Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted a thread on Twitter. “I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who canceled return to the office due to the delta variant,” he began. “A few predictions on what else is going to happen.” His first salvo was titled “Office Death,” and claimed that “by the time people can return to the office a lot of companies will no longer have space to return to.” His next prediction was about “City Flight.” He stated that workers would continue to flee cities and would quit if their employers forced them back into urban offices. The thread continued with sixteen more tweets.
In 2018, Herd, who is thirty-one, started a financial technology company based in northern Scotland. He soon realized the difficulty of attracting talent to his location and organized his business to operate without a physical headquarters. Impressed by the benefits of his office-free operation, Herd pivoted into a new company, First base, which supports a remote-work infrastructure. In 2019, he began tweeting strident objections to office work, with loud claims about the superiority of alternatives. When the pandemic hit, the audience interested in these discussions exploded in size. In early 2020, Herd posted a long thread of predictions about remote work’s rise during the next decade, and it hit a nerve in a way that his earlier tweets had not. His follower count grew from about a thousand to over forty-five thousand, and his threads became must-reads for anyone who closely followed these topics. Many commentators have been discussing the need for a more flexible approach to when and where work happens in a post-pandemic world. Herd, it turns out, is proposing something altogether more radical.
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Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source photograph by Paul Denzer
We constantly hear about what you should put on your resume, but we rarely talk about what to leave off.
As the CEO of a resume writing service, I’ve read more than a thousand resumes this year so far, and I’ve seen a lot of “junk” that doesn’t belong — things that can hurt your chances of landing an interview.
If you want to write a resume that says “Hire me,” then every word, number, line, and achievement must be carefully considered. So let’s hit the backspace button on seven commonly overlooked things you should remove from your resume ASAP
Can you identify a time when you were energized at work? In other words, you gave more effort than you would’ve expected to, doing something that you wouldn’t have thought was particularly exciting — because someone infused the task with energy and spurred your enthusiasm.
Why did you feel that way?
Chances are it was less about the work and more about the people you collaborated with. Perhaps the client visit became inspiring because your counterpart was so passionate and engaged. Or your boss gave you a boost of motivation because they showed genuine excitement about your ideas, interests, and aspirations for the project.
People who create this experience for others at work frequently are called energizers. They thrive on collaboration and personal connections with teammates.
Over two decades ago, Warren Buffett lectured at the University of Florida’s school of business and gave students life lessons on happiness, careers, finances, and relationships.
Buffett urged students to do the things they know will enjoy throughout their lives and gave good counsel about making business connections with likable people. “I only work with people I like,” Buffett told students. “If I could make $100 million with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I’d say no.”
Since childhood, our parents have been trying to teach us that beauty comes in different shapes and sizes. Whether we are too tall, too short, or self-conscious about our ears, growing up, many of us wished we look like someone else.Unfortunately, physical appearance has always been an essential part of our lives, and probably always will be. These people struggled with their exceptional appearance growing up, but eventually, their unique features are what made them famous.
After meeting someone for the first time, do you see yourself as a glittering conversationalist, a kind of Wildean wit whose bons mots sparkled and delighted? Or do you find yourself wincing at every possible faux pas, imagining all the ways you may have bored or offended?
If you identify with the former description, you are in the minority. Multiple studies show the average person takes a rather low opinion of their conversational abilities, and the social impressions they leave.
In most situations, we are often much more pleasant company than we imagine, yet we forget all the cues of friendliness towards us and think we were irritating or dull. It is as if we are remembering a completely different conversation from the one that actually happened.
The mismatch between our perceptions of our social performance, and others’ opinions of us, is known as the “liking gap”, and it may limit our ability to form connections in our personal lives, and also stand in the way of mutually beneficial collaborations at work. Like many of our brain’s biases, the liking gap can be hard to correct – but the latest research suggests there are ways to overcome this common form of social anxiety.
Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.” In other words, the medium doesn’t matter, only the computational ability.
Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?
To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev, and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source photograph by Paul Denzer
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James' World 2 