fortune--2020-12-14--Will there be a Dr. in the White House? Absolutely

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Meghan Markle makes her debut as a startup investor, Argentina moves to legalize abortion, and Dr. Jill Biden has definitely earned her title. Go get your Monday.
– There’s a Dr. in the house. If you spent this weekend relaxing, hanging out with friends and family, or reading for pleasure, allow me to fill you in on the past few days’ hate-read of choice. The topic is one that may seem ridiculous right off the bat—and it doesn’t get any better.
Should Dr. Jill Biden, the First Lady-elect of the United States, call herself “doctor?” Writer Joseph Epstein managed to devote 800 words to this question in the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion pages.
Any belief that this would be a good-faith argument evaporated in the piece’s first sentence, where Epstein addresses the 69-year-old First Lady-elect as “kiddo.” Her title of “Dr.,” he argues, “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”
Epstein achieved something rare with this piece. In one fell swoop, he offended Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences (he argues that the degrees have lost their prestige); medical doctors (for some reason, he cites a “wise man” who said that “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child”); his former employer, Northwestern University, which issued a statement distancing itself from him; and, of course, women.
Would any writer dare to declare in a national newspaper that a man who has earned the title of “Dr.” through years of study should “drop the doc?”
Biden was awarded her doctorate—an Ed.D., or a doctor of education—from the University of Delaware in 2007. Epstein is not just the latest in a long line to question women’s professional achievements, but belittles Biden’s research specifically. He calls the title of her dissertation, “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs,” “unpromising.” That analysis—to be generous with the word—would likely be news to the community college students Biden has taught for more than 20 years, including during her time as Second Lady, and to those who will be in her classes as she continues to teach after moving into the White House. (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary had another appropriate clapback to that dig: it added that the word “doctor” comes from the Latin word for “teacher.”)
Epstein, who admits that he is not a doctor of any kind, bemoans that he has often been called “Dr.” by mistake—a hardship I doubt many women have faced. A 2017 study of speaker introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds, for example, found that men introduced women with their professional title only 49% of the time, compared to 72% of the time for male speakers with similar qualifications.
The WSJ writer spends a chunk of his op-ed chronicling a supposed loss in “prestige” to the Ph.D. outside the sciences over the past few decades, with standards “relaxed” from mid-century tests in Greek or Latin and oral exams that, he says, left candidates fainting. That was, of course, an era when few women were able to attend the universities where those degrees were awarded. So, by Epstein’s standards, it seems that hardly any woman who is an expert in a humanities or social science field should ask to be addressed by the title she earned, coming in as she did after norms in higher education changed.
There are some good arguments against always using the title “Dr.;” AP style—and Fortune‘s style—usually don’t use honorifics, instead describing a person by their specific expertise when relevant. Some argue that an over-reliance on or celebration of advanced degrees can make those credentials seem necessary to students who take on more and more debt to obtain them.
But as to whether Dr. Jill Biden, who earned a doctorate through years of study, has the right to call herself by the title? Of course the answer is yes. The First Lady-elect weighed in on the debate Sunday night: “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished,” she wrote on Twitter.
Epstein is an essayist known for his “wit,” so maybe this was meant to be a humorous piece. But when so many women are faced with their colleagues and bosses questioning their professional expertise every day—whether they have a fancy title or not—the joke just doesn’t land. You can read the op-ed, if you must, in the pages of the WSJ. (We have decided not to give it additional promotion by linking to it.) Or better yet—read Dr. Biden’s dissertation here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Meghan Markle, startup investor. A Fortune exclusive this morning: Meghan Markle is making her debut as a startup investor. The Duchess of Sussex is backing Clevr Blends, a Southern California-based brand led by cofounder and CEO Hannah Mendoza that makes instant oat milk lattes. The duchess is interested in supporting female-founded companies and says that her investment is "in support of a passionate female entrepreneur who prioritizes building community alongside her business." Read more here: Fortune
- Ancient history. Sen. Mike Lee blocked bipartisan legislation last week that would establish national museums for women's history and Latino history. Lee says the long-sought projects would "further divide an already divided nation within an array of separate but equal museums of hyphenated identity groups." Fellow GOP Sen. Susan Collins was the lawmaker who aimed to pass the women's history museum legislation; she described his move as a "sad moment." Politico
- Disturbing lawsuit. The musician FKA twigs filed a lawsuit against actor Shia LaBeouf, describing a pattern of physical, emotional, sexual, and mental abuse in their relationship. Her aim with the unusual civil suit is to "explain how even a critically acclaimed artist with money, a home and a strong network of supporters could be caught in such a cycle." LaBoeuf said that some allegations were "not true," but said he has "no excuses for [his] alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations." New York Times
- #QueSeaLey. Argentina is set to become the first major Latin American country to legalize abortion after a measure to do so passed the legislature's lower house. Abortion rights campaigners have been pushing for the change for years and hope the decision could lead other countries in the region to follow suit. On social media, women's rights activists are using the hashtag #QueSeaLey: "let it be law." Guardian
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Kat Cole will leave her role as COO and president of Focus Brands. Vanessa Lopez joined Nia Impact Capital's impact investment team as COO.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- FDA OK. In its emergency authorization of the Pfizer vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration left open the possibility that pregnant and breastfeeding women can receive the immunization. The vaccine is authorized for anyone older than 16; the FDA asked Pfizer to file regular reports on its use in pregnant women, who weren't included in tests. In the U.K., in comparison, regulators have cautioned against pregnant women receiving the vaccine. Health care providers say the choice allows women to pick the best option for their own health. New York Times
- Deal or no deal? The U.K. and EU are warning that a no-deal Brexit is likely after talks between U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ended without an agreement. The two leaders extended their deadline; von der Leyen says it is "responsible" to go "the extra-mile." CNN
- Keep going, period. After Scotland's decision last month to make menstrual products free, Chandra Bozelko, a contributor to the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstrual Studies, argues that businesses must continue to fight period poverty—both to help women and girls who can't afford pads and tampons, and to support women in the private sector who can be caught without access to menstrual products when they need them. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
Female workers could take another pandemic hit: To their retirements New York Times
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ adviser confirms she declined offer to join Biden’s Cabinet Atlanta Journal-Constitution
She stalked her daughter's killers across Mexico, one by one New York Times
Biden’s CDC pick, a savvy communicator, will take over at a time when agency’s voice has been muted STAT News
PARTING WORDS
"Honestly, it was the Harry Potter socks."
-Vanderbilt kicker Sarah Fuller, who became the first woman to score in a Power Five college football game when she kicked two extra points on Saturday. She credits her lucky socks.


fortune--2020-12-14--Exclusive: Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, makes her debut as a startup investor

Exclusive : Meghan , The Duchess of Sussex , makes her debut as a startup investor

Throughout her near half-decade on the global stage—and long before—Meghan Markle has made gender equality one of her core causes. The Duchess of Sussex is now extending that mission to the private sector as she begins to build a portfolio of startup investments.
The duchess is investing in Clevr Blends, a startup that makes instant oat-milk lattes. In a statement announcing her investment in the brand—which is led by cofounder and CEO Hannah Mendoza—Meghan emphasized her interest in supporting female-founded companies, which received only 2.7% of venture capital funding in 2019. The personal investment is Meghan’s first to be made public.
“This investment is in support of a passionate female entrepreneur who prioritizes building community alongside her business,” the duchess said in a statement to Fortune. “I’m proud to invest in Hannah’s commitment to sourcing ethical ingredients and creating a product that I personally love and [that] has a holistic approach to wellness. I believe in her, and I believe in her company.”
Wellness has long been an interest of Meghan’s; she often wrote about the wellness space when she ran a now-shuttered lifestyle blog called The Tig. Meghan reached out to the Clevr team after trying the company’s oat-milk latte product, which debuted through a Santa Barbara pop-up coffee shop in 2017. The Southern California–based business is headquartered near Montecito, where Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, moved earlier this year.
A representative for the duchess declined to disclose the size of her investment, which wasn’t part of any kind of larger funding round. The brand, which has six staff members, has until now been self-funded. Clevr plans to use the investment to scale its business, which currently sells four different kinds of instant lattes retailing for $28, as well as a milk frother and travel mug. The brand has also committed to donating 1% of revenue to organizations fighting for food justice in the U.S., money that is currently going to Santa Barbara’s El Centro SB, a mutual aid and community organization.
“Entrepreneurs need funding, but they also need advisers who care deeply about what they are building. I’m grateful to have found both in the Duchess of Sussex,” Mendoza said in a statement. “Her passion for what we’re creating is palpable, and I couldn’t imagine a more aligned partnership. We’re excited for the road ahead.”
Since the Duke and Duchess of Sussex departed from their roles as senior members of the Royal Family in early 2020, the pair have been developing platforms to continue to support their charitable causes—which also include mental health, the end of online harassment, and support for veterans—as public figures largely based in the U.S. Their Archewell Foundation, where Meghan is continuing to work on the issue of gender equality through the nonprofit space, is getting off the ground. The duchess joined the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit and MPW Next Gen Summit this fall to discuss these issues.
During their complicated exit from their official roles in the Royal Family, the couple stated a commitment to attaining “financial independence,” meaning they would no longer rely on British taxpayer funding; as working members of the Royal Family, they were barred from earning any form of “professional income.”
In addition to Meghan’s interest in startup investing, the duke and duchess, who is a former actor, have entered the private sector through a deal to produce content for Netflix.


fortune--2020-12-14--COVID vaccines are coming—but it might be too late for the housing market

This is the web version of Bull Sheet, a no-nonsense daily newsletter on what’s happening in the markets. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Bull Sheeters. It’s shaping up to be a risk-on Monday as investors cheer the imminent arrival of vaccine doses.
The shipments couldn’t come at a better—or, depending on your perspective, worse—time. COVID cases are spiking just about everywhere and, with less than two weeks before Christmas, new lockdown measures are being mulled, or being rolled out, in some of the world’s biggest economies.
Let’s check in on today’s roundup, where I get into BofA’s analysis of how the pandemic is likely to shake up the housing market. Oh, and I have a bit of a treat for all you gastronomes. Read on.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are mostly higher in afternoon trading with Japan’s Nikkei up 0.3% .
are mostly higher in afternoon trading with Japan’s up . China this weekend pledged to slash its 2030 carbon emissions by 65% , a move that, some climate hawks say, could put further pressure on the incoming Biden Administration to reciprocate.
this weekend pledged to slash its , a move that, some climate hawks say, could put further pressure on the incoming Biden Administration to reciprocate. Corporate boards, beware. BlackRock is putting companies on notice, saying it will increasingly vote ‘yes’ on climate-friendly shareholder resolutions, using its $7 trillion assets under management as a kind of cudgel to advance green initiatives.
Europe
The European bourses are higher out of the gates with the DAX up 0.8% despite news over the weekend that Germany , the engine of the Eurozone economy, will enter a tighter lockdown on Wednesday, lasting through early January.
are higher out of the gates with the up despite news over the weekend that , the engine of the Eurozone economy, will enter a on Wednesday, lasting through early January. British businesses and the public won something of a reprieve this weekend after the latest Brexit make-or-break deadline passed with—lucky us—an extension, sending the pound sterling higher; the FTSE is flat. Dear reader, I share your tedium. Brexit trade talks have become that leaky faucet, that slow leak in your front tire, that pebble in your shoe. It’s not going away any time soon.
passed with—lucky us—an extension, sending the higher; the is flat. Dear reader, I share your tedium. Brexit trade talks have become that leaky faucet, that slow leak in your front tire, that pebble in your shoe. It’s not going away any time soon. Shares in AstraZeneca bombed 7.9% lower at the open after the pharma giant disclosed this weekend it was buying rare-disease specialist Alexion Pharmaceuticals in a cash-and-shares deal valued at $39 billion.
U.S.
U.S. futures point to a solid open. That’s after all three major indexes edged lower for the week as—speaking of tedious business stories— stimulus negotiations fizzled out. If Washington is to get stimulus checks into Christmas stockings, Congress has to reach a deal this week.
point to a solid open. That’s after all three major indexes edged lower for the week as—speaking of tedious business stories— stimulus negotiations fizzled out. If Washington is to get stimulus checks into Christmas stockings, Congress has to reach a deal this week. They’re calling it the biggest mass mobilization effort since World War II . Pfizer on Sunday morning began shipping COVID vaccines from its Michigan factory; McKesson will handle distribution.
. Pfizer on Sunday morning began shipping from its Michigan factory; McKesson will handle distribution. Fortune polled Americans, and found that the majority plan to wait to see how the vaccine performs before rolling up their sleeves, and taking a jab.
how the vaccine performs before rolling up their sleeves, and taking a jab. The U.S. COVID death toll is on the brink of 300,000 and the average daily number of infections is above 200,000, so this next data point might not surprise you: 58% of American adults support some kind of national stay-at-home order, a recent Fortune poll found.
Elsewhere
Gold is down, trading below $1,840/ounce .
is down, trading below . As is the dollar .
. Crude is higher on vaccine hopes, with Brent futures trading above $50/barrel .
is higher on vaccine hopes, with futures trading above . Bitcoin is flat, but it’s back above $19,000.
***
Home sweet home
I’m guessing you too have had a brief exchange over coffee that goes something like this:
My wife: Look at this. There’s a house in [X part of the country, or city] for sale. Look at all this space!
Me: I don’t want to move.
Wife: Just take a look.
I usually wiggle out of the conversation by reminding my wife she married the wrong Warner brother, the journalist.
Why am I bringing this up? Last week, a new housing report from BankofAmerica came out that showed Americans are increasingly getting the itch to change homes. Every month, BofA analysts ask Americans if the COVID outbreak is a factor making them “seriously consider moving to a different house or apartment.”
In June, 19% of the panelists said that yes, the pandemic was making them seriously consider a move. Last month, that figure had jumped to 28%.
That’s not exactly an exodus, but it’s still a significant data point. The U.S. housing market accounted for about 15% of GDP in 2018. All those people moving around the country would be a hugely positive jolt for the likes of banks, retailers, appliance makers and select local tax authorities.
Beyond that, it’s hard to determine the big winners and losers from such a potential housing shakeup. For starters, as the BofA table shows, the migration pattern looks to be fairly unambitious. A good chunk of the survey respondents said that if they were to move, it would be likely somewhere else within the city, or within the region.
And, survey respondents said, they’re not looking to bail on the city, prompting BofA to declare the urban exodus is amounting to something of an “urban legend.” (I totally get this point; I too am not mentally ready to move out of the city.)
Still, we could be seeing the start of a fundamental housing shift in the quarters to come, one that’s likely to happen regardless of whether or not the new COVID vaccines do their job.
I hope my wife doesn’t read today’s Bull Sheet.
***
Postscript
While my wife is checking house prices, this time of year I’m typically monitoring the market swings in a certain species of edible, subterranean fungus, the white truffle.
This year has been a particularly volatile one for fans of the mighty tuber magnatum pico, the Italian white truffle.
While on break two weeks ago, I went foraging for truffles with my neighbor, Renzo, his dog, Luna, and my Lagotto pup, Scilla. I wrote about our little adventure, a story that we published this weekend, replete with photos of shaggy dogs, freshly unearthed truffles and a little video explainer of why prices for this exotic dish are soaring.
This is where we went, in the woods behind my place in Amandola.
The elusive white truffle can be found in scattered patches in the hills of Amandola, in central Italy. Original photo: Bernhard Warner Original photo: Bernhard Warner
***
Correction: a previous version of Bull Sheet incorrectly characterized the mood of investors. It was a risk-on day before the opening bell in New York.
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
Bombing on bonds. 2020 has been a humbling one for many a trading legend. Count British billionaire Mark Coombs in that group. The investment firm he built, Ashmore Group, has lost roughly $15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, betting on bonds from Argentina, Ecuador and Lebanon this year. Clients, to say the least, are not happy.
Is the IPO market running too hot? After the gravity-defying debuts of DoorDash and Airbnb last week, you'd think every tech unicorn would want to push up their listing date. But, instead, we're seeing a surprising bit of hesitation. In recent days, videogame maker Roblox and fintech Affirm Holdings pressed pause on their IPO plans as investors start to rethink the frothiness of the market. Consider this data point: "Investors this year have valued newly public tech companies at a median of 23.9 times the revenue they reported in the 12 months before going public," the Journal reports, citing IPO tracker Jay Ritter.
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
$225,000
Last week's data dump detailing who benefited from the Paycheck Protection Program (and who was shut out) is creating all kinds of headaches in Washington. Among the glaring nuggets: "the program cost nearly $225,000 for each job that it saved," writes Fortune's Rey Mashayekhi. That's only the tip of the iceberg.


fortune--2020-12-15--Workit Health, a Digital rehab startup, raises $12 million

Why Australia just canceled an order for 51 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine

There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous (okay, there are many): “It works if you work it.” But here’s the problem—many who need to “work it” can’t because of the time and cost associated with traditional recovery programs.
That’s the problem that Workit Health, a startup founded by Robin McIntosh and Lisa McLaughlin, two tech workers who met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Oakland more than a decade ago, is trying to solve. By bringing together technologists, clinicians, and counselors to develop a digital-first platform for recovery, the duo hope they will be able to reach far more people who are in need of recovery than existing, in-person programs.
“Both inpatient and outpatient programs are expensive and inconvenient,” says McIntosh, the cofounder and co-CEO of Workit Health. “And there hasn’t been much of a digital aspect of recovery. It’s still largely face-to-face.”
Workit Health got its start in 2015, well before the pandemic. But it’s no surprise it is now seeing a boom in demand—and is announcing a $12 million Series B round of financing, which brings its total funding to date to $20 million. That’s because COVID-19 has exacerbated existing addiction problems in the United States, with several studies showing that the virus has led to an increase in substance abuse and drug overdoses. At the same time, the pandemic has also accelerated demand for telemedicine and for startups that enable it.
“Workit was already at an inflection point in their growth and was ready for this,” says Beth Ferreira, a general partner at New York City–based firm FirstMark Capital. “[Their] approach is completely holistic and they have the infrastructure to prescribe medication and conduct therapy and group counseling—all aspects of addiction treatment in one platform from the safety and privacy of home.”
Ferreira is leading the Series B investment in Workit. Her firm is joined by Lux Capital, GingerBread Capital, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Venture Partners, and actor Rob Lowe, who is a public advocate for recovery and mental health.
While telemedicine is on the increase in all fields, a recent study from the Commonwealth Fund shows that behavioral health is leading the way: It has the highest percentage of visits currently conducted online—about 40% of total sessions. Workit Health now has more than 10,000 individuals across its recovery platform, accessing group meetings and one-to-one counseling sessions, among other forms of treatment and therapy. (An important note: While Workit Health provides several recovery paths to choose from, its forms of interventions aren’t new; what’s innovative is its delivery model.)
“We saw a 200% increase in demand [this year as compared to last] in part because people are isolated and unemployed,” says McLaughlin, Workit’s other cofounder and co-CEO. “All of these things are coming to a head now.”
So far, Workit’s results are promising. A recent white paper from the company showed that its digital-first approach is achieving better retention results than traditional, in-person recovery programs. But it’s still early days for telemedicine, relatively speaking, despite the explosion in usage providers have seen this year. And there’s still lots of data to be collected and analyzed. Workit’s founders say they have yet to publish in peer-reviewed publications but that they have plans to do so. “JAMA [The Journal of the American Medical Association] calls us on a semi-regular basis,” says McLaughlin.
For now the startup is focused on launching in more regions. To date, Workit is available in five states, including Michigan, Washington, and California, and plans to launch in Ohio, Texas, and Florida in 2021. (Clearly, addiction afflicts both red and blue states.) The duo, meanwhile, are optimistic that despite the uptick in rates of overdose and substance abuse, there are silver linings to the pandemic. “COVID has changed so much,” says McIntosh. “We’ve been advocating for remote care for years.”


fortune--2020-12-15--Singapore is desperate to revive tourism and business travel. Here are all the ways it’s tried

Singapore announced on Tuesday it will open a segregated travel lane so “business, official, and high economic value travelers” can visit the city-state quarantine-free by staying in a designated “bubble” facility near the airport.
The facility, Connect@Changi, will feature guest rooms and conference rooms where visitors can meet with other people staying in the bubble. Travel lane visitors will be able to meet with Singapore residents in the bubble—but only with floor-to-ceiling dividers separating them.
The business travel lane is the latest attempt by Singapore’s government to jump-start the country’s all-important tourism and business travel sectors, which have cratered in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tourism accounts for 4% of Singapore’s gross domestic product—it generated $20 billion in 2019—and the city is normally a top spot for business conferences and trade shows.
Over 19 million international tourists—more than three times the population of the country—visited Singapore in all of 2019, according to the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network. Through October, just 2.7 million visitors had trickled across the border in 2020.
Singapore largely has its coronavirus outbreak under control; it has not logged more than 20 new daily cases since the end of September. But its small size—the island nation spans 280 square miles—means that unlike its geographically bigger Asian peers that have also tamed COVID-19, Singapore can’t rely on domestic tourism to make up for the steep drop-off in international visitors.
“We don’t have a big domestic tourism market unlike, say, China or Hong Kong or Australia, and so the impact has been tremendous on our tourism industry,” Keith Tan, chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board, said during a Fortune Global Tech Forum virtual conversation earlier this month.
In desperate bids to revive tourism and business travel, Singapore has rolled out a series of schemes—with varying degrees of success.
Domestic tourism
In June, as Singapore was loosening stay-at-home orders and other COVID-19 restrictions, the Singapore Tourism Board started letting popular tourist attractions reopen in stages and began accepting applications from domestic tour operators to resume business.
The following month, the board launched SingapoRediscovers, a $34 million campaign to boost local tourism, offering residents “staycation” packages, tours, and discounted attractions. That campaign included a $75 voucher for every adult Singaporean to use on hotels and attractions. On Dec. 1, the first day the vouchers were redeemable, the designated booking platforms received $1.4 million in sales.
Singapore’s renowned Jewel Changi Airport features a 16-meter Christmas tree this holiday season. Earlier this year, the Singapore Tourism Board encouraged residents to “travel” domestically by offering vouchers. Suhaimi Abdullah—Getty Images
Singapore’s flagship carrier, Singapore Airlines, has also staged creative attempts to boost revenue and get some of its planes back in the air. (In October, it recorded a 98.2% year-on-year decrease in passengers carried.)
The airline toyed with the idea of “flights to nowhere.” Passengers would board a plane that took off from Singapore’s Changi Airport, fly around, and then land at Changi again. Airlines in Taiwan and Hong Kong have operated flights to nowhere, with some working better than others. The haze over Hong Kong on the day of the region’s inaugural flight to nowhere was so thick that passengers couldn’t see the city from the plane.
Singapore Airlines ultimately didn’t follow through on the flights to nowhere idea, opting instead in October for a grounded experience that offered customers dinner and a movie on a double-decker A380 plane for $37 to $440. The airline also began offering tours of its training center and use of its flight simulator.
Singapore did allow the Royal Caribbean cruise line to launch “cruises to nowhere” from its harbor, but last week one ill-fated ship returned to port a day early after a passenger tested positive for the coronavirus, despite upgraded air filters, mandatory testing, and other safety protocols that officials had required of the operator. (It’s still unclear when or where the passenger contracted the virus.)
Bubbles and lanes
In September, the city-state received the first passengers from Brunei and New Zealand under its Air Travel Pass program.
The scheme lets visitors—including leisure tourists—apply to travel to Singapore and do so without undergoing a 14-day quarantine. Since it launched the plan in September, Singapore has expanded the list of eligible regions to include Australia, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The scheme is unilateral, meaning Singaporeans who want to travel to those countries are still subject to existing coronavirus travel restrictions.
Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas cruise ship docked at the Marina Bay Cruise Centre in Singapore on Dec. 9, 2020, after a passenger on a “cruise to nowhere” tested positive for COVID-19. Ore Huiying—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Singapore also runs reciprocal “green lane” programs with China, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Brunei, and Germany that let some corporate and diplomatic travelers skip quarantine on arrival if they test negative for COVID-19.
But Singapore still hasn’t managed to open a travel bubble with another region that would allow tourists from both sides to travel back and forth without quarantining.
In late November, it very nearly pulled off a travel bubble with Hong Kong that would have let residents of each region travel quarantine-free to the other, but a fourth wave of coronavirus cases in Hong Kong thwarted the bubble and forced authorities to delay it until at least 2021.
Conference hopes
Singapore’s various travel schemes provide an immediate boost to struggling hospitality businesses, but they are also attempts to establish Singapore as a place that is safe and open to visitors. Such a reputation would bolster the city-state’s chances of playing host to global conferences and events as COVID-19 vaccines become available and the pandemic eases in 2021.
The “MICE industry”—meetings, incentives, conventions, and exhibitions—supported more than 34,000 jobs in Singapore and contributed $2.9 billion to the economy in 2019, according to the tourism board.
The World Economic Forum announced earlier this month that it would hold its annual meeting in Singapore instead of Davos, Switzerland. The gathering of business and political elites is scheduled for May. If it takes place successfully, it will be a boon for Singapore’s economy and a clear indication that the city can host large global events without risking coronavirus transmission.
But Singapore no doubt is haunted by a worst-case conference scenario it experienced early in the pandemic.
In late January, when Singapore had the third-highest number of confirmed coronavirus infections in the world (which, at the time, meant 43 cases), a British man contracted COVID-19 while attending a business conference in Singapore. The man traveled back to Europe, where he infected several other people. The media dubbed the Singapore conference a “super-spreader event.”
Singapore’s current control over local coronavirus infections supports the city’s argument that it can host global events like WEF’s annual meeting next year. But its handling of the virus was far from perfect. Singapore’s government said on Tuesday that half of the city’s migrant workers have had COVID-19.
Authorities used serology tests to detect antibodies, indicating past infection, and found that 98,289 workers had them. The government is still completing serology tests for 65,000 more workers. The results indicate that Singapore’s case count is far higher than the official tally of roughly 58,000.


fortune--2020-12-15--What a year it was for Leadership Next

What a year it was for Leadership Next

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
When we started Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast back in February, I had no idea we would be launching into the most tumultuous year in modern business history. The drama unfolded each week before our eyes—or rather, ears.
Ellen McGirt and I talked with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, in the midst of his journey from travel lockdown to $10 billion IPO billionaire; with Flagship Pioneering founder Noubar Afeyan, whose company Moderna was on its way to creating one of the first vaccines for COVID 19 at record-breaking speed; with GM CEO Mary Barra about her powerful and personal response to the George Floyd killing; with tech CEOs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Workday’s Aneel Bhusri, HP’s Enrique Lores, and Cisco’s Chuck Robbins who saw their businesses soar; retail CEOs like Levi’s Chip Bergh, Kohl’s Michelle Gass and Lowe’s Marvin Ellison who were forced to make dramatic moves to digital channels; and hospitality CEOs like Hyatt’s Mark Hoplamazian, who saw his business largely disappear overnight. If you want to understand the profound impact 2020 had on business, I suggest you go back and listen to all 40 episodes.
Yea, okay, I know—nobody has a spare 20 hours. So here’s a short cut: Ellen and I made a summary, with clips from some of our favorites, and with help from our favorite sponsor—Deloitte CEO Joe Ucuzoglu. You can hear it this morning, on Apple or Spotify.
We will be back with a new season in the new year. News below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Boeing inspections
Boeing has discovered more manufacturing defects in its new 787 Dreamliners and is expanding inspections of the production lines. The company and U.S. regulators agree that the newly discovered problem—regarding "skin flatness tolerances"—isn't an immediate threat to safety, but the expanded inspections explain why Dreamliners aren't being delivered right now. Wall Street Journal
Russian hack
The (suspected) Russian hacking of U.S. Treasury computers hit other departments too, according to Trump administration officials who said the State Department, Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon were also targeted. The attack was apparently highly sophisticated, compromising the software of IT administration firm SolarWinds. It looks like a lot of data may have been stolen. New York Times
Digital regulation
The European Commission is today introducing much-anticipated legislation known as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, which will have a huge impact on Big Tech. The DSA will update two-decades-old legislation governing online platform operators' responsibilities, while the DMA will update competition law to make it easier to detect and tackle market abuses. Meanwhile, the U.K. also unveiled its DSA analog today, threatening fines of up to 10% of global revenue. Euractiv
Ellison out
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has become the latest Silicon Valley mogul to leave California. He's moved his primary residence to Hawaii, he announced Monday following Oracle's announcement that it too is leaving Redwood City, for Austin, Texas. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Biden time 1
Fortune had a chat with former White House insiders Peggy Hamburg, Laurie Zephyrin, Valerie Jarrett, Maria Contreras-Sweet, and Frances Townsend, about the big challenges sitting in President-elect Biden's inbox. Covering issues such as vaccine skepticism and international ties, here are their thoughts. Fortune
Biden time 2
David Topel, who authored a book on Biden's 1972 Senate campaign, writes for Fortune about the president-elect's chances for reuniting the nation. He's optimistic: "Ideally suited to calm a climate of anarchy, Biden's values include an insistence on civility; an instinct for reaching across the aisle, often creating solutions at times when impasse seems inevitable; and a belief in giving voice to the next generation, evidenced by a lifetime of dedication to youth empowerment." Fortune
Biden time 3
Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally congratulated Biden, following the U.S. Electoral College's affirmation of the win yesterday. "Russian-American cooperation, based on the principles of equality and mutual respect, would meet the interests of both nations and the entire international community," his office said in a statement. CNN
Fitness+ review
Fortune's Aaron Pressman takes a spin through Apple's new workout video service, Fitness+, which requires an Apple Watch plus some other i-device that can show videos. He writes: "The Apple Fitness + seems best suited for beginners and intermediate exercisers, and not more advanced users. Videos are classified only as 'absolute beginner' or just typical. There are no double black diamond workouts here." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-12-15--Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison joins the executive exodus from California

Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison said he has moved his primary residence to Hawaii, becoming the latest Silicon Valley executive to depart the state where they built their fortunes.
Ellison, the world’s 11th-wealthiest person, notified his staff Monday of the move. Recode first reported the executive’s decision, which followed Oracle’s announcement Friday that it had shifted the company’s headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Redwood City, California.
“I’ve received a number of inquiries about whether or not I will be moving to Texas,” Ellison wrote in a memo to Oracle’s employees. “The answer is no. I’ve moved to the State of Hawaii and I’ll be using the power of Zoom to work from the island of Lanai. Mahalo, Larry.”
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Ellison, 76, who has a net worth of about $75 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, owns 98% of Lanai, Hawaii’s sixth largest island that’s mostly made up of Ellison’s luxury hotels and resorts. Ellison is the main employer of Lanai’s 3,000 residents. In addition to his three hotels, he also owns a significant chunk of the housing stock as well as the main grocery store and the monthly newspaper there.
The Oracle chairman joins other tech leaders and ultra-wealthy in leaving California, with some pointing to the state’s high taxes. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, a friend of Ellison’s, said last week that he had left California for Texas. Splunk Inc. CEO Doug Merritt also reportedly moved to the Austin area. Oracle, the world’s second-largest software maker, had called Silicon Valley home since the company’s 1977 founding.
Despite Lanai being such a small island — with only one school and no stoplights — residents rarely see Ellison around town, though that may change now that he’s officially moved there.
“Nobody knows what his schedule is,” said Alberta de Jetley, a longtime resident of the island and founder of Lanai Today, the island’s monthly newspaper, which she sold to Ellison in 2019. “He comes in on his private plane and he’s here and then he’s gone. Nobody, except for the people who actually work at the airport, know when he’s coming and going.”


fortune--2020-12-15--China keeps extending its lead over other major economies

China pulled further ahead of other major economies in November as industrial output and retail sales strengthened, reinforcing expectations of healthy growth in 2021.
Industrial production rose 7% in November from a year earlier, while retail sales expanded 5% in the period. Fixed-asset investment grew 2.6% in the first 11 months of the year from the same period in 2019. The data matched the median estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
China’s control over the pandemic is widening its divergence with other major nations, many of which are now re-imposing virus restrictions amid new waves of cases. After an early reliance on state-led investment to spur the economy, the latest figures show China’s recovery has broadened out to consumers, with spending on goods like cosmetics and jewelry picking up strongly.
“China’s economy continued to accelerate across all fronts in November,” Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics in Hong Kong, said in an email. “We expect output to remain above-trend in the coming quarters, even as tailwinds from stimulus and exports start to ease,” he added.
Oxford upgraded its estimate for China’s 2021 growth to 8.1% from 7.8% based on Tuesday’s data. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg predict growth will accelerate to 5.9% in the current quarter and reach 2% for the whole of 2020.
While the strong recovery has given the central bank reason to reassess its policy stance, it isn’t withdrawing support just yet amid a spate of corporate defaults that have roiled debt markets. The People’s Bank of China added liquidity on Tuesday to ease financing pressures, injecting 950 billion yuan ($145 billion) of one-year cash via the medium-term lending facility, more than offsetting the amount maturing in December.
China is benefiting from its status as manufacturer to the world. Exports have rocketed in recent months as new virus restrictions in many of China’s biggest markets fueled demand for medical equipment and work-from-home electronic devices.
Consumer spending was boosted last month by the ‘Singles’ Day’ discount shopping festival, with e-commerce accounting for 25% of retail sales in November.
‘Demand-Side Reform’
Still, the recovery has some way to go. Retail growth remains below the 8%-plus pace reached last year, and for the first 11 months of 2020, sales were still down 4.8% year-on-year. Restaurants and catering declined 0.6% in November from a year ago, suggesting that consumers are still somewhat nervous about eating out.
Liu Li-gang, chief China economist at Citigroup Inc., said the economy’s recovery so far has been unbalanced, with domestic demand, as reflected by retail sales, remaining “quite sluggish.” However, there’s likely to be a stronger cyclical rebound in 2021, he said in an interview on Bloomberg TV.
China’s leaders have signaled they’re considering further measures to boost household incomes and spending, with the ruling Communist Party’s Politburo, its top decision-making body, last week promising “demand-side reform.” Incomes may also get a boost from a tightening labor market, with Tuesday’s data showing the urban unemployment rate dropping slightly to 5.2% in November.
Fixed Investment
The latest economic indicators point to fourth quarter growth that’s likely to be better than the previous three months, according to Fu Linghui, a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics. He also projected “relatively fast” expansion in 2021 driven by consumption.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also upgraded its growth forecasts based on Tuesday’s report, raising this year’s to 2.4% from 2% and next year’s to 8% from 7.5%.
Fixed-asset investment growth slowed slightly in November from the previous month, but remained well above levels seen in recent years. Manufacturing investment grew 10.8% year-on-year in November, up sharply from October in a trend driven by export growth, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a report. Infrastructure investment growth moderated slightly, while property investment growth remained at high levels.
The data suggested that private sector sentiment is improving, with fixed asset investment by privately-owned companies up 0.2% in the 11 months through November, the first positive reading this year.
“The impressive export growth in 2020, by helping to boost the V-shaped recovery in the domestic economy since the second quarter of 2020, has for the past couple of months reduced the government’s need to ramp up infrastructure spending,” Nomura Holdings Inc. economists led by Lu Ting wrote in a note. “That said, we expect manufacturing investment growth to remain elevated in coming quarters.”


fortune--2020-12-15--Why Wall Street is ‘signaling caution’ for your stock portfolio in 2021

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Good morning. Stocks and futures are rebounding on Tuesday. That’s despite little to no progress on stimulus negotiations in Washington, or on Brexit trade talks in Europe.
Elsewhere, investors are so far brushing off the latest lockdown news, which threatens to put the clamps on Christmas on both sides of the Atlantic.
In today’s essay, I get into the loneliest trade in the market: shorting the S&P 500.
Let’s check in on what’s moving markets.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are mostly lower in afternoon trading with the Shanghai Composite down 0.1% .
are mostly lower in afternoon trading with the down . The Chinese economy is finishing 2020 with strong momentum. Factory output and retail sales figures for November grew in line with analyst estimates, and unemployment fell .
is finishing 2020 with strong momentum. and figures for November grew in line with analyst estimates, and . Equities analysts at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Nomura Holdings are all fairly bullish on Asian stocks for 2021, saying equities should climb at least 20% over the next 12 months.
Europe
The European bourses started off in the red, before rebounding, with Germany’s DAX up 0.2%. With just 10 days before Christmas, tough new lockdown measures will go into effect in London, Germany and the Netherlands this week, and Italy too is mulling new measures for the holiday period—grim news for economies teetering on recession.
started off in the red, before rebounding, with Germany’s up With just 10 days before Christmas, tough new lockdown measures will go into effect in and this week, and Italy too is mulling new measures for the holiday period—grim news for economies teetering on recession. Another day has passed with no progress on Brexit trade talks , but that’s not stopping the region’s biggest companies from sounding the alarm. Yesterday it was Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury saying a disruptive divorce would force it to mull a big scale-back in the U.K.
, but that’s not stopping the region’s biggest companies from sounding the alarm. Yesterday it was Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury saying a disruptive divorce would force it to mull a big Big tech could be facing tough new data usage rules, or get slammed with a fine of up to 10% of annual sales, according to EU draft regulation seen by Bloomberg.
U.S.
U.S. futures have been gaining much of the morning. That’s after the S&P 500 fell for a fourth consecutive day on Monday. The mighty Russell 2000 , meanwhile, continued its impressive run; the small cap index is up 19% since Election Day.
have been gaining much of the morning. That’s after the S&P 500 fell for a fourth consecutive day on Monday. The mighty , meanwhile, continued its impressive run; the small cap index is up since Election Day. Newly minted IPO darlings Airbnb and DoorDash fell sharply on Monday, and are trading lower in pre-market trading. As my colleague Aaron Pressman wonders, did their stock market debuts just break the IPO market ?
Airbnb and DoorDash fell sharply on Monday, and are trading lower in pre-market trading. As my colleague Aaron Pressman wonders, did their stock market debuts just ? A fascinating story to watch for 2021 will the streaming wars. Disney shares on Friday hit an all-time high even after it revealed its huge investments in Disney+, Hulu and other steaming services would take a big bite out of earnings.
Elsewhere
Gold is up, trading near $1,850/ounce .
is up, trading near . The dollar is flat.
is flat. Crude is down on vaccine hopes, with Brent futures trading around $50/barrel .
is down on vaccine hopes, with futures trading around . Bitcoin is flat again on Tuesday, trading around $19,200.
***
The loneliest trade
Since the March nadir, U.S. stocks (as measured by the S&P 500) are up a startling 66%. And that bull rally is giving investors a sense of invincibility.
Just look at short positions. With the uncertainty of Election Day well and truly behind us—remember all those worries of a disputed election?—investors are long stocks. Long with a vengeance.
According to Morgan Stanley, the short interest on the median S&P stock is well below 2%, the lowest level in nearly two decades, as the chart below shows. (A little plug: in the most recent issue of Fortune, I wrote about the new breed of short-sellers that is disrupting the investment world. It’s worth checking out.)
This long-everything phenomenon is but the latest indicator that investor exuberance for stocks is running off-the-charts hot. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management chief investment officer Lisa Shalett, for one, sees reason for concern. This everything-is-awesome stance, she says, “suggests complacency, which always becomes its own Achilles’ heel.”
For starters, the S&P is trading a mere 6.5% shy of Morgan Stanley’s year-end 2021 target, she points out. “Near-term catalysts are mostly exhausted, fiscal and monetary policy are at maximum accommodation levels, and sentiment and positioning indicators have highly bullish readings. Thus, we are signaling caution,” she writes.
Morgan Stanley is hardly alone. Equities analysts see a solid economic recovery in 2021, and a surge in earnings. But stocks are so expensive today that we’d need to see a wave of bottom-line beats to bulk up those relatively puny denominators, and bring P/Es back to their historical range.
***
Correction: In yesterday’s Bull Sheet, I incorrectly characterized the mood of investors. As was abundantly clear, it was a risk-on day before the opening bell in New York. Apologies for the confusion.
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
Adverse reaction. AstraZeneca shareholders were quick to signal their displeasure with the pharma giant's $39 billion cash-and-shares deal for Boston-based Alexion. Shares have fallen 7.4% over the past two trading sessions. That's a fairly harsh verdict. As Fortune's Jeremy Kahn points out, AZ shares had hit all-time highs earlier this year, and CEO Pascal Soriot would have looked "foolish if he wasted the opportunity" on making a big splash.
Big foodie. After DoorDash's blockbuster IPO last week, the seven-year-old home delivery firm is now worth more than food giants General Mills, Kraft Heinz. Never mind that it's deeply unprofitable. Fortune's Danielle Abril speaks with CEO Tony Xu about the challenges ahead of living up to its lofty market cap.
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Market candy
3,000%
Move over, Tesla. Novavax, the biotech darling working on a COVID-19 vaccine, was, as of yesterday morning, up 3,038% so far this year. Moderna, too, was up a not-too-shabby 702% YTD as investors have rewarded the biotech firms in the battle to find a COVID cure. The traditional pharma companies in the mix have also seen stock bumps, but, in most cases, they are under-performing the S&P 500, the Wall Street Journal reports.


fortune--2020-12-15--More Republicans believe the economy is improving while Democrats think it’s getting worse

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There was talk aplenty about a so-called “V-shaped” recovery back in the summer when economic data was skyrocketing off of the lows earlier this year. Now, as the U.S. heads into a winter with a new but not yet widely-distributed vaccine, Americans appear less confident that the economy is heading in the right direction: In fact, the majority think things are getting worse.
According to a recent Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, over half (54%) believe the current national economic situation is worsening, up from 52% in August.
However, much as the narratives on the economy themselves have been varied, some 26% of Americans polled think the economy is improving. And among those who identify as Republicans and Democrats, the contrast was stark: 50% of Republicans believed the economy was improving, versus only 9% of Democrats. Notably, though, Republicans were much more bullish on the economy before the election, when 62% of those polled between Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 thought the economy was improving.
Among income levels, meanwhile, at least roughly half of all income groups believed the economy was headed down the wrong path.
Nearly ten months into a pandemic that’s wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy, it’s not hard to understand why many Americans have a gloomy outlook.
To be sure, the economic rebound was better than many economists and analysts expected, and key data points like retail spending and the unemployment rate have continued to improve, albeit at a much slower pace in recent months. The most recent unemployment report on Dec. 4 showed that only 245,000 jobs were added in November, dropping the unemployment rate slightly to 6.7% from 6.9%.
“The recovery has lost some momentum, but it has continued,” Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America, recently told Fortune.
But at the current juncture, the recovery is starting to stagnate and needs an extra push to continue or risk a further decline, some economists argue. Roughly 13 million people are due to lose pandemic unemployment benefits on Dec. 26 without another relief package to extend them, and millions may be vulnerable to evictions in January.
“If we don’t get that help, [the recent unemployment] report suggests that the economy is going to start backtracking, we’re going to start losing jobs, and unemployment will start rising again,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi recently told Fortune. In fact, he argues without additional relief from Congress, “There’s a pretty good chance this will go down in history as a double-dip recession.”
That relief, though, has yet to materialize, even as Congress nears a deadline to pass a bill. And on Dec. 10, weekly jobless claims for the week ending Dec. 5 rose to 835,000 from 716,000 the week prior—higher than anticipated.
Fortune-SurveyMonkey polled 2,247 U.S. adults between Nov. 30 to Dec. 1. The margin of error is 3 percentage points.


fortune--2020-12-16--How to be an anti-racist not just in the summer of 2020, but next year and beyond

Vise , a company founded by two high school graduates , raises $ 45 million in funding with Sequoia at @ @

As I reflect on an enormously painful and exhausting year, I find myself in a hopeful place. And yes, I am surprised by that.
Part of the hope stems from the many conversations I didn’t expect to have. Some have been with chief executives who have committed to address issues of race and inequity with humility, determination, and grace. (Check out this year-in-review episode of Leadership Next, my podcast with Fortune CEO Alan Murray, for more.) Some have been with mid-career executives on the Fortune Connect platform—now our largest executive community—who represent the cohort who will be responsible for leading and implementing the radical reimagining of work and society going forward. They give me life. (More on Fortune Connect here.)
For the better part of a year, I’ve also been Zooming into conferences and other private meetings to share what I’m learning from my 2020 reporting, and to learn what’s top of the mind for decision-makers. When it comes to race and inequity, so many leaders are—miraculously—on the same page, but not always clear about what comes next. I did my best to represent all of you. Looking back, I’ve come to see that my responses can be condensed to one simple prompt: It is up to each of us to notice who is not in the room, and to ask why.
In the “why” is the work.
The act of noticing is a powerful one. It’s the first step to inclusion and puts you on the road to understanding, allyship, and the elimination of the kinds of barriers whose roots lie far beyond your workplace. It takes twenty years to grow an entry level employee, and a lot goes wrong for them along the way: Unequal access to health care, education, clean water and food leads to unequal life outcomes. Living in communities that offer little promise of safety or civic life, leads to deep despair. Not an insignificant pipeline problem.
“Room,” then, becomes a metaphor for wherever history, power, and commerce operate: To stand for inclusion in the workforce is to notice who isn’t on your board, executive suite, high potential pool, store shelves, professional service value chain, customer base, teams, and professional membership groups. Take a look at your LinkedIn connections. Your social feeds. Look around the neighborhood where you live. Where you worship. The zip codes where your (mostly empty) corporate headquarters are. Who’s not there? Why?
Pull the threads, and narratives begin to emerge that will help you better understand how outside forces—like a historic lack of access to capital markets—have created the seemingly intractable gaps in wealth and agency that plague so many in the U.S. and beyond. New questions will emerge about how those forces have worked their way inside your firms. Whose family was decimated by COVID-19? Why was our new accommodation for working from a distance not the pre-pandemic norm for disabled employees? How could it possibly be that working women have lost so much traction in the last nine months? Why do so few employees of color make it past their first leadership assignment? What specific benefits and services do the extraordinary people we are frantically trying to hire our way into a better diversity report really need to thrive in their jobs?
Once you see exclusion you can’t unsee it. And that’s a good thing.
Despite the good vaccine news, we are facing many months of uncertainty, pain, and darkness before the light shines once more. Plenty of families and communities will emerge more scarred than others.
Are we prepared to ask why and act on what we learn?
Currently, it feels pretty unlikely. Global inequality is on the rise at a time when people are literally stabbing each other in the streets at political rallies. And yet, most of us are just trying to get through this thing called life.
I get it.
So, my best advice is to do as much of your looking and listening as close to home as possible. One soul at a time.
To help with that, I’m moved to repeat this simple advice from David Kyuman Kim, a professor of religious studies, and a philosopher and scholar of radical love and inclusive democracy. He is currently the founding director for the Center for Values, Ethics, & Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His advice: Open your mind, and then listen. When you give genuine attention to other people, they find the courage to talk about their lives. The simplicity masks the power.
“We have a responsibility to draw our attention to co-workers, to community members, and ask a simple question: ‘How are you doing?’” he says. “And then listen, really listen, as if you don’t already know the answer.”
Not knowing. What’s the worst that could happen?
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Pinterest settles gender discrimination lawsuit The suit was brought by former COO Françoise Brougher in August. In it, Brougher alleged that she had been paid less than her colleagues, left out of important meetings and was given gendered feedback. The settlement of $22.5 million, includes a provision where Brougher and the company will jointly contribute $2.5 million to philanthropies supporting women and underrepresented minorities in the tech. In the not so good news, two Black public policy officials, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with their own stories of racist and disparaging treatment. Both said they were underpaid and both left the company with less than a year’s severance.
The Verge
Black farmers took back the land in Detroit There is a vibrant and surprisingly diverse community of small farmers in Detroit and environs. That said, much of the farmed land is owned by white people and real estate speculators. The disparity caught the eye of the non-profit Keep Growing Detroit (KGD), which teamed up with other farming and food insecurity-focused organizations to launch a GoFundMe designed to help Black farming families buy any available farmland. “We noticed that more white farmers were getting the land than Black farmers,” says KGD co-director Tepirah Rushdan. The organization tracks the number of gardens and farms in Detroit. “Maybe it was because they had the money and the extra time to go through the hoops to buy the land. I didn’t like that. I had a lot of Black farmer friends who were rocking it, but they didn’t own the land.” In 20 minutes, the fund blew past their $5,000 goal to collect more than $50,000. Read it and eat.
Civil Eats
Root, root, root for the Cleveland team After a long, protracted battle, Cleveland’s baseball franchise is retiring its racist team name, following the slow elimination of their even more racist logo and mascot. It’s a victory. The team plans to disclose more plans later this week, but for now, enjoy the news.
New York Times
On background
The whitewashed way we study music Hannah Marie Robbins, the Frederick Loewe Research associate at the University of Sheffield, was well into secondary school before she noticed the perpetual whiteness of arts education in Britain. It was in profound contrast to the children in the classroom, who hailed from a wide variety of countries and heritages. As a music student working with a mostly Western canon, “diversity” mostly focused on “black suffering” narratives and not on the rich cultural offerings of non-Western modes. Things must improve, she says. “Shockingly, it remains possible and, according to considerable anecdotal evidence, normal to deliver introductions to Popular Music without covering any work by creatives of colour,” she says.
Media Diversified
A public policy class in a women’s prison helped spark a unique post-incarceration re-entry program Vanessa Thompson was a long-time inmate in Indiana Women’s Prison. Once troubled, she was later redeemed by a public policy class that gave her the skills to lobby for reforms to legislation that touched the lives of vulnerable women—issues of drug addiction, domestic violence and sexual assault, chiefly among them. But when a local politician promised to address the scourge of abandoned homes due to the mortgage crisis, she had an idea. What if people re-entering society could help renovate the homes, and then live in them? “It’s a double restoration—not just of the house but of the person,” Thompson told The Marshall Project. The public policy class got to work, holding video meetings with experts from Habitat for Humanity and Yale Law School. They even lobbied lawmakers directly, via video. And that’s when things started getting interesting.
The Marshall Project
Does it matter that architecture is so white? Well, the architects of color (who could be found) uniformly say yes, and make their individual and collective cases in this Curbed story from way back in 2017. “I have an undergraduate education in architecture as well, and I never saw anything about work by black architects or architecture about black people unless it was traditional African architecture or the pyramids in Egypt,” says Mabel O. Wilson, founder & principal of Studio &. “That's as far as it went.” Eurocentricity defined every aspect of architecture, she says, and the absence of her own narrative became a source of real concern. “If we don't change the body of knowledge, then people will always have that same reaction.” Solutions, they’ve got ‘em.
Curbed
raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.
Today's mood board
When you go from small city mayor to potentially the first LGBTQ Cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate in the span of two years.


fortune--2020-12-16--Google Gmail suffers outage for second day in a row

Google said Gmail connectivity issues affected a “significant subset” of users, the second consecutive day in which one of the internet giant’s most popular services had been stymied by technical problems.
The Alphabet company said service had been restored for all users at 6:51 p.m. New York time on Tuesday. Google first reported the problem at 4:29 p.m., according to its status page. More than 17,000 people had reported Gmail issues to the website DownDetector, which compiles user-reported website and mobile network errors.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” Google said on its website. “Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
Google services, including YouTube and Gmail, suffered major global outages Monday, temporarily preventing people from accessing those and other products from the internet giant. The company later said it had “experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.”
“We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future,” a Google spokeswoman wrote in an email Monday.


fortune--2020-12-15--Hackers used a little-known IT vendor to attack U.S. agencies

At the epicenter of the most sprawling cyber-attack in recent memory is a two-decade-old, Austin, Tex.-based software maker called SolarWinds. Little known outside of tech circles, its customer list boasts of every branch of the U.S. military and four-fifths of the Fortune 500.
Many of those customers found themselves ensnared in the attack because suspected Russian hackers inserted a vulnerability into a popular SolarWinds’ software product, designed to give users a bird’s eye view of the varied web of applications that keep their operations humming.
In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, SolarWinds said it believed its monitoring products could have been used to compromise the servers of as many as 18,000 of its customers. Those clients include government agencies around the globe and some of the world’s largest corporations.
The company “has been made aware of a cyber-attack that inserted a vulnerability within its Orion monitoring products which, if present and activated, could potentially allow an attacker to compromise the server on which the Orion products run,” according to the filing. “SolarWinds has been advised that this incident was likely the result of a highly sophisticated, targeted and manual supply chain attack by an outside nation state.”
SolarWinds fell 6% in early trading Tuesday. The company fell 17% on Monday, the worst drop since it went public in October 2018. The company said it has sent mitigation steps to relevant customers and is providing an additional “hotfix” update Dec. 15.
APT 29, a hacking group linked to the Russian government, is suspected of being behind the breach. The Department of Commerce was breached, as were the departments of Homeland Security and Treasury, Reuters reported.
The global hacking campaign also included the Dec. 8 cyber-attack on the cybersecurity firm FireEye.
The Russian Embassy has denied any involvement in the hack, saying that Russia “does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain.”
Governments and companies are now racing to determine how such a security disaster materialized, and how it is that an obscure company founded by two brothers in the 1990s now appears to be at the heart of a potentially major Russian intelligence coup.
According to its website, SolarWinds has more than 300,000 customers. Outside the U.S., SolarWinds has picked up contracts for the U.K. National Health Service, European Parliament and NATO, according to its website.
The company was founded in Tulsa more than two decades ago by brothers David Yonce and Donald Yonce after they heard friends “griping about a long, specific list of frustrations managing their infrastructures,” according to an article from January on the company’s website. “They were part of the same perennial discussion we all share in tech. ‘Why can’t somebody just make a tool that X?!’ The difference was they decided to do something about it.”
SolarWinds provides network monitoring needs for government agencies and private sector companies, marketing itself on its LinkedIn page as “Everybody’s IT.” SolarWinds has taken down its webpage that details its U.S. government and private-sector clients.
Its Orion product is a powerful and important monitoring tool, allowing computer systems administrators to see the status of a company or organization’s network at a glance. Because Orion provides information on the entire network, it also has privileged access to sensitive parts of the network.
“It gives you visibility across our entire network and allows you to quickly respond when a server or router goes down,” said Ben Johnson, chief technology officer of Obsidian Security. “But if you’re trying to do global monitoring of systems and traffic, that has very trusted access.”
Hardly a household name, SolarWinds is the number three maker of IT operations software, behind Splunk Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., according to data provided by Gartner Inc. SolarWinds’ other main competitors are Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft.
Hackers penetrated Orion’s update system, introducing malicious code disguised as legitimate Orion updates, according to blog posts by FireEye and Microsoft Corp. The malicious vulnerability existed in updates between March and June, the company said. The hacking tool embedded within the update even stored stolen data within the Orion software as to evade detection, according to FireEye. The result was that hackers could snoop on a company’s network all while appearing as legitimate traffic.
As of mid-day Monday, the malicious update was still available for download on SolarWind’s website, according to Karim Hijazi, founder and chief executive of Prevailion Inc., a Maryland-based cybersecurity firm. Hijazi said his team compared the available download with security alerts identifying the tampered update, and it’s an exact match.
That appears to contradict a statement the company made earlier in the day that Orion products downloaded after June didn’t contain the vulnerability. When asked about continued access to the malicious file, SolarWinds denied the claim and referred a Bloomberg reporter back to the company’s statement to the SEC. Following the email exchange, the web page that previously hosted the malicious software update was taken down, Prevailion said. It now reads, “Not found.”
The number of victims is likely to climb as companies and governments comb their computer systems for traces of the hackers.
“The victims have included government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East,” according to FireEye. “We anticipate there are additional victims in other countries and verticals.”
The breadth of the damage caused by the hacking campaign is still unknown. The Russian hackers most likely prioritized the most valuable intelligence targets first, meaning it wouldn’t have had time to penetrate every SolarWinds customer. “Once you’re discovered, that’s when you start to pull everything you can,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be a crazy week.”


fortune--2020-12-15--FDA approves first at-home, over-the-counter COVID test

The first Covid-19 test that can be performed entirely at home was cleared by U.S. regulators on Tuesday, and it can be acquired without a prescription.
While availability will be limited initially, the new test and others in development could make virus screenings as accessible as over-the-counter pregnancy tests in the U.S. for the first time. The advance follows months of criticism that the Food and Drug Administration has been too slow to approve rapid home tests for the virus.
Manufactured by East Brisbane, Australia-based Ellume, the self-administered, single-use nasal swab test is small enough to fit in the palm of a person’s hand. It detects proteins on the virus’s surface in 15 minutes and delivers results to an app.
Tests will be sold in pharmacies and online for about $30 each. Ellume plans to manufacture 100,000 a day starting in January, Chief Executive Officer Sean Parsons said in an interview before the FDA clearance. The company, which received about $30 million from a National Institutes of Health program to scale up manufacturing, could have capacity to make a million tests a day by mid-2021, Parsons said.
“Self-testing, from the things we’ve learned along the way, is a good deal harder than it looks,” Parsons said. “This product was designed to be put in the hands of consumers directly, and we believe we have shown comprehensively that users can use it correctly and can interpret the results.”
Screening Obstacles
Testing has been a key line of defense against the virus. Yet throughout the pandemic, U.S. test-seekers have often faced long lines, slow turnaround times and high costs.
Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has called for making inexpensive tests widely available, called the clearance a tremendous advance, although he cautioned that access could remain a problem.
“Keeping these tests purely in the free market is a disaster waiting to happen, and reflects an overall lack of public health agency to have a coordinated response,” he said. “These will quickly be bought up by the rich and powerful.”
Currently, the vast majority of U.S. Covid-19 tests are performed in a medical setting and require a prescription, including an at-home test from Lucira Health Inc. cleared by the FDA last month. Last week, the agency cleared a test from Laboratory Corp of America Holdings that doesn’t require medical authorization but must undergo lab processing.
Tests that cost $5 or $10 “are possible and coming, and I’d love to see them, because you need both a low price point so lots of people use it and you need plenty of production,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Still, “we should have had this in May, June,” Jha said in an interview. “We could have ended this pandemic in America. We could have brought this under control if we had decided to pick a different approach.”
‘Major Milestone’
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn on Tuesday called the authorization a “major milestone in diagnostic testing for Covid-19.”
While Ellume’s product isn’t as accurate as a lab-based test, “the fact that it can be used completely at home and return results quickly means that it can play an important role in response to the pandemic,” Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a release. A small portion of positive and negative results from the test could be inaccurate, the FDA said.
The U.S. government has recognized a need to make new kinds of testing technologies available, including through the NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics program, or RADx, which Ellume took part in. The Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA also sponsored a design-a-thon in November aimed, among other goals, at using technology to resolve challenges like data collection that accompany making testing more accessible.
While the FDA put out guidance for companies working to make home-based, non-prescription tests in late July, regulators took a cautious approach because of concerns about human error and test results going unreported to public-health officials.
A study run by Ellume found that its test produced accurate results more than 90% of the time in people with and without symptoms, including correctly identifying 96% of positive samples from symptomatic individuals. Results are shared with public-health authorities through the accompanying mobile app, with has users fill out their zip code and date of birth, the FDA said.
Like Ellume, some other companies are also turning to technological solutions to ensure results are read correctly and tracked.
‘Scanning a Check’
Another at-home Covid-19 test being developed by Gauss Surgical Inc. and the biotech Cellex uses an artificial intelligence-powered mobile app to read the results from a test strip, “like scanning a check for your banking account,” said Gauss Chief Executive Officer Siddarth Satish. “You can read it the way you might expect a trained laboratory operator to read it.”
The Gauss and Cellex test kit will cost $30 to $40 initially, with plans to produce a million tests in December and 10 million by the end of January, Satish said. The companies are working with a partner to report results to public-health departments.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup E25Bio’s paper strip Covid-19 test, meanwhile, can be read visually, and a web app will allow users to share their results. Working with a Chinese manufacturing partner, E25Bio can produce tens of millions of tests each month, according to Chief Executive Officer Prashant Chouta.


fortune--2020-12-15--Facebook is building a tool to let fans pay celebrities for face time

Facebook is building a new video product that will let people pay content creators or celebrities for the chance to interact with them during a live broadcast.
The tool, called Super, will let creators, entrepreneurs or celebrities host live, interactive video events. Viewers can tip creators by buying them digital gifts, or pay to “appear” alongside a creator during the livestream to ask a question or take a selfie, according to a person familiar with the new feature, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the product hasn’t been announced publicly. Creators will also be able to sell merchandise or other products alongside the livestream.
Super is being developed within Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, an internal group that builds standalone apps and other products. Super is still unreleased, but the company is testing it internally, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed.
The concept behind Super could gain importance as more public figures look to connect with fans digitally during the pandemic. Cameo, an app that lets people pay celebrities to send a friend or family member a personalized video message, was valued at $300 million in mid-2019, according to Axios. On Monday, Facebook rolled out an update to Collab, an app it launched in May for musicians to collaborate with fans on their music.
Facebook has become the world’s dominant social media company in part because it has made successful, strategic acquisitions, like Instagram and WhatsApp. But buying new companies may get harder for Facebook moving forward — the company was sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a group of state attorneys general last week for alleged anticompetitive practices, putting the possibility of future acquisitions into question.
That means the social giant may need to build its next big app or service internally. The NPE team was unveiled in July 2019, and Facebook describes the group as “an internal community of entrepreneurs testing new standalone experiences.” NPE has released about 10 products in the past year, including a meme app called Whale, a live events app called Venue, and an app for couples called Tuned. None of them has broken out to become a well-known, standalone product.
Facebook has pushed more aggressively into live video features this year as the Covid-19 outbreak kept people from gathering in person. The company launched a group chat feature called Rooms in April to compete with Zoom Video Communications Inc., and has also made a public showing of building products for creators. It’s also fought with Apple Inc. over in-app commissions, arguing that taking those fees hurts creators during a pandemic.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company rolled out a paid events product in August, allowing small businesses or Page owners to charge users to watch a livestream. It expanded a digital tipping feature earlier this year, too, so it would apply to a broader group of creators. A Facebook spokeswoman says the company won’t take a cut of money generated through Super.
It’s unclear if Super will launch as a standalone app or be built into an existing Facebook product.


fortune--2020-12-15--A.I. needs to get real—and other takeaways from this year’s NeurIPS

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
Hello and welcome to the last “Eye on A.I.” of 2020! I spent last week immersed in the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, the annual gathering of top academic A.I. researchers. It’s always a good spot for taking the pulse of the field. Held completely virtually this year thanks to COVID-19, it attracted more than 20,000 participants. Here were a few of the highlights.
Charles Isbell’s opening keynote was a tour-de-force that made great use of the pre-recorded video format, including some basic special effects edits and cameos by many other leading A.I. researchers. The Georgia Tech professor’s message: it’s past time for A.I. research to grow up and become more concerned about the real-world consequences of its work. Machine learning researchers should stop ducking responsibility by claiming such considerations belong to other fields—data science or anthropology or political science.
Isbell urged the field to adopt a systems approach: how a piece of technology will operate in the world, who will use it, on whom will it be used or misused, and what could possibly go wrong, are all questions that should be front-and-center when A.I. researchers sit down to create an algorithm. And to get answers, machine learning scientists need to collaborate far more with other stakeholders.
Many of the invited speakers picked up on this theme: how to ensure A.I. does good, or at least does no harm, in the real world.
Saiph Savage, director of the human computer interaction lab at West Virginia University, talked about her efforts to lift the prospects of A.I.’s “invisible workers”—the low-paid contractors who are often used to label the data on which A.I. software is trained—by helping them train one another. In this way, the workers gained some new skills and, possibly, by becoming more productive, could earn more from their work. She also talked about efforts to use A.I. to find the best strategies to help these workers unionize or engage in other collective action that might better their economic prospects.
Marloes Maathuis, a professor of theoretical and applied statistics at ETH Zurich, looked at how directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) could be used to derive causal relationships in data. Understanding causality is essential for many real world uses of A.I., particularly in contexts like medicine and finance. Yet one of the biggest problems with neural network-based deep learning is that such systems are very good at discovering correlations, but often useless for figuring out causation. One of Maathuis’s main points was that in order to suss out causation it is important to make causal assumptions and then test them. And that means talking to domain experts who can at least hazard some educated guesses about the underlying dynamics. Too often machine learning engineers don’t bother, falling back on deep learning to work out correlations. That’s dangerous, Maathuis implied.
It was hard to ignore that this year’s conference took place against the backdrop of the continuing controversy over Google’s treatment of Timnit Gebru, the well-respected A.I. ethics researcher and one of the very few Black women in the company’s research division, who left the company two weeks earlier (she says she was fired; the company continues to insist she resigned). Some attending NeurIPS voiced support for Gebru in their talks. (Many more did so on Twitter. Gebru herself also appeared on a few panels that were part of a conference workshop on creating “Resistance A.I.”) The academics were particularly disturbed Google had forced Gebru to withdraw a research paper it didn’t like, noting that it raised troubling questions about corporate influence over A.I. research in general, and A.I. ethics research in particular. A paper presented at the “Resistance A.I.” workshop explicitly compared Big Tech’s involvement in A.I. ethics to Big Tobacco’s funding of bogus science around the health effects of smoking. Some researchers said they would stop reviewing conference papers from Google-affiliated researchers since they now could not be sure the authors weren’t hopelessly conflicted.
Here were a few other research strands to keep an eye on:
• A team from semiconductor giant Nvidia showcased a new technique for dramatically reducing the amount of data needed to train a generative adversarial network (or GAN, the type of A.I. used to create deepfakes). Using the technique, which Nvidia calls adaptive discriminator augmentation (or ADA), it was able to train a GAN to generate images in the style of artwork found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art using less than 1,500 training examples, which the company says is at least 10 to 20 times less data than would normally be required.
• OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. research shop, won a best research paper award for its work on GPT-3, the ultra-large language model that can generate long passages of novel and coherent text from just a small human-written prompt. The paper focused on GPT-3’s ability to perform many other language tasks—such as answering questions about a text or translating between languages—with either no additional training or just a few examples to learn from. GPT-3 is massive, taking in some 175 billion different variables and was trained on many terrabytes of textual data, and it’s interesting to see the OpenAI team concede in the paper that “we are probably approaching the limits of scaling,” and that to make further progress new methods will be necessary. It is also notable that OpenAI mentions many of the same ethical issues with large language models like GPT-3—the way they absorb racist and sexist biases from the training data, their huge carbon footprint—that Gebru was trying to highlight in the paper that Google tried to force her to retract.
• The other two “best paper” award winners are worth noting too: Researchers from Politecnico di Milano, in Italy, and Carnegie Mellon University, used concepts from game theory to create an algorithm that acts as an automated mediator in an economic system with multiple self-interested agents, suggesting actions for each to take that will bring the entire system into the best equilibrium. The researchers suggested such a system would be useful for managing “gig economy” workers.
• A team from the University of California Berkeley scooped up an award for their research showing that it is possible, through careful selection of representative samples, to summarize most real-world data sets. The finding contradicts prior research which had essentially argued that because it could be shown that there were a few datasets for which no representative sample existed, summarization itself was a dead end. Automated summarization, of both text and other data, is becoming a hot topic in business analytics, so the research may wind up having commercial impact.
I will highlight a few other things I found interesting in the Research and Brain Food sections below. And for those who responded to Jeff’s post last week about A.I. in the movies, thank you. We’ll share some of your thoughts below too. Since “Eye on A.I.” will be on hiatus for the upcoming few weeks, I want to wish you happy holidays and best wishes for a happy, healthy new year! We’ll be back in 2021. Now, here’s the rest of this week’s A.I. news.
Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
C3.ai goes public. The California-based A.I. company founded by billionaire Tom Siebel, which counts big companies such as Caterpillar and Baker Hughes as customers as well as the U.S. Air Force, went public on The New York Stock Exchange, raising $651 million. The company was valued at $4 billion on its debut, but the shares immediately soared, and at one point the company had a market cap of more than $11 billion. For more Siebel's thoughts about the IPO, when C3.ai might turn a profit, and the ethics of A.I., you can read my interview with him here.
Google CEO Pichai promises to investigate Gebru's departure. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google-parent Alphabet, wrote a letter to the whole company promising the investigate the circumstances that led to the departure of Timnit Gebru, co-head of the company's AI Ethics research team. Gebru says she was fired after questioning Google's commitment to diversity in a message she posted to an internal listserv. The company insists she resigned. The incident followed Google's request that she withdraw a research paper looking at the ethics of A.I. systems responsible for recent breakthroughs in natural language processing. Gebru was one of Google's few Black women researchers and Pichai acknowledged that what happened to her "seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google. I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust," according to The Verge. But in an interview with VentureBeat, Gebru said Pichai was trying to paint her as "an angry Black woman" and that his memo was "dehumanizing." Pichai's memo came after more than 6,000 people, including more than 2,000 Google employees, signed an open letter in support of Gebru and calling on the company to live up to its commitments to academic freedom.
Did Huawei and Megvii build a system to help China identify Uighurs? That's what The Washington Post reported based on documents it obtained that said the two companies had collaborated on a facial recognition system that had, as one of its features, a "Uighur alarm." It says the system was tested in 2018 and could identify members of the ethnic minority group by their facial features. Huawei told the paper that "simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications.” Megvii said its systems was not designed to target specific ethnic groups. Both companies have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for their role in allegedly abetting human rights violations by Beijing.
Graphcore says its A.I. computer chips outperform Nvidia's. The U.K.-based A.I. hardware startup, which is a likely IPO candidate in the coming months, published data from benchmark tests that it says show its specialized chips, which are engineered to accelerate the running of deep learning systems, offer better perfromance than Nvidia's graphics processing chips, which are currently the workhorses for most A.I. computing tasks. For some tasks, Graphcore's intelligence processing units (IPUs) were more than five times faster than Nvidia's DGX A100 system.
Ransomware criminals target Intel's Habana Labs A.I. chip group. A group of hackers likely linked to Iran has posted on the web what appears to be data stolen from Habana Labs, an Israel-based A.I. chip company acquired by Intel a year ago, and has threatened to post far more if Habana doesn't pay a ransom in bitcoin, according to a story in tech publication The Register.
The University of Texas abandons admissions algorithm over bias concerns. UT Austin had been using software called GRADE to screen PHD candidates for its computer science department since 2013. But it stopped using the system in early 2020, according to a story in The Register, because of concerns the system may have incorporated historical racial and gender biases in admissions decisions.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Graphable, a Boston-based data science company that specializes in software that helps organize and analyze data in graph form, has hired Lee Hong as its director of data science, according to Ai Authority. Hong was formerly director of data science for L Brands.
Aktana, a San Francisco company that provides A.I.-enabled customer engagement software for the life sciences industry, announced it has hired Dmitri Daveynis to be its chief technology officer and senior vice president of engineering and Mary Triggiano as senior vice president of professional services. Daveynis had previously been vice president of engineering at analytics firm Verint. Triggiano was previously chief operating officer at digital media company Theorem.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
There was an entire workshop at NeurIPS devoted to ways in which machine learning can be applied to combating climate change. One paper to highlight from that session: Jiayang Wang from Harrisburg University's data science department teamed up with Selvaprabu Nadarajah from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Jingfan Wang from Stanford University, and Arvind Ravikumer, also from Harrisburg University, to create a machine learning system to automatically predict areas of oil and natural gas drilling sites that are likely to leak methane, the heat trapping gas that is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide and a major contributor to global warming.
Normally such work is carried out by engineers conducting walking a site armed with special imaging cameras. It is, as the researchers point out, slow and time-consuming. The machine learning system allows engineers to prioritize for repair parts of a site most likely to leak large amounts of methane. In a proof of concept project, their algorithm reduced the time needed to halve methane emissions by 42%. It also reduced the mitigation cost from $85 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent to $49 per ton. You can read more here.
One of the interesting things about this paper is that there has been a movement among some A.I. researchers to eschew work for oil and gas companies on ethical grounds—after all, why help major carbon emitters to stay in business? But, as this research shows, some of the most impactful steps in combating climate change may come from helping exactly these sorts of companies make their existing operations more efficient.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Europe is missing out on the A.I. revolution—but it isn’t too late to catch up—by Francois Candelon and Rodolphe Charme di Carlo
Google’s ouster of a top A.I. researcher may have come down to this—by Jeremy Kahn
Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai, discusses failure and the future after his company’s soaring IPO—Jeremy Kahn
Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 million in funding with Sequoia at the helm—by Lucinda Shen
BRAIN FOOD
Anthony Zador, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor National Laboratory, gave a talk at NeurIPS in which he made a provocative argument: Maybe the A.I. community is far too focused on individual learning as the essence of intelligence and not focused enough on the innate abilities that so many animals possess—abilities that are not learned at all on the individual level and which have been selected and programmed by evolution.
The wiring diagram for each creature's brain, Zador argues, has to pass through what he calls a "genetic bottleneck"—the fact that the genome can only encode a limited amount of information. And that means the wiring diagram cannot be too complex and probably includes more hard-coded rules than A.I. researchers would like to admit. Focusing on this bottleneck, Zador argues, may be the key to unlocking artificial neural networks that will be able to learn far more rapidly from very limited data. He also argues that to the extent humans have been more successful than other species, it is not because we are better learners, but that we have developed a system for overcoming the genetic bottleneck through language and the cultural transmission of knowledge. You can read more about Zador's argument here.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES...
Thank you again for emailing in response to Jeff's Eye on A.I. newsletter last week asking for reader picks of the best depiction of A.I. in film and television. Here were some of the responses:
Kurt Bunker suggested the television series "Devs." Jonathan Dunnett said "Person of Interest." Mel Edwards recommends Japanese anime "Psycho-pass" as well as "I am Mother." Celia Chapman says that while she knows it's not a movie, the book "Robopocalypse” by Daniel H. Wilson is worth checking out, as well as the short story “Executable” by Hugh Howey, which can be found in the anthology “Robot Uprisings” edited by Wilson. Lisa Baker's top choice was "Star Trek, First Contact," particularly looking at the story arc of the character Data. Leland Schwartz is, like many on Fortune's own staff (myself included), a big fan of "Ex Machina." Jeff says that Magnus Daniellson was one of many people who wrote in to remind him that he had left "The Matrix" off his list. And Thomas Cross emailed to say about HAL in "2001" that "there are many interpretations, but HAL was actually programmed to do what he did. that is why so many AI projects fail." Thanks for all the comments and feedback.