When should Safety intervene on site when it’s not our business? Should we just support our teams by sticking to fixing hazards and unsafe behaviors? Here’s what I mean…
Not long ago, a director lamented, “I want that lead-man to take the foreman position so that he’ll be in line to manage shops, but he says he’s happy where he is.”
It’s no secret here that I’m an active busybody; I owned and ran two businesses and was a reliable rock for my partner and our employees. When I got my Certified Health and Safety Technician certificate from BCSP fourteen years ago, I pledged to honor public safety. When I see unsafe practices anywhere, I get involved and try to stop them. (That’s a Tik Tok if you ever saw one.) So, why wouldn’t I help our teams? You know, for them to excel.
If you’re still reading this then you know how many sides exist in Safety. At the core, it’s about nurturing and engaging workers in our message, building trust like an owner would, if you were one. And like an owner, we are out here to affect better working conditions.
Bosses look for born leaders, employees who know their job and do it well. It doesn’t mean every leader wants to move up, though. They may not see their future like you do. Here’s what they might see in your company’s leadership instead, so take heed.
Managers work overtime unpaid. They might be asked to give up holidays, family events, and their kids’ games. The reality is, today’s foremen are “time poor.”
Sure, foremen get paid more money, but Lead men and women make their own overtime. When extra money is needed a lead can choose when to work it.
Good leads are hard to come by. A good lead has job security. They don’t get fired.
To some people a foreman is low on the management rung. It seems that every day, someone blames them for some new issue, no matter what.
What is inexcusable is that most foremen get blamed for every injury affecting their crew. It’s lazy stuff – the quickest resolution for ‘time poor’ managers to make.
Foremen, managers and directors regularly get fired, sometimes for the smallest offense. To a lead man, when they see it, foreman is a weak position to aspire to.
What is honestly happening here? The answer is there is no unity between the field and management. There should be one team – one purpose — and there are two. In fact, you might say being a foreman is thankless and prone to being dumped on. Why would any sane person take it?
In previous articles I have talked about advancing a business structure called, ‘the trinity business.’ A trinity business has three equal parts that fit well in large, medium, and small construction, manufacturing, and Utility companies. It ends workplace dysfunctions.
Think of the ‘trinity’ as a thick rubber coupling between metal pipes carrying a very precious liquid. Bury these pipes, add frost and heat that expand and contract them; then some heavy vibrations and loads roll over them, even toss in a few low earthquakes. The trinity business still holds, never spilling a precious drop.
There are many reasons why a trinity business succeeds; mainly because the trinity is built on three equal parts: Production, Quality Control, and Safety. Secondly, it is run with respect to each of the three. And finally, it is based on common sense; the kind of common sense and respect for people that can come out of the field.
A trinity business doesn’t cost anything to begin and run, and yet it makes money and keeps your talent from moving on.
The trinity is a field/management system sharing control of the three most crucial drivers, but the glue that binds these together is Psychological Safety. This growing trend is a perfect fit for any business built on mutual respect and common sense. Go to psychsafety.com. Located in Nottingham, UK, Jade and Tom run a very busy shop, full of great purpose. The purpose is how expertly they cut the grizzle and fluff, teaching you what counts in business. They are sensible people; they know that growth, safety or otherwise, comes from well-developed skills like patience and common sense. Based in respect, here is their abbreviated mission statement:
To make the world of work a safer, higher performing, more inclusive and equitable place.
Empower people across the world to foster psychologically safe environments in their organizations and teams.
We’re building a global community of folks who want to create and maintain psychological safety.
A core goal is to amplify the voices of those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of color, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.
We believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this (Friday) newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access.
Honestly, there is no gimmicky product here for sale.
By now, we all know that our own universal safety missions are a ‘moveable feast’. Safety methods come and go; some with gadgets, some without and all are designed to make us safer. Unfortunately, we deal with sentient human beings. Well-worn ideas top imperfect content, while promised patented products crush careers every season. With all those unpredictable, unsafe choices we humans make every day, success is made in baby steps.
This is why Psych Safety is so attractive to me — it focuses on how we think and function, our physiology, the role of dopamine, hormones, and other natural chemicals, and how our archaic brains reward us when we choose unsafe actions. Those one second calculations we make to bring home the bacon are totally unpredictable. Psych Safety practiced in a trinity structured company may very well be the incoming wave to choose.
Jade and Tom know that it takes ‘a village to raise safe people.’ That’s why they share what they learn with others via their platforms, their training, on LinkedIn, and by mouth. I’ll tell you what a colleague told me recently. He said that in a few years AI will figure us all out finally and chart a course that will make us safe… Is this what you’re waiting for too?
Robert Slocomb CHST, Safety Specialist and book author, works for the water wastewater industry in metropolitan Washington, DC.
Two hikers who veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park have been found within five hours using a drone powered by artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind mission, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has said.https://www.theguardian.com/au...The two men, aged in their 20s, were reported missing at 7pm on Tuesday evening after they failed to return to a rendezvous point on time.FRNSW’s remote air piloted system was put into the air, and was able to use thermal imaging to find the hikers who had been walking the Dead Horse Gap track, about 35km south-west of Jindabyne.At the same time, the hikers used a red light on a mobile phone to attract the drone in the dark.
In this episode of the serialised novel "Realm of the Cephalopods" (about a dystopian future marred by global heating and cephalopods), Toby muses about how the pursuit of AGI mimics the development of fire in early civilisation, what is says about people in general and the destruction that it caused. People have the capacity to achieve and produce great things however that same ability, unfortunately, also tends to lead to great destruction. Why is that so? And is there ever any way to avoid it?
Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:
"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."
The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.
"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."
However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:
"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."
'Doctors at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes.'H., a 40-year-old family man from northern Israel, was injured in his neck several years ago. Because of the injury, he relied on painkillers and eventually became addicted to them....'The patient himself reported a craving score of zero out of 10 for using the drug, and even another side effect, a drastic drop in the desire for cigarettes, from three packs a day to just a few cigarettes, and with no urge to use alcohol. In other words, in a treatment that lasted about 20 minutes net, our patient was completely freed from an extreme dependence that had accompanied him every day for years. This is nothing less than a medical and therapeutic revolution.”'
Braking distance regulations would stick around, but the physical pedals would no longer be required for cars designed to be exclusively autonomous.
I would want any autonomous car to have emergency brake and/or shutoff.
The heat on Wednesday alone, when the temperature soared as high as 112.3 degrees Fahrenheit (44.3 degrees Celsius), exceeded the 2050 projections in 19 out of 34 locations across mainland France — far sooner than some may have expected.Some places surpassed those hypothetical future temperatures by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.It’s part of a dramatic shift in heat wave frequency across the country. Half of the heat waves observed since 1947 have occurred since 2010.
Volkswagen (VW) plans to cut up to 100,000 jobs around the world in the next few years as part of a dramatic overhaul.The German car giant plans to axe a sixth of its global workforce as part of a restructuring designed to save €11bn (£9.5bn) by 2030, according to local media.Oliver Blume, the chief executive, is also considering carving up the business and spinning off the namesake VW brand under the proposals, which will lead to the closure of four plants in Germany.It marks a dramatic escalation from the 50,000 job losses set out in a letter to shareholders by Mr Blume in March, which was itself higher than previous plans for 35,000 cuts. The company employs around 657,000 people worldwide.The restructuring comes as VW faces intense competition from China, which has flooded the European market with cheap electric vehicles (EVs). VW sales have remained static at around nine million vehicles a year as it grapples with the competition.
Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 is available to download, the second of four snapshots planned for the ‘Stonking Stingray’ development cycle ahead of a stable release in October. As with the first snapshot, there’s not a lot “new” stuff to see or test out, so unless you’re a developer or an avid bug hunter there’s little reason to rush off and try it. Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta, announcing the release on Ubuntu’s developer mailing list, warns of a “breaking change” – don’t panic: it’s not in the image itself, but the URL it’s accessed from. Over the past few weeks the Ubuntu […]
I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence:
This blog existed before AI could write blog posts.
If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean.
And now let me add this: I, dynomight, guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only exceptions would be quotes from other humans or something that’s clearly labeled as an AI output.
How is that evidence? Well, say you think I’m a low quality person and I do use AI but I’m lying and I’ve figured out how to evade AI-detectors. OK, ouch. But consider: It’s extremely likely that AI-detectors will improve in the future. (More precisely, it’s likely that future AI-detectors will be better than current AI-detectors at detecting current AI.) If I were using AI, and a future AI detector later caught me, the fact that I made the above promise would be really embarrassing.
You may be thinking that this looks gross and self-congratulatory. So I’d like to stress that the above guarantee is carefully worded. I do often use AI “for research”, just not “for writing”. (We’ll come back to that distinction.) And I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with using AI to write blog posts. I don’t do it personally, mostly because:
I like writing.
The act of writing itself helps me figure stuff out.
This is a hobby. If you start automating your own hobbies—just what the hell are you doing?
I also don’t use AI for writing because—can we just admit it?—no one wants to read AI-generated essays. Or, rather, people love reading AI-generated essays, but when they want to read one, they will ask an AI for it themselves, thank you very much.
I know the counterarguments. What does it matter where the words came from? Shouldn’t you judge them on their own merits? Maybe. That’s a legitimate way to look at things. But empirically, I think most people don’t agree.
(I also know you’re counting the em-dashes. Count away, I’m still human.)
Here’s an oddly neglected question: Take all the essays that are AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted by one person and then given to someone else to read. In what percentage of cases does the first person disclose the AI usage? Ignore everything related to education if you want. You can even ignore emails. I suspect the answer is still <20%.
Why do people care about this? Several reasons. One is proof of work. If I, a human, write eight thousand plausible-seeming words about vitamin D, that proves that I’ve put some time and effort into understanding vitamin D. That suggests giving some weight to my opinion, even if just to best exploit the wisdom of crowds. That doesn’t work if my essay is secretly AI-generated.
And writing isn’t just cold clinical information-sharing. It’s a kind of parasocial interaction. I know “parasocial” sounds sinister, but I maintain that parasocial relationships are often a perfectly healthy way to adapt our primitive social instincts to the modern world. Anyway, good or bad, that’s part of it.
I bring this up because I’m worried that blogs are heading into a sort of lemon market. You’ve surely had the experience of reading an essay only to slowly become dismayed as you realize it was AI-written. What’s the equilibrium? I expect that some people have already cut back on reading essays, at least from non-established authors. Over time, I expect this will lead to fewer humans writing essays, further increasing the density of AI-generated content, driving more people to cut back on reading, et cetera. This is bad because blogs are good.
As that cycle turns, social norms are also changing. Cast your mind back to the old world, five years ago. At that time, if you had started a blog and posted AI-generated essays without telling anyone, I’m reasonably certain that would have been considered a dick move. (Future generations will marvel.) But today, the largest corporations appear to do that all the time. There’s incredible momentum towards a world where AI can be used anywhere, for any purpose, with no disclosure, and that’s fine.
But it is fine! At this point, trying to bully people into proactive disclosure is just a tax on honesty / consciousness / integrity. Instead, I suggest we agree that arbitrary usage is, by default, fine. Instead, let’s work at the other end: If you have chosen to impose limits on your AI usage, then state those limits publicly. If you’re human, tell me.
Obviously, this is no panacea. People can lie. But they can’t do so without taking some reputational risk, because if you use AI and lie about it, how long will your secret stay safe? No one knows because for once the unpredictability of technological change is on our side.
However. HOWEVER. I am not suggesting that we should bully writers into declaring that they are AI-free. I think that’s a terrible idea, because AI use comes on a spectrum. Already today, most people surely use it at least a little. (Do you avert your eyes when AI summaries come up at the top of search results?) Arguably, most people should use AI at least a little. We need to acknowledge that writing is entering the centaur era.
For context: Computers beat humans at chess in 1997. But for years after that, human + AI “centaur” teams could still beat both the best humans and the best chess AIs. Slowly, the value humans contribute to those teams has diminished, and today it’s somewhat unclear if centaurs still hold any advantage over pure AIs.
Humans are still better at blogging than AIs. (Though perhaps not better at literary short fiction.) In chess time, blogging is still pre-1997. But it’s a historical coincidence that no one seems to have cared about centaur chess before 1997. If people had tried, I suspect centaur chess teams could have beaten the best human players much earlier. So, to stretch our analogy, I’d put blogging around 1990 in chess time, in an alternate timeline where there was vast interest in centaur chess in the 1970s and 1980s.
I mean, what exactly can you do while still considering your essay “human written”? Can you:
…look at AI summaries at the top of search results?
…ask AI to find spelling or grammar errors?
…use AI as an advanced thesaurus? (“Give me 50 words with meanings interpolating between ‘aggressive’ and ‘punctilious’.”)
…ask AI factual questions when doing research?
…trust the answers, or verify them yourself?
…ask AI for options to rephrase an awkward sentence?
…use those options verbatim?
…ask AI for high-level organizational suggestions?
…ask AI to to make figures / tables / code?
…run an entire essay through an AI to “clean it up”?
…ask an AI to give a rough prototype of the next section?
I don’t feel super-comfortable saying this, but I sometimes do all of those except #7, #10, and #11.
Wait! Let me explain! I probably do #3 or #6 around once per post. For #5, I usually verify, but when trying to understand something, I read a lot of sources. I try to mentally mark AI-derived facts as unreliable, but I don’t formally track the provenance of every single part of my mental model. I rarely do #8, and even-more rarely accept the suggestions, because AI seems to dislike me as a person and wants to purify my writing of all life and personality. But, in want of a human editor, I sometimes find it helpful. And no matter what, if any information flows from AI into my writing, it does so through my fingers, being written in my own words, never cutting and pasting, not a single word, never-ever.
On a spectrum where 0 = “refuses to look at AI summaries in web searches” and 100 = “puts a single prompt into an AI and posts the output without revisions”, I’d put myself at, I don’t know, 10?
Again, saying all that feels gross. (Somehow it feels like admitting to something shameful and simultaneously an exercise in arrogant self-congratulation? It’s remarkable.) I don’t know how my position on that spectrum compares to other writers, because almost no one discloses any AI usage at all.
But come on people. Democracy dies in darkness! We’re now at the point where readers default to assuming some relatively high (and increasing) level. I’m convinced that many people use AI in ways that are almost completely unobjectionable, but they’re too scared to admit it. This muddies the distinction between different parts of the spectrum, and exacerbates the dynamic where people are too afraid to read anything, lest they later realize it is “slop”.
We need to come to terms with the idea that for most writers, the optimal amount of AI usage is not zero. I’m sure that most people would say that some kinds of usage are normal / expected / good, while other kinds are aberrant / duplicitous / slop. But people have different opinions, and this is all shifting as technology and culture develop.
Unsurprisingly, I like the idea of people drawing the line close to where I did. But I’m willing to accept a fairly wide range, provided you’re upfront about it. Usually, if I sense the invisible hand of heavy AI editing, I sigh and unsubscribe. But Trevor Klee (an excellent blogger) has a couple posts where he says, “here’s an output from ChatGPT I thought was interesting.” Not only did I not unsubscribe, I actually attempted to read that output.
Still, I think it’s important to draw some line, not just to communicate to the outside world, but also for yourself. There’s a very blurry boundary between using AI “for research” or “to catch grammatical errors” and using it “for writing”. It’s very easy to slip from asking AI factual questions, to asking it to find errors in what you wrote, to asking it to fix those errors, to asking it to generate whole paragraphs of text. Each of those steps is easy to justify. So if you want to operate at some position on the spectrum, it’s probably best to choose some boundaries and then enforce them.
360 degree feedback promises that it will offer truth in all directions. It will illuminate blind spots, reveal the development areas people couldn’t see before and unlock potential they didn’t know they had. It promises, above all, to make honesty safe, offering confidentiality and anonymity for the people with less power, so they can finally tell the truth about the people with more. It is an appealing set of promises, but whether it can keep them is another matter.
The Murky History of 360 Degree Feedback
Let’s just clarify first what we mean by 360 degree feedback. Generally, the term refers to a process of gathering feedback about an individual from the people around them, perhaps their manager, but also peers and direct reports, hence the full circle – 360 degrees. This is ostensibly to support their development, to feed into an appraisal, or both. Responses are typically anonymised, often pooled in groups of three or more so that in theory no single rater can be identified (although that’s rarely watertight in practice).
So where does this popular practice actually come from? Rumours abound. I once heard a version involving a KGB sabotage manual, which I’d love to believe as it would make a great story. Unfortunately, I’ve found no evidence for it. The more likely history, referenced widely online, traces an early version to officer selection in the German Reichswehr around 1930, under a military psychologist named Johann Rieffert. Nobody called it 360 degree feedback, but multiple observers would feed into a single judgement about who should make the cut.
The name “360-degree feedback” was coined in the mid-1980s by an assessment firm called TEAMS Inc, who registered the phrase as a trademark, and then spent years trying to enforce their ownership of it until the company was sold. There has always been money in this, and attempts to trademark concepts and practices should always raise an eyebrow, if not a red flag.
None of which stops 360 degree feedback being treated today as a solid, almost scientific HR default. For a practice this murky in its origins, that’s quite a leap, and as we’ll see, neither the evidence nor people’s experiences of it seem to justify the confidence.
Experiences of 360 Degree Feedback
I’ve worked in organisations running 360 degree feedback processes, and I know the anxiety of waiting on anonymised comments, followed, almost always, by one of two deflations:
You’re handed some critical but cryptic line, spend an unreasonable amount of energy trying to guess who wrote it and have to actively resist the urge to go and just ask them what they mean, or:
You get the other thing entirely: bland, school-report style platitudes about being a great colleague, which are technically positive, but don’t really say anything at all.
Both versions arrive by the same route. The 360 degree feedback process tips into a tick-box exercise, and once it has, it doesn’t just fail to start a constructive, developmental conversation; the anonymity built into it often makes sure that conversation can never happen at all.
None of this is unique to me. I have these conversations regularly with clients, people in mid-sized and large organisations where 360 degree feedback has become so completely entangled with performance management or appraisal that all ideas of feedback get drawn into this dreaded annual cycle. It seems like once an organisation has a formal annual mechanism for feedback, that mechanism exerts a gravitational pull over all other feedback instances. The ordinary, day-to-day, low-stakes, useful versions of feedback – like a quick check in after a meeting or small flagging of a blind spot – start to feel like something to save up rather than say now. People batch it all up for judgement day and the process that’s designed to surface feedback ends up suppressing many more useful, and low-threat, day-to-day exchanges.
And then there are the others, the ones just starting out on their 360 degree feedback ‘journey’, asking important questions before they commit: why are we doing this, and what is it actually going to do to psychological safety here?
The Evidence Gap
It turns out that the case for 360 degree feedback is pretty underwhelming, given how embedded all this is. Despite three decades of near universal corporate enthusiasm, nobody has ever managed to show, convincingly, that it does what it’s supposed to do. The Institute for Employment Studies spent a year interviewing organisations running these schemes and combing through the available research, and concluded that widespread adoption of 360 degree feedback reflects “faith rather than proven validity,” which is, it turns out, a rather generous way of putting it. Evidence of actual impact on individual development or organisational performance was, in their own words, “scant.” Similarly, the most authoritative meta-analysis in the field, pulling together twenty-four longitudinal studies, found that improvement in ratings over time, the entire point of the exercise, was ‘generally small’. As the authors put it, “practitioners should not expect large, widespread performance improvement after employees receive multisource feedback.”
That meta-analysis was published in 2005. Two decades on, the more recent literature isn’t full of fresh studies overturning or confirming it, it’s largely quiet, with prominent practitioners in the field noting a “glaring absence” of new research even as usage of 360 feedback keeps climbing. The honest answer to “does this work?” still sits somewhere closer to “a bit, maybe, for some people, under conditions nobody’s fully pinned down” than anything resembling a “yes!”
None of which has slowed adoption down. Which brings me back to the money. Google “360 degree feedback” (a reasonable start for any investigative dive into the practice!) and the first page is dominated by sponsored placements and paid products, all companies selling their own version of a 360 degree feedback tool. Twenty years ago, the IES were already noting the volume of “spin from external providers” surrounding this practice. If there was a lot of spin then, I suspect there’s a great deal more now.
More Raters, More Bias
All feedback is subjective. I’ve written about why that matters elsewhere, so I won’t revisit the whole argument, except to say that the moment you treat a rating as a fact about a person rather than an impression formed by another person, you’re already in trouble.
What’s worth adding in this context is a particular claim some 360 degree tools lean on, implicitly or explicitly: that gathering feedback from many sources cancels out individual bias and delivers something more objective than a single manager’s view. It’s an appealing idea, but averaging several biased judgements doesn’t remove the bias, it just blends it into something that looks smoother and harder to attribute while carrying the original distortions inside it. Gender and racial bias don’t disappear when you collect more ratings; in fact they may well accumulate while becoming harder to see, hidden behind an aggregate score that feels objective and is anything but.
There’s another issue too: 360 asks how a person is performing, rarely about what pressures and constraints they were facing. The forms have feedback for the individual and rarely for the conditions, so the subject of the feedback ends up holding the weight of the system around them.
The Trouble with Anonymity
Anonymity exists in these practices for an obvious reason: people are supposed to feel safer telling the truth if they can’t be identified for it. Aside from the (very real) risk that this reinforces the idea that it’s actually not safe to speak up unless we’re anonymous, the IES researchers did find this working roughly as intended – raters giving upward feedback anonymously were more critical than those who knew their names would be attached. But they also found the protection failing in two different ways. In some cases, managers asked direct reports to provide them directly with “anonymous” feedback, which of course undermines the anonymity from the start. In other cases, raters who had been promised anonymity colluded with each other, with several colleagues agreeing in advance to write identical negative comments about their manager so that no single person could be singled out and blamed. They didn’t trust the protection the system offered, so they built their own on top of it.
There’s a further risk in anonymous feedback – it can easily mask people over- or under-rating for political reasons, which is most likely when the stakes are high. In some organisations, 360 degree feedback has reportedly been folded into the machinery of ‘rank and yank,’ the practice of ranking people by their performance ratings and firing the bottom 10%, a practice which is (thankfully) effectively unlawful in many parts of the world. But where it, or practices like it, still exist, are you really going to risk rating a colleague higher than yourself?
When the IES researchers looked at places where anonymity was removed instead, some people reported being approached and made to feel uncomfortable for giving honest upward feedback. Yet others preferred it that way, worried that anonymity would let others use the process to settle old scores under cover rather than to give honest feedback. “At least the feedback can be challenged if the names are on it,” as one of them put it, and I see their point. We know feedback is most useful when it’s context-rich – when it can be located in specific incidents and relationships – and when it’s part of a two-way conversation. Anonymised 360 degree feedback removes both the context and the conversation.
So take anonymity away, and people fear retaliation for their honesty. Leave it in place, and people suspect the cover is being used to settle scores or game the system. Either way, the distrust is still there. The problem was arguably never about anonymity at all, but that nobody in the system trusted that honest feedback would be received well, used fairly, or kept safe, regardless of whether names were on it.
Which brings us back to psychological safety. What people need in order to offer honest feedback, is consistent, demonstrated, lived experience that speaking honestly won’t cost them anything. That can only be developed slowly, through what actually happens when people speak up – we can’t shortcut our way to it via an anonymous feedback form.
The Costs of 360 Degree Feedback
There is a financial and relational cost to 360 degree feedback which is easy to overlook when it becomes ‘the norm’. We work with a number of large organisations stuck with a frustrating annual ritual, gathering and inputting reams of data into a system most people resent, kept alive less by conviction that it actually works than by a software licence they’re tied to. These platforms cost a significant amount of money, and the decision to buy one was often made a long way up the organisation. The cost is sunk; the plan is the plan, and questioning it means telling someone senior that their expensive choice isn’t working. It’s often easier, on balance, to just keep doing it.
In another organisation, someone told me their HR team was considering bringing 360 feedback in specifically to deal with one ‘bad manager’. The logic, as it was explained to me, was that this was the only way to get that manager some direct, unfiltered feedback from the people reporting to them. Which might be true. But it also means reaching for an entire organisation-wide measurement system, with all its cost, fatigue and risk, to solve a problem that’s really about one person — a siege engine wheeled up to a door that only needed knocking on.
So where does that leave us?
Not, unfortunately, with a tidy verdict. I’m not here to tell you 360 degree feedback never works, or that everyone running it should stop tomorrow. The honest position is that we don’t really know what it does, the evidence has been thin for twenty years and a great many organisations are running these processes at real cost to time, money and trust without properly questioning whether they’re helping or harming.
If there’s a structural point underneath all of this, it’s that candid feedback isn’t a system we install. The IES researchers, after all their interviews and analysis, landed somewhere strikingly modest: that organisations might do better simply reminding people to give honest, regular feedback as a matter of ordinary practice, rather than building elaborate machinery to extract it once a year.
I don’t think the story of 360 degree feedback is over. The tools are still being sold, the licences still being signed, the annual cycles still grinding on in organisations full of people wondering what they’re for. I suspect I’ll be having these conversations with clients for a long time yet. But maybe we can at least take a step back and ask what problem this process is actually meant to solve, and whether this is a good way to solve it.
If this leaves you wondering what good feedback actually looks like, the more personal, everyday kind that doesn’t need an annual cycle or an anonymous form, that’s exactly what we cover in our Delivering Effective Feedback workshop. Full details are here.
Tenerife, the power gradient, and the calculus of voice
On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, and 583 people died. It is still the worst disaster in the history of civil aviation, and it happened on the ground, in fog, between two aircraft that weren’t actually supposed to be there.
Neither flight was scheduled to land at Los Rodeos. They were bound for Gran Canaria, until a separatist group detonated a bomb in the terminal there and a warning of a second one closed the airport. All flights headed to Gran Canaria were diverted, and many of them were sent to Los Rodeos on Tenerife: a small airport on a saddle between two mountains, with a single runway, a handful of taxiways, one apron, and a local reputation for being foggy. By the afternoon the apron was full of diverted widebodies, and the taxiways were blocked by the aircraft parked on them. When the all-clear finally came, the planes that wanted to leave could not taxi around to the runway in the ordinary way, because there was no room. They had to taxi down the active runway itself, turn around at the far end, and take off back the way they had come.
By Mtcv for Dutch wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091580
Speaking up on the flight deck
The KLM 747 was piloted by Captain Jacob van Zanten, with First Officer Klaas Meurs beside him and Flight Engineer Willem Schreuder behind. Van Zanten taxied the length of the runway, turned the aircraft 180 degrees, and got ready to depart. Behind them, the Pan Am 747 was still taxiing down the same runway, under instruction to turn off at the third exit.
Van Zanten advanced the throttles. Meurs, somewhat surprised, told him they did not yet have ATC (air traffic control) clearance. Van Zanten brought the power back and, by the report’s account, told him to go ahead and ask for it. Meurs did speak up, and van Zanten did respond.
The ATC tower then passed KLM a route clearance, the instructions for after departure, and it contained the word “takeoff” without actually being a clearance to take off. Meurs read it back and tailed off with the words “we are now at takeoff.” Van Zanten, already releasing the brakes, said two words over the top of him: “We’re going.” The controller, who could not see the runway, answered “OK,” and then, after a pause, “stand by for takeoff, I will call you.” At that exact moment the Pan Am crew keyed their microphone to say they were still on the runway. The two radio transmissions collided, producing a squeal that meant neither were audible. The only word that reached the KLM cockpit cleanly was “OK.”
The tower then told the Pan Am to report when it was clear of the runway, and Pan Am acknowledged. This much was audible in the KLM cockpit, and Schreuder heard it. He then asked the question that should have prevented disaster: “Is he not clear, that Pan American?” Van Zanten answered, emphatically, “Oh, yes.” Schreuder asked again. He was answered again, with the same certainty, and Van Zanten increased the throttle, accelerating the 747 along the runway.
And then both Schreuder and Meurs were quiet. For the ten or fifteen seconds that remained they said nothing, until the fog ahead cleared, at about 160 miles an hour, showing the Pan Am 747 directly in their path, pointing straight at them. Both crews tried to take evasive action. The Pan Am hauled left toward the grass verge beside the runway; whilst van Zanten pulled back hard enough to drag the tail along the tarmac, trying to take off straight up and over the Pan Am. However, Van Zanten had decided to refuel during the long wait, sensibly enough, and combined with the full complement of passengers and luggage, it meant the KLM was heavy, and they didn’t quite make it. The wheels and one engine of the KLM ripped into the Pan Am, and the KLM aircraft hit the ground at speed. The collision killed everyone aboard the KLM and most of those aboard the Pan Am. 583 people died as a result.
Wreckage on the runway of Los Rodeos after the Tenerife airport disaster of March 27, 1977
“But if it really matters, won’t people speak up?”
If we take one thing from this, it is this: people do not speak up with their concerns, and they especially do not speak up again once they have spoken up and been dismissed, even when their own lives and the lives of others are at stake. The interpersonal costs and risks of speaking up loom so large that they outweigh the benefits of doing so.
Willem Schreuder was not junior or inexperienced. He had more flying hours than either of the men in cockpit with him. He had seen the problem and named it, twice. And then, having watched his certainty bounce off the captain’s certainty, he stopped, in an aircraft accelerating along a runway he had good reason to think was occupied by another plane. This is not cowardice or stupidity. It is what the interpersonal cost of voice does to all of us.
Consider the tacit calculus of voice, combined with Prospect Theory: we weigh the almost certain cost of speaking up against a merely possible benefit. The cost of pressing the captain a third time is immediate, social, and certain. You will be the person who second-guessed the chief instructor, out loud, on the basis of a feeling, and if the runway turns out to be clear you will have aborted his takeoff for nothing. The benefit is probabilistic and invisible if it works: a collision that does not happen leaves no trace and earns no credit. We all tend to over-estimate the immediate costs of speaking up, especially against someone senior, so the calculus tips towards the negative and we remain silent. This is all very human.
And notice the form the doubt took. Schreuder did not say “there is an aircraft on that runway, stop.” He asked whether the Pan Am was clear. This isn’t incidental: crews, and especially the less senior, tend to raise concerns in mitigated forms, as hints and questions rather than statements and commands, and the softer the form, the easier it is to wave away (Fischer and Orasanu, 1999). The same calculus that pushes us toward silence also shapes how we say something.
Here’s the really uncomfortable bit though – if the calculus still tips toward silence when the downside is death, in an aircraft, with your own life in the balance, then we should not be remotely surprised that it tips toward silence in a marketing meeting, an ideation session, or a finance catch-up. In most of the meetings and conversations we have, nobody is about to die. The high stakes that might justify the risk of speaking are not even close to this example, which means the silence makes even more sense. Tenerife is not a rare case at the edge of human behaviour. It’s an ordinary case, but with a tragic outcome.
The Power Gradient
The second thing this disaster surfaced, along with the others that the human-factors investigators were studying around the same time, was the gap in power between the most powerful person in the space, and the least. The aviation safety literature of the period called it various things, the authority gradient, the cockpit gradient, the trans-cockpit authority gradient, the power gradient. They are all pointing at the same structural feature: the steeper the difference in power between the person at the top and the person who has something to say, the harder it is to say it. This isn’t only intuitive: it shows up in the data on how status differences shape cockpit communication and coordination (Milanovich et al., 1998). The steeper the gradient, the more that voice is suppressed – it’s much harder to speak up against someone with greater power – power over your future, your reputation, your job, or your status. This is in fact, one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing, governing whether people speak up.
“Power” is a large and ambiguous word though, so it helps to break it down. Drawing on French and Raven, but trying to make it usable rather than academic, we can talk about four kinds of power.
Formal power (positional power) is the obvious kind, the kind that is described and written down. Role, rank, title, seniority; where we sit in the org chart, how many people report to us, who we report to, which rules and structures are ours to invoke. It is the most legible form of power, and being legible, it is also the easiest to see and to navigate around.
Informal power is much harder to see, because it is almost never written down. It lives in social standing, reputation, popularity, the size and shape of our networks, our reputation, how many people we know and how well. It does its work invisibly, which makes it harder to name and harder to navigate.
Demographic power is mostly the power we did nothing to earn and cannot hand back: height, race, age, gender, sexuality, class, accent. It endows, or otherwise, different degrees of power in different contexts.
Expert power is what we know: our qualifications, our experience, our demonstrated competence in this domain. It is sharply contextual. A brain surgeon in a cockpit has very little of it (probably, maybe they’re also a qualified pilot). An experienced surgeon in an operating theatre has a lot of it.
The Four Types of Power
The point of separating these out is that they do not behave as one thing. They can pull against each other, they can compensate for each other’s absence, and, dangerously, they can stack up.
In van Zanten they all stacked up. His informal power was enormous: he was the face of KLM’s advertising, the man in the in-flight magazine, photographed under the line about the people who made punctuality possible. He was, at least in the world of the airline, a minor celebrity. His demographic power was high as a tall, tanned, silver-haired Dutchman in a captain’s uniform. His expert power was as high as it goes: he was KLM’s chief instructor on the 747, the man who taught other pilots how to fly the aircraft, the airline’s recognised authority on the type. And his formal power matched it, the seniority and standing of the chief of flight training, the man KLM would later try to reach to help investigate the crash, before they realised that he had been at the controls. He had also, only weeks earlier, conducted Meurs’s qualification check on the 747. The first officer beside him owed his certification on the aircraft to the man he was trying to challenge.
Set that out and the gradient in that cockpit is incredibly steep, along every axis.
It is worth being careful here, because the easy version of this story makes van Zanten a powerful tyrant, and the evidence doesn’t support it; in fact rather the opposite. Colleagues who knew him, including Jan Bartelski, a fellow KLM captain and later president of the international pilots’ federation, dispute that portrait flatly. By their account he was studious and introverted but warm, a believer in partnership who insisted his first officers call him “Jaap” rather than “Captain.” This doesn’t weaken the argument; in fact it reinforces it. The power gradient did its silencing work in the cockpit of a man who, by temperament and by stated belief, was trying to flatten it. The gradient is not mainly a matter of personality. It forms between people, out of their positions relative to one another: rank, reputation, expertise, and how readily the room defers. None of that dissolves because the person at the top is, personally, a good sort. We might work to mitigate the gradient, and we should; but the gradient remains.
None of which is to say it was his fault, or that having power is something to feel guilty about. We may possess a great deal of power and that is fine; most of us will, in some room at some time, be the most powerful person in it. What we are obliged to do is recognise and acknowledge it, because the gradient forms whether or not we want it to, and it has effects whether or not we intend them. And the gradient acts on the powerful, too. A reputation built entirely on being on time every time is a reputation with a downside, and a man already badly delayed, watching the duty clock run down, was under a pressure of his own making to go. The punctuality that sold his reputation was pressing on the throttle in his hand on the runway.
What we learned from the wreckage
The lasting answer to Tenerife, and to the accidents around it, was Crew Resource Management. It came out of a NASA workshop on human factors in 1979, which itself was catalysed by the Tenerife disaster, along with others, and was first adopted comprehensively by United Airlines in the early 1980s, and was taken up by nearly every airline in the world within a remarkably short time. It is, with some justification, often called the most successful safety programme humanity has ever created. It is a large part of the reason that getting into an aeroplane is now one of the safest things you can do.
CRM emerged in aviation specifically to reduce catastrophic errors by changing cockpit culture: communication norms, authority gradients, briefing practices, and coordination under pressure. It was quickly adopted in medicine, especially in emergency response and (surprise) surgical teams. It trains people to speak up when something looks wrong, to challenge respectfully, to cross-check decisions, and to share situational awareness. In doing so, it creates a structured environment in which speaking up becomes expected and legitimate (Weller, Boyd and Cumin, 2014). The sense that it is safe to raise a concern is not a mysterious precondition that must somehow appear in advance. It is the result of concrete practices, training, and norms that make voice a normal part of the work.
It began life as Cockpit Resource Management and became Crew Resource Management, as a result of further disaster and our learning from them. Accidents like Kegworth, where cabin crew outside the cockpit could see things the pilots could not and the information never made the journey forward – due to a steep power gradient between cockpit crew and cabin crew, taught the industry that it is not enough to train only the people at the controls. Cabin crew, ground crew, air traffic control, operations staff: everyone in the system needs to be able to speak up to power at the moment it matters, and everyone needs the people above them to listen when they do. The safest crews are the ones where leadership is, in effect, shared: cabin and cockpit prompting and correcting one another rather than information travelling in one direction (Bienefeld and Grote, 2014).
CRM works on the problem from both ends. It scaffolds the act of speaking up against a gradient, giving people recognised, legitimate ways to push information upwards. And it works on the gradients themselves, building in practices that share power and distribute authority so that the slope is shallower before anyone has to climb it. Both are necessary. We cannot only teach the person at the bottom to be braver; we also have to lower the wall. None of this is a switch we flip once. Safety silence persists even in trained crews wherever the local culture quietly licenses it, which is why CRM has to be lived rather than merely delivered (Perkins et al., 2022).
Walking ourselves up the ladder
One of the practices that came out of this world is PACE, a graded assertiveness tool, and it is worth walking through because it is a scaffold built precisely for the moment Schreuder found himself in.
We begin with a Probe: a low-threat question that surfaces the concern without confronting anyone. “Is that red light meant to be on?”, “That Pan Am, is he clear yet?” Schreuder’s question was, in effect, a probe. If the probe does not get traction, if it doesn’t draw attention to the thing we are actually concerned about, we escalate to an Alert, which names the hazard clearly. “Oxygen is at 90% and falling.” or “We don’t have ATC clearance for takeoff.” Meurs’s first objection was an alert. If the alert doesn’t land either, we go to Challenge: stating the problem and proposing a different course of action, which is much harder, because now we‘re not just raising a worry, we’re asking the powerful person to do something other than what they have decided. “I don’t think it’s safe to take off yet. There may be an aircraft on the runway. Let’s hold and check.” And if even that fails, we reach Emergency, an unambiguous command: “Stop. This is unsafe.” This is very interpersonally challenging and risky, but is less so if we’ve walked ourselves up the PACE steps already – and hopefully we don’t need to get to Emergency anyway.
At Tenerife, nobody got past Alert. Two experienced professionals raised the hazard, had it dismissed, and stopped where the ladder becomes more interpersonally expensive.
We see the same pattern far outside aviation. Elaine Bromiley died in 2005 during what should have been a routine operation, when her anaesthetists became fixated on an airway they could not secure and lost track of the time she had spent without oxygen. The nurses in the room could see what was happening. One of them had fetched the kit for an emergency surgical airway and had it ready. They did not speak up and directly challenge the anaesthetists however, because the gradient between nurse and consultant in that theatre was every bit as steep as the one in the KLM cockpit, and the calculus of voice tipped the same way it always does (Harmer, 2005). Her husband Martin, an airline pilot, went on to found the Clinical Human Factors Group, and has spent the years since bringing aviation’s hard-won human-factors lessons into healthcare.
The reason the ladder helps is not that the top rung becomes comfortable. Issuing an unambiguous command to someone who holds your future in their hands is never going to feel safe, and it is not supposed to. The point is that you very rarely have to start there. By beginning with a probe and escalating only as far as you need, you walk yourself up the slope one manageable step at a time, and most of the time the problem is resolved long before you reach the top. The ladder turns one impossible act into a sequence of difficult but possible ones. And it gives the people around you, the ones with the power, a recognised signal that something is wrong before it becomes a fight.
What Tenerife taught us
We have learned an enormous amount from this disaster, as we have from many others. The conditions that produced the silence in that cockpit are not rare or unique to aviation. A steep gradient, a respected expert who has just expressed certainty, a team under time pressure, a concern that gets raised and dismissed once: this isn’t just a description of a 1977 runway. It is a description of an ordinary Tuesday in a finance team, a weekly planning meeting with the boss, or any number of other, comparatively mundane, contexts (with the merciful difference that the stakes are usually lower). The silence itself is not a quirk of individuals but a collective condition, one that organisations produce and reproduce in themselves (Morrison and Milliken, 2000).
That difference is also the danger. Because the stakes are lower, the silence is cheaper, and the scaffolding that aviation was forced to build under the pressure of mass fatalities is scaffolding the rest of us never get round to building at all. If two skilled people would not press a third time with their own lives on the line, we cannot reasonably expect anyone to press in a meeting where the worst case is mild embarrassment, unless we have deliberately made the conditions possible.
Jan Hagen’s Confronting Mistakesis a great book to read alongside this, because it works through the disasters of these decades and asks, of each one, why it happened, what might have prevented it, and what we learned from it. For the fullest blow-by-blow reconstruction of the accident itself, Admiral Cloudberg’s account is the best there is (Cloudberg, 2022). Underneath nearly all of them sits the same thing the human-factors investigators surfaced at Tenerife, decades before psychological safety became a term anyone outside a few corners of academia would recognise. They weren’t using the term psychological safety (because it wasn’t yet in mainstream use), but they were describing the exact same thing. The gradient suppresses voice; the silence risks disaster; and the work is to build the conditions, structural as well as interpersonal, in which the least powerful person in the room can say the thing that needs saying while there is still time to act on it.
Van Zanten’s last two words on the matter were “We’re going.” Everyone else acquiesced.
References
Bienefeld, N. and Grote, G. (2014) ‘Shared leadership in multiteam systems: How cockpit and cabin crews lead each other to safety’, Human Factors, 56(2), pp. 270–286.
Fischer, U. and Orasanu, J. (1999) ‘Cultural diversity and crew communication’. Paper presented at the 50th International Astronautical Congress, Amsterdam, October 1999.
Milanovich, D.M., Driskell, J.E., Stout, R.J. and Salas, E. (1998) ‘Status and cockpit dynamics: A review and empirical study’, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2(3), pp. 155–167.
Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25(4), pp. 706–725.
Perkins, K., Ghosh, S., Vera, J., Aragon, C. and Hyland, A. (2022) ‘The persistence of safety silence: How flight deck microcultures influence the efficacy of crew resource management’, International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace, 9(3).
Weller, J., Boyd, M. and Cumin, D. (2014) ‘Teams, tribes and patient safety: Overcoming barriers to effective teamwork in healthcare’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 90(1061), pp. 149–154.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of content moderation and account enforcement across major online platforms. While AI can help identify spam, scams, and harmful content at internet scale, what happens when the system gets it wrong?A recently published Medium article examines this question through the experience of a Facebook account suspension that was reportedly initiated by an automated system, followed by an automated appeal denial and no meaningful path to human review.The article argues that the issue isn't AI itself—it's allowing AI to become investigator, decision-maker, and appeals process without effective human oversight.The broader concern is that platforms like Meta have evolved into critical pieces of modern infrastructure. They host community groups, school communications, local government announcements, business pages, political discussions, and years of personal history. Their ecosystems also span multiple interconnected services, meaning a single enforcement action can affect Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and Meta hardware tied to the same account.This concern extends beyond a single user's experience. A growing advocacy effort at People Over Platforms documents thousands of reports from users who say they were wrongfully locked out of their accounts and calls for stronger transparency, meaningful appeals, and human oversight.The movement originated with a Change.org petition that has gathered more than 63,000 supporters before transitioning to an independent nonprofit focused on digital rights and platform accountability.Media outlets in multiple countries have also reported on users who say they were wrongly disabled by Meta's automated enforcement systems, with some accounts later restored after additional review.Rather than asking whether AI should be used for moderation, the article asks a different question:If AI is empowered to make decisions that can revoke a person's digital identity, communications, communities, and purchased ecosystem, should there always be a meaningful human appeal available?Medium article:https://medium.com/@vtadorsett...People Over Platforms:https://www.peopleoverplatform...Original Change.org petition:https://www.change.org/p/hold-...
Polestar is now winding down its car sales in the United States, following the decision of the U.S. Department of CommerceThe Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia.Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the United States.
Microsoft has extended the consumer ESU support for Windows 10 for another year. It will now run until Oct 2027.
Both the ESU page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates#cw) and a Blog Post (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/06/24/stay-secure-with-windows-11-copilot-pcs-and-windows-365-before-support-ends-for-windows-10/) from Microsoft reflect the change.
Consumer ESU is either free (sometimes with strings attached) or low cost (~30 U$D) compared to Enterprise ESU. The details are in the ESU page.
Enterprise ESU remains unchanged, and runs until Oct 2028.
For people still using Win10 as their main OS, either because their HW does not support Win11, or because they like Win10 better, or people (like me) Dualbooting another OS as the main one, with a Win10 partition for other uses, these are excellent news.
On Monday, June 22, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive targeting 16 Airbus A380 aircraft after the agency determined cracks found on certain aircraft could "reduce the structural integrity of the wing." The impacted aircraft include 15 Emirates planes and one Qantas aircraft
The A380, the world's largest passenger plane, has faced similar emergency inspections over past wing cracks
[T]he payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500 million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces. In addition to Stripe, other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, and the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several traders at the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, according to an Intercept spokesperson.
“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. On average, people spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Despite that, drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprits. There are so many that it typically doesn’t pay to try to stop any one of them with a vaccine. “When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” says Ransohoff. “So it hasn’t attracted the resources.”
[...] The project takes inspiration from efforts to fight the covid-19 virus, where Veesler’s group was among those involved in the speedy development of vaccines, antiviral drugs, and antibodies. According to Ransohoff, Intercept’s advisors will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, as well as Moncef Slaoui, the pharmaceutical executive who led the US coronavirus vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed. A key challenge for Intercept will be coming up with ways to counter many viruses at one time. That accounts for the interest in air-cleaning technology, such as using strong ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses. The idea, the group says, is to remove them from the air in the same way municipalities remove impurities from the water supply before it’s piped to people’s homes.
New GTK4/libadwaita app Whisp is positioning itself as the note-taking app for people fed up with note-taking apps (the best one is always the next one, right?). Scratch that; Whisp pitches itself as “the anti-note for GNOME”, a riff on Antinote, a macOS app with a similar look and feature set. Developer Tanay Bhomia describes it as “a fluid, gesture-driven scratchpad designed for absolute speed”. The website takes shots at the complexity of Obsidian and Notion, but Whisp isn’t out to compete with either. It’s a foil to notes relying on databases, hierarchies and corkboard-and-red-string organisational complexity. Me? I am a disorganised savage. […]
Login
Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 is available to download, the second of four snapshots planned for the ‘Stonking Stingray’ development cycle ahead of a stable release in October. As with the first snapshot, there’s not a lot “new” stuff to see or test out, so unless you’re a developer or an avid bug hunter there’s little reason to rush off and try it. Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta, announcing the release on Ubuntu’s developer mailing list, warns of a “breaking change” – don’t panic: it’s not in the image itself, but the URL it’s accessed from. Over the past few weeks the Ubuntu […]
