You could easily spend months on something that doesn’t matter, or on something that doesn’t make you happy. Most of the time, the problem isn’t even your job or your colleagues. It’s because you aren’t clear on your objectives and you can’t isolate what matters from what

doesn’t. Knowing your objectives is like having a North Star you can follow.

This principle is at the core of the “Objectives & Key Results” (OKRs) system, which was made popular by Google. The company reached a stage in its development, about a year into its existence, when it needed a better way to manage itself as it kept

growing. They chose OKRs and have been using them ever since. OKRs had actually been around for a long time under other names, like strategic

planning execution.

But to this day, this incredibly

powerful tool, although increasingly popular, remains misunderstood.

OKRs is often confused with key performance indexes, or KPIs. KPIs tell you how you’re doing. It’s a benchmark. But the O in OKR, which stands for objectives, leads to the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?” It starts at the top, where the answer might be something like, “Make our shareholders more money”. Then it gets passed on to the level below, where the OKR for the head of

marketing, for example, might be, “Be the number one brand in our field”.

In the end, every level of the

company defines concrete objectives that support the top-level objective.

That’s why at Google, employees’ OKRs are accessible by all their

colleagues. You can look up the CEO’s OKR or your boss’s at any time. This allows employees to know why they’re coming to work in the morning. Everyone knows how their OKRs feed into the company’s.

This isn’t to say KPIs are bad. Actually, KPIs and OKRs work really well together. KPIs allow you to benchmark how you’re performing on your OKRs. But OKRs force you to ask, “Why?” Are you pursuing objectives what will “move the needle” for your company? Are you supporting the business’s growth?

Before even jumping into OKRs, start-ups and large organisations alike should therefore be careful that they’ve worked out the fundamentals of their strategy. But even when that is clear, there are four common failures to watch out for when implementing OKRs.

One, not being clear enough and not being accountable enough. Two, not knowing who owns the OKRs. Three, leadership not following up. And four, choosing the wrong

OKRs.

The objectives should not be too easy – they should be inspiring. Moreover, the reason behind each objective should be clear. Let’s say your objective for your website is “achieving a 20 per cent conversion rate”. Why? Why does this matter? If I ask a company “why” and they can’t answer, then the objective is wrong.

This is why OKRs aren’t a standalone topic. They are an extension of growth. OKRs force you to focus on the tangible things you need to accomplish to say you have met your objective. And if every team in your company does that, everything falls under the same objective. That’s the beauty of this

system. Everyone is accountable and everyone works in unison.

Hai Habot is a tech executive from Silicon Valley. Has been practising and teaching OKR at top accelerator programmes, including Google Launchpad and dtac accelerate.

Telegram chief Pavel Durov thanked Apple and the California-based company’s top executive Tim Cook from his verified Twitter account for “letting us deliver the latest version of @telegram to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks.”

A day earlier, Telegram accused Apple of blocking its updates for users worldwide after Russian authorities imposed a ban on Telegram for refusing to hand over keys to decrypt messages.

In April, a Moscow court banned the popular free app following a long-running battle between authorities and Telegram, which has a reputation for securely encrypted communications.

Telegram refused to provide Russian authorities with a way to read communications over its network as Moscow pushes to increase surveillance of internet activities.

Russian authorities ordered domestic internet service providers to block the app, causing disruption of other services but failing to shut down Telegram in the country.

On Monday, Russia’s communications watchdog said it had requested Apple block push notifications for Telegram users in Russia, which would mean users would not receive alerts for new messages and thus render it less useful.

The watchdog also requested Apple no longer make the app available for download in Russia.

Telegram lets people exchange messages, stickers, photos and videos in groups of up to 5,000 people. It has attracted more than 200 million users since its launch by Durov and his brother Nikolai in 2013.

Priced up to 3,699 yuan ($578), the Mi 8 Explorer Edition is equipped with a transparent glass back panel that allows consumers to peek into the insides of the phone. The move is part of Xiaomi’s broader push to build up its image as a pioneer keen to experiment with cutting-edge smartphone design.

Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi, said it is also the first Android smartphone that comes with infrared cameras for face unlocking and gesture controls, a method that is used in its rival Apple Inc’s iPhone X.

“We are constantly pushing the technological envelope of smartphones. That is what drives us forward,” Lei said at a product launch event in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

The new handset came as Xiaomi is gaining strong momentum in overseas markets. In the first quarter of this year, it saw an 88 per cent year-on-year growth in global shipments to 28 million units, with the uptrend rising to more than 999 per cent in Europe, according to data from market research firms IDC and Canalys.

The launch came at a time when the eight-year-old company is reportedly considering delaying the market debut of its blockbuster Hong Kong listing by one or two weeks to make it move in line with the issuance of Chinese depositary receipts, a form of equity that will allow Chinese investors to gain exposure to foreign-listed shares.

The Beijing-based company is reportedly scheduled to issue CDRs in Shanghai on July 16, after pricing CDRs and share sale in Hong Kong on July 9. Xiaomi declined to comment on the specific timetable.

But Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Chief Executive Charles Li Xiaojia said on Thursday: “I believe Xiaomi would make the market debut of its highly-anticipated IPO in no time, though I don’t know how the approval process of its IPO application is going on.

Xiaomi filed an application for its HK IPO earlier this month, in what could become the world’s biggest flotation since 2014. The offering is said to value the company at as much as $100 billion.

His death was announced Saturday in a Facebook post by a friend, Leonard Herman.

“RIP dear friend,” Herman wrote of San Francisco-born Dabney.

“Your legacy will live on a long time!”

The New York Times on Thursday cited confirmation from Dabney’s wife that her husband died on May 26 from cancer.

Electrical engineer Dabney and Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in June 1972 and began shipping “Pong” arcade machines later that year, according to the company’s website.

The game was a digital spin on table tennis, with players using joy sticks to slide on-screen paddles to serve and return balls represented by squares of light.

“Pong” became a sensation and coin-operated machines could be found in pubs, bowling allies, and shopping malls, as well as arcades.

California-based Atari and Pong have been credited with helping lay the foundation for the multi-billion dollar video game industry existing today.

“Ted Dabney, who we lost on Saturday, designed the incredible, true genius circuit behind ‘Computer Space’ and ‘Pong,’ which truly and directly has its beautiful tendrils in every pixel you will ever see,” video game designer and industry icon Jonathan Seamus Blackley said in a tweet from his official account.

“Think of him today, and thank him.”

No one was in the patrol car when the collision took place in the late morning, the Laguna Beach Police Department said in a message posted along with photos on Twitter.

“When using Autopilot, drivers are continuously reminded of their responsibility to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle at all times,” a Tesla spokeswoman said in response to an AFP inquiry.

“Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn’t make the car impervious to all accidents.”

Responses to the police department Twitter post ranged from thoughtful analysis of the accident to mistrust of self-driving cars.

“For automation to learn from mistakes, their developers need to admit making them,” read a comment tweeted from the account of @SafeSelfDrive.

“Human error behind the wheel has been replaced with human error behind keyboard.”

Tesla chief Elon Musk complained in a recent earnings call that accidents involving self-driving cars get sensational headlines while the potential for the technology to save lives is downplayed or ignored.

Whether an Autopilot feature was engaged when a Model S collided with the rear of a stopped fire truck in the US state of Utah on May 11 remained to be confirmed.

According to local media, police said the woman at the wheel of the car claimed it was in a self-driving mode and that her attention was on her phone.

“It’s super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the (approximately) 40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage,” Musk said in a tweet in mid-May.

“What’s actually amazing about this accident is that a Model S hit a fire truck at 60mph (96 kmh) and the driver only broke an ankle.”

Among accidents to make headlines was a fiery March crash in California that involved its “Autopilot” feature.

The US National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident, which led to the death of a 38-year-old father of two, Walter Huang.

Huang’s hands were “not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision,” Tesla said in a blog post.

Uber put a temporary halt to its self-driving car program in the US after a March accident in Arizona that resulted in the death of woman pushing a bicycle in a street.

The deal struck by 23-year-old Karim Baratov, who immigrated to Canada from Kazakhstan, also resulted in a fine that “encompasses all his remaining assets,” the US Justice Department said in a statement.

Baratov has been in American custody since being extradited from Canada last year on a US warrant for hacking, commercial espionage and related crimes.

US authorities allege Russian intelligence agents hired Baratov and another hacker to carry out attacks on Yahoo from 2014 to 2016.

The data breach compromised 500 million Yahoo accounts and is one of the largest cyberattacks in history.

“The sentence imposed reflects the seriousness of hacking for hire,” said prosecutor Alex Tse.

“Hackers such as Baratov ply their trade without regard for the criminal objectives of the people who hire and pay them.”

Targets included Russian and US government officials, cyber security, diplomatic and military personnel, journalists, companies and financial firms.

“It’s difficult to overstate the unprecedented nature of this conspiracy, in which members of a foreign intelligence service directed and empowered criminal hackers to conduct a massive cyber-attack against 500 million victim user accounts,” said John Bennett, FBI special agent in charge for the San Francisco field office.

A team from Germany, the United States and France taught an artificial intelligence system to distinguish dangerous skin lesions from benign ones, showing it more than 100,000 images.

The machine — a deep learning convolutional neural network or CNN — was then tested against 58 dermatologists from 17 countries, shown photos of malignant melanomas and benign moles.

Just over half the dermatologists were at “expert” level with more than five years of experience, 19 percent had between two and five years’ experience, and 29 percent were beginners with less than two years under their belt.

“Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN,” the research team wrote in a paper published in the journal Annals of Oncology.

On average, flesh and blood dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of skin cancers from the images, compared to 95 percent for the CNN.

“The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists,” the study’s first author Holger Haenssle of the University of Heidelberg said in a statement.

It also “misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma… this would result in less unneccessary surgery.”

The dermatologists’ performance improved when they were given more information of the patients and their skin lesions.

The team said AI may be a useful tool for faster, easier diagnosis of skin cancer, allowing surgical removal before it spreads.

There are about 232,000 new cases of melanoma, and 55,500 deaths, in the world each year, they added.

But it is unlikely that a machine will take over from human doctors entirely, rather functioning as an aid.

Melanoma in some parts of the body, such as the fingers, toes and scalp, are difficult to image, and AI may have difficulty recognising “atypical” lesions or ones that patients themselves are unaware of.

“Currently, there is no substitute for a thorough clinical examination,” experts Victoria Mar from Monash University in Melbourne and Peter Soyer of the University of Queensland wrote in an editorial published with the study.

And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots — called “DNA barcodes” — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?

That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.

For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.

The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

Simpler, cheaper 

To understand the answer, one has to understand DNA barcoding. Animals have two kinds of DNA.

The one we are most familiar with, nuclear DNA, is passed down in most animals by male and female parents and contains the genetic blueprint for each individual.

The genome — made up of DNA — is constructed with four types of molecules arranged in pairs. In humans, there are three billion of these pairs, grouped into about 20,000 genes.

But all animals also have DNA in their mitochondria, which are the tiny structures inside each cell that convert energy from food into a form that cells can use.

Mitochondria contain 37 genes, and one of them, known as COI, is used to do DNA barcoding.

Unlike the genes in nuclear DNA, which can differ greatly from species to species, all animals have the same set of mitochondrial DNA, providing a common basis for comparison.

Mitochondrial DNA is also a lot simpler, and cheaper, to isolate.

Around 2002, Canadian molecular biologist Paul Hebert — who coined the term “DNA barcode” — figured out a way to identify species by analysing the COI gene.

“The mitochondrial sequence has proved perfect for this all-animal approach because it has just the right balance of two conflicting properties,” said Thaler.

‘Neutral’ mutations

On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.

On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.

“It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain,” Thaler said.

In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

What they saw was a lack of variation in so-called “neutral” mutations, which are the slight changes in DNA across generations that neither help nor hurt an individual’s chances of survival.

In other words, they were irrelevant in terms of the natural and sexual drivers of evolution.

How similar or not these “neutral” mutations are to each other is like tree rings — they reveal the approximate age of a species.

Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?

Darwin perplexed 

Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

“Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study.

“In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.”

But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best.

“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle.

“It is more likely that — at all times in evolution — the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently.”

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

And yet — another unexpected finding from the study — species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.