• AS ORGANIZATIONS ARE INCREASINGLY RECOGNIZING THE IMPORTANCE OF RESTRUCTURING for optimal productivity and staff retention, many are unaware that employee Burnout is also an increasing risk. A survey by National Alliance on Mental Illness found that last year around half of all full-time employees reported experiencing Burnout, with around a third saying they’ve considered quitting their jobs due to workplace stress from six primary factors: “overwhelming workload, lack of control over work, insufficient reward for their efforts, interpersonal conflict with managers and/or colleagues, a sense of unfairness, and mismatch of values between theirs and the organization.” Burnout stems from workplace disorganization – which DCG have decades of experience in providing strategic guidance. Call Dennis for courtesy consult.
  • TODAY’S PREDOMINANT USE OF DIGITAL DEVICES HAS ALTERED THE QUALITY OF READING, especially when under pressure to ready rapidly. Latest research shows a “screen inferiority effect” – where text read digitally will be less well understood than if read on paper – and may “increase susceptibility to misinformation by making it less likely to notice important discrepancies, with greater risk of being misled by false claims online. This stems from more superficial reading, sufficient to understand the gist of short simple texts without attention to longer content words that convey ‘who did what to whom.” Another similar impact is from reading subtitles in movies or TV where experiments show that viewers adapt their normal reading behavior to even shorter eye movements. The impact is influenced by how immersed the reader becomes in a story, and time pressure to read the material, but this clearly impacts society. [PSYCHE.CO]
  •  70% OF AMERICA’S I.T. INFRASTRUCTURE IS MANAGED by large private sector companies, and another 15% by the federal government. But a critical 15% is under the auspices of smaller businesses & organizations who control some 45% of America’s GDP, employ 45% of the workforce, but get victimized in roughly 7 out of ten cybercrimes – many of which are also detrimental to national security. The dollar loss and trauma caused by inevitable cyber-disruptions in the face of increased cyber risk, evolving cyber threats, ever-present vulnerabilities, and escalating legal requirements continues to worsen. Easy guidance for cyber-security protection of businesses and families is available from SECURE THE VILLAGE.ORG.      
  • ROBOT SWARM TECHNOLOGY has now been revolutionized with development of lightweight drones which can handle uneven terrain and work together to collaborate for fast environmental monitoring and disaster relief in areas where human access is limited. Applications include post wildfire mapping of contamination zones & spread, search for survivors, earthquake rescue, landmine clearance, agriculture pest control & soil sampling. [IMPACT LAB]

  THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

  •  Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024 was ‘Brain Rot’- defined as “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state resulting from watching to much ‘trivial or unchallenging’ content online,” such as TikTok videos. And a recent Chinese university study claims that bingeing short-form videos creates “functional brain differences among more addicted participants, including tendency for excessive social comparison and envy while watching, which could over time, lead to potentially harmful changes and reshaping brain structure. [SCIENCE FOCUS.COM]
  • “AMERICA IS NOT A BOARDING HOUSE FOR THE WORLD. We are a sovereign nation and it’s about time we started acting like it. There are now upwards of 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S., of which some 400,000 with criminal records have so far been ordered to be deported after having been released by federal immigration courts. Dept. of Homeland Security has some 2,000 federal agents attempting to track them down, while most are living, working, going to public schools, and being given drivers licenses, in most states without voter ID requirements. Estimates are that over 60% are committing crimes and/or plotting ‘terrorist’ attacks in America. Meanwhile, border fences to our north and south are a joke, even while we’re still sending money to Egypt and Mexico to help them build fences on their southern borders.” [IMPRIMIS.HILLSDALE.EDU]