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Can I Still Work From Home? Goldman Sachs Sticks to Office Plans in Hybrid Era - Bloomberg

Firms or managers toying with a full-time return face an uncomfortable reality, experts say: Without significant pay incentives that only the richest firms can offer, staff are increasingly likely to look elsewhere. For everyone else, wholesale changes to workplace culture are needed to retain and attract the best.

What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick? - The New York Times

A 2015 study published in the journal Pain analyzed 84 clinical trials of pain medication conducted between 1990 and 2013 and found that in some cases the efficacy of placebo had grown sharply, narrowing the gap with the drugs’ effect from 27 percent on average to just 9 percent. The only studies in which this increase was detected were conducted in the United States, which has spawned a variety of theories to explain the phenomenon: that patients in the United States, one of only two countries where medications are allowed to be marketed directly to consumers, have been conditioned to expect greater benefit from drugs; or that the larger and longer-duration trials more common in America have led to their often being farmed out to contract organizations whose nurses’ only job is to conduct the trial, perhaps fostering a more placebo-triggering therapeutic interaction.

Cold and flu tablets can SHRINK the brain and slow down thinking | Daily Mail Online

Dr Shannon Risacher, the university’s assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, said: ‘These findings provide us with a much better understanding of how this class of drugs may act upon the brain in ways that might raise the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia,’ ‘Given all the research evidence, physicians might want to consider alternatives to anticholinergic medications if available when working with their older patients. ‘The impact of these drugs have been know about for over a decade, with a 2013 study finding drugs with a strong anticholinergic effect cause cognitive problems when taken continuously for as few as 60 days. Drugs with a weaker effect could cause impairment within 90 days.’

From Casio's smoking ring to the iWatch

Founded in 1946 by Tadao Kashio, Casio didn't start out as an electronics company, but as the manufacturer of a plastic ring for smokers. The yubiwa pipe slipped onto a smoker's finger and held a cigarette, helping a smoker extract every bit of tobacco. […] Looking for a follow-up success, Kashio and his brothers started working on an all-electronic calculator.[…] turned Casio into a company that focused not just on producing electronics, but on setting itself apart from the competition through innovative design, specifically by working to make things more compact. In 1974, Casio entered the watch market with the idea that watches shouldn't be just timepieces. Its initial creation was one of the first watches with a liquid crystal display, […]"We saw demand for digital watches settle down in the '80s and Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, ‘a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.' We started talking about a multifunction, ‘time display plus other things, such as telephone number, memory and music alarm' strategy."