The case of growth hacking in rural China, the future of jobs and an emerging pandemic of grief

Jon Cherry -

Farmers in rural China are using technology in surprising ways to connect themselves to the modern world and amplify their impact.

These lessons might hold vital clues for other disconnected communities as to how they might be able to better leverage their assets and skills in an increasingly remote working world.

The Untold Technological Revolution Sweeping Through Rural China
In “Blockchain Chicken Farm,” Xiaowei Wang documents how technology is transforming the lives of China’s rural poor.
NYTimesClive Thompson

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report is out and makes for some interesting reading.

Content producers and brand creators are definitely in favour - along with the usual suspects in the realm of tech.

The Future of Jobs Report 2020
After years of growing income inequality, concerns about technology-driven displacement of jobs, and rising societal discord globally, the combined health and economic shocks of 2020 have put economies into freefall, disrupted labour markets and fully revealed the inadequacies of our social contract…
World Economic Forum

Why do we have a varying experience of time?

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel presented some important new insights into what stretches and compresses our experience of time.

They demonstrated that the perception of time is wedded to our brain’s constantly updated expectations about what will happen next. So it is intrinsically linked to our perception of the future.

Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time
New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue.
Quanta MagazineJordana Cepelewicz

What's really missing from the ongoing and continuous dialogue around covid-19 is the fact that families are losing loved ones to this illness - a lot of people are dying. That means that a lot of families are dealing with grief.

What are the long-term consequences of a year where the primary emotion around the world was grief and loss?

Opinion | The grief pandemic will outlast the Covid pandemic, and no one’s prepared for it
Leslie Gray Streeter, author of “Black Widow,” and David Kessler, author of “Finding Meaning,” tell Hoda and Jenna their tips for managing grief during these uncertain and emotional times.
NBC NewsGabrielle Birkner and Rebecca Soffer, cofounders of Modern Loss