fortune--2020-10-13--How the World’s Best Workplaces have led the way in a year unlike any other

The story of 2020 is one of historic challenges.
The novel coronavirus arose. Economic shutdowns aiming to “flatten the curve” triggered a recession on the scale of the Great Depression. And in the midst of these challenges, the brutal murder of George Floyd ignited a racial reckoning that began in the U.S., and sparked sympathetic protests across the globe.
These historical challenges touched nearly every part of the world this year. The two viruses of COVID-19 and racism combined to sow immense fear, chaos, and pain in countries and companies alike.
But 2020 also is a story of deeply human responses by the Fortune World’s Best Workplaces.
In a year unlike any other, the World’s Best Workplaces made it an opportunity to become better—to get creative in how they care for people, to deepen their commitment to community, to courageously connect in new ways.
Collectively, the World’s Best Workplaces have accelerated the movement toward a better future, in which all organizations become great places to work For All. Their story this year, ultimately, is one of hope.
The Fortune World’s Best Workplaces 2020 list is the product of surveys representing 10.2 million employees. These employees work at some 10,000 organizations that work with Great Place to Work across the globe. From 2019 through mid-2020, employees responded to more than 60 questions on our Trust Index survey. Based on this data set, companies were recognized on Great Place to Work national Best Workplaces lists in the United States, Canada, and countries in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Great Place to Work’s team selected the best of the best to create the Fortune World’s Best Workplaces 2020. These 25 organizations stand out for creating globally great cultures and employ roughly 2.1 million people worldwide in industries ranging from manufacturing to technology to transportation.
Technology giant Cisco ranked first on the list for the second straight year. Transportation and logistics provider DHL ranked second on the 2020 list, and hotel giant Hilton placed third.
These companies have met the historic challenges of 2020 in human, inspiring ways.
Let’s consider Cisco’s story.
Cisco is perhaps best known as the company that connects people and data. It got its start more than 20 years ago by helping to build the foundation of the Internet.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, though, the company’s dedication to linking up systems and customers was tested as never before. Demand for Cisco’s Webex video collaboration tool soared, requiring resolve on the part of frontline Cisconians and executives alike.
The company also had to demonstrate courage as it confronted the racial reckoning.
In connecting with people in new ways, Cisco leaders were challenged to blend bravery with humility.
As the COVID-19 pandemic prompted businesses across the globe to close offices and send workers home, demand for Cisco’s technology and applications spiked. All of a sudden, millions of employees who used to meet in person were now meeting online. Many more people throughout the world began firing up Cisco’s Webex collaboration software to get critical work done.
So much so that Volumes on the Webex platform tripled in April.
That put great pressure on Cisco’s workforce to deliver. And they did, said Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO.
“The teams that were building out our infrastructure for this platform, they worked seven by 24 for probably a month solid just to deal with the increased volumes,” Robbins said. “Because these platforms were never designed for the entire world to be working from home.”
How were Cisco employees willing and able to work so hard, for so long, in a stressful time? It had much to do with the culture of trust and psychological safety Cisco had built prior to the pandemic, and how Cisco deepened its internal bonds amid the COVID crisis.
Fully 87% of Cisco staffers globally called the company a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace heading into the pandemic. That’s one of the highest global marks in Great Place to Work’s research, fully 6 points better than the average among the World’s Best Workplaces.
Once the pandemic hit, Chuck and his leadership began weekly “check-ins” of 75 minutes to listen to employees and address questions.
Cisco also listened to its employees by surveying them about their workplace experience—itself a sign of concern and a willingness to learn about how employees were doing. Employees responded that they appreciated how the executive leadership team handled the COVID crisis.
One U.S. Cisco employee told us: “We feel connected mentally even though we are confined home. During COVID, I sometimes drove by [the] offices just to see the Cisco logos and campus. I am longing to get back to Cisco office again after COVID, because Cisco is part of my identity.”
Even though customers around the globe desperately needed Cisco’s technology and support to keep operating amid the pandemic, many of these clients were struggling.
The economic downturn prompted by COVID-related shutdowns meant that customers faced cash shortages.
Cisco responded by enabling many customers to finance their purchases. In effect, Chuck and his team dared to trust that these clients would make good later on. And rather than focus on short-term payments, Cisco leaned into the bigger purpose of keeping the world working.
“We didn’t say, ‘Well, send us a purchase order and we’ll get over there and help you out,’” Robbins said. “We just went and just got the technology out there and said, ‘We’ll figure it out later.’”
It takes courage to confront racism head-on. These can be difficult conversations. Especially when they come as a surprise. Indeed, the racial reckoning touched off by George Floyd’s death blindsided many organizations.
Not Cisco. The company’s leaders already had taken a hard look in the mirror around issues of racial equity. Back in the fall of 2019, Chuck had read White Fragility. And that book helped prompt Chuck, who is white, to learn more about racial disparities at the company.
In January, Chuck arranged for his executive team to have a listening session with 18 Black leaders from across Cisco. It was an emotional moment, as the senior executives came to terms with a culture that wasn’t as inclusive as they’d thought.
Chuck says 90 percent of his team “had tears in their eyes” as they reflected on what they’d heard from Black colleagues.
But the tears didn’t hijack progress, as they have in other organizations. Instead, Cisco launched a 100-day “sprint” to tackle areas of racial inequity within the company. And those efforts helped prepare Cisco for the society-wide focus on racism sparked by George Floyd’s murder.
The weekend after Floyd’s murder, Chuck invited racial equity experts to speak with the entire Cisco staff. Things got heated—and boundaries were crossed.
“There were a few comments in the chat that we consider inappropriate,” recalls Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s Chief People Officer. “And what we decided to do in the follow-up meeting was to bring this workplace color spectrum that we have to the discussion.”
That color spectrum involves defining what kinds of comments are “green” and which are “yellow,” “orange” and “red.” Green comments are respectful, productive and inviting—even if they dispute a viewpoint. Fran and her team provided examples of each kind of comment, to help employees know how to keep the conversation constructive.
With the help of the color spectrum guidelines, the conversations have continued and grown more constructive. As one employee puts it, “I am very impressed with our executive team who have been not just willing, but aggressively driving thought leadership and hard, emotional conversations about our community impact, racism and how we, both internally as a culture, but also globally, need to improve our approach. All levels of the organization are actively and enthusiastically connecting.”
Judging by employees’ overwhelmingly positive reaction to the conversations about equity, Cisco’s courage to connect is advancing the cause of racial justice—even as it motivates employees to bring their best to work.
As Cisco’s story suggests, in the worst of times, the World’s Best have shown the way to a better world. They have given us hope for the future.
To read more about the 2020 World’s Best, click to view our report.
Click here to see the full list of the 2020 Fortune World’s Best Workplaces.
Ed Frauenheim is the senior director of content at Great Place to Work. He is co-author of A Great Place to Work For All.


fortune--2020-10-13--The electric car market is buzzing with Europe and China taking the lead

10 stocks to buy now : These names should perform well no matter who wins the White House

Sales of electric vehicles in Europe are growing at such a pace that the continent looks increasingly likely to outpace China in the near future.
That’s one of the findings of a report released Tuesday by London-based automotive research firm Jato Dynamics. However, it found that Europe and the U.S. still have a few things to learn from China, the world’s biggest EV market, including prioritizing affordability, centralizing planning, and using data to better understand consumers.
Demand for cleaner and smarter cars is rising globally, particularly in Europe where the market has been bolstered by tighter emissions regulations along with an increasing awareness of climate change. EV sales in Europe in the first half exceeded China for the first time since 2015.
Although the coronavirus pandemic hurt all car sales, including EVs, which fell 15% globally in the second quarter, the market for electric vehicles is forecast to expand about 7% this year, led by Europe, according to a September report from BloombergNEF.
“What governments in underdeveloped EV markets now need is a more centralized plan to catalyze growth and create an optimal environment to build consumer confidence by making adoptions as simple as possible,” Jato’s report said.
Charging Stations
Besides heavily subsidizing EVs, the government in China has created an effective infrastructure and implementation strategy that’s crucial to supporting adoption, the report found. According to the International Energy Agency, the number of public slow- and fast-charging spots reached 862,118 worldwide, with China taking a 60% share.
Tesla Inc., the California-based company that’s currently the world’s biggest EV maker, earlier this month cut the price of its China-made Model 3 sedan to 249,900 yuan ($36,800), cheaper than anywhere else, aided by supply chain localization, especially batteries.
While subsidies in China are being dialed back, EVs are still much cheaper than elsewhere. In Shanghai, it costs $13,000 for a license plate for a vehicle with a combustion engine whereas it’s free for an EV, thereby “creating a huge economic incentive and making the use of electric vehicles a no brainer,” Jato said. Automakers in Europe meanwhile have traditionally had a focus on luxury, more expensive EVs.
China isn’t the only country to offer EV subsidies, but it also spurred the domestic manufacturers by ensuring imported vehicles were for a long time not eligible for subsidies, and subject to import tariffs.
Beyond its home market, China aims to become a global automotive superpower and considers wider penetration of its own EVs as essential to that objective longer term.
“Despite sales data showing signs of an impending slowdown, once subsidies are fully phased out, the EV market in China will still be miles ahead of its competitors,” the report said. “Currently, there are 138 different EV models available in China, 60 in Europe and 17 in the U.S.”
It’s “apparent that a lighter touch approach is simply not as successful, as can be seen in the EU or U.S.”
Additionally, the use of data by Chinese firms including suppliers to the auto industry enables them to understand consumers better, and local buyers are very different to those in Europe.
“Chinese consumers are tech savvy, early adopters and keen to be at the forefront of digital development. A third believe it is critical to have in-car connectivity, compared to 18% of consumers in Germany,” the report said. “European consumers have typically been more hesitant when it comes to the adoption of electric vehicles, uncertain of EV capabilities and preferring to stick to what they know.”


fortune--2020-10-13--The U.K. government’s scientific advisers told it weeks ago to introduce a national lockdown. It ign

The U.K. government’s scientific advisers told it weeks ago to introduce a national lockdown. It ignored them.

Three weeks ago, the British government’s panel of expert scientists concluded that the country needed a short “circuit-breaker” period of lockdown, to bring its rapidly increasing COVID-19 case count out of control. The government ignored it, and now the second wave is in full swing across much of the U.K.
The news of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’ (SAGE) shunned recommendations came late Monday, when the group published the minutes of a September 21 Zoom meeting. The disclosure came shortly after Boris Johnson’s administration announced a new three-tier alert system for England, which will be used to impose localized lockdown measures on cities and regions.
That tiering system in itself runs against the SAGE recommendations—the group said “both local and national measures are needed; measures should not be applied in too specific a geographical area.”
The government also rejected SAGE’s recommendations to close “all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms, and personal services (e.g. hairdressers)” and to put all university and college teaching online “unless face-to-face teaching is absolutely essential.” It did however quickly take up the advice to tell people to work from home.
“A consistent package”
According to the SAGE minutes, the panel said measures would be “urgently needed” to mitigate the effects of its proposed interventions on the poorest members of society. However, it also said—with high confidence—that putting its recommendations in place quickly would speed up the reduction in COVID-19 case counts and deaths.
“A consistent package of measures should be adopted which do not promote, or appear to promote, contradictory goals,” it said. “This will enable clear, consistent communications that can explain the rationale for measures, which in turn will support adherence.”
That is not what happened over the subsequent few weeks.
Instead, Johnson’s cabinet has been split over what to do next, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak—the U.K.’s economic chief—prioritizing the economy, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock prioritizing health. The prime minister himself took weeks to decide which side to take; ultimately, he seems to have joined the Hancock camp, resulting in the three-tier alert system announced Monday.
The government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty—a key member of SAGE—said after Johnson’s announcement that he was “not confident” the localized restrictions would be enough to stop the disease’s spread. But Johnson said a national lockdown “would do a great deal of harm to our economy.”
The day before, there were 3,451 patients in English hospitals with confirmed cases of COVID-19. That’s 354 more than there were on March 23, the day the U.K.’s national lockdown began—though it should be noted that the rate of new hospitalizations was steeper at that point.
Second waves
Last week, Sunak defended his decision to subsidize pub and restaurant meals during the month of August, under his “Eat Out to Help Out” program. The move was designed to protect jobs and keep businesses afloat, but some have linked it to the rise of infections that led to the newly announced localized-lockdown scheme.
“What’s happening here is pretty much in sync with what’s happening around the world in second waves,” Sunak insisted.
Indeed, second waves have taken hold across much of Europe, with new restrictions imminent or already in place in countries including France, Italy, Spain and Germany.
But SAGE’s revelations come as the government is already facing heavy criticism over failures in its Test and Trace program, with program chief Dido Harding—the former CEO of telco TalkTalk—being urged by unions to step down after nearly 16,000 cases went unreported for over a week due to an Excel spreadsheet error.
There is never a good time for a government to be seen ignoring the recommendations of its scientific advisers, but the timing here is particularly inauspicious.


fortune--2020-10-13--Earnings season is here. Will companies deliver on the hype?

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning, Bull Sheeters. U.S. future are mixed ahead of a gusher of Q3 earnings reports, beginning later today. Yesterday, the markets rallied, with the Nasdaq notching its best trading day in a month. Investors are watching Amazon (it’s Prime Day), Apple (it’s new iPhone day) and Johnson & Johnson (bad news on the COVID vaccine front).
Let’s see what’s moving the markets.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are higher in afternoon trading with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng soaring again, up 2.2% , and up more than 6% over the past two weeks.
are higher in afternoon trading with soaring again, up , and up more than over the past two weeks. “ Time is on China’s side and it’s not on the United States’ side,” says hedge fund king Ray Dalio. He points to China’s methodical handling of the coronavirus , its steady monetary policy and the excitement over Chinese IPOs as reasons why investors see big potential in the world’s No. 2 economy.
and it’s not on the United States’ side,” says hedge fund king Ray Dalio. He points to China’s methodical handling of the , its steady and the excitement over Chinese IPOs as reasons why investors see big potential in the world’s No. 2 economy. Last week OPEC gave a glum assessment of the oil market. Now it’s IEA saying oil demand won’t rebound to pre-pandemic levels until 2023 at the earliest and that we will almost certainly hit peak oil by the end of the decade.
Europe
The European bourses are down with the Europe Stoxx 600 off 0.4% a half-hour into the trading session as concerns grow over a series of new lockdown measures introduced across parts of Europe. The euro and British pound are down too.
are down with the off a half-hour into the trading session as concerns grow over a series of new lockdown measures introduced across parts of Europe. The euro and British pound are down too. Pubs and bars will be shut in the hardest hit parts of England under Boris Johnson’s latest efforts to corral COVID , moves that are creating further rifts between the British PM and his allies.
in the hardest hit parts of under Boris Johnson’s latest efforts to corral , moves that are creating further rifts between the British PM and his allies. U.K. banks stocks fell on Monday after the BOE sent out a fact-finding letter to lenders inquiring, How would you fancy negative interest rates? BOE Governor Andrew Bailey had to later clarify the central bank is merely collecting input on sub-zero rates, not drawing up plans. Tough crowd.
U.S.
Dow and S&P futures point to a weak open. That’s after the Nasdaq, Dow and S&P 500 powered to big gains on Monday, putting the tech-heavy index within two percentage points of its all-time high.
point to a weak open. That’s after the and powered to big gains on Monday, putting the tech-heavy index within two percentage points of its all-time high. Big cap tech stocks led yesterday’s rally with Amazon shares up nearly 5% . The retailing giant kicks off its Prime Day shopping bonanza with estimates it will generate close to $10 billion over the two-day event.
. The retailing giant kicks off its shopping bonanza with estimates it will generate close to over the two-day event. Shares in Johnson & Johnson are down 2.4% in pre-market trading on news its COVID-19 vaccine trial has been suspended after a mysterious illness of a participant. It reports later today so the drug giant may have more of an update then.
Elsewhere
Gold is down, trading around $1,920/ounce .
is down, trading around . The dollar is up.
is up. Crude is up, with Brent trading around $42/barrel.
***
The season of big beats
Yesterday in this space we looked forward to the reporting season. Reminder: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, BlackRock and Johnson & Johnson are among the big names to report today.
The expectation is we’re in for a quarter of big beats. How big?
The consensus estimate is that S&P 500 Q3 earnings will come in around $33 per share. That would put full-year EPS at about $130, says Morgan Stanley, with even bigger bottom-line jumps in 2021 and 2022.
Basically, all the banks have been recalculating EPS estimates after companies solidly beat their expectations last quarter. According to BofA, its biggest upward revisions come courtesy of some of the most beaten-up sectors this year: energy, consumer discretionary and financials.
As I mentioned yesterday, finance stocks have been soaring in recent weeks. They traded higher yesterday again, closing up 1.1%. Yes, tech stocks drew most of the attention yesterday, but this rally feels a bit different. Other sectors are contributing this time around.
That’s probably because the macro signs show the economic recovery is well on its way, and we’re likely to see more granular evidence of this during earnings calls over the coming weeks. As BofA notes, “a 46% bounce in average oil prices from 2Q, strong consumption and manufacturing trends, and a weakening USD all point to a healthy recovery in earnings in 3Q.”
At the very least, earnings season should give investors something to focus on that’s a bit more orderly and illuminating than stimulus talks and presidential polling data. And for that we should be thankful for the distraction.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
$16 trillion. It might seem a bit premature to put a price tag on COVID, but that's not stopping former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and fellow Harvard University economist David Cutler. The duo say the full impact of COVID-19 will cost the United States $16 trillion, or four times the damage done by the Great Recession. Why so high? They take into account the toll from premature deaths and health losses as well as the economic toll of the shutdowns.
Calling the election. Every presidential election cycle, Wall Street looks to a variety of indicators to determine who might win the White House. Fortune's Rey Mashayekhi goes through this year's big indicators—the stock market, the dollar, manufacturing data, etc—to determine what it might mean for the U.S. balance of power, and for your portfolio.
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a discount offer for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
Quiz time
What percentage of S&P 500 companies have provided investors with some level of guidance for how their businesses are operating during these COVID-rattled times?
A) All
B) Most
C) Roughly half
D) None
The answer is C. According to Fortune's Shawn Tully, just 48% of S&P 500 companies have given investors something—anything—to go on as they continue to manage this crisis. "Given the big valuations Wall Street is awarding their stocks, it's worrying that the giants of the S&P are a lot less confident about where earnings are headed than investors appears to be," he writes.


fortune--2020-10-13--J&J pauses COVID-19 vaccine trial after participant falls ill

Johnson & Johnson halted clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine after a participant fell ill, the second time that a front-runner developer has paused testing in the race to create a viable immunization against the virus.
The participant’s illness is being evaluated, the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company said late Monday, adding that it would share information after further investigation. J&J shares fell 2.4% in trading before U.S. exchanges opened. The vaccine is undergoing tests in as many as 60,000 volunteers from Peru to South Africa.
J&J is racing along with rivals such as Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to deliver a shot to help blunt the pandemic. Drugmakers must balance time pressures—especially as coronavirus cases set new records—with safety considerations in the crucial last stage of testing.
“We’re going to have to get used to hearing these sorts of reports of pauses,” Hassan Vally, an associate professor in epidemiology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said by email. “As you vaccinate more people in these trials the chances are that there will be some illnesses in participants. The only difference here is that in the world that we live in right now, the progress of these trials are in the public eye, and so we are riding every bump.”
British drugmaker Astra last month temporarily stopped tests of its own vaccine candidate after a trial participant fell ill. That study has resumed in a number of countries, but remains halted in the U.S.
While such pauses are routine in the pharmaceutical industry, J&J’s interruption may contribute to concerns over safety with vaccine research progressing at an unprecedented pace. Developmental processes that usually take years have been compressed into months, egged on by politicians wanting a solution to a pandemic that has killed over 1 million people and scuppered economic growth.
“We are committed to providing transparent updates throughout the clinical development process of our vaccine candidate,” J&J said in a statement. “Adverse events – illnesses, accidents, etc. – even those that are serious, are an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies.”
In recent days, officials have sought to dampen expectations for a quick fix. Guido Rasi, executive director of the European Medicines Agency, said last week that a vaccine was looking unlikely by year end. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to demand two months of safety data before reviewing any application and said any shot submitted will need to be evaluated by an independent panel.
J&J executives will likely face questions about the trial pause Tuesday morning when they present third-quarter earnings. Representatives for the FDA could not immediately be reached by phone or email for comment after business hours.
Safeguards in Place
The pause “is good news in that it demonstrates that the regulatory safeguards to protect the public are still in place,” said Michael Kinch, a vaccine specialist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He said more information is needed to determine whether the issues with J&J’s vaccine are related to the illness experienced by Astra’s trial participant.
In the Astra incident, a patient who received the vaccine experienced unexplained neurological symptoms, prompting a halt in early September. Though trials have since resumed in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa, work remains paused in the U.S., raising questions over whether regulators there have lingering safety concerns.
J&J’s setback will add to these worries, delivering another reality check as some politicians continue to say that a Covid-19 fix is around the corner.
The pursuit of a vaccine has become a political topic, with some observers concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump’s eagerness to see a shot authorized before the election could compromise the scientific process.
Higher Bar
An inoculation must clear a higher bar than a treatment because it’s injected into healthy individuals. Public trust in a vaccine will be crucial as health authorities try to convince millions around the world to take it. Drugmakers have condensed the development timeline substantially, but are eager to avoid the perception that they are bending to political interference and have pledged to avoid scientific shortcuts.
While there are hundreds of Covid-19 vaccines being developed around the world, J&J is among a small group of vaccine makers which have progressed into final-stage human studies. The company is dosing up to 60,000 volunteers in the first big trial of an Covid-19 inoculation that may work after just one shot.
J&J Chief Executive Officer Alex Gorsky joked in an interview earlier this month that he’s asked “almost every 15 minutes” when a vaccine will be available. At the time, he reaffirmed J&J’s expectation that by “late this year, early next year,” the company could begin reviews with regulators for possible emergency use authorization. That timeline may now be in question.
Astra, Pfizer and Moderna are among other western developers with late-stage clinical trials. Pfizer has said it could have the data to support an application for an emergency authorization as soon as this month. Moderna doesn’t expect to have such data until late November.
Russia has tried to leapfrog the process in the race to be first with a Covid-19 shot, approving its Sputnik V product before it’s undergone full testing, drawing widespread skepticism. China also has several candidates in the works and the country’s top bio-safety scientist said last month that shots will be ready for public use as early as November or December.


fortune--2020-10-13--HP’s CEO on how the pandemic is accelerating change in technology and business

“We are witnessing the dawn of a new age,” HP CEO Enrique Lores said at the company’s Reinvent conference this year. Many of the changes that business leaders planned to transition into over the next few years are here now, and they’re being accepted seamlessly due to the pandemic from constant video conferencing to working from home.
On the latest episode of “Leadership Next,” the Fortune podcast about the changing roles of business leadership, Lores tells cohosts Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt that the fast pace of change has affected not only business and technology, but also the personal lives of employees and managers alike. That, he says, necessitates the development of a more approachable style of leadership across the company at this time when so many lives are more complicated and more stressful than ever.
And prioritizing those changes, along with the employees that they will serve, does not mean that profit takes a back seat, Lores said, adding that leaders should not feel the need to choose between short-term results and long-term contributions to the world. “I firmly believe you can do both, and we are proving that you can do both.”
And though HP’s stock is down since the pandemic started, Lores assures Murray and McGirt that the business remains strong, with opportunities in areas like education and 3D printing on the horizon.
To learn more about what HP is doing to negate its environmental impact and Lores’ approach to diversity and inclusion within the company, tune into the latest episode of “Leadership Next” at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.


fortune--2020-10-13--Some Chinese firms are unfazed by worsening U.S. relations. A fintech unicorn’s IPO is the latest pr

Some Chinese firms are unfazed by worsening U.S. relations. A fintech unicorn’s IPO is the latest proof

Chinese financial technology firm Lufax last week filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in what could be the largest Chinese company IPO on a U.S. exchange so far this year.
Lufax didn’t say when it will list or how much it aims to raise, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the firm plans to list by the end of the month and raise around $3 billion.
Shanghai-based research firm Hurun Report ranked Lufax, an online wealth-management and lending platform backed by Chinese insurance giant Ping An, the fourth-most valuable unicorn in the world in 2020 with an estimated $38 billion valuation.
Lufax raked in $3.6 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit in the first six months of 2020, according to its filing document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Its client base includes China’s fast-growing affluent middle-class, many of whom have a budding interest in personalized investment and who are accessible to Lufax through Ping An and its 210 million financial services customers, the filing says.
Lufax is the latest Chinese company to pursue a U.S. listing as U.S.-China political tensions rise and Chinese companies listed on U.S. bourses face more regulatory risks.
Despite those headwinds, the U.S. market “remain[s] one of the top IPO destinations for Chinese companies,” said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategy research at China Renaissance, an investment bank. Chinese companies still see the U.S. as a highly liquid listing venue that can boost a firm’s attractiveness to investors and help it achieve a higher valuation, Pang said.
In fact, Chinese companies have raised $9 billion in U.S. IPOs in 2020 to date, compared to $3.5 billion in 2019, according to Dealogic.
“Listing in the U.S. is … kind of the landmark. It’s too juicy to be lost,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at investment bank Natixis. Unless the U.S. makes listing on its exchanges prohibitively difficult, Garcia-Herrero said, many Chinese companies “will still try, until the very last day,” to land on a U.S. exchange.
At the same time, a counter trend exists in which U.S.-listed Chinese firms are distancing themselves from the U.S. by pursuing go-private deals and secondary listings closer to home.
Four of the five biggest Chinese IPOs of 2020 were either the debut of a firm that delisted from the U.S. or the secondary listings of Chinese firms already trading in the U.S. For instance, two Nasdaq-listed Chinese companies—JD.com and NetEase—raised $4.4 billion and $3.1 billion, respectively, in secondary offerings in Hong Kong in June.
The Trump administration has aimed its recent scrutiny of Chinese firms almost exclusively at large, globally-prominent companies. For instance, the Trump administration has gone after ByteDance-owned TikTok, the first Chinese app to go mainstream in the U.S. market. The administration has also attacked Huawei, the biggest smartphone maker in the world by sales, and SMIC, China’s leading chipmaker that’s key to Beijing’s goal of semiconductor self-reliance. And just last week, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration is mulling restrictions on the digital payment services of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group and gaming conglomerate Tencent Holdings over national security concerns.
The administration’s tendency to go after big fish means U.S. markets remain appealing to Chinese firms that don’t fit that bill. Garcia-Herrero told Fortune last month that “big, iconic” Chinese tech companies were likely to avoid U.S markets, whereas smaller-profile firms still felt comfortable pursuing U.S. listings.
Ant Group was seemingly aware of the risks of a U.S. crackdown when it decided on Hong Kong and Shanghai—not American exchanges—for its upcoming IPO. In its Hong Kong stock exchange filing application, Ant cited “geopolitical tensions” and “regulatory challenges” as risk factors in markets outside China.
Analysts estimate Ant Group’s IPO could occur as soon as this month and raise around $35 billion, making it the biggest public offering in history.


fortune--2020-10-13--Facebook defends decision to leave anti-vaccine posts untouched as it bans anti-vaxxer ads

How the World ’ s Best Workplaces have led the way in a year unlike any other

Facebook will ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccines, but it will still let anti-vaxxers and supporters COVID conspiracy theories post their ideology for free on the service.
The social network announced its new rules for ads on Tuesday, expanding a previous policy against ads touting vaccine hoaxes. Enforcement of the new rule is expected to begin over the next few days.
Facebook gave no reason why it changed its mind about anti-vaxx ads, which previously were allowed to run on the service. But recently, the company has cracked down on misinformation—despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly praising free speech earlier this year.
In general, Facebook said its imposes “stricter” policies on ads than it does for what users post in their News Feeds. That’s because the company says it “proactively” choses which ads users see while users can better control what appears in their News Feed.
Additionally, Facebook explained that giving anti-vaxxers wide latitude to post on the service for free actually helps combat vaccine hoaxes. “If we removed all rumours and hoaxes, the content would still be available elsewhere on the internet, social media ecosystem, or even around the dinner table,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “By leaving this content up we can provide people with important information and context instead of creating an information vacuum.”
When it identifies vaccine misinformation, Facebook doesn’t remove the post. Instead, it curtails distribution of the post in News Feed, removes it from posts suggested to users based on their interests, and adds a label to the post with links to credible sources of information. It also reminds users that the content has been identified as false information if they try to share it.
Facebook has struggled to curb the massive amount of misinformation its users post. In April, alone, the service labeled 50 million posts containing harmful misinformation related to COVID-19.
Some advocates say banning ads that discourage vaccines isn’t enough. “We hope to see a more effective means of identifying and halting the spread of organic misinformation,” Joe Smyser, CEO of the Public Good Projects, a nonprofit public health organization, said in a release. “Ads are important, but they’re not the most important in terms of how misinformation spreads.”


fortune--2020-10-13--A disputed election could cost the U.S. its ‘AAA’ credit rating

President Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of next month’s presidential election isn’t just threatening America’s democratic norms—it could also damage the country’s pristine credit rating.
According to credit rating agency Fitch Ratings, it appears likely that the winner of the Nov. 3 election will “take longer to determine than usual,” as the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a “sharp rise in mail-in voting this year” and will likely cause “logistical challenges at physical polling places.”
That means Americans could very well be deprived of the ritual of finding out the identity of their next President on election night or of waking up the next day to the results. Depending on how the contest plays out on a state-by-state basis, uncertainty around the winner of the election could conceivably last for “weeks” after the election, Fitch analysts said in a note on Monday.
Yet coupled with Trump’s continued refusal to commit to accepting the results and ensuring an orderly transfer of power should he be defeated, a delayed and perhaps contested election could have a corrosive effect on the order that “underpins the United States’ ‘AAA’ sovereign rating,” according to Fitch.
“Strong governance is essential to ‘AAA’ sovereigns, which are characterized by well-understood rules and processes for the transfer of power that are broadly accepted and executed,” Fitch said—adding that it would “view a departure from this principle negatively” in evaluating the U.S.’s rating.
The ratings agency warned that such a departure could indeed transpire, given the extent to which the pandemic could put America’s “electoral infrastructure under strain.” There will be fewer polling places than in previous elections and more mail-in voting in states historically unaccustomed to having such a large proportion of citizens cast their ballots by mail.
Not only could that delay the results—as many states won’t begin counting mailed ballots until Nov. 3—but it also increases the likelihood that results “will be disputed by one or both of the candidates or party organizations” given the various challenges that may arise around the voting process.
As Fitch notes, the U.S. Constitution sets out specific deadlines for resolving electoral disputes. For example, electors to the Electoral College from each state must be selected on Dec. 8, the Electoral College vote itself is scheduled for Dec. 14, and Congress typically certifies the election results on Jan. 6—all with an eye to inaugurating the winner as president on Jan. 20.
But the ratings agency said it would monitor the situation “for any departure” from that established framework,” with the U.S.’s credit rating very much tied to “an orderly retention or transition of power on Inauguration Day in January 2021.”
Fitch already downgraded the U.S.’s rating outlook to “negative” in July 2020, citing an “ongoing deterioration in the U.S. public finances” and the lack of a “credible fiscal consolidation plan.” The downgrade came in the wake of massive stimulus measures that—while designed to combat the economic fallout from the pandemic—have rapidly expanded the government’s deficit.
On Monday, the agency noted that the potential for a disputed election result reflects “deepening political polarization,” which could, in turn, hinder the next administration’s mandate and “how it approaches public policy decision-making on key issues.” That would result in “policy gridlock” among lawmakers and impede “the bipartisan cooperation necessary to efficiently address economic and fiscal challenges,” Fitch said.


fortune--2020-10-13--Michaela Coel on her genre-spanning career and how ‘I May Destroy You’ became a comedy

Back when she was in drama school, Michaela Coel grew tired of acting in the same-old period pieces. So often set in the predominately white worlds of the past, these plays just weren’t relatable for Coel. So, she began to write her own.
“At that time, I didn’t feel like I was able to authentically portray [those types of roles],” said Coel—the multi-talented English actress, screenwriter, director, producer, poet, and singer––who spoke at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen virtual summit on Tuesday. “I started writing stuff that I felt I could do. So, that was the beginning. In my final year of drama school, I wrote a play called Chewing Gum Dreams.”
Chewing Gum Dreams would eventually lead to the hit Netflix comedy Chewing Gum, a two-season show which Coel also wrote and starred in. While working on the show, Coel suffered a personal tragedy––a sexual assault––which ultimately served as the inspiration for her next project.
“Quite quickly, I knew I wanted to write something, maybe in a way to process it, maybe in a way to distance myself from it,” Coel said. “My agent at the time managed to set me a meeting with HBO Comedy. I’m not sure how I actually was allowed into those offices, because I hadn’t really done much yet.”
Out of that meeting came Coel’s latest television hit, I May Destroy You, which she wrote, co-directed, executive produced, and starred in as a fictionalized version of herself. However, Amy Gravitt, executive vice president of HBO Comedy Programming, who spoke alongside Coel at Tuesday’s summit, remembers that original meeting a little differently.
“We were begging to meet with you and were thrilled that you were coming into town,” Gravitt said to Coel. “Just given the subject matter, I thought ‘Oh my gosh, I want to work with her so badly.’”
Gravitt said she didn’t think there was any way that the show, which focuses on a woman piecing together the memories of a sexual assault, would end up as a comedy rather than a drama. But after writing an average of 10 drafts per episode to get it right, Coel said she was confident she had successfully woven humor into the seriousness of the plot.
“I always knew that it was going to be funny, that I wanted it to be funny,” Coel said. “I remember that was one of the things I said when [I] first met with [Amy]. … I don’t think anyone was convinced by it until the actors started to say the script.”


fortune--2020-10-13--Momofuku CEO: Restaurants ‘need to diversify’ after COVID

Nothing exposed the fragility of the restaurant industry like the coronavirus pandemic.
With global business shutdowns and fears of new infections, many people simply stopped going out to eat. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. restaurants have shut down or temporarily closed.
If there’s any silver lining to the situation, it’s that COVID-19 has made restaurant executives realize they must adapt their operations. Many are ginning up new business models and adopting new technologies that will, they hope, make their businesses more resilient to future calamities—assuming they survive this one.
Marguerite Zabar Mariscal, chief executive of Momofuku, a chain of Asian-American eateries cooked up by star chef David Chang in 2004, says the old ways of doing things will no longer suffice. “We need to diversify,” she said at Fortune’s virtual Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit, a conference that caters to early career businesswomen. “It’s the only way we can continue to provide income” to workers, she said.
Mariscal, who started at Momofuku as an intern in 2011 and eventually worked her way up to the top job, said she aspires, ultimately, for half of the chain’s revenues to be non-restaurant. She said she set this “maybe impossible” goal with founder Chang.
Toward that end, Mariscal’s team is exploring new ideas, like striking up partnerships with other businesses, offering cooking classes, and shipping food and spices directly to customers. She said a major focus is to break the constraints of geography and give fans “a Momofuku experience where they are, as opposed to being every once in a while when they come to Las Vegas, or visit Toronto,” where the chain has restaurants.
Mashama Bailey, chef and partner at The Grey, a Savannah, Ga.-based restaurant that specializes in Southern cuisine, also spoke on the panel alongside Mariscal. She agreed that diversification will be paramount for restaurants.
Finding other revenue sources is “the best way to offer security,” Bailey said, emphasizing job protection. She said restaurants needs to make sure “that people who work in this field can still view it as an industry and not just as a hobby or a way to get to another goal.”
“Whether it’s catering, whether it’s events, restaurants have always had other means to make money to complement what they do on a daily basis,” Mariscal said. This just like that, except the imperative of the pandemic lends far greater urgency.


fortune--2020-10-13--Empathy is an underrated weapon in fighting vaccine skepticism

If someone you know expresses skepticism about getting a potential COVID-19 vaccine—if and when one is released—it can feel difficult to know how to respond accurately and convincingly. But according to Karen Ernst, executive director of Voices for Vaccines, an organization that helps inform parents about vaccines, you don’t need any special expertise to correct misinformation: You can simply point out that what that person is saying contradicts doctors and public health experts.
What is essential, though, is being empathetic while doing so.
“It’s really important at that point to be a good listener as well as a good talker,” Ernst said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit on Tuesday. She emphasized how crucial it is “to listen, to find out what it is that is behind this person’s hesitancy about vaccines or why they’re listening to a particular kind of misinformation.”
The central theme of the virtual panel, hosted by Clinton Foundation vice chair Chelsea Clinton, was reliance on close relationships as a foundation for honest dialogue about vaccines. Yet even taking that approach, the fight against misinformation is daunting, given the sheer amount of it present on social media platforms.
“Social media could tip the scales if it wanted to in favor of truth, and the companies do not choose to do that on the whole,” said Ernst. “It not only increases the spread of misinformation, … it also groups people together so that their incorrect ideas don’t seem as abnormal as they otherwise would.”
Underscoring this challenge, Joslyn Prince, a student at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas, spoke about her campaign to spread accurate COVID-19 information among local communities of color. When asked how she would deal with someone who wasn’t willing to take standard COVID-19 precautions, she would take a direct approach and tell them: “We need to so we can stop the spread.”
The solution, argued Anuradha Gupta, deputy CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is to focus on local communities, building trust with channels people trust such as health providers, religious leaders, and faith-based organizations. The alliance is working to equip these ambassadors on the ground with the information and tools they need to respond to the community’s questions.
Ultimately, Gupta’s advice for fighting vaccine skepticism is simple: “The best antidote to misinformation is good information.”


fortune--2020-10-13--Diane Von Furstenberg, rocked by pandemic, insists the jet-setting woman hasn’t gone away

Diane Von Furstenberg, founder of the eponymous DVF fashion brand and creator of its iconic wrap dress, knows a thing or two about travel. The Belgian-born designer studied in England, Spain, and Switzerland before marrying into German nobility and founding her womenswear brand in New York.
The aforementioned jersey wrap dress was created by DVF for women like Von Furstenberg who lived out of a suitcase but wanted to remain chic. Its fans include Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton, as well as legions of professional women and expectant mothers.
“You know, I’ve always been the same woman, I was the same woman at 20,” said Von Furstenberg at Fortune’s MPW Next Gen virtual conference on Tuesday. “I wanted to be a woman who can move and go from the car to the airport and be ready to go and ready to pack, and easy to pack. And those are the clothes that I made.”
But what happens to the jet-set wrap dress wearer when the travel goes away?
“She’s still the woman in charge, who wants to own her life, whether at work or whatever it is,” said Talita Von Furstenberg, Diane’s granddaughter who has her own sub-line TVF for DVF. “That woman still exists today whether she’s getting on a plane or not.”
But the pandemic has radically rocked DVF’s business. Earlier this year, the brand closed all but one of its 19 directly operated stores in the U.S., laid off 75% of its 400-person workforce, and its French and British operations filed for the European equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“Our stores have obviously been dying out in the past,” said Talita, “But now retail is much different, it’s online, it’s all DTC (direct to consumer) and I think DVF has to accept that and evolve.”
Instead of shying away from the struggles of her brand, Diane Von Furstenberg has been quite vocal about them, and hopes her trials can be a lesson for others.
“I’ve been a little bit the ‘mother’ of fashion for so many years. So if I was having difficulties, I think it’s important to share it with other people so that they know that it can happen to everyone,” Diane said of the reasons why she’s so open about the DVF brand’s rocky moment. “And the same time. Other moment people think, Oh, it’s over and our business is over. And that’s not true, either. Because you’re already on the way back. So I think that for me, sharing everything that I experience has been good for me. And it’s good for others, and there is no shame.”


fortune--2020-10-13--Solar power is “the new king of electricity”

Ray Kurzweil was right—again.
The International Energy Agency today declared solar photovoltaic power “the new king of electricity,” stating in its annual World Energy Outlook that “solar PV is consistently cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, and solar projects now offer some of the lowest cost electricity ever seen.”
Kurzweil told us more than a decade ago this would happen. Hardly anyone believed him. Kurzweil is the inventor and futurist best known for his writings on the singularity, the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and it becomes possible to upload our brains. “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine,” he has written.
Many of his predictions are based on applying Moore’s Law to technologies other than computer chips and following that idea where it goes. Back when photovoltaic tech was impossibly inefficient, he observed that it was doubling in performance every two years or so; he extrapolated from there.
Result: Depending on which year you take as the baseline, he was forecasting over a decade ago that global photovoltaic capacity in 2019 would be 448 gigawatts or that in 2020 it would be 1,120 gigawatts. Reality is right in between. The IEA’s estimate for 2019 (the actual number still isn’t available) is 633 gigawatts; the forecast for 2020 is 770 gigawatts.
You could argue that Kurzweil’s forecast range was very wide, but remember that he was making these calls when global photovoltaic capacity was only seven to 15 gigawatts. Remember also that he didn’t claim to predict the future of oil, gas, or coal prices or the future of energy demand as the world economy expanded, all of which would affect demand for solar technology.
Making outlandish predictions that tend to come true is largely the story of Kurzweil’s life, as Fortune noted four years ago. Today’s news is a reminder of what writer David Z. Morris advised: Ignore him at your peril.


fortune--2020-10-13--Ousted Pinterest exec says more transparency needed to fight Silicon Valley pay discrimination

Françoise Brougher says she found only out she was making 37 cents on the dollar earned by her male C-suite counterparts at Pinterest when the e-commerce company’s IPO prospectus was published in March 2019.
The former Pinterest operations chief, a Silicon Valley veteran with earlier stints at Google and Square, was ousted in April 2020 after two years with the company and four months later, she sued Pinterest, claiming it fostered a discriminatory, misogynistic and hostile work environment. As COO, she was second in command at the company.
Pinterest has previously said it is reviewing the suit and conducting an independent review about its culture and practices.
Brougher, who accused Pinterest’s top executives of excluding her from key meetings even as the company was gearing up for an IPO that happened in April, said companies divulging more information on pay is the only way to end pay discrimination, up and down the corporate ladder, a problem she said is acute in Silicon Valley.
“This problem can be solved only if there is much more transparency, even at the executive level of compensation, because it’s cloaked in secrecy,” Brougher told the Fortune MPW NextGen conference on Tuesday. “Discrimination is insidious,” she said.
Brougher claims that early on, she saw signs of a clubby culture at Pinterest that excluded women, and said she was the recipient of “a lot of microaggressions” such as being left out of important meetings or excluded from the Pinterest “road show” aimed at lining up Wall Street interest in the Pinterest IPO even though she was the company’s second-in-command.
“This behavior keeps female executives from advancing and doing their job. And that’s what happened at Pinterest,” she said.
At the same time, Brougher says she wish she had fraternized more with other women at the company to help females there and herself. “Ultimately you realize you are not alone,” she says. “I think I could have done more.”


fortune--2020-10-13--Everything Apple just announced: 5G iPhones, HomePod mini, and MagSafe accessories

Apple debuted several new products on Tuesday in addition to its new 5G iPhones. The new arrivals include the HomePod mini smart speaker, revived “MagSafe” brand name for a new line of magnetic chargers, and other accessories. Here are the most significant new items coming to an Apple Store near you soon.
HomePod mini
Apple debuted a smaller, cheaper version of its HomePod smart speaker that integrates with Apple’s speech-controlled Siri digital assistant. Software in the round-shaped speaker adjusts the audio according to the type of music being played, Apple said. Putting a pair of the new speakers in the same room will automatically act as stereo speakers. And the speaker can work as an intercom with iPhones and other Apple devices.
The speaker, which works with Apple Music, will be compatible with music services from Pandora and Amazon in “coming months,” Apple said. The company did not mention compatibility with Spotify, the largest streaming-music service.
The new speaker will cost $99 and be available November 16 with pre-orders starting on November 6.
MagSafe
Apple revived the brand name of its old magnetically connecting laptop chargers, MagSafe, for the iPhone line up this year. The new iPhone line has magnets embedded in the back case that can link up with a series of accessories such as a wireless power charging mat for $39 and a leather wallet for $59. Apple said third-party accessory makers would also be allowed to make compatible connecting gadgets.
iPhone 12 5G
After debuting three new models in 2019, this year Apple had four new phones, all with 5G compatibility.
The new iPhone 12 mini, the smallest and cheapest new model, has a 5.4-inch screen and starts at $700. Apple says it’s the smallest and lightest 5G phone available. The regular iPhone 12, slightly larger with a 6.1-inch screen, starts at $800.
For its more expensive Pro models, Apple went with slightly larger displays than last year while shrinking the bezels around the edges. The iPhone Pro has a 6.1-inch screen, up from 5.8-inches, and starts at $1,000. The iPhone 12 Pro Max comes with a 6.7-inch display, up from 6.5-inches, and costs $1,100. The new Pro phones got much improved cameras, with a telephoto lens that can zoom in up to 5X, up from 2X in last year’s models.
Compared to last year’s models, the new iPhones have a boxier design with flat sides. Apple also said it would no longer include headphones or a power adapter with every phone, in a nod to helping the environment by reducing plastic waste.
Pricing was unusually varied among U.S. carriers. At T-Mobile or for an unlocked phone from Apple, the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 cost $30 more than the list prices of $700 and $800.
And Verizon and AT&T also offered among the most generous trade-in offers in several years on new iPhones. Customers of AT&T and Verizon could get a free iPhone 12 with qualifying trade-in if added to an unlimited data plan. At Verizon the deal was only for new customers, while AT&T made the offer to new and existing customers.


fortune--2020-10-13--‘Something, algorithmically, is creating this obsession’: Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex warns agains

‘Something, algorithmically, is creating this obsession’: Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex warns against social media addiction

Study after study has shown that women, and especially women of color, are disproportionately targeted by cyberbullying on social media platforms. But few have attracted the level of racist and sexist trolling that Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex has in recent years.
“For my own self-preservation, I have not been on social media for a very long time,” the duchess told Fortune’s Emma Hinchliffe at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit, which kicked off Tuesday. “I made a personal choice to not have any account, so I don’t know what’s out there, and in many ways that’s helpful for me.”
Over the past four years, the actor turned duchess turned activist has been dissected and, in many instances, disparaged across the internet. She spoke about the consequences of toxic digital behavior at an earlier Fortune conference last month and revisited the topic—with a bent toward self-care takeaways and other thoughts on how women can lead with both caution and courage—during this week’s event. Meghan spoke with Fortune virtually from her home in California.
Building healthier online communities has become a focus for Meghan. Along with her husband, Prince Harry, she founded the Archewell Foundation, which aims to address and mitigate the negative side of social media and make headway on other causes that are core to the couple. Her conversation with Fortune comes at a time when all eyes are on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the impact that misinformation and conspiracy campaigns that flourish on these sites could have on the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Of course, there is also the issue of the very real mental health impact that social media usage has on many users. “I have a lot of concerns for people that have become obsessed with it [social media],” said Meghan. “People who are addicted to drugs are called users and people who are on social media are called users. There is something in there, algorithmically, that is creating this obsession.”
The duchess’s advice to the audience of rising women leaders was to be selective, and to not reward bad behavior through retweets and reposts. “As you’re out there building your brand, as you are out there engaging with friends online, just be conscious of what you’re doing,” said Meghan. “Understand that it is not limited to that one moment—that you are creating an echo chamber for yourself.”
To be sure, being a public figure has always come with its perks—and its pitfalls. But the level and scale of criticism enabled by social media platforms is unprecedented. And for whatever reasons, Meghan has attracted some of the worst kind of attention the internet has to offer. It is no wonder, then, that the duchess analyzes her every move and choice of words—before others do. As a new mother in the spotlight, she has even more at stake when choosing how to use her platform.
“My gut is that it makes you more courageous,” she said when asked if motherhood has made her more courageous or cautious. “It makes you so concerned for the world they [your children] are going to inherit. At the same time, I am cautious of putting my family at risk by [saying] certain things—I try to be very clear with what I say, and not make it controversial.”
That is easier said than done. Last month, the American duchess and her husband spoke out in an effort to encourage Americans to vote in the 2020 election. To be sure, the couple was subsequently scrutinized, criticized, and even accused of interfering with the upcoming election by some—at a scale only made possible by the internet.


fortune--2020-10-13--Apple MagSafe charger returns with a wireless iPhone 12 twist

Apple’s latest generation of phones—the iPhone 12 line—come equipped with wireless charging, the company revealed at a smartphone-centered product event on Tuesday.
The feature debut comes more than a year after Apple scrapped an earlier version of the long-delayed technology, called AirPower. The company previously said the forerunner’s prototypes did not live up to its “high standards.”
The new technology, called MagSafe, uses magnets to snap iPhones into place on battery-recharging mats. The tech also provides a connection point for add-ons, such as specially compatible phone cases ($49 a pop) and related accessories, like a magnetic leather wallet ($59).
The charging mat offers 15 Watts of power, costs $39, and is available online through the Apple Store.
Another version of the mat, called the MagSafe Duo Charger, enables an Apple Watch to charge alongside an iPhone. Pricing and availability details for the sibling product have yet to appear on Apple’s website.
Apple said to expect third-party iPhone accessories that are designed to work with the new magnetic attachment feature. The company suggested, during its product demo livestream, that Belkin, the connected electronics-maker best known for its routers, is creating a wireless charging mount for cars.
MagSafe revives a beloved brand Apple originally used for magnetic chargers for its MacBook laptops. Apple pulled the plug on that feature in 2016, opting for more standard ports—Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C—in its later models.
Apple said it would no longer include headphones or outlet adapters in the box with newly purchased iPhones. The move, spun as beneficial for the environment by reducing plastic waste, could help boost sales if more people must buy the parts separately.
The reality is:
Let's say Apple sells 40m iPhones in the next year (as they did in 2019)
Assuming the BOM for a USB-C adapter is $3/unit, apple would save ~$120m this year by not including it, and if 5% of new owners buy a new USB-C wall adapter, could generate an extra $60m. — Steggy (Jeff Stegner) (@Steggy) October 13, 2020
In addition to wireless charging, Apple’s new iPhones—the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max—come with 5G, a wireless technology that sports much faster download speeds, among other innovations.
Apple also released a smaller smart-speaker, the HomePod Mini, to compete with much bigger rivals like Amazon’s Echo Dot and the Google Home Mini. The event came a few weeks after another Apple product show at which it debuted new Apple Watches and iPads.


fortune--2020-10-13--Here’s how to get a free Apple 5G iPhone

Apple’s iPhone 12 5G, the most anticipated phone in years, will be given away for free by AT&T and Verizon, showing the carriers are gearing up to fight hard for new subscribers during a potentially huge upgrade cycle.
The promotions announced Tuesday coincide with Apple’s introduction of its first 5G iPhone. Customers who sign up for unlimited plans and trade in qualifying phones can begin placing orders online for delivery.
The 5G iPhone is Apple’s biggest product introduction of the year, and the first major redesign of the popular handset since 2017. The wireless industry has been awaiting this event for more than a year, and as the giveaways suggest, each carrier is eager to use the moment to win or at least solidify its customer base.
The offers are a gamble that if the mobile-service providers cover the cost of the phones over a two-year-plus payment schedule, subscribers will be inclined to sign on for higher-priced unlimited plans. The free offer is available on the $799 iPhone 12, but not on the $699 mini, the $999 Pro or the $1,099 Max, according to the carriers.
While all of the companies require a qualifying trade-in device and an unlimited plan, AT&T is offering free iPhones to both new and existing customers. Verizon is only offering free iPhones to new customers. Existing Verizon customers can get a new iPhone for $15 a month if they qualify.
Given the sluggish pace of phone sales over the past few years, the arrival of a next-generation iPhone has been expected to trigger a robust upgrade cycle. But as AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey said last month, demand could be tempered by tough economic conditions and job losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ready or not
Ready or not, the jump to 5G could be thorny for the carriers if customers are disappointed by a lack of dramatic speed improvement on their expensive new phones.
U.S. carriers have spent billions of dollars upgrading their networks with fifth-generation wireless technology that promise 10 times faster speeds than current connections. Verizon on Tuesday became the third carrier to boast about having nationwide 5G coverage. But at the moment, the super-fast 5G experience is only available in limited areas as the carriers continue to expand their networks.
T-Mobile US Inc. is also in the promotion game. The carrier, now second largest in the U.S. thanks to its Sprint Corp. merger, is offering two iPhone 12 Pros for $100 each to new customers with trade-ins. It’s also selling the new iPhone for half off with a trade-in.
AT&T is also offering deals on Google Android phones. Android shoppers looking for new 5G devices can get as much as $700 off Samsung, LG and Motorola phones with trade-ins, as long as they sign on to an AT&T 5G unlimited plan.


fortune--2020-10-13--AMC could run out of money by the end of the year

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. said it may soon run out of cash amid fresh signs that the pandemic is pushing cinema operators close to default.
The world’s biggest theater chain said in a filing Tuesday that liquidity will be largely depleted by the end of this year or early next year if attendance doesn’t pick up, and it’s exploring actions that include asset sales and joint ventures. AMC’s shares sunk to the lowest since April.
“Bankruptcy is an almost foregone conclusion,” CreditSights analyst Matt Zloto said in an interview. “The writing is on the wall.”
A representative for AMC didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.
Attendance since the resumption of business in the U.S. is down 85% from the same period a year ago, the company said. AMC has been hobbled by the coronavirus outbreak, which discourages some patrons from coming and studios from releasing blockbusters that might attract them. The company earlier disclosed an 81% decline in moviegoers through Sept. 14.
AMC is looking for sources of liquidity to ride out the pandemic, including asset sales and joint ventures, but cautions there is “significant risk” that its efforts may fall short or fail. Other actions could include debt and equity financing, continued talks with landlords on rent reductions and arrangements with existing business partners.
Given where the company’s debt and equity is trading, the Leawood, Kansas-based chain may have trouble tapping those markets for fresh cash, Zloto said. AMC’s bonds due 2025 fell 1.5 cents on the dollar to trade around 66 cents Tuesday, according to Trace trading data. Its shares fell as much as 11% to $3.63.
“Unless you can isolate the risks for a new equity investor, it would be challenging to see a sophisticated investor get involved when the liquidity picture looks so bleak,” Zloto said. Asset sales might be a more promising avenue for the company if it can garner interest in theaters located in a specific country or region, he added.
Attendance dilemma
Cinema chains are facing a chicken-and-egg problem with no near-term solution: As local capacity restrictions and audience skittishness keep U.S. theaters largely empty, studios are delaying most of their major film releases into 2021 and beyond, which gives consumers still less reason to buy tickets.
Cineworld Group Plc, owner of the Regal chain, earlier this month suspended operations at its U.S. and U.K. locations because of the lack of big movies. It’s preparing for talks with its creditors to reduce its debt pile.
AMC pledged to stay open, citing releases of less ambitious movies still on the schedule such as “The War With Grandpa.” Illustrating the industry’s woes, that Robert De Niro vehicle opened with a paltry weekend gross of $3.6 million in North America.
AMC has resumed operations at just under 500 of its 598 U.S. theaters with limited capacity, the company said. It adjusted operating hours to align costs with attendance levels for each theater.


fortune--2020-10-13--Everything to know about Apple’s first 5G iPhones

Apple unveiled its 2020 line up of new iPhones on Tuesday, a few weeks later than usual because of the pandemic, but with a headline-grabbing new feature: 5G.
The first 5G iPhones, which can download data at least 10-times faster than older 4G models, come up to two years behind rivals but just as wireless carriers are building their 5G networks.
Apple CEO Tim Cook called the 5G feature a “new era” for the popular phone line. “Each generation of cellular technology on iPhone has enabled breakthrough innovations,” Cook said during an online unveiling. “5G is the most exciting step yet.”
After debuting three new iPhone models a year ago, this year Apple had four new phones.
The new iPhone 12 mini, the smallest and cheapest new arrival, has a 5.4-inch screen and starts at $700. Apple says it’s the smallest and lightest 5G phone available. The regular iPhone 12, slightly larger with a 6.1-inch screen, starts at $800. However, both phones were priced $30 higher if bought for T-Mobile’s network or unlocked without a carrier’s SIM card.
For its more expensive Pro models, Apple went with slightly larger displays than last year while shrinking the bezels around the edges. The iPhone Pro has an 6.1-inch screen, up from 5.8-inches, and starts at $1,000. The iPhone 12 Pro Max comes with a 6.7-inch display, up from 6.5-inches, and costs $1,100. The new Pro phones have much improved cameras, with a telephoto lens that can zoom in up to 2.5X, up from 2X in last year’s models. And prices were the same for all carriers.
Compared to last year’s models, the new iPhones have a boxier design with flat sides. Apple also said it would no longer include headphones or a power adapter with every phone, explaining that it would help the environment by reducing plastic waste.
The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro will be available for pre-order on October 16 and delivered on October 23. The iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max will be available for pre-order on November 6 and delivered on November 13.
Analysts are split about whether the addition of 5G will be a big draw for consumers. Apple said customers could use 5G to download files more quickly, play battle games like League of Legends that require low-latency connections, and upload hefty 4K resolution video clips. Apple also showed off an app that doctors could use to download a medical diagnostic scan instantly, and an augmented reality app for mapping 3D spaces and sharing the maps in real-time.
In China, where 5G networks are widely deployed, rival 5G phones from Samsung and others have sold well. But U.S. networks have lagged behind and some early incarnations of 5G aren’t any faster than 4G. AT&T even has set up parts of its 4G network to display as “5GE” on iPhones and other devices, a confusing label that may explain why almost half of all current iPhone owners think they already have a 5G compatible device (AT&T denies being a source of confusion and notes its has the fastest 5G network according to some researchers).
As part of Apple’s event on Tuesday, Verizon announced it was rolling out a somewhat slower but nationwide 5G service, matching offerings from rivals AT&T and T-Mobile and complimenting its super-fast 5G network that is only available in parts of a few dozen cities. Both Verizon 5G networks will also work with phones from other manufacturers.
Apple’s stock price was down 3% at midday after the event after gaining 30% over the past three months on growing excitement over the arrival of the new 5G models. Still, the company will have to attract buyers at a time when the pandemic has put many people out of work. Apple sold $56 billion worth of iPhones in last year’s fourth quarter, its fiscal first quarter, an 8% increase from a year earlier.
(This story was updated on Oct. 14 to correct the amount of zoom on telephoto lens of the iPhone 12 Pro Max.)


fortune--2020-10-13--Peloton’s Ally Love on racism, staying motivated, and being kind to oneself

Ally Love keeps busy as a popular Peloton fitness instructor, the in-arena host for the Brooklyn Nets, and the CEO of the health and lifestyle Love Squad community.
But despite her hectic schedule, the energetic Love is trying to find time to be kind to herself.
“Thinking and saying kind things to myself is actually pretty hard,” Love said Tuesday during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit, a virtual event this year.
With the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning over systemic racism, it’s been a particularly difficult time for many Americans to stay positive. To help herself cope, Love said that she’s “taken the time during the pandemic for some personal awareness” and is doing some “internal work.”
Whether that means talking with family members, a therapist, or others that are part of a person’s support group, Love said these conversations have been important for herself as well as for the people who attend her Peloton fitness classes, in which she’s trying to create “space for all people.”
The point is that Love is “making sure I’m being honest.”
“I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t talk about anti-racism and racism,” Love said.
Although Love couldn’t pinpoint any specific incident in her life that involved racism, she said that she’s been increasingly more aware of the subtle aspects of racism that can creep into people’s lives, including micro-aggressions.
As she said regarding the subtle ways racism plays into society: “Especially as Black women, we are dehumanized because we have to be stronger than everyone else.”
Story updated Oct. 14 at 11:55 A.M. PT to correct Love’s quote to say “be” instead of “mean.”


fortune--2020-10-13--Facts aren’t the most powerful tool in the event of a contested election

Did you hear about the election worker in Pennsylvania who threw out nine military ballots? The U.S. Justice Department says at least seven of them were marked for Trump. Or how about the mail carrier in West Virginia who admitted to changing the party affiliation of five absentee ballot applications from Democrat to Republican?
Stories like those could be crucial in the aftermath of a contested election outcome. Never mind that the numbers of votes involved are insignificant or that such anecdotes would count for little in the courts or legislatures where a contested outcome would be decided. But these stories could largely determine the critical question of whether the eventual outcome is widely accepted, for the simple reason that stories, researchers have found, are far more powerful than data.
It’s the way we’re hardwired. We don’t naturally see the world as data that we analyze; that’s what Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist, calls System 2 thinking. Collecting and analyzing information—what the legal process does—is slow and difficult, and we have to make ourselves do it. Our default way of thinking is System 1, which “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” he wrote in his classic bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
By contrast, System 1 understands the world as stories, not data. It’s so powerful that it creates stories from whatever we see or hear. As Kahneman puts it, “System 1 is adept at finding a coherent causal story that links the fragments of knowledge at its disposal.” Seeing stories, which includes attributing motives to the people involved, is actually easier for us than not seeing stories.
When we hear a story, we are driven to repeat it. And when we repeat it, the brains of the storyteller and the listener align—what researchers call “neural coupling.” When the storyteller is speaking to a group, the effect is “to induce similar brain activity across different individuals.” That is, the storyteller and a group of listeners are all having the same emotional experience at the same time. It’s enormously more powerful than when everyone merely possesses the same facts.
One more element in the magic of story: Research shows that we remember information far better when it’s included in a story than when the very same information is presented simply as a collection of facts.
Which brings us back to a potential contested election outcome. President Trump’s refusal to promise he’ll accept a loss has prompted party leaders on both sides to recruit brigades of lawyers and politicians who could be deployed for battle in courts and legislatures. That’s where the outcome would be decided—but it’s only half the battle. Truly winning requires that the country broadly accepts the outcome, and data alone wouldn’t do the job. But data plus stories would.
The idea of using stories strategically isn’t new. For years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed such strategies in a program called Narrative Networks. “We need a more comprehensive understanding of how a failure to tell good stories can lead to an increased risk of insurgencies, violent social movements, and terrorist action,” explained program manager William Casebeer. The objective was to develop a “counter-narrative strategy” for “undermining the efficacy of [the enemies’] narratives” and to develop competing stories.
Elections are war, and it’s possible this war could extend past Election Day. We don’t know if party leaders are developing story strategies along with legal strategies in the event of a contested outcome. But if they’re not, they should be.


fortune--2020-10-13--Waiting to pass stimulus until after the election is a mistake, says economist Mark Zandi

On Friday, the White House offered up a stimulus plan of $1.8 trillion, or $400 billion shy of the $2.2 trillion Democratic leaders are seeking. The two parties are numerically the closest they’ve been since they started discussing the package in July—when Democratic leaders were asking for $3.4 trillion and the White House was under $1 trillion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly rejected the White House’s $1.8 trillion offer, saying it didn’t do enough to eradicate the virus. And Republican Senators like Rick Scott and Marsha Blackburn rejected the idea of passing a stimulus package of that size.
Even as stimulus talks continue on Capitol Hill the odds of passing another economic aid package are looking bleaker by the day. President Donald Trump’s latest stimulus reversal and push reads more like election desperation than progress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week a stimulus package is unlikely to pass the Senate before the election, and could be preparing for a political divorce from Trump—who is falling in the polls. Meanwhile Democratic leaders might be stringing the White House along and waiting to pass a more generous package with a President Joe Biden.
What’s at stake? The finances of millions of small businesses owners, state government employees, and jobless Americans. Not to mention the economy.
“The economic recovery is already slowing. Without additional support it threatens to stall out or even backslide,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Fortune on Monday.
The bigger the stimulus, the better. But Zandi would prefer Democratic leaders pass the $1.8 trillion the White House is offering, rather than risk waiting for a bigger bill after the election or inauguration. Even if Biden wins, Zandi says, there is no guarantee they’d be able to pass what they want.
“Not passing a package now is a significant error. They [Congress] are taking a really big chance,” Zandi says. “Passing a $1.8 trillion package now doesn’t preclude a package in February. [Democrats could] take the $1.8 trillion and come back after the inauguration and see where the economy is, and then pass another package.”
While FiveThirtyEight only gives Trump a 13% chance of winning, it gives the GOP a 31% chance of retaining the Senate chamber. If Republicans still control the Senate, Zandi says, Biden would struggle to pass a robust stimulus package.
Zandi says the consensus is that if the federal government doesn’t pass more stimulus before the election, it’s very unlikely anything gets done before the inauguration.
The $600 enhanced unemployment benefits—part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act—expired in July. And hiring (or really rehiring) is slowing: U.S. employment rose by 661,000 in September, down from 1.5 million jobs added in August and 1.8 million added in July. There are still 12.5 million unemployed Americans.
While the two parties disagree on the dollar size of the next stimulus package, they do agree on lots of the spending areas. Both parties reaffirmed support this week for another round of $1,200 stimulus checks for adults and $500 for dependents. Both parties also support more funding for education, coronavirus-related projects, mortgage and rental assistance, food programs, and state and local government funding.


fortune--2020-10-13--Inside Waymo’s autonomous trucks and A.I. systems

If you’ve heard of Waymo, it’s probably for its self-driving cars. But the autonomous-vehicle subsidiary of Google’s parent company is also developing self-driving trucks that its executives hope will become the backbone of a major freight delivery business.
On Tuesday, Waymo revealed some previously undisclosed technical details about those trucks. The details are likely intended to assuage concerns about autonomous vehicle technology failing to progress as quickly as many people had expected.
There are multiple reasons for the delay, including the research being more difficult than originally believed and the high cost of perfecting and training A.I. systems.
Boris Sofman, Waymo’s director of engineering for trucking, sounded a hopeful note for his unit’s trucking initiative by saying much of the research into self-driving cars is also applicable to trucking. “The foundational systems are all the same,” he told Fortune, which implies that Waymo may be able to save on some costs.
In other words, Waymo’s autonomous cars and trucks generally have similar computer brains. “If I want to merge into a lane, whether I’m a car or a truck, the logic is actually quite similar,” Sofman said. “You look for an opening, you try to position yourself in the right way in order to interact with that opening, and if it doesn’t exist you create one.”
Of course, the significant difference in size between cars and trucks requires them to make different decisions when merging into traffic. For Waymo’s trucks, that means using two lidar sensors that remove nearly all blind spots except for what’s “100% behind the truck, which exists for humans as well,” Sofman said.
Ultimately, Waymo’s biggest challenge to perfecting self-driving trucks is getting enough real-world driving experience to obtain the necessary data used to train the company’s deep learning systems. “It’s a data problem rather than an architecture problem,” Sofman said.
He declined to comment about how many self-driving trucks Waymo has or how many miles they’ve logged on the road since their debut in 2017. It’s therefore difficult to compare Waymo’s progress against competitors like TuSimple, Daimler, and Embark. Waymo still requires that human drivers be behind the wheel while trucks move, at least until the company’s next generation of trucks and computers, he said.
Sofman hopes that Waymo’s new truck testing grounds in Dallas will open the door to more long haul trials as the trucks shuttle back and forth between an existing testing facility in Phoenix. This is crucial for its autonomous trucking research because the long drives on the freeway could provide a wealth of much-needed data. Long drives would also mean that the self-driving trucks could experience more “edge cases,” or anomalies like cows running across the freeways; while these experiences are unusual, they are needed in order to create robust self-driving cars.
“It’s safe to say we know there’s still a lot in front of us and there’s a lot of unknowns, but we started to discover a lot through just our driving today.” Sofman said.
Update: A Waymo spokesperson added that the company’s planned freight delivery business will rely on partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), fleet, and freight players, but declined to name the partners. Although Waymo currently uses Peterbilt trucks as part of its self-driving truck research, Peterbilt is not one of Waymo’s OEM partners, the spokesperson said.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Still not enough. Members of The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence met last week in an online talk to discuss federal A.I. policy measures, which included a proposal for “the creation of a Malign Information Detection and Analysis Center, or MIDAC, staffed by a team of intelligence analysts,” according to a report by Nextgov. The commission’s chairman and former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt said: “I think everything you’re recommending we should do, and it’s probably still not enough. In other words, we’ve got to rethink how we’re going to deal with this because with the broad ability to do deepfakes, and fake texts and so forth, it’s only going to get worse.”
Think of the children(’s faces). Human Rights Watch has discovered that the city government of Buenos Aires, Argentina has been using facial-recognition to monitor children suspected of “criminal activity,” MIT Technology Review reported. “Buenos Aires first began trialing live facial recognition on April 24, 2019,” the report said. “Implemented without any public consultation, the system sparked immediate resistance.”
Facing a problem. As China continues its push to use facial-recognition software as part of its efforts to contain COVID-19, some Chinese residents are concerned about “data leaks,” in which sensitive data about their faces could get unintentionally leaked due to “sloppy mistakes,” The South China Morning Post reported. “As the use of facial recognition has exploded across China in recent years, the country has been hit with numerous data leaks related to the technology,” the report said. “But people without any legal expertise might not know how to fight back, especially when the installation of such systems are being pushed by local police.”
Am eye biased? Researchers from Birmingham University and other institutes examined a collection of data sets used to train A.I. systems that can identify eye disorders, and discovered that the eye data is predominantly comprised from patients in North America, Europe, and China, Wired reported. As a result of the biased data sets, the A.I. eye-scanning technology will likely produce poorer results on underrepresented racial groups. From the report: "The researchers found other problems in the data, too. Many data sets did not include key demographic data, such as age, gender, and race, making it difficult to gauge whether they are biased in other ways."
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Twilio hired Jeremiah Brazeau to be the cloud communication company’s chief technology officer. Brazeau was previously a distinguished architect at Salesforce.
Yellowbrick Data picked Mark Cusack to be the enterprise tech firm's CTO. Cusack was previously a Teradata vice president for data and analytics. Yellowbrick specializes in data warehousing technology, which, as Fortune writer Aaron Pressman reported, is one of the hottest corporate technologies. Yellowbrick rival Snowflake recently went public in what is considered to be the highest valued software IPO ever.
Eye on A.I. emailed a couple of questions for Cusack about his thoughts on machine learning. His responses were edited for length.
What distinguishes one data warehousing service from another?
The new players in the market are innovating in two key areas. First, they are investing in providing a “consumer cloud experience,” in which it is much easier to use and manage a data warehouse: easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to elastically expand capacity in line with business growth, and with low to no administration overheads. Second, the true innovators realize that the hardware is as critical to the overall performance as the database software, and they are developing offerings that span database operations across the hardware and software stack to deliver differentiating performance.
Explain the importance of data warehousing for machine learning practitioners.
Data warehousing will become really important in the A.I./ML space. We’ll see the emergence of data warehouses as “feature stores”—repositories for the engineered features that feed ML models. There are several reasons for this. First, the data warehouse typically contains the most valuable and up-to-date data within an organization, and it is often this data that is needed to support model training and scoring. More than 80% of the time taken to develop ML models is spent in preparing the data. Data warehouses have in-built data transformation capabilities that can be used to wrangle the raw data into the features needed to plug into ML algorithms, and they can perform this task quickly and at massive scale.
Second, data warehouse feature stores promote the reuse of engineered features across different analytics projects. The same data modeling approaches that have been used for decades to support efficient BI [business intelligence] and reporting applications can now be used to overlay a schema across different feature sets, which reduces duplication and increases the quality of the data. Data scientists can use well-modelled feature stores in a data warehouse to find and reuse features created for past projects, further reducing the time to yield business value from analytics.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
On artificial and real brains. Researchers from Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Washington, and other institutions partook in an online conference last week by Stanford about the confluence of A.I., psychology, and neuroscience.
One fascinating portion of the event: Stanford assistant professor Chelsea Finn’s robotics research. Finn explained that a big challenge in A.I. is for researchers to create robots that are good at generalizing.
“Humans are good at generalizing—it’s not clear how we do it,” Finn said.
She explained that babies tend to learn by observing the actions of their parents. Using that basic premise of learning by observing, Finn and her colleagues showed a robotic arm (outfitted with deep reinforcement learning software) photos of various things the robot arm could potentially do to a nearby drawer, among other examples. Her team classified certain photos as “interesting” in order to prod the robot to do its own set of “interesting” actions.
After analyzing the photos, the robotic arm learned to "interact with the drawer and plays with it in different ways,” Finn said.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
IBM showcases latest A.I. advancements on Bloomberg’s “That’s Debatable” TV show—By Jeremy Kahn
Someone finally outright accused Huawei of collusion with the Chinese state—By David Meyer
What experts think of robots’ threats and benefits to humanity—By Brett Haensel
Facebook tightens rules on political posts and ads as the presidential election nears— By Danielle Abril
The tech startup trying to restore our faith in COVID-free air travel—By Vivienne Walt
IBM CEO will be on the hunt for acquisitions and new businesses after spinning off services unit—By Aaron Pressman and Jonathan Vanian
BRAIN FOOD
What’s up with patent law and A.I.? The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released a report detailing how various members of bar associations, companies, academia, and trade and advocacy groups view A.I.’s impact on existing patent law. The rise of deep learning in recent years has posed some notable brain teasers for legal scholars. For instance, if an A.I. system can generate its own designs, who controls the patent?
According to the report’s findings, maybe these vexing patent dilemmas aren’t that complicated after all. The majority of the responders concluded that “current USPTO guidance, especially on patent subject matter eligibility and disclosure of computer-implemented inventions, is equipped to handle advances in AI.”
From the report:
The vast majority of public commenters asserted that current inventorship law is equipped to handle inventorship of AI technologies. One commenter went as far as to state that “there is no urgency to revise the law with respect to inventorship.” Many of these commenters suggested that assessment of conception should be fact-specific, as in the analysis done today. For example, one commenter stressed that there are different ways in which a natural person may contribute to the conception of an invention and that each contribution “should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” as is the law today. A related view was that a data scientist carrying out the task of building and testing a use of an AI technology invention is doing nothing more than reducing the invention to practice. In the words of one commenter, “running [an] AI algorithm on the data and obtaining the results is unlikely to qualify as a contribution [to conception].”