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 S61Here's Why Getting Back to Work in 2024 Is So Hard--and How You Can Get Over the Slump   Welcome back! Another year is here, and if the mood at your office is like the one at WIRED, things are a little sluggish. Maybe it was all the spiked cocoa over the holidays, or the travel, or the midnight movie marathons, but 2024 is off to a sputtering start, and lots of folks, it seems, are on a quest to overcome a lethargic January.Everyone isn't fortunate to have extra days off at the end of the year, but those who can take time to unwind might find it jarring to come back, logging on to find that all of that promised circling back in the new year is actually happening. No matter the reason for your lack of early-year motivation, remember these tips to feel more energized and focused at work.
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S48How this Indian crypto CEO is navigating tough regulations and high taxes  Rahul Pagidipati heads ZebPay, which was one of the first crypto exchanges to launch in India. ZebPay now has 7 million app downloads. Pagidipati talks about how his company navigated a tough business environment in 2023, when investors were exiting in droves, due to high taxes and tight regulations.In 2023, a noticeable trend shift occurred, marked by significant gains in prominent tokens such as bitcoin and ethereum. Given that interest rates of central banks have largely remained the same since 2023, this growth is not a result of credit flow but because of notable developments in the crypto space. We hope to see capital gains tax and tax deduction at source reduced in the coming years.
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S30S26How to Have a Eureka Moment  In the ancient world, the Greeks believed that all great insights came from one of nine muses, divine sisters who brought inspiration to mere mortals. In the modern world, few people still believe in the muses, but we all still love to hear stories of sudden inspiration. Like Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bathtub (both another type of myth), we’re eager to hear and to share stories about flashes of insight.
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S19Why Managers Should Think More Like Hackers  Hackers are systems thinkers; they have an attitude that allows them to identify opportunities to make outsized impacts creatively, quickly, and resourcefully. Managers could benefit from thinking more like hackers. Hacking helps us take a step back from the worn-out management tenets of efficiency, long-term planning, hierarchical decision-making, and full information, to adopt instead more adaptable strategies. Adopting a hacker attitude can help managers work around obstacles, find opportunities across siloes, cultivate a culture of pragmatism, mobilize staff around processes instead of end goals, and navigate situations in which there isn’t an obvious answer or clear choice.
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S65The 21 Best Shows on Apple TV+ Right Now  Slowly but surely, Apple TV+ is finding its feet. The streaming service, which at launch we called “odd, angsty, and horny as hell,” has evolved into a diverse library of dramas, documentaries, and comedies. It’s also fairly cheap compared to services like Netflix—and Apple often throws in three free months when you buy a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV.Curious but don’t know where to get started? Below are our picks for the best shows on the service. (Also, here are our picks for the best movies on Apple TV+.) When you’re done, head over to our guides to the best shows on Netflix, best movies on Hulu, and best movies on Amazon Prime, because you can never have too much television.
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S43Taupo: 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.
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S29S37S67The SEC's Official X Account Was 'Compromised' and Used to Post Fake Bitcoin News  The official X account of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission was "compromised" this afternoon, resulting in the publication of an "unauthorized" post, according to SEC chair Gary Gensler. The account, @SECGov, also said the account had been compromised."The SEC has determined that there was unauthorized access to and activity on the @SECGov x.com account by an unknown party for a brief period of time shortly after 4 pm ET," an SEC spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. "That unauthorized access has been terminated. The SEC will work with law enforcement and our partners across government to investigate the matter and determine appropriate next steps relating to both the unauthorized access and any related misconduct."
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S66'The Mandalorian' Is Getting a Movie--Which It Should Have Been All Along  Today in news we weren't expecting in the second week of 2024: The Mandalorian is getting a movie. Titled The Mandalorian & Grogu, the movie, according to Lucasfilm, will begin production this year with Jon Favreau, who created the TV series and served as showrunner, set to direct.This is the way, and probably indicative of what The Mandalorian should have been from the beginning. Even as Disney tried to capitalize on its acquisition of the Star Wars franchiseâand bolster Disney+ subscriptionsâby churning out lots of street-level series, a great many of them have felt like movies already. With the exception of, perhaps, Andor, which is as much a political drama as it is a Star Wars show, many of the Star Wars series have lost steam mid-season. If a show like, say, Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi had been trimmed down to a 2.5-hour space opera, they might have struck a better chord.
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S63Rabbit's Little Walkie-Talkie Learns Tasks That Stump Siri and Alexa  Do you hate apps? Jesse Lyu hates apps. At least, that was my takeaway after my first chat with the founder of Rabbit Inc., a new AI startup debuting a pocket-friendly device called the R1 at CES 2024. Instead of taking out your smartphone to complete some task, hunting for the right app, and then tapping around inside it, Lyu wants us to just ask the R1 via a push-to-talk button. Then a series of automated scripts called “rabbits” will carry out the task so you can go about your day.The R1 is a red-orange, squarish device about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It was designed in collaboration with the Swedish firm Teenage Engineering. (Lyu is on TE's board of directors.) The R1 has a 2.88-inch touchscreen on the left side, and there's an analog scroll wheel to the right of it. Above the scroll wheel is a camera that can rotate 360 degrees. It's called the “Rabbit Eye”—when it’s not in use, the camera faces up or down, a de facto privacy shutter—and you can employ it as a selfie or rear camera. While you can use the Rabbit Eye for video calls, it’s not meant to be used like a traditional smartphone camera; more on this later.
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S69Brilliant leaders are often strategic thinkers skilled at handling complexity  Strategic thinking wouldn’t be necessary if the business world were benign, stable and predictable. But, of course, it’s none of those things. It’s ever more competitive, and the stakes are high. Determining the right strategies to create or sustain success is challenging, and leaders must pilot their organizations through increasingly turbulent waters. The combination of high stakes and challenging environments is what makes strategic thinking so valuable. To appreciate this, it helps to understand the nature of the mental processing challenges that leaders face. Specifically, they confront four dimensions of difficulty: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA, a term that dates back to the work of Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus in the mid-1980s and was subsequently adopted by the US Army and then more broadly in work on leadership).
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S70Sustainability is humanity's North Star -- and it is within our reach  Sustainability is humanity’s North Star. Make sure current generations have opportunities for a good life, shrink our environmental impact so that future generations have the same (or better) opportunities, and let wildlife flourish alongside us. That’s the dream. And it’s one I believe we can achieve in our lifetimes.No generation has done this before. ‘Sustainability’ has two halves. Our ancestors were never sustainable because they never achieved the first half – meeting the needs of the current generation. Half of all children died, preventable disease was common and nutrition was often poor.
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S50AI Safety Research Only Enables the Dangers of Runaway Superintelligence  AI will become inscrutable and uncontrollable. We need to stop AI development until we have a necessary safety conversationAfter underachieving for decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has suddenly become scary good. And if we’re not very careful it may become quite dangerous—even so dangerous that it constitutes an “existential risk” to humanity.
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S56Is Making Extra Mortgage Payments Worthwhile? | Michael Roberts  Worried about your money? Wharton finance professor Michael Roberts is here to help with common-sense advice on mortgage debt, personal budgeting, and planning ahead. This episode is part of a series on getting a “Fresh Start” this new year.Dan Loney: As we have hit the New Year, many people look to make changes in their lives so that they can have a better lifestyle. There are many different things to improve your financial health, even something like paying off your mortgage.
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S16Unexpected Interruptions Can Boost Creativity  Long work interruptions are usually seen as detrimental, causing losses in productivity as operations grind to a halt. But when a fire at a supplier’s factory forced a temporary shutdown at the plant of a large European manufacturer of consumer goods, Hamburg University of Technology’s Tim Schweisfurth and a colleague—Anne Greul, then a doctoral student at the Technical University of Munich—found a surprising upside: The idleness led to an outpouring of ideas for improvements. The conclusion: Unexpected interruptions can boost creativity.
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S45Did 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.
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S4Why Startups Like Uber Stumble Over Problems They Could Have Avoided  Research shows that rapidly growing companies—especially fast-growing start-ups like Uber—face a high risk of stumbling. One of the hardest acts in business is scaling a business rapidly and profitably. Bain’s research concludes that of all new businesses registered in the US, only about 1 in 500 will reach a size of $100 million—and a mere 1 in 17,000 will attain $500 million in size and also sustain a decade of profitable growth. More often, they trip over themselves. Research for our book The Founder’s Mentality found that 85% of the time, the barriers to growth cited by executives at rapidly growing companies are internal—as opposed to, say, external threats such as unreceptive customers, a misread business opportunity or the moves of a dangerous competitor. With so many company growth stories coming undone because of internal causes that their leaders could have controlled, boards, leaders, investors and advisors should assess, early and often, the general health of a business and its ability to grow to large scale.
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S32S36S44Message 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.
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S54Wildfire Risk Maps Haven't Kept Up with Wildfire Risks  Many states haven’t been able to keep their wildfire risk maps up to date, even as global warming increases the danger, because of funding constraintsA Mountain View wildland firefighter walks through the smoke and haze after a fast moving wildfire swept through the area in the Centennial Heights neighborhood of Louisville, Colorado on December 30, 2021.
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S13Adobe's CEO on Making Big Bets on Innovation  In 1998 the author joined Adobe as vice president and general manager of the engineering technology group. Shortly thereafter he took on layout engineering as well, and the following year the company released InDesign, the powerhouse publishing platform that overshadowed Quark. In 2007 Narayen was named CEO. Two years later the company expanded from content creation to content management, measurement, and monetization with the acquisition of Omniture, a web-analytics software company with clients including Ford, TD Ameritrade, and Walmart.
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S62CES 2024 Live Blog: More News, Gadgets, and Photos From Tech's Big Show  Get live, up-to-the-minute reports of all the products, trends, and weird stuff we're seeing at CES in Las Vegas.Every January, the giant trade show known as CES takes over Las Vegas. It's a global bazaar featuring the best and worst tech ideas the industry has to offer. The products on display are by different turns wearable, pocketable, audible, rideable, mountable, and—in some cases—digestible. There are also a few dozen new cars to ogle, with most major automakers present. Here on this page, we'll be keeping a running report of everything we find interesting, from fascinating new EV concepts to bio-scanners to the latest smart home tech.
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S59What would it take for generosity to go viral?  What would happen to humanity if generosity went viral? Sharing transformative stories from around the world, head of TED Chris Anderson outlines why the time has come for the internet to realize its power to supercharge small acts of kindness, changing lives at a scale never experienced before. Learn how to cultivate a generous mindset — with or without giving money — and get inspired with tools to amplify your impact. "Be brave. Give what you can, and then be absolutely amazed at what happens next," Anderson says.
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S18Twitter's Cofounder on Creating Opportunities  After failing to make the basketball, baseball, and football teams in high school, the author persuaded the administration to start a lacrosse team, figuring that no one would know any more than he did about how to play. Eventually he got good at the game and became team captain. He took a valuable lesson from that experience: Opportunity is something you manufacture, not something you wait for.
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S31S41How to Raise a Difficult Issue in a One-on-One with Your Boss  Raising a potentially emotional topic to your manager can be difficult — you don’t know how they will react or whether you will be judged or punished in some way. Based on the science of conflict resolution, dissent, upward communication, and the authors’ own research on one-on-one meetings, they share a clear process for raising these issues with your manager. It involves first recognizing the importance of one-on-ones to you, the direct report; then clearly understanding the core need you are trying to address. Then it’s a process of picking your battles carefully, preparing yourself, starting well, executing with composure, curiosity, and a willingness to adapt, and finally wrapping up while maintaining momentum.
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S33S64Supernal's 120-MPH Flying Car Is as Quiet as a Dishwasher and Designed Using Bees  While this CES has been a more subdued affair in the on-road electric vehicle space—with Ford, General Motors, Toyota, and Stellantis all not exhibiting at the show—2024 seems to be a year of companies once again trying their darnedest to make flying cars happen.Electric vertical takeoff and landing craft, or eVTOLs, for superfast urban mobility seem to be perennially just a few years or so away, but Hyundai’s air mobility division, Supernal, is seemingly making a concerted play to make this mode of transport a reality.
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S58Why Retirement Gets Better With Annuities  New research co-authored by Wharton’s Olivia S. Mitchell makes a case for deferred income annuities with some equity exposure in defined contribution plans.Everyone aspires to have a steady source of income after retirement that replaces as much as possible of their pre-retirement earning. But for many people, one big challenge in saving for that goal is to find the right financial product that accommodates their specific requirements, such as when they want to retire or how much more they need over and above their Social Security benefits.
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S52Private U.S. Lunar Lander Suffers 'Critical' Anomaly after Launch  Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander was meant to be the first commercial spacecraft to operate on the surface of the moon. Instead it may not reach lunar orbit at allAstrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander lifts off on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on January 8, 2024.
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S47Rebel or sellout? How Nigeria's startup darling became tech minister  On a Saturday afternoon in August, Bosun Tijani stood before Nigeria’s parliament and read from a lectern. It was a job interview of sorts: After greeting the assembled senators, as well as President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he launched into explaining why he was the ideal candidate to be Nigeria’s next minister of communications, innovation, and digital economy.A portrait of patriotism in the Nigerian national colors, with a green cap and white shirt, Tijani compressed an impressive resume into seven minutes, covering achievements that had attracted the attention of globally recognized tech figures. He is something of a celebrity in Nigeria’s tech space: When Mark Zuckerberg made a trip to Lagos in 2016, Tijani showed the Meta CEO around Yaba, the city’s tech neighborhood. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of X (previously known as Twitter), similarly met Tijani when he visited Nigeria in 2019, and again in the wake of the #EndSars protests in 2021. Earlier this year, Tijani interviewed Bill Gates onstage at a youth innovation event.
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S25So You Haven't Heard Back After a Job Interview...  You applied for a job and actually heard back from the recruiter. Not only that, you’ve made it to the first step of the interview process: the recruiter screen. What should you do if you’re met with silence after that interview, or even later in the process? The good news is that silence doesn’t always mean rejection. The author presents common reasons you might hear crickets after interviewing — and what to do about it.
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S60The US vs. itself -- and other top global risks in 2024  2024 will be a dangerous year for the world, says Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. Forecasting the top geopolitical risks set to play out in the months to come, he untangles what's in store for the war in Ukraine, the state of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the tensions putting democracy in the United States to the test — all while AI continues to evolve faster than governments can regulate it. (This interview, hosted by TED's Helen Walters, was recorded on January 8, 2024.)
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S21Saving the Planet: A Tale of Two Strategies  Business is the engine of the developed economies that devour a disproportionate share of the world’s nonrenewable resources and produce a disproportionate share of its emissions. We see it, therefore, as both a cause of and a solution to environmental degradation. But how, exactly, can business contribute?
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S34S39When Your Boss Gives You a Totally Unrealistic Goal  There are many reasons why bosses set unrealistic goals. They may have heady aspirations and subscribe to the popular notion of “big, hairy, audacious goals.” Alternatively, they may be removed from day-to-day operations and not realize the logistical or process-related difficulties of achieving it. Or they may recognize that the goal is unrealistic but face pressure from higher up the food chain or important clients. In this article, the author outlines steps to try if your boss is expecting the seemingly impossible.
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S5How AI Could Help Small Businesses  As technology opens the doors to vast troves of data, opportunities are emerging to create new insights on a small business’s health and prospects. Insights from this data have the potential to resolve two defining issues that have faced lenders and borrowers in the sector: heterogeneity—the fact that all small businesses are different, making it difficult to extrapolate from one example to the next—and information opacity, the fact that it is hard to know what is really going on inside a small business. And what if technology had the power to make a small business owner significantly wiser about their cash flow, and a lender wiser as well? What if new loan products and services made it easier to quickly and accurately predict the creditworthiness of a small business, much like a consumer’s personal credit score helps banks predict creditworthiness for personal loans, credit cards, and mortgages? What if a small business owner had a dashboard of their business activities, including cash projections and insights on sales and cost trends that helped them weave an end-to-end picture of their business’s financial health? What if this dashboard helped them understand all credit options they qualified for today and which actions they could take to improve their credit rating over time? And better yet, what if the dashboard, marshaling the predictive power of machine learning amassed from data on thousands of business owners in similar industries, could help a business owner head-off perilous trends or dangers?
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