Weekend Reading

 

Upfront I was invited on ET NOW 9 pm primetime news on 17th to discuss LIC IPO. You can watch the interaction here. ET Now - India Development Debate - 17-May-2022 I also published the monthly Q&A for April where I take questions on investing and finance from our subscribers. Monthly Q&A - April 2022 And now onto the weekend readings... The four-day workweek Businesses across the globe are becoming increasingly interested in the benefits of giving employees an extra day off, encouraged by Microsoft’s August 2019 trial of a four-day workweek in Japan, which resulted in a 40% rise in productivity. Since then, many other organizations have followed suit. The British arm of camera company Canon is among the latest to try a four-day workweek without a pay cut. In the U.S., Kickstarter and Bolt are among the many companies experimenting with four-day weeks, as is Unilever, which announced last November that it would be piloting such a schedule in New Zealand.   Of businesses already implementing a four-day workweek, 68% (up from 63% in 2019) said flexible work arrangements are helping them to attract the right talent by demonstrating the organization’s forward-thinking approach to work, such as greater autonomy stemming from meeting-free days. These businesses also recognize that their potential employees expect the norm to be “portfolio careers” of more than one job. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-does-the-four-day-workweek-mean-for-the-future-of-work/ Data is not information Data is everywhere, but turning it into information isn’t free.   It takes focus, effort, consultation and time.   More information is only useful if it helps you make a decision. Knowing the temperature on Saturn isn’t useful. Knowing it to even more accuracy is less useful. That’s because we’re not making any decisions that involve the temperature on another planet.   We’re surrounded by data that our spreadsheets or networks or cohorts seem to want us to be aware of. How many people clicked yesterday, or what someone wrote in a comment, what a backlist book sold or the foot traffic in that store vs. this store.   But if you’re not going to use the data to make a decision, don’t spend the time to expose yourself to it. It’s resistance at work.   If you can’t do anything with the data, it’s never going to be information. https://seths.blog/2022/05/data-information-and-decisions/ Google's supercharged Ctrl+F for the world around you Google announced new enhancements for its Lens multisearch tool, which lets you conduct a search with just an image and a couple of words.   A new mode, called “near me,” will let users take a photo of an object and then find results locally. As Raghavan explained, you’ll be able to take a photo of a dish and then search for restaurants that serve that specific food. Google will then display a list of relevant restaurants near you. To make this feature happen, Google scans relevant photos from websites, as well as those posted by reviewers, and then matches them to the one you uploaded. Near me will be available in English later this year and will expand to more languages “over time.”   Google is also rolling out something called scene exploration. This will allow users to pan their camera and then enter a search phrase about the objects in front of them. When explaining the feature, Raghavan used the example of trying to find a nut-free chocolate bar in a supermarket. You’ll be able to scan an entire shelf of chocolate bars and then see overlays that provide “helpful insights,” like reviews about each object. We think Raghavan’s description of the feature sums this up quite nicely: “This is like having a supercharged Ctrl+F for the world around you.” https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/11/23063809/google-lens-multisearch-feature-ai-io-near-me-scene-exploration Environmentally Friendly LEDs Created Using Rice Husks Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot (QD) LED light.   This new method transforms agricultural waste into state-of-the-art light-emitting diodes in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way.   Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks typically produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year.   The technology makes use of porous silicon (Si), a material that is non-toxic and found abundantly in nature with photoluminescence properties, stemming from its microscopic (quantum-sized) dot structures that serve as semiconductors. Waste rice husks have been found to be an excellent source of high-purity silica (SiO2) and value-added Si powder. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/04/environmentally-friendly-leds-made-from-rice-husks/ Deal with the unexpected Unforeseen circumstances happen to us all. We have disappointments and challenges. We all have reversals and those moments when, in spite of our best plans and efforts, things just seem to fall apart. Challenging circumstances are not events reserved for the poor, the uneducated or the destitute. The rich and the poor have marital problems. The rich and the poor have the same challenges that can lead to financial ruin and personal despair. In the final analysis, it is not what happens that determines the quality of our lives, it is what we choose to do when we discover that the wind has changed directions.   How quickly and responsibly we react to adversity is far more important than the adversity itself. Once we discipline ourselves to understand this, we will finally and willingly conclude that the great challenge of life is to control the process of our thinking. https://www.success.com/how-to-deal-with-the-unexpected