Tag: Brain

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Health

This Is Your Mind on Peloton

This Is Your Brain on Peloton

While yoga emerges from a philosophical and spiritual tradition, spinning is about your relationship with the machine. You become one with the equipment; You literally pocket yourself. If a traditional bike ride offers some thrill from frolicking outside, Peloton is an absolute mastery of the natural surroundings. The peloton user submits to the uncharted territory of Cody’s World. He decides when to go down a flat road and when to puff up a hill.

Even though we are isolated in our homes, we are connected to the product through a common tactile experience: thousands of legs rotate at the same pace, thousands of fingers rotate the button just like that. Part of the hypnotic appeal of the peloton instructor monologue is how seamlessly the commentary blends into jargon about cadence and resistance. By their physical abilities, the instructors claim broader social and even moral authority, and their classes suggest that using the peloton itself can release positive energy into the world.

On the right side of the screen, a restless ranking list orders us by physical exertion, and each user’s self-selected awareness hashtag rises and falls depending on how hard they drive their body: #PeloForWine, #WilliamsSyndrome, #WearADamnMask. Since I don’t own the fancy company bike, my own hashtag – #FreeBritney – can no longer be seen. Each class also acts as an infomercial for the Peloton line of equipment. I felt like buying a peloton bike that’s just an inch closer to the imaginary topic the instructors are talking about.

Does that all sound a bit scary? Safe in most contexts. For example, I don’t want to sit next to a peloton instructor on an airplane. The first thing Peloton CEO John Foley does when he wakes up in the morning is to drink water from his hands “until I feel like vomiting,” and my rational brain is skeptical of that person. But exercise promotes a special kind of mental gymnastics. When I work out, I suddenly welcome a parasocial relationship with a cute annoying person who can continue the conversation for 45 minutes non-stop, and my flowing endorphins keep me paired with him after the session is over.

Social media companies work to layer our personalities, isolating various impulses and pumping in stimuli to satisfy them: Twitter me is extremely critical, Instagram me is a basic mother, and Peloton me is a capitalist shill in power. (Twitter, I would hate Peloton myself.) Recently, the frothyest moments of Peloton training videos were removed from the app and transferred to other social networks where they are read differently. Instructors are released as memes on TikTok. They are recorded on Twitter and politically questioned.

I first noticed Rigsby when he went a bit viral by giving a sermon on Britney Spears’ longtime conservatory when her song “Lucky” came up in the background. Shortly after that joke was celebrated on TikTok, another clip hit Twitter, setting off an alarm about Rigsby’s rise: he appeared to be using black slang, as washed up by white gay culture, while jokingly threatening a cartoon toddler who have favourited Angelica Pickles’ Rugrats Heel. This is the kind of absurd cultural performance that arouses suspicion on Twitter but, just moved a tab, enables mindless training. Even if Rigsby is easily pulled over the internet, lots of people follow close behind requesting a link to the ride.

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Business

How Andy Jassy, Amazon’s Subsequent C.E.O., Was a ‘Mind Double’ for Jeff Bezos

How Andy Jassy, Amazon’s Next C.E.O., Was a ‘Brain Double’ for Jeff Bezos

SEATTLE – In 2002, Andy Jassy, ​​a young manager at Amazon, began closely following Jeff Bezos, the founder of the online bookstore.

Mr. Jassy followed Mr. Bezos everywhere, including board meetings, and participated in his phone calls, said Ann Hiatt, who was Mr. Bezos’ executive assistant from 2002 to 2005. The idea, she said, was for Mr. Jassy to be “a brain-double” for Mr. Bezos so that he can challenge his boss’ thinking and anticipate his questions.

“I thought I had very high standards before I started this job,” said Mr Jassy in a podcast interview last fall over the 18-month period alongside Mr Bezos. “Then, with this shadow job, I realized that my standards weren’t high enough.”

Now Mr Jassy, ​​who had learned from Mr Bezos for more than two decades, was accused of having advanced the Bezos Way. This summer, the 53-year-old will take over the running of Amazon while the 57-year-old Bezos is stepping down to become chairman of the board.

Only a few corporate succession are observed so closely. Mr. Jassy has Amazon – which grew into a $ 1.7 trillion company with 1.3 million employees and worldwide operations in e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, entertainment, and devices – under the watchful eye of Mr Bezos controls who is still the largest shareholder.

Amazon, which has seen a surge in growth, is also facing growing challenges. In Europe and the US, the Seattle-based company is being scrutinized for power by regulators and lawmakers. The own workforce has become louder and more active in dealing with the company. And given its size, some investors and employees are wondering if Amazon can keep its innovative ways without bureaucracy blocking them.

Mr Jassy has not spoken publicly about his vision for Amazon, but those who know him said it was clear he would continue what Mr Bezos had built – and not take a sharp break from it. The quintessential Amazonian life, Mr. Jassy helped design and proselytize many of the mechanisms and internal culture of the company.

“Andy is an integral part of the overall culture,” said Tom Alberg, managing partner of Madrona Venture Group and board member of Amazon through 2019. “I really think this will be a strong sequel.”

Amazon declined to make Mr. Jassy available for an interview. In an email to staff on Tuesday announcing the transition, Mr. Bezos said, “He will be an excellent leader and he has my full confidence.”

Mr. Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, NY, as the middle of three children. His father ran a white-shoe law firm, and his mother ran the household and supported arts organizations. He studied government at Harvard and worked on the business side of The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.

Mr. Jassy wanted to become a sports caster, but ended up in direct marketing after graduating. He also tried starting a business with a colleague before going to Harvard Business School.

In 1997 he got the call for an interview on Amazon while going to a Shawn Colvin concert in New York City. He got the job, took his final exam on a Friday, and started working at Amazon the next Monday, three weeks before the company went public, he said in the podcast interview.

After serving in marketing and music, Mr. Jassy was referred to as his “shadow” by Mr. Bezos in 2002, a chief of staff-like role for promising leaders.

“His job was to be an intellectual sparring partner for Jeff,” said Ms. Hiatt, former executive assistant to Mr. Bezos who is now a management consultant. She said Mr Jassy helped Mr Bezos discuss the benefits of offering memberships to the Prime Express Mail program to persuade a skeptical board of directors.

When Mr. Jassy followed Mr. Bezos, he also led Amazon’s step into a new field: cloud computing. At the time, Mr. Bezos was frustrated with Amazon’s software development teams taking longer than expected to complete projects, even though the company hired many new engineers to help introduce products faster. He asked Mr. Jassy to find out.

Mr. Jassy discovered that product teams spent more time designing and building their own infrastructure than developing products. Amazon ultimately decided to reconfigure its technology systems so that different groups could share the same basic technical building blocks.

In 2003, Mr. Jassy and other executives gathered for a meeting at Mr. Bezos’. They said they smelled a business opportunity to help other companies solve the same problems Amazon had encountered.

Before the project could proceed, Mr. Jassy had to present the Amazon board with a “six pager” – a narrative memo that contained a vision for a new idea – and explain what resources would be needed.

“I was so nervous. I wrote 30 drafts of this paper,” Jassy said in a 2017 presentation at the University of Washington.

He asked for 57 people, a meaningful question since Amazon employed about 5,000 people at the time. Mr. Bezos “didn’t flicker,” said Mr. Jassy.

The project became Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s largest source of income. Companies were quick to accept the idea of ​​paying Amazon only for the computers and storage they used, rather than investing large sums in buying, building, and maintaining their own computer systems.

By 2012, Jassy said, Amazon’s cloud entity grew so rapidly that it added roughly the number of computers per day it took to run the entire company in 2003.

Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, ran like a start-up within the company. Mr. Jassy developed a reputation for being tough but not yelling or undercutting staff according to current and former employees. He would ask specific questions in meetings, but would also sit back and let others challenge it while he took in their arguments.

In emails, Mr. Jassy responded to good news by simply saying, “Fine,” with a seemingly random number of exclamation points, said current and former employees. Many debated whether the number of exclamation marks had a secret meaning.

Mr. Jassy also made time for staff activities. He acted as master of ceremonies at an annual Buffalo Wing dining competition known as the Tatonka Bowl. He granted attendees “badges,” one with a burning chicken that appeared in Amazon’s internal directory.

In the past few years, AWS has introduced its own software services that can run on its computers, which is often doomed to failure for startups with competing products.

Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group, who writes a newsletter titled “Last Week On AWS,” said the cloud computing unit has shown the same intransigence as Amazon’s premier retail website in tracking new products and markets.

“They seem to share a common belief that impossible is only a matter of time,” he said.

Last year, AWS revenue rose to $ 45.4 billion, or 12 percent of revenue and 63 percent of profit for the company.

After becoming CEO, Mr Jassy’s opinions will be examined more closely. Earlier last year he spoke enthusiastically about the sale of Rekognition Police Department, Amazon’s facial recognition technology that has been criticized for bias against dark-skinned people.

“Let’s see” whether police authorities “abuse” the technology somehow, he told the PBS program “Frontline” in February. “They didn’t do that. Suspecting that they will, and therefore you shouldn’t allow them to have access to the most advanced technology out there, doesn’t seem like the right balance to me. “

“I cannot let the death of Breonna Taylor go without accountability,” Jassy wrote in a six-part thread on Twitter about the police in September. “We still don’t get it in the US. If you don’t hold the police accountable for killing black people, we will never have justice and change, or be the country we seek (and claim). “

At an AWS conference in December, Mr. Jassy gave an insight into how he might approach the acquisition of one of the world’s richest tech companies. Echoing Mr. Bezos, who has long been a champion of how businesses need to evolve, Mr. Jassy said the key to long-term survival is for companies to reinvent themselves while business is doing well.

Mr Jassy then put forward an eight-step plan for reinventing businesses, stressing the importance of being “manic, relentless and persistent”.

“You have to have the courage to pull the company up and force it to change and move,” he said.

David Streitfeld contributed to the coverage.

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Business

The Pandemic Helped Reverse Italy’s Mind Drain. However Can It Final?

The Pandemic Helped Reverse Italy’s Brain Drain. But Can It Last?

When the engineer Elena Parisi left Italy at the age of 22 to pursue a career Five years ago, in London, she joined the numerous talented Italians who had escaped a sluggish job market and a lack of opportunities at home to find work abroad.

But last year, when the coronavirus pandemic forced employees around the world to work from home, Ms. Parisi, like many of her compatriots, took the opportunity to really return to Italy.

Between the Zoom meetings and her other work for a recycling company in London, she took long walks on the beach near her family’s home in Palermo, Sicily, talking to vendors in the local market about recipes at dawn.

“The quality of life here is a thousand, a thousand times better,” said Ms. Parisi, who is now in Rome.

As with so many things, the virus has a well-known phenomenon – this time Italy’s longstanding brain drain. How much things are changing, and how permanent those changes will be, is a source of debate in the country. But something is clearly different.

According to the European Commission, Italy is one of the European countries, along with Romania and Poland, that send the most workers abroad. And the proportion of Italians living abroad with a university degree is higher than that of the Italian population.

Given the money the country spends on education, Italy’s brain drain costs the country an estimated 14 billion euros (about $ 17 billion) each year, according to Confindustria, Italy’s largest business association.

Italian lawmakers had long tried to win back talented workers with tax breaks, but a bleak job market, high unemployment, baroque bureaucracy, and narrow career opportunities continued to draw many Italian graduates abroad.

Then the virus seemed to do what years of incentives couldn’t.

Last year, the number of Italians between the ages of 18 and 34 returning home rose 20 percent year over year, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry.

The Italian government has welcomed the return of some of the country’s best and brightest countries as a silver lining to a pandemic brutal for Italy, calling the postponement a “great opportunity”. There is also a financial advantage as Italians who spend more than six months in the country have to pay their taxes there.

Paola Pisano, Italy’s Minister for Technological Innovation, said at a conference in October that Italy would have the chance to benefit from the skills and innovation that returning Italians bring with them.

She also said Italy must do its part to keep them there. For one thing, the country needs “a strong, diffuse, powerful and secure internet connection” so that those who have moved abroad can “return to their country and continue working for the company they worked for”.

A group of Italians formed an association called Southworking to encourage remote working from the less developed south of Italy in the hope that returning professionals would devote their free time and money to improving their hometowns.

“Your ideas, your volunteer work and your creativity stay on the land where you live,” said Elena Militello, the association’s president, who returned to Sicily from Luxembourg.

To encourage remote work, the association creates a network of cities with fast internet connections, an airport or train station nearby, and at least one common work area or library with good WiFi.

To map them, the association received help from Carmelo Ignaccolo, a graduate student in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned to Sicily after the coronavirus.

For the past few months, Mr Ignaccolo has been overseeing exams with the Mediterranean in the background of his zoom screen, teaching classes near his great-grandfather’s olive press, and escaping the heat by studying in a nearby Greek necropolis.

“I am 100 percent for an American professional life,” he said, “but I have a very Mediterranean lifestyle.”

Not only the south of Italy benefits from the return traffic.

Roberto Franzan, 26, a programmer who built a successful start-up in London before joining Google, returned to his home in Rome in March.

“You go to the bar and you can just start talking to just about anyone,” he said. “It worked great for me.” He said a number of interesting startups and tech companies had popped up in Italy and he could envision investing in the country.

“That moment has given us all along that getting back to your roots can be a good thing,” he said.

Italy’s business leaders have urged the government not to miss the opportunity.

“Coronavirus, the U-turn of the brain drain,” wrote Michel Martone, a former deputy labor minister, in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. He called on lawmakers to find a way to sustain the “extraordinary army of young people who have returned home in the face of the emergency”.

However, some experts say there aren’t really that many benefits to solidify.

While many Italians may have returned to the Tuscan countryside or Sicilian beaches, their thoughts still benefit American, British, Dutch, and other overseas businesses.

“Zoom isn’t going to solve Italy’s problems,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on labor and urban economics and is part of the Italian brain drain himself.

Brunello Rosa, a London economist who is another member of the diaspora, said returned Italians “produce an activity for a foreign entity – they create value abroad and income abroad.” He added that “the fact that they spend their salary in Italy doesn’t really make a difference.”

A more likely outcome, he said, is that the virus will lead to economic rubble and huge unemployment that will spark another wave of emigration once European countries lift their locks.

To really tackle the problem, Italy and others would need to undertake profound structural and cultural reforms that tighten bureaucracy and improve transparency, rather than relying on “people returning home because the food is bad abroad and the weather is bad “.

Mr. Ignaccolo, the MIT graduate student, plans to return to the US to pursue his academic career and the new company that programmer Mr. Franzan is starting will be based in Delaware.

The disadvantages of working in Italy are also of concern to Ms Parisi, who is concerned that her career advancement would be hampered in what she believes is an Italian business world with limited scope for younger workers. She admitted London’s lack of sun was dreary and British food bad for her skin, but said other things in life were important too.

“I am young, I am a woman and I am in a very high position,” she said, explaining that she would return to her job in London when her office reopened.

“It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I could both keep the job and live in Italy, ”she said of her time there. “But I always knew it would only be temporary.”

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Health

Alzheimer’s Researchers Examine a Uncommon Mind

Alzheimer's Researchers Study a Rare Brain

While they waited for Aliria’s body to arrive, Dr. Villegas and the staff each other their demands with: freezers checked, sterile gloves, iodine, cell culture medium, tissue preservative mixed and done. The brain bank frequently sends tissue to its staff overseas, and within a few days samples from Aliria’s brain are being examined in Germany and California, as well as Medellín.

Every brain donation does not begin in a hospital morgue, but in a large and well-stocked funeral home. The arrangement allows researchers to remove the brain and quickly take it one block away to their dissection laboratory, after which the family can proceed with a funeral or cremation.

Aliria’s autopsy began at 11:30 a.m. three hours after her death. The senior team members of Dr. Villegas, Dr. Aguillon and Johana Gómez, a biologist dressed in plastic overalls, masks and face shields, took precautions required by the pandemic while a medical student, Carlos Rueda, took notes.

The team removed the brain relatively easily, though the process is always complicated, with connective tissue that needs to be carefully severed. Dr. Villegas then extracted the pituitary gland and olfactory membrane, structures of interest to Alzheimer’s researchers, from deep within the skull. The group took samples of skin, tumor, and vital organs before leaving the remains of their famous patient, on whom so much research hopes were tied, for cremation.

Within minutes, the group came together again in the Brain Bank Dissection Lab, a room no bigger than a walk-in closet, down the street. It was almost 1 p.m. and Dr. Aguillon put Aliria’s brain on a scale. It weighed 894 grams, just under two pounds – significantly less than a healthy brain. Mr. Rueda started photographing it on a rotating platform, on which a three-dimensional image was created, while Dr. Villegas told and Dr. Aguillon typed.