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The world envies Swiss chocolate, army knives, and now . . . interest rates? Swiss National Bank, Switzerlands central bank, moved interest rates to zero this week, a reduction of 25 basis points, and a notable detraction from other central banks around the world, such as the Federal Reserve in the U.S. and the Bank of England in the U.K. In a statement, the Swiss National Bank said that the move was made in relation to declining inflation worriesand that its expecting the economies to buckle under the volatility created, in part, due to the Trump administrations trade policies. With today’s easing of monetary policy, the SNB is countering the lower inflationary pressure. The SNB will continue to monitor the situation closely and adjust its monetary policy if necessary, to ensure that inflation remains within the range consistent with price stability over the medium term, the statement read. The global economic outlook for the coming quarters has deteriorated due to the increase in trade tensions. In its baseline scenario, the SNB anticipates that growth in the global economy will weaken over the coming quarters. Inflation in the U.S. is likely to rise over the coming quarters. In Europe, by contrast, a further decrease in inflationary pressure is to be expected. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Federal Reserves latest meeting wrapped up this week with no change in interest rates, despite pressure from the White House and others to lower them. Fed Chair Jerome Powell and other Fed governors have been reluctant to do so, as inflation data still has not gotten close enough to its 2% target, and employment data has remained positive. Across the Atlantic, however, another European country, Norway, also cut rates this week. And some experts think that the Swiss could go even further, instituting negative interest rates at some point this year. There are risks that the SNB will go further in the future if inflationary pressures dont start to increase, and the lowest the policy rate could go is -0.75%, the rate it reached in the 2010s, Swiss National Banks Chairman Martin Schlegel told CNBC on Thursday. But what I can say is that going negative, we would not take this decision lightly.
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An unlikely body byproduct may be able to help doctors diagnose Parkinson’s Disease early. According to a new Chinese study, which was published in Analytical Chemistry, ear canal secretion, or ear wax, contain chemical compounds which can be telltale signs of Parkinson’s. During the study, researchers examined ear canal secretions from 209 people. About half (108 of the participants) had Parkinson’s. In their examinations, scientists were able to identify four volatile organic compounds (VOC) that were notably different in those with the disease. Those compounds, or biomarkers, were ethylbenzene, 4-ethyltoluene, pentanal, and 2-pentadecyl-1,3-dioxolane. The scientists then trained an artificial intelligence olfactory (AIO) system on the biomarker data. And once training was complete, the AIO system was able to successfully determine which patients had Parkinson’s and which did not. The system was accurate 94% of the time. Currently, Parkinson’s is a tough disease to diagnose. According to Mayo Clinic, it requires expensive imaging, neurological tests, blood tests, genetic testing, and more. And often, a diagnosis is still often not conclusive. Likewise, treatment is a work-in-progress, with current therapies aimed at slowing progression rather than curing it. Therefore, ear wax testing could be a breakthrough first-step screening tool that’s inexpensive, noninvasive, and accessible. The researchers who worked on the study say the findings are a major step in Parkinson’s early detection, which currently, doesn’t exist, but that more research is needed. This method is a small-scale single-center experiment in China, study coauthor Hao Dong said in a press release.Hoa Dong continued, The next step is to conduct further research at different stages of the disease, in multiple research centers and among multiple ethnic groups, in order to determine whether this method has greater practical application value.
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Not long ago, a client of minelets call her Mayashared something that struck me. I had a rare Sunday with nothing urgent on my plate. My kids were with their grandparents. My inbox was quiet. I could have done anything. Instead of feeling relaxed, I panicked. I literally didnt know what to do with myself. She laughed softly but tears were in her eyes. I realized . . . I dont know how to exist without a task list. If Im not accomplishing something, I feel like I dont matter. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Maya isnt alone. In my coaching work, Ive heard this story many timeswomen who have full, meaningful lives yet feel theyre only as good as what they checked off today. In a culture that rewards output and treats busyness like a badge of honor, its easy to confuse productivity with worth. But what happens when you slow downor are forced to? Who are you without the to-do list, the perfect calendar, and the high performance? This article invites you to pause and honestly examine where your worth may be tied to how much you get done. Its about recognizing patterns that keep you in constant motionand beginning to loosen their grip so your value is rooted in something more lasting. Warning signs you might be outsourcing your self-worth to productivity You dont have to be burned out or in crisis to be stuck in this trap. Often, its invisibleespecially when things seem to be going well. Here are some subtle signs: You feel anxious or restless when youre not actively getting something done. You judge your days success by accomplishments, not feelings. You feel guilty or uncomfortable during downtime. You struggle to enjoy activities unless theyre productive (reading must educate, exercise must burn calories). You only feel good about yourself when exceeding expectationsat work or home. Another client, Elenaa physician and mom of threesaid, I know rationally that Im a good mom and doctor. But the only time I feel that way is when Im accomplishing something measurablepublishing, presenting, finishing charts. Otherwise, I feel like Im failing. Elena wasnt asking to do less. She wanted to feel enough even when she wasnt at full throttle. That distinction matters. Reclaiming your self-worth doesnt mean abandoning ambition. It means building a foundation where your identity isnt tied to output highs and lows. Why this runs so deep Tying worth to productivity isnt a personal flawits shaped by powerful cultural forces. We live in a society that prizes output, where worth is measured by results, not relationships or inner experience. Women are socialized to be competent, accommodating, and endlessly availableto anticipate needs, keep things running, and never drop the ball. Add motherhood, with its endless work and little feedback, and its easy to internalize that your value depends on how much you handle without breaking. The pandemic intensified this. With work, school, and home merging, many working moms became the nerve centermanaging logistics, meals, meetings, and everyones emotions. The doing never stopped. And when people praised our resilience and ability to keep it together, we absorbed the message that being useful was what made us worthy. The costs of outsourcing your worth This isnt sustainable. Even if it works temporarily, it erodes well-being. Your sense of self rises and falls with accomplishment. Burnout looms as rest feels like failure. Disconnection creeps inyou struggle to be present with loved ones unless everything is tied up. When things go off script, disappointment turns to shame, as if falling short means youre fundamentally flawed. Most damagingly, this mindset convinces you rest, joy, and self-compassion are rewards to be earned, not essential parts of being human. When worth is always up for reevaluation, peace remains out of reach. What reclaiming your worth looks like This work is slow and layerednot a quick fix or a slogan. Its a recalibration of how you relate to yourself. Start here: 1. Notice the NarrativesPay attention to thoughts that arise when youre not productive: I should be doing more, Im falling behind, I dont deserve to rest yet. Notice whose voice this echoesa parent, boss, or cultural script? Naming these is the first step to disarming them. 2. Redefine SuccessCreate space for a fuller definition of success: being present for bedtime without planning tomorrow, holding a boundary at work, or letting something be good enough. Reflect daily: What felt aligned? When did I feel like myself? Where did I honor my values? 3. Practice Being, Not Just DoingChoose small moments to simply be: sit with coffee without scrolling, walk without exercising, and rest without earning it. Your nervous system may resist at firstthats normal. Over time, youll build capacity to sit with yourself without judgment. 4. Anchor to Identity, Not OutputAsk: Who am I when Im not performing or producing? This can feel scary but also freeing. You are more than a multitasking manageryou are a person with humor, intuition, creativity, and resilience. Begin rooting your worth in being human, not heroic. One client, a lawyer and mom of two, shared: I still work hard, but now I can pause during the day to breathe. I let dishes wait without calling myself lazy. And strangely, I feel more powerfulnot lessbecause my worth isnt riding on every task. Being enough High-achieving moms are admired for how much they handlebut that admiration can come at a cost. Beneath competence and reliability often lies a quiet desire: to feel whole even when nothing is getting done. You dont need to give up your drive or goals. But you deserve a life where worth isnt constantly measured: a life where rest is allowed, not earned; where joy has space without justification; where being enough isnt something you proveits something you simply trust. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Exclusive Interview With Ciscos Jeetu Patel Data centers are popping up all over the world to support the quickly growing demand for all kinds of AI apps and services. Cisco, of course, is no stranger to the data center, and its been working hard over the past few years to make itself a vital part of the AI technology stack. I asked Cisco EVP and chief product officer Jeetu Patel how he sees the current situation in generative AI, and about how his company fits into the picture. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you give me your 30,000-foot view of the transition to generative AI? Were now moving from this mode of chatbots intelligently answering questions for us to us now moving into a mode where agents are conducting tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans. As that happens, theres going to be an augmentation of the capacity of billions and billions of agents thatll actually get added on over the course of the next few years. But the requirements that you have around low-latency, high-performance, high-energy-efficiency infrastructure, as well as around safety and security so that the user can establish trust with these AI systems, is going to have to be fully reimagined. Can you describe in simple terms how Cisco plays in the AI tech stack? At the very baseline, we build our own silicon and ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] for the network itself. I think were the only non-Nvidia silicon provider that is part of Nvidias reference architecture where our networking is tied with their GPUs and we actually make sure that those work together in a reference architecture that an enterprise can deploy. We then have our own systems, which are the physical boxes for the networks and the servers on the compute side, and the optics and the optical systems that actually can do ultra-long haul data center interconnect, as well as interconnect between clusters. We then provide the safety and security platform thats needed to secure AI as wellwere one of the largest security players in the market. We provide a data platform in Splunk. Were actually building our own bespoke custom models for security and networking. You mentioned latency as a key challenge. How critical is response time for AI applications? If it takes three seconds for an AI voice agent to respond to you, you know its a robot and you dont want to talk to it. But if you do it within 500 milliseconds, you have a very different kind of behavior from the human. In our user testing, outside of efficacy, latency is one of the most important things. It has to be interruptible and it has to have enough training on EQ [emotional intelligence] and sentiment analysis, so that if youre sounding annoyed, it doesnt say, Hows the weather today? How do you handle the security challenges with multiple AI models? Most of these models are putting their own safety and security guardrails in the models. But models can get tricked through jailbreaking techniques. Weve built a product that not only does the visibility of what data is flowing through the model and when the model is getting fine-tuned, so you can do a continuous validation. . . . We validate the model within a matter of minutes through an algorithmic red-teaming exercise rather than it taking weeks or months for companies to validate the model. We jailbroke DeepSeek within 48 hours. We can take that model and then create runtime enforcement guardrails for every application developer. The end outcome is that no developer has to rebuild the security stack every time they build an application, and no model provider needs to be responsible for every single way that a model can be jailbroken. So every app developer building on top of DeepSeek will benefit from this pool of knowledge that Cisco knows about how to jailbreak the model and how to protect against that? Thats exactly right. We believe that you need a neutral party that provides a common substrate of security for every app developer, every model builder, every agent developer, so that the developer can innovate fearlessly. Are AI companies putting big data centers in the Middle East because they have plenty of power and room to grow, or is it to better service customers in that region? Its literally both. You dont have enough power to fuel all the demand for AI right now. The amount of usage that OpenAI is getting right now is literally like breaking the internet. They came up with $20 a usertheyre losing money on $20 a user, from what the industry says. So they added a plan for $200 a user. My guess is theyre going to lose money at $200 a user. They have a plan for $2,000 a user. They will lose money for $2,000 a user. Tha’s not a bad thing. It tells you that there is intrinsic demand. The demand for data centers is going to be insatiable for a very long time. As models get more efficient over time, youll have small models with very large context windowsyou might have a million-token context window, very small model, very small data set with a very small footprint to be able to get the inference done. But were not quite there yet. Is it because of inference costs that they cant make money? Whats the big cost driver? Right now its the usage and the cost of GPUs. Its expensive. But the beauty about this is its the wrong thing to focus on to get a company to profitability at this stage. What they should focus on is the acquisition of as many users as possible so that they can have the daily workflow fusion of ChatGPT for both consumers and enterprises. Once that happens, they can figure out a way to optimize later. But right now, starting to optimize would be putting cycles in the wrong thing. There are two dimensions that are a really good signal for the AI industry: Nvidia is wildly profitable, and ChatGPT is losing money. Both those things tell you the future of AItheres such insatiable demand that even at a very high cost, people are buying GPUs and theyre willing to lose money because the adoption is so high. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Why OpenAI and Microsofts AI partnership might be headed for a breakup AI is supercharging war. Could it also help broker peace? AI tools collect your data across devices. Here’s how to be selective about what you share The debate over state-level AI bans misses the point Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Rewards programs are getting revamps all over the place. Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase announced major changes to its Chase Sapphire Reserve rewards credit card. That announcement came shortly after competitor American Express teased an upcoming overhaul to its premium Platinum rewards card. And now, one of Americas most popular cruise lines, Carnival, has announced it will radically shake up its rewards program come 2026. Heres what you need to know about Carnival Cruise Lines upcoming overhauled rewards program. Bye-bye, Very Important Fun Person (VIFP) Carnival Cruise Lines current rewards and loyalty program is called the Very Important Fun Person (VIFP) program. The program has been in existence since 2012 and is beloved by many Carnival Cruise enthusiasts. One of the reasons frequent Carnival customers love the VIFP program is its simplicity. You earn points based on how many days you cruisethats it. Theres no complicated earning structure or confusing rules. The total number of these points based on the total number of days cruised slots you into one of five groups: blue, red, gold, platinum, or diamond. The higher the group (diamond is tops), the more perks you get, including everything from free bottles of water to priority reservations at Specialty restaurants. However, Carnival has now announced that the VIFP program is being discontinued. Its last day of operation will be May 31, 2026. Hello, Carnival Rewards Carnivals VIFP program is being replaced with a new rewards and loyalty program called Carnival Rewards. The program will officially launch on June 1, 2026, and it represents a radical departure from the current VIFP program. One of the biggest changes to the new Carnival Rewards program is that points are no longer earned based on how many days you cruise with the line. Instead, points will be earned based on what you spend with Carnival Cruise Line. This spend includes the cost of tickets, drinks you buy on board, and even what you spend in the ships casino. Points can also be earned through the use of a new Carnival Rewards Mastercard, which will be debuting. However, you wont just be collecting points to move up the group rankings anymore. The new Carnival Rewards program will use a dual-earning structure. The dollars you spend will earn you both stars and Carnival Rewards points. The stars will dictate which group you are slotted intothere are only four this time: red, gold, platinum, or diamond (blue is going away). The more prominent the group, the better perks you get, such as embarkation and debarkation priority, if you are a member of the diamond group. The Carnival Rewards points you earn can be redeemed for anything from cruise fares, transfers, onboard purchases, and more. Why is Carnival revamping its rewards program? The business answer to this question is that Carnival Cruise Line likely believes that the revamped rewards program will lead to a better bottom line. As points and group tiers are now dependent on what you spend, customers who are keen to collect Canrival Rewards points may be more willing to spend more onboard to keep earning those points. But Carnival would likely argue that the revamped program is now a little fairer than its current VIFP program. Under the VIFP, Carnival customers would receive the same amount of rewards regardless of whether they paid for the lowest or highest class of cabin on the ship. Thats because the rewards were simply linked to the number of days cruised. The new program will mean that customers who book higher-priced cabins will now earn a higher number of reward points. But there is some bad news for customers under the new Carnival Rewards program, no matter how much they spend: the new status tiers they earnred, gold, platinum, and diamonddont last forever. Under the VIFP program, when a customer earned a status, they could only move up, not down. That means someone who earned diamond status would keep it for life. But the new status program will see customers lose their status after two years. And the points earned to achieve a status must be earned within a two-year period; otherwise, they do not count towards a status upgrade. In a FAQ about the new rewards program, Carnival says that this move is consistent with loyalty programs across the travel industry. The company says it recognizes that change can be difficult, but the current program based on cruise frequency makes it difficult to properly recognize our loyal guests. Carnival stock price still well below pre-pandemic levels The owner of Carnival Cruise Lines, Carnival Corporation & plc, filed its most recent earnings report on March 21 for the first quarter of 2025. The company announced that its Q1 revenues increased by over $400 million from the same quarter a year earlier, reaching $5.8 billion. At the time, Carnival Corporation & plcs CEO, Josh Weinstein, boasted that the quarter was truly characterized by outperformance. That growth is something investors are undoubtedly happy to see, especially after Carnival, like all other cruise lines, took a major hit in 2020 following the outbreak of the pandemic. In January 2020, Carnival Corporation & plcs stock (NYSE: CCL) was trading at above $50 per share. But by April, it had fallen to below $8 per share. As recently as October of 2022, CCL stock was trading below $7 per share. However, the stocks fortunes have improved as the cruise industry has slowly recovered from the pandemic’s impact, receding from peoples memories. As of yesterdays close, CCL stock is trading at above $23 per share. However, that is still down more than 5% since the beginning of the year. We wont know whether Carnivals new rewards program will have a material impact on the companys business, and thus its stock price, until it launches next year.
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E-Commerce
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