Protests against displacement in Jharkhand: November 18, 2022 - How to Make Your Matrix Organization Really Work

How to Make Your Matrix Organization Really Work

Much has been written about why matrix organizations are needed and what they look like at a surface level. Far less advice is available about what it takes to make them work. This information gap sets many teams up for disappointment because matrix organizations flourish or fail based on attention to their design and dynamics.

Consider the case of Juan, a regional supply chain leader in a large health care system who was caught between competing agendas from multiple bosses in his organization. Juan reports to Brenda, his enterprise-level boss in the supply chain organization, but he also has a reporting relationship to Steve, a regional operations executive. (Note: All names have been changed for anonymity.)

Brenda’s goals for Juan included implementing a new supplier network model with ambitious timelines. Meeting her goals would require a substantial time investment for Juan and his small team. Meanwhile, Steve was grappling with critical materials and staffing shortages and had asked Juan to optimize workforce and supply costs. Steve expected Juan to meet a tight schedule for opening a new clinical facility to help reach regional volume targets.

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China's influence in Myanmar could tip the scales towards war in the South China Sea

An undemocratic Myanmar serves no one’s interests except China, which is consolidating its economic and strategic influence in its smaller neighbour in pursuit of its two-ocean strategy.

Read more: Friday essay: if growing US-China rivalry leads to 'the worst war ever', what should Australia do?

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Iâ€™ve Made More Than 1,700 Wikipedia Entries on Women Scientists and Iâ€™m Not Yet Done

“The job that pays me,” Jessica Wade told VICE, smiling, “is that of a material scientist who works on new material technology for a more sustainable future.”

So, what’s the non-paying job for the 34-year-old British scientist who works as a research fellow in the Department of Materials at the Imperial College in London?

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Amazon keeps selling out of these genius things that you've probably never heard of

The internet is a wonderful invention. Aside from work and socialization, it’s also a great way to learn how to get through life easier. Apparently, everyone on the internet has discovered a better way to de-fur the couch, a brilliant way to take notes, and so much more.

In fact, Amazon is full of so many genius products that achieve tasks like those, and you might not have ever heard of them. Take, for instance, the blanket that’s designed to cool you down — and even the mini vacuum for your desk. And did I mention the alarm clock that projects the time on your wall? Because that’s out there, too. Genius.

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Italian Cops Take Down Occult Neo-Nazi Group Preparing Violent Attacks

A militant neo-Nazi group raided by Italian anti-terror police this week was ready to carry out violent attacks and had numerous transnational connections, including a member who claimed to have met with Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, according to media reports citing police.

Italian police said on Tuesday they had arrested five members of a white supremacist terror organisation called the Order of Hagal, which was based in Marigliano in the province of Naples and promoted occult neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denial and anti-vax ideology.

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CRISPR could help bacteria destroy cancer and gulp up methane

As it turns out, the most powerful tool for tinkering with nature’s blueprints came from nature itself. Developed in the early 2010s, CRISPR is a technique for editing DNA with painstaking precision. But as high-tech as it sounds, CRISPR wasn’t dreamed up in a lab.

The basic machinery — a protein that targets and cuts specific DNA sequences — evolved naturally in bacteria, where it’s part of a simple immune system that fends off viruses and other threats.

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Flushing toilets aren't the solution to South Africa's sanitation problem

Around 65% of South Africa’s population have access to waterborne sanitation such as flushing toilets connected to a sewer network, septic tank or conservancy tank. Another 19% have ventilated improved pit latrines, while 13% have pit toilets with no ventilation pipes. The remaining population either have pour flush toilets, chemical toilets or composting toilets, or they use buckets. Unfortunately, about 1% of the population still practise open defecation because they have no access to any sort of toilet facility.

South Africa is a water scarce country that has faced extreme weather events in recent years. For example in 2018 Cape Town faced severe drought and the possibility of running out of water. More recently, the east coast city of Durban was hit by floods which damaged bulk water and sanitation infrastructure. With the country’s challenges around water management and availability, it’s just not feasible and viable to continue with waterborne sanitation.

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MH17 convictions pave the way for war crime prosecutions from Ukrainian invasion

On November 17 2022, the Hague District Court in the Netherlands convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian of murder in relation to the downing of flight MH17 by a Buk-TELAR surface-to-air missile in 2014 over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.

This conviction is the first concluded legal action in relation to the incident. It is important not only because it provides some answers for the families of the 298 people killed on that flight, but because it demonstrates that states intend to pursue justice against Russian acts of violence connected with the Ukrainian conflict, regardless of the time or cost involved.

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VAR and peace? Why tech-assisted refereeing won't do away with disputed decisions at the World Cup

The football teams of 32 nations are gathered in Qatar for the quadrennial FIFA World Cup. Some 5 billion people around the world are expected to tune in to watch matches over the course of the month-long tournament.

These enormous audiences will be ready to applaud great play – and to howl ferociously when a referee’s decision goes against their team. To ensure the tough decisions are fair and accurate, FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the sport’s global governing body) has invested not only in the best human referees but also in the latest and greatest in technological tools.

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A groundbreaking Hollywood alliance could change horror movies forever

On November 16, The New York Times published interviews with Blum, the prolific horror producer, and Wan, the director and screenwriter responsible for a slew of hits, about an impending merger of their companies: Blum’s Blumhouse and Wan’s Atomic Monster.

The companies have shaped mainstream and indie horror cinema over the last 20 years, and a merger could further decide the genre's future. While the outcomes of the Blumhouse-Atomic Monster merger aren’t immediately apparent, it could be a moment fans will look back on as a turning point.

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These Tiny Greek Islands Have Become Unlikely Laboratories for Global Corporations

ASTYPALEA, Greece – On a small island in the middle of the Aegean Sea, there’s an unfamiliar but distinctive sound behind the bleating of goats and sheep, and the clanging of their bells: the faint hum of electric cars.

The hills of Astypalea, which has a population of just 1,300 and where goats and sheep outnumber people 10 to 1, now thrum to the sound of electric vehicles (EVs) from Volkswagen.

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My Dad Was Jailed for 16 Years in Saudi Arabia Over a Bunch of Tweets

Ibrahim Almadi last spoke to his father over the phone on the 21st of November, 2021. It was the same day his father arrived in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh to visit family.

But his dad never made it out of the airport, as when he landed he was, in Ibrahim’s words, “kidnapped”.

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Why Jerome Powell Could Be the Most Important Person in Washington Between Now and 2024

As Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as the Speaker of the House of Representatives ends, and newly empowered Republicans prepare to launch investigations of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, it’s clear that the next Congress won’t get much done. The midterms have further hollowed out the ranks of moderate Republicans who are willing to work with Democrats on bipartisan legislation. And the new Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, thanks to the Republicans’ narrow majority, will be largely beholden to the Freedom Caucus, which represents the (let’s be polite) populist, fruitcake wing of the G.O.P.

The Biden Administration won’t be entirely blocked. With the Democrats having retained control of the Senate, they should be able to get more nominations to the judiciary and other offices confirmed, which is significant. Plus, the President will still be able to conduct foreign policy and issue executive orders. But this week’s ruling from a federal appeals court that halted the Administration’s student-loan plan—a ruling that seems likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court—highlighted some of the constraints that Joe Biden will be operating under.

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Why Corporate Success Requires Dealing With the Past

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the venerable British company Lloyd’s of London sold insurance policies on enslaved people and the ships that transported them.1 In recent times, events such as the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, together with ongoing concerns about racism and racial injustices, have intensified the pressure on companies to recognize their contributions to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In June 2020, Lloyd’s of London issued a direct and unambiguous apology: “We are sorry for the role played by the Lloyd’s market in the 18th- and 19th-century slave trade. This was an appalling and shameful period of English history, as well as our own, and we condemn the indefensible wrongdoing that occurred during this period.” Since then, the company has hired an archivist to examine its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade more thoroughly and opened its archives. It has also made a commitment to develop Black and minority ethnic talent, increase its share of minority employees, and prevent its complicity in the use of slave labor in supply chains.

Today, corporate success requires dealing with the past. Throughout history, companies have been complicit in human rights violations and mass atrocities such as slavery, genocide, wars, and harms related to colonialism. Businesses’ involvement in these events remains a great concern for stakeholders today as momentum for social justice and equity builds within society. Many people — including customers and employees — increasingly expect companies with these ties to acknowledge and respond to their historic transgressions, even when they are generations removed from culpability.

We have conducted extensive research on historic corporate social responsibility, including interviews with corporate executives, legal professionals, and victims of mass atrocities and their descendants, plus reviews of news and corporate publication archives. What we have found is that managers who meaningfully engage with their company’s past can address the resulting harm while simultaneously contributing to their company’s successful future. Those who try to avoid historical issues, on the other hand, risk the company’s reputation and sometimes more.

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Jeremy Hunt's autumn statement is a poisoned chalice for whoever wins the next election

UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has produced a highly political autumn statement that throws forward major cuts in public spending to after the next general election. The accompanying economic forecast by the government’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) confirms that the country is facing a recession, with unemployment rising, inflation still high, and the average person’s standard of living dropping by 7% – wiping out almost all the gains of last decade.

The chancellor aims to ease the pain by increasing benefits and pensions in line with inflation. He is also raising spending on health, social care and education, while maintaining the spending levels already planned for all departments until 2024-25 in cash terms.

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Photos of the Week:Â Camel Race, Sea Horse, Illusion Room

Artwork by Banksy in the ruins of Ukraine, an American Indian Heritage celebration in San Francisco, a gaggle of geese in Prague, damage from Hurricane Nicole in Florida, liberation in Ukraine’s Kherson region, early Christmas decorations in Paris, a volcanic eruption in Chile, and much more

Spectators watch as the Artemis I unmanned lunar rocket lifts off from launchpad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on November 16, 2022. Artemis I is on a 25-and-a-half-day mission, traveling beyond the far side of the moon and back to Earth. #

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The Year Virginia Rewrote the Rules of Popular Culture

At the peak of his powers, Michael Vick could make a broken play look like it was planned. In 2002, as quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, he was a newly minted NFL star, known for his ability to confound defenses with his deep passes and exhilarating runs. In my Virginia Beach high school, this was the year of the Michael Vick jersey; we were about a Vick-length scramble from his hometown of Newport News. Sure, Vick played in Atlanta, but we were keenly aware that he was bred from our soil, and we were proud of his ascension to the national stage.

In December of that year, when the Falcons played the Minnesota Vikings, Vick more than confirmed his star status. The game was tied at 24 in overtime, and Vick had the ball. Facing an oncoming pass rush, he instinctively moved to the left, his strong side, and found a running lane. Most other quarterbacks of that era would likely have taken a few yards and slid to avoid a blow from an opposing linebacker. But Vick kept running. Two defenders closed in on him, one on each side. The defender to his left missed the tackle altogether, and the one to his right got just a handful of jersey. Vick charged on another 20-plus yards into the end zone for the touchdown, and the Falcons won. As the teams cleared the field, a television announcer said: “Is there any doubt as to who will be the most valuable player in the NFL this season?” Vick didn’t end up winning the award, but plays like this one made him a household name nonetheless.

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5 years ago, Netflix released Marvel's darkest superhero show ever

There’s recently been a lot of talk among Marvel fans about Netflix’s long-canceled superhero shows. Not only have some of their characters, like Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock, begun to reappear in the MCU, but all of Netflix’s Marvel titles were recently added to Disney+. A renewed interest in revisiting Marvel’s Netflix TV era is understandable — and welcome.

While it may not be quite as well-remembered as Daredevil and Jessica Jones, it’s impossible to discuss Netflix’s Marvel shows without mentioning The Punisher. The two-season series premiered in 2017, when the craze surrounding Netflix’s Marvel originals was already dying down. Five years later, however, it’s hard not to look back and be surprised by the experience The Punisher provides, especially given the lighter approach Marvel Studios has adopted for its Disney+ originals.

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The Football Fans Boycotting the Qatar World Cup 2022

For many football fans, Qatar 2022 feels like a tainted tournament. It’s been beset by controversy from the beginning: the bidding process which led to Russia and Qatar being awarded consecutive World Cups in 2010 was overshadowed by allegations of bribery, with FIFA, the game’s world governing body, engulfed in a maelstrom of corruption scandals and investigations in the aftermath (albeit not all directly connected to the bidding process).

In the time since, there has been intense scrutiny over Qatar’s human rights record. Human rights organisations have spent much of the last decade drawing attention to the treatment of the migrant workers labouring on the country’s World Cup infrastructure, much of which has had to be built from scratch at enormous financial, environmental and human cost. Same-sex relationships are also criminalised in Qatar, leaving many LGBTQ+ people anxious at the prospect of attending the tournament.

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Some of My Dream Jobs

Job going on walks and taking pictures with my phone of very small flowers growing by the street.

Job where I go visit my friends for a few days and, while they’re at work, I wander around alone finding things to do and places they’ve never been before and then I tour them around town showing them my favorite spots.

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Star Wars is finally bringing back a storytelling tool that Disney ignored

There’s nothing Star Wars likes more than a new creature. From the first appearance of the Jawas to Freck, the star-nosed mole alien from Obi-Wan Kenobi who sounded an awful lot like Zach Braff, introducing an alien is a great way to nab a viewer’s attention and flesh out the galaxy.

Andor takes a new approach to this, and Episode 11 is the perfect example. First, a whole new species was seen on Narkina Five after Melshi and Cassian escaped prison. Then, two other scenes use human characters to show alien practices, a technique that makes the world of Andor feel much more significant.

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Your Home Belongs to Renovation TV

In the new Netflix horror series The Watcher, which follows a family as a stalker turns their new suburban dream home into a nightmare, the first boogeyman the viewer meets is the home’s carrara-marble countertops. The house is, by all indicators, an impeccable domestic fantasy at the time of purchase, and its new owners had to empty their savings and investment accounts to fend off rival bidders and afford the final price. But the family finds the house’s gleaming white Italian counters so offensive—so five years ago—that they take out an additional loan in order to remove them immediately.

The series edges into absurdity—in a bit of inspired casting, Jennifer Coolidge plays an aggressively divorced, Mercedes-driving New Jersey real-estate agent—but the family’s immediate desire to renovate an already lovely home is played completely straight. And for good reason: Real people do this all the time now. They do it on instructional HGTV shows, on social media, in publications such as Domino and Dwell and Architectural Digest. On real-estate TV, brokers and buyers wince and gag over dark cabinets and high-shine brass light fixtures and white appliances, all relics of trends past. Houses with idiosyncrasies or personality—or even just somewhat dated but easily changed design flourishes, such as a red accent wall—are mocked relentlessly, only to be turned into pristine, camera-ready monuments to sterility. Often, the transformations involve explicit calculations about how much has theoretically been added to a home’s potential market value.

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Could Psychedelics Open New Doors for Science and Business?

Psychedelics. Just mentioning the word triggers a wealth of opinions, stigmas, misconceptions, and judgments that are often based on loosely founded assumptions, Hollywood depictions, or stories of good or bad “trips” that linger in our social consciousness and mythology. Putting preconceptions aside, it’s fair to say we are entering what many are calling a psychedelic renaissance — a new science-driven wave of thinking about psychedelics’ use for psychiatry, mental health, and well-being.

First, a primer. Psychedelics have been used by ancient societies across the globe for thousands of years, though rigorous scientific research didn’t begin in this field until the 19th and 20th centuries. They are psychoactive substances that affect several cognitive processes in the brain, leading to altered states of consciousness and influencing perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.

By the 1950s and 1960s, there was an explosion of research into the use of psychedelics in mental health and illness. However, the counterculture movement, spikes in recreational use (and misuse), and political unrest led to such drugs’ stigmatization, which ultimately resulted in psychedelics being classified as Schedule 1 controlled substances in 1970. This made it nearly impossible to continue conducting clinical research.

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The New Majority

The last time Republicans won control of the House of Representatives with a Democrat in the White House, the two parties clashed so ferociously that Congress nearly crashed the economy with a first-ever debt default. But with the GOP’s majority-making victory, those bitterly partisan confrontations of the Obama era might seem like halcyon days compared with what’s to come.

Republicans will assume control of the House in January, at a moment of deepening political turmoil. Trust between the parties is lower than it’s been in decades. A would-be assassin assaulted the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. A majority of the GOP’s House conference refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and party leaders have vowed to immediately disband the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol sacking that occurred just hours before that very vote. Republicans will launch their own investigations, into not only the actions of Biden’s administration but also the business and personal life of the president’s surviving son. Politically motivated impeachments of President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet could be inevitable. “There are going to be fulsome investigations, and we will not take anything off the table,” Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the House’s third-ranking Republican, told me before the midterm elections.

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The Jungle and the Sea reminds us war is profoundly local, with the intimate negotiation of human relationships

After the roaring success of their debut collaboration, Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack have produced another play that will captivate audiences.

Sri Lanka was in a civil war from 1983 to 2009, about a Tamil national liberation struggle for independence in the north and east. This followed decades of discrimination by the Sri Lankan state against Tamils.

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An Ode to Pull-Ups

I think I’m an ape. I think I’m an aerialist. I think I’m Jason Momoa. I think I’m a 54-year-old man with a dodgy shoulder, experiencing—to the pound, to the ounce—the precise terms of my contract with gravity. That’s one thing you can always say for the pull-up: You’re lifting your own weight.

Its first cousin is of course the push-up. But the push-up has no verticality. A blur of ground, or of floor, bounces madly back and forth in front of your face. And besides, your feet are taking some of the load—so as far as body weight goes, that means you’re bearing (just Googled this) only 64 percent. No, for the true self-haul, the full load of who you are, it has to be the pull-up.

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Digital First, Physical Second: WayfairÃ¢Â€Â™s Fiona Tan

With a background in building enterprise platforms for organizations, including Oracle and Walmart, Wayfair CTO Fiona Tan oversees all of the technology initiatives for the Boston-based e-commerce company. As the home furnishings retailer begins to open brick-and-mortar stores, it's taking lessons learned from the digital space to inform how it markets its home products to customers in physical locations.

On this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, Fiona joins Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh to discuss how artificial intelligence fuels nearly everything the retailer does, from ad purchasing to product pricing, and where human decision makers fit in. She also describes how AI enables Wayfair's marketing automation technology, as well as some innovative new programs underway to help customers experience the company's products virtually.

Fiona Tan is the chief technology officer at Wayfair, where she oversees a global innovation team responsible for creating market-leading experiences through the home furnishings retailer's world-class e-commerce platform. Before joining Wayfair, Tan served as senior vice president of U.S. technology at Walmart, where she was responsible for innovation and engineering execution spanning its site, mobile app, and all associate and merchant-facing technology across its e-commerce business and retail stores in the United States.

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Get Ready for the Next Supply Disruption

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in an era of supply chain disruption and unpredictability that has severely challenged many companies’ planning and processes, and revealed how far prevailing practices are from the ideal. An MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics poll conducted online at the onset of the pandemic revealed that only 16% of organizations had an emergency response center — an established best practice for mitigating and recovering from unplanned interruptions in the physical flow of goods.1

Unsurprisingly, given the pandemic’s disruptive effects, the same poll found that the highest ambition of supply chain managers was to bolster their risk management protocols and tools. The problem with crisis-driven supply chain initiatives that are focused on protocols and tools is that they are only as effective as the ability of the organization to use them. Having that ability requires the systematic development of capabilities to manage for supply disruptions. These capabilities are combinations of people, policies, processes, and technologies that ensure companies can not only plan for and respond to known business and operating risks but also — and more importantly — manage unknown-but-knowable threats and their associated consequences.

We’ve identified six capabilities that fill this bill: anticipate, diagnose, detect, activate resources for, protect against, and track threats. Together, they constitute the ADDAPT framework, which is based on our research into how public agencies and private enterprises experience and respond to supply disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. In medicine, pathology is aimed at understanding the causes and effects of a disease to guide treatment. Similarly, the ADDAPT capabilities help companies understand the causes of supply disruptions and their immediate and long-term effects, in order to both respond to unfolding supply disruptions and prevent their recurrence.

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Executives Are Coming to See RAI as More Than Just a Technology Issue

MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG have assembled an international panel of AI experts that includes academics and practitioners to help us gain insights into how responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) is being implemented in organizations worldwide. This month, we asked our expert panelists for reactions to the following provocation: Executives usually think of RAI as a technology issue. The results were wide-ranging, with 40% (8 out of 20) of our panelists either agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement; 15% (3 out of 20) disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with it; and 45% (9 out of 20) expressing ambivalence, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. While our panelists differ on whether this sentiment is widely held among executives, a sizable fraction argue that it depends on which executives you ask. Our experts also contend that views are changing, with some offering ideas on how to accelerate this change.

In September 2022, we published the results of a research study titled “To Be a Responsible AI Leader, Focus on Being Responsible.” Below, we share insights from our panelists and draw on our own observations and experience working on RAI initiatives to offer recommendations on how to persuade executives that RAI is more than just a technology issue.

Many of our experts are reluctant to generalize when it comes to C-suite perceptions of RAI. For Linda Leopold, head of responsible AI and data at H&M Group, “Executives, as well as subject matter experts, often look at responsible AI through the lens of their own area of expertise (whether it is data science, human rights, sustainability, or something else), perhaps not seeing the full spectrum of it.” Belona Sonna, a Ph.D. candidate in the Humanising Machine Intelligence program at the Australian National University, agrees that “while those with a technical background think that the issue of RAI is about building an efficient and robust model, those with a social background think that it is more or less a way to have a model that is consistent with societal values.” Ashley Casovan, the Responsible AI Institute’s executive director, similarly contends that “it really depends on the executive, their role, the culture in their organization, their experience with the oversight of other types of technologies, and competing priorities.”

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Parents Need Their Own AARP

Compared with other wealthy nations, the United States is a uniquely difficult place to raise children. One in four mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, and we’re the only rich country that doesn’t have federally mandated paid leave for new parents. While other wealthy countries invest an average of $14,000 a year for every toddler’s care, America spends $500.

The pandemic sharpened our awareness of these problems—parents left the workforce in droves, child-care centers closed en masse—and yet little has changed. Child care was cut from the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, leaving families to scrape together funds for a service that now costs more than in-state college tuition in many states. To add insult to injury, a growing number of employers have started scaling back their parental-leave offerings. Unsurprisingly, the happiness gap between parents and nonparents is larger in the U.S. than in any other developed country. Many caregivers here feel scared, exhausted, and isolated in our struggles.

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'The Menu' Skewers Class Politics

The pitch-black comedy examines the ethics of “eating the rich”—and the hypocrisy of “ethical consumption.”

Let’s get this out of the way quickly: The Menu is not—I repeat, not—a movie about cannibalism. I say this not to spoil potential viewers but to reassure, since it’s the first question almost anyone who’s aware of the film has asked me. Just what is going on in Mark Mylod’s pitch-black comedy about a celebrity chef presiding over a very special meal for the wealthy and famous? Something sinister, yes, with an “eat the rich” mentality—but Julian Slowik (played by Ralph Fiennes) is not turning his diners into food, nor is he feeding them other diners.

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How to Cheer for America

When I watch the World Cup, I’m celebrating not what this country is, but what it can be.

When I was 6, my mother missed the deadline to register me for the Pop Warner football league. She needed something that would get me to do a lot of running outside the house, so that I didn’t do as much running inside of the house. A colleague suggested soccer. It wasn’t a sport my mom had considered: Not many Black kids in Louisiana played soccer in 1994.

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Every Company Needs a Political Strategy Today

What if your company’s health insurance plan (or your hiring and training practices, or your policy on guns in the workplace) violates a new state law? And what if your efforts to comply with fast-changing laws and regulations are met with condemnations from employees, customers, and investors?

One clear cause is the U.S. Supreme Court term that concluded in June 2022, which both revealed and reopened ugly scars in the social fabric of American society. Decisions on climate regulation, reproductive rights, and gun control, to pick just three, sparked immediate protests and generated swift backlash from multiple sources, as well as a new wave of legislation and additional court cases. The court’s agenda for its current term, which includes controversial issues such as affirmative action, will turn up the heat even more.

It’s not just the courts that are necessitating having a political strategy. As political polarization has made states more prone to one-party rule, the chasms between conservative and liberal legislatures are much deeper than in the past, making conflicting state laws more difficult to navigate.

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Why Elon Musk Is Blowing Up Twitterâ€™s Business

The new owner says he hates advertising. That’s a problem because it provides 90 percent of his social-media platform’s revenue.

Hours before Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter, he published an open letter to advertisers. Musk knew that big companies in particular were anxious about his plans to dramatically reduce the amount of content moderation on the site. They saw this as a potential threat to what advertisers call “brand safety,” because it would make it more likely that their ads would end up next to deceptive or offensive content. In his letter, Musk acknowledged those concerns, saying that he wanted Twitter to become “the most respected advertising platform in the world,” and that he understood that the site could not become “a free-for-all hellscape.”

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Improve Your Diversity Measurement for Better Outcomes

If business leaders hope to move the needle on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), it’s critical that they put measurements in place to track progress and hold managers accountable for results, something that few organizations are currently doing effectively.1

Indeed, the more than 2,200 executives who have signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge have committed to driving “measurable action,” but recognizing that something should be measured is not the same as knowing how to measure it. And for many organizations, a lack of understanding of precisely what metrics to collect, how to do so, and how to interpret the data is a common stumbling block in their DEI efforts, contributing to underwhelming returns on their diversity investments.2

In this article, we draw upon more than three decades of collective research and practical experience to highlight six factors that should be considered when deciding how to measure and track DEI data.

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Qatar Bans Beer At Stadiums 48 Hours Before World Cup Starts

Qatar has banned the sale of alcohol anywhere near all eight World Cup stadiums in a sudden change of policy just 48 hours before the start of the tournament.

“Following discussion between host country authorities and FIFA, a decision has been made to focus the sale of alcoholic beverages on the FIFA Fan Festival, other fan destinations and licensed venues, removing sale points of beer from Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 stadium perimeters,” FIFA announced in a statement on Friday.

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The Best Gifts for Every Music Lover, From Metalheads to Rap Moguls

This may seem like a no-brainer, but when you're picking out gifts for your loved ones, crushes, frenemies, and polycule members, you should probably try to cater to their interests. And music lovers, mercifully for us as gift-givers, tend to be pretty vocal about what they like, whether it's through their parade of band shirts or endless chatter about what festival they're blowing their paycheck on next.

Some of the best gifts we've ever received have been thoughtfully curated albums, the headphones we end up using every day, and that long-coveted vintage tour sweatshirt. So with this gift guide, we wanna pay it forward and make the hip hop heads, metalheads, Deadheads, punx, jiggly jazz-heads, freakazoids, indie goons, and audiophiles of the world very merry indeed. Here you go: the best gifts for music lovers, from the super-practical to the hard-to-find memorabilia they'll treasure forever.

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Webinar: The Business Case for Blockchain in the Enterprise

Blockchain’s promise as an enterprise technology has been slow to take off, but that is about to change. Major businesses have worked their way through the challenges and are getting real value for their investments, whether in supply chain, finance, or internal operations.

In his new book, Enterprise Strategy for Blockchain: Lessons in Disruption From Fintech, Supply Chains, and Consumer Industries, author Ravi Sarathy lays out blockchain’s unique capabilities and benefits for enterprises and provides a strategy road map for moving forward.

Ravi Sarathy is professor of international business and strategy at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, and author of Enterprise Strategy for Blockchain: Lessons in Disruption from Fintech, Supply Chains, and Consumer Industries (The MIT Press, 2022). Abbie Lundberg is editor in chief at MIT Sloan Management Review. She moderated the session.

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Developing Successful Data Products at Regions Bank | Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean

Employing a product orientation has long been an important component of success in the software industry. Product managers shepherd new software from the earliest stages, where customer needs are identified, to the finished offering and beyond. As one description of software product management put it, successful product managers must balance the different perspectives of the technology, the business, and the user experience — all without having direct control of any of these domains.

Over the past decade or so, as software has increasingly incorporated data and analytics features, the idea of data products has become popular among digital native companies. These are software products whose primary purpose is to do something with data — collect, manage, analyze, or facilitate the consumption of it. Data products also typically involve some degree of analytics or AI models. Virtually every offering from Google, for example, qualifies as an AI-enabled data product.

Embedding data, analytics, and AI into products has been a game changer for people like Manav Misra, the chief data and analytics officer at Regions Bank. The financial institution has $161 billion in assets and is one of the nation’s largest full-service providers of consumer and commercial banking, wealth management, and mortgage products and services. Misra came to Regions with a background in software: He had been a professor of computer science and then worked in software and analytics businesses for many years. A product orientation became second nature to him. That’s a good thing, because when he arrived at Regions in 2018, he discovered both the need for a product focus and the opportunities it presented.

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'Disenchanted' review: Amy Adams is still magic, even if the satire is not

Amy Adams doesn't lose a step in a sequel that almost, but can't quite, capture the greatness of the original.

In 2001, the Disney fairytale formula was completely demolished by a smelly, green ogre. Dreamworks’ Shrek mercilessly satirized the rival studio. So it was only fair that Disney would join in the fun — on its own terms.

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Star Wars is finally bringing back a storytelling tool that Disney ignored

5 years ago, Netflix released Marvel's darkest superhero show ever

A groundbreaking Hollywood alliance could change horror movies forever

To understand the limits of human senses, look to the wild world of animal cognition | Aeon Videos

While it might seem like your sensory experience is capturing the outside world as it truly is, science tells a very different story – that you’re taking in only a small, subjective slice. To better understand this truth, we can look to the creatures around us, including the ones you’re maybe keeping as companions. Working from ideas discussed in his book An Immense World: A Journey Through the Animal Kingdom’s Extraordinary Senses (2022), in this lecture at the Royal Institution in London, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong guides viewers through the vast and eclectic sensory experiences of animals. Exploring the concept of umwelt – or ‘the sensory bubble that each species exists in’ – Yong takes the audience through everything from the smell and sight experience of dogs, to the electrically powered navigation abilities of the black ghost knifefish.

There’s no one way for an insect to fly, but they’re all amazing in close up and slo-mo

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On the advantages of believing that nothing is true | Aeon Essays

Alethic nihilism is the theory that nothing is true. There is much to gain by taking this radical idea seriously

Truth is a topic philosophers have spent centuries considering. We have asked questions such as: what is the content of the concept of truth? That is, what is it to think of something as true? And what is truth itself? Can we come up with a true and illuminating account of what truth really is? For example, is truth the same thing as matching the facts? How does truth relate to other important philosophical topics, such as knowledge, reasoning and assertion? Those are all good questions, but the question I’d like to focus on is one that has been discussed far less often. As it’s far more fundamental, it deserves close examination. The question is this: do we have good reason in the first place to think that some things are true?

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What Akiko saw at the centre of the Hiroshima blast, and the indelible mark it left | Aeon Videos

On 6 August 1945, 20-year-old Akiko Takakura was working alongside a friend at the Bank of Hiroshima when her life was upended in an instant. She was just 300 m from the hypocentre of the atomic blast that the United States had unleashed on the city that day. Gravely wounded, Takakura would somehow escape with her life. However, the lingering shadow of the carnage she witnessed that day would haunt her for decades to come. Through animations seemingly inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, the short film Obon (2018) from the Berlin-based filmmakers Anna Samo and André Hörmann captures Takakura’s memories of the blast, and the permanent mark they left on her, from the vantage of more than 70 years later. With an unsparing sequence depicting the brutal violence of bombing, the work highlights how the attack unleashed horrors that Takakura couldn’t begin to comprehend, and how it altered her relationship with her strict father.

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Disability Pride: Representation is Only the First Step

In the summer of 2018, in the heart of bustling, jam-packed, pre-pandemic Times Square, a giant billboard for the skin-care brand Olay might have gone unnoticed. But for anyone who looked up and saw, anyone who knew, who understood, it was revolutionary. Over the words “too Defiant,” with too crossed out, was the luminous face of a rising young model named Jillian Mercado. A native new Yorker of Dominican descent, Mercado was born less than thirty years earlier with a variation of muscular dystrophy. (Later, on Instagram, she’d describe herself as “a Latinx model, who is queer af [as fuck] and happens to have a disability.”)

Five years before, she’d unexpectedly won an open modeling call for Diesel, the clothing brand that sells jeans starting at roughly $200 a pair. Campaigns for Nordstrom and Target followed. In 2016, she appeared in merchandising for Beyoncé’s world tour. Her career trajectory was meteoric, if unlikely. No one thought anyone who used a motorized wheelchair could go so far or so fast. No one had before. In the beauty business, some big-name companies had included plus-size and older models, but showcasing disability was unheard of.

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Someone Has to Say It: Bob Dylanâ€™s New Book Would Have Been Better as a Podcast

As such, certain loyalties are, let’s say, in play, try as I might—and I will try—to out-run them. The real truth of the matter is that I will struggle to give Bob Dylan a bad review—or even to effectively assess whether he deserves one—because I have been horrifically in love with him for almost 20 years. Listen: given the circumstances, we do what we can, each and every one of us.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is a mistitled coffee-table book. There isn’t really any philosophy (whatever that is) in this book and, dust jacket claims to the contrary, it is not “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting.” The book is organized into a series of one-to-three-page essays on pop, rock, country, folk, and blues songs, mostly American and British.

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How Jane Austen Almost Walked Away From Writing

If you’re a literary genius, you’ve got it easy—right? Wrong. Even Jane Austen, indisputably one of the greatest novelists in the English language, spent years struggling to be published and became so dispirited that there were moments when she almost walked away.

The story begins with an almost-twenty Jane, at home in Hampshire. It’s the winter of 1795, and Austen’s first full-length novel is safely drafted. Enter Tom Lefroy, visiting a neighboring rectory, and delighting Jane, celebrating her birthday on 16 December. Despite evidence that the two young people are strongly attracted to each other, despite a letter suggesting that Jane has great hopes of Tom, there is no engagement, let alone marriage. Money is the problem. It usually is, in Austen’s world.

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A 10-Year Study Reveals What Great Executives Know and Do

Despite the huge impact executives can have on their organizations, failure rates remain high. Prescriptions for what to do continue to fall short. So we wondered: If we closely studied the executives who succeed in top jobs once appointed, could we identify distinguishing features that set them apart and defined their success?

As part of our ten-year longitudinal study on executive transitions, which included more than 2,700 leadership interviews, we did a rigorous statistical analysis (including more than 90 regression analyses) to isolate the skills of the top-performing executives. We isolated seven performance factors correlated to strong organizational performance as well as leadership strengths through IBM Watson’s content analysis tools as well as historical performance reviews of these leaders and their direct reports. These seven factors led to our discovery of four recurring patterns that distinguished exceptional executives. What separated the “best of the best” from everyone else is a consistent display of mastery across four highly correlated dimensions, while “good” executives may have only excelled in two or three. Executives who shine across all four of these dimensions achieve the greatest success for themselves and their organizations.

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Iâ€™ve Made More Than 1,700 Wikipedia Entries on Women Scientists and Iâ€™m Not Yet Done

The Football Fans Boycotting the Qatar World Cup 2022

These Tiny Greek Islands Have Become Unlikely Laboratories for Global Corporations

Qatar Bans Beer At Stadiums 48 Hours Before World Cup Starts

Italian Cops Take Down Occult Neo-Nazi Group Preparing Violent Attacks

My Dad Was Jailed for 16 Years in Saudi Arabia Over a Bunch of Tweets

CRISPR could help bacteria destroy cancer and gulp up methane

Amazon keeps selling out of these genius things that you've probably never heard of

Star Wars is finally bringing back a storytelling tool that Disney ignored

5 years ago, Netflix released Marvel's darkest superhero show ever