How to Shine in the (Virtual) Spotlight

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How to Shine in the (Virtual) Spotlight Odissi is a classical Indian dance that’s traditionally performed in front of a live audience. It relies heavily on dramatic storytelling through the use of body movements, expressions, and gestures. We are trained dancers who perform and teach this art form. We are also leadership development advisors who regularly conduct workshops with managers and executives. It may seem like a surprising combination, but in both of these roles, we rely on strong presentations to engage our listeners. We draw a lot of energy from being in front of a room, sometimes even onstage, connecting with people in-person. Continued here

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Your Company's Data Is for Sale on the Dark Web. Should You Buy It Back? In the course of routine monitoring, you may come across proprietary company information on the dark web. So should you try to buy it back? The short answer is that in most cases, the legal and reputational risks far outweigh the benefits of purchasing the information. Here’s a closer look at eight of those risks. Continued here

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How to Move Past an Embarrassing Moment at Work You’re going to feel embarrassed at some point in your career. The worst thing to do afterwards is tear yourself down. It’s not productive to invalidate your feelings or use your mistakes as an indication of your worth. You did something that drew unwanted attention, and it’s perfectly reasonable that you’d want to hide for awhile. But do come out of hiding. Here are a few ways to move past an embarrassing moment at work: Continued here

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How Diet Builds Better Bones: Surprising Findings on Vitamin D, Coffee, and More For healthy adults who want strong bones, a commonly recommended vitamin doesn’t seem to help, but other things really do Among my friends, many of whom are women of a certain age, one topic seems to dominate our conversations about health: bones. It makes sense, given that 20 percent of American women ages 50 and older have osteoporosis and that more than half have detectable bone loss (osteopenia). For men, the respective figures are lower: 4 percent and a third. Worldwide, one out of three women over age 50 and one out of five older men will develop an osteoporotic fracture—a hip, a wrist, a vertebra or two. Another reason for the endless jawboning about bones is mass confusion over how best to strengthen your skeleton and whether diet and supplements really make a difference. Continued here

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3 Questions to Ask Before You Send That Instant Message A little thinking can go a long way toward improving clarity and avoiding conflict at work. Continued here

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Why You Should Work Less and Spend More Time on Hobbies As professionals around the world feel increasingly pressed for time, they’re giving up on things that matter to them. A recent HBR article noted that in surveys, most people “could name several activities, such as pursuing a hobby, that they’d like to have time for.” This is more significant than it may sound, because it isn’t just individuals who are missing out. When people don’t have time for hobbies, businesses pay a price. Hobbies can make employees substantially better at their jobs for three reasons: they reawaken your creativity, give you a fresh perspective, and bolster your confidence. Continued here

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Why Some Videos Go Viral A viral video is every marketer’s dream. It’s the surest way to cut through the noise of the internet. And studies show that social viewers—people who watch shared content rather than videos they’ve found by browsing—are far more likely to buy a product and recommend it to others. Continued here

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Why Robots Won't Steal Your Job According to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2020, 85 million jobs may be displaced by the shift in labor between humans and machines by 2025, while 97 million new roles may emerge. These are the “jobs of the future,” and they are actually better opportunities for early career professionals. Why? Continued here

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What the 10 Biggest CEO Failures of 2022 Teach Every Leader Remember these 10 simple lessons to accelerate your success. Continued here

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What Job Description Jargon is Actually Saying When you first look at a job description — or JD, if you want to sound like an expert — it seems precisely that: a description of a job. Indeed.com agrees, defining a job description as a document that “summarizes the essential responsibilities, activities, qualifications, and skills for a role.” Continued here

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Growth Marketing Outsourcing: Why It Makes More Sense in 2023 Wonder if you should outsource your marketing efforts? Find out how to decide. Continued here

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How to Compete for Top Talent in These Times With so many layoffs, why are salaries still high and competition steep? Here's how you can recruit the best talent. Continued here

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Why Business Growth in Uncertain Times Requires Rethinking Who Leads A 'leadership for all' approach makes your business more resilient. Continued here

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Readers Respond to the September 2022 Issue In “A Tale of Two Horizons,” Edgar Shaghoulian provides an intriguing alternative view of black holes and our entire cosmos as well. Especially of interest is his statement that “we must find a way to look at the cosmic horizon from the outside.” Yet that assumes there is an outside. Moreover, if one does exist, what is outside of that? I am afraid we anthropomorphize the universe when attempting to describe it in familiar terms such as in the holographic principle. Our observations require an observer—us. We use our senses and employ instruments whose measurements must ultimately also depend on our interpretations. Perhaps it is human hubris, which knows no bounds. Our species evolved in order to survive on Earth, not to understand the cosmos. Perhaps the universe is not only stranger than we understand; it may be stranger than we can understand. Continued here

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How to deal with bullying from your past | Psyche Guides The effects of being bullied can linger for decades, but it’s never too late to heal and reclaim your place in the world is a transgender counsellor, educator and public speaker. She is associate professor in the counsellor education and supervision programme at Adler University in Chicago, and the author of The Healing Otherness Handbook (2021). Continued here

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What's on the Horizon for 2023 Scientific American editors share what scientific events they are paying attention to as 2023 begins For the editors at Scientific American, a new year is a chance to look ahead and predict what might unfold in the world of science and health. In 2022 we covered both inspiring and disturbing news—exquisite images from space telescopes, massively reduced reproductive rights in the U.S., efforts to dismantle environmental regulation, a war that laid bare our energy co-dependencies, a Nobel Prize for our Neandertal ancestry, and much more. Here’s some of what we’re paying attention to as 2023 arrives. Continued here

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Return to Office? Not So Fast Make sure you weigh the pros and cons before a rapid return. Continued here

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BMW's I Vision Dee Concept Car Changes Colors in Seconds Worldwide, the most popular car colors are white, black and gray, in that order—underlying just how boring auto buyers are. Part of this is likely a desire not to stand out, and part of it is undoubtedly that sober-colored cars perform best when it comes to long-term value retention. BMW is hoping to fix this chromatic conundrum with a new concept car that not only changes color on command, but also uses e-ink to make facial expressions with its grille and headlamps. It can even project a head-up display across the entire windshield. Shown off at the CES technology show in Las Vegas, the BMW i Vision Dee is also surprisingly compact. And while clearly from the future, instead of ticking all of the usual concept-car boxes (a foldaway steering wheel; autonomous driving in a mobile lounge; aspirations of flight), the i Vision Dee takes existing technology in the form of a head-up display (HUD) and virtual assistant, then aims to explore where they might go before the end of this decade. Continued here

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Our language is inadequate to describe quantum reality This is how the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead expressed his frustration with the onslaught of weirdness coming from the emerging quantum physics. He wrote this in 1925, just as things were getting truly strange. At the time, light had been shown to be both particle and wave, and Niels Bohr had introduced a strange model of the atom that showed how electrons were stuck in their orbits. They could only jump from one orbit to another by either emitting photons to go to a lower orbit or absorbing them to go to a higher orbit. Photons, for their part, were particles of light that Einstein conjectured to exist in 1905. Electrons and light danced to a very unique tune.  When Whitehead spoke, the wave-particle duality of light had just been extended to matter. In trying to understand Bohr’s atom, Louis De Broglie proposed in 1924 that electrons were also both wave and particle, and that they fit in their atomic orbits like standing waves — the kind you get by vibrating a string with one end fixed. Everything waves, then, although the waviness of objects quickly becomes less apparent with increasing size. For electrons this waviness is crucial. It is much less important to, say, a baseball. Continued here

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The Era of "Move Fast and Break Things" Is Over Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst argues that the era of “move fast and break things” is over; that in the wake of the Facebook scandal, the public is less tolerant of tech startups that ignore the societal ramifications of their innovations; and that VCs should analyze not only for market size and product viability, but for whether founders show sufficient foresight and concern about the unintended consequences of the ideas they are pursuing. Instead of just “minimum viable products,” today VCs need to screen for “minimum virtuous products.” The author offers eight questions to help VCs identify entrepreneurs who can meet this evolving need. Continued here S24 5 Reasons to Leave Your Job -- Even in a Downturn In a tight labor market, especially when news of large and small-scale layoffs continues to proliferate, it might seem inadvisable to look for a new job if you’re employed. But if you’re not engaged in your work, that will eventually show, which could put your career at risk. Once you realize you’re spending 40 hours weekly feeling unfulfilled, it’s always better to control your destiny than wait for others to decide your fate for you. Consider what steps you can take to reengage or whether a new job will make you feel more fulfilled. The author presents five signs that it’s worth looking for a new job elsewhere. Continued here S13 Need to Generate Fresh Ideas? This New Book Can Help After 10 years at the helm of Stanford's Masters of Creativity speaker series, we've learned innovation has more to do with discipline than luck. Continued here S14 My Employee Doesn't Want To Work When It Snows And two other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here S25 The promise of batteries that come from trees About eight years ago, a major paper producer in Finland realised the world was changing. The rise of digital media, a fall in office printing and the dwindling popularity of sending things by post – among other factors – meant that paper had embarked on a steady decline. Stora Enso, in Finland, describes itself as "one of the largest private forest owners in the world". As such, it has a lot of trees, which it uses to make wood products, paper and packaging, for example. Now it wants to make batteries as well – electric vehicle batteries that charge up in as little as eight minutes. Continued here S16 Entrepreneurial Exuberance: The Business Benefits of Outrageous Expectations Shooting for the moon (or even Mars) may seem unlikely, but it has its benefits. Continued here S33 Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why For something so routine, walking is shockingly complicated. Biomechanists break a single step into several phases: First there’s touchdown, when your heel strikes the floor. Next comes the single support phase, when you’re balancing on that leg. After that, you roll onto your toes for takeoff and your leg goes into a forward swing. All of this contains a mystery.  Researchers have long observed that when we walk, our planted leg bounces twice before swinging into the next step. That is, the knee bends and extends once when the foot first touches down, then again just before takeoff. That first bounce helps our foot absorb the impact of our weight as we hit the ground. But the function of the second bounce, a feature characteristic to human gait, has never been clear.  Continued here S28 Predators Act like Butterflies' Eyespots Are Looking Right at Them The concentric circles or eyespots on butterfly and moth wings—like those seen on this Suraka silk moth—not only look like real eyes but may also appear to glare directly at predators from many directions, scientists have found. This optical illusion, called the “Mona Lisa effect,” could scare would-be attackers and buy the insects enough time to escape. Scientists suspect that eyespots, with dark “pupils” in the center surrounded by lighter “irises,” look like real eyes to predators. Hannah Rowland, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, wanted to see if the direction of this fake gaze contributed to the effect. Her study results were published recently in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Continued here S26 Meet the most powerful Uber driver in India For nearly 20 minutes in November 2022, Shaik Salauddin walked alongside Rahul Gandhi, the former president of India’s main opposition political party, the Indian National Congress, in Hyderabad. The march was part of Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra (“unite India movement”), in which he walked across 12 states to modernize his party’s image, ahead of the elections in 2024. In a video, Gandhi can be seen placing his hand on Salauddin’s shoulder as they engage in a deep conversation while passing through the Kukatpally neighborhood of the southern Indian city. Salauddin is neither a powerful politician nor an affluent business tycoon. An Uber driver by profession, over the last three years, Salauddin has become a quasi-celebrity as a gig industry organizer: spearheading strikes, engaging with policymakers, and highlighting issues in the media to help improve the working conditions of his peers. Walking alongside Salauddin sent a strong message to Gandhi’s supporters: He is serious about India’s unemployment issues. Perhaps Gandhi knew how important it was to be seen with the unofficial leader of millions of gig workers in India. Continued here S43 Bored at work? Your brain is trying to warn you. Our modern understanding of the relationship between work and boredom developed largely out of the Industrial Revolution. As the demand for factory labor increased, millions of people were forced to perform the same repetitive task for 12 hours a day, day after day, ad nauseum. This seismic shift from the work of centuries past erupted in a boredom epidemic. In fact, our modern word boredom didn’t originate until the mid-19th century, a combination of bore (one that causes weariness or restlessness) and the suffix –dom (a state of being). Continued here S30 Are Home Insurers Abandoning Communities Vulnerable to Climate Change? Dozens of environmental and consumer groups are rallying behind the Biden administration’s plan to collect information from property insurance companies to determine if they are abandoning communities that are vulnerable to climate change. The groups submitted comments praising the Treasury Department’s unprecedented plan to require 213 large insurers to present detailed information about their homeowners insurance policies and claims. Continued here S23 How to Motivate a Top Performer -- When You Can't Promote Them Organizations can’t promote everyone; there will always be high-performing employees who want to get promoted in situations where promotion isn’t possible or requires waiting. This creates a problem for managers and leaders who want to retain top talent, but don’t have flexibility in promotions. The solution is to develop interim strategies to help these employees get their underlying needs met. For example, by narrowing down what the promotion signifies or enables for a given employee, managers can then scan for opportunities that could lead to uniquely meaningful work experiences. Continued here S32 KC Davis: How to do laundry when you're depressed Ever had a hard time doing daily household tasks -- cooking, cleaning, laundry -- and felt like a terrible person for struggling in the first place? Therapist KC Davis is here to flip that negative internalized script with a simple yet perspective-shifting fact that may change your approach to life. Learn a gentler, more practical approach to mental health as Davis shares hard-won wisdom and helpful shortcuts on how to get by when you feel like you've barely got it together. Continued here S40 The key lesson to learn from science's greatest debate So, you’ve arrived at a crossroads: you think the world works in a certain way, and someone else disagrees with you and thinks the world works in a different way. You’ve both got your reasons as to why you’re convinced that your way is right and the other person is wrong, but for some reason, you cannot come to an agreement with one another. Despite agreeing on the facts and the evidence, you don’t agree on how to interpret them, and you’re both unable to convince the other of their folly. In most arenas of life, you’d rightfully chalk this up to a difference of opinion. But in science, opinions don’t really matter: the world and Universe really do behave in a particular fashion. Either your conception of how the world works agrees with reality, in which case it’s valid, or it doesn’t, in which case it isn’t. Yet scientific arguments and debates happen all the time, even though they never settle anything. The only solution that’s scientifically valid is to obtain the critical evidence: a lesson we all need to be reminded of. Continued here S38 Sony Releases Its First Accessible Controller Despite game studios investing in accessibility teams and design practices for their games, Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller has been the only first-party accessible game controller available. Until now, that is, with Sony’s announcement of Project Leonardo for the PlayStation, a split-design controller designed with accessibility and customization in mind. Software accessibility has advanced tremendously in recent years. 2022’s God of War Ragnarök, for example, includes dozens of features that cater to an array of disabilities. Indie darling Tunic offers a No Fail Mode that removes the challenges of combat so players can focus on exploration and the story. Continued here S41 The mind-blowing stats on male inequality Boys and men are falling behind. This might seem surprising to some people — and maybe ridiculous to others — considering that discussions on gender disparities tend to focus on the structural challenges faced by girls and women, not boys and men. But long-term data reveal a clear and alarming trend: In recent decades, American men have been faring increasingly worse in many areas of life, including education, workforce participation, skill acquisition, wages, and fatherhood. Continued here S42 Boys are graded more harshly than girls. Why? “Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in maths. Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading, and science,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow in Economic Studies and the Director of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative, wrote in his recent book Why the Modern Male is Struggling, According to a 2018 Brookings Institution report, about 88% of American girls graduated high school on time, compared with 82% of boys. In 2020, six out of ten college students were women. Once on campus, they graduate at higher rates, receiving more associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in the process. As evidenced by declining college enrollment in the U.S., a drop for which men account for 71%, the gender disparity is continuing to worsen. Continued here S34 The Gear You Need to Shoot Your Own Indie Movies It’s never been easier to produce your own videos, short films, or even feature-length movies. While video production isn’t exactly a cheap hobby, you don’t need a film studio to get studio-level shots. No piece of equipment will automatically make you skilled with a camera, but if your skills are struggling against the limitations of your environment, these tools might open up some possibilities for you. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Continued here S68 The GOP-Speaker-Vote Burlesque 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. If you think the crisis of American democracy is over, the circus in the House should remind you that a significant portion of the Republican Party has no interest in governing, policy, or democracy itself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. Continued here S47 The OnePlus 11 launches in China with 100 W charging OnePlus is launching its new flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 11, but only in China for now. It will come to the US on February 7. Continued here S70 Shut up and paint | Psyche Films Titus Kaphar has reached the pinnacle of the art world. A critical and commercial success, the Kalamazoo, Michigan-born, New Haven, Connecticut-based painter has earned accolades including a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and has work on display in some of the world’s most vaunted art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City. Kaphar’s provocative images address struggle, white supremacy and omissions of Black representation at the intersection of art and history. This includes, notably, a loose-hanging portrait of Thomas Jefferson, which reveals a painting of an unclothed Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman owned by Jefferson who bore several of his children, and a TIME Magazine cover, commissioned in the wake of the George Floyd racial justice protests of 2020, which depicts a Black mother clutching the silhouette of a baby to her chest. But, as the short documentary Shut Up and Paint (2022) conveys, Kaphar’s lofty achievements have been profoundly complicated for him to process. As a Black artist born to a 15-year-old single mother, Kaphar has always created work that reflects his own struggles, intending to connect with those who’ve shared in them. However, these deeply personal expressions are often characterised as ‘activism’ by those in the art and media worlds. With each mounting success, he seems to find the chasm between his work and where it ends up – as ‘non-fungible tokens for billionaires’, as the philosopher Jason Stanley puts it in one conversation – growing ever wider. And so, over the course of the film, each major career accomplishment Kaphar experiences, including a work selling for more than $1 million, is cause for deeper introspection rather than celebration. Continued here S57 The Economy Is Improving in Three Major Ways The bad news you probably already know. Mortgage costs are brutal at the moment, putting homeownership out of reach for millions of Americans. The pace of inflation is coming down but remains high, meaning consumer goods keep getting more expensive. Businesses are bracing for a recession. The economy is just weird right now, suffused with uncertainty and crossed with mixed signals. Nevertheless, Americans have some positive short-term trends to celebrate, among them falling gas prices. Better still are three long-term trends that, despite their economy-transforming magnitude, have gone largely uncelebrated or even unnoticed. These trends promise a more dynamic economy not only in 2023 but also in the coming decades: Continued here S54 Abortion pills can now be sold at pharmacies, FDA rules Last summer, US President Joe Biden criticized states attempting to restrict access to abortion pills. In response, Biden directed the Food and Drug Administration to protect access, saying that “extremist governors and state legislatures” that were “looking to block the mail or search a person’s medicine cabinet or control a woman’s actions by tracking data on her apps she uses” were “wrong” and “out-of-touch” with “the majority of Americans.” Now, the FDA has taken its biggest step yet to expand access to abortions by allowing retail pharmacies to sell medications by mail order or in drugstores. Continued here S35 'Andor' Is a Master Class in Good Writing Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUH The new Star Wars series Andor, a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One, is a dramatic examination of the early days of the Rebel Alliance. Science fiction author Matt London was impressed by the show’s sophisticated characterization and dialog. Continued here S45 The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked to Rome She’s been called “the greatest female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law. Her full name, in modern Icelandic, is Guðríður víðförla Þorbjarnardóttir — Gudrid the Far-Traveled, daughter of Thorbjorn. She was born around 985 AD on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland and died around 1050 AD at Glaumbær in northern Iceland. This map shows the extraordinary extent of her travels in between those dates and places. In all, she made eight Atlantic sea voyages, at a time when those were very dangerous and often deadly. Continued here S46 About 1 in 100 people stutter. What causes it? What comes to mind when you think of someone who stutters? Is that person male or female? Are they weak and nervous, or powerful and heroic? If you have a choice, would you like to marry them, introduce them to your friends or recommend them for a job?  Your attitudes toward people who stutter may depend partly on what you think causes stuttering. If you think that stuttering is due to psychological causes, such as being nervous, research suggests that you are more likely to distance yourself from those who stutter and view them more negatively.  Continued here S53 Experiments with paper airplanes reveal surprisingly complex aerodynamics Drop a flat piece of paper and it will flutter and tumble through the air as it falls, but a well-fashioned paper airplane will glide smoothly. Yet these seemingly simple structures involve surprisingly complex aerodynamics. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences conducted a series of experiments involving paper airplanes to explore this transition and develop a mathematical model to predict flight stability, according to a March paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Continued here S37 Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You Disclaimer: All #WiredSixWord submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium. Submissions must be original and not violate the rights of any other person or entity. 🏔🏃‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏽‍♀️🦑🛸 —@jessbeckah42, via Instagram Continued here S51 Ars readers gave over $31,500 in our 2022 Charity Drive Thanks to everyone who gave whatever they could. We're still early in the process of selecting and notifying winners of our swag giveaway, so don't fret if you haven't heard if you're a winner yet. In the meantime, enjoy these quick stats from the 2021 drive. Continued here S48 Intel announces new, mildly improved CPUs for this year's crop of laptops Intel's 13th-generation desktop CPU refresh is interesting because processors throughout the lineup are picking up extra clusters of four or eight E-cores, significantly improving how they handle heavily threaded tasks. The new laptop CPUs that Intel has also announced are much less interesting—the ones that will end up in most laptops increase clock speeds and support faster memory but are otherwise mostly identical to the 12th-generation CPUs they're replacing. Continued here S64 Are Sports Worth the Risks? This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Earlier this week, the NFL player Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field after a violent collision with another player; a mountain climber died after an avalanche on Britain’s highest mountain; and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched a new program to treat kids with sports injuries. Although the three events are technically unrelated, they each serve as a timely reminder of the potential hazards of athletic pursuits. Continued here S67 Kevin McCarthy’s Predicament Is a Warning Kevin McCarthy’s humiliation, and that of Donald Trump alongside him, offers a tall draft of schadenfreude. At the end of that, though, the nation is left with an empty glass and a bitter taste. For many reasons, McCarthy is unfit for the speakership: He undermined the 2020 election, he is dishonest, he is (as we see) unable to marshal his caucus. But his defectors aren’t really interested in a speaker who is able to keep the House organized or functional. Their ability to hold Congress hostage is a flashing red light for the country. Continued here S58 How Children Conjure a Snow Day Snow days felt magical when I was a child—and not just because of the wonder of waking up to a world transformed or the gift of a day without school. They felt magical because I believed that I had helped to conjure them. As soon as the forecast hinted at snow, my brothers and I would get to work. First came the ice cubes, upended from their trays and flushed down the toilet, one for each inch of snow. Then our pajamas, put on early (for good measure) and inside out (no matter how itchy the seams). Finally, three spoons, selected with care, stowed under each of our pillows. We knew our classmates had also followed these steps, because we’d all game-planned together at recess the day before. And, chances were, so had other students in schools across the district—maybe even the state, depending on the reach of the storm. We were joining an army of children who for generations, armed with nothing but household supplies, have believed they could change the weather. Continued here S66 The Inflated Risk of Vaccine-Induced Cardiac Arrest Damar Hamlin’s collapse on Monday Night Football calls attention to a medical myth that will not die. During this week’s Monday Night Football game, the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed moments after making a routine defensive play. Hamlin seemed to have suffered a blow to his chest shortly before losing consciousness from cardiac arrest, and his condition is grave. The source of his illness remains unclear. A study of sudden cardiac events in U.S. athletes from 2014 to 2016 found that structural abnormalities of the heart muscle or arteries and faulty electric rhythms were the most common causes; traumatic chest injuries have also been linked to such incidents, in a rare condition called commotio cordis. Still, the availability of these hypotheses did not stop online activists from blaming Hamlin’s health crisis on vaccines. Continued here S36 Cops Hacked Thousands of Phones. Was It Legal? For a week in October 2020, Christian Lödden’s potential clients wanted to talk about only one thing. Every person whom the German criminal defense lawyer spoke to had been using the encrypted phone network EncroChat and was worried their devices had been hacked, potentially exposing crimes they may have committed. “I had 20 meetings like this,” Lödden says. “Then I realized—oh my gosh—the flood is coming.” Months earlier, police across Europe, led by French and Dutch forces, revealed they had compromised the EncroChat network. Malware the police secretly planted into the encrypted system siphoned off more than 100 million messages, laying bare the inner workings of the criminal underground. People openly talked about drug deals, organized kidnappings, planned murders, and worse. Continued here S65 13 Feel-Good TV Shows to Watch This Winter Call it the First Law of Winter Viewing: The colder the weather, the stronger the urge to watch something warm. Although there’s nothing wrong with, say, returning to Stars Hollow for the umpteenth time or indulging in TV’s bounty of feel-good programming for the new year, why not press “Play” on an unconventional—yet equally comforting—pick? Below, we’ve compiled a guide to under-the-radar shows and nostalgic favorites that are stuffed with heartfelt themes, soothing settings, and wholesome narratives. All are perfect for an evening curled up on the couch with a cozy blanket. Shows about raising kids are nothing new, but this short-lived series from the New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether and her collaborator J. J. Philbin, about a set of single parents in the same town, boasts a fresh charm. The families form an unconventional, close-knit group, helping one another overcome struggles that can be unexpectedly mature for a domestic comedy. Many episodes follow the divorced dad Will’s (played by Taran Killam) tentative return to the dating pool, and one of the best running gags involves the widower Douglas (Brad Garrett) treating his twin daughters like grown-ups. In some ways, with its breezy plots and youthful energy, Single Parents presents a soothing fantasy of parenting—a welcome rarity in a genre packed with tales of child-rearing woes.  — Shirley Li Continued here S49 Roku introduces its own self-branded lineup of streaming-oriented TVs To say Roku is dominant in the TV software space would be an understatement—RokuOS is by far the most popular smart TV operating system. But for its hardware, the company has relied on partners like TCL and Hisense. As previously rumored, that's changing in 2023. Continued here S60 The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy Shortly before 4 p.m.yesterday, Kevin McCarthy, the man who desperately wanted to be House speaker, had just suffered two brutally public rejections in a row. For some reason, he was unbowed. “We’re staying until we win,” McCarthy assured a crush of reporters waiting for him outside a bathroom in the Capitol. Moments earlier, McCarthy had sat and watched as a small but dug-in right-wing faction of his party twice defied his pleas for unity and ensured the 57-year-old Californian’s ignominious place in congressional history. Trying to avoid the first failed speaker vote in 100 years, McCarthy could afford to lose only four Republicans in the crucial party-line tally that opens each new Congress and allows the majority party to govern. McCarthy lost 19. The clerk called the roll again, and once again 19 Republicans voted for someone other than McCarthy. By the hyperpolarized standards of the modern Capitol, this was a rout. Continued here S61 Another White Male Writer Has written about poetry being dead as if no other stanzas have been structured to decolonize the page in the past 100 years. The contemporaries fail to pique his interest. Such a fickle heirloom, to suggest something has died because you see no value in its pulse. Continued here S50 Hundreds of WordPress sites infected by recently discovered backdoor Malware that exploits unpatched vulnerabilities in 30 different WordPress plugins has infected hundreds if not thousands of sites and may have been in active use for years, according to a writeup published last week. Continued here S62 The Dark Pageant of the NFL Like millions of people, I had been looking forward to my weekly escapist fix of NFL Monday Night Football. Buffalo at Cincinnati promised to be a powerhouse clash between two teams with Super Bowl aspirations. No doubt this would be one of the top-rated television shows of the week in America, from the entertainment juggernaut that accounted for 22 of the 25 most watched prime-time telecasts in 2022. I happened to miss the first few minutes of the contest while I walked to the market to buy a pint of ice cream. But whatever, it was all part of football’s grand entertainment bargain: I could get fat for a few hours on the couch while the players did all the work, provided all the spectacle, and suffered all the damage. Continued here S52 Move over, Nvidia: Some AMD 7900 XTX GPUs are having their own heat issues Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 has been through the PR wringer for the last few months because of problems with its power connector, but AMD's newest Radeon cards are proving capable of having issues, too. Some users have been complaining of overheating and thermal throttling in their RX 7900 XTX GPUs, and AMD confirmed that there was an issue in a statement to Tom's Hardware today. Continued here S59 Electric Vehicles Are Bringing Out the Worst in Us American car executives keep insisting that there is no trade-off between saving the planet and having a hell of a good time behind the wheel. “What I find particularly gratifying,” Ford’s executive chair, Bill Ford, said in April as he unveiled his company’s new electric truck, “is not only is this a green F-150, but it’s a better F-150 … You’re actually gaining things that the internal combustion engine doesn’t have.” Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, sounded equally bullish in a recent social-media post: “Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.” The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are handing them? Continued here S63 A Visit to the French Southern and Antarctic Lands The French Southern and Antarctic Lands is a territory spread across multiple islands and island groups in the southern Indian Ocean. Patrick Hertzog, a photographer with AFP, recently visited several of its subantarctic districts aboard the research-and-supply vessel Marion Dufresne. These islands are home to many penguins, seals, and seabirds, and a temporary home to groups of scientists and researchers who work in several small stations that are supplied by the Marion Dufresne. A scientist walks among thousands of King penguins on Île de la Possession, part of the Crozet Islands, on December 20, 2022. The Crozet Islands are home to multiple species of penguins, fur seals, and southern elephant seals. # Continued here S55 Black man wrongfully jailed for a week after face recognition error, report says Police in Louisiana reportedly relied on an incorrect facial recognition match to secure warrants to arrest a Black man for thefts he did not commit. Continued here S56 Asus brings glasses-free 3D to OLED laptops During the CES 2023 in Las Vegas today, Asus announced an upcoming feature that allows users to view and work with content in 3D without wearing 3D glasses. Similar technology has been used in a small number of laptops and displays before, but Asus is incorporating the feature for the first time in OLED laptop screens. Combined with high refresh rates, unique input methods like an integrated dial, and the latest CPUs and laptop GPUs, the company is touting the laptops with the Asus Spatial Vision feature as powerful, niche options for creative professionals looking for new ways to work. 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) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... Feb 1, 2023 - 4 Startup Terms Explained With Analo... January 31, 2023 - Russian offensive "imminent" as... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... 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