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wearables can serve another purpose — determining whether you’re a productive employee. The data-obsessed may be quick to embrace such an assessment, but what if an employer has access to that information as well?

The researchers say their mobile-sensing system, which consists of fitness bracelets, sensors and a custom app, can measure employee performance with about 80 percent accuracy.

The system monitors physical and emotional signals that employees produce during the day and uses that data to create a performance profile over time that is designed to eliminate bias from evaluations

One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.

Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.

Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”

After three years in office, President Barack Obama has enough of a record to judge against the economic performances of other recent presidents. The rankings can help you cast a more informed vote in November

In “The President as Economist: Scoring Economic Performance From Harry Truman to Barack Obama,” I compare the 12 presidents since World War II using 17 economic indicators, including growth in gross domestic product, rate of unemployment, inflation, population below the poverty line, increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, savings and investment rates, exports and trade balances, federal budget growth, and debt and federal taxes as a share of GDP.

The book examines each indicator for each administration, and boils down the many aspects of a president’s economic performance to a single score. The scores are derived using basic statistical methods, including averaging each president’s indicators, then determining standard deviations from the mean. These methods produce a common unit of comparison for indicators that are expressed in different units, such as growth rates and shares of GDP.

While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” — a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one — IBM’s researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

“We’re entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility,” said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. “The era of utility.”

Present-day computers are called digital, or classical, because they deal with bits of information that are either 1 or 0, on or off. A quantum computer performs calculations on quantum bits, or qubits, that capture a more complex state of information. Just as a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

“happiness is, in the end, a much more complicated concept than income. Yet it is also a laudable and much more ambitious policy objective.”

it’s a challenge to set criteria for measuring happiness. However, in a conversation, she told me she did not see it as an insurmountable one: “It doesn’t have to be perfect; after all, it took us decades to agree upon what to include in G.D.P. and it is still far from a perfect metric.”

there remains the issue of being No. 1. Many of us have lived our lives in a country that has thought itself the world’s most powerful and successful. But with the United States economy in a frustrating stall as China rises, it seems that period is coming to an end. We are suffering a national identity crisis, and politicians are competing with one another to win favor by assuring a return to old familiar ways.

Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.

Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”

In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.

Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.

Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.

Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.

“Fifteen years ago,” says Will Burgess, of Practise Music, a management company, “if you wanted to record a song you needed two days in a studio, at £400 a day, plus a sound engineer at £100 a day. That’s the cost of a laptop, on which you can make unlimited amounts of music today.”

These days you don’t need to be able to play a musical instrument to be a musician and you don’t need a studio. All you need is a computer. “I’ve created songs that have gone to No 1 in my daughter’s bedroom downstairs,” says Crispin Hunt, former lead singer of the Longpigs and now a songwriter who has worked with Lana Del Rey, Rod Stewart and Ellie Goulding.

You can sketch out a musical idea on a laptop, you can add instrumentation, you can record your own vocals. If you want to collaborate with others around the world, no problem: when Luke Sital-Singh, a singer-songwriter who works in London, needs drums, he asks a friend with a studio in Lewes to send the files to his computer. He’s working with a guitarist in Santa Fe, to whom he sends a rough version of the song; his collaborator sends him back a guitar track.

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

the persistence of blackface is unsurprising. It has been a part of American popular culture since what we recognize as popular culture emerged — roughly round 1832, when Thomas Dartmouth Rice, in blackface, performed his song “Jump Jim Crow” to thunderous applause at the Bowery Theatre in New York.

minstrel shows and blackface performances, both reinforced and popularized the “stereotype of the dimwitted slave who was happy to be in the South.”

“Its longevity is because it’s been institutionalized into every aspect of American life,” Dr. Barnes said. “People have perpetuated blackface because we don’t teach minstrel history. If these people had ever been exposed to it in a safe classroom environment, they would know better.”

even the most seemingly apolitical performers are running into controversy by showing up for Trump, more than they would for most any previous president-elect. On Thursday, Madison Square Garden Company chairman James Dolan announced that The Rockettes—a New York City fixture with wide appeal, steeped in mid-century nostalgia and catering to visitors from outside the city—would perform for Trump. Immediately, individual dancers began to dissent. “The women I work with are intelligent and are full of love and the decision of performing for a man that stands for everything we’re against is appalling,” one wrote on Instagram.

it’s clear that the problem was not only the public. On Facebook, the dancer Amanda Duarte shot back that most of the Rockettes don’t want to perform, writing “It’s perfect, actually. What could be more fitting for this inauguration than forcing a group of women to do something with their bodies against their will?”

there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

"Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

He said that because of the 2013 overhaul, 150,000 teachers requested retirement or early retirement in the past three years, and the number of applicants to teacher colleges fell by 23%

“It was undoubtedly unfair to have blamed teachers alone for the problems in public education,” he said. “Teachers aren’t against evaluations, but they are against this evaluation, which they say is punitive, tied to the labor aspects.” He said that an estimated 1,000 teachers who were fired for refusing to take the performance tests would be reinstated.

Average student scores in Mexico rank among the lowest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Pisa test, which measures performance in mathematics, science and reading. Mexico’s own student performance tests showed little change on average between 2015 and 2017, with less than 10% of ninth-grade students achieving outstanding levels in language and communication and just 5.1% in mathematics.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.