   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S69Many people think cannabis smoke is harmless - a physician explains how that belief can put people at risk   Though tobacco use is declining among adults in the U.S., cannabis use is increasing. Laws and policies regulating the use of tobacco and cannabis are also moving in different directions.Tobacco policies are becoming more restrictive, with bans on smoking in public places and limits on sales, such as statewide bans on flavored products. In contrast, more states are legalizing cannabis for medical or recreational use, and there are efforts to allow exceptions for cannabis in smoke-free laws.
Continued here
|
| ? |
 |
S13 Strategies to Boost Sales and Marketing Productivity  A study of B2B companies found that just one in 20 was able to consistently grow sales faster than sales and marketing expenses. As companies seek to cut costs in an uncertain economy, increasing this commercial productivity is a smart strategy. Research shows the three ways companies can do this are to refine the go-to-market model, turn every rep into an A player, and make sales and marketing support more efficient.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S2Tackling the Problem of Subscribers Who Binge...Then Bail  Consumers love to binge-watch streaming video. But as the number of streaming services has grown, more subscribers are scrutinizing subscription expenses and deciding to cancel. People who do this too frequently — “serial churners” — pose a special challenge to companies like Netflix. This article presents three ways companies can seek to reduce the problem of serial churn.
Continued here
|
S3The Problem with Setting Goals: Our Favorite Reads  Kathak is one of the eight major forms of Indian classical dance, and it’s specific to the region I grew up in. As an amalgamation of three art forms — music, dance, and drama — Kathak performances are a delight to watch. I had learned it for a couple of years as a child, given up, and come back to it a few times, but it never stuck. It never became a thing I consistently wanted to practice. “Maybe I just like to watch it? I must not be that great,” I’d think to myself.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S4How to Get Comfortable "Being Yourself" at Work  “Being yourself” at work while “being taken seriously” is easier said than done. This is especially true when you’re just starting out, or when you’re seasoned but new to an organization. If this is the case for you, don’t feel pressured by the things you read online about “why first impressions matter,” or why you have “90 days” to establish your entire reputation. Authenticity is more about how you feel in this moment of your life, and what you’ll do to honor that identity. Here’s what you can do to get more comfortable showing up authentically with your colleagues right now:
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S5Tap Into Your Creative Genius  Simply put, to be creative is to use our imaginations, which most of us do every single day. At work, we use creative shortcuts to manage our time and productivity, design engaging presentations, and strategize plans for the future. At home, we are creative every time we try a new hobby, cook a new meal, or improvise dance moves to our favorite songs.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S6How to Prepare for a GenAI Future You Can't Predict  Given the staggering pace of generative AI development, it’s no wonder that so many executives are tempted by the possibilities of AI, concerned about finding and retaining qualified workers, and humbled by recent market corrections or missed analyst expectations. They envision a future of work without nearly as many people as today. But this is a miscalculation. Leaders, understandably concerned about missing out on the next wave of technology, are unwittingly making risky bets on their companies’ futures. Here are steps every leader should take to prepare for an uncertain world where generative AI and human workforces coexist but will evolve in ways that are unknowable.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S7Are Collaboration Tools Overwhelming Your Team?  Today’s workers feel numbed by a fragmented, unpredictable, and overwhelming collection of collaboration tools — the very things advertised to boost their productivity. They know they’re overloaded and feel exhausted but believe there is little or nothing they can do to slow the onslaught of communication. The authors explored how collaboration technology bloat impacts employees and tried to help people take control over their work. They called their intervention the “collaboration cleanse.” Here are their findings, as well as strategies for leaders to simplify employees’ collaboration tool use.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S8What is the best clothing to keep you cool in a heatwave?  As the world continues to grapple with extreme heatwaves, which are becoming ever more regular thanks to climate change, the clothing we wear is a vital component in how we stay cool. Researchers have found that by wearing appropriate clothes, it is possible to turn the air-conditioning up by 2C (3.6F) – which over the long term would save considerable energy, both saving money and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.When it comes to colour, most people wear white in the summer – because white reflects the sun's rays, rather than absorbing the light like black does.
Continued here
|
S9Why there's a rush to explore the Moon's enigmatic South Pole  It's a place where no human-made object has trundled before. Last week, however, the diminutive Pragyaan rover slid down a ramp from its mothership, India's Vikram lander, and began exploring the region around the Moon's South Pole.The uncrewed spacecraft is something of a pioneer – the first to make a soft-landing in the frigid, crater-strewn lunar polar landscape. Whereas the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s primarily set down near the Moon's equator, the lander from India's Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully touched down about 370 miles (600km) from the lunar south pole, closer than any spacecraft has been to this location.
Continued here
|
S10Come downstairs or we'll eat your order, delivery workers tell customers  When a customer asked Pedro Júnior to bring the food he was delivering up to their apartment, he’d weigh his options: Take his bulky (and often heavy) bag up with him, or leave it behind and risk it being stolen? Júnior, who works for a food delivery app, has had his bag stolen twice already on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. One night, he told Rest of World, someone tried to steal his motorbike. “I came back to see someone had tampered with the chain with which I lock up my baby,” he said, using the pet name he has for his bike. That was the last straw. From then on, Júnior pledged that customers would either come down to get their food — or they’d go without it. Customers pushed back, often reacting rudely when Júnior told them they’d need to come down to collect their order. So he turned to TikTok, and a trend was born: Júnior posts videos of himself arguing with customers over the intercom, while eating the unretrieved meals and singing a song he’s made up. “Se não descer, eu como mesmo,” it goes. (“If you don’t come down, I’ll eat it”). In one video, Júnior dances to the song with a group of other delivery drivers.
Continued here
|
S11Why Amazon isn't the Amazon of Latin America  The Argentine e-commerce company MercadoLibre is having a very good year, doubling its profits thanks to a thriving fintech business. Broadly speaking, it’s Latin America’s version of Amazon’s “everything store,” right down to the electric delivery vehicles — but for whatever reason, Amazon doesn’t seem to be much of a threat. It’s hard to make a direct comparison between Amazon and MercadoLibre, for reasons our Latin America editor laid out earlier this year, but they’re both inescapable in their home regions. MercadoLibre’s emphasis on financial software makes it even more pivotal: As skyrocketing inflation paralyzed the Argentine economy in recent years, the company’s payment service Mercado Pago became a kind of currency hedge, using investing features to keep deposits from melting away as the Argentine peso lost its value.
Continued here
|
S12Rare Superheavy Oxygen Isotope Is Detected at Last  The long-awaited discovery of oxygen 28 might prompt physicists to revamp theories of how atomic nuclei are structuredBy combining a powerful set of instruments with some experimental savvy, physicists have for the first time detected oxygen-28 — an isotope of oxygen that has 12 extra neutrons packed into its nucleus. Scientists have long predicted that this isotope is unusually stable. But initial observations of the 28O nucleus suggest that this isn’t the case: it disintegrates rapidly after creation, a team reports in Nature today. If the results can be replicated, physicists might need to update theories of how atomic nuclei are structured.
Continued here
|
S13S14Olive Oil Prices Surge as Persistent Drought Ravages Mediterranean Groves  Olive trees in Spain and neighboring countries have little fruit, which itself could wither awayAs summer winds down in the verdant olive groves across southern Spain’s region of Andalusia, the tree branches typically bend down, heavy with ripening fruits. But this summer, Cristóbal Cano’s groves—25 acres in the city of Alcalá la Real near Granada, Spain—look light and nearly empty, as if the trees have already been harvested.
Continued here
|
S15Online Talk Therapy Works as Well as an In-Person Session, a New Study Shows  A study of 27,500 patients in the U.K.’s health system suggests that getting people into mental health treatment faster is a huge boon of online therapyTalking to your therapist over Zoom is as helpful for anxiety and depression as going to in-person therapy. The virtual session, moreover, can be delivered at a lower cost, according to a large new study conducted in the U.K.
Continued here
|
S16Maui Fires Could Contaminate the Island's Waters  Researchers in Hawaii are studying the effects of the deadly blazes on its island of Maui, including how they have impacteddrinking-water quality and might affect local marine ecosystemsAs search crews wrap up the hunt for people missing after fires swept the Hawaiian island of Maui, scientists are gearing up for a challenge facing survivors: water contamination. Early indications suggest that the local water system has been compromised in places, and the sheer scale of the damage could pose unprecedented threats to Maui’s diverse coastal ecosystem.
Continued here
|
S17Bilawal Sidhu: The AI-powered tools supercharging your imagination  How is AI changing the nature of human imagination and creativity? Through a mind-bending tour of new techniques he's been tinkering with, creative technologist Bilawal Sidhu shows how anyone can use AI-powered tools -- like 3D scans that let you redesign the physical world in real time -- to expand the possibilities of artistic expression, often within just minutes.
Continued here
|
S18The Inventor Behind a Rush of AI Copyright Suits Is Trying to Show His Bot Is Sentient  “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” is a pixelated pastoral scene of train tracks running under a moss-flecked bridge. It was, according to its creator’s creator, drawn and named in 2012 by an artificial intelligence called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). But earlier this month, a federal judge in the US decided that Stephen Thaler, DABUS’s inventor who listed his AI system as the artwork’s creator, can’t claim the copyright for the work. Thaler is appealing the decision.Thaler, a Missouri-based inventor and AI researcher, has become something of a serial litigant on behalf of DABUS. Judges have swatted away similar lawsuits in the European Union, the United States, and, eventually, on appeal, in Australia. In the UK, the Supreme Court is currently deliberating over his attempts to be granted a pair of patents for a “neural frame” and “fractal container” that Thaler says DABUS invented.
Continued here
|
S19Segway's P100S Electric Scooter Is a Heck of a Smooth Ride  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 WIREDThe first time I went to take the Segway P100S for a spin, it was as though I’d touched a Lawmaster Motorcycle from Judge Dredd. The whole thing started flashing lights and blaring a loud siren. That's when I realized it has an anti-theft alarm on by default that detects “unusual movements.” I promptly turned this feature off, but I suppose it’s a nice deterrent if you have to leave this thing outside for more than a few minutes.
Continued here
|
S20The Best Travel Mugs to Keep Drinks Hot or Cold  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 WIREDIf it isn't whiskey, you shouldn't be drinking it at room temperature. Even river water on a warm day of hiking is refreshingly cooler than the ambient air temperature. Lukewarm coffee is a great way to get your whole day off to rough start, and nobody daydreams about relaxing by the pool with a tepid glass of 70-degree water by their side.
Continued here
|
S21People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse  Over the past year or so, you’ve probably had conversations with friends, family, and coworkers about the rise of generative AI capable of making convincing text and imagery—but perhaps also about the hype and fear swirling around the technology. A poll out this week finds that worry over harmful effects of AI is outpacing the wow of helpful AI.A majority of Americans say their concern about artificial intelligence in daily life outweighs their excitement about it, according to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 11,000 US adults. The results come at a time when a growing number of people are paying attention to news about AI in their daily lives. Pew has run this survey twice before and reports that the number of people more concerned than excited about AI jumped from 37 percent in 2021 to 52 percent this month.
Continued here
|
S22'Super Mario Bros. Wonder' Is What Happens When Devs Have Time to Play  Here’s something you don’t hear often in game development: When the team behind Super Mario Bros. Wonder was in the prototyping stage of the game, it had no due date. “I wanted to prevent people from saying, ‘We won’t make that deadline, so that’s why we didn’t do it—we can’t do it,’” producer Takashi Tezuka says. For the game’s director, Shiro Mouri, it was a very clear, and very positive, sign. They did not intend to make this game halfway.Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which comes out October 20, is the series’s return to the format that originated the entire franchise: 2D side-scrolling. Mario is trading the Mushroom Kingdom for the Flower Kingdom, where flora talks and special items can make the entire world tilt faster than a bad trip.
Continued here
|
S23The 26 Best Shows on Hulu Right Now  While Netflix seemingly led the way for other streaming networks to create compelling original programming, Hulu actually beat them all to the punch. In 2011—a year before Netflix’s Lilyhammer and two years before the arrival of House of Cards—the burgeoning streamer premiered The Morning After, a pop culture-focused news show that ran for 800 episodes over three years, plus A Day in the Life, a docuseries from Oscar winner Morgan Spurlock.Hulu has continued to make TV history in the dozen years since, most notably in 2017, when it became the first streamer to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series with The Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, that was just one of eight Emmys the series took home in its inaugural season, and it has continued to rack up nominations and wins over the years.
Continued here
|
S24Apple's Decision to Kill Its CSAM Photo-Scanning Tool Sparks Fresh Controversy  In December, Apple said that it was killing an effort to design a privacy-preserving iCloud photo-scanning tool for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. Originally announced in August 2021, the project had been controversial since its inception. Apple had first paused it that September in response to concerns from digital rights groups and researchers that such a tool would inevitably be abused and exploited to compromise the privacy and security of all iCloud users. This week, a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative told Apple that it is organizing a campaign to demand that the company “detect, report, and remove” child sexual abuse material from iCloud and offer more tools for users to report CSAM to the company. Today, in a rare move, Apple responded to Heat Initiative, outlining its reasons for abandoning the development of its iCloud CSAM scanning feature and instead focusing on a set of on-device tools and resources for users known collectively as Communication Safety features. The company's response to Heat Initiative, which Apple shared with WIRED this morning, offers a rare look not just at its rationale for pivoting to Communication Safety, but at its broader views on creating mechanisms to circumvent user privacy protections, such as encryption, to monitor data. This stance is relevant to the encryption debate more broadly, especially as countries like the United Kingdom weigh passing laws that would require tech companies to be able to access user data to comply with law enforcement requests.
Continued here
|
S25'Reservation Dogs' Is a Vision of Hollywood's New Normal  In the FX comedy Reservation Dogs, currently midway through its third and final season, the residents of Okern, Oklahoma, are rendered on a glorious scale. They are a collection of oddballs and misfits, lovers and loners, friends and frenemies, wise elders and wise-cracking aunties. To engage their all-encompassing community is to enter into the beauty and the difficulty of contemporary Native American life. It is also to be absorbed into the possibility of a better TV future.Reservation Dogs was unprecedented in form and theme when it premiered in 2021. Sister comedies like Peacock's Rutherford Falls, which likewise concerned the preservation and future of Indigenous identity, weren't attempting the same narrative feats. It was a coming-of-age story, but by no means your typical teenage roller coaster. Layered and vivid, world-building was the key to its magnetism, and that's what originally captivated me. Its point of view was never exclusive to the enthusiasms of its eponymous quartetâBear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), Elora (Devery Jacobs), and Cheese (Lane Factor)âbut grew to include a community bound by circumstance but comically divergent in temperament.
Continued here
|
S26The physics of why the first clock in America failed  For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of time was through the pendulum clock. From its initial development in the 17th century until the invention of quartz timepieces in the 1920s, pendulum clocks became staples of household life, enabling people to organize their schedules according to a universally agreed upon standard. Initially invented in the Netherlands by Christian Huygens all the way back in 1656, their early designs were quickly refined to greatly increase their precision, where it soon became routine for pendulum clocks to keep time accurately to within a tolerance of just ~2 seconds per day.But when the first pendulum clock was brought to the Americas, something bizarre happened. The clock, which had worked perfectly well at keeping accurate time in Europe, was initially synchronized with known astronomical phenomena, like sunset/sunrise and moonset/moonrise. But after only a week or two in the Americas, it was clear that the clock wasn’t keeping time properly. The first clock in America was a complete failure, but that’s only the beginning of a story that would revolutionize our understanding of the physics of, and gravitation on, planet Earth.
Continued here
|
S27Leadership is overrated  It’s easy to blame the person at the top. Everyone wants to take shots at authority figures, so why pay attention to such complaints? Leadership development has typically focused on making the individual, not the team as a whole, better. All the training, educating, and seminaring we’ve done has led to an abundance of autocratic individuals who see themselves as saviors. They didn’t do this by themselves; we helped. Under the old model, the team exists, at least in the leader’s mind, to help the boss get ahead, to increase production, maximize profit, and make the leader look better.Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup and author of The Coming Jobs War, wrote, “What the whole world wants is a good job, and we are failing to deliver it… This means human development is failing, too. Most [individuals] are coming to work with great enthusiasm, but the old management practices — forms, gaps, and annual reviews — grind the life out of them.” Management styles, which have changed very little since the late 1700s, are due to evolve with the changing face of business. The world of work is changing fast, and management needs to follow.
Continued here
|
S28How maternal mood shapes the developing brain  Health, athleticism, intelligence, illness: The traits that make us who we are come from the interplay between the genes we inherit and the environment we’re exposed to. And those environmental effects begin even before we are born. Thanks to long-running studies that track offspring from womb to adulthood, we know that smoking during pregnancy is linked to low birth weight, that drinking alcohol can cause heart defects or joint disorders, that a bad diet raises the odds of a child being an obese as an adult.But what about a mother’s mental health? Until recently, researchers thought that this had an effect only after birth — that if a mother’s poor emotional well-being led to neglectful or abusive parenting, it increased her child’s risk of psychological disorders such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety or other conditions. But a woman’s mental health is an integral part of her fetus’ environment, explains Catherine Monk, a medical psychologist at Columbia University in New York. And a burgeoning body of evidence shows that a pregnant woman’s psychological health can influence that of her child’s.
Continued here
|
S29A sensational theory about a civilization-ending comet in ancient Ohio has been retracted  Roughly 1,900 years ago, a prominent Native American culture arose in the Midwest, centered in southern Ohio. Though not a true civilization — there were neither large cities nor common rulers — the Hopewell Culture connected communities and tribes living from modern-day New York, across to Minnesota, and down to Missouri. The Hopewell peoples traded similar trinkets, painted similar art, cremated and buried their dead in similar manners, and, above all, shared a spirituality that drew them all to the Ohio Valley. It was here where they collectively constructed monumental ceremonial earthworks and regularly pilgrimaged to celebrate the religious traditions that united them. They feasted together, practiced elaborate rituals, held funerary services for the highly respected deceased, and watched the young perform rites of passage.
Continued here
|
S30Why the truth of art is greater than the truth of science  “At the very beginning of history, we find the extraordinary monuments of Paleolithic art, standing as a problem to all theories of human development, and a delicate test of their truth.”—R.G. CollingwoodThis quote and the problem it describes drives The Entanglement by Alva Noë, a new book on art, philosophy, and what it means to be human. Almost as far back as we want to go in the story of humanity, there is art standing in a central, pivotal location. The question that Noë, a philosopher at the University of California-Berkeley, wants to understand is simple: Why? Why is art so central to our development that we cannot tell the story of humanity without it?
Continued here
|
S31Alexa and Google Assistant fall on hard times, agree to be speaker roommates  The Google Assistant and Alexa have long been at odds, and back in the voice assistants' heydays, speaker-makers seemingly weren't allowed to ship both platforms in one product. Later around 2019, the two companies finally deigned to be on the same device—but never active at the same time. Notably on Sonos speakers, customers could swap between the two assistants via an app setting. Times are getting tough for voice assistants, though, and now via a new toolkit, Amazon and Google can finally work at the same time on a single speaker. One of the first to support the new toolkit is JBL, via the new JBL Authentics 200, 300, and 500 speakers.
Continued here
|
S32S33S34S35AI-powered hate speech detection will moderate voice chat in Call of Duty  On Wednesday, Activision announced that it will be introducing real-time AI-powered voice chat moderation in the upcoming November 10 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. The company is partnering with Modulate to implement this feature, using technology called ToxMod to identify and take action against hate speech, bullying, harassment, and discrimination.
Continued here
|
S36First Qi2 chargers look to expand MagSafe-like wireless charging beyond Apple  The first wireless charging devices that support the Wireless Power Consortium's (WPC) Qi2 wireless charging standard were detailed today. The chargers and subsequent Qi2 products will feature Apple MagSafe-like technology and promise a secure, more efficient wireless charge with the help of magnets. We don't know which smartphones will support Qi2, but there's hope that with the right compatibility, it will be easier to charge an Android phone with a secure magnetic connection. The new charging standard will also expand the number of chargers that can power Android and iOS devices wirelessly.
Continued here
|
S37S38AI fever turns Anguilla's ".ai" domain into a digital gold mine  Anguilla, a tiny British island territory in the Caribbean, may bring in up to $30 million in revenue this year thanks to its ".ai" domain name, reports Bloomberg in a piece published Thursday. Over the past year, skyrocketing interest in AI has made the country's ".ai" top-level domain particularly attractive to tech companies. The revenue is a boon for Anguilla's economy, which primarily relies on tourism and has been impacted by the pandemic.
Continued here
|
S39Right to repair's unlikely new adversary: Scientologists  The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don't think product repairability should be government-mandated, it's been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple's place is a new entity looking to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.
Continued here
|
S40S41Take a Wife ... Please!  This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.In the year 2000, having narrowly escaped the Y2K computer glitch, Americans should have been poised to party. The bendy riff of the Santana–Rob Thomas joint “Smooth” wailed from Top 40 stations everywhere. Survivor beckoned us to watch people eat grubs for a chance at $1 million. Brad and Jen got married, and the gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius asked acerbically, “Are you not entertained?”
Continued here
|
S42A Country Shaped by Love and Fear  Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protestors, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.
Continued here
|
S43How to Pick the Right Sort of Vacation for You  Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Although I don’t know exactly what you were hoping for in your summer vacation this year, I can make an educated guess based on data. The travel company Expedia, in a survey of more than 12,000 travelers, found that 38 percent of them primarily value relaxation, and 37 percent are searching for “contentment and mental well-being.” Meanwhile, no research I have ever seen finds that vacationers are looking for an increase in their stress and aggravation.
Continued here
|
S44The Real Men South of Richmond  In an era of artificial wonders, authenticity—or at least the illusion of it—is only going to become a more coveted commodity. Perhaps that’s one reason country music has ruled the highest reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 for most of the summer. And no one is selling authenticity like Oliver Anthony, a former factory worker from Virginia who was totally unknown until his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit No. 1 two weeks ago. His rise is surprising, but it also fits with a long pattern of audiences cherishing—and power brokers exploiting—figures who seem like the real deal.Sporting a beard and voice of comparable wildness, Anthony yowls a blend of working-class angst, complaints about the welfare state, and references to child trafficking by elites on “Richmond.” The power of his performance is straightforward; the reaction has not been. While right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene evangelized for the song days after its release, music-industry experts wondered if an astroturfed campaign was unfolding: Digital downloads, an outdated and easily manipulated format that receives outsize weight in how the charts are calculated, drove the song’s initial ascent. Such suspicions—as well as liberal criticisms that Anthony’s lyrics dissed poor and obese people—spurred indignation from political pundits for whom Anthony’s success confirmed various pet narratives. At the GOP presidential debate, the very first question was about Anthony: “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?”
Continued here
|
S45The Emptiness of the Ramaswamy Doctrine  Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, has initiated a war against what he views as an outdated, establishment foreign policy. He is deeply skeptical of NATO. He wants to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, detach Russia from China, and compel Taiwan to defend itself without America. He also proposed reducing American financial aid to Israel, a stance long considered politically impossible on the right, before saying he would do so only with Israel’s approval. This week, Ramaswamy attempted to justify such stands with an essay in The American Conservative called “A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine.”Invoking Presidents George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon—whom Ramaswamy has called “the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country, probably in all of American history”—the article appears to be an effort to lend coherence and gravitas to Ramaswamy’s worldview. It also seems to be an attempt to counter the attack by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley that he has “no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” In the article, Ramaswamy promises to restore American national pride and identity after decades of feckless liberal internationalist and neoconservative policies. “We will be Uncle Sucker no more,” he writes.
Continued here
|
S46Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2023: Highly Commended  The organizers of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest have been kind enough to share a preview of some of this year’s Highly Commended images. The full list of competition winners, and the Grand Title and Young Grand Title Awards, will be announced in October. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style. Snow Bison. Waugh caught sight of a plains bison kicking up flurries of snow over its bulky frame. From his vehicle, he saw the bison start to head downhill toward the road, gathering momentum, and he drew up to give it space to cross. Location: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. #
Continued here
|
S47When the State Has a Problem With Your Identity  Inside one family’s decision to move from Texas to California to protect their transgender teenagerThis week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments have already quit or left the state. The estimated tens of thousands of young people in Texas who identify as trans—roughly 1 percent of the state’s population of kids between ages 13 and 17, according to one count—and their families, must grapple with a new political reality.
Continued here
|
S48This Hurricane Season Is Unprecedented  A very strange climate drove Hurricane Idalia. Scientists can’t predict whether more storms like it are coming.Earlier this week, mission control commanded the International Space Station to turn its cameras toward the Gulf of Mexico. Giant white clouds, gleaming against the blue of the planet’s oceans and the blackness of space beyond, indicated the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, hovering menacingly off the coast of Florida. From that high-flying view, you couldn’t tell exactly how much havoc Idalia would wreak—the record-breaking storm surges; the flooding across Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas—or the very unusual conditions in which the storm had formed.
Continued here
|
S49When Sci-Fi Anticipates 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.The relationship between tech and sci-fi is closer—and messier—than observers might think.
Continued here
|
S50S51Why 'Hot Springs' Draw the World's Largest Gathering of Deep-Sea Octopuses /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/2b/0d/2b0d91ef-996d-43e8-9f6b-931cf20581d2/octopus_garden_water_sensor_d1318_01_1150-1024x576.jpg) Some 20,000 octopuses congregate near an inactive underwater volcano off California’s coast, using heat from thermal springs to hatch their eggs fasterShimmering water intrigued scientists at a spot off the coast of California in 2018, where they made a staggering discovery: Far below the surface, a legion of an estimated 20,000 deep-sea octopuses had gathered, the largest congregation of the cephalopods ever found.
Continued here
|
S52London Zoo Weighs All 14,000 of Its Animals, 'From the Tallest Giraffe to the Tiniest Tadpole' /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/6d/2b/6d2bf40b-9dd8-46b0-b67b-7f48b0cb9b0e/a_meerkat_is_weighed_at_the_annual_weigh_in_website.jpg) Last week marked the start of the London Zoo’s annual weigh-in, a near-herculean effort in which keepers weigh and measure each of the zoo’s more than 14,000 animals.“We record the vital statistics of every animal at the zoo—from the tallest giraffe to the tiniest tadpole,” says Angela Ryan, head of zoological operations, in a statement. “Having this data helps to ensure that every animal we care for is healthy, eating well and growing at the rate they should—a key indicator of health and wellbeing.”
Continued here
|
S53Teenager Helps Uncover 34-Million-Year-Old Whale Skull in Alabama /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/42/e0/42e04c27-e149-4c85-9b86-a0c82a50cf77/lindsey_in_the_research_space_3.jpg) Working with one of her teachers, the 16-year-old student found the fossil, which may represent a new species, on her family's propertyWhat started out as a trip to look for shark teeth ended with a shocking discovery, when a 16-year-old student and her teacher unearthed a 34-million-year-old whale skull in Alabama.
Continued here
|
S54A Lost N.C. Wyeth, Bought for $4, Could Sell for $250,000 /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/38/04/38048335-c0e9-4686-b050-ac3f1802f4f2/newell_convers_wyeth_1882-1945_ramona_frontispiece_illustration_detail_shot.jpg) The owner had no idea the painting was an original when she found it in a New Hampshire thrift storeIn 2017, a woman was thumbing through old picture frames at a New Hampshire thrift store when one caught her eye. She bought the frame, and the painting inside it, for $4. Perhaps she had stumbled across something valuable, she joked at the time, per CBS New Boston. A quick internet search revealed nothing, so she hung the painting up in her home and didn’t give it a second thought—until this spring.
Continued here
|
S55S56Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact | Quanta Magazine  In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture, a major open question in number theory about the relationship between addition and multiplication. There was just one problem: His proof, which was more than 500 pages long, was completely impenetrable. It relied on a snarl of new definitions, notation, and theories that nearly all mathematicians found impossible to make sense of. Years later, when two mathematicians translated large parts of the proof into more familiar terms, they pointed to what one called a "serious, unfixable gap" in its logic â only for Mochizuki to reject their argument on the basis that they'd simply failed to understand his work.The incident raises a fundamental question: What is a mathematical proof? We tend to think of it as a revelation of some eternal truth, but perhaps it is better understood as something of a social construct.
Continued here
|
S57How 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.
Continued here
|
S58 Procurement in the Age of Automation  Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.The authors have been studying procurement and automation for two decades.i Mary Lacity has conducted more than 50 case studies on enterprise use of automation technologies. Remko Van Hoek and Lacity have been studying early adopters of procurement technologies for three years, including companies using e-auctions, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies, such as blockchains. For this article, they interviewed senior executives, business unit leaders, managers of centers of excellence for procurement, buyers at dozens of companies, suppliers, and automated negotiation software vendors.
Continued here
|
S59Kokum: India's naturally cooling fruit juice  Scrawled with chalk on a small blackboard in Maharashtra, India, there was a list of items available at the small restaurant where I took shelter to escape from the sweltering midday heat.The deep red sherbet (a traditional Indian beverage prepared with fruits and spices) almost instantly relieved me of my thirst and exhaustion. My drink was made from the fruit of kokum, a tropical evergreen tree from the mangosteen family that's indigenous to Konkan, a western coastal belt of land that extends from Maharashtra to the states of Goa and Karnataka.
Continued here
|
S60Venice Film Festival: Is Hollywood self-destructing?  Returning to the Venice Film Festival towards the tail-end of the pandemic in September 2021, a group of newly vaxxed, tested and masked film journalists journeyed to the Lido to see a brilliant slate of films, including sci-fi epic Dune, Campion's homoerotic western The Power Of The Dog and harrowing feminist autobiographical tale Happening. It felt at the time that, gratifyingly, cinema had weathered the terrible storm of the previous 18 months, and only better days could lie ahead. Two years on, however, and as the industry hits the Lido once more from today, unfortunately an altogether different crisis has left it reeling.At present, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has lasted since early May, and negotiations to end it are still ongoing, but both sides are accusing the other of being unreasonable. To make matters more tense, on 14 July SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild) joined the strike, and now labour disputes involving both actors and writers have brought Hollywood to its knees, with production suspended on the majority of its films and television programmes.
Continued here
|
S61View from The Hill: Australians go into the referendum divided - can the country emerge united?  The stakes in the October referendum are high. For Anthony Albanese, who has made the Voice his great social cause of his first term. For Peter Dutton, who has defied those who say he is on the “wrong side of history”. For those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who look to the referendum for affirmation of their special place in our society, as well as giving them a chance for some tangible improvements in their lives and opportunities.
Continued here
|
S62Workers like it when their employers talk about diversity and inclusion  Many companies have made commitments toward diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in recent years, particularly since the murder of George Floyd sparked weeks of racial justice riots in 2020. But some of those efforts, such as hiring diversity leaders and creating policies to address racial inequality, have stalled or reversed at the same time as a growing conservative backlash is threatening to further undermine such initiatives.
Continued here
|
S63Iran's street art shows defiance, resistance and resilience  A recent rise in activism in Iran has added a new chapter to the country’s long-standing history of murals and other public art. But as the sentiments being expressed in those works have changed, the government’s view of them has shifted, too.The ancient Persians, who lived in what is now Iran, adorned their palaces, temples and tombs with intricate wall paintings, showcasing scenes of royal court life, religious rituals and epic tales. Following the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, murals in Iran took on a new significance and played a crucial role in shaping the national narrative. These murals became powerful visual representations of the ideals and values of the Islamic Republic. They were used to depict scenes of heroism, martyrdom and religious devotion, aiming to inspire national unity and pride among Iranians.
Continued here
|
S64Giraffes range across diverse African habitats - we're using GPS, satellites and statistics to track and protect them  Nearly 6,000 years ago, our ancestors climbed arid rocky outcrops in what is now the Nigerian Sahara and carved spectacularly intricate, larger-than-life renditions of giraffes into the exposed sandstone. The remarkably detailed Dabous giraffe rock art petroglyphs are among many ancient petroglyphs featuring giraffes across Africa – a testament to early humans’ fascination with these unique creatures. We are still captivated by giraffes today, but many of these animals are at risk, largely due to habitat loss and illegal hunting. Some are critically endangered.
Continued here
|
S6550 years after the Bunker Hill mine fire caused one of the largest lead-poisoning cases in US history, Idaho's Silver Valley is still at risk  On Sept. 3, 1973, a fire swept through the baghouse of the Bunker Hill mine in Idaho’s Silver Valley. The building was designed to filter pollutants produced by smelting, the melting of rocks that separates metal from its ore. The gases produced in this process carried poisons, including lead.At the time, the prices of lead and silver were climbing toward all-time highs. Rather than wait for new filters and repairs, company officials kept the mine running. They increased production, bypassed the filtration steps and, for eleven months, dumped noxious gases directly into the surrounding area.
Continued here
|
S66Year-round school: Difference-maker or waste of time?  Contrary to how it sounds, “year-round” school usually doesn’t mean students going to school throughout the year – or for more days than other students. Often it just means switching up the calendar so that there’s not such a long summer break. Below, two education experts – Nicole Miller and Daniel H. Robinson – answer five questions about the modified school calendars known as year-round school.The first is the “single-track” modified calendar, also known as a “balanced calendar.” The second is the “multi-track calendar.” Neither one is typically an extended year. Instead, both calendars involve moving the 180 school days around so that there are multiple short breaks as opposed to the typical long summer break.
Continued here
|
S67S68Governors may make good presidents - unless they become 'imperial governors' like DeSantis  Many people believe governors make good presidents. In fact, a 2016 Gallup Poll found that almost 74% of people say that governing a state provides excellent or good preparation for someone to be an effective president. As a result, many political commentators have tried to explain why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is stumbling in his campaign for president. Some say it is because he is stiff or awkward on the campaign trail, or his path to the nomination is not really to the political right of former President Donald Trump, or he needs to step up and directly confront the former president.
Continued here
|
S70
 |
TradeBriefs Publications are read by over 10,00,000 Industry Executives About Us | Advertise Privacy Policy Unsubscribe (one-click) You are receiving this mail because of your subscription with TradeBriefs.
Our mailing address is GF 25/39, West Patel Nagar, New Delhi 110008, India |
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/52/49526839-8c84-4c03-bc22-7ea6686fac8a/abb_3_ct0a6868.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/8d/33/8d334c2d-5d5b-4fb8-90c5-bf68fb0b1eda/370569073_271470382305293_4053533448377484979_n.jpg)
