Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for September, 28, 2019

Learning about the meaning of work from the world's largest refugee camp; Amazon is drafting facial recognition laws for proposal to legislators; Selling merchandise online without keeping inventory; Google News reviewing article previews in France; and tips for debt reduction

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What Can the World’s Largest Refugee Camp Teach Us About the Meaning of Work? - This article describes research by Harvard's Reshmaan N. Hussam, who plans to study "the misery of joblessness and the value of work" at a refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, where 700,000 Rohingya people are living after fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The people, who were subsidence farmers, have gone from full employment to unemployment at massive scale, and many have sunk into despair. Along with several colleagues, Hussam is planning research that will compare groups among people who received an unconditional monthly stipend and others who received the same amount of money, conditional on performing 12 days of work. The people with the work-stipulation will be further divided between those with a set schedule, and those with ad-hoc scheduling. Hussam says that there is a good deal of research to suggest that work is more than a source of income, adding that, "It gives you a sense of identity, of purpose, of a larger goal. It gives you an opportunity to build a social life." The assigned work will be to survey community members about how they spend their days. A pilot study was run with 300 households earlier this year, and found that, "Refugees who worked had significantly lower rates of depression and illness and more positive social interactions. Working also increased their sense of control, especially among those who lost a family member to violence in Myanmar." Discussion question for readers: How could Steem help researchers to learn about the value of work, and how could it help refugees like these to realize a sense of purpose in their own lives (assuming that they have access to cell phones and/or computers)? The link also contains a video.

Amazon wants Congress to regulate its facial-recognition technology, but with laws it drafted - According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon's public policy team is currently drafting laws to govern the use of facial recognition technologies. It is apparently a regular practice for Amazon to draft proposed laws and pitch them to legislators. The article suggests that this could be a preemptive move to avoid having more aggressive regulations imposed. Amazon was asked for comment, but did not offer an immediate response.

This 31-year-old sold $700,000 of stuff online without buying any inventory - Manchester, England, based Chris Wane, launched five online stores that made use of "drop shipping" before succeeding with his sixth. The article doesn't name his online property, but says it's like an online general store, and it makes use of Shopify for $29.95 per month. It also lists alternatives such as BigCommerce and Volume Vision, which can cost anywhere from $15 to $135, depending on the plan. Describing the way it works, the article has this: "'There’s an app called Oberlo, which allows you to add products from AliExpress to your Shopify website,' Wane said. 'You basically find products, import them to your store, change the description so that they look more professional, and change the price.'" It also says that he uses facebook ads to reach consumers. With his online store, Wane reports that he has sold $700,000 worth of merchandise with a profit of $125,000. Wane says that his first five failures were because he didn't know how to use facebook to target consumers correctly. Carnegie Mellon's, Ari Lightman is quoted as saying that the seller just acts as a middleman, and never has to lay hands on the product.

Google removes news previews in France to avoid paying publishers - The company eliminated News completely in spain after the nation enacted a new law based on the EU's copyright directive, and now says that it will remove overviews in France, unless publishers give them explicit permission to include them. Many French publishers believe that Google is depriving them of clicks by showing the overviews in the search results, but Google said they are providing a service by indexing the links, and argues that the overviews help publishers.

STEEM Questioning everything reduced debt - In this post, @debtfreein2 offers two tips to explain how they managed to save thousands of dollars. First, the article suggests going through bank statements, identifying all of the automatic microtransactions, and eliminating the ones that are not needed. Second, it suggests questioning everything by calling service providers and asking them to lower rates. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @debtfreein2.)

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