   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S69You've Never Seen a Star Like This   A new image from the Webb telescope shows an infant star not as a diamond hanging in the sky, but as a velvety, dark orb surrounded by jets of radiant dust.From our perspective down here, on the surface of our planet, the stars are tiny, gleaming specks in an inky-dark universe. Occasionally they appear to twinkle, when the air in our atmosphere bends the incoming light. Through telescopes, they are balls of light, their glow distorted by the lens. And up close, the best star in the universe—our sun—is an orangey sphere of flame.
Continued here
|
| ? |
 |
S1The Elusive Green Consumer  Companies that introduce sustainable offerings face a frustrating paradox: Most consumers report positive attitudes toward eco-friendly products and services, but they often seem unwilling to follow through with their wallets. The authors have been studying how to encourage sustainable consumption for several years, performing their own experiments and reviewing research in marketing, economics, and psychology.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S2Exploit the Product Life Cycle  Most alert and thoughtful senior marketing executives are by now familiar with the concept of the product life cycle. Even a handful of uniquely cosmopolitan and up-to-date corporate presidents have familiarized themselves with this tantalizing concept. Yet a recent survey I took of such executives found none who used the concept in any strategic way whatever, and pitifully few who used it in any kind of tactical way. It has remained—as have so many fascinating theories in economics, physics, and sex—a remarkably durable but almost totally unemployed and seemingly unemployable piece of professional baggage whose presence in the rhetoric of professional discussions adds a much-coveted but apparently unattainable legitimacy to the idea that marketing management is somehow a profession. There is, furthermore, a persistent feeling that the life cycle concept adds luster and believability to the insistent claim in certain circles that marketing is close to being some sort of science.1
Continued here
|
S3The 30 Elements of Consumer Value: A Hierarchy  What consumers truly value can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. But universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in existing markets or break into new markets. In the right combinations, the authors’ analysis shows, those elements will pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S4
| ? |
|
S5Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know  The field of neuromarketing, sometimes known as consumer neuroscience, studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Over the past five years several groundbreaking studies have demonstrated its potential to create value for marketers. But those interested in using its tools must still determine whether that’s worth the investment and how to do it well.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S6Business Marketing: Understand What Customers Value  How do you define the value of your market offering? Can you measure it? Few suppliers in business markets are able to answer those questions, and yet the ability to pinpoint the value of a product or service for one’s customers has never been more important. By creating and using what the authors call customer value models, suppliers are able to figure out exactly what their offerings are worth to customers.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S7Branding in the Age of Social Media  Marketers originally thought that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would let them bypass mainstream media and connect directly with customers. Hoping to attract huge audiences to their brands, they spent billions producing their own creative content. But consumers never showed up. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S8The Globalization of Markets  Many companies have become disillusioned with sales in the international marketplace as old markets become saturated and new ones must be found. How can they customize products for the demands of new markets? Which items will consumers want? With wily international competitors breathing down their necks, many organizations think that the game just isn’t worth the effort.
Continued here
|
S9How to Scale Local Innovations in Big Companies  All too often innovations — including new products, new HR policies to attract and retain talent, and new production processes —developed in one part of a business stay there. Other groups that could benefit from them don’t know they exist. This leads to lost revenues and higher costs, since teams around the world often end up duplicating (or triplicating, or quadruplicating) investments in solving common problems. This article identifies three common obstacles to scaling innovations and describes a way to overcome them.
Continued here
|
S10Will AI Replace the Front Office in Pro Sports?  With accurate player-availability predictions for all active players, AI-powered decision-making is dramatically improved around three dimensions: 1) Risk management: If a productive wide-receiver is likely to get hurt, for example, a team might invest more in talented backups, to minimize drop-off in team performance during injury. 2) Training and targeted interventions: If AI suggests a player is injury-prone, teams can target that player with customized training, nutrition, or other regimens to reduce the likelihood of injury. Alternatively, a team might choose to reduce a player’s workload, also reducing risk. 3) Personnel decisions: By identifying factors that predict injury or other unavailability, teams can draft, trade for, or otherwise acquire players that they believe are more likely to be available season-long. Additionally, teams may choose to trade players for whom injury seems likely.
Continued here
|
S11Welcome to the Experience Economy How do economies change? The entire history of economic progress can be recapitulated in the four-stage evolution of the birthday cake. As a vestige of the agrarian economy, mothers made birthday cakes from scratch, mixing farm commodities (flour, sugar, butter, and eggs) that together cost mere dimes. As the goods-based industrial economy advanced, moms paid a dollar or two to Betty Crocker for premixed ingredients. Later, when the service economy took hold, busy parents ordered cakes from the bakery or grocery store, which, at $10 or $15, cost ten times as much as the packaged ingredients. Now, in the time-starved 1990s, parents neither make the birthday cake nor even throw the party. Instead, they spend $100 or more to “outsource” the entire event to Chuck E. Cheese’s, the Discovery Zone, the Mining Company, or some other business that stages a memorable event for the kids—and often throws in the cake for free. Welcome to the emerging experience economy.
Continued here
|
S12A Refresher on A/B Testing  A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of something to figure out which performs better. While it’s most often associated with websites and apps, the method is almost 100 years old and it’s one of the simplest forms of a randomized controlled experiment. This testing method has risen in popularity over the last couple of decades as companies have realized that the online environment is well-suited to help managers, especially marketers, answer questions like, “What is most likely to make people click? Or buy our product? Or register with our site?”. It’s now used to evaluate everything from website design to online offers to headlines to product descriptions. The test works by showing two sets of users (assigned at random when they visit the site) different versions of a product or site and then determining which influenced your success metric the most. While it’s an often-used method, there are several mistakes that managers make when doing A/B testing: reacting to early data without letting the test run its full course; looking at too many metrics instead of focusing on the ones they most care about; and not doing enough retesting to be sure they didn’t get false positive results.
Continued here
|
S13A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself  Many of us dread the self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in-person: Present, past, and future. You can customize this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself.
Continued here
|
S1415 Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer  In some industries, a weak labor market has left candidates with fewer options and less leverage, and employers better positioned to dictate terms. Those who are unemployed, or whose current job seems shaky, have seen their bargaining power further reduced. But the complexity of the job market creates opportunities for people to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment. Negotiation matters most when there is a broad range of potential outcomes.
Continued here
|
S15How to Answer "Why Do You Want to Work Here?"  Of all the interview questions job applicants prepare for, the most obvious ones sometimes get the least attention. Yes, you came ready to share your biggest flaw, your greatest strength, a moment when you shined, and a concept you learned, but what do you do with a broad but direct question like “Why do you want to work here?” In this piece, the author offers three strategies for answering this common interview question and provides sample answers for you to use as a guide.
Continued here
|
S16How to Write a Cover Letter  Perhaps the most challenging part of the job application process is writing an effective cover letter. And yes, you should send one. Even if only one in two cover letters gets read, that’s still a 50% chance that including one could help you. Before you start writing, find out more about the company and the specific job you want. Next, catch the attention of the hiring manager or recruiter with a strong opening line. If you have a personal connection with the company or someone who works there, mention it in the first sentence or two, and try to address your letter to someone directly. Hiring managers are looking for people who can help them solve problems, so show that you know what the company does and some of the challenges it faces. Then explain how your experience has equipped you to meet those needs. If the online application doesn’t allow you to submit a cover letter, use the format you’re given to demonstrate your ability to do the job and your enthusiasm for the role.
Continued here
|
S17How to Write a Thank You Email After an Interview  You’ve updated your resume, written your cover letter, and prepared for your interview. Now it’s time for your thank you note to seal the deal. In this piece, the author outlines what to say — and not to say — in your thank you email to interviewers and answers common questions like: How much detail should you include? When should you send it? And why is it important to do? He also includes three sample emails to use as a guide.
Continued here
|
S1838 Smart Questions to Ask in a Job Interview  The opportunity to ask questions at the end of a job interview is one you don’t want to waste. It’s both a chance to continue to prove yourself and to find out whether a position is the right fit for you. In this piece, the author lists sample questions recommended by two career experts and divides them up by category: from how to learn more about your potential boss to how to learn more about a company’s culture. Choose the ones that are more relevant to you, your interests, and the specific job ahead of time. Then write them down — either on a piece of paper or on your phone — and glance at them right before your interview so that they’re fresh in your mind. And, of course, be mindful of the interviewer’s time. If you were scheduled to talk for an hour and they turn to you with five minutes left, choose two or three questions that are most important to you. You will always have more time to ask questions once you have the job offer in hand.
Continued here
|
S19How to Give a Killer Presentation  According to Anderson, presentations rise or fall on the quality of the idea, the narrative, and the passion of the speaker. It’s about substance—not style. In fact, it’s fairly easy to “coach out” the problems in a talk, but there’s no way to “coach in” the basic story—the presenter has to have the raw material. So if your thinking is not there yet, he advises, decline that invitation to speak. Instead, keep working until you have an idea that’s worth sharing.
Continued here
|
S20How to Find Your Purpose  Purpose can be defined as an overarching intention that is personally meaningful to you and of consequence to the world beyond yourself. Your purpose can help you organize your life, give you a clear direction, and motivate you — especially when you encounter life’s inevitable setbacks and disappointments.
Continued here
|
S21S22Sustainability Is About Your Workforce, Too  In recent years, many companies hired chief sustainability officers and established a set of high-priority programs to reduce carbon emissions and the risk of global climate change. As the EU moves forward with a number of regulations designed to protect the workforce, it’s time to extend the concept of sustainability. People sustainability takes a holistic approach to corporate human capital practices, including diversity and inclusion, well-being, employee safety, and fair pay. It raises these human capital issues to the C-suite and obliges chief human resource officers to work with chief sustainability officers on these programs.
Continued here
|
S23How to Get Honest and Substantive Feedback from Your Customers  Businesses can’t improve operations without honest and substantive feedback. Customers can be reluctant to provide it, for several reasons. Companies can try to overcome this by focusing feedback requests on improvement (not employee assessment), focusing on customer actions instead of words, and approaching the gathering of feedback as a habit rather than an occasional effort.
Continued here
|
S24A More Impactful Strategy for Sustainable Investing  The effectiveness of sustainable investing has been challenged, with critics like Tariq Fancy describing it as a mere placebo. Amidst rising skepticism and stricter disclosure requirements, a deeper dive reveals that traditional methods of influencing companies, namely “voice” (shareholder engagement) and “exit” (portfolio screening), are not exhaustive. Through a comprehensive review of over 3,500 research papers, a new approach — “field building” — emerges. This tactic acknowledges the interconnected web of stakeholders around companies, termed “fields”, that profoundly influence corporate behavior. By reshaping these fields, investors can indirectly drive sustainable change in firms. Five tactics are highlighted: (1) Shifting other investors’ evaluation of issues, (2) Sharing expertise, (3) Delegitimizing certain business activities, (4) Establishing voluntary standards, and (5) Supporting regulatory changes. While promising, field-building presents challenges like profitability and political exposure. Yet, by embracing this expanded toolkit, investors can magnify their positive impact and appeal to an increasingly conscious investment clientele.
Continued here
|
S25How the Geeks Rewrote the Rules of Management  Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout his career, he has done ground-breaking research on how digital technologies are changing the world. He is a prolific writer, a frequent contributor to HBR and other outlets, and a sought-after commentator on technological change – especially, these days, on the potential of generative AI. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results,” the subject of much of this “New World of Work” interview. His big idea is that “geeks” have created not only the technology that’s driving our future but also a management approach that defines contemporary corporate excellence. It’s a somewhat contrarian view; after all, many of us have criticized Silicon Valley-run businesses as being male-dominated and lacking in empathy (even, of course, as we continue to use their products). What does McAfee mean by geek? He defines them as “obsessive mavericks,” people who become obsessed with hard problems and are willing to pursue unconventional solutions – to avoid the dysfunctions that have traditionally plagued companies as they expand.
Continued here
|
S26Should we be worried about older politicians?  Pauline Newman, now 96, holds a lifetime position as a US federal judge. Though she wants to carry on working, she's in the midst of lawsuits with colleagues who want her to retire.The US has become a hotspot for debates about whether people in the political sphere can ever be too old to lead. The top contenders for the 2024 US presidential election are Joe Biden, who at 80 is over twice as old as the median American; and 77-year-old Donald Trump, who is a more than a decade beyond the "Normal Retirement Age" – the age at which Americans can receive their full retirement benefits.
Continued here
|
S27The politics of Africa's TikTok bans  In August, Senegal and Somalia banned the app, with calls to do the same in Kenya and Uganda. While local governments and petitioners have cited security risks and morality as reasons to take action against TikTok, lawyers and activists told Rest of World via text and social media messages that the Chinese app is falling prey to politically motivated decisions.“It seems it’s a political decision shrouded in a morality cloak,” said Mohamed Mubarak, a Somali policy analyst. “The government is unhappy about the political parody of the president and [prime minister] and is using ‘human rights’ as a justification.” In its official announcement of the ban on August 20, the Somali government said its decision was based on the damage the app had caused to the country’s social morals and cultural values.
Continued here
|
S28The U.S. is racing to source chips from Vietnam -- but engineers are scant  In 2004, a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur opened a microchip design company in Hanoi — not for business reasons, but simply to be close to his Vietnamese girlfriend, goes the story. He hired electrical engineering and telecommunications student Nguyen Thanh Yen, despite Yen lacking any knowledge about chips. Yen spent his first three months on the job devouring textbooks on chip design.Fast forward to the present day, and Yen is the lead engineer at Korean chip design company CoAsia Semi’s Hanoi branch. Despite building a thriving career, he still has the same struggle as his first boss: finding enough chip engineers to hire. Over the past three years, he’s only been able to recruit 70 chip design engineers, a fraction of his target goal of 300, he told Rest of World.
Continued here
|
S29The SoftBank-backed company that lets you buy glasses over WhatsApp  Founded in 2010, Lenskart is an online-first brand that sells prescription eyewear, contact lenses, sunglasses, and accessories. Its app offers three ways to buy glasses: The “buy at store” option, which lets users locate the nearest Lenskart retail store from its network of 2,000 outlets, “try at home,” where an eyewear expert brings over 150 frames to the customer’s doorstep, or “buy on chat,” where users place orders over WhatsApp.Co-founded by Peyush Bansal, a former Microsoft employee, Lenskart launched its own premium eyewear brand, John Jacobs, in 2017. It has since expanded operations to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The SoftBank-backed company is one of the few internet companies that reported a profit in two of the last three years. For the 2022 financial year, Lenskart’s revenue was $180 million, of which the sale of eyewear products alone contributed to 94% of its total revenue.
Continued here
|
S30Can You Spot a Satellite?  Thousands of spacecraft circle Earth. Seeing them from the ground is surprisingly easy—and a lot of funWhen I take people out for a stargazing session on a dark night, they’re always surprised to find out how many human-made satellites are visible as they pass overhead. In fact, if you stay out for an hour or two, you can easily spot a dozen or more making their way across the sky! I understand the confusion, though. Satellites seem so far away—in space—that you’d think they’d be almost invisible and only rarely seen.
Continued here
|
S31How Schadenfreude Is Poisoning U.S. Politics  Partisan desires to see opponents harmed has created a vibrant demand for promises of candidate cruelty in the U.S.The arrest of Donald Trump in Georgia, for his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, was a landmark moment in American political history. The momentousness arose not only from the event itself (Trump was the first president ever to have a mug shot taken). The public reaction to Trump’s arrest—an outburst of unbridled euphoria—clearly illustrates a dynamic increasingly animating American politics: a large portion of the public enjoys seeing harm or misfortune befall those with whom they disagree politically.
Continued here
|
S32S33Forgotten Memories May Remain Intact in the Brain  Forgetting is a fact of life—one that many people find frustrating. But mounting evidence pushes back at the notion that a slip or lapse in our recollection is inherently bad. Indeed, forgetting can sometimes help people cope psychologically or let go of useless knowledge. In a new study, neuroscientist Tomás Ryan of Trinity College Dublin and his colleagues have examined the fundamental biology underlying a form of forgetting we experience every day. Their work suggests that when we can’t recall an old phone number or a high school teacher’s name, those details are not necessarily lost. As Ryan explained to Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas, forgetting may be an active process that the brain uses to support learning. He also discussed how dementia may ultimately reflect disordered forgetting more than lost memories.You study an idea that some people may find counterintuitive: forgetting can be part of learning. How so?
Continued here
|
S34Why Japan Is Building Its Own Version of ChatGPT  Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and cultureJapan is building its own versions of ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot made by US firm OpenAI that became a worldwide sensation after it was unveiled just under a year ago.
Continued here
|
S35S36Dams Worldwide Are at Risk of Catastrophic Failure  After two dams in northeastern Libya failed, thousands of people are dead, thousands more are unaccounted for, and tens of thousands are displaced in the city of Derna and surrounding towns. The dams along the Wadi Derna river valley collapsed amid Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean cyclone that dropped up to 16 inches of rain over parts of the North African country in a single 24-hour period this week. The same record-breaking storm also inundated Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, causing devastating flooding across the region of those nations before making landfall in Libya.The scale of the catastrophe in Derna, a city of around 100,000 people, is massive. Yet its underlying causes are not unique. The disaster occurred at the confluence of sociopolitical instability wrought by civil war, a historic storm (likely exacerbated by climate change) and neglected infrastructure: the destroyed dams, first constructed in the 1970s, had reportedly not been maintained since 2002. Similar conditions are replicated in many other places worldwide. In the aftermath of Derna’s dam collapses, experts are calling for renewed attention to the international problem of aging, ill-maintained dams.
Continued here
|
S37Life-Changing Cystic Fibrosis Treatment Wins $3-Million Breakthrough Prize  A trio of scientists who developed the combination drug Trikafta are among the winners of five major awards in life sciences, physics and mathematicsThe triple-drug combination Trikafta has given a new lease of life to 90% of people with cystic fibrosis, an inherited disorder that affects the lungs and other organs. Now, the trio of researchers who spearheaded its development has won one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science.
Continued here
|
S38Climate Change Is Hindering Global Growth and Prosperity, U.N. Says  In the five decades between 1970 and 2021, extreme climate events caused more than two million deaths and led to economic losses of $4.3 trillion, 60 percent of which occurred in developing countries, a U.N. report foundCLIMATEWIRE | Climate change is undermining efforts to address hunger, health and other sustainable development targets — including the transition to clean energy, a U.N. report said Thursday.
Continued here
|
S39Al Roker: An extreme weather report from America's weatherman  It's not just you: the weather is getting worse. And if there's one person who would know, it's "America's weatherman," Al Roker, who's spent decades reporting live from some of the worst storms and natural disasters in history. He explains how we can each take action to address climate change and work towards a more sustainable, hopeful future for generations to come.
Continued here
|
S40Welcome to Halal Hinge  Swoosh. Ping. Slow and studied scrolling. Typing with the index finger. My mother is on the prowl for a man. Not for herself, of course, but for any of her three daughters, all of whom have the great misfortune of being single in their late twenties and early thirties. “I’m depressed,” she tells us when the subject of suitors comes up. She, a Bangladeshi woman who got married at 19 and had three kids by 27, can’t believe that none of us have procured a husband or given her any grandchildren. So, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She is now part of several WhatsApp groups where hundreds of fussy parents are on the hunt.Instead of debating the merits of The Office or pineapple on pizza as one does on Hinge, mums and aunties in these groups discuss deal-breakers such as level of piety, education, willingness to relocate—and the ever controversial, interest in living with in-laws. They trade CVs, often called “biodata” in South Asian communities. When a parent is happy with what they’ve heard, they may forward information to their children. The whole process is more bureaucratic than you might think. Each biodata comes with a unique code, and there are subgroups depending on your preferences, including those for people living in London or seeking older suitors or divorcées. If you like the sound of one suitor, you can find their preferred contact details (frequently a different number than the one in the WhatsApp chat) and message them privately.
Continued here
|
S41The Best Mobile Controllers for Gaming on the Go  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 WIREDMobile gaming has never been more popular. You can relax with a casual puzzle, indulge your tower defense addiction, or dip into some competitive shooter action. These days, there’s something for everyone. The latest phones can run demanding, graphically impressive titles, so ports of popular PC and console games are increasingly common, but they’re not always fun to play with touchscreen controls. What you need is a mobile game controller.
Continued here
|
S42If Elon Musk Had Been a Happy Child, Would He Still Be Launching Rockets?  I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s mega-bestseller Steve Jobs. I’m sure somewhere else in the office are covers representing his other subjects—Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna—which together have earned him the sobriquet “biographer of genius.” It’s a unique and enviable shift in career focus for Isaacson, whose main gig for years has been as a top editor and administrator for Time Magazine, the Aspen Institute, and CNN. Now I am putting myself among his countless interlocutors ahead of an epic book tour for what might be his biggest book yet. It’s a forest-clearing doorstop of prose based on two years spent observing the man who is perhaps the world’s most ambitious pursuer of the future—one whose periodically wretched personality has made him an object of fear and scorn. Climate change notwithstanding, no one has sucked up more oxygen in the tech and business world than Elon Musk, and with this eponymous biography, Isaacson has made a case that all that attention is justified.The biographer-subject bond between Isaacson and Musk seems predetermined. Musk, whose ego is interplanetary, was so eager to add himself to Isaacson’s bookshelf of geniuses that he tweeted the book project as a done deal minutes after an informal exploratory meeting. The leader of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI, and X (“Twitter” had an insufficiently Bond-villain ring), gave his chosen Boswell unbelievable access. This allowed Issacson to share Musk’s secrets for getting things done when the US government and Detroit carmakers could not, including his inquisitorial cost-cutting regimen, dubbed “The Algorithm.” The 71-year-old legacy-media veteran spent hundreds of hours literally within arm’s reach of his subject, observing Musk as he destroyed launch pads, humiliated Tesla workers, and swung a wrecking ball at Twitter’s culture. Family members, ex-wives, and parenting partners shared their views, including frustrated complaints about Musk’s cruelty and impulsivity. One scene is straight out of a French farce: Unbeknownst to either of Musk’s parenting partners, both are in the same hospital, one giving birth to his twins and the other helping a surrogate deliver another fruit of his loins. (Among the many surprises in the book is that Musk and his sometimes-partner Grimes have a hitherto unannounced third child. Grimes, you held this back from me!)
Continued here
|
S43The 39 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now  Streaming services are known for having award-worthy series but also plenty of duds. Our guide to the best TV shows on Netflix is updated weekly to help you know which series you need to move to the top of your queue. They aren’t all sure-fire winners—we love a good less-than-obvious gem—but they’re all worth your time, trust us. Feel like you’ve already watched everything on this list you want to see? Try our guide to the best movies on Netflix for more options. And if you’ve already completed Netflix and are in need of a new challenge, check out our picks for the best shows on Hulu and the best shows on Disney+. Don’t like our picks, or want to offer suggestions of your own? Head to the comments below.
Continued here
|
S44The Auto Strike Threatens a Supply Chain Already Weakened by Covid  In addition to making everyone an epidemiologist, the Covid-19 pandemic schooled the public on the world-spanning network of manufacturers, assemblers, and shippers behind just about every consumer good that arrives on your doorstep. Or driveway. Car prices soared as automakers struggled with a supply chain jammed up by worker shortages, chip shortages, and shipping delays.Now plants at Detroit’s Big Three automakers are closed again, after nearly 13,000 members of the United Autoworkers Union left the assembly lines at three plants run by Stellantis, Ford, and General Motors. The workers want reforms, including higher pay and shorter workweeks, as the industry faces unprecedented change associated with the transition to electric vehicles.
Continued here
|
S45Ask Ethan: Why don't neutron stars decay?  One of the most exotic naturally occurring objects in the Universe is the neutron star: achieving some of the highest densities, temperatures, and energies found anywhere outside of a black hole or separate from the Big Bang. Often containing more than a solar mass worth of matter compressed into a sphere just 10-20 kilometers across, neutron stars generate the strongest magnetic fields in the cosmos, and some neutron stars may even contain more exotic states of matter — like a quark-gluon plasma, possibly including not just up-and-down quarks but heavier species as well — toward their innermost cores.But neutron stars, as far as we can tell, remain stable over very long timescales. Based on observations of millisecond pulsars, the oldest of the known neutron stars, they must persist for at least hundreds of millions of years, and potentially much, much longer. And yet, if you had just a single free neutron in your possession, it would decay after a mean lifetime of about ~15 minutes. This bothers reader Gary Camp, who wants to know:
Continued here
|
S46More accountants are leaving the field than joining. What's going on?  Imagine a world without accountants. It’s not as distant as you might think. Over 300,000 accountants have left the field in the past two years, and fewer students are pursuing accounting majors or the CPA exam.Forensic accountant Kelly Richmond Pope explores this alarming decline in interest in accounting. Pope believes the difficulty and cost of getting an accounting degree have drawn prospective students away, along with shifting career interests driven by social media, ESG, cybersecurity, and IT.
Continued here
|
S47How to understand all the talk about a "crisis in cosmology"  Human beings need origin stories, which is why every human culture has an origin “myth,” a narrative of how the Universe was born and how it came to be the way it appears today. We moderns, however, developed science, which is a particularly powerful way to enter into dialogue with the world.Our scientific origin story is something called the standard model of cosmology. It is justifiably seen as a triumph of reason and human imagination. Recently, however, in light of new data and other theoretical considerations, the idea of a “crisis in cosmology” has been getting attention. This essay, the final in a series I’ve been doing here at Big Think, is meant as a kind of summation of where we stand right now in that question.
Continued here
|
S48Nobel disease: Why some of the world's greatest scientists eventually go crazy  Winning a Nobel Prize in the sciences may be the most prestigious achievement in the world. It’s the ultimate golden ticket. Professionally, a Nobel Laureate in physics, chemistry, or medicine can spend the rest of their career wherever they choose, studying whatever they want. Laureates become spokesmen for their fields, or they can lead institutes or head government agencies. They represent the pinnacle of human achievement.But fame comes with downsides. Laureates are often asked to comment on things far outside their area of expertise. This can be fraught with danger, particularly if the topic involves something of wide public interest, like politics or religion — or aliens. Though he wasn’t a Nobel Laureate, Stephen Hawking regularly found himself in such situations — and he often said incredibly dumb things.
Continued here
|
S49Technology's unintended consequences require a "containment" solution. But how?  Alan Turing and Gordon Moore could never have predicted, let alone altered the rise of, social media, memes, Wikipedia, or cyberattacks. Decades after their invention, the architects of the atomic bomb could no more stop a nuclear war than Henry Ford could stop a car accident. Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction.
Continued here
|
S50Social media restrictions "profoundly damaging," Biden admin tells SCOTUS  In July, a federal judge issued an order limiting the Biden administration's social media contacts over Republicans' concerns that officials illegally suppressed speech. That order was mostly overturned last week, and now, US Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar has rushed to ask the Supreme Court to reevaluate one of the order's remaining restrictions.
Continued here
|
S51S52S53Wizardry remaster is in early access, and it looks like a pretty, painful dive  The original Wizardry, started by a Cornell University student in 1978 and released in 1981, was a mostly text-based affair, with just enough primitive Applesoft BASIC graphics to hint at what was happening. It was published by a newly formed Sir-Tech software, with just enough polish to stand out from the Ziploc-bagged crowd. And it was polished and play-tested enough to find its audience. It's likely the first party-based RPG, and it all but created the genre "dungeon crawler."
Continued here
|
S54Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that?  This change led to a firestorm of understandable anger and recrimination across the game development community. But it has also led some to wonder how such a massive change is even legally possible. Can Unity just unilaterally alter the fee structure its developers were relying on, even for development projects that were started (or even completed) under completely different legal terms?
Continued here
|
S55Things get serious this week in a really solid The Wheel of Time episode  Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode of Amazon's new WoT TV series. Now they're doing it again for season two—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We're going to do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
Continued here
|
S56Musk's X revokes paid blue check from United Auto Workers after strike called  Last night when the clock struck midnight, nearly 13,000 workers at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis went on strike after the so-called "Big Three" car companies failed to reach an agreement with United Auto Workers (UAW). By Friday morning, UAW discovered that X, the platform formerly known as Twitter—in what appeared to be a petty move by platform owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—had stripped their account's verified status, The Intercept reported.
Continued here
|
S57S58Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media  On Sunday, a Reddit user named "Ugleh" posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that rapidly gained attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. Follow-up posts garnered even more praise, including a tweet with over 145,000 likes. Ugleh created the images using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet.
Continued here
|
S59Toddler poisoned after eating deadly plant mislabeled as diet supplement  Last September, a New Jersey toddler got ahold of a bottle of weight loss supplements. The product, purchased by the toddler's mothers, was labeled as the dried root of tejocote, aka Mexican hawthorn, a large shrub-like plant found in Mexico and Latin America that produces crabapple-like fruits. Although there's little data on the effects of the dried root—including any supporting its use for weight loss—tejocote is generally considered safe to consume.
Continued here
|
S60Photos of the Week:  A new volcanic eruption in Hawaii; deadly flooding in coastal Libya; a devastating earthquake in Morocco; scenes from China Fashion Week, in Beijing; a tunnel deep underground in Germany; wheelchair basketball in Germany; a penny farthing race in England; an end-of-summer cattle drive in Germany; and much more Surfing dogs compete in Helen Woodward Animal Center's 18th Annual Surf Dog Surf-A-Thon at Del Mar Dog Beach, on September 10, 2023, in Del Mar, California. #
Continued here
|
S61'The Morning Show'  The series should capture the wild ambition and tense charms of the TV business. Its leads don’t telegraph any of that.Ah, The Morning Show. Less a television series, really, than a vibe—plotlines that were topical two years ago, ageless female faces, constant chaos that you should simply allow to wash over you like rain. Does it make sense? Not at all. You could watch other shows, and you would never see this: Jennifer Aniston’s frown-acting, Reese Witherspoon’s pissed-off listlessness, Billy Crudup harnessing all the frantic charisma of Satan losing at poker. The first episode of the new season begins with the broadcast-morning-show host Alex Levy (played by Aniston) watching her own TV obituary, and ends with the news anchor Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) in literal space, weeping in zero gravity while bemoaning the war in Ukraine. What other series has the creative capacity, the daring, the money to do something so grand and so pointless? TV like this is a gift.
Continued here
|
S62Don't Let Love Take Over Your Life  If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom. When Kuurne asked them to rate, on a scale of one to seven, how close various relationships felt, they’d frequently give the highest mark to only their partner and their children, if they had them; when subjects illustrated their social networks, they’d commonly put those other connections—friends, co-workers, siblings—on the outskirts of their map. People outside the household, for the most part, weren’t “woven into that everyday life,” Kuurne told me.
Continued here
|
S63Political Art Isn't Always Better Art  The cultural critic dream hampton on the false divide between “conscious” and mainstream rapOne of the challenges of profiling dream hampton, the cultural critic who has cut a winding trail across journalism, filmmaking, and activism since 1991, is that she is sick of hip-hop, the art form she is most famously associated with. Another challenge is that she has too many stories to fit into any one article. Interesting bits end up getting left out—like the tale of the time she stopped the Notorious B.I.G. from beating up Questlove.
Continued here
|
S64The Real Issue in the UAW Strike  Unions fear that the auto industry is using the transition toward EVs to advance a second shift away from well-paying jobs.The United Automobile Workers’ strike against the Big Three manufacturers that began earlier today is exacerbating the most significant political vulnerability of President Joe Biden’s drive to build a clean-energy economy.
Continued here
|
S65The Very Common, Very Harmful Thing Well-Meaning Parents Do  A few years ago, I gave a talk about raising kids in the digital age at a public high school in an affluent suburb on Chicago’s North Shore. During the Q&A session, a father stood up and spontaneously shared that he wasn’t taking any chances: He tracked his son’s and daughter’s locations on their phones. In fact, he still tracked his eldest, 19, who was away at college in another state. If the Find My Friends tracking app suggested she wasn’t in class—he also had her class schedule—he would text her, demanding an explanation. Some parents in the audience grimaced at the invasion of this young woman’s privacy, but seemingly just as many nodded their heads: They were tracking their kids too.Casual surveillance has become a given of modern parenting. For the past five years, as I researched my new book, Growing Up in Public, I heard from teens about parents tracking their locations, reading their texts, and checking up on their grades multiple times a day. (I offered parents and their children anonymity while reporting my book, to protect their privacy.) Meanwhile, the “family locator” geo-tracking app Life360 has more than 50 million active monthly users. In a study from 2016, when the Pew Research Center most recently studied this phenomenon, 61 percent of parents admitted to monitoring their kids’ internet activity, and almost half said they looked through their kids’ messages or call logs.
Continued here
|
S66The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again  The pseudoscience of race provides both a justification of hierarchies and an enemy to rail against.The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.)
Continued here
|
S67This Week in Books: Should We Still Read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'?  A conversation with Clint Smith on the moral complexity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book.Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the trials of an enslaved man named Tom who accepts his suffering with Christian equanimity proved a boon to the abolitionist cause, though its actual depictions of Black people skimp on providing them with much humanity. Even in its time, the book was vulgarized via stage adaptations that reduced Stowe’s story to minstrelsy and her characters to caricatures. Today, a work that did so much to shake white northerners out of their complacency is remembered mostly as a slur. But in an essay for The Atlantic’s October issue, Clint Smith surprised himself by discovering the original power of the book—along with what remains so limited and prejudiced about it. His article uncovers the story of Josiah Henson, the “original” Uncle Tom, Stowe’s real-life inspiration for the character. In his 1849 memoir, Henson described what it was like to be an overseer on a Maryland plantation and all of the moral compromises he had to make to survive slavery. Becoming acquainted with Henson’s story also gave Smith a new perspective on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I talked with Smith about this aspect of his essay, and how he was able to brush so much accumulated dust off the book.
Continued here
|
S68The Brain of a Man Who Is Always Thinking About Ancient Rome  Do you find yourself constantly closing your eyes and seeing marble? Do thoughts of Caesar and chariot races and a nascent republic punctuate your daily goings?All roads lead to Rome—and apparently so do all male thoughts. Across social media, women have been encouraged to ask the men in their life how often they think about the Roman empire and to record the answer. To their surprise (recounted in videos posted all over TikTok, Instagram, and more), many men purport to think about the Roman empire quite a bit. One reveals that his iPhone background is Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, a painting depicting a Roman legend. “Men Are Thinking About the Roman Empire All the Time” has quickly become a meme of its own. Even those who don’t cop to this behavior still sometimes do it. “Probably not a lot, why?” one confused man replies when asked, before admitting that he thinks about the Romans three or four times a month. “The Roman empire was a very big part of history,” he says defensively.
Continued here
|
S70Libya's Unnatural Disaster  Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are currently believed dead—a number that could double in the days ahead. An estimated 38,000 residents have been displaced.Libya has seen no shortage of suffering and misery since the 2011 revolution that toppled its longtime dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Yet Storm Daniel promises to be a singular event. Already, Libyan commentators inside the country and out are pointing to the apocalyptic loss of life in Derna as the product not simply of a natural disaster, but of Libya’s divided and ineffectual governance. The west of the country is run by the internationally recognized Government of National Unity; the east, including Derna, falls under the rule of the renegade strongman Khalifa Haftar.
Continued here
|
 |
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 |
