Employees and managers alike continue to debate the pros and cons of working remotely. Many workers desire to keep their flexible schedules, lower costs, and improved work-life balance. On the other side, some managers and executives believe that for employees to be fully engaged in their work, they must be present in the workplace.

A Harvard Business Review (HBR) article claims that reducing employees' sense of alienation from their coworkers and the corporate culture is a compelling justification for getting them back to the office. Studies have shown that remote workers are more inclined to leave their jobs when they feel alienated and separated.

These emotions of loneliness can be lessened by encouraging employees to socialize and assigning them a talking companion. For remote and hybrid workers who live in the same city, employers can arrange gatherings to lessen their sense of loneliness.

Many firms argue that returning to the workplace is necessary to boost worker productivity, since people are less productive at home than they are at work.

But the HBR analysis shows just the opposite. Following the COVID-19 lockdowns in April through mid-May 2020, researchers collected metadata from all Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx meetings (with webcams on or off) from ten sizable international organizations. They then compared this set of six weeks in 2021 and 2022 with the same set of six weeks in 2020.

The study concluded that, while remote work doesn't reduce productivity; it does alter how both employees and employers define productivity. The habits of remote employees changed in 2022 as compared to 2020, when it was novel.

The survey found virtual meetings are more common today. They’re more spontaneous, condensed, and with fewer people. We can assume that as remote working became more ubiquitous, people realized that sometimes it's unnecessary to have a 30-minute to an hour-long meeting.

The HBR study found that meetings were 10 minutes shorter in 2022 than they were in 2020, and 66% of one-on-one meetings were unscheduled. In contrast to the strict timetables organizations followed prior to the epidemic, these statistics can be attributed to managers and employees arranging meetings on an as-needed basis.

Another interesting fact from the research found that meeting attendance decreased by 50%, from an average of 20 participants to 10. According to HBR, this decline was brought on by a rise in one-on-one meetings in 2022, when 42% of meetings were one-on-ones, up from 17% in 2020.

The goal of the HBR study was to refute the claim that remote workers are not interacting with their coworkers. Unplanned one-on-one meetings, according to the report, may take the place of the face-to-face interactions that employees once had at work.
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Although the ways that we work now are different and might change more over time, it's clear that people are still working. Bottom line: Does it really matter where employees are working as long as they finish their tasks on time and meet their targets?

Regardless of the business you work for, networking is a key skill for success. But in the contemporary environment we live in, creating and distributing business cards doesn't really make sense.

An alternative that is more environmentally friendly is a new electronic card called the Linq card that digitally sends your contact information to someone else's phone. 

The Linq business card looks exactly like a standard business card, but it has a significant difference: it can instantly share your contact information with others by tapping it on a smartphone.

The card makes use of a near-field communication (NFC) chip, the same technology that powers regular activities like using your smartphone to make in-store purchases, to enable the tap-sharing feature. Most devices have NFC reading capabilities, but if the person you want to share with doesn't have NFC, you can still easily share your information by having them scan the QR code on the back of the card.

The Linq profile is displayed once the person taps the card or scans the QR code. When you first activate your card, the Linq app prompts you to create your unique profile. The best feature is how customizable it is—from the design of your bio page to the social media platforms and links that are displayed, right down to the reference profile picture and even an included video.

If you meet regularly with new businesses and individuals, they offer an option for you to save the contact information on those with whom you share your information. The recipient has the option to add your contact information automatically to their default messaging app when it is scanned.

The traditional white card is the least expensive option in terms of price, coming in at $12 on Linq’s website; prices rise as you choose different color options, finishes and additional custom features.
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Regardless of age, these cards make wonderful stocking stuffers or presents for everyone who works.

New chips are being released by Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud computing division to power the most advanced computing, supporting tasks like gene sequencing and weather forecasting.

The largest provider of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced recently that it will allow users to rent processing capacity that uses a new generation of its Graviton chips. The product, according to Peter DeSantis, senior vice president and manager of most of AWS' technical teams, is a platform for expanding access to high-performance computing.

The newest chip is Amazon's most recent push to produce more of the hardware for its large data centers that power AWS. Making its own chips, according to Amazon, will provide clients access to more powerful computers at a lower cost than they could by renting time on processors made by companies like Intel Corp., Nvidia Corp., or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. These businesses, which are also some of AWS's biggest suppliers, are now in direct competition with it because of the new chips. According to DeSantis, the chipmakers are still "excellent partners," and AWS intends to keep providing high-performance computing services based on their chips.

To kick-start its in-house chip designs, which initially were concentrated on basic computing activities like serving as the foundation for websites, AWS bought chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. The high-performance computing initiative, which was unveiled at the opening of the AWS re:Invent trade conference, aims to show that Amazon's proprietary technology can compete head-to-head with chips from leading manufacturers.

The Inferentia chip, which is made to make deductions from enormous volumes of data, has undergone an update, according to AWS Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky, who made the announcement the second day of the re:Invent conference. According to Amazon, Inferentia2 handles larger data sets than its predecessor, making it possible to perform tasks like software-generated graphics or speech recognition and interpretation.

Among the most sophisticated systems powered by cutting-edge semiconductors are computers that forecast weather patterns and simulate the aerodynamics of race cars. Usually, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions have created pricey computer systems in their own data centers using components from Intel, Nvidia, and AMD.

According to DeSantis, the Graviton3E, the most recent model in AWS's line of Graviton processors, will be twice as capable as earlier models in one category of calculations used by high-performance computers. When combined with other AWS technology, the new offering will be 20% better than the previous one. Amazon didn't say when services based on the new chip would be available.
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“The reason that high-performance computing isn’t big is it’s hard,” DeSantis said. “It’s hard to get capacity, it’s hard to get time on that supercomputer. What we’re excited about is bringing the capabilities of high-performance computing to more workloads.”

To keep up with the ever-growing numbers in our digital world, we need more unit measurements for larger numbers as more digital data is produced and stored and smaller numbers for quantum science and particle physics.

The last time this was done was 1991 when we added two larger prefixes – zetta [Z] (1 with 21 zeroes) and yotta [Y] (1 with 24 zeroes) and two smaller prefixes – zepto [z] (21 zeroes to the right of the decimal point) and yocto [y] (24 zeroes).

Now, the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures introduced four new prefixes to the International System of Units, or metric system. On the “larger” scale, the first new prefix is ronto [R] (1 with 27 zeroes) and quecto [Q] (1 with 30 zeroes). On the “smaller” scale, the two new prefixes are ronna [r] (27 zeroes to the right of the decimal point) and quetta [q] (27 zeroes.)

"Most people are familiar with prefixes like milli- as in milligram," Richard Brown, head of metrology at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory who proposed the four new prefixes, told The Associated Press. "But these [new additions] are prefixes for the biggest and smallest levels ever measured."

On the larger scale, we can now state the Earth’s mass as 6 ronnagrams rather than 6,000 yottagrams. The sun is 2,000 quettagrams rather than 2,000,000,000 yottagrams. On the smaller scale, now an electron’s mass is said to be 1 rontogram rather than 0.001 yoctograms.
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"It was high time. [We] need new words as things expand," Brown said. "In just a few decades, the world has become a very different place."