Robert M. Ewers in Nature:

The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds. The 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 min; t-test, t = 2.91, P = 0.007). For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled. For the audience, this is exciting news. Boring talks that seem interminable actually do go on for longer.

He also gives some good advice on giving a good talk:

To avoid banality, speakers should introduce their objectives early on and focus on pertinent information. They should avoid trite explanations, repetition, getting bogged down by irrelevant minutiae and passing off common knowledge as fresh insight.

This is some dystopian stuff.

Amazon Uses a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses:

Amazon is not the only company that relies on what publicists call “employee advocates.” Lizz Kannenberg, the director of brand strategy at Sprout Social, which advises companies on social media use, said that employee advocacy had developed over the last three to five years.

Bromwich, J. E. (2019, August 15)

This is 100% the fault of June and not the user:

June CEO Matt Van Horn says that owners, not the oven, are at fault. “We’ve seen a few cases where customers have accidentally activated their oven preheat via a device, figure your cell phone,” he tells The Verge. “So imagine if I were to be in the June app clicking recipes and I accidentally tapped something that preheated my oven, we’ve seen a few cases of that."

Carman, A. (2019, August 14). Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.