Category: personal AnGoL

What is Candida auris? Candida auris is a fungus that, when it gets into the bloodstream, can cause dangerous infections that can be life-threatening. Scientists first identified it in 2009 in a patient in Japan. In recent years, it has emerged around the world, largely in hospitals and nursing homes. There have been 587 C. auris cases reported in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of them in New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Source: What You Need to Know About Candida Auris – The New York Times

Those who keep more active tend to be happier overall

The scientists found that, while those who exercised regularly tended to feel bad for around 35 days a year, non-active participants felt bad for 18 days more on average.

In addition, the researchers found that physically active people feel just as good as those who don’t do sports, but who earn around $25,000 more a year.

Essentially, you’d have to earn quite a lot more for your earnings to give you the same happiness-boosting effect sport has.

Source: Exercise makes you happier than money, says Yale and Oxford study – Business Insider

FIGURE OUT THE TECH, AND CLEARLY EXPLAIN THE RULES

Third, she thinks managers should make sure that their technological infrastructure can adequately support a distributed team. Additionally, she says managers should be upfront and transparent about where team members can work from. If workers can only work remotely from certain offices or locations, managers need to be explicit about the rules so that it doesn’t seem like certain workers are enjoying certain privileges over others.

It’s also worth noting that at Google, each employee has their own set of objectives and key results both for the quarter or year—a framework that may help its remote workers stay productive. “I think that sort of organization and structure in place certainly helps people to get work done,” says Gilrane, “because then they’ll have a clear understanding of what is prioritized.”

Source: Google’s remote work employee survey

One of FiveThirtyEight’s goals has always been to get people to think more carefully about probability. When we’re forecasting an upcoming election or sporting event, we’ll go to great lengths to analyze and explain the sources of real-world uncertainty and the extent to which events — say, a Senate race in Texas and another one in Florida — are correlated with one another. We’ll spend a lot of time working on how to build robust models that don’t suffer from p-hacking or overfitting and which will perform

Source: When We Say 70 Percent, It Really Means 70 Percent | FiveThirtyEight

Need to raise another funding round? Andreessen Horowitz specialists would give you “superpowers,” helping write your presentation, then coaching you through dozens of dry runs before scheduling the meets. Need a vice president of engineering? The firm’s talent team would identify and tap the best search firm, monitor its effectiveness and help choose the best candidate for the job. Human re­sources problem? Accounting crisis? “If something is going off the rails, you have the ‘Batphone,’ ” says Lea Endres, the CEO of NationBuilder, which makes software for nonprofit and political campaigns.

Source: Andreessen Horowitz Is Blowing Up The Venture Capital Model (Again)

The Stormtrooper Problem

Intelligence agencies face a unique set of problems that require creative, un-googleable solutions to one-off problems.
You’d naturally think they would value and seek out diversity in order to solve those problems. And you’d be wrong. Increasingly it’s harder and harder to get a security clearance.
Do you have a lot of debt? That might make you susceptible to blackmail. Divorced? You might be an emotional wreck, which could mean you’ll make emotional decisions and not rational ones. Do something as a youth that you don’t want anyone to know? That makes it harder to trust you. Gay but haven’t told anyone? Blackmail risk. Independently wealthy? That means you don’t need our paycheck, which means you might be harder to work with. Do you have a nuanced opinion of politics? What about Edward Snowden? Yikes. The list goes on.
As the process gets harder and harder (trying to reduce risk), there is less and less diversity in the door. The people that make it through the door are Stormtroopers.
And if you’re one of the lucky Stormtrooopers to make it in, you’re given a checklist career development path. If you want a promotion, you know the exact experience and training you need to receive one. It’s simple. It doesn’t require much thought on your part.
The combination of these two things means that employees increasingly look at—and attempt to solve—problems the same way. The workforce is less effective than it used to be. This means you have to hire more people to do the same thing or outsource more work to people that hire misfits. This is the Stormtrooper problem.

Source: The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better

The question is not, do you dare to be great? The question is, do you dare to be different? To diverge from the pack is required if you’re going to be a superior in anything. Number two, do you dare to be wrong? Number three, do you dare to look wrong? Because even things which are going to be right in the long run, maybe look wrong in the short run. So, you have to be willing to live with all those three things, different, wrong, and looking wrong, in order to be able to take the risk required and engage in the idiosyncratic behavior required for success.
I think one of the most important things to have kids who function well around money is for them to have a feeling of finiteness. And this goes back really to “Economic Reality,” the memo. They should understand that money is finite. No matter how much money you have, you can get in trouble if you spend too much of it. And since it’s finite, you shouldn’t waste it. You should make good decisions.

Source: Luck, Risk and Avoiding Losers: Oaktree Capital Co-founder Howard Marks [The Knowledge Project Ep. #53]

I started Wharton 55 years ago last month. And the first thing I remember learning there is that you can’t tell the quality of a decision from the outcome. And that pervades my thinking. And I think it’s very important. And then I played backgammon with my good friend Bruce Newburg, out in Los Angeles, and you need some crazy number to win, and you get it. That doesn’t mean you’re a good player. It means you were lucky.
I think I’ve been the luckiest person on the planet. And I think it was to that that people were responding. But I get into arguments with people and a lot of people say, “Oh—!” Well, what started the article is, I read a piece that quoted some Silicon Valley guy who says, “Success is never accidental. You make your own luck.” And I don’t agree. I think luck is a real thing and it’s important and it’s inherently unfair, but that’s life.
For most investors, loss is the bad outcome they’re concerned with. But, the truth is, if it’s the probability of bad outcomes, there are really at least two risks that we should think about. One is the probability of loss and the other is the probability of gains that you miss out on.

Source: Luck, Risk and Avoiding Losers: Oaktree Capital Co-founder Howard Marks [The Knowledge Project Ep. #53]

The math, and Meituan’s potential, can be dizzying. China’s urban areas have 2,426 people per square kilometer (6,283 per square mile), almost eight times the comparable U.S. population density. While the U.S. has 10 cities with 1 million or more people, China has 156. Deliveries in China cost about $1, compared with $5 in the U.S., iResearch says. Meituan retained about 63 percent of the country’s meal delivery market at the end of 2018, according to Bernstein Research, even as Alibaba spent billions over the previous several years to capture most of the rest.

The growing conflict and its costs have delayed some of Wang’s other initiatives. He put on hold an expansion into ride-hailing after setting up money-losing experiments in two cities. He says he’s now focused on getting each delivery person to drop off 40 percent more orders. Wang estimates Alibaba, based on its balance sheet, can afford to spend at its current level for about 12 more months, but he expects to last years.

Source: Meituan and Alibaba Have Reshaped Food Delivery in China

Wang had learned from his mistakes. He expanded quickly, to hundreds of cities in 2011, but spent less recklessly than his competitors did. While two leading, homegrown group-discount sites flamed out and Groupon shut down its China business, Wang focused on food and dining to develop steady repeat customers. “They thought the business was group buying,” he says of competitors. “We thought the business was e-commerce for services.” By 2013, with rivals continuing to fade away, he shifted from volume discoun

Source: Meituan and Alibaba Have Reshaped Food Delivery in China