When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeat practice sessions may help people master the skill faster than practicing the task in precisely the same way, Johns Hopkins researchers report.
Source: Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions – 01/28/2016
Winning a competition engenders subsequent unrelated unethical behavior. Five studies reveal that after a competition has taken place winners behave more dishonestly than competition losers. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that winning a competition increases the likelihood of winners to steal money from their counterparts in a subsequent unrelated task. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate that the effect holds only when winning means performing better than others (i.e., determined in reference to others) but not when success is determined by chance or in reference to a personal goal. Finally, study 4 demonstrates that a possible mechanism underlying the effect is an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners.
Source: Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior
Enterprise tech distributor Arrow Inc will take a $13m charge on the chin after a fraudster posing as a company exec transferred money from the corporate bank account to an external one.
[…]
Deloitte has previously highlighted what it reckoned is the growing threat from ‘fake president frauds, “affecting many companies at the moment”.
It involves convincing an employee to make emergency bank transfers to a third party, “in order to obey an alleged order of a leader under the pretext of a debt to pay, a provision in contract or a deposit”.
Organised crims are suspected of perpetrating these scams, “with a complete knowledge regarding the market, structure and customers of the companies they are attacking”.
Source: Arrow: Fraudsters impersonated one of our execs to steal money • The Channel
Benson Leung, an engineer on Google’s Pixel team, was doing God’s work by risking his Chromebook Pixel, which charges via USB-C, to test every single USB-C to USB-A cord available to general consumers. One crappy cord, and his $1500 computer would be fried.
Source: Cheap USB-C Cables Could Kill Your Phone or Laptop
There’s a link to a spreadsheet of all his reviews here