If you can’t cultivate the art of socially skilled conflict and disagreement and make others value your honesty, you are not only depriving others of valuable thoughts and ideas but failing to grow your own potential
By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
One of the disadvantages of living in a civilized society is that there are great incentives to lie to others, especially at work. Many of us prefer fake compliments and sham agreements to brutally honest feedback and honest disagreement because we value harmony and collegiality. This is why so many employees are surprised when they don’t get promoted, get a smaller bonus than expected, or are even fired without previously registering much negative feedback from their managers. Indeed, one of the hardest things for managers to do is give their direct reports critical, negative feedback. …
The tech giant bought speech AI pioneer Nuance as part of a push into healthcare. But transformational speech transcription algorithms may still have a long way to go.
By Ruth Reader
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it had acquired Nuance Communications for $16 billion. Nuance is a pioneer in the field of advanced medical transcription, but the technology is still young. The battle to reduce the administrative burden for doctors using artificial intelligence is intensifying, and the acquisition could position Microsoft well to compete against other tech giants as they jostle for dominance within healthcare.
Nuance has a long history as a medical transcription service and has invested heavily in voice recognition technology. The hope is that its technology could potentially reduce the number of hours that doctors spend…
COVID-19 passports are imperfect solutions to a massive problem. And yes, the people building them are very aware.
By Mark Wilson
In late March, New York announced the launch of the Excelsior Pass. Colloquially, it’s what is called a COVID-19 passport.
Joe Biden is not planning any sort of national-level COVID-19 passport, so the closest we’ll get are state-sanctioned solutions. The state of New York developed Excelsior in conjunction with IBM in a mere eight weeks. It’s both an iOS and Android app — as well as a website — that allows people who have been vaccinated or tested negative for COVID-19 to quickly enter everywhere from big venues like Madison Square Garden to smaller, one-off events like…
In 2001, Tom Szaky founded TerraCycle — and launched a global recycling revolution
By Elizabeth Segran
Have you ever felt guilty about tossing your old Teva sandals, or Colgate toothbrush, or Etch A Sketch into the trash, where they will clog up a landfill for hundreds of years? I have good news for you. All of those items — and many more — are now recyclable thanks to TerraCycle, a company that can recycle just about anything, especially items that can’t be processed by municipal facilities.
When the company launched in 2001, eliminating waste wasn’t something the average consumer cared about, but two decades later, environmentalism has gone mainstream, and that’s been good…
An architect of California’s tough new privacy laws says we shouldn’t bet on anything similar happening on a national level in the near future
By Mark Sullivan
Alastair Mactaggart founded and bankrolled the privacy activism organization that pushed California’s landmark privacy law–the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)–into the books in 2018. The law spurred the introduction of similar privacy bills in states around the country, and it will likely give shape to an eventual federal privacy law.
As the story goes, Mactaggart, who made his fortune in the Bay Area real estate market, spoke to a Google employee at a cocktail party in 2016 who told him he’d be surprised at the amount of data the search giant had on him. Alarmed, Mactaggart and…
Chou has struggled to raise funding for her tool to help manage harassment on Twitter. Now she’s going up against a competitor with far more resources.
By Katharine Schwab
In January 2021, prominent software engineer Tracy Chou opened up registrations for her company’s first product. The service — like the company, called Block Party — is designed to help people who experience harassment online, starting on Twitter but with the ambition to expand to other platforms. By giving users more control over what they see on Twitter, Chou is hoping to solve one of the biggest and most intractable problems with social media.
The problem is also deeply personal. “I have some dedicated harassers who are proud to have been harassing me for six or seven…
A lot of people are ready to party their way out of the pandemic, but let’s hear it for quietly appreciating our precious safety and just kind of vibing and thriving
By Joe Berkowitz
Fetch the bolt cutters, America.
As the vaccination effort ramps up nationwide, anticipation of unfettered freedom crackles in the air. People are getting ready to be perceived out in the wild again, to hit unpause on the Massive Multiplayer Game of social life in physical spaces. Indoor ones, even! Here comes the heavy wave of ecstatic hedonism, as economists and tarot-reading Twitterers predict a second coming of the Roaring ’20s.
And that’s fine! For a while. More power to the (vaccinated) partyers, but personally I’m over the idea of an entire new Roaring ’20s. …
The attackers are using chat-app file sharing as a content distribution network for malware that they can link to from elsewhere online
By Steven Melendez
Attackers are finding the file-sharing capabilities in popular group-chat apps such as Discord and Slack a convenient way to distribute malware, warns a new report from Cisco Talos, Cisco’s threat intelligence unit.
The risk isn’t just that hackers can gain access to a particular channel and trick people in it into downloading malware. Once a file containing malicious code is uploaded, attackers can also grab a freely accessible link to that file where it’s hosted on the chat system’s servers. Then, they can send that link to people via phishing emails, misleading texts, or any other method…
This is what happened when I tried creating the inverse of a traditional to-do list
By Diana Shi
The fog of the pandemic has made it difficult to get stuff done. After a certain point, our usual modes of time management no longer feel efficient. The classic to-do list may feel less like a motivational tool and more like a hanging obligation — and an overly familiar one, at that.
During the course of this remote-work experiment, I’ve noticed in myself a waning of energy. Slowly but surely the afternoon may descend into moments of low motivation and sluggishness, if I don’t seek out some “wake-up” activity, such as doing 50 jumping jacks or (more…
AFVentures matches technology startups with military needs while helping them navigate the “valley of death” and the labyrinthine world of defense contracts
By Mark Sullivan
The Defense Department is trying to renew its once robust relationship with Silicon Valley to find the technologies needed to confront 21st-century threats. The Air Force is taking the novel approach of establishing a venture capital firm within its ranks that locates, invests in, and opens doors for promising defense startups.
AFVentures is a division of an Air Force technology acquisition and development group called AFWerx (the AF stands for Air Force and Werx is shorthand for “work project”) established in 2017. …
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