HTC is cooking up a game of its own for the Vive virtual reality headset. Little is known about the title, other than its name — Front Defense — and that it’ll be shown at the Computex conference in Taiwan next week. A quick translation of HTC’s an…
Peaches is her aunt. Jared Leto’s a fan and so is Jean-Michel Jarre, who sent her to live with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. She’s modeled for Diesel and composed for German theater. She’s conducted magnetic resonance imaging studies on mutated…
What makes a problem “wicked” rather than just daunting, formidable or really, really tough? Wicked problems are ones in which we operate with incomplete or contradictory and rapidly-changing information with a large number of stakeholders and with connections to many other problems. How to provide nutritious, satisfying and sufficient food for 9 billion of our neighbors in a sustainable and affordable way is an example of a wicked problem. By DNV GL Chief Sustainability Officer Bjørn K. Haugland; and Professor Kevin Noone, Department of Environmental Science and Analytical Chemistry (ACES), Stockholm University.
It’s clear that dealing with wicked problems will require a far greater degree of collaboration and cooperation than most of us are used to applying in our day jobs. We will need to assemble new constellations in which not only stars shine, but where everyone can contribute to illumination. What is equally true, but perhaps less clear is that fixing these constellations in the sky requires trust, and trust needs time, resources and a supportive environment to develop.
We often tend towards homogenization out of tradition and proclivity. Our colleagues have similar backgrounds and training, we develop a professional pathos that identifies us as a group as opposed to them who use a different jargon or have a different viewpoint. This kind of tribal compartmentalization is incompatible with solving wicked problems. Even in cases in which silo building is explicitly undesired, we often find ourselves falling into the geometry of separate cylinders almost unconsciously. How can we avoid this trap?
We recognize that diversity is a good thing, regardless whether your organization is a Fortune 500 business, a world-class university, a basketball team or a small mom-and-pop restaurant. Team diversity is a necessary but insufficient condition for successfully tackling wicked problems. In addition our diverse teams will need a safe, authorized, repeated space in which to build trust, learn each other’s languages, find each others’ talents, and together develop a strategy for dealing with complex, interconnected and rapidly changing problem landscapes. The safe aspect means that participants in the space are free to express their curiosity and can attempt to alleviate their ignorance without fear of appearing on YouTube with a “clueless” sign hung around their necks. The authorized aspect signifies that the participants are sufficiently high in the food chains of their organizations that they have a fair degree of decision-making power and responsibility; they can make things happen. The repeated aspect means that the participants will encounter each other often enough that trust building – with its own intrinsic gestation time – can happen.
Given the number of wicked problems we have to deal with today, such as climate change, mass migration and the food crisis, we all want these teams to be in place immediately and without costs for building or maintaining them. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen.
What is the way forward?
It seems to us that there are two main issues we need to address. One is creating and resourcing the “safe, authorized, repeated space”. The second is providing incentives for the diverse, talented, driven people to occupy this space and invest enough of themselves so that they can flourish there – and turn the space itself into a creative, collaborative environment for true innovation. We’ll save discussing the creating and resourcing aspects for a later blog, and assume that we have been successful at it. Once we’ve created the space, how do we incentivize people to fully engage in it?
We can start by mapping out the disincentives that exist to doing something risky and out of the ordinary. All professional sectors have metrics by which people are judged. They can be sales quotas achieved, reports written, degrees granted, goals scored or pizzas served. If an individual is to fully occupy and contribute to the safe, authorized, repeated space and help solve wicked problems, it means that they will not be able to fulfill these metrics to the same extent as their colleagues who are not involved in the endeavor. We either need to create a better set of success metrics within all of our respective professions, or we can create an additional reward structure for the folks who dare to step outside their silos. The latter pathway may be the simpler one. We don’t have the perfect solution to this better set of metrics, but we do have some ideas about some of its characteristics.
This list of characteristics is not exhaustive.
Together with UN Global Compact and Monday Morning Global Institute, DNV GL prepares an annual outlook for how to turn global risks into opportunities through the Global Opportunity Report. Global risks assemble the characteristics of wicked problems. They represent challenges in which we operate with incomplete or contradictory and rapidly-changing information with a large number of stakeholders and with connections to many other problems.
You may have more and better ideas about what this new metric should contain. If so, we would be happy to hear from you; please let us know what you think. Help us create a better world by making visible and rewarding contributions to solving wicked problems.
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“Data dependent.”
That’s what the Fed has said over and over again since the minutes of the last meeting were released on 5/18. Various Fed speakers have talked about 2 or 3 rate hikes this year – if the data supports it – and now we have the Atlanta Fed providing supporting data as they have raised their GDP Now forecast by 100% this month.
Forget the fact that the core Durable Goods were terrible or that Auto Sales are falling off or that Consumer Comfort is at year lows or that yesterday’s Richmond Fed Report showed continued contraction – the Fed doesn’t measure those things. The Fed measures whatever their Bankster owners want them to measure to come to the conclusion that makes the Banksters the most money. See how simple it is?
We’ll see of they are right on the GDP forecast but, if they are – then a June rate hike is a lot more likely than people are thinking because, at this pace, our GDP will be over a Bazillion Dollars in a year or two if we double our growth each month.
Call me a cynic but, to me, if you can change your forecast from 1.6% to 2.9% in 22 days – then your forecast isn’t worth crap and people should stop listening to you!
Speaking of things people shouldn’t listen to: On Wednesday, we talked about the back and forth on the Brexit issue and, just yesterday, Project Fear put out yet another release from the UK Treasury – this time aimed at seniors with claims that a Brexit would hit pensions by $440Bn. “Pensioners rely on economic growth for their security and stability, whereas leaving the EU would mean huge uncertainty,” Pensions Minister Ros Altman said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 on Friday. “All serious economic forecasters agree” that “leaving will damage our economy,” she said.
The Treasury has been criticized by Brexit campaigners and some analysts for overstating the consequences of Britain leaving the EU amid accusations the government is playing on voters’ fears to keep the U.K. in the bloc. The referendum, now less than four weeks away, has split the ruling Conservative Party in two in a debate that’s become increasingly acrimonious, with accusations of smear tactics from both sides.
“This is an utterly outrageous attempt by the government to do down people’s pensions,” former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said in a statement e-mailed by the Vote Leave campaign. He said retirement savings face threats from EU plans to harmonize pension regulations and proposals for a financial-transaction tax.
Here’s a good case for leaving from the Telegraph and I agree with the Brexiteers, the entire fear campaign is based on the assumption that the UK will lose out on trade agreements but, as I’ve said from day one, the UK used to own this whole planet – they certainly know how to negotiate trade deals on their own and the EU takes so long to get 26 nations to ratify their deals that it’s been stuck in the mud for 5 years anyway.
Like our GDP forecasts – the whole thing is simply a farce and, if the UK doesn’t take this opportunity to escape – this is the Bankster trap they will find themselves in:
The ESM is nothing less than a Government takeover by the Banks, who will be able to squeeze the entire EU the way they have squeezed Greece. This is what is being shoved down the throats of 500M EU citizens (and maybe 50M British citizens) and this is why tens of Billions of Dollars are being spent by Remain lobbyists on Project Fear, to cower the people of the UK into voting to stay in the alliance – by raising fears that worse things will happen if they leave (hard to imagine worse than the ESM though).
That vote is on June 23rd and it’s a lot closer than you are being led to believe. Whether it’s ultimately good or bad for the UK, a Brexit would certainly be catastrophic for the EU and may lead to a complete collapse of the Euro, so there’s a good reason to have CASH!!! going into the weekend. We have the next Fed Decision on the 15th and OPEC meets next Thursday (2nd), so all kinds of crazy, market-moving events coming up in the next two weeks.
8:30 Update: The actual Q1 GDP came in at 0.8%, up from 0.5% in the first estimate and below the 1% expectations of leading economorons. Net Exports tell the whole story, they are down to -$575M net of oil that has dropped from and average of $90 in 2013 and 2014 to an average of $40 this year and we import 7Mb/day so $50 less x 7M x 365 = $127Bn LESS IMPORTS so, when Net Exports are down $125Bn since 2014 you need to add back $127Bn less oil we’re importing and that means our actual exports are down about $250Bn – that’s NOT GOOD!
None of this matters because the Banksters are sitting on record amounts of cheap cash (subsidized by you and me) and now they want to lend it out at higher rates (to you and me) so they need the Fed to hike rates so they have an excuse to jam up the lending rates which also drives people into the housing market and the Banksters also happen to be sitting on a record inventory of foreclosures that they stole from the homeowners they tricked into taking unsuitable loans (bailed out by you and me) and now they want to cash in that portfolio so they can lend money to the next round of suckers before they pull the plug and start the cycle all over again.
Have a great holiday!
– Phil
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Warning: This article contains nudity and may not be appropriate for work environments.
For nearly 15 years, photographer Anna Ogier-Bloomer viewed her mother as her muse, and motherhood as her subject of inspiration. So when Ogier-Bloomer became a mother herself, it only made sense to turn the lens on her own experience. In her series simply titled “Motherhood,” the artist captures the transformative experience of becoming a mother in raw and gripping detail.
“Being a mother is the absolute hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I was surprised by what a physical toll it would take on me for the first two years,” Ogier-Bloomer wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. “There’s not a single part of my life that’s the same as before I became a parent. It’s all changed, and it’s amazing but hard too.”
Despite the intense exhaustion Ogier-Bloomer experienced as a working mother, she knew she had to keep shooting. She captured the tender moments — her daughter breastfeeding in bed — and the painful moments — the bruised aftermath of such a feeding. She documented the way her body morphed to adapt to the challenges of motherhood, zooming in on her engorged breasts and painful nipples. All of it, the joy and the pain and the stuff made from both, is presented with the pride and love of a mother.
“In the first 18 months, when sleep was nonexistent, each image captured felt like, and was, an enormous accomplishment,” Ogier-Bloomer said. “What was most significant for me was allowing myself to give real weight and meaning to what I was making. The first two years my husband and I were in survival mode, so when I made a picture that really got at something, it felt like such a victory. And it was.”
The photographs shift back and forth between the banal and the sublime, showing how everyday moments, filled with such triumph and tenderness, can change a person entirely — especially when she’s running on little to no sleep. Through her work, Ogier-Bloomer hopes to eliminate the stigma surrounding the less visible aspects of motherhood, from breastfeeding to the inevitable disappointments that arise along the journey. She accomplishes this by inviting viewers into the intimate corners of her home, allowing access to the contradictory and complex experience of becoming a mom.
“I want those who are going and have gone through this to know I’m an advocate for them, for all mothers,” the artist said. “Becoming a parent dramatically changed how I view my own mother. I get it now. I understand the pain she feels when one of her three children, all grown, suffers, experiences heartbreak or disappointment or becomes estranged. I understand the desire she has to make it all go away, to come fix it for us even though she can’t. The deep pain and sadness I feel when my daughter is hurt or sad is something that doesn’t disappear. My child is a part of me. And I hope viewers see their own mother, or all mothers, in a new light.”
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With knowledge that 1 out of 6 women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, for many, the inevitability of this experience feels less about if it will happen and more about when.
I was 19 when I was raped, targeted by a man more than a decade my senior. I was a tourist 600 miles from home and across the border in Montreal, Quebec. I was an inexperienced and infrequent drinker, too trusting of strangers. I was plied with liquor and separated from my friends by a congenial bartender named Frank*, whom we’d met the first night of our vacation.
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Standing here, gazing up at you on your porch as the crisp early-evening air envelopes the two of us, a poignant thought has come to me. I’m struck by how two people who’ve been acquainted for this short a period of time can have such an intimate understanding of each other’s deepest desires.
You: a woman who has unconditionally acknowledged that I am a man with needs — specifically, the need to sell industrial-strength cleaning supplies door to door. Me: a wayward soul who has swiftly and eagerly developed an appreciation for the fact that you don’t take kindly to uninvited solicitors. And given this “entente cordiale” we share, I feel there’s really no need to alert the police or whistle for your princely Doberman — I’m ready to take my leave. Truly, you had me at “Get the hell off my lawn!”
You see, there’s an overpowering symbiotic union that exists between us. I know you feel it, too — a connection so strong, it’s practically electric. You loathe those employed in the traveling sales industry, and ergo wish for me to remove myself from your property without hesitation. Meanwhile, I am equally eager to vacate these premises, being both concerned for my personal safety and acutely aware there’s zero chance of making a sale from an irate suburbanite with significant boundary issues. My vision may be a touch below average, but it doesn’t take a Lasik procedure to notice the adrenaline-fueled sneer emblazoned on your face.
I’ve come to realize your words are not unlike the hypnotic Sirens’ call that washed over Odysseus during his illustrious nautical adventures. Only in lieu of blissfully luring me towards your island shores, your goal is to verbally girl-slap me into submission until I’m as far from your field of vision as is mathematically possibly. Rest assured, the delicate subtext of a shrieking hausenfrau is not lost on these enlightened ears.
Or perhaps that cherubic melody I hear is simply emanating from the choir you’re preaching to. You know, on the subject of me getting “the triple-freak out of here!” as you’ve so elegantly phrased it. Believe me, given the large hay-riddled broom with which you’re attempting to swat my face, few words in the English language could resonate with me as penetratingly as those. I breathe in their blazing intent, feel satiated by their meaning, and subsequently exhale my undying reciprocity. Clearly, at this fateful juncture in time, not parting would be such sweet sorrow.
The devoted bond we’re sharing right now runs on a level so profound, few could fully grasp its mysterious workings. As evidence, I offer you this. A mere minute ago you somehow intuitively sensed my arrival, and managed to passionately descend upon me before I could even negotiate your ivy-covered stoop. And I in turn felt an unexplained rush of heart-fluttering adrenaline moments before you flew out the front door, your rage-fueled spittle glistening under the porch-light like the celestial Orion.
Your words, actions and body language have created a trifecta of unbridled dedication that embraces the very core of this kindred relationship. And yet, with emotions running so deliriously high, I find it a daunting challenge to express myself on a comparable level.
That admission aside, perhaps the intensity of my feelings for you, for us, and for this brief-but-all-consuming personal journey we’ve taken together might best be summed up as such:
Stop flipping out on me, you psycho! I’m going, already!
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This week, the wife of a Republican legislator did something you might find shocking: she wrote about having an abortion. Stephanie Chatfield, who is married to Michigan’s state representative Lee Chatfield, posted on Facebook about ending a pregnancy in high school after she was sexually assaulted at a party.
“To tell you the truth, I desperately wish that I had the courage as a teenage girl to accept and welcome my child into this world,” she wrote. “But I didn’t, and I made a decision that I’ve thought about and regretted nearly every day since.”
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Lena Dunham is a LinkedIn Influencer and this post first appeared on LinkedIn Pulse.
Beyonce’s “Lemonade” was a massive cultural event for a lot of profound reasons, not least of which because it gave women a melody to which they could sing the words “Sorry, I ain’t sorry,” again and again (and again). This refrain immediately became the stuff of Instagram captions and yearbook quotes and screaming, drunken bachelorette parties: partially because it’s catchy as fuck, but also because it allowed women to express (safely, while pretending with all their might to be Bey) just how sick to death they were of apologizing.
Apologizing is a modern plague, and I’d be willing to bet (though I have zero scientific research to back this up) that many women utter “I’m sorry” more on a given day than “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” combined. So many of the women I know apologize like it’s a job they were given by the government (we’ll save the whys of that for a massive sociology text). We rush to say it when we’re interrupted. We scream it across a crowded restaurant when someone else arrives late so we’ve lost our table. We mutter it when a man walks too close to us on the street. As I write this, a Mister Softee truck is singing its grating tune right below my window, and I want to run and apologize to the driver for how insane he’s making me.
Saying sorry serves as a sort of cork, making sure my emotions are contained and packaged neatly. Sorry is the wrapping paper AND the bow.
I’m not sure when in my life “the sorries” began, but I can distinctly remember apologizing profusely to a girl who didn’t invite me to her birthday party in second grade, after she publicly handed invitations out to the whole class in front of me. Sorry for my tears. Sorry you had to be mean. Sorry I’m not the kind of person you’d want to attend a Sunday afternoon romp at the YMCA. Sorry.
But to quote Madonna “I’m not sorry (I’m not sorry)… I’m not your bitch don’t hang your shit on me.” Because the fact is, a lot of the time when I say sorry it’s because I’m mad. Really mad. So mad that I’m afraid anything but sorry will cause me to explode and drip my hideous rage juice all over someone I’m simultaneously pissed at and trying to please. And so saying sorry serves as a sort of cork, making sure my emotions are contained and packaged neatly. Sorry is the wrapping paper AND the bow.
I say sorry all day, which doesn’t make sense considering I’m not a warlord, a drunk driver, or a pizza delivery guy speeding down 6th Avenue on a fixed gear bike scaring the shit out of pedestrians. I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry. And this has never been more clear to me than in the six years since I became a boss. It’s hard for many of us to own our power, but as a 24-year-old woman (girl, gal, whatever I was) I felt an acute and dangerous mix of total confidence and the worst imposter syndrome imaginable. I had men more than twice my age for whom I was the final word on the set of Girls, and I had to express my needs and desires clearly to a slew of lawyers, agents and writers. And while my commitment to my work overrode almost any performance anxiety I had, it didn’t override my hardwired instinct to apologize. If I changed my mind, if someone disagreed with me, even if someone else misheard me or made a mistake… I was so, so sorry. “If you say sorry again, I’m going to lovingly murder you,” Jenni texted during a meeting. “I’m sorry,” I texted back.
It was actually my father who gave me the challenge: “What would happen if you spent this week NOT apologizing?” I was back at work after a health-related hiatus and I was feeling particularly vulnerable, aka sorry. “Doll, you’ve apologized to me 10 times in the last 10 minutes.” I told him it was even worse with my friends and a total parody at work, where I was sorry for having to pee. My father likes to counter my anxiety with love-based aggression: “Get it the fuck together!”
It turns out saying sorry somehow makes you sorrier. In friendships, it creates tension and some odd drama where there wasn’t any.
The next day I tried to accept his challenge. But what do you replace sorry with? Well for starters, you can replace it with an actual expression of your needs and desires. And it turns out when you express what you want (without a canned and insincere apology) everyone benefits. Your employees know what you want from them and can do their jobs with clarity and pride. The dynamic remains healthy and open. You feel 79 percent less shame (there’s 21 percent of human shame that’s just baseline and incurable, right!?)
Because it turns out saying sorry somehow makes you sorrier. In friendships, it creates tension and some odd drama where there wasn’t any. Think about it: if your friend is apologizing to you all day for a slight that you didn’t even register, then you start to wonder what she did! You start to wonder what you did! Everyone is confused! Let’s just trust that when our friends have something they need an apology for, they’ll be honest and clear, and when we really need to offer one, we’ll know it.
Mind you, I am not negating the power of a real apology, especially in the workplace. One of the most important things a person in charge can do is own their mistakes and apologize sincerely and specifically, in a way that shows their colleagues they have learned and they will do better (I’ll try, OK!?) But if most women I know — some bros, too — were to keep an apology log, I bet they would find these sincere apologies are few and far between, and deeply diminished by the litany of reflex sorries they’re doling out all day.
I won’t say my father’s experiment cured me. After all, I’ve been apologizing profusely since 1989 — like pigs in blankets and reading celebrity gossip, it’s not a habit easily broken. But it illustrated a better way. Something to strive for. When I replaced apologies with more fully formed and honest sentiments, a world of communication possibilities opened up to me. I’m just sorry it took me so long.
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It’s over … again.
Khloe Kardashian filed for divorce from her estranged husband Lamar Odom on Thursday. The 31-year-old reality star cited irreconcilable differences in her filing, obtained by TMZ, which still lists her name as Khloe Kardashian Odom.
Previously, the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” star filed for divorce in December 2013, but the couple didn’t officially sign their divorce papers until July 2015. The divorce was called off a week after the former NBA player collapsed at a Nevada brothel in October 2015.
“This was always the plan,” a source told People. “The divorce has never been officially off. Khloe was waiting for the timing to be right.”
Odom recently opened up to Entertainment Tonight about the possibility that his estranged wife would follow through with divorce, telling the outlet in April, “We did talk, you know, everything is [up for] discussion. We talk about anything. We’ve been through a lot. It won’t ever stop.”
Kardashian was allegedly worried about Odom’s drinking just a few months after his accident and reportedly also wanted to start a family. Despite not believing in divorce, it seemed the reality star and author couldn’t look past Odom’s alleged infidelities throughout their marriage.
“It was a challenge for me when I decided to get divorced,” Kardashian wrote in a recent essay for Lenny Letter. “At my core, I don’t believe in divorce, but I came to a point in my marriage where I had to make the choice to take care of my own mental and emotional well-being in order to protect myself and my happiness. I am at peace with that decision and do feel like I honored my vows to the very end.”
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