Category: 21st Century Sideshow

I’ve attended many conferences, but this one had the strangest session I’ve ever seen

LAST SPRING I COVERED the HR Transform conference in Las Vegas for a website I founded and used to edit — TLNT.com. I also attended HR Transform last year, and it’s a smart conference that’s clearly on the rise. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a cutting-edge event in the HR and talent management space. When

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It never ends — yet another use for AI and ChatGPT: Getting out of a parking ticket

THERE SEEMS TO BE NO END to the creative (some might say strange) uses for Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. Here’s a new one I had not heard of before: appealing a New York City parking ticket. Wilfred Chan, writing in Fast Company, told his tale in a story titled I asked ChatGPT to contest my parking ticket. What followed

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Silly surveys we could do without: Insights into improving employee “bio-breaks”

Copyright: wrightstudio

FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE IS NOT a publication I’ve spent much time with, but since they have a section on their website titled Work Life, it seemed like a periodical that might have some interesting articles worth sharing here. So far, I have not been disappointed. That doesn’t mean everything in Fast Company’s Work Life is great, because it’s not. There’s a definite Jekyll and Hyde quality

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Another use for AI and ChatGPT – writing better fortunes for Fortune Cookies   

I LIKE FORTUNE COOKIES almost as much as I like Kung Pao chicken, but the actual “fortunes” leave a lot of room for improvement. You know what I’m talking about — “fortunes” that say things like: A friend is a present you give yourself. All your hard work will soon pay off. Believe in yourself and others will too. Depart not from

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Heres’s a Reminder Why You Shouldn’t Listen Too Closely to What Critics Say

BACK WHEN I TAUGHT college part-time, I told my opinion writing students about the struggle I had with movie and television reviews. I was usually disappointed when I watched something after reading a positive review because it seemed whatever the critic praised was never quite as good as they said it was. Bad reviews just

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500 intriguing new ways to end a letter or email, according to our AI overlords 

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

I DON’T KNOW IF this is a personal quirk or if others have this happen, but I bump into all sorts of odd and/or amusing content as I look for things to share on this blog. Most of the time, I couldn’t tell you how I found this kind of stuff, but here’s a good example of something interesting and amusing that I found recently.

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Yes, Today’s Crazy Job Listings REALLY Have Gone Off the Deep End

I’VE SEEN A LOT of job listings over the last few years, so why am I surprised at some of the preposterous skill requirements that some hiring managers seem to be looking for? I shouldn’t be — but then I saw this one. Here’s what was listed as the No. 1 required skill for a

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Is “Ghosting” a Big Problem? Well, I Was Ghosting Back When Ghosting Wasn’t Cool

WHO SAYS THERE’S no such thing as “fake” news? I’m reminded of this whenever I read about how the “ghosting” trend (people skipping job interviews, failing to show up when they get hired, or bailing from a new job with no warning) is disrupting recruiting and hiring, because the more I hear about it, the more

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Smartphone Addiction: It’s Problematic, Self-Destructive, and Taking Over Our Lives

People are in denial about their smartphone addiction. That’s what I take from a recent survey from KDM Engineering titled Smartphone Etiquette that hit my email recently. As I read the findings, all I kept thinking was, “This doesn’t surprise me at all.” Here are a few of the topline findings: A whopping 92 percent of Americans believe

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Summer Reading: The Best Dr. Seuss Book Is One You May Have Never Heard of

EVERYBODY SEEMS TO HAVE their favorite book by the late, great Dr. Seuss. But picking the “best” Dr. Seuss book isn’t easy. According to The Washington Post, Dr. Seuss’s 45 plus published books have been translated into 17 languages and have sold 650 million copies in 95 countries. A number of them have also been turned into

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