A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco

https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/the-skylab-race-to-san-francisco-18074888.php

After its launch in 1973, Skylab was a successful observatory and laboratory that saw three separate crews climb aboard to conduct experiments over 24 weeks. But by 1979, with the country’s interest in space already waning, diminished budgets and a delay in construction of a shuttle needed to refuel it, the only solely American-owned space station in history was left derelict, and would eventually fall back to Earth.

While the agency insisted that injuries were very unlikely, it did add that if citizens of any country heard that the space station was falling nearby, they should maybe hide out in the lowest floors of their homes.

Skylab was the size of a three-story house and was expected to break into about 500 pieces upon reentry anywhere in a wide band around the Earth that covered 90% of the population. In late June, NASA said that Skylab would hit around July 10 to 14, but that NASA would only have a two-hour period of notice to pinpoint where it would land after the space wreck pierced the atmosphere.

Optical illusion from Yurii Perepadia

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqVQ1fjBF2E/

The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Aren’t More Workers Using ChatGPT?

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-arent-more-workers-using-chatgpt-a1dfe96a9460

Dedicated time for exploration is a luxury most PMs can’t afford. Under constant pressure to deliver immediate results, most rarely have even an hour for this type of strategic work — the only way many find time for this kind of exploratory work is by pretending to be sick. They are so overwhelmed with executive mandates and urgent customer requests that they lack ownership over their strategic direction. Furthermore, recent layoffs and other cutbacks in the industry have intensified workloads, leaving many PMs working 12-hour days just to keep up with basic tasks.

This constant pressure also hinders AI adoption for improved execution. Developing robust testing plans or proactively identifying potential issues with AI is viewed as a luxury, not a necessity. It sets up a counterproductive dynamic: Why use AI to identify issues in your documentation if implementing the fixes will only delay launch? Why do additional research on your users and problem space if the direction has already been set from above?

WMATA Schematic or Map

https://i.imgur.com/fER7aki.png

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users. 

How I ship projects at big tech companies

https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

The most common error I see is to assume that shipping is easy. The default state of a project is to not ship: to be delayed indefinitely, cancelled, or to go out half-baked and burst into flames. Projects do not ship automatically once all the code has been written or all the Jira tickets closed. They ship because someone takes up the difficult and delicate job of shipping them.

That means that in almost all cases, shipping has to come first. You cannot have anything else as your top priority. If you spend all your time worrying about polishing the customer experience (for example), you will not ship! Obsessing over UX is praiseworthy behaviour when you are an engineer on the team, but a blunder if you are leading the project. You should cherish the other engineers on your team who are doing that work, and give them as much support as you can. But your primary concern has to be shipping the project. It is too hard a job to do in your spare time.

A Real Estate Queen and the Secret She Couldn’t Keep Hidden

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/realestate/alice-mason-nyc-real-estate-broker.html

Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.

A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men, not too many couples. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter.

“The key to my parties is the small tables,” Alice once told The New York Times. “That way people do not have to talk only to the people on their right or left. They can talk to the whole table.”

Memo shows 76 percent of grades in A range last year, prompting faculty discussion

https://williamsrecord.com/468144/news/memo-shows-76-percent-of-grades-in-a-range-last-year-prompting-faculty-discussion/

Professor of Political Science Justin Crowe said he believes that grade inflation has decreased student learning. “Many faculty — certainly I include myself in that — have seen that grades are something of a motivator for students,” he said. “It’s important to give students honest feedback so they know what they’re doing well, what they’re doing less well, [and] so they can decide whether they want to put the work in to do better.”

Crowe added that he’s observed that grade inflation increases student stress around grades and discourages academic exploration. He noted that a B+ is now in the bottom third of grades awarded to students. “That puts so much pressure on any individual paper, on any individual course, and it sends students’ anxiety and stress through the roof, because there is effectively no margin for error in a world in which the only good grades are A, A+, and A-,” he said.

Holding poor performers accountable can lead to better government

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/holding-poor-performers-accountable-can-lead-better-government/400568/

One place government should mirror the private sector and improve, however, is how it manages its employees. My organization’s polling trust data, for example, shows that over one-quarter of Americans view holding employees more accountable for their performance as one of the top two actions the government could take to become more effective and trustworthy.

Large private sector companies like Walmart, FedEx and Home Depot invest in their people—establishing clear cultural values, employee development programs, and performance appraisal, enforcement and reward systems —and they have incentives that help remove poorly performing employees. 

Unlike the private sector, the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for employees. While most employees are doing good work on behalf of their agencies, some are underperforming and some need to be fired. This happens in every industry across the private sector.