Earlier this month my family and I made a memorable journey to a fishing village in Cambodia. While there we were lucky to spend some time at a local school with a group of sixth grade children who had taken a rowboat to get to class. Unfortunately, their teacher was missing that day – because
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About a year and a half ago, a Japanese company called Gatebox released a depressing preview video of a new AI powered “Holographic Wife” that would offer lonely young Japanese salarymen companionship at home. The character is based on anime and stand about 8 inches tall inside a glass box. This week the company finally released their actual
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The Washington Post story this week revealing the “previously unreported ratings system” used by Facebook to rate the trustworthiness of users on a scale of zero to 1 has all the usual components of an outrage-worthy announcement. How dare Facebook think they can rate all of us? What if they abuse this system or someone hacks it?
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For the past several years the debate about tattoos at work has gone back and forth between those who think a tattoo is taboo in the office and those who feel it is a modern expression of individuality and may even help connect with certain people. The view of this article is that more millennials are uncovering their
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A team of German researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany studied how humans interact with robots. In a paper published in PLOS ONE – they offered the finding that people who were asked to turn a robot off were more likely to leave it on if the robot pleaded with them to “live.” The conclusion
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Earlier this week the US government had to officially ask people to stop jumping out of moving cars to dance in the streets in response to a viral dance challenge for one of Drake’s songs. About the same time I first read this story, for some reason another story and video about how you can
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Last week Netflix announced that they would be stopping their long standing policy of asking customers to vote on early pilots for programs to see if they have enough critical mass and audience to continue. In the same week, at a television industry event a Netflix executive shared that Netflix finds demographics to be useless
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One piece of advice I am fond of sharing from the stage is about the importance of showing your work – something we are told to do in school but often forget. This brand video from Victorinox is a twelve minute journey behind the scenes into how their iconic Swiss Army Knives are made. The
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Recently a contributor to Forbes named Panos Mourdoukoutas wrote an opinion piece suggesting that local taxpayers would be better off if libraries were replaced with Amazon. The article created an instant controversy and media reporting of the outrage led Forbes to quickly take it down. For years the expansion of contributors to the Forbes network
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British supermarkets are quickly becoming the unexpected pioneers in adding more empathy into retail. In January, Tesco introduced a “slow checkout line” for customers who have dementia or otherwise need more time to check out. This week, Morrisons, another British supermarket chain, announced it would have “quiet hours” to help autistic shoppers to have a
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