Coronavirus News (224)

 Universities sound alarm as coronavirus cases emerge just days into classes — 530 at one campus

Is Your Organization Ready for Permanent WFH?  organizations large and small are realizing that jobs we used to assume had to be done on-site can in fact be done remotely .........  Many companies, including Twitter and Facebook, are moving to make certain roles permanently remote .........  Americans live 16 miles from the office on average, and about 98% live within 50 miles of their offices ..........  CEOs of the top fully-remote organizations cite access to distributed talent as a key competitive advantage .........  people are willing to give up as much as 8% of their pay for the opportunity to work from home ........  before the pandemic Americans spent more than 52 minutes every day, on average, commuting to and from the office ...........  shifting to remote work could free up the equivalent of 28 to nearly 50 workdays per year per employee ............  Map out critical tasks and needed competencies. ............  Once you know what competencies you need, you can start thinking about which roles can be sourced locally and which will need to be remote-friendly to attract more-elusive, competitive talent. ........  Remote work makes it easy to miss the socioemotional undertones communicated through nonverbal cues (gestures, body position) and paralinguistic cues (tone, pace, pitch), making collaboration especially difficult. ..........  To overcome these communication and coordination challenges, focus on building clearer hierarchies and formal organizational processes. Don’t hesitate to put pen to paper to sketch out more-detailed job descriptions and reporting lines along with guidelines for how to get work done. Engage your employees in the process to capture their knowledge and create a shared sense of ownership. And where possible, structure teams and tasks such that employees on a particular task are either all remote or all in person. Hybrid teams with both remote and on-site employees can have the greatest communication challenges. ...........  encouraging video calls as well as more-frequent, shorter meetings to provide more social contact points can improve remote collaboration ..........   Investing in tools and software for remote collaboration, such as virtual whiteboards, project management software, and high-quality webcams and microphones, can further help your team meet the challenges of remote work.   

Could Russia side with the US and India against China? Cracks are opening in the Russia-China relationship, from the status of Vladivostok to Russian arms sales to India The biggest crack involves New Delhi’s suggestion that Moscow join the US-led Indo-Pacific grouping, which is widely seen as anti-China .......   “The Chinese are also engaged in reverse engineering Russia’s military technology and then trying to sell indigenous platforms based on Russian designs, thereby competing against Russia on the global arms sales market”  .................    throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union had been a close friend of India, and the relationship remained warm today.    

Coronavirus News (223)

 So You Think New York Is Dead? It's Not. 

Schools Can Reopen, Germany Finds, but Expect a ‘Roller Coaster’ With nations determined to return to in-person learning, many will have trouble matching Germany’s formula: fast and free testing, robust contact tracing and low community spread.   

Can Tesla Maintain Its Momentum? Tesla’s stock has risen nearly tenfold over the past year to current levels of $2,000, making it the most valuable automobile company and Musk the fourth-richest man on the planet. Those gains have come on the back of four consecutive quarters of profits amid a pandemic; meeting delivery targets for cars; expanding manufacturing capacity globally; mastering storage battery technology to lower costs; and advancing the technologies for electric vehicles (EVs) and AVs, the next big promises for automakers............  Tesla has managed to check “all the boxes that analysts or investors or people like me who are observing Tesla have put in front of ourselves,” Kapoor said. “That is a great fairytale as far as Tesla and Elon Musk are concerned.” ..........  Over the next 10 to 15 years, the “vast majority” of the cars will be electric, and many of them will be fully autonomous ...........  unveiled a new electric pickup Cybertruck “that pulled science fiction into reality” ..........  “Tesla needs to play the game of scale,” now that it has earned its technology leadership spurs, especially in battery technology. Scaling up will make it “harder and harder for other players to catch up,” he noted. Chipmaker Intel did the same in the 1970s and 1980s, when it started with a manufacturing base out of California and scaled up with factories and plants across the globe. ............  “Waymo could do what Google did to the smartphone industry, with the launch of the Android and eventually giving an operating system to smartphone manufacturers for free.” ............  “If it can create an autonomous [vehicle] operating system, and it starts giving it to these established automakers, Tesla has a real competition on their hands.” ............  “This would be along the lines of what Microsoft has so successfully done with the transition to cloud or what Nestle did with the transition to premium coffee,” he wrote in the CNN op-ed. “Or will [established firms] continue to hold back and pursue piecemeal strategies that are more reminiscent of what Kodak did with digital photography or Nokia with smartphones?”