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To see more of his innovative and elegant pastries, follow… via #Instagram Blog

To see more of his innovative and elegant pastries, follow @cedricgrolet on Instagram. The very best part of Cédric Grolet’s (@cedricgrolet) job? Creation. “I’m in a perpetual process of creation,” says the 32-year-old award-winning French pastry chef, who lives in Paris. “I look for ideas every day so that I never get bored. Everything that surrounds me — what I can taste, what I can see, what I can smell — there’s no limit. And that enables me to be creative.” As for his dreams for 2018, Cédric is on a mission to open his own bakeries around the world.

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Becoming the Subject of Your Own Life with @delphinediallo To… via #Instagram Blog

Becoming the Subject of Your Own Life with @delphinediallo To learn more about her life and work, follow @delphinediallo on Instagram. Photographer and activist Delphine Diallo (@delphinediallo) has been unpacking her identity her entire life. Born in Paris to a French mother and Senegalese father, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York. “I have always been fascinated by improving my understanding of consciousness through the years,” says Delphine. “All my work is about study.” And her self-portraiture is central to that study. “Self-portrait is the door where your spirit reveals itself in different forms: the eyes, the attitude, the complexity of the person can be discovered through self-portraiture,” she says. In her work, she feels called to frame herself and her subjects as the protagonist…

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AR Studio Now in Open Beta, World Effects Rolling Out for Creators via Facebook Developers Blog

Since launching in closed beta at F8, we’ve seen a strong response from the 2000+ creators using AR Studio – building fun, animated frames, masks, and interactive AR experiences. We’ve been working hard to give them even more powerful tools, and open them up to more people. Starting today, we’re expanding availability of the platform and the AR Studio creative tool to all third parties.

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Spreading Cheer with a #flowerflash in New York City To keep up… via #Instagram Blog

Spreading Cheer with a #flowerflash in New York City To keep up with all of Lewis’ flower flashes, follow @lewismillerdesign on Instagram. After finishing big events, florist Lewis Miller (@lewismillerdesign) often found himself wondering: How else could he reuse all these flowers? “I was walking down the street one day and I saw a typical New York City trash can, overflowing with garbage and spilling onto the sidewalk,” says Lewis, who’s run his floral business for 15 years. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if that were all flowers?” So, the #flowerflash was born, and in the wee hours of the morning after an event, Lewis and his team load up their van and head out to trash cans, bus stops and lampposts throughout…

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Combustible cigarettes kill millions a year. Can Big Tobacco save them? via The Economist Business

BESIDE a serene lake in Switzerland sits a modern glass building called the Cube. Wide-leafed tobacco plants grow in the lobby. In one room machines that can “smoke” more than a dozen cigarettes at a time dutifully puff away, measuring the chemicals that consumers would inhale. The research centre is run by Philip Morris International (PMI), which sells Marlboro and other brands around the world. The facility’s purpose is not to assess the risks of smoking, but to determine whether this huge cigarette-maker might get out of selling cigarettes altogether.André Calantzopoulos, PMI’s chief executive, talks about moving to a “smoke-free future”, with the firm’s business comprised entirely of alternatives to cigarettes. “We are crystal clear where we are going as a company: we want to…

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An experiment with in-home deliveries is under way via The Economist Business

AFTER staying at home one afternoon for a delivery of discounted toilet disinfectant that never came, Valentin Romanov, a Stockholm IT manager, installed a special lock on his flat’s entrance. When no one is in, deliverymen unlock the door and slip packages inside. Four months on, Mr Romanov has doubled his spending online and says he cannot imagine life without in-home deliveries. These are sweet words for delivery firms and online retailers, Amazon included, that are setting up partnerships with lock manufacturers to overcome a big hurdle for e-commerce.Conventional deliveries fail so often that a parcel is driven to a home an average of 1.5 times in the Nordic region, says Kenneth Verlage, head of business development at PostNord, a logistics giant operating in Denmark,…

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Intangible assets are changing investment via The Economist Business

WHEN you work as an equity analyst at an investment bank, your task is clear. It is to comb all the statements made by corporate executives, to scour the industry trends and arrive at an accurate forecast of the company’s profits. Achieve this and your clients will be happy and your bonus cheque will have many digits.But is all this effort worthwhile? Not as much as it used to be, according to Feng Gu and Baruch Lev, writing in a recent issue of Financial Analysts Journal*. The authors imagined that investors could perfectly forecast the next quarter’s earnings for all companies. They then assumed that investors bought all the stocks that they expected to meet or beat the consensus of analysts’ forecasts; and that investors…

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Have yourself a dismal Christmas via The Economist Business

ONLY an economist would think to ask whether Christmas is efficient. In 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then a professor at Yale University, turned a lunchtime conversation with colleagues into a paper entitled “The deadweight loss of Christmas”, which argued that, no, it is not. That gift-giving might actually be bad is the kind of opinion which breeds a deep mistrust of economists—loathing is perhaps too strong—among those not schooled in the dismal science. It is also just the sort of analytical insight on which economists pride themselves: counterintuitive, irreverent and interesting. But they should perhaps be less pleased with themselves. The way they think about the most festive time of the year reveals something important about the shortcomings of the field’s approach to human behaviour.Mr Waldfogel’s…