How to Find and Join Groups or Communities on LinkedIn

 As long as there are flowers and children and birds in the world, have no fears: everything will be fine.

— Nikos Kazantzakis, who died in 1957

Make Use Of: “While there are plenty of social platforms out there, LinkedIn is known as a network where professionals are looking for connections. It’s more than just a place where people seek jobs and reach out to industry professionals; it’s a place that cultivates a sense of community. 

If you’re not utilizing groups and communities on the platform, and you don’t belong to any, it might be time to take a look at what’s out there. We’ll show you how to make the most out of LinkedIn’s groups and communities so that you can start networking in a whole new way…”

“Today’s Older Adults Are Cognitively Fitter Than Older Adults Were 20 Years Ago, but When and How They Decline Is No Different Than in the Past.”

The U.S. population has experienced an intense range of stressors over the past few years, as the Covid-19 pandemic, racial injustice, and political divisiveness have dominated news cycles and social media. A new survey, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of APA, tells a story of uncertainty and dissolution. Stress in America 2022: Concerned for the Future, Beset by Inflation, shows a battered American psyche, facing a barrage of external stressors that are mostly out of personal control.

There are three types of meetings Cam Daigle: “I have a system – a survival mechanism, really – for classifying, planning, and executing meetings in a way that helps keep me sane at work. I’ve shared it with enough folks for whom it was also a survival mechanism that it’s now a system, at a URL, for you.

• You can’t solve meeting problems with other meetings. Managers generally feel more effective when they’re communicating directly with people, which means they tend to be fans of meetings, so they try to solve issues with meetings through other meetings.
• You also can’t solve meeting problems by removing them. Individual contributors, however, generally feel more effective when they’re plying their trade. They often feel like meetings pull them away from their ‘real work’, so they try to solve issues with meetings by checking out or not attending.
• Not more, not less – just better. I’ll go ahead and tell you this up front: my system isn’t necessarily a path to having fewer meetings. After all, everyone’s threshold for ‘too many meetings’ is different based on what helps them feel effective at their role, and every company’s need for meetings is dependent upon the work they’re trying to accomplish. I’m hoping this system helps you have better meetings – that the people running the meeting feel like it’s worth their time to run them, and that the people in attendance feel like their presence there matters. There’s even a possibility that once you’ve worked through this system, you end up with more meetings, because you’ve realized you need to break apart one monstrous, all-encompassing meeting that’s trying to do too many things…”

The Verge: “…The companies are referring to technologies, typically known as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), that can manage aspects of the driving experience and intervene if the human behind the wheel makes a mistake. Such features include automatic emergency braking, lane keep assist, adaptive cruise control, and pedestrian detection. 

With billions of dollars invested, automakers, federal regulators, and safety advocates alike are bullish about ADAS’s potential to achieve “collision-free mobility,” as Honda puts it.  But upon examination, these new features are hardly the panacea that their boosters imply. 

Some elements presented as safety enhancements (like lane keep assist) may be little more than driver conveniences. For now, at least, those technologies that could save the most lives (like pedestrian detection) remain deeply unreliable. And even if ADAS eventually works flawlessly, it is likely to have only a modest impact on annual traffic deaths. 

 As the United States confronts a national crisisof traffic fatalities, carmakers and policymakers alike are focused on unproven and overhyped innovations. In reality, even the best technologies can’t compensate for the ways in which ill-conceived cars and poor street designs have made crashes more numerous and severe. We risk making our road safety crisis even worse by expecting car tech to bail us out…”

Don’t expect your car’s safety technology to save you The Verge

Tracking Misleading Tweets

Center for Data Innovation: “The Verge, a U.S.-based technology news publication, has created a dataset of tweets flagged for misinformation in Twitter’s Birdwatch program. Twitter’s Birdwatch program serves as a content moderation ecosystem in which users can identify misleading tweets, annotate them with additional context, rate each others’ notes, and view all submitted notes. The Verge collected and analyzed 37,741 Birdwatch notes submitted between January 22, 2021 and September 20, 2022. They found that the most common subject terms in flagged tweets were COVID, prediction, vaccine, people, earthquake, election, Trump, Biden, scientific, and better.”

• Get the data.

Ars Technica: “Google has been pushing out a tool for removing personally identifiable information—or doxxing content—from its search results. It’s a notable step for a firm that has long resisted individual moderation of search content, outside of broadly harmful or copyright-violating material. But whether it works for you or not depends on many factors. As with almost all Google features and products, you may not immediately have access to Google’s new removal process. 

If you do, though, you should be able to click the three dots next to a web search result (while signed in), or in a Google mobile app, to pull up “About this result.” Among the options you can click at the bottom of a pop-up are “Remove result.” Take note, though, that this button is much more intent than immediate action—Google suggests a response time of “a few days.” Google’s blog post about this tool, updated in late September, notes that “Starting early next year,” you can request regular alerts for when your personal identifying information (PII) appears in new search results, allowing for quicker reporting and potential removal.

 I took a trial run through the process by searching my name and a relatively recent address on Google, then reporting it. The result I reported was from a private company that, while putting on the appearance of only posting public or Freedom of Information Act-obtained records, places those records next to links that send you to the site’s true owner, initiating a “background check” or other tracking services for a fee…”