Aishwarya Jagani

As an antidote to sometimes problematic unlimited vacation policies, some companies are requiring employees to take a certain number of days off. Does it work?

People were already working long hours before the pandemic, but Covid-19 further extended workdays. It’s taking a toll. According to recent data, nearly three-fifths of employees reported experiencing negative impacts of work-related stress in 2021. Yet despite their elevated stress levels, more than 50% of American workers end up le...

Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze vast amounts of data more quickly than humans and draw accurate conclusions, making for myriad business applications. But now, some technologists and mental healthcare clinics are using artificial intelligence (AI) to inform mental health therapy. They think it could help pinpoint the most effective strategies to help sufferers get better. This may mean better staff retention and productivity and greater value for money from employee assistance program...

The last few years have forever changed the way we work, calling into question the importance of location.
“The blurring of the distinction between home and the workplace is here to stay, and the erosion of the 9-to-5 office-based model cannot be undone,” the ADP Research Institute’s People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View study states.
The acceptance of long-term remote work has made it possible for employees to consider living in a different city, country or time zone from their workpl...

An app "auctioning" Muslim women brings to light growing misogyny and Islamophobia in India

When Mexico City–based journalist Humberto Basilio was reporting a story for Spanish-language magazine Distintas Latitudes (Different Latitudes) about the water crisis in Mexico in 2021, he booked a two-week field trip to a rural Indigenous community in El Nandho, a small village tucked away in the mountainous state of Hidalgo. Once there, he discovered that El Nandho had no internet connectivity, nor did it have a functioning mobile network—crucial tools for most working journalists. “Every ...

When neurologist Eishi Asano and his team at Wayne State University strapped electrodes onto the brains of their research volunteers, they asked them to describe what they saw while looking at a picture of a hippo swimming in a pool. Using the odd request, the team was hoping to pinpoint which parts of the brain were responsible for identifying and describing an image.
But something else caught their eye.
“During the experiment we found that some patients used some filler words like ‘um’ or ‘...

While most millennials would probably do anything to forget a time when we thought low rise pants, visible thongs, and diamante-encrusted everything was cool, for Gen Z, early 2000s fashion is nostalgic and vintage. Just like Millennials romanticised 90’s fashion and pop culture, as Gen Z (people born around the turn of the millennium to the early 2010s) enter their late teens and early 20’s, they are fascinated by early 2000s or ‘aughties’ fashion, also known as the Y2K aesthetic.
Characteri...

As the country seeks to build one of the world’s largest face databases, activists fear bias against vulnerable groups.
On a hot May afternoon in India, when Hyderabad activist SQ Masood stepped out to get some paperwork done, he did not expect the police to stop and question him. Nor did he expect them to photograph him without consent.
At the time of the incident, Masood was passing through Shahran Market. It is an area inhabited by a number of Muslim residents in Hyderabad, the capital of ...

While maintaining employee privacy depends on intent as much as it does on technology, for companies who genuinely care about privacy, blockchain solutions pose an alternative to traditional systems.
Businesses, whether they are large or small, are usually in possession of massive amounts of data pertaining to consumers and employees. Consumer privacy is typically what’s prioritized, leaving employee privacy overlooked, in part due to the lack of strong laws upholding the privacy rights of em...

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives are a growing priority for businesses across the world and especially in the U.S. But despite fair intentions, too many organizations are failing on the DE&I front, either focusing narrowly on inefficient training and sensitization programs, or limiting their efforts to online, public displays of support for marginalized communities.
Last year, Disney drew widespread criticism when the company tweeted in support of Pride month, and in the sam...

A survey conducted by Adobe suggests that employees spend as much as 3 hours a day just checking and responding to email. Communicating in real time, whether it is in the form of a meeting, a quick phone call or even an ongoing email conversation, can be a huge drain on employees’ time and effort, leading to lower productivity.
And that’s just if you count the actual time spent on emails. A constantly buzzing inbox or Slack conversation can be extremely distracting and lead to more time waste...

Reindeer are essential to life in the Eurasian Arctic. Reindeer herding, fisheries, and sea-mammal hunting are the most important livelihood practices among Indigenous peoples in the Arctic region, which stretches across parts of Alaska, Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.
But over the last few decades, with the planet warming rapidly – and the Arctic warming three to four times faster...

Sabrina Beaumont, CMO at a California-based planning firm, was in the middle of a Zoom call on a Friday morning when her water broke. Beaumont, who hadn’t announced her pregnancy to her manager or co-workers yet, had to cover up, citing WiFi issues at home.
“As I got further into the lie from not admitting I was pregnant, I started feeling guilty. I was afraid I would be seen as ‘just another woman who got a job and chose to inconvenience her boss with her pregnancy’,” she told The Org.
When ...

This article was written by Aishwarya Jagani for Arweave News.
While ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was vocal about his fascination with Bitcoin and blockchain in general (and the new CEO, Parag Agarwal, seems equally keen on the technology), and Facebook has its own crypto division, Google has seemed reluctant to dip more than a toe into the waters of web3.
This is the first time the company, which has been quick to experiment with new technology like Augmented and Virtual Reality, Artificial In...

In Zimbabwe, political mismanagement, misguided land reforms, and devastating droughts and cyclones linked to climate change have created a devastating food-insecurity crisis. The United Nations estimates that as much as 60 percent of the country’s population is food-insecure, and about half of all urban dwellers go to bed hungry every night.
But in Mwenezi, a small district in the Masvingo province in southern Zimbabwe, 112 households are able to keep their heads above water, literally—thank...