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By Staff Reporters

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MARKETS: Stocks ticked lower as investors fretted over an upcoming interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve and a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. With all the chatter of conflict in Europe, everyone’s watching whether oil prices will hit $100 a barrel—they didn’t budge yesterday.

CRYPTO: SEC Chair Gary Gensler said thr crypto firm BlockFi would pay $100 million to the SEC and 32 states over charges that it had violated securities law. The penalty is the agency’s largest ever against a cryptocurrency company. BlockFi, a banklike crypto company backed by Peter Thiel, didn’t admit or deny the SEC’s findings but did agree to stop opening new lending accounts to customers in the US.

METAVERSE: For doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals who’ve spent the last few years hunched over laptops smiling pleasantly into a Zoom meetings, burnout has been pervasive. Zoom fatigue is now a widely recognized work-induced malady studied by university researchers, and many remote workers say they have trouble balancing work and their personal lives. With images on screens surrounding remote healthcare workers like a labyrinthine maze of fun-house mirrors, it might seem like the last thing a burned out medical provider needs is to strap on a VR headset to detach from the rigors of the digital medical workplace.

• Nevertheless, some health care organizations are transporting their workers to the metaverse—a network of connected, 3D, virtual environments where people can interact through avatars and spatial audio—as a means of combating stress. But, for any organization curious about the metaverse, Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication and the founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, advises having a specific task in mind, such as addressing burnout or building camaraderie. “VR wins when it solves a hard problem,” he said.

• The broader question of how organizations will further incorporate virtual reality into their mental health programs and rapport-building exercises is largely unanswered at this point, he added. Bailenson believes VR is a “home run for clinical use cases.” But “for this general burnout, it’s probably going to be a good tool for some people, but not a magic pill.”

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Filed under: Alerts Sign-Up, Health Economics, Information Technology, Investing, Sponsors | Tagged: BlockFi, DJIA, FOMC, Gary Gensler, Jeremy Bailenson, metaverse, NASDAQ, Peter Thiel, S&P, VR, zoom |