Rijo Stephen Cletus: How Tech Companies Can Still Grow During a Time of Layoffs

How Tech Companies Can Still Grow During a Time of Layoffs

Tech companies with cooler heads can prevail by valuing quality offerings, marketing, and talent retention.

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Dolphins and Humans Work Together to Catch Fish in Brazil

The partnership has endured for some 150 years, and it benefits both species, a new study finds

In southeastern Brazil, local fishers wade into murky waters in search of migrating mullet. On their own, it would be tricky to find the silvery fish. But the humans get help from an unusual ally: wild bottlenose dolphins.

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The (lost found) boy man bunny | Psyche Films

It’s possible that you’ve come across Pablo Woodward before on the streets of England, where he performs as the Disco Bunny – a one-man roving dance party dressed in flamboyant raver attire with a mission to entertain and unite passersby. Or more likely you’ve seen him in a viral video – viewed millions of times – that shows him and an elderly woman in Brighton letting loose to Twist and Shout during one of his ecstatic performances. More than a way to earn clicks, cash or even just pass time on the weekends, Woodward considers his Disco Bunny persona part of a spiritual rebirth. This new chapter has included embracing a nomadic existence, keeping just a few possessions in his storage unit (or ‘Bunny Cave’, as he calls it), and leaving the trappings of his old, more conventional, life behind.

Daniel Ifans’s film The (Lost Found) Boy Man Bunny explores the person behind the meme, providing an intimate account of Woodward’s motivations for his unconventional lifestyle and street persona. Digging beneath the glittery surface, the UK filmmaker finds his subject searching to make sense of his place in the world and, especially, of what makes him happy. Standing before a backdrop of colourful lights, speakers and his few other belongings in the Bunny Cave, Woodward retraces the events that led him down such an atypical path. Born in Brazil, he spent his early childhood in an orphanage – an existence he remembers as poor but happy. When he was adopted by parents in the UK, his life became more privileged but also much more complicated. By 18, he was homeless by choice for the first time, sleeping on the streets of London in search of the joyful simplicity of his early years.

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What Should Congress Be?

Former Representative Justin Amash’s critique of the House illuminates its failures to live up to democratic ideals––and casts the fight over its rules in a new light.

Representative Kevin McCarthy’s protracted fight to become speaker of the House last month raised a big, seldom-discussed question about American democracy: What sort of institution should the House of Representatives be? Should a partisan speaker control if or when a bill or amendment is introduced to advance the program of the coalition that vested the speaker with power? Should power reside in committee chairs, perhaps assigned by seniority, who develop subject-area expertise and command commensurate deference from their colleagues? Or should all 435 voting members (and thus their constituents) be on equal footing, regardless of party or seniority, such that all can introduce bills or propose amendments that succeed or fail based only on whether a given proposal commands a majority?

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'Knock at the Cabin' and the Terror of Raising Children

M. Night Shyamalan understands how to make a ludicrous horror concept work: Add in a healthy dose of tenderness.

M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking career has taken many wild and woolly turns over 30-plus years, but recently, he seems to have struck on a powerful, understated plot formula: What if you went on a vacation with your children and something terrible happened? In his 2021 hit, Old, a family gets stuck on a secret beach that ages them rapidly. His new follow-up, Knock at the Cabin, proposes another Twilight Zone–esque conundrum to a family trying to enjoy a weekend away. Simply put, the world is ending, and the only way to stop it is by killing someone they love.

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Beware the Transition from an Iconic CEO

Disney, Starbucks, P&G, Microsoft, GE, Ford, Twitter, Dell, Nike, and scores of other marquee companies in their prime have stumbled painfully in CEO transitions. And we may see more stumbles to come: Almost a quarter of Fortune 200 companies are led by CEOs who’ve been in place for a decade or longer. What makes succession failures especially unfortunate is that they are largely self-imposed wounds. The authors, who have nearly three decades advising more than 1,000 companies on CEO succession, discuss the mindsets that lead boards down the wrong path, and offer seven strategies to ensure a healthy succession pipeline.

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My Printer Is Extorting Me

The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel, even impressive ways, ultimately causing the purchase to haunt you like a malevolent spirit. So rich is the history of printer dysfunction that its foibles became a cliché in the early days of personal computing.

After years of holding out, my family finally succumbed to a pandemic inkjet purchase. (Like many, we were doing a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I girded my loins for the agony of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded utterance “Driver not found.” What I did not expect, however, was for my printer to shake me down like a loan shark.

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Do This 1 Thing to Instantly Become a Better Leader

Unlock the profound power of gratitude.

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Why Some People Get Burned Out and Others Don't

Stress and burnout are not the same thing. And while we know that stress often leads to burnout, it’s possible to handle the onslaught of long hours, high pressure, and work crises in a way that safeguards you from the emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of confidence in one’s abilities that characterizes burnout. The key is tapping into your emotional intelligence.

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How to Be Smarter (and Safer!) with Your Marketing Dollars in 2023

Your instinct may be to pull back on marketing during a slower economy, but that's exactly the time you need to lean in. Here's how to make smarter choices to engage your customers--and keep business growing.

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People With HighÂ Emotional Intelligence Ask Themselves 3 Questions to Keep Making Progress and Achieve Huge Goals, Backed by Psychological Research

And to help other people do the same.

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How the Property Brothers Get So Much Done

Drew and Jonathan Scott, better known as the Property Brothers, test their collaboration skills while facing off for a game of Know Your Co.

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What Causes DÃ©jÃ Vu?

Does this all feel a little familiar? Called déjà vu, that sensation may be your brain correcting its own errors

It’s an eerie feeling: You walk into a place you know you’ve never been before but are overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity—a memory you can’t quite reach. Has this all happened before?

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Not Every Atrocity Is About White Supremacy

On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim and perpetrators were all Black, leading to confusion and distress. The basketball star LeBron James tweeted, “WE ARE OUR OWN WORSE ENEMY!” This kind of self-directed criticism is familiar to anyone who has had their hair trimmed in a Black barbershop. What is novel today is the amount of anger and the specific form of critique that James’s tweet, for one prominent example, engendered. One of the more polite and reprintable responses: “i’d say white supremacy was our worse enemy but okay lebron.”

White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept, denoting invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the invisible hand of all American social and political life.

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Size, Sex and Breed May Predict Dogs' Cancer Diagnosis

A study of more than 3,000 dogs finds that larger breeds, males and purebred animals tend to be diagnosed with cancer at a younger age

Cancer is common in dogs. About one in four will develop cancer at some point during its lifetime—and that proportion rises to an estimate of nearly 50 percent after a dog passes its 10th birthday. A new analysis of thousands of dogs finds that traits such as size, breed and whether an animal has been fixed are associated with how soon our furry friends might get diagnosed with the disease.

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6 great philosophers and how they used their political power

Even philosophers occasionally point out that members of their profession tend to discuss the world rather than change it. This doesn’t mean that every philosopher declines the opportunity to test their ideas in the political arena. Several famous thinkers entered government and tried, with more or less success, to implement their theories. Here we look at six political philosophers who held power — and what they did with it.

The most important philosopher in Chinese history, Confucius is the founder of the philosophy of Confucianism. Many of his ideas are still prevalent in Chinese and East Asian culture today. His political philosophy centers on ideas of legitimacy, knowing your place in the social order, playing that part well, and the proper following of ritual. He was undoubtedly influenced by his time in office.

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Antibiotic-Resistant UTIs Are Common, and Other Infections May Soon Be Resistant, Too

Urinary tract infections are increasingly becoming resistant to first-line antibiotics, and this may be a warning for our ability to treat other microbial infections

About half of women and more than one in 10 men will get a urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime, with many people experiencing recurrent UTIs. These common bacterial infections, which can lead to painful urination, have been easily treated and cured with antibiotics for decades.

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Nikki Haley Expected to Launch Presidential Bid in 2024, Challenging Trump

The former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador knows a thing or two about small business--after all, her parents were once small-business owners.

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When You're Stuck in a Job You Can't Quit

What should you do when you’re stuck in the wrong job but can’t quit? Even if you can’t immediately escape your situation, there are simple ways to improve it. Here are four ways — through both thought and action — that you can alter how you feel about your job and make an imperfect situation work.

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How To Actively Learn From Customer Complaints

When you're unsure how your business needs to improve, check in with your customer service department.

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Hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright's Designs Were Never Built. Here's What They Might Have Looked Like

So far, David Romero has digitally reconstructed over 20 of the famous architect’s unrealized projects

Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 structures during his seven-decade career. The prolific American architect, known as one of the creators of the Prairie School, helped popularize a now-widespread style characterized by simplicity and harmony with nature.

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How Black queer culture shaped history

Names like Bayard Rustin, Frances Thompson and William Dorsey Swann have been largely erased from US history, but they and other Black queer leaders played central roles in monumental movements like emancipation, civil rights and LGBTQ+ pride, among others. In this tribute to forgotten icons, queer culture historian and TED Fellow Channing Gerard Joseph shares their little-known stories, connecting the origins of drag in the 1880s to the present day and exploring the awesome power to choose how we define ourselves.

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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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How Black Women Entrepreneurs Overcame the Odds

A recent survey shows that Black women entrepreneurs find success despite lacking a leg up from capital.

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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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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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How to Preorder Samsung's Galaxy S23â€”and Which Model to Buy

Samsung has three new flagship smartphones to mark 2023â€”the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra. They're available for preorder right now and officially go on sale starting February 17. But should you upgrade? If you need a new phone, which Galaxy S23 model is best for you? We break down what's different between each model, what's new, and which one is right for you. We've also featured a few of the best Galaxy S23 promotions from Samsung and mobile carriers so you can get the most out of your purchase.

Be sure to check out our Best Android Phones and Best Cheap Phones guides for more recommendations. If you're snagging last year's Galaxy S22 instead for cheap, well, we've got accessory recommendations as well. Â

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5 Tips for Making a Good Impression -- Virtually

As millions of people around the world have recently moved from office to teleworking environments, due to social-distancing measures required by the Covid-19 crisis, many will be leading or joining virtual teams. In my research, I’ve identified what I call the “Big 5 E-communication Whammies” — behavioral changes associated with non-face-to-face interactions that can lead to negative consequences ranging from hurt feelings to lost jobs. In the current scenario, there is one I’d like to especially call out.

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Fake Pictures of People of Color Won't Fix AI Bias

Armed with a belief in technology's generative potential, a growing faction of researchers and companies aims to solve the problem of bias in AI by creating artificial images of people of color. Proponents argue that AI-powered generators can rectify the diversity gaps in existing image databases by supplementing them with synthetic images.Â Some researchers are using machine learning architectures to map existing photos of people onto new races in order to "balance the ethnic distribution" of datasets. Others, likeÂ Generated Media andÂ Qoves Lab, are using similar technologies to create entirely new portraits for their image banks, "building â€¦ faces of every race and ethnicity," as Qoves Lab puts it, to ensure a "truly fair facial dataset." As they see it, these tools will resolve data biases by cheaply and efficiently producing diverse images on command.

The issue that these technologists are looking to fix is a critical one. AIs are riddled with defects, unlocking phones for theÂ wrong person because they can't tell Asian faces apart,Â falsely accusing people of crimes they did not commit, and mistaking darker-skinned peopleÂ for gorillas. These spectacular failures aren't anomalies, but rather inevitable consequences of the data AIs are trained on, which for the most part skews heavily white and maleâ€”making these tools imprecise instruments for anyone who doesn't fit this narrow archetype. In theory, the solution is straightforward: We just need to cultivate more diverse training sets. Yet in practice, it's proven to be an incredibly labor-intensive task thanks to the scale of inputs such systems require, as well as the extent of the current omissions in data (research by IBM, for example, revealed thatÂ six out of eight prominent facial datasets were composed of over 80 percent lighter-skinned faces). That diverse datasets might be created without manual sourcing is, therefore, a tantalizing possibility.

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How Can I Make My Employees More Comfortable Figuring Things Out on Their Own?

And three other tricky workplace dilemmas.

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Relatives abroad are driving Cuba's e-commerce boom

Mara Karla Sánchez often feels compelled to send groceries to her mother and grandfather; they live in the Cuban capital of Havana and often struggle to find basic goods on the island. Sánchez, who has been living in Miami since 2015, uses services offered by Cuban e-commerce companies to deliver basic supplies to her family, a system she says is unreliable but necessary.

“It’s always either a hassle, or the prices are too high, but I’m willing to pay so that my family doesn’t starve,” she told Rest of World. Despite some items often taking months to be delivered or being excessively overpriced — like $260 for a tiny leg of pork — she hasn’t stopped using the shopping platforms for the past two years.

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More Airports to Use Greener 'Glide' Approach to Landing

A growing number of U.S. airports are trying swoop landings rather than staircase descents, a method that saves fuel, cuts emissions and reduces noise

Eleven more U.S. airports plan to adopt a new way of landing planes that reduces both emissions and noise — all by having incoming planes turn off their engines and glide down to the tarmac like a paraglider.

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Weird Supernova Remnant Blows Scientists' Minds

When dying stars explode as supernovae, they usually eject a chaotic web of dust and gas. But a new image of a supernova’s remains looks completely different — as though its central star sparked a cosmic fireworks display. It is the most unusual remnant that researchers have ever found, and could point to a rare type of supernova that astronomers have long struggled to explain.

“I have worked on supernova remnants for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Fesen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who imaged the remnant late last year. He reported his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on 12 January and posted them in a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on the same day.

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Everything Samsung Announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2023

The pomp around smartphone launches is often deflated by one word: iterative. Too often, a shiny, just-released phone fails to add anything exciting to the list of features we saw in the previous models. If there is a crazy new trick, it's gimmicky; if there isn't, well, there's probably no need to upgrade, right?

Like clockwork, Samsung has unveiled its next set of flagship smartphones: the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra. You won't find any gimmicks here, but to call these phones iterative would be an overstatement. These new Android phones—at a surface level—seem to have barely evolved beyond their predecessors.

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The Supreme Court Considers the Algorithm

When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered a lawsuit against Google in 2020, Judge Ronald M. Gould stated his view of the tech giant’s most significant asset bluntly: “So-called ‘neutral’ algorithms,” he wrote, can be “transformed into deadly missiles of destruction by ISIS.”

According to Gould, it was time to challenge the boundaries of a little snippet of the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as Section 230, which protects online platforms from liability for the things their users post. The plaintiffs in this case, the family of a young woman who was killed during a 2015 Islamic State attack in Paris, alleged that Google had violated the Anti-terrorism Act by allowing YouTube’s recommendation system to promote terrorist content. The algorithms that amplified ISIS videos were a danger in and of themselves, they argued.

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How to know if you want to be a parent | Psyche Guides

Set aside everyone else’s preconceptions. Then try doing these counterintuitive exercises to understand your own desires

is a marriage and family therapist, parenthood clarity mentor, and author who has been helping people resolve their parenthood indecision since 1991. She offers motherhood and fatherhood clarity courses based on the book she co-authored with Denise L Carlini, Motherhood – Is It For Me? Your Step-by-Step Guide to Clarity (2016). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Stoicism: How to turn your sadness into strength

It can be difficult to process sadness. People often try to numb it, avoid it, or deny that they’re even experiencing it, instead of better understanding and working through the emotion.

The Stoics offer a more head-on approach. This school of philosophy is often falsely associated with the suppression of emotions. But it’s more accurate to say that the Stoics were interested in how people can respond virtuously to life’s trials and tragedies. The answer, according to general Stoic thought, is that we shouldn’t deny emotions or the things that make us feel pain or sadness, but rather strive to accept that which we cannot control and do our best to process our emotions in a way that puts us on a productive path forward.

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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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How to Work with a Workaholic Colleague

Working with a workaholic colleague can be challenging. You know how infectious the secondhand stress can be: since they’re putting in overtime, you feel compelled to do the same. Their urgency and ultra-responsiveness create more tasks and replies for you to deal with. And their behavior can be downright damaging to your wellbeing. In this piece, the author outlines four steps you can take to mitigate the negative effects of their behavior on yourself and your team: 1) Depersonalize their actions. 2) Avoid glorifying the behavior. 3) Resist peer pressure. 4) Set boundaries.

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50, 100 & 150 Years Ago: February 2023

“According to Robert L. Birch, the highest mountain is probably Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Andes. It all depends on what is meant by ‘high.’ Mount Everest rises 29,028 feet above sea level, Chimborazo 20,561 feet. But because the earth is an oblate spheroid, the sea level at the Equator is some 14 miles farther from the center of the earth than the sea level at the North Pole. Indeed, distance from the center of the earth would seem to be a more reasonable standard for the height of a mountain, since it is a measure of how far the mountain sticks out into space. On this basis Chimborazo, which stands within two degrees of the Equator, is some two miles higher than Everest, which is nearly 28 degrees from the Equator.”

“‘Doctor: Are you depressed? Patient: No. Doctor: Were you taking drugs? Patient: No. Doctor: What is your problem? Patient: People make me nervous. Doctor: How do they do that? Patient: They stare at me. Doctor: Why? Patient: Maybe they don’t like the way I look or something. Doctor: Do you look unusual in some way? Patient: Why are you interested in my looks?’ This dialogue is the first part of a diagnostic interview between a psychiatrist and a patient who has systematized delusions of persecution. Unknown to the psychiatrist, however, the patient is a computer programmed to simulate paranoid processes in human beings. Out of 25 psychiatrists who interviewed the computer model, 23 judged the patient to be paranoid.”

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The Last Drug That Can Fight Gonorrhea Is Starting to Falter

To an unfamiliar eye, the press release from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health two weeks ago looked pretty routine. Its language was a little unnerving, maybe, but phrased carefully: Analysts had discovered a resident with a strain of gonorrhea that showed “reduced response to multiple antibiotics,” but that person—and a second with a similar infection—had been cured.

To a civilian, the announcement may have felt like bumping over a little wave in a boat: a moment of being off-balance, then back to normal. To people in public health and medicine, it felt more like being on the Titanic and spotting the iceberg.

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The Police Can Be Reformed. These Two Books Lay Out How.

In the aftermath of Tyre Nichols’s killing, it’s easy to despair. But two new books show how police departments can alter their behavior.

Most Americans want to see the police reformed. A Gallup poll conducted in May, two years after the murder of George Floyd, found that 50 percent of adults favored “major changes” to policing, 39 percent wanted “minor changes,” and only 11 percent thought no changes were required. Despite this general consensus and a patchwork of recent policy shifts in communities across the country, injustices continue to accumulate, and it would be easy to see the problems with policing as intractable.

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Could a hidden variable explain the weirdness of quantum physics?

Over the past few weeks, we have explored some of the foundational concepts in quantum physics, from quantum jumps to superposition and well beyond. Today we explore what may be the weirdest of quantum effects, that of quantum entanglement, which Einstein called spooky action-at-a-distance. The word says it clearly: To be entangled is to be connected — to have some kind of relation with or dependence on something else.

The dictionary definition is more pragmatic: “cause to become twisted together with or caught in,” like a fish entangled with a net or a person entangled in a difficult situation. Well, pairs of quantum objects — such as pairs of photons, pairs of electrons, or electrons and detectors — do get entangled. And this kind of quantum entanglement is in fact a difficult situation, at least to understand. To grasp what entanglement is, it might be best to apply it to a practical circumstance. If you stay with me, you will get the basics of entanglement and why it is weird.

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How to Master Social-Media Marketing in 2023

Strategies for small-business owners to stay ahead of the curve.

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McKinsey's Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here's Why It No Longer Applies.

In the 20th century McKinsey created a model called the Three Horizons to explain how businesses must invest in current products, incremental innovations, and breakthrough innovations. The framework relied on time as a guiding factor; it assumes that truly breakthrough innovations will take years to develop. Technology has made that assumption incorrect: Today innovations like Uber and Airbnb can be rolled out extremely quickly. Because established companies tend to move slowly and must invest resources in existing products, this means that unlike in the 20th century, attacking disruptors now have the advantage.

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Fact-Checkers Are Scrambling to Fight Disinformation With AI

Spain’s regional elections are still nearly four months away, but Irene Larraz and her team at Newtral are already braced for impact. Each morning, half of Larraz’s team at the Madrid-based media company sets a schedule of political speeches and debates, preparing to fact-check politicians’ statements. The other half, which debunks disinformation, scans the web for viral falsehoods and works to infiltrate groups spreading lies. Once the May elections are out of the way, a national election has to be called before the end of the year, which will likely prompt a rush of online falsehoods. “It’s going to be quite hard,” Larraz says. “We are already getting prepared.”

The proliferation of online misinformation and propaganda has meant an uphill battle for fact-checkers worldwide, who have to sift through and verify vast quantities of information during complex or fast-moving situations, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, or election campaigns. That task has become even harder with the advent of chatbots using large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can produce natural-sounding text at the click of a button, essentially automating the production of misinformation.

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How America Lost Its Grip on Reality

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.

In her cover story for the March issue of our magazine, the staff writer Megan Garber argues that Americans are living in a kind of “metaverse,” where the line between entertainment and reality is blurrier than ever. That lack of clarity could be hastening the nation’s descent into conspiracy.

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A New Way to Read 'Gatsby'

Of all the books in the 10th-grade curriculum, the class set of The Great Gatsby was what we teachers most coveted. Short enough to cover in one quarter, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was also packed with symbolism—Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes on the billboard, the green light at the end of the dock, the cars, the music. And it was weighty enough to support multiple readings. I imagined my first year of teaching bursting with rich discussions. But to start any conversation, I had to secure the books before the other teachers got them.

I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. The teenagers in my classroom—all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala—simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. “Surely,” I’d say with as much enthusiasm as possible, “you think this part is funny!” And I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: “Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.” Silence. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. “What’s ‘feigned’?”

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Photos: The Up Helly Aa Viking Fire Festival

In Scotland's Shetland Islands, a fire festival named Up Helly Aa takes place every January to mark the end of the yule season. The festival has been on hold for the past two years due to COVID-19 restrictions but was held again this year. Local participants, called guizers, celebrate their Norse heritage by dressing in Viking gear and marching through the town of Lerwick with battle axes and torches, dragging a ceremonial Viking longboat with them. At the end of the procession, the guizers hurl their flaming torches onto the longboat and set it ablaze. Gathered below are images from several Up Helly Aa processions over the past 20 years.

A Viking longboat burns during the annual Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick, Shetland Islands, on January 28, 2014. #

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The Wild West was lawless and chaotic â€” and the police helped keep it that way

Countless books, movies, video games, and television shows have presented the Wild West as a dangerous and lawless place, and it’s easy to see why. While the American frontier was sparsely populated compared to the country’s more urbanized regions, violent crime seems to have been as rampant on the hills of the Great Plains as it was in the streets of Chicago or New York — at least proportionally.

Here is a good example. In 1872, the territory of Wyoming witnessed a total of 153 crimes, including 4 murders. At first glance, that does not sound like a lot. However, when you consider that Wyoming — one of the last regions of the U.S. to become settled — only had a population of around 9,000 people, those same numbers suddenly leave a very different impression.

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The sober truth about finding the Universe's first stars

In this Universe, there are many things that we’re certain must exist, even though we haven’t discovered them just yet. These gaps in our understanding include the very first stars and galaxies: objects that didn’t exist in the early stages of the hot Big Bang, but that exist in great abundance later on. Although the Hubble Space Telescope and, more recently, the JWST have brought us back very close to the earliest objects of all — with the current record-holder being a galaxy whose light comes to us from just 320 million years after the Big Bang — but what we’re finding isn’t quite pristine.

Instead, the most distant, ancient objects we see are still quite evolved, showing evidence that stars have formed within them previously, rather than what we’re still seeking: gas that’s forming stars for the very first time. Just like many “firsts” in science, there are many teams out there making very strong claims that the evidence doesn’t quite support, like the claim that we’ve just spotted an example of these pristine, so-called “Population III” stars in a distant galaxy: evidence for the Universe’s first stars. Despite an uncharacteristically error-riddled article by Quanta Magazine lauding this possible detection, the evidence simply isn’t there to make such a claim.

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The GOP Is Just Obnoxious

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Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

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Asthma drug brings back "lost" memories

Losing sleep can have dramatic effects on mental function and cognitive performance. It can, for example, lower alertness, make it harder to concentrate, and lead to worse decision-making.

Sleep is also known to be important for strengthening new memories, and so another consequence of sleep deprivation is amnesia. But whether this memory loss is due to losing the information altogether or because of an inability to access or retrieve it is unclear.

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Climate change is altering the chemistry of wine

Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint. 

Industry laboratories were slammed with grape samples to test, with wait times of up to six weeks. Growers didn’t know whether it was worth harvesting their crops. Eight percent of California wine grapes in 2020 were left to rot. 

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1.5 Degrees Was Never the End of the World

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How hot is too hot for planet Earth? For years, there’s been a consensus in the climate movement: no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The figure comes from the Paris Agreement, a climate treaty ratified in 2016, and world leaders such as President Joe Biden bring it up all the time: “If we’re going to win this fight, every major emitter nation needs [to] align with the 1.5 degrees,” he said in November. Youth activists at the Sunrise Movement call 1.5 degrees a “critical threshold.” Even the corporate world is stuck on 1.5 degrees. Companies including Apple, Google, and Saudi Aramco—the world’s largest oil company—claim to be transitioning their operations in alignment with the 1.5 goal.

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Apple should be required to let iPhone users sideload apps, Biden admin says

The Biden administration wants major changes to the Apple and Google mobile app models, saying the companies "act as gatekeepers over the apps that people and businesses rely on" and enforce policies that "have the potential to harm consumers by inflating prices and reducing innovation."

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Netflix stirs fears by using AI-assisted background art in short anime film

Over the past year, generative AI has kicked off a wave of existential dread over potential machine-fueled job loss not seen since the advent of the industrial revolution. On Tuesday, Netflix reinvigorated that fear when it debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork.

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Won't somebody please think of the insects?!

Nearly 17 percent, or 22.5 million square kilometers, of the world’s land now falls within protected areas. Countries have established laws that safeguard these parcels of land—or in some cases, aquatic areas—to ensure that the natural ecosystems and their respective species and functions remain in good health. Creating protected areas has clearly helped some species, like the Asian elephant, survive.

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Bethesda's Redfall needs to be online for single-player mode

Bethesda's upcoming supernatural shooter Redfall will require "a persistent online connection," even for the single-player experience. That's according to an FAQ posted by Bethesda last week, which also confirms that players will need an active Bethesda.net account to play the game.

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Unofficial Link to the Past PC port is a reverse-engineered gem

It's a sad reality among retro emulation enthusiasts: You often spend far more time crafting your perfect setup than playing the games. You get your controller, linear filtering, sound engine, and everything else just right, and then you discover that your favorite game of yesteryear is far slower and more annoying than you remember.

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Up to 29,000 unpatched QNAP storage devices are sitting ducks to ransomware

As many as 29,000 network storage devices manufactured by Taiwan-based QNAP are vulnerable to hacks that are easy to carry out and give unauthenticated users on the Internet complete control, a security firm has warned.

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Massive nursing degree scheme leads to hunt for 2,800 fraudulent nurses

More than 2,800 people may be working as nurses under false pretenses after allegedly buying a fake diploma for between $10,000 and $15,000 from a massive Florida-based scheme recently busted by federal investigators. State and federal authorities are now working to track down the alleged fraudulent nurses, and in some cases, immediately annulling their licenses.

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Teasing out the secret recipes for mummification in ancient Egypt

Most of what we know about ancient Egyptian mummification techniques comes from a few ancient texts. In addition to a text called The Ritual of Embalming, Greek historian Herodotus mentions the use of natron to dehydrate the body in his Histories. But there are very few details about the specific spices, oils, resins, and other ingredients used. Fortunately, science is helping fill in the gaps. A team of researchers used molecular analysis to identify several basic ingredients used in mummification, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

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(Most of) AMD's gaming-centric Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs launch February 28

AMD's pumped-up, 3D V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will be available to buy on February 28, the company announced today. The rollout will start with the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which will start at $599 and $699, respectively. A cheaper model, the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, will be available for $449 but won't launch until April 6.

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ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base in history, report says

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that AI bot ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million active monthly users last month, a mere two months from launch, making it the "fastest-growing consumer application in history," according to a UBS investment bank research note. In comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach 100 million monthly users, and Instagram about 2.5 years, according to UBS researcher Lloyd Walmsley.

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Thursday, February 2, 2023

How Tech Companies Can Still Grow During a Time of Layoffs

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