   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S7S28
S37Poems: 'Fractal' and 'In Practice'   Editor's Note: A kitty tail worked its way into this poem when the poet's granddaughters, arguing over a cat costume, interrupted her reading of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time, excerpts from which appear here in quotation marks.This article was originally published with the title "The Poetry of Fractals and Physics" in Scientific American 329, 4, 91 (November 2023)
Continued here
|
S38Fish Skin Can Heal Other Animals' Eye Injuries  Tilapia skin’s collagen can aid in healing burns, fixing heart valves, and more—and now it can be used for repairing corneasTilapia skin is rich in collagen, and this structural protein's abundance has made the fish a popular resource in veterinary and human medicine. Researchers have explored its use in applications from bandaging burn victims and correcting abdominal hernias to mending heart valves and reconstructing vaginas.
Continued here
|
S29Did NASA Just Spoil the Plot of 2023's Best Sci-Fi Show?  One of the coolest aspects of the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series For All Mankind is its impressive realism when it comes to space policy. While the alternate timeline in For All Mankind offers some aspirational outcomes — like more women and people of color in space — it depicts the journey to those endpoints realistically. In Season 1, President Nixon is motivated to put more women in space to one-up the USSR. In Season 3, the race to Mars is as much about securing resources as it is about the spirit of exploration. And, in the forthcoming Season 4, the very nature of why we set out to colonize the Moon and Mars is put into question.But, if you find yourself getting sucked into the ethical and philosophical debates that span the forthcoming new episodes of For All Mankind (starting on November 10, 2023) you may be shocked to learn that in real life, some of these exact same issues are central to urgent conversations about upcoming real-life missions to both the Moon and Mars. On October 4, 2023, during the International Astronautical Conference, in Baku, Azerbaijan, many of the talking points played out exactly like the upcoming season of For All Mankind. This conference didn’t spoil the new season outright, but in some ways, it also kind of did — at least, philosophically.
Continued here
|
S31
S22How 'Marvel's Spider-Man 2's Ending Sets Up a Third Game (Or DLC)  Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 crafts a harrowing emotional story for both Peter Parker and Miles Morales. And even though the game draws on familiar elements of the wall-crawlers’ history, the climax is more dire than anything the two heroes have faced. Spider-Man 2’s final hours are also packed to the brim with hints at the future, new villains, and even unexpected heroes. There’s a lot to take in during Spider-Man 2’s final act, so we’ll help break it all down, piece by piece. Before jumping into the ending proper, it’s important to break down two of Spider-Man 2’s sidequests that could be vital for the series' future. The Flame quests see Peter helping the new vigilante Wraith, who is actually Peter’s old police friend Yuri Watanabe. The duo battle a fanatical cult led by an enigmatic figure known as The Flame.
Continued here
|
S35
S36Readers Respond to the June 2023 Issue  “Mimicking Matter with Light,” by Charles D. Brown II, discusses a phase of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) acquiring a geometric phase, “a term in the mathematical description of its quantum phase that determines how it evolves.” The article mentions the BEC picking up a geometric phase of pi (π) in one experiment, and it shows a full circle in an accompanying graphic. Later it depicts a phase of 2π with two full circles.I understand that a geometric phase has no physical interpretation, which the article also mentions. But I am still confused because a single full circle is usually associated with 2π, as I remember from my telecommunications engineering studies, which had a lot of math as their base. Can you clear up this seeming contradiction?
Continued here
|
S32
S39What Went Wrong with a Highly Publicized COVID Mask Analysis?  The Cochrane Library, a trusted source of health information, misled the public by prioritizing rigor over realityThe COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, but in May officials ended its designation as a public health emergency. So it's now fair to ask if all our efforts to slow the spread of the disease—from masking, to hand washing, to working from home—were worth it. One group of scientists has seriously muddied the waters with a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help.
Continued here
|
S9What VUCA Really Means for You  It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right?
Continued here
|
S27'Rick and Morty's Next Episode Will Parody a Classic '90s Comedy  Rick and Morty Season 7 is already one big party. The season premiere saw Rick stage a failed intervention for Mr. Poopybutthole, who’d been crashing at the Smith family home for several months. After recruiting Gearhead, Squanchy, Birdperson, and their next-door neighbor Gene, the gang wound up going on a bender that led them right to Hugh Jackman’s “Jack Shack” to party.When all’s said and done, Mr. P and friends seemingly learned a lesson. But will things change? Probably not. Rick and Morty Season 7 continues on with Episode 2, “The Jerrick Trap.” Here’s everything you need to know, including the release date and time, episode title, trailers, and more.
Continued here
|
S16The Beautiful, Unpredictable Life of Ryuichi Sakamoto  In late March, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was hailed as “arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world,” died at the age of seventy-one. The cause was complications from cancer, which he had been battling for two years. I first got to know Sakamoto in 2018 and, since his diagnosis, had been interviewing him. I wasn’t sure what form a piece about Sakamoto would take, but it seemed important to capture everything I could. Sakamoto moved from New York to Tokyo in 2022 to continue his treatment, and our meetings became less frequent. Eventually, even Zoom was too tiring, and then he was gone.In July, still unsettled, I went to the Shed, in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, to see “Kagami,” a mixed-reality show dedicated to his memory. For the piece, Sakamoto was filmed over three days in December of 2020 at a green-screen studio in Tokyo. That footage forms the basis for a virtual Sakamoto with the same neat silver mop of hair and round tortoiseshell eyeglasses as the living Sakamoto. There are moments in “Kagami” when the composer looks like a video-game character who has unlocked the Piano Spirit level. Mostly, though, Sakamoto is the flame in his own digital shrine, accompanied by the sound of his playing and a shifting backdrop of rain, smoke, and stars. The conjured tableaux do not distract from the impression that the show—kagami means “mirror” in Japanese—seeks resurrection through reflection.
Continued here
|
S5How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut  Intuition is frequently dismissed as mystical or unreliable — but there’s a deep neurological basis for it. When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. The author offers strategies to learn how to leverage your intuition as a helpful decision-making tool in your career: 1) discern gut feeling from fear, 2) start by making minor decisions, 3) test drive your choices, 4) try the snap judgment test, and 5) fall back on your values.
Continued here
|
S34S2650 Dope Home Upgrades That Are So Cheap on Amazon  You might be living under the erroneous assumption that upgrading your home will upend your life, leaving you in chaos and dust for months while gutting your bank account. The reality is that there are many things you can change that make a huge impact and take only a few minutes and a few dollars — whether it’s sorting out a storage problem so you can find a battery when you need one or figuring out how to clean and fix things that seem out of reach. These 50 dope home upgrades that are so cheap on Amazon will transform your space with little time, money, or effort.When you’re cooking with bacon, it’d be a mistake to forget about the grease — it’s a delicious fat to use for popping popcorn, frying an egg, or seasoning cast-iron pans. The trick is to save it whenever you cook bacon and this container with oil strainer is the perfect place to put it. A strainer removes the bacon bits while a lid keeps the fat clean. It holds one quart of the good stuff.
Continued here
|
S4The Balanced Scorecard--Measures that Drive Performance In the same way that you can’t fly an airplane with just one instrument gauge, you can’t manage a company with just one kind of performance measure. Think of a balanced scorecard as the instrument panel in the cockpit of an airplane. It’s a set of interrelated gauges that links seemingly disparate information about a company’s finances and operations. Together, they give you a more complete view of how your company has been performing, as well as where it’s headed.
Continued here
|
S25S18Dr. Becky Kennedy Wants to Help Parents Land the Plane  Every morning, as parents across the country struggle to get their kids out of bed and out the door to school or sports, they may feel a reassuring voice in their ear. Perhaps it says, “Resistance is part of the pathway to separation”; perhaps it says, “If we want kids to tolerate frustration, we have to tolerate their frustration.” That voice—the calm, firm, and empathetic tones of the fully actualized contemporary parent—belongs to Becky Kennedy, a.k.a. Dr. Becky, the Manhattan-based clinical psychologist whose punchy scripts and practical advice have earned her more than two million followers on Instagram, a Times No. 1 best-seller (“Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be”), and a blockbuster podcast (“Good Inside with Dr. Becky”).Like many of her peers, Kennedy rejects what is often called the behaviorist approach to parenting, in which caregivers attempt to condition children’s behavior by wielding rewards and punishments—sticker charts, time-outs, and the like. “Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior rather than understanding behavior,” Kennedy, a mother of three, writes in “Good Inside.” “It sees behavior as the whole picture rather than as an expression of underlying unmet needs.” Kennedy encourages parents to privilege making connections over meting out consequences, and she demonstrates how in snappy posts and videos such as “Try This Instead of ‘Go to your room!,’ ” “4 Ways To Say No To Your Child,” “When It Feels Like You Might Explode,” and—a personal favorite—“Ever wonder . . . Is my child a sociopath?”
Continued here
|
S10A Leader's Framework for Decision Making  Simple contexts are characterized by stability and cause-and-effect relationships that are clear to everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident. In this realm of “known knowns,” leaders must first assess the facts of a situation—that is, “sense” it—then categorize and respond to it.
Continued here
|
S2133 Years Ago, One Power-Up Transformed Nintendo's Most Iconic Series Forever  For all the new twists the critically acclaimed Super Mario Bros. Wonder adds to Nintendo’s most iconic series, none has gotten more attention than the Elephant Fruit, which transforms whoever eats it into, well, an elephant. (And probably for a variety of reasons that are none of my business, much of that attention seems to be focused on Elephant Peach.)But whether it’s pandering to certain corners of the internet or not, Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s elephant transformation is just the latest in a lineage of animal-themed power-ups that began in one of the best Super Mario games ever made.
Continued here
|
S24Xbox Game Pass Just Released the Best Samurai Game of the Year  Believe it or not, Brad Pitt played a part in bringing the latest Yakuza game to American audiences. Well, sort of.The Yakuza games are known for their specific (and sometimes absurd) depictions of life in modern Japan, expertly translated for American audiences by the studio’s localization team. But the crime-drama franchise faced a new challenge when it transposed its story to the 19th century in the 2014 title Like a Dragon: Ishin! Parts of the game take place in Kōchi, a region located on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan, but explaining the local Tosa dialect to foreign audiences proved difficult. Then, the team had a breakthrough.
Continued here
|
S30S6The Elements of Good Judgment  Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions—is “the core of exemplary leadership,” according to Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls). It is what enables a sound choice in the absence of clear-cut, relevant data or an obvious path. Likierman believes that a more precise understanding of what exactly gives someone good judgment may make it possible for people to learn and improve on it. He approached CEOs at a range of companies, from some of the world’s largest right down to start-ups, along with leaders in the professions: senior partners at law and accountancy firms, generals, doctors, scientists, priests, and diplomats. He asked them to share their observations of their own and other people’s exercise of judgment so that he could identify the skills and behaviors that collectively create the conditions for fresh insights and enable decision makers to discern patterns that others miss. As a result, he has identified six key elements that collectively constitute good judgment: learning, trust, experience, detachment, options, and delivery. He describes these elements and offers suggestions for improvement in each one.
Continued here
|
S33S40What the Techno-Billionaire Missed About Techno-Optimism  As a general rule, any essay that includes the one-sentence paragraph “I am here to bring the good news” is written by someone who wants to take your money, your vote, or your soul. As far as I know, Marc Andreessen, the browser pioneer and cofounder of powerhouse VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, isn’t running for office. But the Techno-Optimist manifesto he posted this week (it’s a habit with him) is definitely bullish on inflating his already bloated wallet—and narrowing the broad arc of human existence with a relentless pursuit of new and even risky technology.Andreessen’s bolt from late-stage capitalism’s Mount Olympus—Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road—landed this week to a mixture of kudos and outrage. He posits that technology is the key driver of human wealth and happiness. I have no problem with that. In fact, I too am a techno-optimist—or at least I was before I read this essay, which attaches toxic baggage to the term. It’s pretty darn obvious that things like air-conditioning, the internet, rocket ships, and electric light are safely in the “win” column. As we enter the age of AI, I’m on the side that thinks that the benefits are well worth pursuing, even if it requires vigilance to ensure that the consequences won’t be disastrous.
Continued here
|
S70If Apple Keeps Making iPads Bigger... They Need To Fold in Half  According to a questionable Digitimes report via MacRumors, Apple might add a 12.9-inch iPad Air to its extremely bloated tablet lineup. Such an iPad Air would be the same size as a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, likely without any “pro” features like Mini-LED or 120Hz ProMotion.Maybe the data shows people want a more affordable 12.9-inch iPad. But a larger iPad got me thinking... if iPads are going to keep getting larger, Apple should do the obvious: make them fold in half. Hear me out.
Continued here
|
S13Bill Hayden's remarkable contribution to public life  Who have been Australia’s most accomplished federal opposition leaders? The conventional answer to this question is Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam, both renowned for rejuvenating their respective sides of politics and galvanising new constituencies of support.But what of the opposition leaders who never made it to prime minister: which among them boasts the most outstanding record? In modern times, Bill Hayden, who died this week aged 90, has powerful claim to that title.
Continued here
|
S3The Case for a Chief of Staff  New CEOs are typically focused on creating and implementing a strategy, building a top team, and driving culture change. Optimizing administrative workflow may not seem to be a priority. But a former CEO who now advises boards argues that many chief executives need a chief of staff (CoS)—someone who goes beyond the executive assistant role to help the office function smoothly. According to one CoS, the role encompasses being an air traffic controller for the leader and the senior team, an integrator connecting work streams that would otherwise remain siloed, a communicator linking the leadership team and the broader organization, an honest broker when the leader needs a wide-ranging view without turf considerations, and a confidant. In this article Ciampa outlines what a CoS does, the qualities one needs to succeed, and the ways companies typically design the role (with varying levels of responsibility) to help make a CEO more focused and productive.
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 |
