Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 86 of 153).

Marissa Mayer doesn’t get it

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer recently nixed the company’s work-from-home policy in an effort to build camaraderie:

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

Mayer is supposedly some kind of whiz kid, and I’d be more open-minded about this move if it weren’t for one thing: this is an asinine way to lead if I ever heard of it. There’s no shared sacrifice. Mayer doesn’t have to worry about balancing her work and home lives because she brings her home with her to work:

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

The story quoted an anonymous Twitter user agreeing with this tactic …

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

… but the likely reason this user was not named is because this person doesn’t have a fucking clue what leadership is.

Leadership is not a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do thing. If you ask your team to sacrifice and yet your Little Dumpling gets a playpen palace in your office your team will be stampeding for the exits in a New York second. If Queen Yahoo isn’t willing to set the example for her team then she’s not a good leader.

I don’t know what work-from-home policy is best. Each company and each situation is different. I do know that if you make a drastic change to your employee’s arrangements and continue feathering your own nest then soon you won’t have a team left to lead.

via Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home Policies – Kara Swisher – News – AllThingsD.

BREAKING: Huge Meteor Explodes Over Russia.

Meteor explodes over Russia


Yesterday, a huge meteor exploded 12 miles over the heads of the Russians citizens of Chelyabinsk.
Watching all the videos on Slate’s Bad Astronomy page, I was struck by how frightening it must’ve been to witness this event. It’s pretty sobering to see this rock hurtling towards you, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

It made me wonder how close this was to what the dinosaurs saw right before their world ended. I also wondered if this was a preview of how our world might end.

Apparently, at about 09:30 local time, a very big meteor burned up over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows.

via BREAKING: Huge Meteor Explodes Over Russia..

Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office? – Esquire

This is a wonderful but sobering look at all our postal service does for us, and the potential cost if we lose it.

“This is the time collectively to think about the postal service,” Adra says from his office in Arlington, Virginia. He’s an assistant inspector general and heads the postal service’s internal think tank, the Risk Analysis Research Center. “This is a transformative moment. We’re like Kodak, Polaroid, IBM with mainframe, and if we don’t plan for this disruptive technology, if we ignore it, we’ll be in trouble.”

via Print – Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office? – Esquire.

The Baffling Economics Of The Island Of Sodor – Forbes

Having spent many nights reading Thomas the Tank Engine to the kids when they were young, I found this pretty amusing.

Being the father of a toddler, I spend a lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. As a writer for a business magazine, my mind can’t help but be puzzled by how the economy of the Island of Sodor actually functions. It seems to me to be dreadfully inefficient, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how anyone on the Island turns a profit – especially the railways.

via The Baffling Economics Of The Island Of Sodor – Forbes.

Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care

Here’s a look at another way of dealing with death on your own terms: the home funeral.

Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child’s paling lips, and covered up Caroline’s toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.

Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline’s death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.

via Home Funerals Grow As Americans Skip The Mortician For Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care.

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

This is a long but fascinating look at how we spend our adolescent years has an unusually strong effect on whom we become.

“If you’re interested in making sure kids learn a lot in school, yes, intervening in early childhood is the time to do it,” says Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University and perhaps the country’s foremost researcher on adolescence. “But if you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years.”

via Why You Never Truly Leave High School — New York Magazine.

How Doctors Die

Here’s something to think about when putting your end-of-life affairs in order.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

via Zócalo Public Square :: How Doctors Die.