ChatGPT answers physics questions like a confused C student

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ChatGPT answers physics questions like a confused C student The first thing you’ll notice when you ask ChatGPT a question is how smart and knowledgeable its answer sounds. It identifies the proper topic, speaks in intelligible sentences, and employs the expert tone of an educated human. The million-dollar question is: Does the AI give correct answers? While ChatGPT (or any other chatbot) is obviously not sentient, its output is reminiscent of a person in certain ways. That’s not surprising, given that it mimics human language patterns. I’ve described ChatGPT as a parrot watching a million years of soap operas. The AI is very good at stringing together sentences simply because it has seen so many of them — it just doesn’t understand them. Continued here

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Today, people fear Twitter. In the 1850s, they feared telegrams Telegrams were the first instant messages, allowing people to send short notes rapidly over long distances. Telegraphy was developed in the 19th century and tweets were created about 150 years later, but despite the vast time difference, they were received and critiqued in strikingly similar ways. Some early reactions to telegrams included one 1858 commentary in The New York Times calling them “superficial, sudden, unsifted” and likely to “render the popular mind too fast for the truth.” The exact same criticisms have been leveled at social media today. In both cases, the short, character-constrained nature of the messages was seen as a problem, leading to a lack of depth and context. Continued here

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Global Internet Connectivity Is at Risk from Climate Disasters Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable lining the seafloor are vulnerable to sea-level rise, storms and other climate impacts, research shows The flow of digital information through fiber-optic cables lining the sea floor could be compromised by climate change. Continued here

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New Space Radar Will Hunt Planet-Threatening Asteroids The new ngRADAR at the Green Bank Telescope offers unprecedented Earth-based views of the solar system When a baseball pitcher throws a fastball, the speed pops up on the jumbotron thanks to radar. The technology is also useful for air traffic control, highway speed traps and weather forecasting—and it’s not reserved for Earth. Astronomers have used radar to probe the planets and asteroids around us, measuring their speed as they whiz around the sun and imaging the details of their surface. A new tool promises to ramp up this brand of science by offering more detailed astronomical radar capabilities than ever before. The team behind a pioneering radar system at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia released their first results last month at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, revealing unprecedented detail on the moon and detecting a near-Earth asteroid. The telescope’s novel radar system, called Next Generation Radar (ngRADAR), “produced results that were beyond expectations,” says Flora Paganelli, a project scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO’s) radar division. Continued here

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Neurolaw: A brain scan test for trademark infringement In 2003, neurologists at the University of Virginia reported what has become the best-known case study in the emerging field of neurolaw: that of a patient who developed a frontal lobe tumor that caused pedophilic behavior. Since then, brain scans and other neuroscientific evidence have been used increasingly to sway juries toward one verdict or another. But in many cases, its use is less clear-cut and more controversial. For example, although brain scans cannot unequivocally determine if a defendant has schizophrenia or psychopathy, their submission as evidence can be mitigating or aggravating, depending on the case. Similarly, several private companies offer brain-scan based lie detection tests, whose submission as evidence leads to more guilty verdicts than the traditional polygraph lie detector test, even though they are no more reliable.  Continued here

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The massive machines cleaning Earth's atmosphere To restrain global warming, we know we need to drastically reduce pollution. The very next step after that: using both natural and technological solutions to trap as much excess carbon dioxide from the air as possible. Enter Orca, the world's first large-scale direct air capture and storage plant, built in Iceland by the team at Climeworks, led by climate entrepreneur Jan Wurzbacher. This plant is capable of removing 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. With affordability and scalability in mind, Wurzbacher shares his vision for what comes after Orca, the future of carbon removal tech -- and why these innovations are crucial to stop climate change. Continued here

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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. Continued here

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Why Design Thinking Works While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity. Continued here

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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments. Continued here

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Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet's Favorite Movie Site By the time Les Adams arrived in Eastland, Texas, in the 1960s, he was about 50 years late for the town's oil boom. But Adams came searching for another kind of treasure. He had received a tip from his former boss at a bowling alley, a politician named Preston Smith, that a printing company in Eastland was changing up its business. For years it had been a major source of promotional materials for the movie industry, but it was moving on to a new market in restaurant menus. The company, Smith said, had some leftover pressbooks—brochures created by film distributors to market new flicks—that might interest Adams. Bearing a handwritten note from Smith, Adams found the owner, Victor Cornelius, at his office on Main Street. "I still don't know what Preston told Victor," Adams told me. "But I do know I ended up getting the pressbooks. He had them upstairs in a blocked-off room—shelves and shelves. It started in 1930, in alphabetical order." Adams borrowed a pick-up truck and made five trips, ferrying three decades of film history to his own collection of memorabilia back in Lubbock, about a four-hour drive away. "I was buried in paper," he recalled. Victor Cornelius' company became one of the largest menu-printing outfits in the country. Preston Smith became the 40th governor of Texas. But Les Adams would become a leader in something arguably even grander and farther-reaching. Continued here

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Underdog stories can inspire us to greatness (or to break the rules) We all tell stories about who we are. Consider any simple “I am” phrase: “I am a parent,” “I am a writer,” “I am a survivor,” or “I am a hard worker.” Within such sample-sized autobiographies, you’ll find a narrative crafted to express identity, the meaning of someone’s experiences, or their relationship to the world. The same is true when we construct collective identities in the form of businesses, societies, and cultural groups. “Story is essential. It’s who you are, what your mission is in the world, why you do it, and what you aspire to do,” Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE, said in an interview. “I always urge companies, in telling their story, you’re trying to create that relevance, that connection. You’re carving just a little tiny piece of yourself into someone’s brain.” Continued here

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How to Install the Google Play Store on an Amazon Fire Tablet For the money, most Android tablets aren't very smart buys. At the high end, hardware is marred by less than stellar software offerings. (If you're going to spend $500 on a tablet, get an iPad.) At the low end, Amazon's Android-powered Fire tablets are hamstrung by the very limited Amazon Appstore, which doesn't include Google apps, among others.  Android tablets are finally getting a boost, but what if you could buy a Fire Tablet for $60 (as you generally can during Amazon Prime Day) and install the Google Play Store? A $60 tablet that's capable of 95 percent of what a $330 iPad can do is a pretty good deal. In this how-to, we'll show you how to get Google Play running on your Amazon Fire Tablet.  Continued here

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Navigating Uncertainty About Your Role During a Reorg While you may have limited influence over your company’s reorganization, you absolutely have control over your response in moving forward. In this piece, the author offers strategies to help you successfully navigate through a corporate state of flux: 1) First, talk to your manager and emphasize how you bring value. 2) Nurture your network. 3) Do some scenario planning. 4) Make time for career maintenance. 5) Manage your emotions, and be kind to yourself. Continued here

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Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers David Wakeling, head of London-based law firm Allen & Overy's markets innovation group, first came across law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. He approached OpenAI, the system’s developer, to run a small experiment. A handful of his firm’s lawyers would use the system to answer simple questions about the law, draft documents, and take first passes at messages to clients.  The trial started small, Wakeling says, but soon ballooned. Around 3,500 workers across the company’s 43 offices ended up using the tool, asking it around 40,000 queries in total. The law firm has now entered into a partnership to use the AI tool more widely across the company, though Wakeling declined to say how much the agreement was worth. According to Harvey, one in four at Allen & Overy’s team of lawyers now uses the AI platform every day, with 80 percent using it once a month or more. Other large law firms are starting to adopt the platform too, the company says. Continued here

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Why Leaders Should Rethink Their Decision-Making Process Many people believe that leaders instinctively make the best decisions based on past experience, almost like muscle memory. But Carol Kauffman, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Institute of Coaching, says falling back on automatic patterns of behavior is often wrong—especially in a crisis or high-stakes choices. Instead, she explains a framework of stepping back, evaluating options, and choosing the tactics that work best in each situation. Kauffman is a coauthor, along with View Advisors founder David Noble, of the HBR article “The Power of Options” and the book Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. Continued here

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ChatGPT failed my course: How bots may change assessment One of the most unpleasant aspects of teaching is grading. Passing judgment on people is never fun, and it’s even less fun when you’ve spent months interacting with those people on a daily basis. Discovering that your students have tried to get a leg up by using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT has made the process even more unpleasant. From a teacher's perspective, it feels a bit like betrayal—I put in all this effort, and you respond by trying to do an end-run around the assessment. Continued here

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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Continued here

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China is exporting its tiny EV obsession The Wuling electric vehicle is an object of fascination. Priced at around $5,500 and famously outselling Tesla in China, it’s a tiny, comically square car, produced in joint partnership with General Motors and SAIC. The micro EV has been fodder for articles and YouTubers — even while it’s remained unavailable outside China. Until last summer, that is, when Wuling attempted to go international. First stop: Indonesia. With its Air model selling at a mere $16,000 — less than half the price of alternatives — the minimalist EV was depicted in advertising as a gateway to the future, a slick solution for busy Indonesian city-dwellers.  Continued here

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Ex-Christian America: How social media created more "nonverts" and atheists Excerpted from Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America by Stephen Bullivant. Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Bullivant and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Suppose that you are a small-town teen with religious doubts and dissatisfactions. Everyone you know, in your family, at school, and at the suite of church youth programs you’re involved with, is some kind of believing Christian. Maybe there are others you know who feel like you do. But how would you know? Sure, those weird Goth kids at school talk the talk about Marilyn Manson and Cradle of Filth — but aren’t they, like, Satanists or something? And besides, those kids are just posers; your mom knows their moms, and you know for a fact that they dress up nice for church and when Grandma comes to visit. Continued here

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Single JWST image encodes science's three greatest mysteries Although we’ve learned so much about the Universe since the dawn of the 20th century, a number of the cosmic mysteries that our investigations have revealed remain unsolved. Arguably, the three greatest ones are: And yet, we can be confident that dark energy, dark matter, and a cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry all exist, even if we don’t know how or why they came to be. Remarkably, one single JWST image, assembled as a composite from an imaging campaign known as the UNCOVER survey, allows us to measure and further investigate all of these mysteries, as well as revealing so much more about how our Universe grew up. Here’s what we can learn from this one tiny region of the sky, and the lessons it holds for our entire cosmic history. Continued here

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What Is Disruptive Innovation? For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. Continued here

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You Need an Innovation Strategy Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities. Continued here

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Oxytocin’s effects aren’t just about love When love is in the air, what’s happening in the brain? For many years, biologists would answer, “Oxytocin!” This small protein — just nine amino acids long — has sometimes been called “the love hormone” because it has been implicated in pair-bonding, maternal care and other positive, love-like social behaviors. But lately, neuroscientists have been revising their thinking about oxytocin. Experiments with mice and other lab animals suggest that instead of acting as a trigger for pro-social behavior, the molecule may simply sharpen the perception of social cues, so that mice can learn to target their social behavior more accurately. “It turns out it’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘oxytocin equals love,’” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. If something similar is true of humans, that may, among other things, add a fresh wrinkle in attempts to treat social disorders such as autism by tinkering with the oxytocin system. Continued here

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Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise Social entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify and bring about potentially transformative societal improvements. Ventures in this realm are usually intended to benefit economically marginalized segments of society that can’t transform their prospects without help. But the endeavors should be financially sustainable, because there’s no guarantee that subsidies from taxpayers or charitable givers will continue indefinitely. Grameen Bank is a famous example of a social venture that met both goals. Continued here S48 Meta Verified Shows a Company Running Out of Ideas Meta’s new subscription service looks pretty familiar. For between $11.99 and $14.99 a month, Instagram and Facebook users will get a blue “verified” mark, access to better security features, and more visibility in search. Their comments will also be prioritized. The package has strong echoes of Twitter’s Blue subscription service, launched under new owner Elon Musk, who has been aggressively trying to find ways to monetize his platform—most recently, by telling users they won’t be able to use text-based two-factor authentication unless they subscribe. Continued here S44 This Lab-Grown Skin Could Revolutionize Transplants Alberto Pappalardo was nervous the morning before the transplant. He’d spent the previous month nurturing a cluster of skin cells until they reached their final form: a pinkish-white tissue in the shape of a mouse’s hindlimb that could be slipped onto the animal like a pant leg. If all went according to plan, the mouse’s surrounding skin would accept the lab-grown stuff as its own. In the end, it took less than 30 seconds to position the new skin, and under 10 minutes to complete the whole procedure. “It was a perfect fit,” recalls Pappalardo, a medical doctor and postdoc focusing on dermatology and tissue engineering at Columbia University Medical Center. That’s a big deal, because it could help solve a persistent challenge in treating burns and other large wounds: how to cover irregular shapes with real, functional skin. Continued here S11 A Refresher on Statistical Significance When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand. Continued here S29 How to Fix Your Collaboration Problem in the Hybrid Era 3 ways to improve communication and productivity. Continued here S31 When Is the Best Time to Ask Customers for a Review? Customers often need time to evaluate a product or think about their experience with it before they decide to post a review. If they’re asked to provide a review too early, they can feel pressured and rushed. But when is the right time to do it? The authors conducted experiments in an attempt to answer this question — and found, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that immediate review reminders (sent the next day) lower the likelihood that customers will post reviews, whereas delayed reminders (13 days later) increase the likelihood. Against that backdrop, in this article they suggest a set of best practices for companies trying to figure out when to send out review reminders to customers. Continued here S67 The Autocrat Next Door Liberal democracy in Mexico is under assault. Worse, the attacker is the country’s own president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here S45 A New Kind of Bug Spells Trouble for iOS and macOS Security For years, Apple has hardened the security systems on iPhones and Macs. But no company is immune from such issues. Research reveals a new class of bugs that can affect Apple’s iPhone and Mac operating systems and if exploited could allow an attacker to sweep up your messages, photos, and call history. Researchers from security firm Trellix’s Advanced Research Center are today publishing details of a bug that could allow criminal hackers to break out of Apple’s security protections and run their own unauthorized code. The team says the security flaws they found—which they rank as medium to high severity—bypass protections Apple had put in place to protect users. Continued here S37 Why Ion Mobility CEO James Chan is the anti-Musk Ion Mobility, a Singapore-based EV startup, was launched during the depths of the pandemic, with a mission to feed Southeast Asia’s demand for new-energy vehicles. Founded by entrepreneur James Chan, the company designs and manufactures electric two-wheelers. In February, Ion closed a $18.7 million series A funding round led by automaker TVS, and launched its first vehicle, the M1-S e-scooter, in November 2022. In late 2019 — just before the pandemic — I had exited my stakes and handed over the ropes of a Southeast Asian fintech venture I’d venture-built from scratch, partnering with a venture-backed player (Abakus Group, formerly Wecash) from China.  Continued here S2 Marketing Intangible Products and Product Intangibles Distinguishing between companies according to whether they market services or goods has only limited utility. A more useful way to make the same distinction is to change the words we use. Instead of speaking of services and goods, we should speak of intangibles and tangibles. Everybody sells intangibles in the marketplace, no matter what is produced in the factory. Continued here S39 What South Asians want to know about ChatGPT From news headlines to popular Twitter threads and even memes, ChatGPT has been all the rage in recent months. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone wants to know more. So, I curated the most frequently Googled questions about ChatGPT from South Asia, and answered them for you. Read on… Continued here S28 1 Rare Trait That Will Instantly Point to Someone With Good Leadership Skills It may be counterintuitive for many, but it is a signature trait of good leadership. Continued here S9 The Discipline of Innovation In the hypercompetition for breakthrough solutions, managers worry too much about characteristics and personality—“Am I smart enough? Do I have the right temperament?”—and not enough about process. A commitment to the systematic search for imaginative and useful ideas is what successful entrepreneurs share—not some special genius or trait. What’s more, entrepreneurship can occur in a business of any size or age because, at heart, it has to do with a certain kind of activity: innovation, the disciplined effort to improve a business’s potential. Continued here S70 Junk Food Is Bad for You. Is It Bad for Raccoons? I was in college when I saw my first truly chonky raccoon. It was perched on the rim of a trash can, a half-eaten tuna-salad sandwich clutched between its forepaws, its whiskers pinwheeling as it chewed. From across the quad, the raccoon fixed me with a beady-eyed stare of reproach, as if daring me to steal its already-filched fish. But I was much more interested in the creature, which looked twice as big as any raccoon I’d seen before. It was also a wild animal that had chosen a very unwild meal. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a link between the two. As cities have grown and green spaces have shrunk, many wild animals, especially those in the Western world, have adopted diets that look an awful lot like ours. Squirrels snarf hard taco shells, and abscond with Nutella jars; subway rats chow down on pizza, while seagulls have ripped fries and even a KFC wrap straight out of human mouths. For at least some creatures, the menu changes seem to come with consequences. Raccoons that spend their days feasting on trash have higher blood sugar, heavier bodies, and crummier teeth than their wilder counterparts; bears that forage on human food hibernate less and show signs that their cells may age atypically fast. Vulture chicks nourished with scraps from landfills have lower levels of antioxidants in their blood. And when researchers repeatedly toss McDonald’s cheeseburgers to crows, the birds’ babies leave the nest chubbier, and with higher cholesterol. Continued here S61 Dealmaster: Big savings on Apple laptops If you're in the market for a new Apple laptop, there are plenty of discounts available. While there are more generous savings with slightly older models, like Apple's M1-powered MacBook Pro, you can still find some solid discounts on Apple's M2-equipped notebooks. These include the new MacBook Air as well as Apple's smaller 13.3-inch MacBook Pro. Those seeking a larger-format Apple notebook, like the 14- or 16-inch Pro, will have to settle for the M1 models if they want to save a bit of money. Continued here S33 Coaching a Direct Report Who Asks for Your Help As a leader, you play an important role in helping others in a way that doesn’t rob them of their autonomy and ownership (micromanaging) or leave them wondering what they’re supposed to do next (under-leading). One area where this tension often shows up is when a direct report asks for help. What’s the most effective way to help an employee bridge the gap between goal setting and goal attainment? When someone has a small measure of experience under their belt, your role is to help them consider and design those next steps for themselves. In this article, the author offers tips for what to say to help your employee form their own action plan. Continued here S36 English as a curse on the development of tech in the Spanish-speaking Americas I’m a bit of a stickler about keeping English and Spanish separate. It’s not because of some purist streak, but because many people don’t speak both languages. It is only polite to stick to the one they have fully mastered. In tech, this is virtually impossible. English is inevitable, even if we don’t consider the cringeworthy use of English-language terminology by Latin American startup founders and investors — usually to prove how clever they are, even as they misuse the words they’ve chosen. A particular pet peeve of mine is how certain sectors of Mexican society have opted to abbreviate “random” as “randy,” clearly not understanding that the word already has a very different definition in English.  Continued here S63 Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers One side effect of unlimited content-creation machines—generative AI—is unlimited content. On Monday, the editor of the renowned sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine announced that he had temporarily closed story submissions due to a massive increase in machine-generated stories sent to the publication. Continued here S17 Don't Be Afraid to Disagree in a Job Interview When you express your honest opinion during an interview, you present yourself as you are, not someone you believe the employer wants you to be. But disagreeing with an interviewer isn’t always easy. There is an imbalance of power and you risks coming off as difficult. But you can navigate the downsides by doing a few things before, during, and after the interview. Research the company. Is the culture one where people are receptive to new ideas? Are the organization and its founders known for inclusion and open-mindedness, or do they have a slow-moving legacy mindset? If the interviewer states something or asks a question that gives you pause, resist the urge to answer immediately. Take time to formulate a thoughtful response. And ask for permission to provide a different viewpoint. Say something like, “I see this differently. May I share my perspective with you?” Of course, during the interview, follow your gut. If you think disagreeing won’t be well received, then bite your tongue. After the interview, be sure to follow-up by email, even if you decide the company is not the right fit for you. Continued here S66 The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet Americans hate—or claim to hate—their politicians, but even by those standards, the early shape of the 2024 presidential race is a little bizarre. More than 20 months out from the election, Americans consistently say they don’t want to see a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet the most likely outcome today is a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. As Biden’s political fortunes have risen since late 2022, Democratic elected officials have slowly come around to the idea that he’s likely to be the nominee again next year, but Democratic voters remain skeptical, as I wrote recently. Still, they’re likely to get Biden, thanks in part to the advantage of incumbency. Continued here S34 How Saudi Arabia Is Fostering a Supportive Startup Ecosystem - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM MONSHAAT A flat tire and a six-hour nighttime wait for roadside assistance inspired the creation of Saudi Arabia’s leading roadside technology app. Morni uses a network of over 33,000 service providers to offer roadside assistance to more than 1.2 million customers in the Kingdom and across the region. Continued here S25 Focus on What Really Matters in Business Shift attention away from money and toward customer experience. Continued here S68 What to Read to Come to Terms With Death Everyone lives with a shared burden: Inevitably, each of us will die, and so will the people we love. It’s easy enough to ignore when you’re young or healthy, but anxious questions remain. When and how will it all end? And what will happen when I’m gone? Over the centuries, religious and philosophical texts, such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, have attempted to ease the journey. Modern meditations on human mortality tend to be written not by wise sages but by individuals who have faced the end of life—sometimes a person who is themselves dying, an individual who is grieving a loss, or an expert in the medical or funeral field. Many of these books can be clumsy exhortations to the reader to make the most of the time they have left. Staring down the ultimate unknown, some authors understandably struggle to walk the tightrope between comforting fictions and a macabre desolation. Continued here S21 Is Your Firm's Culture Ready for the WFH Future? You can order people to show up at the office, but that will waste their time and your money. You need to reshape the way you can share your corporate culture in this new world. Continued here S26 How To Take a Skills-Based Approach to Hiring It's a way to make hiring more equitable and intentional for everyone. Continued here S19 How to Negotiate Remote and Flexible Work Arrangements with Your Boss As social distancing restrictions are lifted in some parts of the world and economies are slowly opening up, some employees are experiencing panic and anxiety about going back to the physical office given the threat of the virus itself. If you’re someone who uses public transportation very often, share your space with a roommate with health issues, or are living with older adults at home, it can be a difficult decision to make. Continued here S59 The big reuse: 25 MWh of ex-car batteries go on the grid in California Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced that it had started operations at a 25 Megawatt-hour battery facility in California. On its own, that isn't really news, as California is adding a lot of battery power. But in this case, the source of the batteries was unusual: Many of them had spent an earlier life powering electric vehicles. Continued here S35 The climate benefits of a four-day workweek In 2011, Simon Ursell and the three other co-founders of newly born environmental consultancy Tyler Grange based in Gloucestershire, UK, decided to give all their workers a day off a month to volunteer. They had found that many of their new employees already spent their free time volunteering in wildlife trusts. "Our ecologists have always loved being ecologists," Ursell says. Continued here S24 How to Identify and Eliminate Productivity Blocks Small inefficiencies add up to soaring stress levels and decreased productivity. My new book offers strategies for optimal workflows. Continued here S20 Yes, You Can Quit Your Job Without Burning a Bridge If you’re considering leaving a job, but worry that doing so might damage your relationships, potential references, or the goodwill you’ve built up, you aren’t alone. While you can’t control how your boss or colleagues react to your decision, you can control how you leave to minimize any unwanted damages. Continued here S65 SCOTUS "confused" after hearing arguments for weakening Section 230 immunity Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments to decide whether Section 230 immunity shields online platforms from liabilities when relying on algorithms to make targeted recommendations. Many Section 230 defenders feared that the court might be eager to chip away at the statute’s protections, terrified that in the worst-case scenario, the Supreme Court could doom the Internet as we know it. However, it became clear that justices had grown increasingly concerned about the potential large-scale economic impact of making any decision that could lead to a crash of the digital economy or an avalanche of lawsuits over targeted recommendations. Continued here S58 Chrome 110 will automatically discard background tabs. Here's how to stop it. Heads up, everybody: Chrome will start doing stuff to your permanently open tabs. Chrome version 110 is rolling out now, and on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the release comes with the new "Memory Saver" feature that will be automatically enabled. We first wrote about this when it hit the Chrome nightly build "Canary Channel" in December, but now the feature is rolling out to everyone. Continued here S22 'Rage Applying' Shows Workplace Deficits That Need to Be Addressed Everyone is looking for a new job. Keep your employees from wanting to. Continued here S62 Microsoft and Nintendo sign 10-year deal for "full" Call of Duty [Updated] [Update 3:35pm 02/21: This post has been updated with information about Microsoft's deal with Nvidia's GeForce Now, along with comments from Brad Smith in Brussels regarding both Nintendo and Nvidia deals.] Continued here S60 Reddit should have to identify users who discussed piracy, film studios tell court Film studios that filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to identify users who posted comments about piracy. Continued here S57 New imaging tool confirms female scribe etched her name in medieval manuscript Jessica Hodgson, a graduate student at the University of Leicester, was poring over a medieval manuscript in the Bodleian Libraries' collection at the University of Oxford when she spotted a faint etched inscription on one of the pages. It seemed to spell out the name "Eadburg," but the etching was too faint for full confirmation. So Hodgson turned to John Barrett, technical leader for a recent project at the Bodleian called ARCHiOx (Analyzing and Recording Cultural Heritage in Oxford), for help. Continued here S64 Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID, study finds A bout of COVID-19 is known to increase a person's long-term risks of having a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke. But being fully vaccinated or even partially vaccinated appears to bring that risk down, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Continued here S69 The Fine Art of Failure English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing. Rejection, not acceptance, is what defines the life of a writer. And rejection has never been easier. Digital technology has allowed people to be rejected at exponentially higher rates. I’ve known writers who used to submit, literally, the manuscript of a work. It might loiter for six months in some publisher’s office before being returned by way of a self-addressed stamped envelope. Under the conditions of print, a dozen failures a year were difficult to accumulate. Today, if you work at it, you can fail a dozen times before lunch. Continued here S23 Should I Be So Emotionally Drained by Managing? 'I'm incredibly worn out by personnel issues.' Continued here S18 What Young Professionals Need to Know About Generative AI “Oh, what a surprising message! You’ve made me cry! You’re the most thoughtful and sweetest friend ever!” My friend Elena was deeply touched upon reading the poem I sent her for her birthday. I captured her love for music, mentioned her dog Bella, and even her passion for her career. But instead of feeling proud, I felt guilty. Yes, I had sent her a customized poem. I “wrote” it while playing around with ChatGPT, killing time in the supermarket queue. It took me 30 seconds (I asked for it, copied it, and pasted it in our Whatsapp chat), and she truly appreciated the gesture. This was back in December 2022, when the app was just catching wind. Obviously, she wasn’t aware. Continued here S27 Junk Fee Prevention Act: Price Transparency Might Benefit Small Businesses President Biden is calling on Congress to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which aims to improve fee disclosure and ban junk fees. 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) Can't Find An Email? Use This Hack. Mar 1, 2023 - VCs and founders are finding life ea... Wegovy: what you need to know about this weight lo... Does Not Being Able to Picture Something in Your M... Do You Cause Your Own Stress? How To Stop a "Toxic... Is Natural Wine Better For You? February 26, 2023 - Russian Information Warfare Us... 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