Shopee, the juggernaut that fended off Amazon

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Shopee, the juggernaut that fended off Amazon     To open the Shopee app is to enter a whirlwind of promotions. The signature orange clashes with red banners blaring discounts; streaming previews lure the user into live shopping; various stores offer similar products, and compete intensely to reduce prices or delivery fees.For Shopee, the formula has worked. It’s the most visited e-commerce platform in Indonesia, the fourth most-populous country in the world. It has also conquered the majority of Southeast Asia, becoming a huge player in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and even as far as Taiwan and Brazil. (According to McKinsey, Shopee is particularly popular for its apparel and beauty products.) The app had already launched by the time Amazon attempted to enter Southeast Asia in 2017, and along with Alibaba-backed Lazada, has managed to box out the U.S. e-commerce giant from the region.  Continued here

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The rival to the Panama Canal that was never built     It is a traffic jam on a colossal scale. More than 200 ships, according to some estimates, float there, just waiting. Some are loaded with containers stuffed full of items including furniture, consumer goods or building materials. Some carry oil or gas. Others are transporting grain. They are all due to travel through one of the world's most famous bottlenecks – a vital gateway for global shipping – the Panama Canal.A highly unusual drought, right in the middle of Panama's supposed wet season, has lowered water levels in two reservoirs that supply the canal. As a result, operators have had to restrict the size and number of ships that pass through its system of locks each day. Continued here

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Scientists find enzymes in nature that could replace toxic chemicals     Some 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, nine major islands rise from the mid-Atlantic. Verdant and volcanic, the Azores archipelago hosts a wealth of biodiversity that keeps field research scientist, Marlon Clark, returning for more. “You’ve got this really interesting biogeography out there,” says Clark. “There’s real separation between the continents, but there’s this inter-island dispersal of plants and seeds and animals.”It’s a visual paradise by any standard, but on a microscopic level, there’s even more to see. The Azores’ nutrient-rich volcanic rock — and its network of lagoons, cave systems, and thermal springs — is home to a vast array of microorganisms found in a variety of microclimates with different elevations and temperatures. Continued here

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Anti-natalism is the view that having children is immoral. Psychopaths tend to believe it     In his book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams opens with these lines:“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” Continued here

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How pants went from banned to required in the Roman Empire     Go to a meeting with any male politician today and you’re almost certainly going to be standing in front of a man wearing pants, except perhaps in Bermuda, where the eponymous shorts are the nation’s official dress. But in Imperial Rome, obviously, things were a little different—no man of honor would think of wearing what was considered the garb of a savage barbarian.When Marcus Tullius Cicero, an eloquent orator and lawyer, was defending the former Gaul governor Fonteius from accusations of extortion, he cited the wearing of pants as a sign of the “innate aggressiveness” of the Gauls—and an extenuating circumstance for his client: Continued here

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Extreme gene therapy treatment for alcoholism slashes drinking by 90% in monkeys     A single shot — a gene therapy injected into the brain — dramatically reduced alcohol consumption in monkeys that previously drank heavily. If the therapy is safe and effective in people, it might one day be a permanent treatment for alcoholism for people with no other options.The challenge: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) means a person has trouble controlling their alcohol consumption, even when it is negatively affecting their life, job, or health. Continued here

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Study: Carbon offsets aren't doing their job, overstate impact     This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.  Continued here

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Four people from four different nations ride SpaceX rocket into orbit     SpaceX launched a Dragon spacecraft into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast early Saturday, carrying a multinational crew from the United States, Denmark, Japan, and Russia on a flight to the International Space Station. Continued here

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Online Ratings Are Broken     Not to boast, but my feedback is important. So important that, in the past couple of weeks alone, I’ve received a mountain of desperate requests for it.Amazon, for example, wanted to know if I’d recommend its company based on my Amazon Returns experience. (When the pillow insert I was returning first arrived, the company also asked me to rate my delivery experience.) EGO Power+, the makers of my broken string trimmer, wanted to know if the callback I requested from them yesterday, and missed at 7 a.m. today, had solved my problem—would I complete a survey? When I opened DoorDash to order an acai bowl, the app prodded me to rate Carlos, the dasher who had, days earlier, delivered my Vietnamese noodles, on a five-star scale. An Etsy seller in India from whom I’d purchased a rug sent a fourth message on the app begging me to please rate and review: “It will help my business.” Later, DoorDash also hoped I’d rate the acai joint (separately from the dasher, whom I was also asked to rate). A difficult question; I’d thought the bowl came with fresh fruits, but it turned out I’d have needed to select them manually. Is that the acai bowlery’s fault, or the app operator’s? And why am I being asked to unwind the matter? Continued here

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A Genetic Snapshot Could Predict Preterm Birth     Doctors are trying out a simple blood test to screen for some common pregnancy complications.For expectant parents, pregnancy can be a time filled with joyful anticipation: hearing the beating of a tiny heart, watching the fetus wiggling through the black-and-white blur of an ultrasound, feeling the jostling of a little being in the belly as it swells. Continued here

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The Rules of Flaking on Plans     This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Over the years, my fellow Atlantic writers have published many bold arguments. But the case Ian Bogost made this month is perhaps one of the bravest in recent years: Flaking on plans is not so terrible, he argued. I likely found Bogost’s claim so controversial because I was a flake in earlier eras of my life, and the feedback I received suggested it was not a good thing. But Bogost’s philosophical case was quite sensible: “Flaking, taken selectively, allows you to acknowledge that life is porous,” he writes. “Errors seep through its gaps.” Continued here

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A new life for London's lost rivers     Though most visitors to London think only of the River Thames, the city is a myriad of waterways. Old maps show a skein of rivers and brooks that provided "blue corridors" traversing the city for centuries, providing both sources of food and recreation. But as London boomed, these waterways faded from consciousness – encased by walls, turned into polluted backwaters or simply covered over to run unseen beneath busy streets.But these "secret" rivers are imprinted on London's geography. Marylebone started life as St Mary by the bourne (an old name for a watercourse, in this case the Tyburn); while Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Westbourne and Holborn are all named by waterways that ran through them. Deptford was the site of a deep ford over the Ravensbourne, while Wandsworth is named after the River Wandle. East Ham and West Ham get their names from an old word for an area between rivers (hamm) – in their case, the Lea and the Roding. And while Britain's leading newspapers have left Fleet Street, the River Fleet still runs beneath. Continued here

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The Colors of Stars, Explained     From dim red to brilliant blue, stellar colors span the spectrum—and reveal how much any star brings the heatI don’t really have a favorite time of year to stargaze; each season brings its own unique charms to the sky. But there is something special about summer, when the weather is milder and the Milky Way stretches high overhead, carrying a bright panoply of stars. Continued here

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Of All The Weird, Wildly Popular Stuff on Amazon, These 50 Things Actually Deserve the Hype     A lot of things on Amazon go viral. If you have ever looked at a dress that everyone says is a “must-have” item and wondered how anyone could fall for that hype, you know that the reasons are not always compelling. Some things become popular only because someone popular got paid to wear them. But that’s not the case with any of these things. Of all the weird, wildly popular stuff on Amazon, these 50 things actually deserve the hype. If you always sleep through your alarm, it will affect everything from your grades to your career and relationships. But you can rely on CLOCKY to get you up. Clocky makes the kind of ruckus even you can’t sleep through. It leaps off the bedside table and tears around the room, making you get up and chase him to stop the alarm. This little guy saved me,” said one reviewer. “As soon as he hits the floor I'm up.” Continued here

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How Much Do Words Matter?     Compared with other widely spoken languages, English has few guardrails against the will of the masses. We have no governing body equivalent to the Real Academia Española, much less the notoriously hard-core Office Québécois de la Langue Française, and our self-appointed language police, the bow-tied vigilantes behind usage guides and dictionaries, have for the last fifty years seen their power wane. Grammar is out, relativism is in, and the very project of telling (alt: teaching) other people how to speak or write has come to be seen by many Americans as authoritarian on its face. Depending on whom you ask, the language tyrants are either a cultural élite bent on gender-neutral pronouns and sensitivity training or a racist overclass clinging to power by refusing to take seriously anyone who ends a sentence in a preposition. Either way, it’s worth remembering that, outside the small fiefdoms of H.R. seminars and classrooms, the English language has no actual nobility.The frustrations of language democracy are just those of democracy in general: that we must, to a large and sometimes intolerable extent, abide by the votes of other people. And so, in language as in any other democratic process, we campaign. Perhaps you ask your roommates not to say “moist,” or you get married and insist that your co-workers use your new last name. Your roommates may not agree that “moist” is objectionable. Your co-workers may disapprove on feminist grounds of you taking your husband’s last name. But if they value keeping the peace at home and work more than they value their unfettered free expression—and, in practice, almost everyone does, almost all of the time—they will, at least to your face, obey. Continued here

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What We Lose When Streaming Companies Choose What We Watch     To have or not to have, that is the question. The problem with having is obvious when looking around at the many shelves for books and CDs and the filing cabinet for DVDs that line the walls and fill floor space at home. It’s especially an issue for city people whose apartment space is at a premium and who lack basements or attics or (imagine!) a spare room to hold their hoard. Ditching physical media in favor of streaming is a liberation of sorts—an unburdening that goes beyond clutter and, in a sense, lightens life itself. It’s a moveable feast for those who live precariously and for others who travel often. In Michael Mann’s thriller “Heat,” Robert De Niro delivers this line: “A guy told me one time, ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’ ” So much for the personal library. At least he’ll have his Criterion Channel subscription.I was out of town for a couple of weeks recently, and I had my subscriptions, too. The permanent smorgasbord of streaming services, whether of movies or music, is a diabolical temptation. Curiosity is easy to satisfy—at least within the wide limits of what’s available. Moreover, a month’s subscription to the Criterion Channel costs less than the purchase of any one Criterion Collection disk, while offering access to hundreds of classics. Even a small basketful of various subscriptions would likely add up to less than one might easily spend on a batch of CDs or DVDs or Blu-rays (not to mention the devices to play them on). Not only is streaming a good deal; given the huge losses recorded by many major streaming services, it may be too good a deal, as suggested by the surprising news this week—even as Netflix is ending its original DVD-by-mail service—that Bob Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, is contemplating restoring physical media to the company’s offerings. Continued here

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How to Reskill Your Workforce in the Age of AI     By now, it’s probably clear to most of us that the Age of AI has arrived. Artificial intelligence applications promise to transform nearly every aspect of business, from analytics to product development to customer experience to pretty much everything else. What’s less clear is how we can best manage this potential. In particular, how do we organize and reskill our workforces to take advantage of both the automated and human skills that will be necessary to drive future success. To try to answer these questions, we invited Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School, to be our guest  on “The New World of Work”. Raffaella’s research focuses on the managerial and organizational drivers of productivity and growth, and she is the co-author of the cover story in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review: “Reskilling in the Age of AI.” The conversation mainly focused on the reskilling challenge. Her underlying message is that companies need to adapt properly to the technology at hand. Do it right, and you can unlock opportunities for innovation and growth. Do it wrong, and you might stagnate. Continued here

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How Wealthy UFO Fans Helped Fuel Fringe Beliefs     In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it. Continued here

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The place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years     I'm always upbeat on the way to interviews. To me they're the most enjoyable part of the storytelling process.But this time I feel different. A tour at Onkalo, which lies 450m (1,480ft) below the ground, to see tunnels hewn in the living rock to store highly radioactive waste for 100,000 years, suddenly makes me nervous. Continued here

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ChatGPT Can Get Good Grades. What Should Educators Do about It?     With its ability to pump out confident, humanlike prose almost instantaneously, ChatGPT is a valuable cheating tool for students who want to outsource their writing assignments. When fed a homework or test question from a college-level course, the generative artificial intelligence program is liable to be graded just as highly, if not better, than a college student, according to a new study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. With no reliable tools for distinguishing AI content from human work, educators will have to rethink how they structure their courses and assess students—and what humans might lose if we never learn how to write for ourselves.In the new research, computer scientists and other academics compiled 233 student assessment questions from 32 professors who taught across eight different disciplines at New York University Abu Dhabi. Then they gathered three randomly selected student answers to those questions from each professor and also generated three different answers from ChatGPT. Trained subject graders, blind to the circumstances of the study, assessed all the answers. In nine of the 32 classes, ChatGPT’s text received equivalent or higher marks than the student work. “The current version of ChatGPT is comparable, or even superior, to students in nearly 30 percent of courses,” wrote study authors Yasir Zaki and Talal Rahwan, both computer scientists at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, in an e-mail to Scientific American. “We expect that this percentage will only increase with future versions.” Continued here

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Futuristic Geoengineering Projects To Solve Climate Change Could Have Drastic Side Effects     Changing Earth’s complex and interconnected climate system may have unintended consequences. When soaring temperatures, extreme weather, and catastrophic wildfires hit the headlines, people start asking for quick fixes to climate change. The U.S. government just announced the first awards from a US$3.5 billion fund for projects that promise to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Policymakers are also exploring more invasive types of geoengineering — the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of Earth’s natural systems. Continued here

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The Biggest Sci-fi Movie of 2023 is in Serious Trouble     Two years after a global pandemic curtailed a box office break for Dune: Part One, its sequel is facing another setback. Dune: Part Two was originally slated for a November 2023 release, but distributors at Legendary and Warner Bros. have pushed the film back to Spring 2024. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Dune: Part Two will now hit theaters on March 15, 2024. The delay has also been accompanied by a later release of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, one month later to April 12, 2024. Continued here

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Vivek Ramaswamy Is Not the Next Trump     Presidential debates, especially those held more than a year before the actual election, are both tedious and chaotic. We all know at this point to not make too much of them. But, much like preseason football, they provide exciting, if illusory, bits of narrative possibility.For the entrepreneur and political novice Vivek Ramaswamy, the early story line is that he put on the most Trump-like performance of all the Republican candidates who took the stage on Wednesday night. The evidence for that claim comes from the obnoxious way that Ramaswamy dealt with his opponents. He claimed to be the only candidate who hadn’t been “bought off,” made a series of frankly confusing hand gestures while his opponents were speaking, and spent almost the entirety of the debate with what we will generously call an impish grin on his face. He seemed, more than anything, to be having a lot of fun at the expense of the other candidates, whose behavior ranged from confused earnestness (Doug Burgum) to polite indignation (Mike Pence) to random yelling (Ron DeSantis). Continued here

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Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Us 'See' Some of the Billions of Birds Migrating at Night     Science is turning to machines to unlock the secrets of the vast, mysterious pulse-of-the-planet phenomenon that is nocturnal migration.Jacob Job: The night skies have fascinated humans for as long as we have been around. Celestial bodies have become actors in our myths and folklore. And from the stars and heavens, we draw inspiration and even religion. Continued here

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'Gran Turismo' is Neill Blomkamp's Worst Movie For One Disappointing Reason     The director was once one of Hollywood’s brightest up-and-coming voices, but not anymore.Fourteen years ago, Neill Blomkamp burst onto the Hollywood scene with his feature directorial debut, District 9. A modest, partly-found footage sci-fi film, District 9 received rave reviews for Blomkamp’s inspired direction and its pointed political themes. It went on to receive numerous Oscar nominations in 2010, including one for Best Picture, which seemed to cement Blomkamp’s place as one of the most lauded and promising filmmaking voices of his generation. Continued here

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Trump's Mug Shot Is His True Presidential Portrait     It's not really a victory for anybody, this photograph, but lots of us will insist on reading it that way. Before it ever existed—when it was only a twinkle in the insistent eye of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis—the mug shot of former President Donald Trump, released Thursday night, had already been combed for meaning by the political observers who sat impatiently refreshing their Twitter feeds, waiting for the picture to "drop" as if it were a hot album. Much of the anticipation seemed to come from liberals who hoped that the sight of the mug shot would bring home just how surreal Trump's alleged criminal attempts to overturn the 2020 election were. Maybe a national trance would lift and the remaining dead-enders would shake their delusions.But anybody inclined, at this late date, to follow Trump and lend him a vote won't mind this new image too much—read innocently, it looks like a passport photo taken on a bad day, of some twerpy kid who doesn't feel like flying anyway. It's hard to parse the mug shot because our desire to see Trump get his just deserts keeps getting thwarted, and each fresh hope makes us interpret before we really see. Continued here

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'Persona 3 Reload' Release Date, Trailer, Story Content, and Platforms     The Xbox Games Showcase 2023 saw the official reveal of the long-rumored (and recently leaked) Persona 3 Reload. Not to be confused with Persona 3 Portable, which received a port in early 2023, Persona 3 Reload is a completely remade version of the Atlus RPG’s original release.Persona 3 Reload will come to PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on February 2, 2024. That means you should have plenty of time to play Persona 5 Tactica, due out November 17, 2023, before Reload launches. Continued here

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There Are No U.S. 'Climate Havens' from Heat and Disaster Risk     Even supposed “climate havens” in the U.S. face a riskier future, and infrastructure often isn’t built to handle climate change. But there are steps cities can take to prepareThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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Social Media Algorithms Warp How People Learn from Each Other     Social media companies’ drive to keep you on their platforms clashes with how people evolved to learn from each otherThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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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. Continued here