fields?

When quantum mechanics arrived on the scene, it brought with it the realization that quantities that were previously thought to be well-defined, like:

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S43
It's Always Sunny Inside a Generative AI Conference

Dave Rogenmoser, the chief executive of Jasper, said he didn't think many people would show up to his generative AI conference. It was all planned sort of last-minute, and the event was somehow scheduled for Valentine's Day. Surely people would rather be with their loved ones than in a conference hall along San Francisco's Embarcadero, even if the views of the bay just out the windows were jaw-slackening. 

But Jasper's "GenAI" event sold out. More than 1,200 people registered for the event, and by the time the lanyard crowd moseyed over from the coffee bar to the stage this past Tuesday, it was standing room only. The walls were soaked in pink and purple lighting, Jasper's colors, as subtle as a New Jersey wedding banquet. 

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S13
Beware a Culture of Busyness

Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how “hard” they’re working. Such thinking is misguided. It can cause organizations to overload their employees, base their incentives on the amount of time they put in, and excessively monitor their activities, all of which undermine productivity and efficiency, research shows. Meanwhile, reducing work to manageable levels can actually enhance them.

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S62
Judging Parents Online Is a National Sport

Whether they share their joys or their struggles, parents just can’t win on social media.

To be a parent on the internet is to be constantly accused of false advertising. We make parenting sound “so freaking horrible,” “messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying,” like it will “change everything, mostly for the worse.” Or is it that we make it look “so easy,” “aesthetically-pleasing” and “effortlessly beautiful,” “miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us”?

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S69
The Truth About Aliens Is Still Out There

The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence.

Believers in UFOs have gotten some tantalizing clues over the past few years. Those 2019 New York Times videos of zig-zagging, Tic Tac–like vessels with curious propulsion are always worth a rewatch. Likewise, the huge New Yorker feature by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously,” is pretty much required reading before you offer a qualified opinion on the issue. As my colleague Marina Koren wrote yesterday, UFO sightings are indeed getting more frequent, even if the data don’t necessarily scream ALIENS!

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S42
What Chatbot Bloopers Reveal About the Future of AI

Last week Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, was gleefully telling the world that the new AI-infused Bing search engine would “make Google dance” by challenging its long-standing dominance in web search. 

The new Bing uses a little thing called ChatGPT—you may have heard of it—which represents a significant leap in computers’ ability to handle language. Thanks to advances in machine learning, it essentially figured out for itself how to answer all kinds of questions by gobbling up trillions of lines of text, much of it scraped from the web. 

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S59
Susan Wojcicki, Googler No. 16 and longtime YouTube CEO, is stepping down

There are big changes at YouTube today as longtime CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her role and leaving Google. The YouTube Blog features "A personal update from Susan" that announces she'll be stepping down to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about." YouTube's new leader will be Neal Mohan, one of Wojcicki's longtime lieutenants who has worked at Google for 15 years.

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S1
Case Study: Should a Dollar Store Raise Prices to Keep Up with Inflation?

Discount retailer Dollar Bill’s has been struggling to maintain its margins over the past two years because of inflationary pressures, delays on imported goods, and decreased foot traffic. Now the board has asked CEO William Fisher Jr. to develop a strategy for raising prices. William worries that raising prices will hurt the company’s reputation and alienate customers, but he recognizes that something has to change.

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S44
Tesla's Recall Targets a 'Fundamental' Flaw

After years selling its controversial Full-Self Driving software upgrade for thousands of dollars, Tesla today issued a recall for every one of the nearly 363,000 vehicles using the feature. The move was prompted by a US government agency saying the software had in “rare circumstances” put drivers in danger and could increase the risk of a crash in everyday situations.

Recalls are common in the auto industry and mostly target particular parts or road situations. Tesla’s latest recall is sweeping, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration saying the Full Self-Driving software can break local traffic laws and act in a way the driver doesn’t expect in a grab bag of road situations.

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S61
How to Beat Trump in a Debate

Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in the coming months.

Let’s take as an example the first televised presidential debate of the 2020 election campaign. The Fox News host Chris Wallace invited Trump to deliver a two-minute statement. And he was off:

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S63
Who Poisoned Pablo Neruda?

A new report suggests what some have long suspected: One of the world’s most famous poets may have been murdered.

Repressive regimes tend to be unimaginative. They persecute and censor their opponents, herd them into concentration camps, torture and execute them in ways that rarely vary from country to country, era to era. As the outrages pile up, public opinion becomes exhausted.

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S24
Is the Tight Labor Market Due to Fewer Workers -- or Fewer Hours Worked?

The labor market remains incredibly tight in the U.S. which usually means fewer people are working. In this case, though, it’s mostly that workers are choosing to work fewer hours. Specifically, higher-earning men have chosen to cut back their hours worked perhaps because the pandemic made them reassess their priorities. That could signal a wider trend toward better work-life balance as more and more workers adjust their work lives to make a similar decision.

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S46
"Nothing" doesn't exist. Instead, there is "quantum foam"

What is nothing? This is a question that has bothered philosophers as far back as the ancient Greeks, where they debated the nature of the void. They had long discussions trying to determine whether nothing is something.

While the philosophical facets of this question pose some interest, the question is also one that the scientific community has addressed. (Big Think’s Dr. Ethan Siegel has an article describing the four definitions of “nothing.”)

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S39
Real Humans Chat About Chatbots

The unstoppable march of artificial intelligence carries on. In mere weeks, AI has oozed into nearly everything we interact with on the internet, from conversations to journalism to how we look stuff up online. It's even got Google scrambling to reclaim its spot on the search throne after Microsoft implemented its own AI tools to miraculously make Bing feel relevant again.

This week, we talk with WIRED senior writer Will Knight about how generative AI is changing the way we search for information and create content online, and whether we should actually be freaking out about our new robot overlords.

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S34
Why Snakes Have Two Clitorises and Other Mysteries of Female Animal Genitalia

Science has long overlooked the clitoris, but the organ’s diversity in the animal kingdom reveals its importance

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

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S20
7 Trends Every Business Owner Should Avoid in 2023

Business trends may be popular among the entrepreneurial crowd, but that doesn't mean they're all worth pursuing.

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S31
At Jupiter, JUICE and Clipper Will Work Together in Hunt for Life

A soon-to-launch European mission is the first of two spacecraft—the other from NASA—that will hunt for signs of habitability on Jupiter’s icy moons

If life exists elsewhere in our solar system, Jupiter’s large icy moons are a pretty good bet on where to find it.

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S64
How Google Ran Out of Ideas

The company thinks it’s an innovator. In fact, it’s an imitator—and not the best one, either.

Microsoft is making a desperate play. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses, the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theory that answering queries with automatically generated, falsehood-strewn paragraphs rather than links to webpages will be what finally persuades users to switch from Google Search.

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S26
Generative AI Can Help You Tailor Messaging to Specific Audiences

Can generative AI tools like ChatGPT help us communicate more effectively — and more empathically? Successful communication often relies on speaking to personality traits, cognitive styles, and identity-linked worldviews. With the right prompts, and familiarity with the right behavioral science concepts, leaders can use generative AI tools to speak more directly to specific audiences. Specifically, it’s possible to prompt these tools to consider loose culture vs. tight culture, psychological capital, framing, regulatory focus, locus of control, personality traits, and worldview.

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S49
Risk takers have "childlike" brains—and sometimes it's a benefit

As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States in 2020 and 2021, forcing millions to forego fulfilling activities — parties, sporting events, dinner outings with friends — a peculiar side effect emerged. Confined indoors, essentially forced to be risk averse, many amped up their risk-taking by turning to stock and cryptocurrency trading. 

Flush with generous pandemic recovery funds and enabled by the recent phenomenon of “free” trades at brokerages, as well as copious, easy-to-use apps permitting rapid-fire market bets, millions of ordinary people became part-time traders. Wall Street had come to Main Street.

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S29
Do people yet to be born have climate change rights?

Seven years ago, Sophie Howe became the world's first ever future generations commissioner. Tasked to be the guardian of the interests of future generations in Wales, she was made responsible for giving advice on long-term thinking to the Welsh government – including on climate.

It's a role that at once both makes sense and raises a host of difficult questions. How on Earth can someone manage to represent people who will be born in five, 50 or 100 years, for example? "I always say that I sort of represent the unborn but they don't talk to me very often," says Howe. "It's impossible for us to know exactly what future generations are going to need."

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S19
Christine vs. Work: How to Make a Presentation Deck That Doesn't Stink

When you land your first job, you’re eventually going to be asked to give a slide deck presentation — whether it’s to propose a new idea, summarize your accomplishments, or report out metrics on a project. But how do you deliver a slideshow that really blows people away? If you’re not a graphic designer or a superstar at presentation software (you know, Powerpoint and the like), what’s the best way to approach building a deck? And how do you succeed at putting on a good show?

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S35
Era of 'Free' COVID Vaccines, Test Kits and Treatments Is Ending. Who Will Pay the Tab Now?

When the U.S.’s national public health emergency for COVID expires on May 11, some costs will shift to the private sector and consumers

Time is running out for free-to-consumer covid vaccines, at-home test kits, and even some treatments.

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S58
Researchers unearth Windows backdoor that's unusually stealthy

Researchers have discovered a clever piece of malware that stealthily exfiltrates data and executes malicious code from Windows systems by abusing a feature in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).

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S56
App founder quits Google, says company doesn't serve users anymore

Here's some insight into what Google's problems are like lately, direct from an ex-employee. Praveen Seshadri, a founder whose company was acquired by Google, recently quit and dropped a scathing Medium post on his way out the door, detailing the problems he saw in his time at the company. Seshadri says Google is "trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews," and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they "get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year."

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S30
Heartbroken gamers mourn World of Warcraft's shutdown in China

Jiang Haoqing still remembers when he first started playing the multiplayer role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) as a high school student in 2011. Spellbound by an online world of mythical creatures and epic battles, he named his avatar “Waterage” — combining his last name Jiang, which means “river” in Chinese, and the character Stormrage from the Warcraft Universe. Since then, Waterage turned into a fixture of Jiang’s daily life. Once an after-school activity, WoW became a relaxing way to unwind at night, after Jiang had put his young daughters to bed.

At midnight, on January 23, Jiang’s Warcraft journey came to an abrupt end. American gaming company Activision Blizzard, the title owner of World of Warcraft, suspended services and shut down its servers in China, because of a licensing disagreement with their partner, the Chinese gaming giant NetEase. Given the difficulty of acquiring game-publishing permits in China, foreign gaming companies usually partner with a Chinese company to enter the local market. A dissolved partnership meant that all of Blizzard’s games in China — including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Hearthstone — were shut down. 

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S66
AI Search Is a Disaster

Microsoft and Google believe chatbots will change search forever. So far, there’s no reason to believe the hype.

Last week, both Microsoft and Google announced that they would incorporate AI programs similar to ChatGPT into their search engines—bids to transform how we find information online into a conversation with an omniscient chatbot. One problem: These language models are notorious mythomaniacs.

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S32
AI Chatbots Are Coming to Search Engines. Can You Trust Them?

Google, Microsoft and Baidu are using tools similar to ChatGPT to turn Internet searches into a conversation. How will this change humanity’s relationship with machines?

Months after the chatbot ChatGPT wowed the world with its uncanny ability to write essays and answer questions like a human, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to Internet search.

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S33
Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' May Be More Prone to Melting Than Expected

Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier is melting more slowly than previously thought but also may be more susceptible to even small amounts of ice loss

A pair of studies this week have shed new light on the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, one of Antarctica’s largest and most menacing stretches of ice. Often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier,” it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 2 feet all on its own.

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