You can improve your meetings by telling people to leave smartphones and laptops outside.

Fed up with his staff constantly checking emails and alerts on their smartphones, Paul Devoy decided in September to ban all phones, tablets and laptops from meetings.

Consequently, the head of Investors in People, the UK body that sets workplace standards, says meetings have become much more productive as attendees are entirely focused.

The distracting pull of digital devices and the detrimental effect that has on our ability to concentrate is well documented. In one Stanford University study, people who regularly attend to electronic alerts and messages do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who concentrate on doing one thing at a time. It is not the technology that is at fault but our inability to manage it.
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Car companies will have to decide who their self-driving vehicles are going to kill in the event of a crash, philosophers have warned.

Self-driving vehicles are now being widely adopted, and are likely to soon become the norm — partly because they will lead to fewer crashes. And the advantage for drivers is clear, allowing them to switch off and have their car arrive at their destination without expending any thought or effort.

But their manufacturers will have to tell the cars which sets of people they are going to kill when the cars do crash, according to a new paper. The cars that generally will allow you to sit back in leisurely comfort might one day have to drive you into a wall and kill you.

Some accidents will be “inevitable”, the authors note. In that case, “some situations will require AVs to choose the lesser of two evils”, according to a paper by Jean-Francois Bonnefon at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and his two co-authors.
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