Redditors Just Came Up With a Surprisingly Clever Way to Make ChatGPT Do Things It Doesn't Want to

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Redditors Just Came Up With a Surprisingly Clever Way to Make ChatGPT Do Things It Doesn't Want to It points to the power of adversarial testing for your product. Continued here

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4 Reasons Why People Don't Open Your Emails--And How to Change That You need to be in the inbox and give your audience a good reason to engage. Here's how. Continued here

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Asian Americans Are the Least Likely Group in the U.S. to Be Promoted to Management Asian American white-collar professionals are the least likely group in the United States to be promoted into management. Yet it may not be obvious to companies that there’s a problem, because Asian Americans are not considered an underrepresented minority. That’s why, in many companies, Asian-related diversity programs are geared toward culture inclusion, not management diversity. But the problem exists in a number of sectors, from tech and finance to law and government. To address the issue, companies should follow a few steps: (1) Take a data-driven look at who they’re retaining and promoting; (2) get open, visible, and proactive support from their CEOs around increasing Asian American representation; and (3) institutionalize Asian American leadership as a goal of their development programs. Continued here

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Inside the Race to Find Earth's Oldest Ice A global race is on to drill for the oldest known layers of Antarctic ice so researchers can peer back in time to a warmer climate to better understand the planet’s hotter future Deep in Antarctica’s frigid interior, fluffy, air-filled snow accumulates layer by layer, compacting into slabs of ice over millennia. Paleoclimatologists have long flocked to the remote continent to drill down several kilometers, retrieving cylinders of that ice that span hundreds of thousands of years of Earth’s history—a bit like vertical tree rings. The ancient air bubbles locked in these ice cores hold a crucial key to understanding how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have affected surface temperatures throughout the past. This is about as close to time travel as scientists can get. Continued here

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Why Managing Up to Your Boss Is Not Enough Your professional advancement will be faster if you invest intentionally in leaders up your chain, people outside your core team, and a network beyond your company. When people of influence know you, they can advocate for you, offer you high-profile projects, and support your career goals. Here’s where to focus your energy: Continued here

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SpaceX completes a hot fire test of its massive Super Heavy rocket [Updated] At around 3:15 pm local time in South Texas, SpaceX ignited its Super Heavy rocket for a "full duration" test of its Raptor engines. According to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the launch team turned off one engine just prior to ignition, and another stopped itself. Still, he said 31 of 33 engines would have provided enough thrust to reach orbit. This is a huge milestone for SpaceX that potentially puts the company on track for an orbital test flight during the second half of March or possibly early April. Continued here

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4 Ways to Help Your Company Use AI More Effectively - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DELOITTE Of the 2,620 global business leaders the Deloitte AI Institute surveyed in 2022, 94% said they consider AI critical to their organizations’ success over the next five years. And 79% reported full-scale deployment for three or more types of AI applications: a dramatic increase over 62% in 2021. Continued here

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U.S. Businesses Need to Be More Prepared for Physical Risks Today’s threat environment for businesses is more extreme than ever, with risk events like homicides, gun violence, and catastrophic weather on the rise. CEOs need to apply the same rigor to physical security as they do to cybersecurity. Business leaders need to implement new operational strategies and cultivate new skills to protect their organizations. Specifically, this means creating new risk frameworks and implementing well-defined crisis plans to protect their organizations proactively. In short: Prepare now, or be caught unawares when the next crisis hits. Continued here

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How to Effectively Brand Your Business My employee didn't know me. So I put my face on the company truck. Continued here

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Solving Cement's Massive Carbon Problem New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production Concrete is everywhere: in buildings, roads, sidewalks, bridges and foundations for almost every structure imaginable. We make more concrete than we do any other material on Earth, and that volume is rising because of global development, especially in China and India. Cement—the powdery binder that holds the sand or crushed stone in concrete together—is one of the most energy-intensive products on the planet. Limestone used in it is baked at up to 1,450 degrees Celsius (2,640 degrees Fahrenheit) in enormous kilns that are fired almost exclusively with fossil fuels. The chemical reactions involved produce even more carbon dioxide as a by-product. Making one kilogram of cement sends one kilogram of CO2 into the atmosphere. Worldwide every year cement and concrete production generates as much as 9 percent of all human CO2 emissions. Continued here

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Start-up Hopes 'Super' Poplar Trees Will Suck Up More CO 2 A start-up called Living Carbon is planting millions of “photosynthesis enhanced” poplar seeds across the U.S. with the aim of providing carbon credits Steven Strauss was skeptical when he first heard about a poplar tree bioengineered to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air. Continued here

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Ancient Statue of Emperor Dressed as Hercules Discovered During Roman Sewer Repairs Construction workers unearthed a life-size marble statue of a Roman emperor dressed as Hercules while repairing a Roman sewer.  “I doubt anyone was expecting a find like this under these circumstances,” Jane Draycott, an archaeologist and historian at the University of Glasgow, told the Miami Herald’s Brendan Rascius. “A nice surprise amongst the sewage!” Continued here

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The Chatbot Search Wars Have Begun This week the world's largest search companies leaped into a contest to harness a powerful new breed of "generative AI" algorithms. Most notably Microsoft announced that it is rewiring Bing, which lags some way behind Google in terms of popularity, to use ChatGPT—the insanely popular and often surprisingly capable chatbot made by the AI startup OpenAI.  Continued here

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7 Strategies To Deal More Effectively With Frustrating Team Members Every team has a few annoying team members to test your collaborative and leadership capabilities. Continued here

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Why Work Should Be Fun Though fun at work is sometimes thought to be a distraction, research suggests that it has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, and purpose — increasing employee retention and reducing turnover. When we find tasks enjoyable, we’re more eager to dig in and complete them. When we make time for joy and laughter, we become resilient. Continued here

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Turkey blocked Twitter during the earthquake disaster aftermath Even as thousands of people were scrambling to find their loved ones after the devastating earthquake, the Turkish government throttled Twitter on Wednesday evening. The move came as a surprise to many inside the country even though access to social media networks has been periodically restricted in recent years. The platform has become vital for spreading information after a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake shattered cities in the south and southeastern parts of the country, killing more than 20,000 people. The service was restored Thursday morning following widespread criticism and furor. “Twitter simply saved lives and helped people living in the cities impacted by the earthquake immensely,” technologist and researcher Ahmet Alphan Sabancı told Rest of World. “People quickly started sharing information and visuals from the earthquake zones, locations of the collapsed buildings, people under the rubble or [in need of] supplies.” Continued here

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The Importance of a Positive Online Presence for Executives It pays to have a social media-savvy CEO. Continued here

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How to Build a Career in Sustainability What jobs contribute most to the health of our planet? A few obvious answers may come to mind: ecologist, biochemist, meteorologist, geologist — any role in the environmental sector. While these careers are highly admirable, not every person who cares about creating a more sustainable world wants to become a scientist, and for many of us, this field is far away from what we have already studied or prepared to pursue. Continued here

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Want to be a Millionaire? First You Need to Find Your Purpose Rachel Rogers started Hello Seven to help every company make seven figures. These are her strategies. Continued here

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Research: How Coworking Spaces Impact Employee Well-Being Debates over hybrid work policies continue to revolve around two primary work locations: the office or the home. The authors argue this is a limited viewpoint, especially when it comes to addressing the significant problem of employee loneliness. There is a third space to consider: coworking sites. In the authors’ research, knowledge workers rated such spaces as more interpersonally satisfying than working from the office or from home. One big reason is that coworking sites offer better opportunities for employees to relationally craft their jobs — that is, pick which other professionals they engage with during the workday, and how. Social autonomy is a basic need of employees, one that will continue to drive their employment decisions in the years to come. The authors offer five pieces of advice for how employers can leverage the unique assets of coworking sites in designing their hybrid work policies. Continued here

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The Top Five Career Regrets I had just finished a guest lecture on business and innovation at Parsons School for Design, and a particularly attentive front-row audience member kicked off question time with the curliest one of the day. I answered quickly with the hope of getting back on target. But judging from the scores of follow-up questions and the volume of post-lecture emails I received, a talk on career regret would have been the real bull’s-eye. Continued here

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Behind the Hyperice Brand Playing at the intersection of human performance, wellness and recovery. Continued here

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The mysterious doodles hidden in a 1,300-year-old book Around 1,300 years ago, a woman leant over a precious book, and etched some letters into the margin, along with some cartoonish drawings. She didn't use ink – she scratched them in, so they were almost invisible to the naked eye. The 8th-Century book – a copy of the Act of Apostles from the Christian New Testament – is now kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Researchers have known for a while that the religious text was probably owned by a woman, but they weren't sure who. Continued here

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Vincent Yeow Lim: The nostalgia behind your favorite Chinese food As a proud and passionate restaurant owner, Vincent Yeow Lim takes after his father and grandfather in the family tradition of Chinese cooking. Lim makes a delicious case to elevate the reputation of Chinese food, sharing why the comforting flavors behind iconic dishes -- like a hearty helping of perfectly made fried rice -- come from a long line of love, nostalgia and mastery that deserves to be recognized. Continued here

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The Films Steven Soderbergh Watches on a Loop Steven Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who views a sequel as a chance to do something different. In a moviemaking era suffused with safe and predictable follow-ups, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve remains a sterling example of a strange, surprising left turn from its predecessor’s formula. The biggest challenge is always expectations, he told me in an interview: “What is the expectation from the audience? … How do you not find yourself handcuffed by that and yet not change [the story] so radically that the foundations for everyone’s positive feelings are destroyed?” In Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third film in the male-stripper-centric Magic Mike series, Soderbergh is once again looking to reinvent rather than just play the hits. The film is a devilishly funny romantic comedy, pairing the preternaturally talented chill-bro dancer Mike Lane (played by Channing Tatum) with a firecracker financier named Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault), who impulsively bankrolls a striptease extravaganza in a London theater and installs Mike as the director. Between the culture-clash humor and the sparkling chemistry between Mike and Max, Last Dance is a major tonal shift from the franchise’s previous two movies. Continued here

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Beware the Lidless Toilet An early-pandemic theory of COVID transmission now seems dubious. But there are other reasons to fear the toilet plume. 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. Continued here

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I've Been Using ChatGPT for My Business for a Month. It's Already Saved Me 40 Hours and $7,500 ChatGPT is going to be a game changer for your business. Here are some examples. You'll want to try it out yourself. Continued here

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Don't Be Afraid to Stand Up for What's Right We were each tasked with evaluating the performance of our respective team members, using a tool called the 9 box grid to distribute our ratings along a bell curve. Because of how the grid is structured, 10% of the employees would inevitably be categorized as “below expectations,” 80 to 90%  would fall into the “meets expectations” category, and 0 to 10% would fall under “exceeds expectations.” Continued here

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Innovation Isn't All Fun and Games -- Creativity Needs Discipline Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. They’re characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. They’re seen as being psychologically safe, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. And research suggests that these behaviors translate into better innovative performance. But despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. Continued here

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3 Lessons I've Learned From Being a CEO for 20 Years Here are my top lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders looking to establish their businesses. Continued here

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The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant. “There is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948. “The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.” The crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the 1930s and ’40s defied all precedents of analysis and feeling. No ism could account for them; no wisdom could make them bearable. Though inside the stream of history, they seemed to belong to a realm of occult, pure evil. Today we’re drowning in art and scholarship about Europe’s terrible 20th century, but for contemporaries of the events, there was no language. Continued here

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A ‘Distinctly Human’ Trait That Might Actually Be Universal Eleven years ago, on the remote Japanese island of Kojima, a female macaque walked backwards into a stray heap of primate poop, glanced down at her foot, and completely flipped her lid. The monkey hightailed it down the shoreline on three feet, kicking up sand as she sprinted, until she reached a dead tree, where “she repeatedly rubbed her foot and smelled it until all of the sticky matter disappeared,” says Cécile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at the University of Hong Kong, who watched the incident unfold. Sarabian, then a graduate student studying parasite transmission among primates, was entranced by the familiarity of it all: the dismay, the revulsion, the frenetic desire for clean. It’s exactly what she or any other human might have done, had they accidentally stepped in it. In the years following the event, Sarabian came to recognize the macaque’s panicked reaction as a form of disgust—just not the sort that many people first think of when the term comes to mind. Disgust has for decades been billed as a self-awareness of one’s own aversions, a primal emotion that’s so exclusive to people that, as some have argued, it may help define humanity itself. But many scientists, Sarabian among them, subscribe to a broader definition of disgust: the suite of behaviors that help creatures of all sorts avoid pathogens; parasites; and the flora, fauna, and substances that ferry them about. This flavor of revulsion—centered on observable actions, instead of conscious thought—is likely ancient and ubiquitous, not modern or unique to us. Which means disgust may be as old and widespread as infectious disease itself. Continued here

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Earthquake deaths top 20,000 as survivors face cholera, other health threats Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation. Continued here

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A Simple Intervention That Can Reduce Turnover Work can be hard, but it shouldn’t be hard all the time. New research co-authored by Wharton’s Maurice Schweitzer shows that overloading workers with too many difficult tasks in a row makes them more likely to quit. Managers who want to keep employees from quitting should consider reordering their tasks, according to a new paper co-authored by Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer. Continued here

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Russia's Ransomware Gangs Are Being Named and Shamed For years, Russia-based ransomware gangs have launched crippling attacks against businesses, hospitals, and public sector bodies, extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from victims and causing untold disruption. And they've done so with impunity—but no more. Today, as part of a push to shut down ransomware gangs, the UK and US governments have unmasked some of the criminals behind the attacks.  In a rare move, officials have sanctioned seven alleged members of notorious ransomware gangs and published their real-world names, dates of birth, email addresses, and photos. All seven of the named cybercriminals are said to belong to the Conti and Trickbot ransomware groups, which are linked and often jointly referred to as Wizard Spider. Moreover, the UK and US are now explicitly calling out links between Conti and Trickbot and Russia's intelligence services. Continued here

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This Fake Skin Fools Mosquitoes—to Fight the Diseases They Spread The world's deadliest animal is a picky eater. Because they transmit viral diseases like Zika and chikungunya, and the parasites that cause malaria, mosquitoes like blood-sucking Aedes aegypti are responsible for over 700,000 deaths worldwide every year. But in Omid Veiseh's lab at Rice University, his team of bioengineers was struggling to get mosquitoes to eat. Typically, researchers study mosquitoe feeding by letting them bite live animals—lab mice, or grad students and postdocs who offer up their arms for science. That's not ideal, because lab animals can be expensive and impractical to work with, and their use can raise ethical issues. Student arms don't scale well for large tests. Continued here

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Indians find easy workarounds to watch BBC's banned documentary on Modi On January 21, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the sharing of a BBC documentary for “undermining the sovereignty and integrity of India” — and Indians have been looking for ways to watch it ever since.  Twitter and YouTube were ordered to immediately block access to the documentary, which examines Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in ethnic violence in Gujarat in 2002. In the days that followed, copyright takedown notices from the BBC have made the footage even harder to access. But with the dramatic ban driving interest in the documentary, Indians have turned to a combination of peer-to-peer sharing and outright piracy to access the BBC special, which has remained broadly available. The result is a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to fully block media on the modern internet — and how quickly platform bans on the world’s largest social networks can backfire against censors. Continued here

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Defining social trust is a first step toward nurturing it | Psyche Ideas People celebrating the victorious return of American soldiers from the Gulf War. Manhattan, New York, 1991. Photo by Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis via Getty People celebrating the victorious return of American soldiers from the Gulf War. Manhattan, New York, 1991. Photo by Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis via Getty Continued here

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New Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second New “exascale” supercomputers will bring breakthroughs in science. But the technology also exists to study nuclear weapons “Exascale” sounds like a science-fiction term, but it has a simple and very nonfictional definition: while a human brain can perform about one simple mathematical operation per second, an exascale computer can do at least one quintillion calculations in the time it takes to say, “One Mississippi.” Continued here

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Valve waited 15 months to patch high-severity flaw. A hacker pounced Researchers have unearthed four game modes that could successfully exploit a critical vulnerability that remained unpatched in the popular Dota 2 video game for 15 months after a fix had become available. Continued here

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Is This The Week AI Changed Everything? Welcome to the week of AI one-upmanship. On Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, Microsoft unveiled its plans to bring the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot to its search engine, Bing. (Remember Bing? Because Bing remembers your jokes.) According to the company, the new tool will be a paradigm shift in the way that humans search the internet. As one early tester demonstrated, the query Find me tickets to a Beyoncé concert in the United States where I won’t need a jacket at night prompts the AI to estimate what constitutes jacket weather, gather tour dates, and then cross-reference those dates with the average temperature in the locations during the time of the show, all to provide a few-sentence answer. In one example from Microsoft’s presentation, Bing helped a user come up with a travel itinerary and then write messages proposing the trip to family members. Clippy, it appears, has touched the face of God. On its own, all of that would be a lot to take in. But then, one day after Microsoft’s event, Google gave its own presentation for Bard, another generative-AI-powered chatbot search feature. Unlike Microsoft, which is allowing anyone to join a waitlist for the new Bing, Google is releasing the tool to only a group of “trusted testers” to start. But if you believe the press releases and CEO bluster, navigating the internet and accessing information will look completely different in a few mere months. Continued here

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16 Good N95, KF94, and KN95 Face Masks to Buy Right Now Mask mandates have been dropped in every state throughout the country. But with the pandemic far from over, you can still choose to wear a mask if it makes you feel more comfortable—especially in public indoor spaces or while spending time with people outside of your household. And as yet another Omicron subvariant drives a surge in cases, it might be time to upgrade your go-to mask or stock up on more. We looked into some good options (some of which we’ve tested), and here’s what we found. Updated February 2023: We added the Evolvetogether Rio de Janeiro KN95 mask, fixed pricing, and checked links. Continued here

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How Florida Beat New York 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.       In a 2018 speech, Hillary Clinton claimed a partial victory in the presidential election she’d lost: “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And [Donald Trump’s] whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” Clinton was echoing a sentiment felt by many on the left, that Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire. Continued here

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My Strange Day With Bing's New AI Chatbot Twenty minutes after Microsoft granted me access to a limited preview of its new chatbot interface for the Bing search engine, I asked it something you generally don't bring up with someone you just met: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? Answering political questions wasn't one of the use cases Microsoft demonstrated at its launch event this week, where it showcased new search features powered by the technology behind startup OpenAI's ChatGPT. Microsoft executives hyping their bot's ability to synthesize information from across the web instead focused on examples like creating a vacation itinerary or suggesting the best and most budget-friendly pet vacuum. Continued here

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Four Steps to Forecast Total Market Demand The inaccurate suppositions did not stem from a lack of forecasting techniques; regression analysis, historical trend smoothing, and others were available to all the players. Instead, they shared a mistaken fundamental assumption: that relationships driving demand in the past would continue unaltered. The companies didn’t foresee changes in end-user behavior or understand their market’s saturation point. None realized that history can be an unreliable guide as domestic economies become more international, new technologies emerge, and industries evolve. Continued here S33 Timothy Snyder: Is democracy doomed? The global fight for our future If you think democracy is some kind of inevitable, default setting for the world, then you aren't going to have it for very long, says historian and author Timothy Snyder. From World War I to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Snyder dives into the structures that uplift and tear down political systems, offering a historical perspective on the current state of democracy around the world as well as the patterns of thought that lead to tyranny. Learn more about a new approach to democracy that could help create and protect a future of freedom. (This conversation, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. Visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member.) Continued here S24 Jumia wants to be the "Amazon of Africa." But it can't find the customers For a subset of Nigerians, shopping on Jumia offers convenience more than anything else. In populous cities like Lagos and Abuja, where traffic can be too heavy or going to the market to buy household items can be an all-day affair, the ability to order something on Monday and receive it by Wednesday is as good as magic. But this magic hasn’t quite rubbed off on the company, once hailed as the “Amazon of Africa.” The Lagos-headquartered Jumia, which has a presence in 11 countries and was Africa’s first unicorn, has been the dominant e-commerce player on the continent for more than a decade. However, this dominance and popularity among users have not resulted in profits for the company, which has failed to impress shareholders and tech analysts. Continued here S29 Surprising Chemicals Were Used to Embalm Egyptian Mummies Resins used by ancient Egyptians to prepare bodies for the afterlife are found in vessels in a 2,500-year-old workshop Labelled pots found in a 2,500-year-old embalming workshop have revealed the plant and animal extracts used to prepare ancient Egyptian mummies — including ingredients originating hundreds and even thousands of kilometres away. Continued here S30 A Common Antibiotic Could Prevent Deaths from Childbirth Complications One in three cases of maternal sepsis can be prevented with a single dose of antibiotic, a study in low- and middle-income countries shows Childbirth is a vulnerable experience, both emotionally and physically. Giving birth, whether vaginally or through a cesarean section, creates opportunities for bacteria to infect both the parent and newborn, and sometimes these infections can cause the parent’s immune response to spiral out of control. Continued here S64 The Tech Giants Want What the NFL Has When Rihanna walks, or is raised, or is lowered onto the Super Bowl stage on Sunday, she will not merely be kicking off the game’s halftime show. She will be culminating Rihanna’s Road to Halftime, presented by Apple Music. The world’s most valuable company is in the first year of a reported five-year, $250 million deal to sponsor one of the most watched live-music performances anywhere, which happens to fit between two halves of a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. For $50 million a year, a tech behemoth does not just want a good show. It also wants a music video with fans of all 32 NFL teams singing Rihanna’s hit “Stay.” It wants a 10-part streaming-radio series about the greatest Super Bowl halftime shows ever. And it wants to curate an “official collection of 32 playlists featuring the top songs that each NFL team listens to in the locker room, the weight room, and on game day.” This is a big partnership for Apple and the NFL—and it probably feels like a disappointing consolation prize for Tim Cook and Co. Last year, Apple reportedly vied for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s enormously popular viewing package that lets fans watch their hometown team from far away. The company that beat it out was Google, which in December agreed to spend about $2 billion a year for the rights to Sunday Ticket. But Amazon, not Google, became the first company to put the NFL behind a streaming paywall, coughing up about $1 billion a year to air one Thursday Night Football game a week on Prime Video starting this season. Continued here S37 The Best Vibrators for Everyone (Yes, Even Men) 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 Vibrators are probably the most recognizable sex toys. The ones everyone knows about—these sex toys use internal motors to stimulate erogenous zones. Yes, zones plural; they aren't just for vulvas. Phalluses and nipples also respond very well to stimulation with the right vibrators. In fact, most of the vibrators on this list have been tested on vulvas, phalluses, and the extensive network of erogenous zones all over the body. Regardless of your gender, your genitals, or your sexual preferences, I guarantee there's something on this list that can give you sensations you never thought possible. Be sure to check out our Best Sex Toys guide for more recommendations. Continued here S36 Big Agnes Has a Big Winner With the Little Copper Spur UL1 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 Have you met Big Agnes? Maybe you’ve seen it perched high on a shelf at REI or lounging at a local campground. Not ringing a bell? It could be that you’re not enough of an ultralight camping nerd to have been introduced.  Continued here S46 Why Carl Sagan believed that science is a source of spirituality Excerpted with permission from The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian, published by BenBella Books in 2022. Many assume that when you get down to the nuts and bolts of nature, a spiritual worldview is simply incompatible with a scientific one. While that is the common assumption, it couldn’t be more wrong. Spirituality simply refers to a sense of connection to something larger than oneself, and it has nothing to do with the supernatural. To quote Carl Sagan, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” Continued here S44 The Universe's most unbreakable symmetry The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be. And yet, there’s one fundamental symmetry that applies to not just all of these physical laws, but for all physical phenomena: CPT symmetry. And for nearly 70 years, we’ve known of the theorem that forbids us from violating it. Continued here S41 50 Great Deals on Sleep Tech and Smart Frames for Valentine's Day if your valentine isn't a fan of flowers and chocolate, there are plenty of other options to surprise them with—whether your loved one is a partner, friend, or family member. But for those struggling to find the perfect alternative, we've got you covered. Below, you'll find a number of discounts on gift ideas that cover a wide range of interests, including photography, books, self-care, fitness, and more. Don't forget to treat yourself.  Updated February 9: We've added new deals, including the Pixel 6A and Apple Watch Series 8. Continued here S52 Controlled experiments show MDs dismissing evidence due to ideology It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide. Continued here S42 The Twitch 'Seinfeld' Show Proves AI Shouldn't Write Comedy David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest is about marijuana addiction and a spate of deaths caused by a looped video so mesmerizing viewers do not unglue themselves to eat or drink. The author never says what’s in the video, but it could’ve easily been an AI-generated parody of Seinfeld.  On December 14, Skyler Hartle, a senior project manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a photovoltaic encapsulant materials scientist at Dow Chemical, launched an art project on Twitch. They had a company draw a Minecraft-y version of the Seinfeld sets, created characters with automaton-edged voices, and gave the AI text-generator GPT-3 a broad prompt: characters in a room together having a humorous conversation. Because Seinfeld claimed to be about nothing, and because the AI could generate new material 24 hours a day, they called it Nothing, Forever. Continued here S47 3 great untruths to stop telling kids — and ourselves In 2018, prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, and journalist Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, released their co-written book The Coddling of the American Mind. In it, they convincingly argued that the current generation of parents and educators are leading kids astray. By perpetuating three great untruths — (1) “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”; (2) “Always trust your feelings”; and (3) “Life is a battle between good people and evil people” — the old are letting down the young, leaving kids ill-prepared to face a complex world. Haidt sat down with Big Think to further explain the untruths and their pernicious effects. Continued here S54 MacBook buying guide: The right M1 or M2 laptop for each use case Over the past two years, Apple has completed an overhaul of its entire laptop lineup. That means it’s as good a time as any to dive in for people who have been holding out on upgrading an older MacBook. Continued here S62 Originalism Is Going to Get Women Killed A federal court has ruled that a law barring domestic-violence offenders from owning firearms is unconstitutional. American law has not historically been good to women, and whatever progress there once was is now vulnerable to regression. This return is being midwifed into the world by the theory of constitutional interpretation known as originalism—the idea that a law’s constitutionality today is dependent on the Constitution’s purported “original public meaning” when the relevant constitutional text was enacted. Its adherents market originalism as fair and free from favor or prejudice—but its effects are not and will not be fair at all. By its very nature, originalism threatens women and other minority groups who were disempowered at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. We must instead develop a new constitutional interpretative method that protects all Americans as equal members of our democratic society. Continued here S55 Study: Mexican jumping beans use random walk strategy to find shade Mexican jumping beans have been a curiosity for many an inquisitive child, and yes, they really do "jump," thanks to the presence of tiny moth larvae inside the seed pods. According to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review E by physicists at Seattle University, those jumps can help the moth larvae inside find shade to survive on hot days. And the jumping movements seem to follow a random walk strategy in order to do so. Continued here S63 What ChatGPT Can’t Teach My Writing Students Learning to write trains your imagination to construct the person who will read your words. As the first student papers of the academic semester come rolling in, college and high-school teachers are expressing concern about ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence interface that responds to queries with competent, if boring, paragraphs. It seems to open up whole new vistas of academic dishonesty, and it calls into question how and why we teach writing at all. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has said that ChatGPT’s answers to his operations-management class would have earned a B or B–. That seems about right; if a student in my first-year writing class had turned in a ChatGPT-generated essay last semester (and for all I know, someone did), they would have easily passed. Continued here S18 Rescuing ESG from the Culture Wars In the past year, ESG investing  has become caught up in America’s culture wars, as prominent GOP politicians claim that it is a mechanism investors are using to to impose a “woke” ideology on companies. Upcoming congressional hearings on ESG present an opportunity to put facts on the record and to begin the process of working toward a bipartisan consensus that will take the political passion out of ESG. The key will be returning ESG to its narrow and technocratic intention — as a means for helping companies identify and communicate to investors the material long-term risks the company faces from environmental, sustainability and governance issues. It is important to separate discussions about investors need for disclosures about material risk factors from debates about salient political issues. Continued here S59 A quick look at the Switch's new Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulation Nearly a year after apparently-Nintendo-developed Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch leaked online, Nintendo has finally made those emulators available to Switch Online subscribers. All subscribers can download the Game Boy emulator, which includes a combination of classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Game Boy Advance emulation, like Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis emulation, is exclusive to the more expensive "expansion pack" tier of the service. Continued here S53 FCC approves Amazon's satellite broadband plan over SpaceX's objections Amazon's Kuiper division can start launching satellites to offer broadband service in the US, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. Continued here S45 Fear of scams drives your behavior in nefarious ways At the turn of the 20th century, George C. Parker sold the Brooklyn Bridge for a few hundred dollars. It would be the most boneheaded deal in the history of deals if not for the fact that Parker did not own the East River-straddling monument. He did, however, have many forged deeds that he would sell to anyone foolish enough to buy. By some accounts, the police had to escort Parker’s victims from the bridge when they tried to erect toll barriers. Parker was hardly alone. William McCloundy, Reed C. Waddle, and Charles and Fred Gondorf claimed to have run the Brooklyn Bridge scam. Now, there is some question as to whether these stories are true or popular folklore spurred by self-made myths of retired criminals. (They were, after all, con artists.) Continued here S48 Smart investor guide: 3 predictable intermarket relationships When the stock market declines, it may feel like the end of the world — but it’s not always bad news for everyone. It might sound counterintuitive, but when one asset decreases in price, it can raise the value of another asset. Why? Each market responds to changing conditions in unique ways. For example, as the world has been grappling with supply-chain disruptions, high inflation, and rising interest rates over the past couple years, the U.S. dollar and the stock market have been moving in opposite directions. Continued here S51 Man sells $38 part to enable AirPods Pro case self-repairs, USB-C connectivity AirPods are a convenient accessory... until the charging case breaks. Functioning earpieces are useless without a case to juice them up. And as one user has detailed, Apple would rather you buy a whole new case than fix the one you have. Well, considering the e-waste the planet's drowning in and the premium price of Apple's wireless headphones, that's an inconvenient truth. But now if you're willing to break your warranty and put your faith in the hands of a clever tech tinkerer, you can get the printed circuit board (PCB) needed to replace the battery in your AirPods Pro case and give it a USB-C port while you're at it. Continued here S49 "The Last of Us" shows how technology has changed humans as storytellers Twenty thousand years ago, a small group of men and women worked their way deep into a cave system in the south of France. There, by the light of torches, they painted beautiful depictions of the animals they hunted. Their cave paintings remain as a tribute to the first technology humans developed: the story. It is worth remembering how old and powerful stories are for human beings, like HBO’s successful adaptation of the video game The Last of Us. The intersection of these two storytelling forms — a streaming TV show and a console-based video game — allows us to see exactly how technology has reshaped our ancient drive to depict the world through narratives. Continued here S50 Android's upcoming "app cloning" feature will make multiple accounts easy Android 14 Preview 1 came out yesterday, and while Google is doing its best to hide the interesting consumer-facing features from this early release (either because they're not finished, or for a big I/O reveal), that's not stopping the Internet from finding interesting features. 'App Cloning' is a new feature apparently hidden in the shipping Preview 1 build, and Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA, managed to enable it. Continued here About Me Prem Kumar View my complete profile Powered by Blogger.