When I Offered Someone a Job, Her Dad Got on the Phone With Questions

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When I Offered Someone a Job, Her Dad Got on the Phone With Questions And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here

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Medieval Pantry Stocked With Spices Found in 500-Year-Old Shipwreck In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan. Continued here

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Dating Apps Crack Down on Romance Scammers The dating app Tinder changed the way we connect by mainstreaming the swipe: Swipe left to reject; swipe right to see if there’s a spark. Now, in the age of pernicious romance scams, Tinder is going hard on another feature: the block. Tinder, which is owned by Match Group, recently said it was introducing a feature that lets users block someone’s profile as soon as it comes up on the app. Previously, Tinder members could only block someone after there was a match and one party subsequently filed a report. Now, blocking can happen right away. Tinder says this is an “easy way to avoid seeing a boss or an ex” on the app; it’s also a mechanism for blocking malicious accounts before there’s even a chance of swiping right. Another new feature in Tinder, Long Press Reporting, speeds up the process for filing complaints. App users can just press on an offensive or shady message and report bad behavior from there. Continued here

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Want a better relationship? Learn how to discuss money with your partner One of the last taboos in a modern relationship is talking about money. While many people like to pretend that love conquers all, or that a positive attitude will overcome all obstacles, the fact is that money issues are a leading factor in divorces — especially among young couples. A 2013 study found that money issues were a significant reason for divorce in 40% of cases. But why? In a consumer society like ours, why do we not like to talk about money in a relationship? And, perhaps more importantly, how can we keep this tendency from negatively impacting our relationships? Continued here

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South African wedding goat and 4 other curious gift-giving traditions from around the world Giving a gift is a tradition as old as society itself. As far back as records allow, we can find examples of gift-giving practices — a dowry, a birthday present, or even bringing a bottle of wine to a party. Humans have always and everywhere given gifts to one another. Gift-giving traditions vary widely, even within the same culture. At Christmas, for example, my family always had the youngest person distribute the presents. I know one family who has a strict “one present only” rule, and another family who insists that gifts either must be handmade or customized to the receiver. Continued here

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If racial identity can be fluid, who changes their race? | Psyche Ideas is a political science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies political psychology, political behaviour and race, largely in the realm of US politics. In the United States, although attention towards race and identity is ubiquitous, this focus often remains narrow – seeing racial identity as a rigid, permanent trait clearly defined for all. Yet growing immigration rates and racial intermarriage have left many with racially ambiguous positions in US society. Accordingly, burgeoning research on ‘racial fluidity’ has sought to better understand these shifting contours of race. In recent research, I take one step in this endeavour, evaluating how the same Americans change the way they racially self-identify over time. Continued here

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Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary Tweeted About His Business Philosophy and Ended Up in Hot Water On Twitter, the Shark Tank investor known as Mr. Wonderful likened financial success to freedom. Continued here

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Earthquake footage shows Turkey’s buildings collapsing like pancakes. An expert explains why. A pair of huge earthquakes have struck in Turkey, leaving thousands of people dead and unknown numbers injured or displaced.  The first quake, near Gaziantep close to the Syrian border, measured 7.8 in magnitude and was felt as far away as the UK. The second occurred nine hours later, on what appears to be an intersecting fault, registering a magnitude of 7.5.  Continued here

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How Pollination Affects Chocolate Production Tiny flies that pollinate cacao are struggling, and this could affect our supply of chocolate It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without chocolate. Yet cacao trees, which are the source of chocolate, are vulnerable. Continued here

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The Commons: Monuments to the Unthinkable America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history, Clint Smith wrote in the December 2022 issue. What can we learn from how Germany remembers the Holocaust? Thank you for this engaging article. As I read it, I could feel Mr. Smith’s empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and their families. I’ve never had much of an inclination to travel to Germany, but after reading this article, I would really like to follow the path he took. It would be great if The Atlantic could publish a sister article by a German writer providing their perspective on visiting museums and historical sites in America that pertain to the story of African Americans. Continued here

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Ancient Golden Glass Unearthed During Roman Subway Construction Subway construction in Rome has revealed a rare fourth-century golden glass depiction of Roma, the personification of ancient Rome. It’s the first known artifact of its kind. “Golden glass is already a very rare finding, but this has no comparison,” Simona Morretta, an archaeologist from the special superintendency of Rome, tells the Italian news agency Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), per Google Translate.  Continued here

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The 6 Ways to Grow a Company The first step to generating real growth is to understand where it comes from. It can be boiled down to six simple categories: new processes, new experiences, new features, new customers, new offerings, and new models. Deciding which ways to grow needs to be intentional — not driven by luck. Innovation budgets are finite, so allocations of your scarce resources should reduce risk and focus on the best bets. It needs to be balanced for maximum return the same way a retirement fund needs to be balanced among high and low risks and rewards. Continued here

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Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes? They hit suddenly and without warning. The two devastating earthquakes that struck south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria have claimed thousands of lives and left many more injured or without shelter. Occurring in the early hours of 6 February, most of the victims would have been inside sleeping when the first 7.8 magnitude earthquake brought their homes crashing down on top of them.  The first indication semiologists had that a major disaster was unfolding were the abrupt flashes of activity on their sensitive instruments spread throughout the world as the seismic waves produced by the first earthquake reverberated around the globe. A few hours later this was followed by a second large earthquake of 7.5 magnitude. Continued here

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The cosmic reason behind planetary rings It was more than 400 years ago — all the way back in 1610 — that humanity got our first glimpse of planetary rings. Looking at Saturn through his primitive telescope, Galileo Galilei noted that there were protrusions coming out of both sides of its planetary disk: a feature that he likened to “ears” surrounding it. By mid-century, other astronomers like Christiaan Huygens had gone further and noted a gap separating these protrusions from the planet itself: Saturn was surrounded by a giant ring. In the time since, we’ve discovered gaps, moons, and moonlets within this system of rings, and moreover, that Saturn isn’t the only world to possess them. We now know that all of our Solar System’s gas giant worlds possess rings: Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have them, but they’re far less significant and massive than Saturn’s rings. We’ve also learned that Saturn’s rings are evaporating, and will likely be no more prominent than Jupiter’s after another 50-200 million years. Additionally, at least two outer Solar System objects — centaur Chiron and Kuiper belt object Quaoar — both possess them, and several known exoplanets show potential evidence for rings. Continued here

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Feel Stuck? Use the Rule of 5 Little Things to Start Being More Productive, Focused, and Happier Sometimes seeing the seemingly impenetrable forest can keep you from seeing all the trees you can easily fix. Continued here

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Have Companies Become Too Specialized? Starting in the late 1980s, a de-diversification wave swept through corporate America, on the premise that conglomerates and highly diversified companies would perform better by focusing on their core businesses. But capital is not the only resource that can be redeployed and reconfigured within a diversified corporation. Companies diversify into new markets in order to exploit underutilized assets or competences. Intangible resources, such as reputation, can be better leveraged and exploited within the confines of a multi-divisional corporation. Managers can more easily recognize and capitalize on innovation opportunities within the boundaries of a diversified firm than when they occur in the open market. Continued here

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The ‘Small Self’ Effect In 1968, three astronauts were sent to orbit the moon. On Christmas Eve, during their fourth lap, the astronaut Bill Anders was preparing to take a series of images of the lunar surface when he spotted the Earth rising above the horizon. The photo he snapped would become known as Earthrise. Humanity had seen a few images of the planet before, but not like this. We were just sort of hanging there, enveloped in blue-and-white swirls—delicate, vulnerable, beautiful—but otherwise surrounded by darkness.  Back on Earth, the image circulated quickly, showing up on television, and in magazines and newspapers around the planet. Continued here

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How Chinese Companies Are Reinventing Management China’s companies have long been acclaimed for their manufacturing prowess and, more recently, for their pragmatic approach to innovation. Now it’s time to recognize how they are reinventing the role of management through an approach the authors call “digitally enhanced directed autonomy,” or DEDA. Continued here

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MIT scientists design AI that could predict rare disasters, like bridge collapses and rogue waves In 1995, the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II was sailing off the coast of Newfoundland. The ship’s crew and passengers were caught in the teeth of a hurricane. The seas were a roiling mass, jostling the boat back and forth.  As his crew struggled to keep the boat afloat and the passengers huddled inside their cabins, Captain Ronald Warwick saw a wall of white rise before the boat. It seemed, he later recalled, as if the boat were heading straight for the White Cliffs of Dover. In horror, he realized this wall was not a landmass, but a wave dozens of feet high. A minute later, it smashed over the bow of his ship. The Queen Elizabeth II tipped forward and raced down the backside of the wave like a car on a roller coaster. It hit the next wave with enough force to damage the ship. Luckily, due to the fact the boat was not caught side-on, and most of the passengers were in their cabins, no one was injured. Continued here

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Chinese spy balloon over the US: An aerospace expert explains how they work and what they see The U.S. military shot down what U.S. officials called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, 2023. Officials said that the U.S. Navy planned to recover the debris, which is in shallow water. The U.S. and Canada tracked the balloon as it crossed the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western Canada and entered U.S. airspace over Idaho. Officials of the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed on Feb. 2, 2023, that the military was tracking the balloon as it flew over the continental U.S. at an altitude of about 60,000 feet, including over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. The base houses the 341st Missile Wing, which operates nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. Continued here

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Ask Your Team "What Are You Stuck On?" Too often team meetings feel draining. But what if they accelerated the progress they often stifle? Managers can take a page from the startup world, where “mastermind meetings” are all the rage. Entrepreneurs routinely sign five-figure checks for the privilege of joining other founders and answering a single question — what are you stuck on? — before an audience of their peers. The benefits of asking this question include: reduced procrastination, stronger resilience, greater trust, less “coasting,” and more growth. Continued here

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The Write Way to Develop Our Kids  ChatGPT has people fearing that students will adapt it to cheat. They're missing the point. We need to teach them actual writing. Continued here

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The Best VPNs to Protect Yourself Online A virtual private network (VPN) is like a protective tunnel you can use to pass through a public network, protecting your data from outside eyes. Whether you're worried about hiding your browsing activity from your internet service provider so it doesn't sell your data to advertisers, or you want to stay safe on a public Wi-Fi hot spot to keep nearby digital snoops from capturing your passwords, a VPN can help protect you. However, while a VPN will keep you safe at your local coffee shop, it comes with a cost. Using a VPN means your VPN provider will know everything about your browsing habits. This makes VPN providers a target for hackers. Be sure you even need one before you read on. Continued here

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A Year After Russia Invaded, a Founder and Her Ukrainian Team Found the Power to Push Forward WLCM founder Lindsey Witmer Collins has redefined what it means to run a company-- and discovered a way to find joy in the darkest times. Continued here

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Skiing Faces an Uncertain Future as Winters Warm Rising temperatures driven by climate change are forcing ski resorts across the world to confront the possibility of a grim future: one without snow-covered slopes. The recent record heat waves in Europe, which brought T-shirt weather around the holidays, led to widespread resort closures, causing some to seek alternative sources of income like biking and hiking.  “It looked dreadful over Christmas and New Year here, the worst I’ve seen in a long time,” Andrea Scherz, whose family has owned and operated the Swiss resort Gstaad Palace since the 1940s, tells Mark Ellwood of Robb Report. “People still enjoyed themselves, but let’s assume for the next five years we never get a white Christmas here. That will affect my business.”  Continued here

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The More You Look for Spy Balloons, the More UFOs You'll Find When U.S. government officials in early February identified and eventually shot down a surveillance balloon attributed to China, the prominent acknowledgment of a spy balloon captured public attention and inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing. But since then, the prospect of the US government intercepting unidentified flying objects has become quotidian, with three UFOs shot down in the past four days—two near Alaska and one over Lake Huron near Michigan. The spree raises the question, are there more UFOs over US airspace than usual, or is everyone just looking more closely? Researchers say it's the latter, and they note that even before the balloon mania began, the US government tracked many UFOs in its airspace, including a number of balloons. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a January report, for example, tracking incidents involving UFOs, which the US government calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs. Between March 5, 2021, and August 30, 2022, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office had 247 reports of UAPs. In a wider pool of 366 UAP reports that also includes newly discovered incidents that occurred before 2021, ODNI said that 163 were balloons "or balloon-like entities," 26 were "Unmanned Aircraft Systems," or drones, and six were "attributed to clutter." So, not all UFOs are balloons, and not all unidentified balloons are spy balloons. Continued here

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You Don't Need to Be "the Boss" to Be a Leader Most people don’t identify as a “leader” unless it’s written into their role, despite the fact that leadership is a skill, not a title. Over the years, through my work as a leadership consultant working in the trenches with companies in nearly every sector, I’ve seen hundreds of early career professionals and individual contributors project more influence than their own managers. The best leaders don’t wait for a promotion to step up. They begin practicing long before then. Continued here

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Didi's Revival Shows China Can't Live Without Big Tech Mr. Wang has five cell phones in his car, each loaded with a different ride-hailing app. He works full-time in a family-owned restaurant in China's Guangdong Province, but with the hospitality industry struggling under Covid-19 lockdowns over the past few years, he took to driving in the mornings. Using five different phones means that Wang can pick the most profitable trips, and game the apps' incentive programs to get extra bonuses. In the past month, as more people have started going out for the Chinese New Year holiday, he's been able to make around 400 RMB ($59) per shift. "I drive for whichever platform that offers the best deal," he says. "It's not a bad job. During the Chinese New Year period I can even make a New Year bonus every ride." Continued here

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Gene Expression in Neurons Solves a Brain Evolution Puzzle | Quanta Magazine Many researchers thought that the neocortex in mammals and a comparable region of the brain in reptiles might have shared an evolutionary origin. But new work shows that the structures evolved separately and are made of different types of cells. The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such a complex brain region evolved. Continued here

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The Wild Logistics of Rihanna's Super Bowl Halftime Show When you’re the person (at least partially) responsible for Left Shark, you have to think about every possible way Super Bowl audiences watch halftime shows. That’s one of the many things Bruce Rodgers has learned over the 16 years he’s spent as production designer for the mid-game performance during American football’s biggest night. “Never again,” Rodgers laughs when asked if he considered including blue fish dancers for Rihanna’s Super Bowl LVII performance. Instead, the superstar made her comeback performance (it’s Rihanna’s first since the 2018 Grammys) atop seven platforms suspended anywhere from 15 to 60 feet above the field. And while the LED-lit platforms, which were arranged in different positions as the singer moved through hits ranging from “Bitch Better Have My Money” to “Rude Boy,” looked cool as hell, they also served a very practical purpose: They kept her off the grass.  Continued here

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Has Anyone Created a Black Hole on Earth? In the popular imagination, black holes are voracious monstrosities gulping down anything in their vicinity. That is why there are occasional worries that physicists might accidentally or intentionally create one, perhaps inside a particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Would such a dark behemoth swallow up Earth itself? Not quite. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn’t pose a huge threat. Real-world black holes are only scary in the sense that if you get too close to one, you won’t be able to escape. But even if someone generated a black hole in a laboratory on Earth, the limits of human technology would prevent us from whipping up anything particularly dangerous. “It would likely be so low-mass that its gravitational influence would be relatively small,” says Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University. “It wouldn’t actually gobble up that much matter.” Continued here

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Does It Pay to Be a Whistleblower? In 2013, soon after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had started a massive whistleblowing program with the potential for large monetary rewards, two employees of a U.S. bank’s asset management business debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Continued here

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AI-powered Bing Chat loses its mind when fed Ars Technica article Over the past few days, early testers of the new Bing AI-powered chat assistant have discovered ways to push the bot to its limits with adversarial prompts, often resulting in Bing Chat appearing frustrated, sad, and questioning its existence. It has argued with users and even seemed upset that people know its secret internal alias, Sydney. Continued here

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Why We're Suddenly Spotting Spy Balloons Every question we have about the airborne objects that might or might not be spying on the U.S. On February 4 the U.S. shot down a massive Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean just off South Carolina, after it spent days traveling across the country. As Americans turned their eyes to the sky, it became apparent that the object was not alone: news soon broke that another Chinese spy balloon was floating over Latin America, and that several such balloons had encroached on U.S. airspace since 2018—and had evaded early detection at the time. China has claimed that the balloon shot down last week was merely a weather-monitoring station blown off course. But the U.S. has since recovered sensors and other electronic equipment from the wreckage, which indicate that it was likely used for eavesdropping on electronic signals. Chinese officials also claimed that the U.S. has sent surveillance balloons over their country, but U.S. officials deny this. Continued here

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Celia Cruz, the 'Queen of Salsa,' Will Appear on U.S. Quarter Celia Cruz, the singer known as the “Queen of Salsa,” will be featured on United States quarters beginning in 2024, the U.S. Mint announced. The renowned artist is the first Afro-Latina to receive the honor.  The Mint is honoring Cruz as part of its American Women Quarters Program. Started in 2022 and continuing through 2025, the initiative will release up to five new designs each year. Cruz’s design will be announced in mid-2023. Continued here

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Video Quick Take: Emerson's Elizabeth Adefioye on Aligning Employee and Corporate Cultures - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM EMERSON Elizabeth Adefioye, Emerson’s first chief people officer, is charged with leading Emerson’s cultural transformation. Today, she’s joining us to talk about how Emerson is using a moment of change to create meaningful experiences for its people and to foster a culture of trust, inclusion, and empowerment. Continued here

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Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system Tara Ghormley has always been an overachiever. She finished at the top of her class in high school, graduated summa cum laude from college and earned top honors in veterinary school. She went on to complete a rigorous training program and build a successful career as a veterinary internal medicine specialist. But in March 2020 she got infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus—just the 24th case in the small, coastal central California town she lived in at the time, near the site of an early outbreak in the COVID pandemic. “I could have done without being first at this,” she says. Continued here

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A Strange, Paranoid New Crime Drama Accused turns a British series about the powerless into an exploration of anxiety among the privileged. Whenever British TV shows are remade in the United States, they tend to undergo an uncanny glow-up: a smoothing-out of flaws, a shift in tone from pallid gray to vibrant gold, a wild uptick in the physical attractiveness of their stars. It rarely works, and almost never in crime drama—a key U.K. export—where drabness and despair are necessary textural elements, qualities that inform our understanding of not just how but also why people do the very worst things they do. Continued here

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Audiobook Narrators Fear Apple Used Their Voices to Train AI Gary Furlong, a Texas-based audiobook narrator, had worried for a while that synthetic voices created by algorithms could steal work from artists like himself. Early this month, he felt his worst fears had been realized. Furlong was among the narrators and authors who became outraged after learning of a clause in contracts between authors and leading audiobook distributor Findaway Voices, which gave Apple the right to “use audiobooks files for machine learning training and models.” Findaway was acquired by Spotify last June. Continued here

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How Diversity of Thought Can Fit into Your DEI Strategy Fawn Weaver started a distillery using her own money to honor the life of Uncle Nearest, a former enslaved man who was Jack Daniel’s first master distiller. The company took off to become the fastest growing spirits company in the world, winning many awards for its whiskeys. Weaver, a Black woman, also was deeply intentional about building in DEI best practices in from the start, which surprised some people who thought a company with a female, African-American leader wouldn’t have to think as much about DEI. Wrong, Weaver says and she demonstrates the ways the company focuses on inclusion to avoid common pitfalls other companies face when building up their diversity efforts. Weaver focuses not just on demographic diversity, but also diversity of thought, a tricky concept that’s sometimes used as a scapegoat to avoid hard conversations about DEI. Weavers says you need both. Her journey is not over, though, as she continues to work on her company’s diversity, and her industries, partnering with Jack Daniels to build a pipeline of diverse talent in the spirits business. Continued here S13 Don't Just Sponsor Women and People of Color -- Defend Them Having an “overly” analytical and unemotional leadership style is a complaint many female leaders and leaders from marginalized racial groups have levied at them. Others are criticized for being “too emotional.” In general, these leaders often suffer from the Goldilocks dilemma: They’re either being too much of one thing or not enough of that same thing. When such criticisms are levied, it’s critical for female leaders and leaders of color to have people willing to sponsor them by defending them to others. Defending comes with a certain amount of risk, and it’s the responsibility of the most powerful sponsors — typically white men — to take on that risk. Continued here S27 How to Use Neuroscience to Build Team Chemistry In this Nano Tool for Leaders, Wharton's Michael Platt shares seven science-based ideas to help you create a high-performing team. Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here S51 Latest attack on PyPI users shows crooks are only getting better More than 400 malicious packages were recently uploaded to PyPI (Python Package Index), the official code repository for the Python programming language, in the latest indication that the targeting of software developers using this form of attack isn’t a passing fad. Continued here S33 A Novel Male Birth Control Could Be an 'On-Off Switch for Sperm' Before a sperm can fertilize an egg, it faces a long journey: Propelled by the back and forth movement of its tail, it needs to swim all the way through the female reproductive tract to the fallopian tube, where it meets an egg. But in a new study, researchers who want to develop on-demand male contraceptives say they've figured out a way to prevent pregnancy: temporarily stop the sperm from swimming. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the researchers announced that when they injected 52 male mice with an experimental compound called TDI-11861, it temporarily inhibited an enzyme that helps sperm move. When they paired the males off with females to mate, no pregnancies occurred. (The same number of male mice treated with a control substance impregnated almost one-third of their mates.) The effects lasted for up to two and half hours. At around three hours, some sperm started moving again, and by 24 hours, nearly all sperm recovered normal movement. The authors say the results point the way to a short-term birth control option for men. Continued here S41 The relatively unknown artists who produced masterpieces Gerard Sekoto. Amrita Sher-Gil. Camilo Egas. Unless you studied art history or live in South Africa, India, or Ecuador, chances are you have not heard of these painters. That is unfortunate, because they were as trend-setting and forward-thinking as Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, two other artists from the same time period who are much more well-known. Often, an artist’s renown says less about the quality of their work than it does about the society that prices and exhibits that work. Picasso and Warhol are omnipresent not only because they were talented but also because the international art market — dominated by Western institutions and individuals — has historically shown the most interest in art from Europe and the U.S. Continued here S21 Five-Eyed, Nozzle-Nosed Oddity Lingered Far beyond the Cambrian Period More than a century ago paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott uncovered a very strange fossil in Canada. The finger-sized animal was utterly alien compared to anything around today: it looked like a lobster tail with five eyes and a nozzlelike trunk at one end. This 508-million-year-old organism, named Opabinia regalis, seemed an isolated expression of evolution running riot back in the Cambrian period—before a mass extinction swept such oddities away. But now scientists have discovered that such enigmatic creatures survived for tens of millions of years longer than previously thought. Only last year Harvard University paleontologist Joanna Wolfe and her colleagues described the second such specimen ever found, called Utaurora. This creature, unearthed in Utah, was related to Opabinia and lived at a similar time. But the day this find was published, Wolfe saw a photograph taken by fellow researcher Stephen Pates that would fundamentally change these organisms’ story. Pates had just found a third Opabinia-like creature in Wales—in rocks about 40 million years younger than the first two specimens. This oddball would have lived when more modern-looking animals, such as snails, cephalopods and corals, were on the rise. Continued here S23 Biden Administration Bets $74 Million on 'Enhanced' Geothermal Power The Energy Department grant aims to cut the cost of new geothermal systems that generate electricity from heat miles underground The Department of Energy will offer $74 million to geothermal pilot projects that tap into heat several miles underground, in a bid to unlock massive amounts of renewable electricity. Continued here S54 ‘They Didn’t Understand Anything, but Just Spoiled People’s Lives’ This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and researchers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.    On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied. Continued here S11 Senator Tim Scott to Join 2024 Presidential Race Against Trump and Nikki Haley The South Carolina Senator is a former small business owner and member of the Senate's Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Continued here S49 Android launches yet another way to spy on users with "Privacy Sandbox" beta Apple blew up the advertising market in 2020 when it gave tracking an opt-in feature on iOS. Since then, Google—the world's biggest advertiser—has been slow to roll out its solution for Android and Chrome. The idea that Google has come up with is called the "Privacy Sandbox," which sounds like a good thing, but it's a new tracking system for Android and Chrome. Once that is up and running, only then does Google say it will start blocking existing tracking methods like third-party cookies. Continued here S48 Tesla Autopilot workers try to unionize, are "tired of being treated like robots" Tesla Autopilot workers in Buffalo, New York, today launched a unionization campaign that, if successful, would create the first union at Elon Musk's electric carmaker. Bloomberg reported on the union drive after speaking to several Tesla workers at the Buffalo facility: Continued here S65 Mexico Bans Great White Shark-Related Tourism on Guadalupe Island The government cited bad practices in the industry as a reason for the ban, which has sparked concerns for the local economy For the last two decades, tourists and “Shark Week” producers alike have traveled to the waters surrounding a small Mexican island, eager for a chance to get up close and personal with great white sharks. Divers donned gear such as snorkels and took the plunge within submerged cages as the sharks, lured by bait, swam nearby. Continued here S19 Inside Flipkart, the Indian giant beating Amazon In October 2016, employees at Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, prepared for its upcoming Big Billion Days Sale as if it were a battle. Conference rooms in the company’s Bengaluru headquarters were renamed “war rooms.” Employees stayed overnight for days at a time, awaking from mattresses and beanbags to finish an app redesign, stress-test their systems, and have frantic last-minute calls with brands, sellers, and warehouse workers. It was a tense time, but several young staffers told Rest of World they felt like they were involved in something momentous. “It’s cliched to say this, but during the sale, you really feel like you’re part of a family,” said one former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Continued here S43 Biden FCC nominee slams critics, says ISPs shouldn't get to choose regulators President Biden's long-stalled nominee to the Federal Communications Commission fired back at her critics today, saying that the telecom industry shouldn't be allowed to choose its own regulators. Continued here S66 Eating Table Scraps and Raw Food May Help Protect Dogs Against Stomach Issues Most pet parents know just how hard it can be to resist the pleading look of a puppy who’s begging for a taste of his human family’s dinner. Now, new research suggests that giving in to those irresistible puppy-dog eyes may actually help protect young dogs against stomach issues in adulthood. Puppies that ate table scraps—as well as human meal leftovers and raw foods—experienced fewer gastrointestinal issues later in life compared to those that ate dry dog food, according to a new study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports. In addition to kibble, the findings also linked rawhides—or dog chews made from dried animal skins—with stomach issues. Continued here S15 The Subtle Art of Disagreeing with Your Boss Whether you’re someone who enjoys ruffling feathers or the type of person who’d like to challenge the status quo but shies away, you’ll benefit from understanding the best, research–backed ways to practice disagreement – even insubordination – while holding onto others’ respect at work. Todd Kashdan is a psychology professor at George Mason University and the author of the book The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively. He explains how contrarians, and those with ideas that run counter to the mainstream, can pick their battles, articulate their arguments, and gain allies along the way. Continued here S32 In Praise of AI-Generated Pickup Lines We're at the height of a global technological revolution, and yet this is the modern state of dating: You swipe left, swipe left again, and again, and again—in fact, you mind-numbingly swipe left so many times that when the app finally lands on a person you deem worthy of swiping right, you accidentally swipe left on them, too. You continue swiping.   My thumbs are bloody with disappointment that dating apps, once the face of innovation, have become relics of the status quo. But I've seen the light on the horizon in the form of generative AI programs like ChatGPT. These have now been crowned the virtual assistant of the future—so why shouldn't we use it for dating, which most people already describe as a second job? Continued here S61 A Popular—And Misunderstood—Theory of Relationships 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. Like astrology signs and the Enneagram, the psychological framework of attachment theory has become a popular blueprint for understanding the self. But as my colleague Faith Hill wrote last weekend in The Atlantic, the four attachment “types” aren’t as cut-and-dried as they may seem. In fact, the whole theory is widely misunderstood. Continued here S57 The Book That Exposed Anti-Black Racism in the Classroom As African American studies faces resistance, a conversation about the continued relevance of Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro In 1925, teachers at the Negro Manual and Training High School of Muskogee, Oklahoma, made what they thought was an appropriate choice of textbook: The Negro in Our History, by the Harvard-trained Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had written this "history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro" to supply the "need of schools long since desiring such a work," as he wrote in the book's preface. Upon learning of this textbook choice, White segregationists on the school board sprang immediately into action. They decreed that no book could be “instilled in the schools that is either klan or antiklan,” insinuating that Woodson’s Black history textbook was “antiklan." Continued here S28 Crisis Leadership: Harness the Experience of Others In this Nano Tool for Leaders, Wharton Dean Erika James and Simmons University President Lynn Perry Wooten explain how “vicarious learning” can prepare you and your team to weather any crisis. Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here S55 An Old Romantic Custom We Should Bring Back “How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. No holiday exposes the problems with gift-giving quite like Valentine’s Day. On birthdays or Christmas, you might at least find some variety. But on February 14, almost everything on offer is painfully conventional and threatens to degrade the quality of your love. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Continued here S47 Prototype of the final unreleased 3dfx GPU sells on eBay for $15,000 Graphics cards cost more than they used to, but it turns out that they can get even more expensive when they're also a rare collector's item. A late-revision prototype of the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000—intended as the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family—sold on eBay this week for $15,000, a price that makes the GeForce RTX 4090 look cheap by comparison. Continued here S60 The New 'Ant-Man' and the Creaky, Cringey Marvel Machine No hero, it seems, is invulnerable to the franchise’s bleakest obsession yet: gobs and gobs of CGI. Marvel movies have never been excessively attached to the real world, given their affinity for Norse gods, alien warriors, flying wizards, and the like. Still, some of these films had at least a vague sense of tactility, and perhaps the most grounded hero was plucky little Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, the perfect smirking everyman of the 21st century. Ant-Man’s power is that he can get very small (though sometimes he’ll switch it up and get very large). He lives in San Francisco with his family and busies himself with fighting petty theft or sabotage at the local lab. The main villain of his last film, the charming Ant-Man and the Wasp, was a criminal restaurateur named Sonny, whose superpower was that he owned a handgun. Continued here S44 Antarctic researchers say a marine heatwave could threaten ice shelves This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here.  Continued here S46 Mycroft's privacy-first, crowdfunded smart speaker will ship, but not to backers Open source voice assistant software-maker Mycroft disappointed thousands when it announced Friday it will not be sending its Linux-based smart speaker to any more people who backed the product on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Remaining inventory of the privacy-focused Amazon Echo alternative will go to those who buy the Mark II from Mycroft's website for 171 percent more than early backers pledged. Continued here S26 How Sunk Costs Affect Firms’ Investment Decisions Research by Wharton’s Marius Guenzel provides evidence that companies systematically fail to ignore “sunk costs” in losing ventures, which leads to significant investment distortions. All too often, firms continue to invest in losing ventures in the misplaced hope that they will somehow turn around to profit after the initial investment. Those are “sunk costs” and are unrecoverable, but the firms are so strongly committed to them that they don’t want to let go of the assets in divestitures. In a recent research paper titled “In Too Deep: The Effect of Sunk Costs on Corporate Investment,” Wharton finance professor Marius Guenzel presented evidence that firms “systematically fail to ignore sunk costs and that this leads to significant distortions in investment decisions.” Continued here S50 Seven states push to require ID for watching porn online After decades of America fretting over minors potentially being overexposed to pornography online, several states are suddenly moving fast in 2023 to attempt to keep kids off porn sites by passing laws requiring age verification. Continued here S58 Band Breakups Are No Simple Thing “Sometimes a journey must end for a new one to begin,” the Panic! at the Disco lead singer Brendon Urie wrote in an Instagram post last month announcing the band’s separation after 19 years. Urie, the band’s only remaining original member, said that he and his wife were expecting their first child (who has since been born), and that, going forward, his focus would be on family. Bands break up all the time, of course, and for the artists involved, that can mean pursuing a solo career or side passions, or retiring altogether. But big bands aren’t just artists, especially not in 2023; they are sometimes full-out companies, complete with operations and social-media managers. And in the age of big festivals, reunions seem a part of life. Continued here S45 American Cancer Society to vape company: Keep our name outta your mouth The American Cancer Society has made it clear that it wants nothing to do with Elfbar after the infamous Chinese vape company suggested last month that they had a partnership. The ACS also says that Elfbar can keep its money. Continued here Contributors Dharmendra Kumar Priya Ranjan Powered by Blogger.