   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S61
| ? |
 |
S1Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter   Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S2
| ? |
|
|
| ? |
|
|
|
S3S4S5S6S7S8S9S10S11S12The Leap from Project Manager to CEO Is Hard -- But Not Impossible  Project managers who aspire to be CEOs are often surprised to learn that their skills, while highly valuable, do not directly align with those needed for positions of executive leadership. Why isn’t successful management of high-stakes projects and organizational resources sufficient to ascend to the top ranks of the business? In this article, the author explores the subtle, yet significant, differences in career trajectories of PMs and CEOs as well as nine attributes PMs should develop to increase their potential to become the next executive leader.
Continued here
|
S13S14S15Corporate Governance Can Be a Growth Strategy  Jorge Quintanilla Nielsen started the private asset management firm Capital SAFI in 2007 — and planned to expand from Bolivia across South America. As a private firm, Capital SAFI isn’t required to have a board, but he knew that governance would be one of the main aspects potential partners would evaluate.
Continued here
|
S16Don't Let Your Corporate Purpose Get Lost in the Daily Grind  When leaders establish a clear line connecting individual jobs to an organizational purpose, it enables everyone to see their part in the larger whole. In their work on purpose activation with more than 150 firms, the authors have developed three strategies to help employees maintain that connection. The first is articulating the ripple effect of people’s work. Encourage employees to reflect on questions like: What happens as a result of my work? The second strategy is to reframe your measures of success. Think about the difference between “number of accounts added” and “number of people we are helping to improve their finances.” Finally, celebrate external impact in addition to internal achievement. Make the connection between why an internal “win” mattered to a stakeholder outside the organization.
Continued here
|
S17Research: How Creative Collaboration Can Strengthen Relationships  We know that creativity can lead to better products or services. But can it also help us get along with each other at work? A research study set out to answer this question and found that, indeed, when people are put in a position to be creative, they tend to view others more fondly because they recollect each person’s unique contributions to the process. This may only work in situations where psychological safety is present, however, as unsafe environments can lead to negative group outcomes and perceptions.
Continued here
|
S18Has Generative AI Peaked?  We are moving towards a new digital landscape where genuine human content is increasingly rare commodity. And, as we all know from Economics 101, its value should therefore rise. This calls for a rethink of the incentives and economics surrounding human-generated content. The real bottleneck in generative AI might not be computation capacity or model parameters, but our unique human touch. Yet, we are on the brink of a digital world that is increasingly filled with AI-generated clutter. Could it be that we have already seen the pinnacle of generative AI? How the next chapter unfolds hinges on our ability to recognize, protect, nurture, and fairly treat human creativity.
Continued here
|
S19What did Stonehenge sound like?  Through the doors of a university building, down a concrete hallway and inside a foam-covered room stands a shin-high replica of one of the most mysterious monuments ever built: Stonehenge. These miniature standing stones aren't on public display, although they might help give the million annual visitors who come to the real site a better understanding of the imposing, lichen-covered stone structure built roughly 5,000 years ago. Instead, this scale model is at the centre of ongoing research into Stonehenge's acoustical properties, and what its sound might tell us about its purpose.
Continued here
|
S20Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake  Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.
Continued here
|
S21Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language  The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.
Continued here
|
S22Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?  The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.
Continued here
|
S23The 420-year-search for Shakespeare's lost play  In 1953, Solomon Pottesman held what appeared to be an ordinary, albeit very old, manuscript in his hands. As he carefully undid the wrappings on "Certaine sermons", which was published in 1637, two leaves of tattered parchment fell out. Pottesman, an eccentric and prolific book collector known in the trade as "Inky", immediately knew that something exciting was afoot. The yellowed pages were scribbled from edge to edge with florid, archaic handwriting – rows of book titles, with crossings out and lines drawn across whole sections, as though the writer were making an informal list. On closer inspection, that is exactly what it turned out to be: a casual inventory of works for sale by a stationery shop in Elizabethan London. Though sheer luck, these venerable notes had ended up fortifying the spine of a volume of religious lectures, where they remained for over three centuries.
Continued here
|
S24People Pay Attention Better Today Than 30 Years Ago - Really.  A rise in IQs in recent decades is mirrored by a trend showing an increase in adults’ ability to concentrateAdults’ ability to concentrate has increased over the past 20 to 30 years, according to a meta-analysis in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The research group that conducted the study, led by Denise Andrzejewski of the University of Vienna, sees this observation as initial evidence that attention is also subject to the Flynn effect, a phenomenon that was observed in many countries in the mid- to late 20th century, in which the population’s mean IQ, or intelligence quotient—as measured through standardized testing—rose from generation to generation.
Continued here
|
S25How Do Ultraprocessed Foods Affect Your Health?  Ultraprocessed foods have become a mainstay of modern diets and could be taking a toll on our healthYou might think you know a processed meal when you see one, but here’s some food for thought: nearly everything you can eat at the supermarket has undergone some kind of processing—such as washing, blanching, canning, drying or pasteurizing. In other words, if there is any change from the way the food began to the way it ends up on a shelf, it counts as processed.
Continued here
|
S26Diversity in Science Includes Cultural Dress  Images of sari-wearing space scientists in India remind us that research is global and cultural dress should be welcome in the workplaceWhen Chandrayaan-3 landed on the south pole of the moon this year, there were many exciting pictures on the news. Among them, the ones that particularly tugged at my heart were those of the women scientists of the Indian Space Research Organization responsible for the mission, wearing saris.
Continued here
|
S27S28'Dinky' Asteroid Is Three Space Rocks, Not Two, NASA Flyby Finds  The Lucy spacecraft’s encounter with asteroid Dinkinesh has revealed a bizarre “contact binary” double-moon companionOn Nov. 1, NASA's Lucy spacecraft zoomed past this space rock, marking the first of several asteroid encounters the probe is designed to make. Lucy's goal is to ultimately explore a set of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojans, which are thought to hold clues about the earliest days of our solar system; these objects may be able to shed light on the origins of life on Earth. But, on the way to those Trojans, Lucy has a couple of stops — including Dinkinesh, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Continued here
|
S29Incan 'Ice Maiden' Revealed in Hyperrealistic Facial Reconstruction  A new facial approximation brings to life an Incan girl who was killed 500 years ago as part of a sacrificial ritualMore than 500 years ago, an Incan girl was killed as part of a sacrificial ritual at a mountain summit in Peru. Her frozen mummified remains were discovered in 1995 by archaeologists, who named her the "Inca Ice Maiden" and "Juanita." However, no one knew what the mysterious girl looked like — until now.
Continued here
|
S30Nature Retracts Controversial Room-Temperature Superconductor Study  One of the world’s most prestigious science journals has retracted a major paper from embattled superconductivity researcher Ranga DiasNature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.
Continued here
|
S31S32State Election Results Bring Clean Energy Consequences  The outcomes of state elections this week may mean more natural gas plants in Texas, greater use of climate law funds in Kentucky and the continuation of the status quo in Maine and MississippiCLIMATEWIRE | Voters in a handful of off-year elections across the country green-lighted incentives for new power plants in Texas, rejected a Maine attempt to create a public electric utility and kept incumbent governors in Kentucky and Mississippi.
Continued here
|
S33Restoring the Planet Will Need More than a Climate Price Tag  In the extraordinary heat of July 2023, the planet perhaps experienced its hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Vast swathes of the world from the U.S. to China endured searing heat waves driven by a lethal combination of anthropogenic climate change and the recurring natural phenomenon known as El Niño. Despite this alarming climate reality, carbon dioxide emissions have continued to surge, matched only by the growing deluge of proposals aimed at achieving “net zero” emissions. But could some of these proposed “solutions” be worse than the problem?
Continued here
|
S34The deadly trap that could create an AI catastrophe  Competition is a core part of human nature, and it can drive us to extraordinary feats. But when it goes wrong, the results can be devastating. Poker champion and science communicator Liv Boeree introduces us to the dark force of game theory driving many of humanity's biggest social problems — a force that's now threatening to derail the AI industry.
Continued here
|
S35Maybe (HBO) Max Just Isn't Worth It  Max, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max, has lost 700,000 subscribers in the past three months. Despite the huge drop, streaming revenue at Max, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, were up 5 percentâwith a 30 percent year-on-year jump in advertising revenue. These numbers raise a big question for the streaming industry: People like Max, but they don't really want to pay for it.Figuring out how much to charge for what service, and whether to offer ad-supported tiers, is the existential crisis of the current streaming wars. Nearly every serviceâNetflix, Disney+, Apple TV+âhas increased prices and/or added commercials to their services in the past few months. While many of them did it more recently, Max's service seems like the least bang for the most buck.
Continued here
|
S36New Jersey Keeps Newborn DNA for 23 Years. Parents Are Suing  When Hannah Lovaglio’s children were born, she didn’t think twice about the newborn health screening they received in the hospital. The routine test uses a few drops of blood from a heel prick to test for dozens of potentially fatal or disabling genetic diseases.“I assumed that this was for my child’s best interest and for the best interest of public health,” says Lovaglio, a pastor in New Jersey. What she didn’t know was that after testing was completed, the leftover blood would be stored by the state for 23 years and could be used for purposes beyond medical testing. In a court case that became public last year, New Jersey police allegedly used a baby’s blood sample to investigate its father for a crime.
Continued here
|
S37The GOP Presidential Debate Is Livestreaming on Rumble, Home to White Nationalist Nick Fuentes  Tonight, the third GOP presidential primary debate will take place in Miami. The event is sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) at a time when antisemitic incidents in the US, according to the Anti-Defamation League, have risen by nearly 400 percent since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last month.While the Republican National Committee (RNC) has partnered with NBC to broadcast the debate on TV, the event will also be livestreamed for the third time on Rumble, the YouTube alternative that is home to what the Southern Poverty Law Center says is one of America’s most notorious white nationalists, Nick Fuentes.
Continued here
|
S38The US and 30 Other Nations Agree to Set Guardrails for Military AI  When politicians, tech executives, and researchers gathered in the UK last week to discuss the risks of artificial intelligence, one prominent worry was that algorithms might someday turn against their human masters. More quietly, the group made progress on controlling the use of AI for military ends.On November 1, at the US embassy in London, US vice president Kamala Harris announced a range of AI initiatives, and her warnings about the threat AI poses to human rights and democratic values got people’s attention. But she also revealed a declaration signed by 31 nations to set guardrails around military use of AI. It pledges signatories to use legal reviews and training to ensure military AI stays within international laws, develop the technology cautiously and transparently, avoid unintended biases in systems that use AI, and continue to discuss how the technology can be developed and deployed responsibly.
Continued here
|
S39EV Batteries Have a Dirty Secret. This Company Has a Plan to Clean Them Up  Here’s the inconvenient truth about your electric vehicle: Making its battery has a big impact on the environment. Producing an EV often generates more emissions than building a conventional car, with the benefits of going electric realized only after a good amount of driving.“Building batteries is creating a very large amount of carbon,” says Peter Carlsson, CEO of European battery manufacturer Northvolt.
Continued here
|
S40The FDA Approves Weight Loss Drug Zepbound, a Wegovy and Ozempic Rival  The blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy has a new rival. Today, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug for weight management called Zepbound, made by American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.The weekly injectable drug is meant for adults who are overweight or obese and have at least one weight-related condition, such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol. The active ingredient in Zepbound, tirzepatide, is already approved under the brand name Mounjaro to help improve blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes and is widely prescribed off-label for weight loss.
Continued here
|
S41Sweeping New Powers Could Let the UK Block Big Tech Platforms  The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, says it is prepared to “disrupt” tech platforms that don’t comply with the country’s controversial new Online Safety Act, including cutting them off from payment systems or even blocking them from the UK.The act—a sprawling piece of legislation that covers a spectrum of issues, from how technology platforms should protect children from abuse to scam advertising and terrorist content—became law in October. Today, the regulator released its first round of proposals for how the act will be implemented and what technology companies will need to do to comply.
Continued here
|
S42Disney Swears It Can Make Streaming Profitable and Promises a Combined Disney+, Hulu Service  Bob Iger believes. On a call with investors on Wednesday, the Disney CEO said that the company’s goal is to make its streaming business profitable by the end of next year. A big component of that: a new service that combines Disney+ and Hulu, set to launch next spring.This is a goal Disney has been working on for a while, ever since it launched its Netflix competitor, Disney+, in 2019. The company has poured millions of dollars into acquiring subscribers, experimenting with ad-supported tiers and service bundles—various combinations of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+—and changing prices in a quest to lure viewers and keep them.
Continued here
|
S43The Best iPhone Deals Right Now  Finding a deal on an iPhone can be tricky. Apple rarely slashes prices on its hardware, unlike other brands. But that doesn't mean they're nonexistent. With Black Friday around the corner, carriers are offering some steep discounts on iPhones, though you have to jump through some hoops to nab them. We've listed them here in case you're on the hunt for an upgrade.Be sure to check out our Best iPhone guide to see which model is right for you, and if you're shopping the new iPhone 15 range, we've got a breakdown of all the models here. (Remember to snag a case!)
Continued here
|
S44Hollywood Actors Strike Ends With a Deal That Will Impact AI and Streaming for Decades  After 118 days on the picket lines, the longest such strike in Hollywood’s history, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides were mum about the terms of the deal Wednesday night, but it comes following a long struggle over the use of artificial intelligence on actors’ performances and actors’ demands for residual payments for shows and films that play on streaming services.A committee from SAG, which represents thousands of film and television actors, approved the agreement Wednesday. The strike itself, which has featured pickets outside the offices of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others, will end Thursday morning. It’s expected that the tentative deal will head to the union’s national board to be approved on Friday.
Continued here
|
S45Most distant black hole raises a huge cosmic question  Although black holes are the most extreme objects in the Universe — with more mass confined inside a tiny volume of space than anyplace else — they’re also poorly understood in a number of important ways. While we know that when very massive stars die, their cores collapse and that can lead to the formation of black holes, we know there must be other ways to form them:It may even be possible, although there are some compelling physics reasons to think not, that the Universe was born with primordial black holes: a population of black holes that sprang into existence long before the very first stars ever formed. These scenarios are particularly important when it comes to explaining the existence of the earliest supermassive black holes ever seen, as many of them are what we call “overmassive” or “outsized,” where it’s very difficult to explain how they got so massive, so quickly, especially considering the environments they’re in.
Continued here
|
S46It doesn't matter if you fail. It matters how you fail.  Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, explores the concept of failure and its connection to success. She challenges our prevailing cultural belief that success requires avoiding failure altogether and instead suggests that failing is a natural part of the path forward.EDMONDSON: I came to study failure to try to figure out what determines success. There is a deep-rooted belief in our culture that success means never failing. That failure's unacceptable, that if I fail, it means there's something wrong with me. Of course, that's nonsense. We all make mistakes, and failure is part of the journey towards success.
Continued here
|
S47Billionaire college dropouts: Why smart leaders avoid "survivorship bias"  During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces faced a devastating dilemma. Enemy forces were downing aircraft faster than they could be manufactured and the losses among airmen were staggering. U.S. officers knew they needed to reinforce the aircraft with armor, but adding too much weight would render them less maneuverable and limit effective range. They needed to determine which parts of the aircraft to protect with armor and where they could safely leave it off.They studied aircraft that returned from battle and found certain parts were statistically more likely to be hit than others. Obviously, the solution was to add armor to these areas. Obvious — and wrong.
Continued here
|
S48How "group genius" surpassed Einstein and gave us quantum mechanics  Quantum mechanics — the creation of several surpassing geniuses in a period of just three years — is the finest example of “collective” or “group genius” in the history of science. The expression “group genius,” inseparable from the then-prevailing zeitgeist, refers to genius traits and legacies far transcending the sum of its parts. Its underlying principles, promulgated in the Copenhagen interpretation under the group’s “father confessor” Niels Bohr, are counterintuitive and indeterministic in distinction to classical mechanics (including relativity), where they are intuitive and deterministic. Just like great art, quantum mechanics is open-ended and porous. The most successful scientific theory in history may forever remain as tantalizing and enigmatic as Mona Lisa’s smile, resonating with a message from nature: “It was my destiny to know more than you!”The celebrated fifth Solvay Conference (1927) had been organized to debate the credibility of quantum mechanics based on the matrix mechanics and uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, the wave mechanics of Schrödinger, along with the probabilistic interpretation of wave functions set down originally by Max Born. Like two tennis champions facing each other across the net, Einstein served gedankenexperiment after gedankenexperiment with blinding speed and perfect placement. Bohr returned the serves with top-spin, slices, and scattershot effects. And he won all the points. The Bohr-Einstein debates were continued at the sixth Solvay Conference in 1930 and they would have continued at the seventh conference in 1933 had Einstein chosen to attend. The controversy has had monumental significance for the philosophy underlying quantum mechanics and the fundamental nature of reality. To his dying day Einstein was never able to reconcile himself with the uncertainty principle. In a memorable exchange, one that was repeated again and again with minor variation, Einstein decried the uncertainty principle: “God does not play dice with the universe!” Bohr offered the riposte: “Einstein, stop telling God what he can and cannot do!”
Continued here
|
S49How a Harvard AI model could make COVID the last pandemic  COVID was the first global, society-altering pandemic in more than a century. It disrupted economies, reshaped politics, changed behaviors, and claimed around seven million lives. But now, artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs are raising hopes that humanity may never be brought to its knees by an infectious disease ever again.When civilization was locked in the grasp of COVID, news of the virus’s latest variants of concern evoked anxiety. During the pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus constantly mutated, evolving to escape the immune system’s arresting reach. Scientists scrambled to track these variants so that treatments, preventative measures, and vaccines could be updated to save lives.
Continued here
|
S50Is the Universe conscious? A panpsychism Q&A with philosopher Philip Goff  Today, I am hosting the British philosopher Philip Goff, a professor at Durham University in England. He is a strong proponent of panpsychism, which the New Oxford American Dictionary defines as, “The doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.”Goff just published a new book this week, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, where he masterfully presents his defense of this worldview, connecting it with a much needed way of addressing not only the challenging nature of consciousness but also our search for meaning beyond a strictly material reality. It’s a fascinating conversation that invites many more questions. The following is a Q&A.
Continued here
|
S51Stonehenge came before the Druids (long, long before the Druids)  Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. John Aubrey (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals.Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. (74,000 called themselves Druids in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times.
Continued here
|
S52Steam might let you hide those embarrassing games in your profile soon  Steam has long sought to strike the right balance between convenience, community, and private refuge. Until recently, sharing your gaming history was either public, exclusive to your friends, or turned off entirely. A screenshot from a noted Steam watcher suggests that a "Mark as Private" option could be coming for individual games that you're not keen on anyone, including friends, knowing you've put some time into.
Continued here
|
S53The courtesan who brought down a cult, and other unsung women of ancient Rome  Around 186 BCE, a former slave turned courtesan named Hispala Faecenia fell in love with a young upper-middle class Roman man named Publius Aebutius. Then she learned his mother and stepfather planned to have Aebutius initiated into the Mysteries of Bacchus, a religious cult that, legend holds, featured drunken orgies and frenzied women tearing young men limb from limb. Hispala objected strenuously, fearing her lover's reputation would be ruined or he would be injured or killed. And she questioned the parents' motives—with good reason. Apparently Aebutius's mother had squandered the young man's inheritance and he was about to come of age, thereby exposing her financial mismanagement.
Continued here
|
S54Google argues iMessage should be regulated by the EU's Digital Markets Act  Google is hoping regulators will bail it out of the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of dysfunctional product reboots. The Financial Times reports that Google and a few cell carriers are asking the European Union to designate Apple's iMessage as a "core" service that would require it to be interoperable under the new "Digital Markets Act." The EU's Digital Markets Act targets Big Tech "gatekeepers" with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and while iMessage didn't make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple's messenger is under a "market investigation" to determine if it should qualify.
Continued here
|
S55S56S57S58S59Dealmaster: Herman Miller chairs, AirPods, and more  That sound you hear in the distance is the slow approach of Black Friday, steadily making its way into your holiday shopping, for better or worse. The deals have already begun, and we've got some doozies in today's Dealmaster, including 4K TVs, headphones and audio gear, tons of tools, and Herman Miller office and gaming chairs.
Continued here
|
S60S62Where Are All the Missing Students?  In 2006, the School District of Philadelphia, in partnership with Microsoft, opened the School of the Future. The idea was simple enough: Establish a learning environment centered on technology—no textbooks, just laptops and Wi-Fi—that would provide students in relatively poor districts the same benefits that those in wealthier areas enjoyed. The district built a handsome, well-lit building and filled it with state-of-the-art trappings including electronic lockers and Italian-marble bathrooms. It was heralded as a path-defining achievement for public-private partnerships in education.Two years later, Michael Gottfried, now an economist at the University of Pennsylvania but then a graduate student there, was part of a team examining whether such a technological revolution actually made a difference in student achievement. But he soon realized that the technology was somewhat beside the point: “We were talking to a teacher [at the School of the Future] and she said, ‘Here’s the thing, we can talk all you want about smart boards and laptops per student and curriculum moving online, but I have a bigger problem: Half of my class isn’t here.’”
Continued here
|
S63Is There More to Conservatism Than Mocking 'Wokeness' on YouTube?  During the 1980s, the area of southeast London known as Canary Wharf was transformed from a shabby industrial wasteland into a peninsula of silver towers, tall enough to reach the clouds. This was the promise of Margaret Thatcher–era conservatism, written in glass and concrete: tearing up the old to liberate the new, unleashing the free market to increase prosperity and productivity.Today, Canary Wharf is still gleaming, still rich. But it’s also soulless. Wide, empty streets run between the towers, with none of the haphazard, organic exuberance of London’s old neighborhoods. Appropriately enough, this was the view that greeted delegates to the inaugural ARC Forum, held last week at Magazine London, a convention center on the opposite bank of the Thames. The acronym stands for Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an international group of politicians, thinkers, and influencers who “do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster.” That statement could reflect a gathering devoted to finding an uplifting vision of the future—or it could be code for climate-change denialism. Hold on to that ambiguity.
Continued here
|
S64All My Life, I've Watched Violence Fail the Palestinian Cause  After Hamas’s attack, I lost hope. Then I started hearing from Israelis and Palestinians.My father was one of 10 siblings from a rural village in the West Bank. As a 6-year-old, he hid with his family in a cave during the Six-Day War, the start of 16 years spent under military occupation. Once, when my father was passing through a checkpoint as an undergraduate, a soldier noticed an astrophysics textbook under his arm. He told my father that Arabs were too stupid for the subject, but that only hardened his resolve to keep learning. By the time he met my English mother, he was in America studying for a Ph.D.
Continued here
|
S65Rashida Tlaib's Inflammatory Language  By amplifying a loaded slogan, the Michigan representative isn’t helping anyone’s cause. I met Rashida Tlaib in 2009, before she was elected to Congress, when she was a young Palestinian American newly serving in the Michigan House of Representatives. I was the highest-ranking Arab American woman in the Obama administration and was receiving a key to the city of Dearborn, known as the heart of Arab America. She may not remember me from that day, but I remember her. She was a mesmerizing presence: attentive, sociable, and seemingly fearless.
Continued here
|
S66Why a Gaza Cease-Fire Is Unrealistic  Humanitarian pause or cease-fire: These two proposals for arresting the fighting in the Israel-Hamas war have gained traction in recent days. President Joe Biden continues to support Israel’s campaign against Hamas but favors a pause, so as to make time for more Palestinians to move out of harm’s way and for more food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to enter into Gaza. Others, both in the United States and abroad, argue for a cease-fire, saying that enough is enough with Israel’s bombing campaign and ground operations.The approaches sound similar in name but are in fact very different. Both convey the cessation of hostilities. But a humanitarian pause is temporary, with the specific purpose of improving the humanitarian situation—in this case, to allow aid into Gaza; provide time for Palestinians to move south, away from Gaza City; and enable foreign citizens and those in need of special medical care to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt. A cease-fire can also be temporary but is usually meant to last for a more extended time, to encourage the start of peace talks or other arrangements that deal with an underlying conflict. Much more than a pause, a cease-fire cements the situation on the ground until it is violated.
Continued here
|
S67Why Abortion Rights Keep Winning in Red States  When given a choice between prohibition and expansive abortion rights, Americans seem to prefer the latter.Abortion foes thought Roe v. Wade’s reversal would usher in a more pro-life America by finally clearing the legal obstacles to the eventual abolition of abortion. But that’s not how things are panning out, even in red states. Yesterday in Ohio—which Donald Trump won in 2020—voters approved a state constitutional amendment to make abortion a fundamental right, effectively restoring the reproductive freedom they once enjoyed under Roe.
Continued here
|
S68Republicans Can't Figure It Out  The surprising results yesterday could not have come at a better time for Democratic leaders.Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights, and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers. Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi.
Continued here
|
S69Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways  On October 13, The Onion shared on X (formerly Twitter) the headline for a new satirical article: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” The tweet was liked by nearly 100,000 people.Within a couple of hours, Michael Eisen, a genetics professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of eLife, an influential open-access journal for the life sciences, retweeted the post with the comment that The Onion “speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.” As Eisen told me in a recent phone interview, he did this “on Friday the 13th—I should have known that was a bad idea.”
Continued here
|
S70The Songs That Shaped My Life  Joni Mitchell’s wisdom, Otis Redding’s invitation, and the Beatles’ schematic of loveI love other people’s songs. How much they’ve taught me about being human—how to think about myself and others. And, most important, how they absorb our experiences and store our memories.
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 |
