How Data Privacy Concerns Impact Firm Performance

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How Data Privacy Concerns Impact Firm Performance     Most of the data that mobile apps collect are used for non-essential purposes like third-party advertising, a new study finds.Almost everybody would want to keep their personal information private and away from prying eyes, but just how much do they value data privacy? The answer to that depends on people’s awareness of how app providers could use their personal data, according to a paper by experts at Wharton and elsewhere, titled “The Supply and Demand for Data Privacy: Evidence From Mobile Apps.” Continued here

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Using Consumer Behavior Analysis to Predict Shopping Habits | Peter Fader     Professor Peter Fader explains why it's so important for retailers to build strong customer relationships.The holidays are always about selling as much merchandise as possible, but marketing professor Peter Fader explains why retailers need to focus on consumer behavior analysis and pay attention to customers year-round. Continued here

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The 23andMe Data Breach Keeps Spiraling     More details are emerging about a data breach the genetic testing company 23andMe first reported in October. But as the company shares more information, the situation is becoming even murkier and creating greater uncertainty for users attempting to understand the fallout.23andMe said at the beginning of October that attackers had infiltrated some of its users' accounts and piggybacked off of this access to scrape personal data from a larger subset of users through the company's opt-in, social sharing service known as DNA Relatives. At the time, the company didn't indicate how many users had been impacted, but hackers had already begun selling data on criminal forums that seemed to be taken from at least a million 23andMe users, if not more. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, the company said that “the threat actor was able to access a very small percentage (0.1 %) of user accounts,” or roughly 14,000 given the company's recent estimate that it has more than 14 million customers. Continued here

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Moving Beyond Stage-Gate Project Management     This article describes how German automaker BMW and European airline Air France have developed new approaches to managing large projects aimed at creating fundamentally new products or ideas that profoundly alter human behaviors. Traditional approaches, such as the stage-gate process, while effective at incremental improvements, don’t work as well when it comes to breakthrough innovations or attempts to change established behaviors. Some of these new approaches harken back to the Manhattan and Polaris projects, with their reliance on iteration and experimentation, while others rely heavily on the principles of fair process. Continued here

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The Fallout TV series trailer is here, and it's loaded with homages to the games     The trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series dropped this weekend, and it's either craven fan service or wonderfully authentic, depending on your point of view. Continued here

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Need for speed: This Johannesburg driver delivers anything in 15 minutes     Gig worker Mkhululi Siziba claims he can deliver any order in 15 minutes. The 30-year-old works for the Checkers Sixty60 grocery delivery app in Johannesburg, and has a clean driving record, despite bike accidents being common among delivery workers in the city. Siziba told Rest of World he stops at nothing to ensure his customers are happy, and that his good ratings speak for themselves.Siziba began working with Checkers Sixty60 in 2020, when South Africa saw a boom in food delivery services. He left his gig with Uber Eats to join the new app, which offered better pay, shorter hours, and work contracts. At the time, he said, he would deliver up to 28 orders every day, earning a weekly income of 5,208 rand ($272). But the competition is higher now — more gig workers have joined the app, and Siziba barely gets 18 deliveries per day. But he still makes more money than he did just working for Uber Eats. Continued here

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New report illuminates why OpenAI board said Altman "was not consistently candid"     Now, in an in-depth piece for The New Yorker, writer Charles Duhigg—who was embedded inside OpenAI for months on a separate story—suggests that some board members found Altman "manipulative and conniving" and took particular issue with the way Altman allegedly tried to manipulate the board into firing fellow board member Helen Toner. Continued here

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The 20 Best Shows on Apple TV+ Right Now     Slowly but surely, Apple TV+ is finding its feet. The streaming service, which at launch we called “odd, angsty, and horny as hell,” has evolved into a diverse library of dramas, documentaries, and comedies. It’s also fairly cheap compared to services like Netflix—and Apple often throws in three free months when you buy a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV.Curious but don’t know where to get started? Below are our picks for the best shows on the service. (Also, here are our picks for the best movies on Apple TV+.) When you’re done, head over to our guides to the best shows on Netflix, best movies on Hulu, and best movies on Amazon Prime, because you can never have too much television. Continued here

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Google Taps Hot Rocks to Cool Climate     The potential of geothermal energy as a carbon-free power source is well known. Now companies such as Google are helping to unlock itA geothermal production well and the Blundell Geothermal Power Plant near Milford, Utah. This well provides 400 degree steam and hot water from deep underground to run the turbines at the power plant. Continued here

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Meet the 16-Year-Old Whose Code Is Jailbreaking iMessage     Eric Migicovsky has long been a believer in open source software. The mild-mannered but intense Canadian systems engineer is most known for creating—and very successfully crowdfunding—the cultish Pebble smartwatch. This was before the Apple Watch, but one distinction Migicovsky made clear from the beginning was that almost anyone could build an app for the Pebble smartwatch, courtesy of an open-source software development kit. Pebble was crushed by Apple’s smartwatch arrival in 2015 and acquired by Fitbit in 2016, but for a while a group of developers, calling themselves Rebble, kept the watch’s software alive as an open source project.A few years ago, while Migicovsky was riding out the pandemic and noodling on new ideas while working as a partner at Y Combinator, he became obsessed with what he called “the dearth of innovation in chat.” Chat apps were becoming increasingly siloed; whether or not someone sent a blue bubble text (iPhone) or green bubble text (Android) became its own status symbol, and emblematic of Apple’s walled-garden approach to software. Migicovsky thought consumers needed a bridge between them. Like Trillian, he said, from the early 2000s, but for the mobile era. Continued here

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The OnePlus 12 packs a 5400 mAh battery, up to 24GB of RAM     The OnePlus is doing its usual early flagship launch in China. The OnePlus 12 is official there but won't be released in the US until 2024. We can still fire up Google Translate and go over it, though. Continued here

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Want a small, cheap EV? The Fiat 500e is coming to the US in 2024     It probably hasn't escaped your notice that, among the flurry of new electric vehicles reaching showrooms, there are very few smaller, cheaper EVs. As we noted last week, automakers have been concentrating on the upper end of the market, mostly building premium electric SUVs that bring in fat profit margins (or perhaps costing the OEM smaller losses). But early next year, another smaller, cheaper EV will reach the US—the 2024 Fiat 500e. Continued here

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The strange similarity of neuron and galaxy networks     Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain “the most complex object in the known universe.” It’s not hard to see why this might be true. With a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion connections, the brain is a dizzyingly complex object.But there are plenty of other complicated objects in the universe. For example, galaxies can group into enormous structures (called clusters, superclusters, and filaments) that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years. The boundary between these structures and neighboring stretches of empty space called cosmic voids can be extremely complex.1 Gravity accelerates matter at these boundaries to speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, creating shock waves and turbulence in intergalactic gases. We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it. Continued here

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When You're Disillusioned at Work, Quitting Isn't the Only Option     Seventy-seven percent of Gen Z say they’re searching for a new role. As many in this group worry about job security, as well as college debt, inflation, and a recession, they feel disengaged and frustrated in their current roles. If you’re among them and considering quitting, know that it’s not your only option. And while leaving a company is the right choice in a toxic situation, if you’re quitting to avoid confronting a difficult situation, it won’t serve you in the long run. The authors offer three strategies for Gen Z to work through these challenges to create positive change at work: Continued here

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Light Can Travel Backward in Time (Sort Of)     Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time—and researchers exploring such “time reflections” are finding a wealth of delightfully odd and useful effectsSchemes for retrograde time travel abound but usually involve irreconcilable paradoxes and rely on outlandish theoretical constructs such as wormholes (which may not actually exist). Yet when it comes to simply turning back the clock—akin to stirring a scrambled raw egg and seeing the yolk and white reseparate—a rich and growing subfield of wave physics shows that such “time reversal” is possible. Continued here

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Unlocking the secrets of oobleck--strange stuff that's both liquid and solid     Oobleck has long been my favorite example of a non-Newtonian fluid, and I'm not alone. It's a hugely popular "kitchen science" experiment because it's simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you've got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily, and it's a liquid. Punch it hard, and it turns more solid under your fist. You can even fill small pools with the stuff and walk across it since the oobleck will harden every time you step down—a showy physics demo that naturally shows up a lot on YouTube. Continued here

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How to Stop Another OpenAI Meltdown     OpenAI needs open-heart surgery. The ChatGPT developer’s new board of directors and its briefly fired but now-restored CEO, Sam Altman, said last week that they’re trying to fix the unusual corporate structure that allowed four board members to trigger a near-death experience for the company.The startup was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, but it develops AI inside a capped-profit subsidiary answerable to the nonprofit’s board, which is charged with ensuring that the technology is “broadly beneficial” to humanity. To stabilize this unusual structure, OpenAI could take pointers from longer-lived companies with a similar arrangement—including introducing a second board to help balance its founding mission with its for-profit pursuit of returns for investors. Continued here

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"Singularities don't exist," claims black hole pioneer Roy Kerr     Here in our Universe, whenever you gather enough mass together in a small enough volume of space, you’re bound to eventually cross a threshold: where the speed at which you’d need to travel to escape the gravitational pull within that region exceeds the speed of light. Whenever that occurs, it’s inevitable that you’ll form an event horizon around that region, which looks, acts, and behaves exactly like a black hole as seen from the outside. Meanwhile, inside, all that matter gets inexorably drawn toward the central region inside that black hole. With finite amounts of mass compressed to an infinitesimal volume, the existence of a singularity is all but assured.The predictions for what we should observe outside the event horizon match extraordinarily well with observations, as we’ve not only seen many luminous objects in orbit around black holes, but have even now imaged the event horizons of multiple black holes directly. The theorist who laid the foundation for how realistic black holes form in the Universe, Roger Penrose, subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 for his contributions to physics, including for the notion that a singularity must exist at the center of every black hole. Continued here

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Due to AI, "We are about to enter the era of mass spying," says Bruce Schneier     In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor. Continued here

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How Leaders Fake Psychological Safety     When it comes to psychological safety, leaders want the best of both worlds: all voices heard and considered, failure acknowledged and learned from, and feedback offered clearly and received graciously. But they also want harmony, comfort, and a sense of equilibrium. While most leaders want to encourage people to speak their minds, their underlying (often unconscious) ambivalence about actually getting the truth can unwittingly lead them to a performative version of psychological safety. And data suggests that only about a quarter of leaders develop the skills needed to create psychological safety for their teams. The author recounts three well-intentioned but misguided ways leaders try to “fake” psychological safety on their teams and presents strategies for creating an environment that welcomes dissenting voices. Continued here

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PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries     If you purchased any Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store, Sony has some bad news for you to discover. Continued here

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IBM Releases First-Ever 1,000-Qubit Quantum Chip     The company announces its latest huge chip—but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to “error correction”IBM has unveiled the first quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits — the equivalent of the digital bits in an ordinary computer. But the company says it will now shift gears and focus on making its machines more error-resistant rather than larger. Continued here

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This Tandem Showerhead Turns Your Bathroom Into a Spa     According to my wife, the world comes with two types of people in it, “soakers” and “non-soakers.” She is the latter. Without question, I am the former. I still dream of a world in which I never need to leave the shower, living my life in a cozy, warm mist like Kramer in that one episode of Seinfeld.One of the first things I wanted to do when my wife and I snagged our one-bathroom bungalow was upgrade the plumbing. Our water pressure, and the associated showerhead that the previous owners attached, was middling. We are lucky to have a sliding glass door so we don’t have to deal with mildewy curtains, but otherwise our shower/bath combo could be described as woefully utilitarian. When I looked at the cost of bathroom remodels and better plumbing, I settled into a series of small upgrades. Continued here

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A MAGA Judiciary     Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations. Continued here

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Why Xi Wants Trump to Win     After four years of Joe Biden, China’s leaders would likely be relieved to have Donald Trump back in the White House.Compared with his predecessor, Biden has operated quietly. Trump launched a trade war; slapped tariffs on Chinese imports; and infuriated Beijing by referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese Virus,” blaming the Chinese Communist Party for its spread, and even at times humoring theories that the party may have played a role in its creation. Continued here

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A New Trick Uses AI to Jailbreak AI Models--Including GPT-4     When the board of OpenAI suddenly fired the company's CEO last month, it sparked speculation that board members were rattled by the breakneck pace of progress in artificial intelligence and the possible risks of seeking to commercialize the technology too quickly. Robust Intelligence, a startup founded in 2020 to develop ways to protect AI systems from attack, says that some existing risks need more attention.Working with researchers from Yale University, Robust Intelligence has developed a systematic way to probe large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI's prized GPT-4 asset, using "adversarial" AI models to discover "jailbreak" prompts that cause the language models to misbehave. Continued here

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A playbook for financing climate solutions     Tackling climate change costs a lot of money — and the financial sector is key to getting that money flowing. In a wide-ranging conversation, sustainable investment leaders Nili Gilbert and David Blood discuss where progress is being made on climate solutions, where capital still needs to move faster and why this is an unprecedented opportunity for sustainable growth. Continued here

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When Your New Hire Is in Jail on His First Day     And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here

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A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions     The average adult makes 33,000 to 35,000 total decisions each day. Many of these happen automatically and simultaneously through the information we’ve subconsciously stored about what is “good” or “bad.” But some decisions are heavier and need conscious thinking. Writing or journaling can help. The practice of daily writing interrupts this “autopilot mode” and invites us to live our lives more intentionally. Continued here

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Human intelligence: It's how your brain is wired rather than size that matters     Arthur Keith was one of those misbegotten researchers who have turned out to be wrong in many of the things they said. A prominent anatomist and anthropologist in the early 20th Century, he was a proponent of scientific racism and opposed racial mixing. At least partly because of his racial views, he was convinced humans originated in Europe, not Africa as is now universally accepted. And he was a strong supporter of Piltdown Man, a notorious hoax involving fake fossils.Keith also described a notion that became known as the cerebral Rubicon. Noting that humans have larger brains than other primates, he argued that human intelligence only became possible once our brains reached a particular threshold size. For Homo, the genus to which we belong, he thought the minimum volume was around 600-750 cubic cm (37-46 cubic inches). For our species Homo sapiens, it was 900 cubic cm (55 cubic inches). Any smaller, the argument went, and the brain wouldn't have enough computational power to support human reasoning. Continued here

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The Best Password Managers to Secure Your Digital Life     Password managers are the vegetables of the internet. We know they’re good for us, but most of us are happier snacking on the password equivalent of junk food. For nearly a decade, that’s been “123456” and “password”—the two most commonly used passwords on the web. The problem is, most of us don’t know what makes a good password and aren’t able to remember hundreds of them anyway.The safest (if craziest) way to store your passwords is to memorize them all. (Make sure they are long, strong, and secure!) Just kidding. That might work for Memory Grand Master Ed Cooke, but most of us are not capable of such fantastic feats. We need to offload that work to password managers, which offer secure vaults that can stand in for our memory. Continued here

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How to stop the next pandemic? Stop deforestation     Clearing tropical forests isn't just dangerous to the natural world — it's also a threat to human health and wellbeing, says physician Neil Vora. Tracing how environmental devastation led to deadly epidemics like Ebola, he presents three ways deforestation unleashes disease and calls on each of us to help preserve the delicate ecological balance we depend upon. Continued here

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Trump's Polarization of Science Is Bad for Everyone     A re­elected Donald Trump would continue to attack studies that stand in the way of his agenda—and to make support for scientific inquiry a tribal belief.The president of the United States cannot control the trajectory of a hurricane, but he can—we learned in 2019—force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to endorse a trajectory that he invented. Thus went Sharpiegate, the brief episode that began when Donald Trump tweeted a warning about Hurricane Dorian’s danger to several states. It was one of his more anodyne tweets, but he erroneously included Alabama. He doubled down when questioned, producing as proof a NOAA forecast altered with what looked suspiciously like a Sharpie. When this failed to quiet criticism, he strong-armed the agency into a statement that affirmed his tweet. Continued here

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Vesuvius Challenge: Can AI decipher these mysterious ancient scrolls?     On August 24, 79 AD, around noon, Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the nearby Roman settlements of Pompeii and Herculaneum in plumes of blistering hot smoke. One of the biggest and most famous natural disasters of the ancient world, the eruption is thought to have killed close to 16,000 people. At the same time, the volcanic ash expelled from Vesuvius’ bowels preserved countless murals, artifacts, and — in the case of Herculaneum’s Villa dei Papiri — even the contents of an entire library.“It really is an amazing combination of circumstances that allowed its preservation,” Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, told Big Think. “The villa was at exactly the right distance from the volcano. The temperature was neither too hot nor too cold. Had it been any cooler, the eruption would have set it on fire. Instead, it carbonized everything — not only the papyri, but all kinds of organic material. And then came a mudflow, sealing the whole thing off from bacteria or other destructive agents.” Continued here

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NASA says SpaceX's next Starship flight could test refueling tech     SpaceX and NASA could take a tentative step toward orbital refueling on the next test flight of Starship, but the US space agency says officials haven't made a final decision on when to begin demonstrating cryogenic propellant transfer capabilities that are necessary to return astronauts to the Moon. Continued here

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World's Biggest Iceberg Finally Escapes Antarctica     A giant iceberg called A23a, which broke off from Antarctica in 1986, is finally moving away from the icy continent after being stuck on the seafloor for decadesStuck on the seafloor for decades, Iceberg A-23A now freely drifts northward toward warmer, iceberg-destroying waters. Continued here

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Consciousness: Not just a problem for philosophers     We’re diving deep into the “hard problem of consciousness.” Kmele combines the perspectives of five different scientists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders to approach one of humanity’s most pressing questions: what is consciousness?In the AI age, the question of consciousness is more prevalent than ever. Is every single thing in the universe self-aware? What does it actually mean to be conscious? Are our bodies really just a vessel for our thoughts? Kmele asks these questions, and many more, in the most thought-provoking episode yet. This is Dispatches from The Well. Continued here

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Share Your Memories With Our Favorite Digital Photo Frames     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 WIREDMost of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos just sitting on our phones and computers that we rarely get to revisit in a polished way. I make photo albums, but some deserve to be more on display, and there are just too many to frame. That's why I love digital photo frames. Continued here

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Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language     The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups. Continued here

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The Pilots Delivering Your Amazon Packages Are Ready to Strike     Amazon deliveries could be headed for some turbulence in the new year. Pilots for US-based Air Transport International, a cargo airline that ferries Amazon packages from its fulfillment centers to airports nearer to its customers, voted to authorize a strike last month. During the three and a half years the union has been negotiating with ATI, wages in the industry have soared, and ATI’s pilots complain that their pay has fallen behind. Meanwhile, they say ATI is facing record attrition as pilots jump ship to better-paying carriers.A strike could throw a wrench in Amazon’s logistics network. ATI, owned by holding company ATSG, operates half of the 80 US aircraft currently in service for Amazon, according to an estimate by Planespotters. But the pilots, who are represented by the Air Line Pilots Association union, can’t walk out until at least next year. Continued here