Skip to main content

January 2023 - Things of Interest


·        52 acts of kindness: how to spread joy in every week of 2023

·        The New Literacy Project’s video offers advice on talking with loved ones in a time of extreme polarisation. John Silva recommends practicing PEP – Patience, Empathy, and Persistence – to help family members veer away from misinformation and conspiracy theories. This webinar, originally delivered for Thanksgiving 2021, stays true and relevant for all family gatherings.

·        Despite much fanfare and promises by lawmakers and proponents, misguided antitrust legislation designed to weaken some of America’s most prominent technology companies was not even brought to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives or the Senate. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) failed to pass because of serious privacy, security, and content moderation problems that were identified early on but never adequately addressed by sponsors and supporters

·        Egg prices have soared 60% in a year. Here's why. Absurd egg prices are a result of corporate greed, group tells FTC

·        And the FTC focuses on non-compete agreements

·        4 common myths about food: the surprising truth about Twinkies, expiration dates, throwing rice at weddings, and fortune cookies

·        Are we headed toward a “polycrisis”? The concept was everywhere in Davos. But is it saying anything meaningful? A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects

·        The past eight years saw the highest global temperatures on record dating back to 1850, according to a new report. Extreme weather events caused at least $165B in damages and economic losses in the US in 2022, estimates say

·        Top Risks is Eurasia Group's annual forecast of the political risks that are most likely to play out over the course of the year

·        And the world's most peaceful countries

·        The Year in Quiet Quitting. A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well-lived life

·        Your stuff is actually worse now. How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products

·        Is modern life ruining our powers of concentration?

·        How to Ask Good Questions. Small talk can be painful but real connections are possible

·        7 daily habits to add to your routine for a happiness boost and the daily habits of happiness experts

·        Social media is too important to be so opaque with its data

·        Meta fined 390M euros in latest European privacy crackdown

·        leading authors pick eight non-fiction books to change your mind

·        Bored at work? Your brain is trying to warn you. Boredom isn’t the enemy, it’s a catalyst for changing your relationship to work

·        Brian May (Queen) wants to collaborate with Paul McCartney (The Beatles)

·        The decluttering philosophy that can help you keep your home organised. Marie Kondo, the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, revealed she's 'kind of given up' on being so tidy

·        Baroness Minouche Shafik to become President of Columbia University in summer of 2023

·        Lego community ambassador Anna Bitanga: this is what it’s like being an official Lego photographer

·        A goal isn’t a mission. A heated argument recorded in the White House in 1962 offers a cautionary lesson in mission-setting for leaders today

·        Net Zero Review: UK could do more to reap economic benefits of green growth

·        Despite great employment numbers (lowest unemployment rate since 1969) in January, most Americans’ view of the economy is negative

·        Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realise. So, how should we think about our different styles of thinking?

·        Your memory probably isn’t as bad as you think so here are some tips to help improve it

·        The work-from-anywhere war is beginning. The most sought-after talent want ultimate flexibility. Their bosses need to get on board

·        There’s a better way to get the things you want…how to negotiate over practically anything

·        Infographic on the longest lasting cars, in miles

·        Born that way. Confident or shy, our temperament is mostly baked-in from birth. But how that influences our lives is open for debate

·        You don’t need to be a parent to build meaningful relationships with kids

·        Here’s the ‘rare’ skill 70 parents who raised highly successful adults taught their kids

·        6 surprising things you think are making you happy, but are doing the opposite

·        The health benefits of a random act of kindness

·        An experimental platform that puts moderation in the hands of its users shows that people do evaluate posts effectively and share their assessments with others.

·        Building trust in an age of disinformation

·        What’s the best way to deal with a flood of misinformation? Maybe it’s time for some deliberate ignorance

·        Do you have an eye for credibility?

·        Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes. So how much you should tip restaurant staff, hotel staff, and drivers in every country?

·        A podcast on what you should read next

·        And an interesting “almost Presidents” podcast

·        11 tech trends to watch in 2023

·        Why the climate fight will fail without India

·        Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 greatest singers of all time

·        The 34 most anticipated albums of 2023

·        The best movie posters of 2022

·        One year ago: American companies that failed in China

·        A Princeton student built an app which can detect if ChatGPT wrote an essay to combat AI-based plagiarism

·        The “Wicked” Bible. One typo ruined two careers, scandalized Europe, and led to a mass-scale book purge

·        Podcast: The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness

·        5 things you didn’t know GPS could do. It's not just keeping you from getting lost

·        BMW’s colour-changing concept car

·        Data reveals the loneliest cities in America

·        What do the coloured circles on food packages mean?

·        10 breakthrough technologies of 2023

·        The Golden Globes winners and not-so-lucky ones

·        The Henley Passport Index is the original, authoritative ranking of all the world’s passports according to the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa

·        Visualising changing world population, by country

·        2023 energy crisis: what can we learn from 1973

·        How the shopping cart changed the way we shop

·        8 powerful speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. other than his famous one

·        Visualising the productivity of the US Congress

·        TikTok rolls out its ‘state-controlled media’ label to 40 more countries

·        A statistical analysis of how music has changed since the 1950s

·        AI Chatbots now let you talk to historical figures like Shakespeare and Andy Warhol

·        Who's in your inner circle? Exploring the unintended consequences of having friends who are just like us

·        Ian Bremmer says your mind is like a programme; here’s how to update it: become a great strategic thinker

·        The world’s largest stack of menus

·        Despite the rise of social media and the ubiquity of the creator economy, most Gen Z-ers are interested in the same traditional careers as generations before them

·        The US Justice Department is suing Google, claiming the company has monopolised the digital advertising market, and is seeking to force Google to divest parts of its business

·        A TED Talk on how to deal with rejection

·        The right way of defogging your car windows

·        The top 50 most visited websites in the world

·        “Stranger Things” was 2022's most streamed original series in the US; “Ozark” and “Wednesday” round out the top three, with Netflix hauling in 13 of the top 15 programmes

·        Here’s a full-length documentary about the ambivalent history of one of the 20th century's most provocative inventions: the lie detector

·        CNET is now letting an AI write articles for its site. The problem is, it's kind of a moron, publishing very dumb errors

·        Microsoft and OpenAI working on ChatGPT-powered Bing in challenge to Google

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 2023 - Things of Interest

  All Things Tech 1.           Daniel Susskind’s report on work and meaning in the age of AI 2.          Intel execs make small cut to their overall compensation after a disastrous quarter 3.          Netflix lists rules and exemptions to prevent account sharing outside household. Also, The era of Netflix password sharing is coming to an end. Netflix reveals first details of password sharing crackdown 4.          How to use ChatGPT : What you need to know, how you can get started on it, and what you can use it for. And seven goals when asking it to re-write something 5.          ChatGPT might be taking over the internet, but a computer scientist explains why some problems are still too h...
Post a Comment
Read more

Musings 7 May 2014

"Call it magic or call it true." This morning, my son, Nael, and I were watching the video for Coldplay's new single, Magic. Chris Martin's handwritten lyric sheets for their new album, Ghost Stories, can be found here . It's a funny thing with Coldplay. I don't consider myself a major fan but that hasn't stopped me from buying all their CDs. Oh, well... some sort of 'conscious uncoupling' here? Do you remember the movie Wicker Park when The Scientist played near the end. They couldn't have chosen a better song to fit the scene. Interesting, the word Ghost. The Police's Ghost in the Machine (1981) was an excellent album and I like the Cure song, The Hungry Ghost (on 4:13 Dream, released in 2008. Looking forward to a new Cure album this year) Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance , remains a favourite of mine. Which is why I would like to get a hold of Our Choice . Looked at in the context of our planet's history, what we're do...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leaders and employees

In the last month, I came across a few interesting readings on leadership and employees worth sharing. Jacob Morgan has a book out called  The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization. He talks about the book in his Forbes post and his manifesto . I especially like the graphic on the evolution of the employee on the Forbes website. Jacob's also involved in a collaborative initiative, The Future Organization. You can join if this is of interest and if you can afford the membership. Good employees stem from and result in good leaders, leaders who inspire, according to Bain and Company, their article, Leaders who inspire: A 21st-century approach to developing your talent . " Leaders can no longer rely only on traditional leadership skills to be effective. They can no longer simply issue directives. Nor can leaders rely heavily on the traditional tools of motivation—the classic carrot-and-stick approach. Instea...
Post a Comment
Read more