Patrick Ozoh (PhD)

Contemporary society has some very wrong-headed ideas about what constitutes success. Popular thinking holds that a person who went to Harvard is smarter and better than someone who attended Ohio State; that a father who stays at home with his kids is contributing less to society than a man who works at a Fortune 500 company; that a woman with 200 Instagram followers must be less valuable than a woman with two million. This notion of success isn’t just elitist and misguided; it actively hurts those who believe it. For my book, The Power of Meaning , I spoke to many people who defined their identity and self-worth by their educational and career achievements. When they succeeded, their lives felt meaningful, and they were happy. But when they failed or struggled, the only thing that gave their lives value was gone—and so they fell into despair, and became convinced they were worthless. Writing my book taught me that being a successful person isn’t about career achievemen...

Multitasking is probably the single most overrated skill in modern life. It drains your brain of oxygenated glucose that could be put toward paying more focused attention, makes it difficult for a person to switch between tasks, and is generally an illusion anyway . Only 3% of the population are “supertaskers,” according to a study from Ohio University . The rest of us just pretend to be. A number of systems have been developed to save us from our endless to-do lists, which can turn any job into a soulless assembly line of chores. One such system is “ Personal Kanban ,” which was named for the Japanese concept that inspired it, a just-in-time manufacturing process developed at Toyota in the late 1940s. In an industrial setting, Kanban (which means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, as a recent Medium post explains) relies on tickets that move with each product through a plant. Only a certain number of one type of ticket can be on a line at one time, and it must cor...

In recent years, the rollout of desktop processors has felt a bit stale. You generally know what you’re going to get: a little more power, a little more efficiency. And while Intel’s latest update doesn’t reinvent the chip, it does provide obscene horsepower at a time when that’s increasingly all that matters. The Core-X series ticks off the usual performance gains, with Intel claiming up to 10 percent faster multi-threaded and 15 percent single-thread performance over its predecessor. But the focus falls to the top-end, and a desktop chip so powerful that Intel carved out a new brand name for it: the Core i9. Uncommon Core The re branding might sound like marketing hype, but it’s not—or at least not entirely. Intel’s Core i9 is the first consumer desktop processor to cram 18 cores and 36 threads into a single piece of silicon, a feat that enables the kind of full-throttle task-juggling that a world full of 4K video and virtual reality demands. The more cores and thr...

Let’s first look at which phone brands are the most popular in each part of the world. Evidently, Apple and Samsung are everywhere and govern the global smartphone bazaar, followed by LG, ZTE, Alcatel, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo. In Europe, besides the big two, Wiko and Huawei are prevalent. Wiko is a French phone manufacturer, although when I researched them I discovered they are majority-owned by the Chinese tech group Tinno Mobile and the Wiko phones are all made in China (in fact, so are Apple’s, so maybe this is not a big deal). Then there are more localized players. Turkey has Vestel and General Mobile and Croatia has Noa. Huawei, The Chinese Manufacturers and their Ominous Relationship with US Let’s take Huawei, the world’s third largest phone manufacturer and world’s largest plumber of mobile-phone networks. Huawei is gigantic globally, but hits the proverbial graveyard here in America. What consumers may not know is that for some reason, our Government still gro...

The bitcoin boom is back. This week, the digital currency leapt to record heights, peaking at nearly $2,800 before tumbling back down to around $2,400—by far the most dramatic run in its history. While bitcoin didn’t maintain its record price for long, it’s been trading feverishly this year, breaking the $2,000 threshold just last week. Other “cryptocurrencies” like Ripple and Ether (the medium of exchange on the decentralized network Ethereum ) have also soared. “People are piling in. I think it’s fear of missing out,” says Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University. The big question is whether a crash is coming or whether cryptocurrencies have hit their stride. Should investors cash out now while the getting is good, or buy more now before the price climbs even higher? So far, when it comes to bitcoin, the only real rule is volatility. Bitcoin has crashed before. In November 2013, bitcoin jumped from trading at about $200 to more than $1,200. It was ...

The UK suffers from the  highest levels of income inequality in Europe  – partly because of the delusions of its rich. In countries where the rich have less, they  tend to be less delusional , about themselves, about other people, about what is possible, and about why some become rich. In the UK, it is unsurprising to read that an investment banker thinks £100m is a lot of money but  “not a ridiculous amount of money” . In a report in The Guardian newspaper earlier this month, we also heard that one particular banker is “fairly confident” that a driven and passionate individual could “start from zero and get to £100m within 20 years”. However, there is hope. In the research report that kicked off this latest set of news stories, Katharina Hecht from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that  one third of her sample  of extremely rich people working in the City of London agreed that “the government should reduce income dif...

Andy Rubin wasn’t ready to retire when he left Google in 2014. He certainly could have: After an illustrious career developing some of the most innovative products in tech, he had all the wealth and accolades anyone could want. As an engineer at the Apple spinoff General Magic, he built some of the world’s first internet-connected portable devices. As CEO at Danger, he created the Sidekick , a smartphone that defined the category before anyone had invented the term. And then, of course, Rubin created Android , the operating system found in more than two billion phones, televisions, cars, and watches. But Rubin wasn’t done. More to the point, he couldn’t be done. Ask around, and everyone says the same thing: Andy Rubin sees the future, and can’t sit around waiting for it to arrive. He’s spent the past few years watching Apple and Google and everyone else try to rule the world from walled gardens, and he considers that a dead end. Rubin has always believed tha...

New graduates may think they’re ready for the world, but even after all that learning, there’s still room in their heads for some wisdom. We asked a dozen business leaders—from CEOs of big companies and startups, to deans of leading business schools—what books they would put in the hands of a newly minted graduate. Here’s what they recommended: The Boys in the Boat Daniel James Brown’s account of an underdog rowing team beating the elite squads of the US and Europe on its way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin is “a vivid description of grit, hustle and, perseverance,” said Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt, the hotel company. “If you want to be part of a team, you have to be willing to give up some of your self.” The Five People You Meet in Heaven Sportswriter Mitch Albom’s best seller from 2006 teaches us “you never know who you touch or the impact you have,” said Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP North America , a unit of the German software giant. “Having a perspective beyon...

O n April 14, 1934, Richard Byrd went out for his daily walk. The air was the usual temperature: minus 57 degrees Fahrenheit. He stepped steadily through the drifts of snow, making his rounds. And then he paused to listen. Nothing. Advertisement He attended, a little startled, to the cloud-high and over-powering silence he had stepped into. For miles around the only other life belonged to a few stubborn microbes that clung to sheltering shelves of ice. It was only 4 p.m., but the land quavered in a perpetual twilight. There was—was there?—some play on the chilled horizon, some crack in the bruised Antarctic sky. And then, unaccountably, Richard Byrd’s universe began to expand. Later, back in his hut, huddled by a makeshift furnace, Byrd wrote in his diary: Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence—a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the musi...

Computer science is wondrous. The problem is that many people in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that matters. You see this when recruiters at career fairs make it clear they’re only interested in the computer scientists; in the salary gap between engineering and non-engineering students; in the quizzical looks humanities students get when they dare to reveal their majors. I’ve watched brilliant computer scientists display such woeful ignorance of the populations they were studying that I laughed in their faces. I’ve watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can’t reason about whether you should be shooting them at all. The fact that so many computer scientists are ignorant or disdainful of non-technical approaches is worrisome because in my work, I’m...

In the article, one small section revealed that one service we’ve talked about extensively over the years, Unroll.me , has been mining and selling off your email data, and Uber used that data to gain intelligence on Lyft. In this case, Uber was buying data collected from one company to give them an edge over their rival, Lyft. Here’s the Times for background info: They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me , Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.) Slice confirmed that it sells anonymized data (meaning that customers’ names are not attached) based on ride receipts from Uber and Lyft, but ...