healthcarereimagined

If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.

• Katie Notopoulosarchive page

October 17, 2023

We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?

There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface.

We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?

There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface.

But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support, advocacy, and community. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh. It can send you a pizza. It’s duality, good and bad, and I refuse to toss out the dancing-baby GIF with the tubgirl-dot-png bathwater. The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea. 

What is the internet and why is it following me around?

To cure the patient, first we must identify the disease. 

When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay. (There are problems with some of that stuff, to be sure. But that’s an entirely other issue—even if both do involve Elon Musk.) “The internet” we’re talking about refers to the popular kinds of communication platforms that host discussions and that you probably engage with in some form on your phone. 

Some of these are massive: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, X. You almost certainly have an account on at least one of these; maybe you’re an active poster, maybe you just flip through your friends’ vacation photos while on the john.

The internet is good things. It’s Keyboard Cat, Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?”

Although the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design. 

The internet also exists outside these big platforms; it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience.

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The internet is good things. For me, it’s things I love, like Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals; it’s AIM away messages and MySpace top 8s. It’s the distracted-­girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” It is a famous thread on a bodybuilding forum where meatheads argue about how many days are in a week. For others, it’s Call of Duty memes and the mindless entertainment of YouTubers like Mr. Beast, or a place to find the highly specific kind of ASMR video they never knew they wanted. It’s an anonymous supportive community for abuse victims, or laughing at Black Twitter’s memes about the Montgomery boat brawl, or trying new makeup techniques you learned on TikTok. 

It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and increasingly needing to figure out if something is real or AI. 

The bad things transcend mere rudeness or trolling. There is an epidemic of sadness, of loneliness, of meanness, that seems to self-reinforce in many online spaces. In some cases, it is truly life and death. The internet is where the next mass shooter is currently getting his ideas from the last mass shooter, who got them from the one before that, who got them from some of the earliest websites online. It’s an exhortation to genocide in a country where Facebook employed too few moderators who spoke the local language because it had prioritized growth over safety.

The existential problem is that both the best and worst parts of the internet exist for the same set of reasons, were developed with many of the same resources, and often grew in conjunction with each other. So where did the sickness come from? How did the internet get so … nasty? To untangle this, we have to go back to the early days of online discourse.

It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels.

The internet’s original sin was an insistence on freedom: it was made to be free, in many senses of the word. The internet wasn’t initially set up for profit; it grew out of a communications medium intended for the military and academics (some in the military wanted to limit Arpanet to defense use as late as the early 1980s). When it grew in popularity along with desktop computers, Usenet and other popular early internet applications were still largely used on university campuses with network access. Users would grumble that each September their message boards would be flooded with newbies, until eventually the “eternal September”—a constant flow of new users—arrived in the mid-’90s with the explosion of home internet access.

When the internet began to be built out commercially in the 1990s, its culture was, perversely, anticommercial. Many of the leading internet thinkers of the day belonged to a cohort of AdBusters-reading Gen Xers and antiestablishment Boomers. They were passionate about making software open source. Their very mantra was “Information wants to be free”—a phrase attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the pioneering internet community the WELL. This ethos also extended to a passion for freedom of speech, and a sense of responsibility to protect it.

It just so happened that those people were quite often affluent white men in California, whose perspective failed to predict the dark side of the free-speech, free-access havens they were creating. (In fairness, who would have imagined that the end result of those early discussions would be Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Black Lives Matter? But I digress.) 

The culture of free demanded a business model that could support it. And that was advertising. Through the 1990s and even into the early ’00s, advertising on the internet was an uneasy but tolerable trade-off. Early advertising was often ugly and annoying: spam emails for penis enlargement pills, badly designed banners, and (shudder) pop-up ads. It was crass but allowed the nice parts of the internet—message boards, blogs, and news sites—to be accessible to anyone with a connection.

But advertising and the internet are like that small submersible sent to explore the Titanic: the carbon fiber works very efficiently, until you apply enough pressure. Then the whole thing implodes.

Targeted advertising and the commodification of attention

In 1999, the ad company DoubleClick was planning to combine personal data with tracking cookies to follow people around the web so it could target its ads more effectively. This changed what people thought was possible. It turned the cookie, originally a neutral technology for storing Web data locally on users’ computers, into something used for tracking individuals across the internet for the purpose of monetizing them. 

To the netizens of the turn of the century, this was an abomination. And after a complaint was filed with the US Federal Trade Commission, DoubleClick dialed back the specifics of its plans. But the idea of advertising based on personal profiles took hold. It was the beginning of the era of targeted advertising, and with it, the modern internet. Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. That year, Google’s revenue from advertising was $21 billion. Last year, Google parent company Alphabet took in $224.4 billion in revenue from advertising. 

Our modern internet is built on highly targeted advertising using our personal data. That is what makes it free. The social platforms, most digital publishers, Google—all run on ad revenue. For the social platforms and Google, their business model is to deliver highly sophisticated targeted ads. (And business is good: in addition to Google’s billions, Meta took in $116 billion in revenue for 2022. Nearly half the people living on planet Earth are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer extent of the personal data we happily hand over to them in exchange for using their services for free would make people from the year 2000 drop their flip phones in shock.

And that targeting process is shockingly good at figuring out who you are and what you are interested in. It’s targeting that makes people think their phones are listening in on their conversations; in reality, it’s more that the data trails we leave behind become road maps to our brains. 

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When we think of what’s most obviously broken about the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn’t want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away. 

But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. Social platforms were incentivized to grow their user base and attract as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible to serve ever more ads. Or, more accurately, to serve ever more you to advertisers. To accomplish this, the platforms have designed algorithms to keep us scrolling and clicking, the result of which has played into some of humanity’s worst inclinations.  

In 2018, Facebook tweaked its algorithms to favor more “meaningful social interactions.” It was a move meant to encourage users to interact more with each other and ultimately keep their eyeballs glued to News Feed, but it resulted in people’s feeds being taken over by divisive content. Publishers began optimizing for outrage, because that was the type of content that generated lots of interactions.

On YouTube, where “watch time” was prioritized over view counts, algorithms recommended and ran videos in an endless stream. And in their quest to sate attention, these algorithms frequently led people down ever more labyrinthine corridors to the conspiratorial realms of flat-earth truthers, QAnon, and their ilk. Algorithms on Instagram’s Discover page are designed to keep us scrolling (and spending) even after we’ve exhausted our friends’ content, often by promoting popular aesthetics whether or not the user had previously been interested. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Instagram had long understood it was harming the mental health of teenage girls through content about body image and eating disorders, but ignored those reports. Keep ’em scrolling.

There is an argument that the big platforms are merely giving us what we wanted. Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like, If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product … I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.”

The big platforms’ focus on engagement at all costs made them ripe for exploitation. Twitter became a “honeypot for a**holes” where trolls from places like 4chan found an effective forum for coordinated harassment. Gamergate started in swampier waters like Reddit and 4chan, but it played out on Twitter, where swarms of accounts would lash out at the chosen targets, generally female video-game critics. Trolls also discovered that Twitter could be gamed to get vile phrases to trend: in 2013, 4chan accomplished this with#cuttingforbieber, falsely claiming to represent teenagers engaging in self-harm for the pop singer. Platform dynamics created such a target-rich environment that intelligence services from Russia, China, and Iran—among others—use them to sow political division and disinformation to this day. 

“Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,” says Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former head of trust and safety for Twitter. “And if you consider that Instagram is a society in some twisted definition, we have tasked a company with governing a society bigger than any that has ever existed in the course of human history. Of course they’re going to fail.”

How to fix it

Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-­seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow. 

One positive sign is the growing understanding that sometimes … you have to pay for stuff. And indeed, people are paying individual creators and publishers on platforms such as Substack, Patreon, and Twitch. Meanwhile, the freemium model that YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Hulu explored proves (some) people are willing to shell out for ad-free experiences. A world where only the people who can afford to pay $9.99 a month to ransom back their time and attention from crappy ads isn’t ideal, but at least it demonstrates that a different model will work.

Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming. (Many—including internet pioneer Richard Stallman, who has a page on his personal website devoted to “Why you should not be used by Threads”—have expressed skepticism of Meta’s intentions and promises.) Even better, it enables more granular moderation. Again, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a good example of what can go wrong when one person, in this case Elon Musk, has too much power in making moderation decisions—something federated networks and the so-called  “fediverse” could solve. 

The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. “As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,” says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.”

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There’s a lot of upside to this, but Collings is still wary. “I fear that while we have an amazing opportunity,” she says, “unless there’s an intentional effort to make sure that what happened on Web2 does not happen on Web3, I don’t see how it will not just perpetuate the same things.” 

Federation and more competition among new apps and platforms provide a chance for different communities to create the kinds of privacy and moderation they want, rather than following top-down content moderation policies created at headquarters in San Francisco that are often explicitly mandated not to mess with engagement. Yoel Roth’s dream scenario would be that in a world of smaller social networks, trust and safety could be handled by third-party companies that specialize in it, so social networks wouldn’t have to create their own policies and moderation tactics from scratch each time.

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The tunnel-vision focus on growth created bad incentives in the social media age. It made people realize that if you wanted to make money, you needed a massive audience, and that the way to get a massive audience was often by behaving badly. The new form of the internet needs to find a way to make money without pandering for attention. There are some promising new gestures toward changing those incentives already. Threads doesn’t show the repost count on posts, for example—a simple tweak that makes a big difference because it doesn’t incentivize virality. 

We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior online. We need to learn to appreciate areas of the internet that are small, like a new Mastodon server or Discord or blog. We need to trust in the power of “1,000 true fans”over cheaply amassed millions.

Anil Dash has been repeating the same thing over and over for years now: that people should buy their own domains, start their own blogs, own their own stuff. And sure, these fixes require a technical and financial ability that many people do not possess. But with the move to federation (which at least provides control, if not ownership) and smaller spaces, it seems possible that we’re actually going to see some of those shifts away from big-platform-mediated communication start to happen. 

“There’s a systemic change that is happening right now that’s bigger,” he says. “You have to have a little bit of perspective of life pre-Facebook to sort of say, Oh, actually, some of these things are just arbitrary. They’re not intrinsic to the internet.”

The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy. 

My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them. 

Katie Notopoulos is a writer who lives in Connecticut. She’s written for BuzzFeed News, Fast Company, GQ, and Columbia Journalism Review.

Article link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/?

IBM Research Global Internship Program applications are now open to intern with IBM Quantum the summer of 2024.

At IBM Quantum, we’re bringing useful quantum computing to the world. This technology is widely expected to solve valuable problems that are unsolvable using any known methods on classical supercomputers. And quantum summer internships, as part of the IBM Research Global Internship Program, are perhaps the most valuable in the field. Every intern working in quantum makes meaningful contributions to the IBM Quantum Development Roadmap — pushing the field of quantum computing forward in the process.

We have directly trained more than 400 interns at all levels of higher education since 2020, many of whom have gone on to work at IBM Quantum or elsewhere in the field of quantum after graduation. Interns have the opportunity to work directly with researchers, developers, and business experts working to advance the field of quantum computing. Our interns have researched quantum applications, and design hardware, developed open-source projects with Qiskit, carried out market research, and more.

We are hiring software developer, hardware engineer, and research scientist interns for the summer of 2024. Interns in the US will work at either the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, or at IBM Research — Almaden in San Jose, California from either May 20, 2024 to August 9, 2024, or from June 17, 2024 to September 6, 2024. International internship opportunities will be added to this article, soon. See the full list of roles and links below to apply.

The internship experience

Internships with IBM Quantum prepare students with the skills, networks, and career paths needed to launch their careers in the field of quantum. In previous years, the IBM Quantum internship program has included the Qiskit Global Summer School, poster sessions, and a fireside chat with IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Quantum, Jay Gambetta, hosted and organized by IBM Quantum interns.

Arian Noori, a University of Wisconsin graduate student and quantum hardware engineering intern who worked on optimizing cryogenic qubit control transmission lines for improved signal delivery to a quantum chip, said about his experience interning at IBM Research:

“Not only did I acquire invaluable practical and technical skills, but my mentors also instilled in me new and intuitive ways of approaching engineering and physics problems. The IBM community is remarkably friendly and open. I was surrounded by some of the most intellectual individuals in the world, and everyone was delighted to share insights into their projects.

“This exposure allowed me to better conceptualize the entire quantum computing ecosystem, enabling a deeper understanding of the most pressing challenges in the field.”

Columbia University undergraduate and quantum software intern Danielle Odigie said about her IBM Research internship experience: “I feel like this summer was the summer where I started feeling like an actual software engineer! It was so fulfilling and so cool to be able to aid in the efforts to create software that connects programmers to such powerful technology.”

And Dhruv Srinivasan, University of Maryland undergraduate and quantum hardware intern learned about the bring-up of quantum computers, and the “many facets of the quantum stack, where I worked on both the room-temperature electronics cooling, as well as the calibration of the amplification of a chain of qubits.”

For more advice from previous interns, take a look at last year’s blog. Though familiarity with quantum computing is not required, we suggest candidates consider getting acquainted with with Qiskit. We have also revamped the IBM Quantum Learning platform, making it easier than ever to hone your quantum computing skills and make yourself a more competitive candidate. Check out the IBM Quantum Learning platform.

2024 internship openings

We look forward to hearing from you. And for those outside the United States, we will share updates on internship opportunities outside of the US in the near future. Follow IBM Quantum on LinkedIn for updates.

Quantum Hardware Engineer Summer Internships

• 2024 Summer Intern: Quantum Hardware Engineer

Quantum Research Summer Internships

• 2024 Summer Intern: Quantum Computational Scientist
• 2024 Summer Intern: Quantum Research Scientist

Quantum Software Summer Internships

• 2024 Summer Intern: Quantum Back-End Software Developer

Article link; https://research.ibm.com/blog/2024-quantum-internships?sf182402378=1

https://www.quantum.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/QIST-Natl-Workforce-Plan.pdf

Release Date October 10, 2023

Today, CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury released guidance on improving the security of open source software (OSS) in operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS). In alignment with CISA’s recently released Open Source Security Roadmap, the guidanceprovides recommendations to OT/ICS organizations on:

• Supporting OSS development and maintenance,
• Managing and patching vulnerabilities in OT/ICS environments, and
• Using the Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs) as a common framework for adopting key cybersecurity best practices in relation to OSS.

Alongside the guidance, CISA published the Securing OSS in OT web page, which details the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) OSS planning initiative, a priority within the JCDC 2023 Planning Agenda. The initiative will support collaboration between the public and private sectors—including the OSS community—to better understand and secure OSS use in OT/ICS, which will strengthen defense against OT/ICS cyber threats.   

CISA encourages OT/ICS organizations to review this guidance and implement its recommendations.

This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.

Article link: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2023/10/10/cisa-fbi-nsa-and-treasury-release-guidance-oss-itics-environments

Google on Tuesday announced the ability for all users to set up passkeys by default, five months after it rolled out support for the FIDO Alliance-backed passwordless standard for Google Accounts on all platforms.

“This means the next time you sign in to your account, you’ll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins,” Google’s Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand said.

“It also means you’ll see the ‘skip password when possible‘ option toggled on in your Google Account settings.”

Passkeys are a new form of authentication that entirely eliminate the need for usernames and passwords, or even provide any additional authentication factor.

In other words, it’s a passwordless login mechanism that leverages public-key cryptography to authenticate users’ access to websites and apps, with the private key saved securely in the device and the public key stored in the server.

Each passkey is unique and bound to a username and a specific service, meaning a user will have at least as many passkeys as they have accounts, although there can be multiple passkeys per account since passkeys function only within the confines of the same platform.

A user can, therefore, have one passkey each for a website for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.

Thus, when a user signs into a website or app that supports passkeys, a random challenge is created and sent to the client, which, in turn, prompts the individual to verify using their biometric or a PIN in order to sign the challenge using the private key and send it back to the server.

Authentication is considered successful if the signed response can be validated using the associated public key.

An immediate benefit to passkeys is two-fold: they not only obviate the hassle of remembering passwords, but are also phishing-resistant, thereby safeguarding accounts against potential takeover attacks.

The development comes weeks after Microsoft officially began supporting passkeys in Windows 11 for improved account security. Other widely-used platforms like eBay and Uber have enabled passkey support in recent months.

Article link: https://thehackernews.com/2023/10/google-adopts-passkeys-as-default-sign.html

Individual atoms on a surface do their first basic calculation.

Physicists have performed the first quantum calculations to be carried out using individual atoms sitting on a surface.

The technique, described on 5 October in Science¹, controls titanium atoms by beaming microwave signals from the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). It is unlikely to compete any time soon with the leading approaches to quantum computing, including those adopted by Google and IBM, as well as by many start-up companies. But the tactic could be used to study quantum properties in a variety of other chemical elements or even molecules, say the researchers who developed it.

At some level, everything in nature is quantum and can, in principle, perform quantum computations. The hard part is to isolate quantum states called qubits — the quantum equivalent of the memory bits in a classical computer — from environmental disturbances, and to control them finely enough for such calculations to be achieved.

Andreas Heinrich at the Institute for Basic Science in Seoul and his collaborators worked with nature’s ‘original’ qubit — the spin of the electron. Electrons act like tiny compass needles, and measuring the direction of their spin can yield only two possible values, ‘up’ or ‘down’, which correspond to the ‘0’ and ‘1’ of a classical bit. But before it is measured, electron spin can exist in a continuum of possible intermediate states, called superpositions. This is the key to performing quantum computations.

Three titanium atoms are arranged inside a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), close enough to sense each other’s quantum spins. Iron atoms stuck to the tip of the STM (top) ‘talk’ with one of the qubits (blue), using it to read and write information on the other two (red) and to get them to perform a rudimentary quantum computation.Credit: Center for Quantum Nanoscience

The researchers started by scattering titanium atoms on a perfectly flat surface made of magnesium oxide. They then mapped the atoms’ positions using the STM, which has atomic resolution. They used the tip of the STM probe to move the titanium atoms around, arranging three of them into a triangle.

Using microwave signals emitted from the STM tip, the researchers were able to control the spin of a single electron in one of the titanium atoms. By tuning the frequencies of the microwaves appropriately, they could also make its spin interact with the spins in the other two titanium atoms, similarly to how multiple compass needles can influence each other through their magnetic fields. By doing this, the team was able to set up a simple two-qubit quantum operation, and also to read out its results. The operation took just nanoseconds — faster than is possible with most other types of qubit.

Heinrich says that it will be fairly straightforward to extend the technique to perhaps 100 qubits, possibly by manipulating spins in a combination of individual atoms and molecules. It might be difficult to push it much beyond that, however — and the leading qubit technologies are already being scaled up to hundreds of qubits. “We are more on the basic-science side,” Heinrich says, although he adds that multiple STM quantum computers could one day be linked to form a bigger one.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03141-z

Article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03141-z

References

1. Wang, Y. et al. Science 382, 87–92 (2023).Article Google Scholar 

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Culture is often described as “how we do things around here” — a passive reflection of legacy norms and behaviors. It’s more helpful to think of culture as the nervous system of an organization. In biology, the central nervous system is the pathway by which thoughts in our brains are translated into actions by our muscles, and how our experience of acting in the world updates our brain’s understanding of the world. In organizations, this means thinking of culture as the transmission mechanism by which a company both communicates its intended strategy to the front lines and receives feedback and intelligence from the field about whether the strategy is achieving the intended outcomes in the market.

This nervous system metaphor illuminates the factors behind two of the most common reasons given for business failure: “We had a great strategy but failed to execute it” (a failure in the communication from the center to the field) or “Our leaders surrounded themselves with people who were afraid to tell them how the business was really performing” (a failure to relay important feedback and intelligence from the field). Both are examples of the failure to create an effective transmission mechanism from thought to action and back again.

A strategic approach to culture involves an active effort to create the environment and infrastructure to promote the necessary information flow between strategy and execution — treating them as complementary components of purposeful doing. These tools can include town halls, customer site visits, postmortems on lost bids, employee engagement surveys and any number of other mechanisms that facilitate the exchange of valuable information about what is (or is not) working. These tools nurture a culture of contextual awareness and adaptability that enables the business to perform better in its current environment and to prepare for future success. 

Different change objectives require different choices about culture.

There are certain aspects of culture that are universally desirable and others whose value is more context-dependent. When Donald Sull and Charles Sull analyzed 1.4 million employee reviews on Glassdoor, they identified four key factors that contribute to a positive corporate culture (respect, leadership, compensation/benefits, and job security). But when organizational change is the imperative, this requires deliberately adding context-dependent factors to the culture.

The importance of adaptation has been the defining theme of our earlier articles

The Strategy of Change

To develop effective strategy amid constant change, leaders must hone their ability to determine which changes will boost their organization’s competitiveness. This series examines data from companies worldwide to provide practical insights for business leaders seeking advantage as they navigate complexity and change. More in this series 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jonathan Knowles is the founder of advisory firm Type 2 Consulting. B. Tom Hunsaker is a clinical professor of strategy and leadership at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. Melanie Hughes is the former chief HR officer of Moody’s, American Eagle, and Tribune Media.

October 6, 2023

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) said it plans to share a lot more data with non-VA medical providers. The VA today announced a data-sharing pledge with 13 community health care systems to improve the veteran experience whether veterans receive their care at a VA facility or not. Through the “Veteran Interoperability Pledge,”the VA said it will securely exchange information with non-VA medical providers about care provided and requested, as well as help to connect veterans with VA benefits. “This pledge will improve veteran health care by giving us seamless, immediate access to a patient’s medical history, which will help us make timely and accurate treatment decisions,” VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal said. The pledge comes as the VA is in the process of migrating to a new electronic health record (EHR) system through its Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM) program.

Maggie Bullard-Marshall, PMP | Sep 10, 2023

If you’re an individually-owned 8(a) participant or applicant and feeling a little overwhelmed by this new requirement to write a social disadvantage narrative, consider using these tools to get you started.

1. Create a free account at https://chat.openai.com/
2. Click “new chat” and copy/paste this prompt in the box:Write a succinct social disadvantage narrative for the Small Business Administration. It must include the following elements: (i) At least one objective distinguishing feature that has contributed to social disadvantage, such as race, ethnic origin, gender, physical handicap, long-term residence in an environment isolated from the mainstream of American society, or other similar causes not common to individuals who are not socially disadvantaged; (ii) The individual’s social disadvantage must be rooted in treatment which he or she has experienced in American society, not in other countries; (iii) The individual’s social disadvantage must be chronic and substantial, not fleeting or insignificant; and (iv) The individual’s social disadvantage must have negatively impacted on his or her entry into or advancement in the business world. SBA will consider any relevant evidence in assessing this element, including experiences relating to education, employment and business history (including experiences relating to both the applicant firm and any other previous firm owned and/or controlled by the individual), where applicable. (C) Business history. SBA considers such factors as unequal access to credit or capital, acquisition of credit or capital under commercially unfavorable circumstances, unequal treatment in opportunities for government contracts or other work, unequal treatment by potential customers and business associates, and exclusion from business or professional organizations. (3) An individual claiming social disadvantage must present facts and evidence that by themselves establish that the individual has suffered social disadvantage that has negatively impacted his or her entry into or advancement in the business world. (i) Each instance of alleged discriminatory conduct must be accompanied by a negative impact on the individual’s entry into or advancement in the business world in order for it to constitute an instance of social disadvantage. (ii) SBA may disregard a claim of social disadvantage where a legitimate alternative ground for an adverse employment action or other perceived adverse action exists and the individual has not presented evidence that would render his/her claim any more likely than the alternative ground. (iii) SBA may disregard a claim of social disadvantage where an individual presents evidence of discriminatory conduct, but fails to connect the discriminatory conduct to consequences that negatively impact his or her entry into or advancement in the business world. (6) In determining whether an individual claiming social disadvantage meets the requirements set forth in this paragraph (c), SBA will determine whether: (i) Each specific claim establishes an incident of bias or discriminatory conduct; (ii) Each incident of bias or discriminatory conduct negatively impacted the individual’s entry into or advancement in the business world; and (iii) In the totality, the incidents of bias or discriminatory conduct that negatively impacted the individual’s entry into or advancement in the business world establish chronic and substantial social disadvantage. Business history – SBA considers factors such as: unequal access to credit or capital; acquisition of credit or capital under commercially unfavorable circumstances; unequal treatment in opportunities for government contracts or other work; unequal treatment by potential customers and business associates; and exclusion from business or professional organizations. For each incident, please describe who, what, where, why, when, and how discrimination or bias occurred. Incidents are more easily digested by the SBA if they provide information in the following order: When – Explain when the discriminatory conduct occurred. Exact dates, if available, are preferred but are not necessary so long as the incident provides a specific time period. This discrimination can be from any period of your life; you do not need to be experiencing current discrimination to qualify. Where – Explain where the discriminatory conduct occurred. The incident must have occurred in American society. Who – Explain who committed the discriminatory action. This could include an individual, a group of individuals, or an institution. Individual names, where available, are preferred but not necessary so long as the incident provides a specific figure or organization. What – Explain the discriminatory conduct. Why – Explain the reason(s) that the conduct was more likely motivated by bias or discrimination than other non-discriminatory reasons. Without additional facts, a mere assertion that the action was the result of bias or discrimination is not enough to support a claim of social disadvantage. How – Explain how each instance of discriminatory conduct impacted your entry into or advancement in the business world. Offensive comments or conduct, while reprehensible, will not support a claim of social disadvantage if there is no negative impact associated with the incident.
3. ChatGPT will start typing but just ignore that. 
4. Add some details about your example. For example, I typed, “My example: I am Black and when I was in the military, I was often overlooked for promotion.” [note: the free version isn’t confidential so don’t put actual names or private information; just make up a name like John Doe or use another tool that does protect your privacy]
5. ChatGPT will reply in the SBA-preferred format.
6. Copy this and paste it in a MS Word document. Edit to make it more personal/specific. 

Hope this helps get you started!

Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8a-companies-can-use-ai-draft-social-disadvantage-maggie

Congress is replete with diseases of leadership. As a nation, we can, and need to do better.

https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-15-diseases-of-leadership-according-to-pope-francis

Pope Francis has not tried to hide his desire to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic Church, which he sees as imperious and insular. The Church is, essentially, a bureaucracy, full of good-hearted but imperfect people – not much different than any organization, making the Pope’s counsel relevant for leaders everywhere. Pope Francis’s 2014 address of the Roman Curia can be translated into corporate-speak. It identifies 15 “diseases” of leadership that can weaken the effectiveness of any organization. These diseases include excessive busyness that neglects the need for rest, and mental and emotional “petrification” that prevents compassion and humility. The Pope also warns against poor coordination, losing a sense of community by failing to work together. A set of questions corresponding to the 15 diseases can help you determine if you are a “healthy” leader.close

Pope Francis has made no secret of his intention to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic church, which he regards as insular, imperious, and bureaucratic. He understands that in a hyper-kinetic world, inward-looking and self-obsessed leaders are a liability.

Last year, just before Christmas, the Pope addressed the leaders of the Roman Curia — the Cardinals and other officials who are charged with running the church’s byzantine network of administrative bodies. The Pope’s message to his colleagues was blunt. Leaders are susceptible to an array of debilitating maladies, including arrogance, intolerance, myopia, and pettiness. When those diseases go untreated, the organization itself is enfeebled. To have a healthy church, we need healthy leaders.

Through the years, I’ve heard dozens of management experts enumerate the qualities of great leaders. Seldom, though, do they speak plainly about the “diseases” of leadership. The Pope is more forthright. He understands that as human beings we have certain proclivities — not all of them noble. Nevertheless, leaders should be held to a high standard, since their scope of influence makes their ailments particularly infectious.

The Catholic Church is a bureaucracy: a hierarchy populated by good-hearted, but less-than-perfect souls. In that sense, it’s not much different than your organization. That’s why the Pope’s counsel is relevant to leaders everywhere.

With that in mind, I spent a couple of hours translating the Pope’s address into something a little closer to corporate-speak. (I don’t know if there’s a prohibition on paraphrasing Papal pronouncements, but since I’m not Catholic, I’m willing to take the risk.)

Herewith, then, the Pope (more or less):

____________________

The leadership team is called constantly to improve and to grow in rapport and wisdom, in order to carry out fully its mission. And yet, like any body, like any human body, it is also exposed to diseases, malfunctioning, infirmity. Here I would like to mention some of these “[leadership] diseases.” They are diseases and temptations which can dangerously weaken the effectiveness of any organization.

1. The disease of thinking we are immortal, immune, or downright indispensable, [and therefore] neglecting the need for regular check-ups. A leadership team which is not self-critical, which does not keep up with things, which does not seek to be more fit, is a sick body. A simple visit to the cemetery might help us see the names of many people who thought they were immortal, immune, and indispensable! It is the disease of those who turn into lords and masters, who think of themselves as above others and not at their service. It is the pathology of power and comes from a superiority complex, from a narcissism which passionately gazes at its own image and does not see the face of others, especially the weakest and those most in need. The antidote to this plague is humility; to say heartily, “I am merely a servant. I have only done what was my duty.”
2. Another disease is excessive busyness.It is found in those who immerse themselves in work and inevitably neglect to “rest a while.” Neglecting needed rest leads to stress and agitation. A time of rest, for those who have completed their work, is necessary, obligatory and should be taken seriously: by spending time with one’s family and respecting holidays as moments for recharging.
3. Then there is the disease of mental and [emotional] “petrification.” It is found in leaders who have a heart of stone, the “stiff-necked;” in those who in the course of time lose their interior serenity, alertness and daring, and hide under a pile of papers, turning into paper pushers and not men and women of compassion. It is dangerous to lose the human sensitivity that enables us to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice! Because as time goes on, our hearts grow hard and become incapable of loving all those around us. Being a humane leader means having the sentiments of humility and unselfishness, of detachment and generosity.
4. The disease of excessive planning and of functionalism. When a leader plans everything down to the last detail and believes that with perfect planning things will fall into place, he or she becomes an accountant or an office manager. Things need to be prepared well, but without ever falling into the temptation of trying to eliminate spontaneity and serendipity, which is always more flexible than any human planning. We contract this disease because it is easy and comfortable to settle in our own sedentary and unchanging ways.
5. The disease of poor coordination. Once leaders lose a sense of community among themselves, the body loses its harmonious functioning and its equilibrium; it then becomes an orchestra that produces noise: its members do not work together and lose the spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. When the foot says to the arm: ‘I don’t need you,’ or the hand says to the head, ‘I’m in charge,’ they create discomfort and parochialism.
6. There is also a sort of “leadership Alzheimer’s disease.” It consists in losing the memory of those who nurtured, mentored and supported us in our own journeys. We see this in those who have lost the memory of their encounters with the great leaders who inspired them; in those who are completely caught up in the present moment, in their passions, whims and obsessions; in those who build walls and routines around themselves, and thus become more and more the slaves of idols carved by their own hands.
7. The disease of rivalry and vainglory.When appearances, our perks, and our titles become the primary object in life, we forget our fundamental duty as leaders—to “do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than ourselves.” [As leaders, we must] look not only to [our] own interests, but also to the interests of others.
8. The disease of existential schizophrenia. This is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive emotional emptiness which no [accomplishment or] title can fill. It is a disease which often strikes those who are no longer directly in touch with customers and “ordinary” employees, and restrict themselves to bureaucratic matters, thus losing contact with reality, with concrete people.
9. The disease of gossiping, grumbling, and back-biting. This is a grave illness which begins simply, perhaps even in small talk, and takes over a person, making him become a “sower of weeds” and in many cases, a cold-blooded killer of the good name of colleagues. It is the disease of cowardly persons who lack the courage to speak out directly, but instead speak behind other people’s backs. Let us be on our guard against the terrorism of gossip!
10. The disease of idolizing superiors. This is the disease of those who court their superiors in the hope of gaining their favor. They are victims of careerism and opportunism; they honor persons [rather than the larger mission of the organization]. They think only of what they can get and not of what they should give; small-minded persons, unhappy and inspired only by their own lethal selfishness. Superiors themselves can be affected by this disease, when they try to obtain the submission, loyalty and psychological dependency of their subordinates, but the end result is unhealthy complicity.
11. The disease of indifference to others.This is where each leader thinks only of himself or herself, and loses the sincerity and warmth of [genuine] human relationships. This can happen in many ways: When the most knowledgeable person does not put that knowledge at the service of less knowledgeable colleagues, when you learn something and then keep it to yourself rather than sharing it in a helpful way with others; when out of jealousy or deceit you take joy in seeing others fall instead of helping them up and encouraging them.
12. The disease of a downcast face. You see this disease in those glum and dour persons who think that to be serious you have to put on a face of melancholy and severity, and treat others—especially those we consider our inferiors—with rigor, brusqueness and arrogance. In fact, a show of severity and sterile pessimism are frequently symptoms of fear and insecurity. A leader must make an effort to be courteous, serene, enthusiastic and joyful, a person who transmits joy everywhere he goes. A happy heart radiates an infectious joy: it is immediately evident! So a leader should never lose that joyful, humorous and even self-deprecating spirit which makes people amiable even in difficult situations. How beneficial is a good dose of humor! …
13. The disease of hoarding. This occurs when a leader tries to fill an existential void in his or her heart by accumulating material goods, not out of need but only in order to feel secure. The fact is that we are not able to bring material goods with us when we leave this life, since “the winding sheet does not have pockets” and all our treasures will never be able to fill that void; instead, they will only make it deeper and more demanding. Accumulating goods only burdens and inexorably slows down the journey!
14. The disease of closed circles, where belonging to a clique becomes more powerful than our shared identity. This disease too always begins with good intentions, but with the passing of time it enslaves its members and becomes a cancer which threatens the harmony of the organization and causes immense evil, especially to those we treat as outsiders. “Friendly fire” from our fellow soldiers, is the most insidious danger. It is the evil which strikes from within. As it says in the bible, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste.”
15. Lastly: the disease of extravagance and self-exhibition. This happens when a leader turns his or her service into power, and uses that power for material gain, or to acquire even greater power. This is the disease of persons who insatiably try to accumulate power and to this end are ready to slander, defame and discredit others; who put themselves on display to show that they are more capable than others. This disease does great harm because it leads people to justify the use of any means whatsoever to attain their goal, often in the name of justice and transparency! Here I remember a leader who used to call journalists to tell and invent private and confidential matters involving his colleagues. The only thing he was concerned about was being able to see himself on the front page, since this made him feel powerful and glamorous, while causing great harm to others and to the organization.

Friends, these diseases are a danger for every leader and every organization, and they can strike at the individual and the community levels.

____________________

So, are you a healthy leader? Use the Pope’s inventory of leadership maladies to find out. Ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 5, to what extent do I . . .

• Feel superior to those who work for me?
• Demonstrate an imbalance between work and other areas of life?
• Substitute formality for true human intimacy?
• Rely too much on plans and not enough on intuition and improvisation?
• Spend too little time breaking silos and building bridges?
• Fail to regularly acknowledge the debt I owe to my mentors and to others?
• Take too much satisfaction in my perks and privileges?
• Isolate myself from customers and first-level employees?
• Denigrate the motives and accomplishments of others?
• Exhibit or encourage undue deference and servility?
• Put my own success ahead of the success of others?
• Fail to cultivate a fun and joy-filled work environment?
• Exhibit selfishness when it comes to sharing rewards and praise?
• Encourage parochialism rather than community?
• Behave in ways that seem egocentric to those around me?

As in all health matters, it’s good to get a second or third opinion. Ask your colleagues to score you on the same fifteen items. Don’t be surprised if they say, “Gee boss, you’re not looking too good today.” Like a battery of medical tests, these questions can help you zero in on opportunities to prevent disease and improve your health. A Papal leadership assessment may seem like a bit of a stretch. But remember: the responsibilities you hold as a leader, and the influence you have over others’ lives, can be profound. Why not turn to the Pope — a spiritual leader of leaders — for wisdom and advice?

• Gary Hamel is a visiting professor at London Business School and the founder of the Management Lab. He is a coauthor of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).