Category Archives: Blog

Microsoft Japan has announced the results of its 4-day work week trial, and it will shock no-one to know the experiment was hugely popular with the company’s employees. What may surprise people is that the shortened week increased productivity by almost 40 percent — thanks in part to shorter, more efficient meetings.

This August, Microsoft Japan trialed a 4-day work week for its entire workforce, calling the project the “Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019”. Approximately 2300 employees were given 5 Fridays off, with no reduction in salary and no days taken out of their annual leave. 

Further, The Mainichi reported that Microsoft Japan also planned to subsidise employees’ family vacations or further education by up to ¥100,000. Read more…

More about Microsoft, Japan, Social Good, Work, and Work Life

Everyone knows that to legitimize anything you read on Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia, you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and check out the references, notes, and citations (or click the little footnote link in the text).

The Internet Archive, known for its Wayback Machine, will now be a resource for book-based citations if that text exists within its library. Previously, only citations linking back to an online source were viewable. Now, some book references will be available online as well.

In a Tuesday post about “weaving books into the internet,” the San Francisco-based non-profit explained how it was taking digitized versions of books and matching them with corresponding Wikipedia citations, so long as those citations reference specific page numbers.  Read more…

More about Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Tech, Web Culture, and Books

Southern California firefighters are still actively tackling as many as six wildfires. While your drone might catch some epic photos, they’re sharing the sky with air tankers, firefighting helicopters, and other craft that are flying to actually fight the devastating and destructive flames. 

The Maria Fire in Ventura County, north of Los Angeles, is only 50 percent contained and has scorched more than 9,400 acres since starting on Halloween. In the few days since, already two “unauthorized drones” have impeded water dropping efforts to quench the flames. 

At least three firefighting helicopters had to stop flying for for about an hour for both incidentsThe Weather Channel reported that law enforcement addressed the issue at a Friday news conference: “This creates a very significant hazard for our airborne firefighting assets and causes them to land and stop firefighting.” Read more…

More about Firefighters, Drone Footage, Faa, Wildfires, and Science

The wait is over. The Chick Fil-A shade is in the past. All that matters now is it’s Nov. 3. That means the Popeyes chicken sandwich is back. And it’s here to stay.

The baffling hype around Popeyes chicken sandwich – I just don’t how it’s better than a three-piece and biscuit? – has been spiked since late August, when it officially sold out. Up until that point, fans of the breaded and bread-wrapped chicken meal had been lining up in droves to get a taste of sweet Louisiana Kitchen bliss.

Why the excitement, you ask? Well, Popeyes released a chicken sandwich for the first time in its history back in August. It might come as a shock that the best fried chicken joint in the fast food never even tried to compete with all the lesser chicken sandwiches out there, but here we are. Read more…

More about Popeyes, Chicken Sandwich, Culture, and Food

Sometimes the world can feel like a bleak place. Life takes a lot out of people and it’s hard to find something pure and untarnished to enjoy without guilt. Except for this video of a guy flipping out over his new T-shirt folder thing. This is fine to enjoy.

Australian Youtuber Christian Hull (@christianhull on Twitter) tweeted a video from his TikTok channel showing off his new T-shirt folding contraption, which appears to bring him more happiness than you have ever experienced in your entire life. 

The shirt folder makes easy work of Hull’s shirts, and he punctuates each fold with an emphatic “boom,” which considering the razor-sharp perfection produced by the contraption is entirely understandable.  Read more…

More about Tee Shirt Folder, Culture, and Web Culture

As part of its package on Donald Trump’s social media presence, The New York Times published an in-depth analysis of the 45th U.S. president’s Twitter account and activity, and the paper supported its observations with interviews from inside the White House as well as with former Twitter employees. 

The article, titled “How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets,” has a lot going on, but here are some of the more bizarre takeaways from their research and reporting. 

1. Half of Trump’s tweets since taking office have attacked a person, group, or institution. 

The Times analysis determined that 5,889 of his 11,000+ tweets since taking office in Jan. 2017 are worded as attacks against targets as varied as television programs, the city of Baltimore, Jeff Bezos, many elected officials, and disfavored members of his own administration.  Read more…

More about New York Times, Trump Tweets, Donald Trump Twitter, Culture, and Social Media Companies

Behold, the orange traffic cone.

A quick, new Tesla software update included “driving visualization improvements.” That means the screen in Tesla’s all-electric cars – Models S, X, and 3 – which shows the road and the surrounding vehicles and lanes is adding more detail. Specifically: traffic cones.

Cars, pedestrians, trucks, and even motorcyclists are depicted as icons that signify each of those things, and now traffic cones will come up as orange cones on the screen as well. Previously, cones were considered generic obstacles that would trigger the warning system about something being in the way, but nothing specific was shown on the driving screen. Read more…

More about Tesla, Autopilot, Tech, Elon Musk, and Transportation

Maybe he just likes the attention?

Donald Trump braved a visit to his now-former home of New York City on Saturday night to check out UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden. And New Yorkers, being the willful and opinionated bunch that we are, let Trump have it with a chorus of boos.

It doesn’t sound quite as bad or dramatic as the boos Trump recently faced at the Nationals-Astros World Series game. The booing stood out especially clearly in that earlier incident because Trump’s sudden appearance at the ball game was bookended on both sides by shout-outs to members of the U.S. military.

There’s also the fact that Trump is an established fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He’s the first U.S. president to sit in the audience for a UFC match, and he attended at the invitation of Dana White, the organization’s president and a vocal Trump supporter. Read more…

More about Donald Trump, Ufc, Culture, Politics, and Sports

Do babies and children freak you out? Do you never know what to say to the children your friends just keep having? 

Saturday Night Live understands your pain, and invented a service that would honestly be a lifesaver were it actually on the market. Host Kristen Stewart goes from kid-averse to actually being able to converse by using Duolingo For Talking To Children, and while it’s definitely a joke… this might be something Duolingo should look into developing.  Read more…

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Saturday Night Live really did it. After a military canine (I call it a dog) became the unlikely hero of the recent U.S. raid that left Al-Qaeda founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead, it was almost inevitable that the weekly sketch show would bring in a real, live dog to do some jokes.

Now it’s happened, and it went about as well as you’d expect a sketch featuring a dog propped up in front of a live studio audience would go. Unpredictable things happened, people laughed when they weren’t supposed to, and what the sketch lost in polish it more than made up for in heart and adorable fluffiness. Read more…

More about Dog, Saturday Night Live, Conan, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows