   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S51S40The Best Travel Bags for Wherever You're Headed   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 WIREDTravel bags live a rough life, and good luggage can be expensive. But paying for a decent bag means buying a little peace of mind. A few yards of zippers and either hard plastic or nylon are the only barriers between your bag and the belly of an airliner, the conveyor belt of a baggage claim, and the trunk of a car. In our luggage testing, we put a lot of focus on luggage that's lightweight, rolls easily or fits comfortably on your back, and doesn't split open on the way to your destination.
Continued here
|
| ? |
 |
S58Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology  Even before start-up nation entered the lexicon, the army’s embrace of technology alarmed some military experts.Not long after the first rocket siren went off on the morning of October 7, my brother-in-law Ben was outside his house in central Israel. At the time, several thousand Hamas fighters were pouring through the Gaza border fence about an hour’s drive to the south, overrunning our military defenses and butchering hundreds of civilians. But no one knew the details yet, just that something very bad was happening and that the army had been caught off guard. Ben ran into a neighbor with two children serving in the army. The neighbor’s immediate response stayed with him, and then with me when I heard the story. “We have cameras instead of eyes,” he said.
Continued here
|
S41The US Supreme Court Will Decide the Fate of Medication Abortion  The US Supreme Court decided Wednesday to hear a case challenging access to abortion pills in the United States, including in states where abortion is legal.This will be the most consequential case for access to reproductive health care since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Following the Roe decision, many patients seeking abortions turned to telehealth providers, who could then send abortion pills by mail. Pills are now the most common abortion method in the US; curtailing the availability of medication abortion would be a major blow to reproductive health care.
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
S62The 2024 Election Already Isn't Normal  One party heads toward a typical primary season. The other remains gripped by an authoritarian revenge fantasy.In a survey of swing-state voters one year out from the 2024 election, a New York Times/Siena College poll asked an unusual question: If Donald Trump were convicted and sentenced to prison, would you still vote for him as the Republican nominee in the general election?
Continued here
|
S61Final Words  The state of Texas has executed nearly 600 men and women since 1982. Most of them had something to say in their last moments, and those words are now collected in a book, Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row. About 100 chose to say nothing at all; “this inmate declined to make a last statement,” the book notes. But many more opted to share their final thoughts. Taken together, their words—on religious faith, love, violence, regret, and capital punishment itself—form an evocative portrait of the moieties of the death penalty in Texas: the crimes these men and women committed, and the death they now suffer for it.Each entry appears as a two-page spread, with a prisoner’s final words on one side (obtained from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) and a brief description of his or her crimes on the opposite page. There are exceptionally short remarks—Freddie Lee Webb, executed in March of 1994, simply said, “Peace”; Jessie Gutierrez, executed roughly five months later, said, “I just love everybody, and that’s it”—and there are long monologues. Sometimes prisoners’ last words appear to have been written by someone else: Richard J. Wilkerson, executed in August of 1993, referred to himself in the third person, saying, “Killing R.J. will not bring [his victim] back.” Some are accepting. “It was horrible and inexcusable of me to take the life of your loved one and to hurt so many mentally and physically,” David Lee Herman said in April of 1997. “I am here because I took a life and killing is wrong by an individual and by the state, and I am sorry we are here but if my death gives you peace and closure then this is all worthwhile.” Others barely register at all: Harold Amos Barnard, killed in February of 1994, apparently mumbled the last of his words. They are described only as “a couple of sentences garbled.”
Continued here
|
| ? |
|
|
| ? |
|
|
|
S63The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'  IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011.In the chronicles of garage entrepreneurship, however, IBM retains a legendary place—as a flat-footed behemoth. In 1980, bruised by nearly 13 years of antitrust litigation, its executives made the colossal error of permitting the 25-year-old Bill Gates, a co-founder of a company with several dozen employees, to retain the rights to the operating system that IBM had subcontracted with him to develop for its then-secret personal-computer project. That mistake was the making of Microsoft. By January 1993, Gates’s company was valued at $27 billion, briefly taking the lead over IBM, which that year posted some of the largest losses in American corporate history.
Continued here
|
S9S53S64The Wish  once again of not coming to know the strident sorrows unfulfilled for fatherland of not seeing loved ones their remains drifted in the far earth of saying father father and to be heard in this benign beginning a gray sky a fleet of nonbirds of faces of inaudible singsongs not a word unrecognizable atoned in this despicable pit of a large burning once and for all again a face your face flies into nothing the wish never to be in- visible
Continued here
|
S50New survey: Nearly 30% of ESA workers experience workplace harassment  According to a new internal survey conducted by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) staff association, about 30 percent of ESA’s employees have either experienced or witnessed harassment in the workplace. The survey, published internally on December 6 and seen by Ars Technica, confirms the findings of our recent investigation into allegations of harassment and bullying at the agency.
Continued here
|
S60The New Face of the 'Great Replacement'  Vivek Ramaswamy is both the newest proponent of the racist idea and the best example of why it’s wrong.Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”
Continued here
|
S44The scientific hazards of being Santa Claus  If you think you have it rough at your workplace, just imagine how hard it must be for Santa Claus. Over the course of the year, he has to oversee the creation of billions of toys and presents for children all across the world. Then, in one herculean night, he must travel to hundreds of millions of households across six continents (seven, if there happen to be children in Antarctica at the time), delivering over one billion kilograms of presents in the process. In addition to that, he must contend with worker safety, his own physical and mental health, as well as the hazards of heat stress and sleigh riding during his annual global journey.For too long, there has been a paucity of research into the occupational health and safety hazards that come along with being Santa Claus, as few resources were devoted to understanding both the long-term and short-term risks associated with his unique occupation. But all of that may be changing, as a 2015 paper written by Sebastian Straube and Xiangning Fan in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology kicked off what’s sure to be a fruitful field of inquiry into the occupational health of Santa Claus. Here’s what everyone considering a job at the North Pole should be thinking about.
Continued here
|
S66Why This Math Professor Objects to Diversity Statements  What happens when the noble goal of social justice is invoked in ways that corrupt rather than improve?Before immigrating to America from Russia as a young academic, Alexander Barvinok lived under a repressive regime that he experienced as “systemic absurdity.” He is now a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, he resigned his three-decade membership in the American Mathematical Society in a letter citing the group’s failure to oppose the growing number of job openings for mathematics faculty that require applicants to draft and submit a statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. He regards these statements as a gravely concerning trend for his discipline, and he wanted to register some sort of protest against them.
Continued here
|
S55S45Dare and care: An astronaut's guide to leadership  Mike Massimino has been many things: a NASA astronaut, a professor of engineering at Columbia University, a senior advisor at the Intrepid Museum, and a TV personality. He was even an early social media influencer, having sent the first tweet from space. But one thing Massimino was not? A natural-born leader.By his own admission, he was always more comfortable as the co-captain. He enjoyed being the guy you could have a chin-wag with over drinks. He wanted to bring the team together and be their confidant when times get rough. Calling the shots? Being responsible for the mission? Leave that kind of stuff for the head honcho.
Continued here
|
S26Vietnam's taxi drivers fight app drivers, wear their uniforms to steal customers  Dao, a motorbike-taxi driver for Grab, was picking up a customer at a bus stop in Ho Chi Minh City earlier this year when a man in a Grab shirt attacked him. The assailant, Dao told Rest of World, was not a Grab driver, but a xe om, or a traditional bike-taxi driver not linked to any platform.Such incidents are common in Ho Chi Minh City, where bike-taxi drivers often try to protect their turf — busy pickup points like railway stations, bus stops, and hospitals — from drivers who use apps. “I can’t drive into bus stations to pick up passengers; [xe om] will come out and chase me away, beat me,” said Dao, requesting to be identified only by his last name for fear of retribution. Even as the xe om push back on platform workers, they often impersonate Grab drivers by wearing fake uniforms to try and win customers’ trust.
Continued here
|
S69The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times  The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline curtailed Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. But who was responsible?At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The pipe, made of thick, concrete-encased steel, lay at a depth of 260 feet. It was filled with highly compressed methane gas.
Continued here
|
S68Why It's So Hard to Search Your Email  Before a flight, I get a Pavlovian stress reaction—not from the prospect of hurtling at 30,000 feet in a concrete tube, but from my email inbox. Airline tickets sometimes get lost in an email abyss, requiring a few stressful minutes of frenzied searching when it’s time to check in. “I can’t find my confirmation for this flight in my email but I know I bought it 😭,” goes one tweet. “Gmail search is amazing,” another user posted just last week. “You can search something like ‘flight sacramento receipt 2023’ and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn’t the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.”Searching your email can sometimes feel basically impossible. Typing in a mix of search terms goes only so far. At some point, it almost feels personal, like the software is purposefully not showing you a conversation you absolutely remember having. One Beyoncé fan posted that he couldn’t find a ticket to the Renaissance movie in his email and ended up buying another. Over Zoom, I asked Hamed Zamani, a search expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, if he ever has trouble finding an email. He smiled and said, “Who doesn’t?”
Continued here
|
S46Exoplanet discoveries reveal Earth's profound rarity in the cosmos  We are now well into a new era of astronomy, where distant planets (called exoplanets) are being detected at a fast clip. At last count, there have been 5,557 confirmed discoveries of exoplanets and another 10,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. These discoveries have given rise to “comparative planetology,” a new area of astronomy dedicated to investigating the properties of different worlds, classifying them according to size, mass, (approximate) atmospheric composition, distance from their parent star, and whether they are rocky, gaseous, or some combination of the two.The main goal is to compare them to Earth and other planets in our Solar System. For example, when astronomers talk about a “super-Earth,” they mean a rocky planet with a radius somewhat larger than Earth’s, while a “sub-Neptune” is a gaseous planet with a radius somewhat smaller than Neptune’s. These definitions are operational and the boundaries between planetary classes are not very rigid, but they offer a quick way of classifying what we see.
Continued here
|
S59How Anxiety Became Content  The way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us.This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.
Continued here
|
S37Europe to End Robo-Firing in Major Gig Economy Overhaul  Platform workers can no longer be fired automatically by algorithms, according to new European Union rules agreed today in a sweeping reform of the gig economy that will affect Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers.“Now we have a proper system, which is something that doesn't exist anywhere else around the world,” said Elisabetta Gualmini, an Italian politician who led the negotiations for the European Parliament in a press conference on Wednesday. She described the new rules as a real improvement in the labor rights for millions of workers.
Continued here
|
S39Tesla Is Recalling Nearly All Vehicles Sold in US to Fix an Autopilot Fault  Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles, nearly all of the vehicles it has sold in the US to date, to fix a flawed system designed to make sure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.Rather than physically recalling vehicles, documents posted today by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) state that Tesla will send out a software update in an attempt to fix the problem.
Continued here
|
S56S49Let's attempt to decode Google's confusing new location data settings  Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google's misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California, Arizona, Washington, a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google's location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.
Continued here
|
S34NFL Playoffs, Ohtani Contract, NBA In-Season Tournament  In this episode, Wharton experts discuss the NFL playoff race, Shohei Ohtani's contract, and the NBA In-Season Tournament.Wharton’s Cade Massey, Eric Bradlow, Adi Wyner, and Shane Jensen discuss the NFL playoff race, Shohei Ohtani’s contract and deferral, and take a look back at the NBA In-Season Tournament.
Continued here
|
S67The Novel That Takes You Inside a Defense Lawyer's Mind  In Marie NDiaye’s latest, an attorney struggles with the case of a mother accused of infanticide.She calls herself a “near-perfect mother”; to her husband, she is a “peerless mother.” Yet one day, Marlyne Principaux drowns her three children in the bath before arranging their bodies in her bed. This is the horror story that underpins Marie NDiaye’s new novel, Vengeance Is Mine. But as shocking as these details are, NDiaye pivots from them to focus instead on a more oblique drama involving the lawyer enlisted to defend the accused woman. When Gilles Principaux, Marlyne’s husband, walks into the office of the attorney Maître Susane, a strange coincidence occurs: She immediately recognizes the bereaved man. He is the teenage boy, now middle-aged, whom she met only once in her childhood under mysterious circumstances that she strains to fully remember but who nevertheless shaped the entirety of her life to come.
Continued here
|
S47A new injection is helping stave off RSV this season  In November 2021, Mickayla Wininger’s then one-month-old son, Malcolm, endured a terrifying bout with RSV, the respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus—a common ailment that affects all age groups. Most people recover from mild, cold-like symptoms in a week or two, but RSV can be life-threatening in others, particularly infants.Wininger, who lives in southern Illinois, was dressing Malcolm for bed when she noticed what seemed to be a minor irregularity with this breathing. She and her fiancé, Gavin McCullough, planned to take him to the hospital the next day. The matter became urgent when, in the morning, the boy’s breathing appeared to have stopped.
Continued here
|
S54S43Samsung's End-of-Year Sale Cuts Prices on Our Favorite Phones, TVs, and Tablets  It's that time of year again. The holidays? Nope! Winter solstice? Try again. OK, I'll just tell you: It's Samsung's quarterly Discover event. I know, I knowâit's less exciting than wintry festivities, but if you're in the market for any Samsung products (for yourself or others), this event is big news. Samsung is running discounts not only on some of its older products but also on its latest and greatest flagships. Here's a curated list of some of the highlights, which run through the weekâand we found the same deals (if not better) at other retailers too. Each and every one of these picks has been tested, vetted, and put through the paces by the WIRED Gear team.We've also got some Samsung coupons worth checking out, including an exclusive 30 percent off code that comes with lots of strings but could save you money depending on what you're buying. Dyson also currently has many of its cordless vacuums on sale at prices at or below what we saw on Black Friday, including the Dyson V15 Absolute at $500 and the Dyson V11 at $400. You can scan our coupon page for more savings.
Continued here
|
S10S57S11S35S48Dropbox spooks users with new AI features that send data to OpenAI when used  On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn't used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.
Continued here
|
S38Denon's PerL Earbuds Sound Great, but They're Not Perfect  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 WIREDI’ve been down a sonic rabbit hole in which I wasn’t always sure where technology ended and human senses began. It came courtesy of Denon’s fascinating new earbuds, the PerL. I can’t even tell you what the PerL sound like; they’re designed to deliver custom sound tuned for each listener. What I can say is that Denon really has something here.
Continued here
|
S31Is Cannabis Bad for Teens? Data Paint a Conflicting Picture  Ten years after cannabis was first legalized for recreational use in adults, scientists are struggling to provide evidence-based recommendations about the risks to young peopleKrista Lisdahl has been studying cannabis use among adolescents for two decades, and what she sees makes her worried for her teenage son.
Continued here
|
S52S12S32Road Map for U.S. Particle Physics Wins Broad Approval  A major report plotting the future of U.S. particle physics calls for cuts to the beleaguered DUNE project, advocates a “muon shot” for a next-generation collider and recommends a new survey of the universe’s oldest observable lightA view from the subterranean excavation for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
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 |
