Sunday 12th May 2024

Quash Your Bad Habits by Knowing What Triggers Them - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

Sometimes we just need to pause.

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How to Reverse a Mistake in the Middle of It - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

I was moving as fast as I could and not getting anywhere, a feeling I’m well acquainted with. This time, though, it was deliberate: I was on a stationary Spin bicycle. When the towel draped over my handlebars fell to the ground, I tried to stop pedaling and get off. Tried being the operative word. […]

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Your Boss Is Leaving for Another Job. Should You Follow? - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

When your boss leaves for a new company, it can be tempting to try to follow them, especially if you’ve had a strong working relationship and built up trust. But is it a good idea? In this article, the author offers advice from Nancy Rothbard, a professor of management and the deputy dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Arika Pierce Williams, a leadership development consultant and the president and founder of Piercing Strategies. They outline five questions to ask yourself before making the leap: 1) Do I know why my boss is choosing to leave? 2) How critical has my boss been to my success? 3) How worried am I about the organization’s future? 4) Do I have the option to leave — and do I really want that? 5) Has my boss explicitly offered me a job?

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Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

“A good sketch is better than a long speech…” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte The ability to visualize the implications of data is as old as humanity itself. Yet due to the vast quantities, sources, and sinks of data being pumped around our global economy at an ever increasing rate, the need […]

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Your Best Ideas Are Often Your Last Ideas - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

Research has clearly shown that people’s creativity tends to increase or stay constant over the course of an ideation session. Nevertheless, most of us consistently underestimate the value of persistence in the creative process — a fallacy the authors refer to as the “creative cliff illusion.” While it is true that we tend to produce fewer ideas the longer we brainstorm, we inaccurately assume that that decline in productivity correlates with a decline in the creativity of the ideas we come up with. And this misperception can lead us to stop brainstorming too early, before we’ve reached our best ideas. Luckily, the authors’ research also suggests that increased awareness of this phenomenon — either through prior experience with the reality of creative work, or through explicit education — can reduce its potency. Based on these findings, the authors propose several tactical strategies for managers looking to foster creativity in their teams, including explaining and reminding people about the counterintuitive nature of the creative process, setting aside extra time for ideation, and constant experimentation and iteration to improve how teams come up with new ideas.

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A new understanding of tinnitus and deafness could help reverse both - New Scientist (No paywall)

Investigations of the paradoxical link between tinnitus and hearing loss have revealed a hidden form of deafness, paving the way to possible new treatments

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Longest-living cat breeds revealed by life expectancy study - New Scientist (No paywall)

Birman and Burmese cats typically live for more than 14 years while sphynxes live less than half as long on average, finds a study of pet cats in the UK

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Fusion reactors could create ingredients for a nuclear weapon in weeks - New Scientist (No paywall)

Concern over the risks of enabling nuclear weapons development is usually focused on nuclear fission reactors, but the potential harm from more advanced fusion reactors has been underappreciated

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Nintendo Just Quietly Released One of the Most Underrated Puzzle Games

Indie puzzle game Hand in Hand is delightfully understated, and so it would make sense if its May 11 release on Nintendo Switch escapes your notice. Trust us, you don’t want to let it. Hand in Hand is a fantastic Switch port offering something rare to video game — a seamless split-screen that is required even for single players.

Games don't feature a solo split-screen often, presumably, because controlling two characters at once is complicated. It can even feel overwhelming. Butt Hand in Hand, which plays gently with the idea of "soulmates," challenges that feeling gracefully. It takes cues from 2013 adventure game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, probably the most popular instance of simultaneously controlling characters, and it heightens the drama; instead of mapping two different joysticks to two different characters, the way Brothers does, Hand in Hand makes you move both characters with the same joystick. Local co-op controls, however, are mapped to both joysticks the way Brothers is.

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'Doctor Who's Future is "Going to be Brilliant," Jodie Whittaker Says

The 13th Doctor couldn’t be more excited about the future — even if she’s a bit jealous.

Before the Disney+ era, before the 60th anniversary specials, bi-generation, and before Ncuti Gatwa got cast as the first Black actor cast in the lead role, Jodie Whittaker made Doctor Who history. After more than half a century of the Doctor portrayed as a man, she took on the role of the world-weary Time Lord with a newfound sense of childlike wonder and whimsy. “I never get bored of talking about it,” she tells Inverse. “I love it. It's my happiest time.”

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