Hey, happy Monday! Have a great week.
Articles to Read.
Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle
Work stress and burnout are mutually reinforcing / Surprisingly, the effect of work stress on burnout is much smaller than the effect of burnout on work stress.
Stress and overload in the workplace are increasing worldwide and are often considered a cause of burnout. Indeed, a new study shows that work stress and burnout are mutually reinforcing. However, contrary to popular belief, burnout has a much greater impact on work stress than vice versa. "This means that the more severe a person's burnout becomes, the more stressed they will feel at work, such as being under time pressure, for example," said Professor Christian Dormann of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Employees suffering from burnout should be timely provided with adequate support in order to break the vicious circle between work stress and burnout.
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Students Have To Jump Through Absurd Hoops To Use Exam Monitoring Software
Last month, as students at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, Canada, began studying for their midterm exams, many of them had to memorize not just the content on their tests, but a complex set of instructions for how to take them.
The school has a student body of nearly 18,500 undergraduates, and is one of many universities that have increasingly turned to exam proctoring software to catch supposed cheaters. It has a contract with Respondus, one of the many exam proctoring companies offering software designed to monitor students while they take tests by tracking head and eye movements, mouse clicks, and more. This type of surveillance has become the new norm for tens of thousands of students around the world, who—forced to study remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, often while paying full tuition—are subjected to programs that a growing body of critics say are discriminatory and highly invasive.
Like its competitors in the exam surveillance industry, Respondus uses a combination of facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm. These programs also often require students to do 360-degree webcam scans of the rooms in which they’re testing to ensure they don’t have any illicit learning material in sight.
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Having 170 competitors is not an obstacle
It states that there are around 170 uptime monitoring services. Despite this fact, I decided to make another one. Before you roll your eyes, let me explain the reasons for making such a decision. At the end of the article, you'll find a comment on hacker news that answers the question.
First of all, let's accept the term that I consider people who are solo-founders who have enough time & desire to make their products. I'm not talking about an investment of millions of dollars, complex financial calculations of risks/profits, creating a big company with hundreds of employees. I'm talking about small businesses.
Let me ask: Does every successful product have a brilliant idea? Does every successful business have an idea at all? If so, https://alternativeto.net/ didn't exist.
How often do we hear: "Gosh, why nobody solves this, isn't it obvious that people should solver this?!". But why the person who says that didn't solve it, if it's obvious?
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It is no real secret that as a discipline, military history is sometimes held in low regard by other historians. There are a number of reasons for this. Often it has to do with outdated views on what military history is and what military historians do. Frequently military history, because it has a large enthusiast and amateur audience, is regarded as an amateur field (something which is not helped by publishers who push quite out reams of quite frankly substandard works of this sort) lacking in sophistication, which is not accurate, but often believed. And perhaps most often, in my experience, these opinions serve as cover for a deeper conviction that studying militaries and warfare is icky and only done by people who like war (when I was a student, this opinion when it was expressed by a certain generation of scholars, now mostly retired, came with a very predictable dose of Vietnam-era anti-military sentiment). Often it seems the study of military history is neglected by other historians precisely because they find the subject matter uncomfortable.
So I want to talk about three major things here: what military history actually is and how it is done these days, why we should study military history and finally what my experience of being a military historian (both as a scholar and a teacher) has been, particularly given that I am a life-long civilian.
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Plants can grow quickly or accurately, but not both
Generally, our actions are subject to a speed-accuracy trade-off: the faster you do something, the less accurate you tend to be. Slower behaviors allow you to gather more information about your goal and you can adjust your actions accordingly, whether moving your hand to precisely grasp a target or deciding when to press a button. Humans and many animals consistently demonstrate the speed-accuracy trade-off. Do plants?
In a recent study, researchers measured the growth of snow pea plants as they climbed towards a support trellis. Surprisingly, as the plants grew upwards, they grew faster as they reached to grasp the thin support compared to how quickly they grew toward a thick support. This finding is perfectly in line with a speed-accuracy trade-off explanation. Thicker supports may actually be more difficult to grasp and less preferred by climbing plants, so much that in rainforest field studies, fewer climbing plants are found in areas with thicker supports.
How are plants, with no advanced nervous system, able to gather information about their environment to guide their behavior, planning and flexibly executing movement? Sound, maybe. Or chemoreception. Possibly even eye-like structures. These findings about the speed-accuracy trade-off in plants perpetuate this interesting debate about plant communication.
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Why to start a startup in a bad economy
If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders.
Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. And if you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.
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More to Check Out:
- Better disposable coffee cups
- What is a particle?
- Pimp my microwave
- Finally understand math, don't memorize it.
- The true size of countries
My Update:
In Santa Monica. Going to AZ next week.