December 29, 2022 - How NFT video games crashed and burned

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How NFT video games crashed and burned Less than 12 months ago, it felt as if 2022 would be the year NFTs took off in the video game world. Companies like EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Zynga, Niantic, and Take-Two Interactive all, at one point, said that they were brainstorming ways to add NFTs into their games. The idea being that non-fungible tokens would replace everything from loot boxes to character skins to even characters themselves. But none of that ended up happening. Continued here

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The stats, facts, and figures that defined tech in 2022 From the growing number of electric vehicles on the streets of Hanoi to the influx of Brazilian influencers on India’s Twitter alternative Koo, Uber’s position in South Africa’s ride-hailing market, Indonesia’s largest-ever IPO, and a decline in Chinese venture investing — these are the statistics uncovered in Rest of World’s reporting this year that encapsulated the dynamics driving change in the tech sector around the world. The number of bitcoins El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, claimed to have bought as of January 2022 Continued here

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2022 was an incredible year for handheld gaming | Engadget The past year was stellar for handheld gaming, no matter the size of your actual hands. Between the Steam Deck, Playdate and an explosion of retro consoles, we received an embarrassing amount of mobile gaming goodness in 2022, and cloud play is only encouraging more innovation. Even though Sony still hasn’t revived the Vita, it feels like the handheld market is in the throes of a renaissance — so let’s celebrate the milestones of the year right here. Continued here

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McDonald’s Perfect Response to Elon Musk’s Offer to Eat a Happy Meal on TV (and More Lessons Learned From 2022) A look back at some of 2022's most read stories, and what takeaways can help you and your business. Continued here

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Winter storms put the US power grid to the test. It failed. Two-thirds of the US population faced snowstorms, high winds, or frigid winter weather over the Christmas holiday weekend, leading to at least 52 deaths and pushing the electricity grid to the brink of failure. And in many instances, it did. At its peak on Christmas, an estimated 1.7 million businesses and homes faced power outages. Continued here

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Build a Strategy of Seized Opportunities How a properly executed SWOT can inform your strategic plan Continued here

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Researchers Collected 15,000 Regrets From Around the World. Their No. 1 Lesson Is Just 3 Words Long  This research-backed three-word rule will save you from a whole lot of regrets. Continued here

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The Best New Year's Resolution Might Be to Just Let Go of an Unfulfilled Life Goal Since the 19th century, when motivational science had its start, scientists have focused on what makes us persist through difficulties and achieve what we want. Only recently have they zeroed in on how we can relinquish our cherished aspirations—and why we should. They term this process “goal disengagement,” and New York University research psychologist Gabriele Oettingen says it has been treated as the “black sheep” of the field. Why is that so? Western cultural bias celebrates persistence and achievement, so abandoning goals is seen as “failure,” says psychologist Cathleen Kappes of the University of Hildesheim in Germany. Kappes is guest co-editor of the December 2022 issue of Motivation and Emotion, which is devoted entirely to advances in goal disengagement science. The issue exemplifies a swelling movement to correct this neglect. Continued here

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If You Must Cry Over a Space Robot, Make It This One Here is the happy part: For more than four years, a funky-looking spacecraft did something remarkable. It was in many ways just another robot, a combination of hardy materials, circuits, and sensors with a pair of solar panels jutting out like wings on an insect. But this particular robot has listened to the ground shake on Mars. It has felt marsquakes beneath its little mechanical feet. NASA and European space agencies designed the spacecraft to study these Martian quakes in detail. Mission managers, in their seemingly endless capacity to invent twisty acronym names for space-bound projects, called it Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport—or InSight, for short. Once on Mars, InSight couldn’t go anywhere; it was a lander, not a rover, so the mission was rooted to the spot where it touched down. Every picture the robot beamed home showed the same dusty, cinnamon-colored expanse, but behind the understated photography, InSight was waiting for the marsquakes to roll in. Continued here

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China tests world's first 'lobster eye' space telescope to X-ray universe more accurately The world's first "lobster eye" space telescope, which will enable researchers to record X-ray images of the universe accurately, has undergone successful testing in China. Lobster Eye Imager for Astronomy (LEIA), the 53 kg (117 lb) telescope, captured high-quality photographs of X-ray sources of the cosmos, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters last week.  Continued here

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Great Public Speakers are Made, Not Born Public speaking is a skill you can sharpen with time and practice. Continued here

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7 Trends Small Business Owners Can Embrace To Excel In 2023 Make the new year an opportunity for growth and fulfillment, even during one of the most challenging eras for small business owners. Continued here

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Just How Badly Does Apple Need China? Long before it reached your home, even before its tiny components were pieced together in an assembly plant, your phone was already one of the most complex gadgets in the world. It is the product of a delicate supply chain whose every link is forged by competing business and political interests. That chain is starting to rattle and even break, as the global tech industry works to become less dependent on China. Earlier this month, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) held an event celebrating the expansion of its first major facility in the United States, a semiconductor plant in Phoenix, Arizona. When the facility starts operating in early 2024, it will use the world’s most precise manufacturing tools to etch billions of microscopic circuits onto the silicon chips that provide all of the world’s computing power. Continued here

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There is a Case for Optimism in 2023 This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. I indulged in my share of gloom in 2022, and I have plenty more where that came from. But I want to make the case for a certain amount of optimism in 2023—and to offer my gratitude to readers of the Daily. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. Continued here

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Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now. Space is becoming a potential source of value for businesses across a range of sectors, including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and tourism. To understand what the opportunities are for your company, the authors advise you to consider the four ways in which using space could create value: data, capabilities, resources, and markets. Continued here

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Recognizing an Investing Signal That Defied Wisdom, and Endured This year’s Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation went to a seminal paper on stock price behavior that spawned numerous studies on the topic of momentum investing. Stock market investing gurus have dispensed maxims like “buy low, sell high“ and “what goes up must come down, and vice versa,” or Eugene Fama’s “efficient markets hypothesis,” which assumes that the price of a security reflects all relevant and known information about that asset. But those guideposts have never convincingly explained why some stocks seem to keep rising or falling on their own steam, or what is called “momentum investing.” Continued here

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Successful Business Plans Start with Customers The key to winning is information. Start by asking the right questions. Continued here

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Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything A disastrous year for the tech industry, captured for eternity in a billionaire’s private exchanges As the year comes to a close, I cannot stop thinking about … a court document. Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc. v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts. Continued here

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Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a 'full-blown meltdown' Travelers wait at a Southwest Airlines baggage counter after flight cancellations hit Los Angeles International Airport on Monday. The airline warns it will fly about one-third of its schedule for the next several days. Eugene Garcia/AP hide caption Continued here

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Want to Be More Productive and Successful? Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Science Agree: Start Your Day Like This Because how you start is how you'll finish, especially if you tend to procrastinate. Continued here

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A crocodile that coexisted with dinosaurs is discovered by scientists University of São Paulo researchers have discovered a new crocodile species that lived alongside dinosaurs. These giant crocodiles lived between 72 and 66 million years ago in modern-day Brazil. Called "Titanochampsa iorii," the crocodile was between 10-20 feet long (3-6 meters), and it had a very sturdy bite, according to the statement of researchers. Their study was published in Historical Biology. Continued here S14 Scientists Propose New, Faster Method of Interstellar Space Travel Scientists have proposed a dazzling new mission to travel to the stars that is inspired by the elegant flights of seabirds, such as albatrosses, reports a new study. The interstellar concept mission would harness shifting winds generated by the Sun in order to accelerate a spacecraft to as much as 2 percent the speed of light within two years, allowing it to soar into the vast expanse beyond our solar system. Continued here S17 How the Cheesecake Factory became the chain restaurant of millennial dreams The Cheesecake Factory menu is over 20 pages long and contains 250 items. The menu was seemingly written by someone who was hungry for everything they could think of but couldn’t name what they actually wanted at that moment. The dishes, mostly sandwiches and pastas and of course cheesecakes, all have names and descriptions. Occasionally, a female first name precedes the actual dish, indicating a personal endorsement for a fresh turkey sandwich or chicken and avocado salad from a “Sheila” or a “Renee” you’ve never met. The burgers are not hamburgers but Glamburgers. Getting shrimp scampi along with the steak Diane is known as a “Factory Combination.” Continued here S4 Wireless electronics can power trillions of IoT sensors. Here's how How great it would have been if your smartphone, laptop, car, and home appliances could interact and share information with one another all the time —- to make your life more comfortable and easy-going.  This exciting possibility can be turned into reality via the Internet of Things (IoT), a technology that employs sensors, software, and the internet to establish a network between all your physical devices and gadgets. Although IoT is still a budding technology, you’d be surprised to know that it’s already in play.  Continued here S11 Sam Bankman-Fried borrowed $546 million from Alameda to buy Robinhood shares Sam Bankman-Fried has revealed he and former executive Gary Wang borrowed more than U.S. $546 million from their his trading and investment firm Alameda Research to purchase a nearly 8 percent stake in Robinhood Markets, according to court documents released on Tuesday. The transactions, that were made earlier this year, were documented in a series of promissory notes in an affidavit provided to a Caribbean court before Bankman-Fried’s arrest. Continued here S66 2022 Seen Through the Lens of Emilio Morenatti Emilio Morenatti, the Associated Press’s chief photographer for Spain and Portugal, has spent the past year documenting important news stories across Europe. Morenatti, who is based in Barcelona, covered drought conditions in Spain, made several trips to Ukraine before and during the Russian invasion, documented the aftermath of wildfires in Catalonia, photographed mourners paying tribute to Queen Elizabeth II, and much more. Below, in roughly chronological order, is a look at some of the stories brought to us through Morenatti’s lens in 2022. Stanislav, 40, says goodbye to his son David, 2, and his wife Anna, 35, on a train to Lviv at the Kyiv station, Ukraine, on March 3. 2022. Stanislav is staying to fight the Russian invasion while his family is leaving the country to seek refuge in a neighboring country. # Continued here S27 How Should Elon Musk Respond to Twitter Criticism? By Taking a Page Out of His Own Playbook From 8 Years Ago If Musk could handle an audience full of oil and gas industry leaders, surely he can respond more thoughtfully to critics of his moves since taking over Twitter? Continued here S9 South Korea reports first death by rare brain-eating amoeba South Korea has reported its first case of brain-eating Naegleria fowleri infection, according to a report by The Korean Times published on Monday. Last month, the disease was making its way across the U.S., and now, it seems to have spread to other nations. In South Korea, the infection caused the death of a man in his 50s who passed away ten days after first displaying symptoms. He is suspected of being exposed to the amoeba in Thailand. Continued here S61 iOS 16 exploit lets you set the system font to Comic Sans (and other things) If you like your iPhone but hate the San Francisco typeface, developer Zhuowei Zhang has posted a neat tool to Github—an app that can temporarily "overwrite" the iOS system font with another one, giving your phone a new, non-Apple-sanctioned look. Continued here S23 Leading Effectively When You Inherit a Mess More than 50% of executives who inherit a mess fail within their first 18 months on the job. To effectively lead a turnaround, resist the temptation to emotionally distance yourself and blame your predecessor. Moreover, minimize references to your past successes; while you should draw on what’s worked for you in the past, no one in a struggling organization likes to hear “This is how we did it at my old company.” You are part of this team now; embrace it. Doing so will help you manage the emotions of people who are probably worrying about keeping their jobs. To help keep their anxiety down, be transparent about how you’ll make changes to the organization and on what kind of timeline. But don’t be afraid to push back when they bring you data that seems skewed, or offer ideas that seem designed to showcase how valuable they are. You want to clean up the mess, not create another one. Continued here S37 Delivery apps are offering loans to workers. Experts allege they're debt traps Jorge had been a delivery worker for several years when he started getting unprompted WhatsApp messages from DiDi — one of the apps he works for, and one of the most popular ride-hailing and delivery platforms in Mexico. DiDi offered him an immediate loan of up to 26,800 pesos (about $1,360), claiming in the WhatsApp message that the money would help “lighten [his] expenses.” DiDi promised he wouldn’t have to pay any interest for 10 days. Jorge, who did not share his full name with Rest of World because he feared getting in trouble with DiDi, did not apply; he had heard enough from other delivery workers to know better. “A friend of mine got a loan approved for 1,300 pesos [$66], missed a payment, and ended up with a debt of 2,600 [$130],” he told Rest of World. Since launching in October 2021, DiDi has been one of the several delivery and ride-hailing platforms to offer an in-app loan service. Uber Eats has been doing so for at least two years, offering loans ranging from 2,000 pesos (around $100) to 15,000 pesos ($750) through push notifications, in-app ads, and WhatsApp messages. Lacking a steady income, and thus a good credit score, many of the estimated 350,000 to 500,000 app gig workers in Mexico may find it difficult to get loans from traditional financial institutions. Companies that depend on gig workers have spotted an opportunity to offer credit to their drivers, potentially opening up a new stream of income for them.  Continued here S24 Don't Just Focus on Your Technical Skills. Focus On Your People Skills. Early in their careers, young professionals tend to focus on the technical skills that will help us get our the next promotion. These skills are certainly useful, but they won’t help you get the promotions down the line. The author identifies three strategic interpersonal skills that young professionals should focus on to shape their future career development: Continued here S15 Change Is Coming for Everyone in College Football--Even Alabama For just the second time since the College Football Playoff began, Alabama will be on the outside looking in. This doesn’t mean the Crimson Tide’s reign is over, though—just that they’re the sport’s bellwether in a new way. Continued here S12 Creating in The Era of Creative Confidence It’s remarkable to watch a five-year-old draw, void of any anxiety about what the world will think. We all start our lives creatively confident, happy to create and share our work with pride. And then, as we age, our comfort with creative expression declines. We’re discouraged by the learning curve of creative skills and tools, by our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and by the harsh opinions of critics. As Picasso famously quipped, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” It is a sad irony: As we age, our creative capabilities (and opportunities!) grow as we collect life experiences that inspire us — but our creative confidence shrinks. We are more creatively confident in kindergarten than we are as adults. Correcting this is among the greatest opportunities for the next generation of humankind. Well, we’re entering an era that changes everything. A few critical technology breakthroughs and fundamentally more accessible platforms are changing everything. From free web-based tools with templates that help conquer the fear of the blank screen to powerful generative artificial intelligence that conjures up anything from a text prompt, expressing yourself creatively no longer requires climbing creativity’s notoriously steep learning curve. Continued here S3 Exoplanets in TRAPPIST-1 are warming up due to solar flares, and that's a good thing Researchers at the University of Cologne In Germany have found that solar flares emitted by the star in the TRAPPIST-1 system could help make the planets become more habitable, Universe Today reported. This is different from the destructive view we have of solar flares thus far. The TRAPPIST-1 stellar system is located approximately 39 light years from Earth. Astronomers are interested in the system since it is home to at least seven rocky exoplanets that orbit around a star that has a mass 12 times lesser than that of our Sun. Since the star in the system is much smaller, the orbits of the exoplanets are also smaller than those in our solar system and could potentially be habitable. Continued here S7 Outpost to build a revolutionary 'ferry' that will transport cargo from the ISS to Earth NASA has chosen Outpost to create a revolutionary ferry capable of transporting goods from the International Space Station back to Earth. This unique new method promises more efficient and cost-effective cargo delivery, allowing astronauts increased access to supplies as they explore our universe. Outpost is the first-ever company to develop a platform to return satellites from the ISS to Earth. It is known to be a sustainable space company that is advancing space development that's reusable rather than disposable. It has made an innovative approach using paragliders to return science and satellites to Earth. It will surely help in putting an end to earth debris. Outpost also pledged that their ferry will probably be ready before the retirement of ISS, which is scheduled in 2030. Continued here S60 Is that shrunken head really human? Combining imaging methods yields clues In Tim Burton's 1993 animated feature The Nightmare Before Christmas, there's scene where a little boy receives a shrunken head as a Christmas gift from Jack Skellington. It does not go over well, with either the boy or his parents. But there was a time in the early 20th century when these macabre objects were in such great demand by Western collectors that it triggered a lucrative market for counterfeits. Many museums around the world count shrunken heads (known as tsantsas by the Shuar people) among their collections, but how can curators determine if those items are authentic? Certain sophisticated imaging methods can help, according to an August paper published in the journal PLoS One. Continued here S16 Football v Soccer - booze, boots (cleats), and calling the referee a... Soccer. A word that in the UK conjures up images of Americans playing football, which is of course the term Americans use for American football, while Brits just call it football despite the fact they used to call it soccer, which is now used by Americans, for which Brits tend to deride them. Confused? Continued here S59 Amazon begins drone deliveries in California and Texas Amazon has begun delivering orders by drone. Amazon Prime Air is now operating in Lockeford, Calif. and College Station, Texas, delivering a small number of packages just in time for Christmas. Continued here S44 The EU's Privacy Protections Must Extend Beyond Its Borders Technology plays a significant role in community building—especially for historically marginalized groups. Women use apps to track all sorts of things, including their periods (nearly a third of all women in the US); the LGBTQ+ community uses apps to meet like-minded people; and activists campaigning via democratic means use social media and messaging apps to attract attention for petitions. However, those rights are now under threat in the US. For instance, police surveillance during Black Lives Matters protests across the United States forced activists to switch to encrypted messaging apps to avoid targeting while they exercised their right to speech and assembly. In 2020, popular dating apps were accused of sharing sensitive data such as GPS location and sexual orientation with at least 135 third-party entities, with potential dangerous implications for the LGBTQIA+ community who may face persecution because of their sexual orientation. And most recently, moments after the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, calls to delete period-tracking apps went viral with people concerned that the data they collect may end up incriminating them.  Continued here S50 Brain-computer interfaces could let soldiers control weapons with their thoughts Imagine that a soldier has a tiny computer device injected into their bloodstream that can be guided with a magnet to specific regions of their brain. With training, the soldier could then control weapon systems thousands of miles away using their thoughts alone. Embedding a similar type of computer in a soldier’s brain could suppress their fear and anxiety, allowing them to carry out combat missions more efficiently. Going one step further, a device equipped with an artificial intelligence system could directly control a soldier’s behavior by predicting what options they would choose in their current situation. While these examples may sound like science fiction, the science to develop neurotechnologies like these is already in development. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, are technologies that decode and transmit brain signals to an external device to carry out a desired action. Basically, a user would only need to think about what they want to do, and a computer would do it for them. Continued here S53 The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits This article was first published on Big Think in October 2018. It was updated in December 2022. I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page. Continued here S45 How Indie Studios Are Pioneering Accessible Game Design In recent years, it hasn’t been uncommon to find an array of accessible features and design practices inside the newest game releases. In 2022 alone, the industry celebrated God of War Ragnarök’s approximate 70 accessibility options, The Last of Us Part I’s revolutionary audio descriptive cutscenes, and Forza Horizon 5’s American and British sign language interpreters. Accessibility is becoming the norm, but not just for AAA studios. Game developers in the indie space are also striving to create entertaining and accessible experiences for disabled players. While some developers complain about the cost and time that accessibility features require, smaller teams are already proving that even without AAA-studio resources, accessibility can and should be an integral aspect for every title. Continued here S6 US startup wants to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to cool down the Earth Make Sunsets, a California-based startup, released weather balloons that carried sulfur particles into the stratosphere which possibly burst there, releasing the chemical, MIT Technology Review reported. We do not know if this happened since the balloons did not carry any monitoring equipment with them. Founded by Luke Iseman, previous director of hardware at Y Combinator, the attempts by the startup fall into the controversial area of solar geoengineering where particles are released into the atmosphere with an aim to reflect sunlight back into space to ease global warming. The field has largely been a thought experiment with no real consensus if the technology can help us fight climate change. Continued here S5 Scientists detect a rare circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts The latest research by scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has identified circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs). The results were based on precise observations of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). FRBs hold the distinction of emitting the most luminous radio flashes in the universe, with the energy released in one such incident rivaling the Sun's output "over a whole day or even a month to a year," according to phy.org.  Continued here S35 HBR's Most-Watched Videos of 2022 Each yeah, HBR produces dozens of videos that cover a wide array of business and work topics, ranging from research-based business theory, to wisdom from top performers in their fields, to nitty-gritty tactics for surviving another day in an imperfect world of work. We took a look at our 10 most popular videos made in 2022, and noticed a few themes emerging. Number one was that viewers were looking for clarity around strategy: What is it? What isn’t it? And how do I get better at it? Other popular videos covered how to be a better listener, a better leader, and insights from leaders at the top of their game. Continued here S10 NASA engineer teaches AI to be 'GPS-like' to guide astronauts over the lunar surface Without instruments like the GPS we have on Earth, scientists have been attempting for years to figure out how to travel over the lunar surface. Since the Moon's atmosphere is significantly thinner than Earth's, it is challenging to determine the size and distance of distant landmarks when looking at the horizon.  Continued here S39 ChatGPT Explains Why AIs like ChatGPT Should Be Regulated The text-generating program ChatGPT, developed by artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, can write about many subjects in a variety of prose and even poetry styles. It can also opine about itself. When we asked ChatGPT to generate a Scientific American editorial, it produced a thoughtful-sounding essay. ChatGPT functions much like any chatbot. Users go to the OpenAI website, type in a query, or “prompt,” such as “Suggest some prompts to test out a chatbot,” and quickly receive an AI-generated response. The program produces its answers based on text prediction: its AI was trained on a vast corpus of human writing available online, which allows it to predict which word should follow the previous one in order to appear like a reasoning entity. Despite sounding more sophisticated and realistic than perhaps any language model before it, ChatGPT cannot actually think for itself—and it can produce falsehoods and illogical statements that merely look reasonable. Continued here S28 You Have 3 Years Before Your Innovative Startup Idea Becomes Obsolete Innovation expiration is real, so you've got to act now. Continued here S62 Startup claims to offer stratospheric geoengineering as a service Humanity has managed to stabilize its carbon emissions, but they have yet to start trending downwards. It looks increasingly probable that we're going to emit enough to commit to at least 1.5° C of warming—and we need to act quickly to avert going past 2° C. This failure to get our emissions in order may force us to consider alternatives such as pulling carbon dioxide out of the air or geoengineering to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight. Continued here S46 Sure, Kids Can Develop iPhone Apps. But It's Not Easy Last summer, after watching an inspiring showcase featuring apps created by young coders using Apple's Swift Playgrounds programming language, I resolved to enlist my kids to develop an iPhone app. Aged 10 and 13, over the years they've both played with countless STEM toys designed to introduce the basic concepts of coding, some of which even involved simple programming, so I figured it'd be fun to make the leap to a real app of our own. We began by kicking around concepts before settling on an app about cats (naturally) and designing a layout on paper. I optimistically thought we could knock together version 1.0 over the summer, but we hit an impasse trying to agree on who would draw each element (they are keen artists). The snags came thick and fast thereafter. This was going to be tougher than I thought, so I decided to chat with a few young coders who had done the deed themselves. Continued here S54 Comcast debacles dominate Ars Technica's biggest ISP horror stories of 2022 Internet service provider horror stories have been a longtime staple at Ars Technica, and over the past 12 months we detailed some of the most horrific broadband customer experiences we've ever heard of. Continued here S48 Yes, It's Time to Ditch LastPass You've heard it again and again: You need to use a password manager to generate strong, unique passwords and keep track of them for you. And if you finally took the plunge with a free and mainstream option, particularly during the 2010s, it was probably LastPass. For the security service's 25.6 million users, though, the company made a worrying announcement on December 22: A security incident the firm had previously reported (on November 30) was actually a massive and concerning data breach that exposed encrypted password vaults—the crown jewels of any password manager—along with other user data.  The details LastPass provided about the situation a week ago were worrying enough that security professionals quickly started calling for users to switch to other services. Now, nearly a week since the disclosure, the company has not provided additional information to confused and worried customers. LastPass has not returned WIRED's multiple requests for comment about how many password vaults were compromised in the breach and how many users were affected.  Continued here S56 Here are the 10 most popular auto stories of the year As 2022 draws to a conclusion and we anxiously await to see how much weirder things get in 2023, it's natural to reflect on the year past. In addition to compiling a list of the 10 best cars, trucks, and SUVs we drove in 2022, I decided to also put together a roundup of our most-read automotive articles, plus a few of my particular favorites you might have missed. Continued here S55 Top US launch companies of 2022--The Ars Technica power ranking A decade ago, only a handful of launch companies existed in the US; United Launch Alliance was the big dog, with SpaceX starting to nip at its heels. Since then, however, a multiplicity of new launch startups have arrived in the United States, many of which developed their own rocket engines. As a result, we are now in the golden age of rocketry, with many different startups and approaches to pushing payloads into space. Continued here S34 Can't Stop Feeling Anxious? Neuroscience Says Your American Brain is to Blame Over-analyzing everything is part of our American mind and history. You can fix it. Continued here S64 How a Perfectly Normal New York Suburb Elected a Con Man Democratic complacency, Republican extremism, and media decline helped George Santos take over my old congressional district. How did George Santos, a Republican newly elected to New York’s Third Congressional District, on Long Island, get away with running for office with an almost completely fictitious résumé? The answer is a combination of Democratic complacency, Republican extremism, and media decline in a House district that I know intimately. Continued here S65 Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct? As an environmental journalist and a parent, I worry that the animals in my son’s bedtime stories will disappear before he learns they’re real. The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars. Continued here S8 Neuroscientists developed a blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer's diagnosis Neuroscientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine developed a new test to identify a sign of Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration in a blood sample, according to a press release. Called "brain-derived tau" (BD-tau), the biomarker is specific to neurodegenerations related to Alzheimer's disease, and it reportedly outperforms currently used blood diagnostic tests. Continued here S47 The Best Camera Gear for Your Smartphone 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 WIRED We're living in a golden age of mobile photography. The gear in this guide will up your game for making content at home or out and about, using just your smartphone. Our favorite Android phones and iPhones have outstanding cameras, but tripods, mics, and video lights can elevate the quality of your work. Here's everything you need to turn your phone into a pro-grade powerhouse. Continued here S63 The Most Memorable Advice of 2022 In a year during which people tried to adopt a new normal, Atlantic writers and other experts explored the challenges and rewards of trying new things, the meaning of true optimism, and how to find joy even in difficult times. The stories in our pages—print and digital—explored what it means to be human and provided advice for navigating parenthood and relationships, friendships and the workforce, and more. Continued here S13 How To Get Lost Sometimes you need an excuse to get lost. Half a dozen years ago, before magazines began to perish in droves, a publication called Afar started an innovative feature called "Spin the Globe." The concept was simple. A writer was told to hold a week open and then a day before travel the editors would quite literally… New York Times bestselling author of Four Fish as well as The Climate Diet and Goodbye Phone, Hello World paulgreenberg.org Continued here S58 Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to preserve nonprofit status Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status. Continued here S41 A Key to Better Leadership: Confident Humility In this Nano Tool for Leaders, Wharton's Adam Grant explains why the best leaders embody both confidence and humility. Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here S43 How Offering Choices Helps Boost Charitable Donations Nonprofits and charitable organizations can increase contributions simply by offering multiple-choice options that signal to potential donors what is appropriate to give. Wharton’s Alice Moon shares the results of her latest study. Wharton’s Alice Moon speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about her research on how organizations can boost charitable donations. Continued here S57 NatureMetrics launches biodiversity platform based on environmental DNA The business sector has had a fraught relationship with conservation. While many companies are now pushing to make their products and operations less damaging to the environment, the private sector, broadly speaking, has made life harder for the world’s complex ecosystems and the organisms in them. Continued here S49 The surprising quantum reason why the Sun shines Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides every square meter of Earth — when it’s in direct sunlight — with a constant ~1500 W of power, enough to keep our planet at a comfortable temperature for liquid water to continuously exist on its surface. Just like the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy amidst the trillions of galaxies in the Universe, our Sun shines continuously, varying only slightly over time. But without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Even in the extreme conditions found in the core of a massive star like our Sun, the nuclear reactions that power it could not occur without the bizarre properties that our quantum Universe demands. Thankfully, our Universe is quantum in nature, enabling the Sun and all the other stars to shine as they do. Here’s the science of how it works. Continued here S36 How the world's deepest shipwreck was found On 23 October 1944, the first engagements of a gigantic naval battle began in Leyte Gulf, part of the Philippine Sea. It was the biggest in modern human history. Over the following three days, more than 300 US warships faced off against some 70 Japanese vessels. The Americans had with them no fewer than 34 aircraft carriers – only slightly fewer than all the carriers in service around the world today – and some 1,500 aircraft. Their air fleet outnumbered the Japanese five to one. Continued here S51 The surprising reason secrets destroy us Holding secrets can negatively impact your well-being. But how, exactly? For decades, psychological research suggested that people experience significant stress while hiding secrets from others during social interactions. But this explanation often doesn’t feel right to people, notes Michael Slepian, an associate professor at Columbia Business School who has spent years studying the nature of secrets. Surveys suggest that it’s actually pretty rare for people to find themselves in social situations where they have to actively conceal a secret they’ve never told anyone about. Continued here S52 What causes burnout, and how to prevent it Excerpted from THE BURNOUT CHALLENGE: MANAGING PEOPLE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR JOBS, by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved. In recent Gallup polls, majorities of American workers rate their  jobs as mediocre or bad. Globally, the situation is even worse, with only 20 percent of employees reporting that they are engaged with their jobs. A recent study of British citizens found that, when they were working at their job, their happiness dropped around 8 percent relative to their average happiness in other life activities. The only thing they associated with more unhappiness than working was being sick in bed.  Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (50) ►  October (2) ►  August (2) ►  July (4) ►  June (3) ►  May (5) ►  April (4) ►  March (2) ►  February (10) ►  January (18) ►  2023 (834) ►  December (20) ►  November (54) ►  October (44) ►  September (108) ►  August (91) ►  July (29) ►  June (68) ►  May (104) ►  April (33) ►  March (30) ►  February (99) ►  January (154) ▼  2022 (208) ▼  December (117) January 1, 2023 - This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wil... 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