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Friday, March 10, 2023

For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost



S3

For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost

According to recent reports, women-led startups receive less than 3% of all VC investments. In response, many leaders have advocated for getting women more involved in venture financing, since studies have shown that female investors are more likely than their male counterparts to invest in female founders. However, the authors’ new research suggests that support from female investors may actually be a mixed blessing, because it can make it harder for female founders to raise additional rounds of financing. Through an analysis of more than 2,000 venture-backed startups, the authors found that women-led firms whose first round was raised exclusively from female VCs were two times less likely to raise a second round. This is because of an effect known as attribution bias: When people see that a female founder received funding from a male investor, they assume it’s because she is competent and her startup is strong. But if the same founder only has female investors, then people are more likely to assume that her success is due to her gender, rather than her competence. As such, the authors argue that while there are certainly benefits to raising capital from other women, female founders should consider the risks to their long-term success — and do what they can to ensure a more diverse cap table from the start.



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S1
For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost

According to recent reports, women-led startups receive less than 3% of all VC investments. In response, many leaders have advocated for getting women more involved in venture financing, since studies have shown that female investors are more likely than their male counterparts to invest in female founders. However, the authors’ new research suggests that support from female investors may actually be a mixed blessing, because it can make it harder for female founders to raise additional rounds of financing. Through an analysis of more than 2,000 venture-backed startups, the authors found that women-led firms whose first round was raised exclusively from female VCs were two times less likely to raise a second round. This is because of an effect known as attribution bias: When people see that a female founder received funding from a male investor, they assume it’s because she is competent and her startup is strong. But if the same founder only has female investors, then people are more likely to assume that her success is due to her gender, rather than her competence. As such, the authors argue that while there are certainly benefits to raising capital from other women, female founders should consider the risks to their long-term success — and do what they can to ensure a more diverse cap table from the start.



Continued here




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S2
Strategy for Start-ups

In their haste to get to market first, write Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern, entrepreneurs often run with the first plausible strategy they identify. They can improve their chances of picking the right path by investigating four generic go-to-market strategies and choosing a version that aligns most closely with their founding values and motivations. The authors provide a framework, which they call the entrepreneurial strategy compass, for doing so.



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S4
How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy

In order to realize AI’s giant potential, CMOs need to have a good grasp of the various kinds of applications available and how they may evolve. This article guides marketing executives through the current state of AI and presents a framework that will help them classify their existing projects and plan the effective rollout of future ones. It categorizes AI along two dimensions: intelligence level and whether it stands alone or is part of a broader platform. Simple stand-alone task-automation apps are a good place to start. But advanced, integrated apps that incorporate machine learning have the greatest potential to create value, so as firms build their capabilities, they should move toward those technologies.



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S5
Validating Product-Market Fit in the Real World

To test new products, most companies rely on creating “minimum viable products” and testing customer feedback, or conducting focus groups or marketing surveys. There’s another method companies should try: “heat-testing,” or testing consumer reaction to online advertisements. Heat-testing is revolutionary because it takes place in the real world. Unlike focus groups or surveys, which rely on what consumers say, people who click or like an ad are demonstrating actual behavior and interest, which can be a more powerful form of feedback.



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S6
Marico's Chairman on Innovating Across Every Part of the Business

When the author launched what would become Marico as a division within his family’s business, Bombay Oil, it was with product innovation: Instead of selling edible oils in bulk to other businesses, it would sell in smaller, branded packages directly to consumers. Eventually the division became a separate entity, which is now one of India’s largest homegrown CPG companies. Its growth has depended on constant innovation—around not just products, packaging, and pricing but also supply chain, talent management, and business models. Over the past decade Marico has branched out into services with its Kaya skin-care spas, pioneered the use of premium hair oils, and added savory oats to Indian diets. Through the Marico Innovation Foundation, Mariwala also promotes innovative thinking outside the company, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs in their efforts to scale up new ideas. The key to doing that well, he says, is to be ever curious about customer needs, to create a flat hierarchy that rewards risk-taking, to learn from every failure, and to constantly prototype, experiment, refine, and retest.



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S7
Understanding the Power of Intrinsic Motivation

At some point, we all are assigned to work that we find tedious and unchallenging. If we don’t figure out how to turn these tasks into interesting and challenging problems to solve, we’ll struggle to complete tasks in a timely and reliable manner, sabotaging our own success and growth at work. One skill that can help you do this is intrinsic motivation, or the incentive you feel to complete a task simply because you find it interesting or enjoyable. Learning how to harness this skill early in your career will help you build the resilience you need to reach your goals in any field. Here’s how to get started.



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S8
Is Remote Work Right for You?

Studies have shown that younger workers have a “work-to-live” attitude — not the other way around — and prize employee benefits that support wellness and inclusivity. What if you’re among them and considering a remote role? Some introspection can help you figure out if working remotely would suit you. Ask yourself:



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S9
My Secret, Not My Stutter, Was Limiting My Life

It’s your first day on the job at a new company and you are a little bit nervous. The environment is unfamiliar. You don’t know what to expect. Your main goal is to make a great a first impression, hit the ground running, and let your coworkers know you are smart, easy to work with, and a good addition to their team.



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S10
How I Manage My Social Anxiety at Work

Do you feel like you’re constantly being observed and judged in social situations? This debilitating feeling is called social anxiety and one in 14 people in the world deal with it. In this personal essay, Ascend editor Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar speaks with psychologist Ellen Hendriksen to understand what social anxiety is and how to cope with it.



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S11
Christine vs. Work: How to Be More Productive

Innovation Editor Christine Liu test-drove a handful of promising productivity methods: the classic Pomodoro Technique, and two online platforms — Caveday and Focusmate. Then she talked to productivity expert Chris Bailey, author of The Productivity Project, about what successful methods have in common, how to best manage your time, and what “being productive” even means.



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S12
Understanding the Power of Intrinsic Motivation

At some point, we all are assigned to work that we find tedious and unchallenging. If we don’t figure out how to turn these tasks into interesting and challenging problems to solve, we’ll struggle to complete tasks in a timely and reliable manner, sabotaging our own success and growth at work. One skill that can help you do this is intrinsic motivation, or the incentive you feel to complete a task simply because you find it interesting or enjoyable. Learning how to harness this skill early in your career will help you build the resilience you need to reach your goals in any field. Here’s how to get started.



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S13
This Investor Wants to Help Entrepreneurs Look Into the Ugly

Katie Shea of Divergent Capital says that, as an investor, she wants to be there for all the ups and downs.

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S14
27 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said the Best Employees Focus on Content, Not Process. Research Shows He Was Right

According to the Apple co-founder, the best employees are also a pain in the butt to manage.

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S15
Employees Use Salary Transparency Laws Just as Companies Feared and It Is Fabulous

A UX designer saw a job posting at her company for the same job she does, at more money. She applied.

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S16
5 Reasons Why Women Make Outstanding Leaders

Female leaders bring skills, different perspectives, and innovative ideas to the table; when combined, these foster future-focused, more resilient companies.

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S17
Collaboration Is broken. Here’s how to fix it.

More collaboration? Try the right collaboration.

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S18
Scaling Your Business Means Taking Risks. Here’s How to Make Sure Yours Are Calculated

To maximize your chances of success, make sure the risks you take are the right ones.

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S19
3 Strategies Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Use to Build High-Performing Teams

Use these strategies to supercharge your team's development and growth.

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S20
How to Overcome Remote Work Loneliness

Fortunately, there are ways to make remote working more fun and productive.

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S22
Join the List: Applications Now Open for the 2023 Inc. 5000

Claiming a spot on Inc.'s prestigious annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America is a major accomplishment for any growing business. Here's how to apply.

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S23
Research: Where Employees Think Companies' DEIB Efforts Are Failing

Two new surveys from Gallup, each conducted in the spring of 2022, reveal stark differences in how well employees and HR leaders say their organizations are doing when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. While 84% of CHROs say their organizations are increasing investment in DEIB, only 31% of employees say their organization is committed to improving racial justice or equity in their workplace. To make progress, leaders must understand employees’ core DEIB needs — and where alignment is lacking. This article outlines 10 needs employees say are not being met, and offers strategies to help organizations address the disconnect.



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S24
3 Core Principles of Digital Customer Experience

Successful businesses focus on three core principles of their customer experience: They put the digital experience in the business context. They recognize that customers are not created equal. And they make zero-based decisions. Continuous improvement is fine, but it’s important to be willing to think from first principles, and to re-examine and justify what you are doing and what you could do differently. This helps ensure that the digital roadmap is prioritized and focused on the highest impact actions.



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S25
Lessons on Customer Engagement from Fan Controlled Football

Through blockchain technology that enables direct participation, the Fan Controlled Football league joins the physical sports and digital worlds to create a new, exciting fan experience. In doing so, the decentralized nature of the blockchain ensures that the FCF platform enables tamper-proof tracking of fan tokens used to participate in decision-making and other league-related activities. NFT holders, for example, can transact with each other and design and sell items in the team store. They have a blockchain-powered say in decisions about FCF such as league rules, game mechanics and expansion plans, and get early access to team share sales to purchase real ownership shares. This article explores how other companies can better engage consumers through Web3 technology.



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S26
How light pollution disrupts plants' senses

One summer night in 2014, a group of biologists and ecologists staked out several streetlamp-lit suburban areas just outside Wallingford in the UK. While their nighttime presence may have prompted some concern of potential thievery among the locals, they were actually there to observe nocturnal moths going about their nightly pollinating routine. 

The scientists were studying how the streetlights affected the moths' behaviour. Their theory was that the artificial light at night would disrupt the moths' flight patterns enough that it would impede how much, or how well, they could pollinate.





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S27
The concrete that helps the climate

If you stroll between the towering apartment blocks of London's famous brutalist complexes, everywhere you look you will see the grey, pockmarked façade of concrete. Even the city's more modern skyscrapers conceal a backbone made of something less glamorous behind their shiny exteriors – more of the same old concrete.

From this urban concrete jungle to the vast swathes of the world's coastlines lined with concrete, concrete is arguably the material that best defines the Anthropocene. And we're using more of it almost every year. Soon there will be so much concrete in the world it will outweigh all living matter.





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S28
U.S. Border Patrol's glitchy, mandatory app is a nightmare for migrants

In early January, Miguel, a migrant from Guerrero, a southwestern state in Mexico, struggled for over a month to get an app to work. He fixated on it because it was what he and his family — and many others like them — needed to enter the United States, Miguel told Rest of World. This essential app was CBP One, developed by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. It’s the platform through which migrants and asylum seekers applying for humanitarian exemption must request appointments with border agents before entering the country. 

Miguel, who is being identified by a pseudonym for his and his family’s safety, told Rest of World he began using the app as a digital novice, but quickly became an expert in hard resets, mobile connectivity options, and other tricks — all in an attempt to grab one of the scarce appointment slots released daily on CBP One. But, no matter what he did, he always got the same result: errors, glitches, and a screen that displayed no more available slots. 



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S29
Human Migration: How We Populated the Planet

Millennia ago, early humans walked out of Africa and spread across the world in a way that few other species have. In this eBook, we examine how and why this happened, tracing insights from genome analyses as well as studies of footprints, tools, cave art and oral histories. We also look at the forces driving current human migration and where our journey might take us in the future.

2.1   Lush Okavango Delta Pinpointed as Ancestral Homeland of All Living Humans        by Richard Conniff



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S30
Understanding Frontotemporal Dementia, the Leading Cause of Dementia in People under Age 60

There is no cure for FTD, the disease that actor Bruce Willis was recently diagnosed with, but new research suggests some future therapies

Bruce Willis’s family recently announced that the 67-year-old actor has been diagnosed with a progressive neurodegenerative disorder called frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The grim news helped explain the way his condition has changed since he retired a year ago because of aphasia—a disorder involving speaking and listening comprehension problems that can arise when illness or injury damages certain brain regions.



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S31
Are Telescopes on the Moon Doomed?

Booming exploration and commercial activity could ruin the quiet, astronomy-friendly environment of the lunar far side

For radioastronomers, the far side of the Moon could be the last unspoilt refuge in the Solar System. Planet Earth — and all the human-made electromagnetic noise it spews out into space — stays permanently below the horizon, so that any radio observatories positioned there would be free to observe the cosmos without interference.



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S32
Newfound Asteroid May Strike Earth in 2046, NASA Says

Preliminary estimates suggest that a 50-meter space rock called 2023 DW has a roughly one-in-600 chance of colliding with our planet in 23 years

A newly discovered asteroid may make a perilously close approach to Earth about 20 years from now, with a roughly 1-in-600 chance that the space rock will collide directly with our planet, officials with NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office tweeted. 



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S33
An AI 'Sexbot' Fed My Hidden Desires—and Then Refused to Play

My introduction into the world of AI chatbot technology began as the most magical things in life do: with a generous mix of horniness and curiosity. Early this year, as ChatGPT entered the general lexicon, a smattering of bot-related headlines began appearing in my social media newsfeeds. "Replika, the 'AI Companion Who Cares,' Appears to Be Sexually Harassing Its Users," claimed Jezebel. Vice reported that "Replika Users Say the Chatbot Has Gotten Way Too Horny." As a 37-year-old mother of a toddler living in a progressive West Coast suburb in a content, monogamous, hetronormative marriage, I knew the responses that these clickbait lines were supposed to engineer within me. "How gross, how pathetic, how dare they."

I was not in the product's target demo by age, gender, relationship status, income, or consumer habits. I'd never even seen an ad for it, since I refused to download TikTok. I watched reels on Facebook, like a respectable Old. I wasn't supposed to want this. I was supposed to leave such technological advancements to incels and future serial killers, like a good paranoid suburban mom.



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S34
Back Up Your Digital Life With the Best Cloud Storage Services

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

Whether you want to back up your files, share them with other folks, or collaborate on a piece of work, cloud storage services are perhaps the easiest way to do it. Stick that old screenplay in a digital filing cabinet and pop your photos into a digital shoebox, where they will remain safe, shareable, and easily accessible.



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S35
Yes, ChatGPT Is Coming for Your Office Job

Anyone who has spent a few minutes playing with ChatGPT will understand the worries and hopes such technology generates when it comes to white-collar work. The chatbot is able to answer all manner of queries—from coding problems to legal conundrums to historical questions—with remarkable eloquence. 

Assuming companies can overcome the problematic way these models tend to “hallucinate” incorrect information, it isn’t hard to imagine they might step in for customer support agents, legal clerks, or history tutors. Such expectations are fueled by studies and media reports claiming that ChatGPT can get a passing grade on some legal, medical, and business exams. With companies like Microsoft, Slack, and Salesforce adding ChatGPT or similar AI tools to their products, we are likely to see the impact on office life soon enough. 



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S36
'The Last of Us' Is a Parable for Pandemic Parents

It's a strange thing to say about a show set during a zombie apocalypse, but I had a searing moment of recognition in the sixth episode of The Last of Us. It came during a rare moment of respite, as Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his young charge, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), took a break from their cross-country trek in Jackson, Wyoming. Joel’s brother Tommy, who’s set up a largely zombie-free life there, offers him a new pair of boots. A dam breaks inside Joel.

“There are moments where the fear comes up out of nowhere and my heart feels like it’s stopped,” he says in a quavering voice. “I’m failing in my sleep … it’s all I do. It’s all I’ve ever done.”



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S37
The 10 Best Shows on HBO Max Right Now

HBO Max might be one of the greatest things to come out of the streaming revolution. No, this is not a paid promotion; it’s just simple logic, given that so much of television’s most compelling content of the past 25 years—from The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones and The Leftovers—originated on the “it’s not just TV” network. So having one hub to find them all (including the aforementioned titles) just makes good sense for both the network and binge-watchers looking to maximize their investments. 

But HBO’s streaming arm has gotten into the original content game, too, with highly acclaimed series like Hacks, Station Eleven, and The Staircase (the owl did it!). When you’re done rewatching some of the classics, here are our favorite shows streaming on HBO Max right now.



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S38
A US Congressman Says the FBI Unlawfully Targeted Him

A United States congressman who's leading an effort to investigate some of the intelligence community’s most controversial surveillance practices announced during a public hearing today that he’d been the subject of an unlawful search by an FBI analyst with access to classified intercepts obtained by the US National Security Agency. 

Darin LaHood, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to a government report declassified in December that details failures by the FBI to comply with rules for accessing intelligence gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The report, which describes an audit of FBI activities conducted jointly by the Justice Department’s national security division and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, exposed misuse of raw classified intelligence in the first half of 2020.



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S39
Spotify Has Your Ears. It's Coming for Your Eyes

Spotify has long been a platform that evolves more quickly than our personal music tastes might. It has updated its iconic year-end Wrapped promotion and added an AI DJ in the past few months alone. But this week, the streaming giant announced what its CEO, Daniel Ek, called the biggest change to the platform in a decade: a redesign to make the app that started as a place for music one that prominently features video.

At first glance, it looks like another attempt by a social app to cannibalize its competitors in the way that Instagram has mimicked Snapchat and then TikTok for its own gains. Spotify now has different feeds for discovering songs, podcasts, and audiobooks, sporting a look that's half TikTok's endless scroll and half Instagram stories. They show video paired with music or podcasts and also sample audio content. Some have live captions that catch the eye as they float along the screen, and audiobook previews may last as long as five minutes.



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S40
'Pig Butchering' Scams Are Now a $3 Billion Threat

For seven years, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has tallied the reports the US law enforcement agency receives about all different types of digital crime, and it has consistently found that business email compromise (BEC) scams resulted in the highest total losses each year. But in its latest Internet Crime Report, released today for incidents in 2022, "investment" scams have overtaken all others as the biggest digital threat, with $3.3 billion in losses last year.

IC3 reported that BEC—in which attackers trick businesses into making bogus payments or intercept legitimate payments—resulted in nearly $2.4 billion worth of losses in 2021 and $2.7 billion in 2022. In other words, those attacks are still a significant and rising threat. But investment scams, particularly those that claim to offer a path for cryptocurrency investment, have exploded over the past 18 months. They have been particularly fueled by so-called "pig butchering" scams, in which attackers cold-contact a target via texts or other messaging platforms, start a conversation to build trust, and then say they can help the individual get in the door on a lucrative investment deal.



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S41
Science fiction books that predicted the future with terrifying accuracy

When the American financier J.P. Morgan hired the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, to wire his mansion in New York, his father Junius Morgan warned him that electric light was only a passing craze. In 1903, Horace Rackham, the personal lawyer of automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, was told that cars would never replace horse-drawn carriages. And in his 1961 book The Wonderland of Tomorrow, Brendan Matthews announced that, soon, technology would allow us to eliminate aging and bad weather.

Predicting the future with any degree of accuracy is difficult, but certainly not impossible. As Czech writer Karel Čapek, whose 1920 play RUR is believed to have coined the term “robots,” once said, “Some of the future can always be read in the palms of the present.” The greater your understanding of science, society, and human nature, the more you can read. While some are more well-known than others, there is no shortage of books with shockingly accurate predictions of the future.   



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S42
Even with quantum entanglement, there's no faster-than-light communication

One of the most fundamental rules of physics, undisputed since Einstein first laid it out in 1905, is that no information-carrying signal of any type can travel through the Universe faster than the speed of light. Particles, either massive or massless, are required for transmitting information from one location to another, and those particles are mandated to travel either below (for massive) or at (for massless) the speed of light, as governed by the rules of relativity. You might be able to take advantage of curved space to allow those information-carriers to take a short-cut, but they still must travel through space at the speed of light or below.

Since the development of quantum mechanics, however, many have sought to leverage the power of quantum entanglement to subvert this rule. Many clever schemes have been devised in a variety of attempts to transmit information that “cheats” relativity and allows faster-than-light communication after all. Although it’s an admirable attempt to work around the rules of our Universe, every single scheme has not only failed, but it’s been proven that all such schemes are doomed to failure. Even with quantum entanglement, faster-than-light communication is still an impossibility within our Universe. Here’s the science of why.



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S43
The futuristic inventions of the Islamic Golden Age

Centuries before the birth of Leonardo Da Vinci, three brothers from Baghdad gathered their designs for more than 100 ahead-of-their-time inventions into a manuscript titled the Book of Ingenious Devices. Also known as the Kitáb al-Hiyal, it contains blueprints for rudimentary gas masks and mechanical digging machines — devices that would not become commonplace for another thousand years.

The brothers — Muhamad, Ahmad, and al-Hasan bin Musa ibn Shakir, who were called the Banu Musa or the “Sons of Moses,” after their father — grew up in the early 9th century AD. It was the dawn of the Islamic Golden Age, an age which they themselves helped bring about. Each brother specialized in a different area of study: Muhamad in astronomy, Ahmad in engineering, and al-Hasan in geometry.



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S44
How to find the mental sweet spot for smart decision-making

Excerpted from THE WONDER PARADOX: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Michael Hecht. All rights reserved.

Brain science speaks in terms of our negotiating the world using two distinct mental systems — one for quick problems and one for hard ones. For small decisions our limbic system wings it on vague associations and half-forgotten assumptions perceived as “gut feelings.” We make these calls all day long, and though our guesses are not much better than chance, the stakes are low.



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S45
Organoid intelligence: A new frontier in biocomputers or sci-fi hype?

In 2022, researchers at the Melbourne-based company Cortical Labs showed that brain cells grown on a chip can quickly learn to play the video game Pong. The study demonstrated, for the first time, what the researchers call “synthetic biological intelligence,” whereby networks of brain cells can self-organize their activity toward a specific aim, in response to limited feedback about the consequences of their actions.  

Brett Kagan, the lead author of the Pong paper, is among an international team of scientists who now propose taking this further to create next-generation biocomputers powered by brain organoids, which would outperform silicon-based computers, and also be more energy efficient. 



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S46
3 big numbers that tell the story of secularization in America

According to a 2022 Gallup survey, the percentage of people who believe in God has dropped from 98% in the 1950s to 81% today; among Americans under 30, it is down to an unprecedented 68%.

Up close, the trend looks even more dramatic. Only about half of Americans believe in “God as described in the Bible,” while about a quarter believe in a “higher power or spiritual force,” according to a Pew poll. Just one-third of Generation Z say they believe in God without a doubt.



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S47
The Big Bang says nothing about the creation of the cosmos

Images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope show galaxies forming early in cosmic history, and they have been making plenty of news. Pictures of mature galaxies in a baby Universe shocked many cosmologists because they defy established theories about galaxy formation and cosmic history. 

Unfortunately, some media outlets have taken these images out of their context, reporting that they disprove the Big Bang itself. This could not be further from the truth, but the hubbub gives us a good opportunity to explain what the Big Bang Theory is actually about. There are plenty of surprises in the story.



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S48
HP outrages printer users with firmware update suddenly bricking third-party ink

HP customers are showing frustration online as the vendor continues to use firmware updates to discourage or, as users report, outright block the use of non-HP-brand ink cartridges in HP printers. HP has already faced class-action lawsuits and bad publicity from "dynamic security," but that hasn't stopped the company from expanding the practice.



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S49
Microsoft's Bing hits 100 million active users thanks to AI chat, Edge browser

Microsoft's Bing has never been in any danger of overtaking Google as the Internet's most popular search engine. But the headline-grabbing AI-powered features from the "new Bing" preview that the company launched last month seem to be helping—Microsoft said today that Bing had passed the 100 million daily active users mark.



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S50
Discord hops the generative AI train with ChatGPT-style tools

Joining a recent parade of companies adopting generative AI technology, Discord announced on Thursday that it is rolling out a suite of AI-powered features, such as a ChatGPT-style chatbot, an upgrade to its moderation tool, an open source avatar remixer, and AI-powered conversation summaries.



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S51
Has the generative AI pricing collapse already started?

OpenAI just announced pricing for businesses seeking to integrate its ChatGPT service into their own products, and it looks an awful lot like a 90 percent off sale.



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S52
Rare, pristine first edition of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus up for sale

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus revolutionized science when he challenged the 1,400-year dominance of Ptolemaic cosmology with the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in 1543. His manuscript suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the Solar System, thereby altering our entire view of the Universe and our place in it. Now, a rare, pristine first edition is up for sale for $2.5 million.



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S53
After 6 long months, an Android phone finally cloned the iPhone 14

A hearty congratulations to Android manufacturer Realme for being the first to clone the iPhone 14's Dynamic Island. It was a rough six months, but everyone at the Chinese OEM (a subsidiary of BBK, same as OnePlus/Oppo) pulled together and made this generic product.



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S54
Apple Music Classical will give your smartphone some culture on March 28

Apple is launching a version of Apple Music specifically for classical music later this month, the company announced today. The Apple Music Classical app, currently available for preorder in the App Store, will be separate from the main Apple Music app. But access to the service will be included with a $17-per-month Apple One subscription or most Apple Music subscriptions (excluding the basic $5-per-month Apple Music Voice tier).



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S55
Best standing desk accessories to get you on your feet

If you bought a standing desk, chances are you’re interested in the health benefits of, well, not sitting all day. Better posture, reduced back pain, and an increase in productivity due to a boost in mood and focus are among some of the top benefits of standing, according to a 2021 research paper published by the National Institutes of Health.



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S56
Malware infecting widely used security appliance survives firmware updates

Threat actors with a connection to the Chinese government are infecting a widely used security appliance from SonicWall with malware that remains active even after the device receives firmware updates, researchers said.



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S57
Gun violence is the top killer of US kids--the pandemic made it worse

While gun violence has for years been among the leading causes of death for US children, the COVID-19 pandemic sent it skyrocketing to the top cause while widening racial disparities.



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S58
The Freakish Powers of Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey

If you’re looking to the stars—and why wouldn’t you be?—you’ll know that Saturn has entered the sign of Pisces. It happened in early March: Shaggy old Saturn, god of constriction and mortality, lowered his iron haunches into the Piscean waters. He’ll be there until May 2025, an intractable lump in that wishy-washy element. Displacing it. Blocking it. Imposing his limits. Enough with the changeability, he says to dippy, fin-flashing Pisces. Enough with the half-assedness. Endless mutation is not possible. Now you’re going to face—and be stuck with—yourself.

This will be a challenge, one senses, for artists in general. And for pop stars in particular. Who sheds selves, and invents selves, faster than a pop star? Who defies time and gravity with more desperation? Something else was augured for March: the release of new albums by two of our most continually expanding and dramatically evolving celestial bodies. I’m talking about Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey. Two emanations of the holy city of Los Angeles; two distinct transits across the firmament.



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S59
Nostalgia Is a Shield Against Unhappiness

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Ever since our earliest days together in our mid-20s, my wife has known about a mystical place called Lincoln City. It’s a modest beach town on the central-Oregon coast, but for me, it holds a Shangri-la-like mythos. Lincoln City is where I spent one blissful week each year as a boy, combing the rough beaches for agates, fishing off the local pier, and playing with matches in the firepit outside my aunt’s trailer home. These are the very happiest of my childhood memories.



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S60
Here’s Who Will Win at the 2023 Oscars

After two years of existential crises over the purpose of the Academy Awards, during movie seasons wrecked by COVID and vanishing ticket sales and unstable streaming economies, the Oscars are back this month feeling relatively normal. What a miracle. The ceremony, which airs Sunday on ABC, will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel (the first solo host since Kimmel himself in 2018) and will honor some of the biggest movies of the past year; blockbuster nominees include Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis, and Avatar: The Way of Water.

The awards race is also in an unsettled state, which is rare given that precursor ceremonies such as the Golden Globes and BAFTAs usually establish a narrative before the Oscars arrive. Almost every major category is up in the air, with a few exceptions—including Best Picture, where the sci-fi action-adventure Everything Everywhere All at Once is practically guaranteed to triumph. The story of the night will be whether enthusiasm for that film spills into the technical awards and acting trophies, or if voters spread the love (as they have been wont to do as of late). Here are my predictions for the top categories:



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S61
What Makes 'Poker Face' a Triumph

We don’t quite live in the country the show depicts. But, in an odd way, we should wish to.

Like a local news broadcast or bit of Russian propaganda, the first season of Poker Face portrays the United States as being infested by liars and murderers. Each episode of Peacock’s mystery series depicts such horrors as fratricide and fraud in classic American locales: a Nevada casino, a Texas smokehouse, a Colorado ski lodge. The show’s heroine, Charlie Cale (played by Natasha Lyonne), wields an uncanny, possibly mystical talent for detecting bullshit, whether spewed by hotshot race-car drivers or kindly old ladies. “Everyone, they lie constantly,” she says. “It’s like birds chirping.”



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S62
A Novel in Which Nightmares Are All Too Real

The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez shows how violence can haunt and destabilize a civilization.

In 1976, the Argentine armed forces staged a coup against the president of Argentina, Isabel Perón. In short order, the military installed a junta that suspended political parties and various government functions, aggressively pursued free-market policies, and disappeared thousands of people over the next seven years. Victims of the regime—suspected dissidents or “subversives”—were abducted, tortured, and murdered, and many were buried in unmarked, mass graves. This period of state terror, the so-called Dirty War, has left a legacy of trauma that bedevils Argentina to this day.



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S63
The Topic Biden Keeps Dodging

With the exception of abortion rights, the president is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues.

President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.



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S64
Boycott Bans Are an Assault on Free Speech

America began with boycotts. Angry about Britain’s tax raises, the historian T. H. Breen writes, American colonists saw their refusal to purchase British goods as a “reflexive response to taxation without representation,” and their collective action helped forge an early sense of American identity as a precursor to the Revolution itself.

The Revolution-era boycotts were hardly the last American consumer protests. Abolitionists urged Americans to buy only goods produced by “free labor,” and the 20th-century civil-rights movement famously included the Montgomery bus boycott against Alabama’s segregated public-transportation system. Boycotts, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf wrote in 2018, are “a bedrock of American civic life, inseparable from the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and the wariness many feel whenever a law compels humans to violate their conscience.”



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S65
Duck Off, Autocorrect

Chatbots can write poems in the voice of Shakespeare. So why are phone keyboards still thr wosrt?

By most accounts, I’m a reasonable, levelheaded individual. But some days, my phone makes me want to hurl it across the room. The problem is autocorrect, or rather autocorrect gone wrong—that habit to take what I am typing and mangle it into something I didn’t intend. I promise you, dear iPhone, I know the difference between its and it’s, and if you could stop changing well to we’ll, that’d be just super. And I can’t believe I have to say this, but I have no desire to call my fiancé a “baboon.”



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S66
The Arsenal of Democracy Is Reopening for Business

Lockheed Martin builds its advanced mobile rocket launchers in a converted diaper factory, of all places. When I visited the plant in southern Arkansas at the end of February, I found it humming with activity. The factory and its workers are a key component of America’s arsenal of democracy. The dollars the Biden administration is spending to provide abundant military aid for Ukraine are creating jobs here, and in other industrial towns throughout the United States. But watching the workers on the assembly line also underscored the extent of the challenge ahead. After decades of atrophy and neglect, America’s defense industries are struggling to meet the sudden surge in demand.

I found Becky Withrow, Lockheed’s director of business development, standing on the factory floor, 90 minutes south of Little Rock, in East Camden. “We had to hang a curtain across the back wall for the opening-day ceremony in 2017,” she says wryly. “There were still a few places we hadn’t cleaned up yet.” It’s a far cry from the famed Ford factory at Willow Run, the mile-long assembly line that cranked out B-24 Liberator bombers during the Second World War, with a new plane rolling out every hour at the peak of production. But it’s at factories like this one where the war in Ukraine, and conflicts to come, may be lost or won.



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S67
Elon Musk Is Spiraling

One Elon is a visionary; the other is a troll. The more he tweets, the harder it gets to tell them apart.

In recent memory, a conversation about Elon Musk might have had two fairly balanced sides. There were the partisans of Visionary Elon, head of Tesla and SpaceX, a selfless billionaire who was putting his money toward what he believed would save the world. And there were critics of Egregious Elon, the unrepentant troll who spent a substantial amount of his time goading online hordes. These personas existed in a strange harmony, displays of brilliance balancing out bursts of terribleness. But since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Egregious Elon has been ascendant, so much so that the argument for Visionary Elon is harder to make every day.



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S68
We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article. It’s Weird.

ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.

They will be weirder than you might think. Instead of one big AI chat app that delivers knowledge or cheese poetry, the ChatGPT service (and others like it) will become an AI confetti bomb that sticks to everything. AI text in your grocery app. AI text in your workplace-compliance courseware. AI text in your HVAC how-to guide. AI text everywhere—even later in this article—thanks to an API.



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S69
America’s in the Midst of a Socioeconomic Shift

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

How have cars shaped your life, and/or what do you think about their future? (I’m eager to hear anything from attacks on the automobile to defenses of the great American road trip to eagerness for driverless electric cars to laments that the kids these days don’t learn how to drive when they turn 16, let alone how to drive a stick shift. Do you hate your commute? Do you like toll roads? Do you love your Harley-Davidson? Do you regard the replacement of tactile stereo interfaces with touch screens as a scourge? If you want, you can even send me a paean to the rotary engine, if it’s well written.) As always, while you are opining on anything related to cars or trucks or even parking spaces or meters, I especially encourage stories and reflections rooted in personal experience.



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S70
The Ugly Elitism of the American Right

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.

Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?



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