Leadership,
Education
“What started as simply stargazing
with her Girl Scouts troop as a 7-year-old in New Mexico has since turned into
a career at NASA, IBM, Apple and Dell for Sylvia Acevedo.
Most recently, in May, she was named
the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, the organization
she belonged to growing up. Her mission: to ensure STEM learning is a part of
every young woman's life.
"I had an 'aha' moment when I
was a young girl and my troop leader saw me looking at the stars," Acevedo
tells CNBC Make It.
"Later on, when we were choosing our badges, she
encouraged me to get my science badge," she recalls. And the rest is
history.”
Solar Eclipse, Science
“On Monday, as you
might have heard, the first total solar eclipse in more than a century will be
visible in North America. Across a wide swath of the country, the moon will
block out the sun, creating an awe-inspiring, near-three minutes of darkness
and incredible views. A certain segment of the population, eclipse enthusiasts
known as “umbraphiles,” have been planning for months: stocking up on special
solar-eclipse glasses, planning themed festivals, and purchasing tickets
to fly into what is usually flyover country for the event. The short burst of
ecotourism is going to be huge: U.S News and World Report wrote
that a 1,600-population town in Idaho
is expecting 100,000 visitors for the event. Hotels,
Airbnbs, and even campsites have been booked for months.
So what if you forgot
to schedule—or simply did not want to invest in—an eclipse getaway? We
understand. It’s been a rough year.
If you don’t have a personal plane, it’s
probably too late to get somewhere that’s in the “path of totality,” the 70-mile-wide path across the U.S
where the sun will be completely blocked by the moon. (Fourteen states are inside the path of
totality, and the
biggest city in the path is Nashville.) Being in the path will be pretty
cool—once the moon covers that last 1 percent of the sun, it gets about 10,000
times darker. But
even if you can’t get out there, thanks to the wonders of technology, you can
still virtually watch the spectacle: NASA is live-streaming the view of it from 11
spaceships, at least three aircraft, and more than 50 balloons. You can also indulge your FOMO with
the #eclipse and #eclipse2017 hashtags, where you can be sure the people who
made it will share their experiences.”
Science, Happiness
“It’s a question
central to daily life: Do you spend money to save time or spend time to save
money? Well, if happiness is the goal, you might consider opening that wallet.
That’s the takeaway of
a study, published this week in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, whose findings suggest that spending money to
save time may reduce stress about the limited time in the day, thereby
improving happiness.
“People who spent
money to buy themselves time, such as by outsourcing disliked tasks, reported
greater overall life satisfaction,” said Ashley Whillans, an assistant
professor at the Harvard Business School and lead author of the study, which
was based on a series of surveys from several countries. Researchers did not
see the same effect when people used money for material goods.”
Health, Diet
“Attention, males of the
world: if you’re looking to attract a female partner, try changing your diet
first.
A study from Macquarie
University in Sydney, Australia says women are most attracted to
the sweaty scent of men who eat fruits and veggies. The study also claims that
fat, meat, egg and tofu intake were tied to pleasant-smelling
sweat and a carb-rich diet was linked to a more intense,
less-pleasant sweat smell.
“We’ve known for a while
that odor is an important component of attractiveness, especially for
women,” Ian Stephen, who helped conduct the small
study, said in a recent interview with NPR.
“Women basically found that men who ate more vegetables smelled nicer.””
Data, Regulations
“A NEW commodity
spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to
step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in
question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal
in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent
company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the
five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they
collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017.
Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and
Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in
America last year.
Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as
Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against
such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success
has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine,
Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the
alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers,
many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more
data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less
worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new
entrants can still make waves.
But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control
of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition,
devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the
“data economy” (see Briefing). A new approach is needed.”
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