HR managers can stem workers' mounting dissatisfaction, but they say they need better tools to do it.

You'd be forgiven for feeling a little burned out from hearing about burnout. For years, experts have beensounding alarms that modern workers are struggling with career-sinking levels of chronic exhaustion and other issues.

So when Charlie DeWitt, vice president of business development at Kronos, a workforce management software company, declares that "employee burnout has reached epidemic proportions," you may think you've heard it all before. But according to new research by Kronos and Future Workplace, burnout really is getting even worse and more widespread, and so are the consequences of it. This time around, there are some surprising reasons why—and a few steps employers can take right away to turn things around.

The Overwhelming Data On Burnout's Big Consequences

Kronos and Future Workplace surveyed 614 U.S. human resources professionals at organizations with 100 to over 2,500 employees. The result: 46% of respondents blame burnout for up to half of their staff quitting each year.

These HR managers and executives believe that three factors are contributing to all that burnout:

• Unfair compensation (41%)
• Unreasonable workload (32%)
• Too much overtime or after-hours work (32%)

The survey also found that the bigger the company, the more likely it is to burn you out. Larger organizations are more likely to have exhausted employees. Fifteen percent of HR leaders at companies with more than 2,500 employees say burnout causes 50% or more annual turnover, as opposed to 10% turnover at smaller firms with less than 500 on staff.

The consequences by now are clear. Burnout, according to this and other surveys, leads first and foremost to lack of engagement (another HR crisis many of us have grown fatigued of hearing about). No wonder that Gallup's most recent survey on the issue found only 33.1% of respondents reporting that they're engaged at work, while a 2015 study by the Marcus Buckingham Company, a management consultancy, found only 19% of U.S. employees saying they're involved, enthusiastic, and committed to their jobs.

Nowhere has this so-called (forgive me for this one) epidemic of burnout been clearer than in health care. Fast Companypreviously reported on the results of a survey of nearly 9,000 registered nurses, more than one-third of whom said they wanted to quit their jobs. The nurses listed a variety of reasons, including not enough time spent with patients, inadequate pay, long hours, an unmanageable workload, not enough staff, and lack of support from management. This prompted Marcia Faller, RN, PhD, chief clinical officer at AMN Healthcare, to tell us at the time, "The harm to the health-care industry goes beyond the numbers. The loss of this intellectual asset may be acutely felt in terms of quality of care and patient satisfaction."

Faller's assessment could apply just as well to any employer, no matter the industry. All those bad feelings—whether workers feel taken for granted or overworked and underpaid, or any combination of similar grievances—certainly back up findings from yet another recent study, by Oregon State, in which the majority (52.1%) of people who quit their jobs burn bridges in the process—by walking out without notice, trying to harm the company, or some other display of ill will.

The Culture Component

The Kronos/Future Workplace survey found that while burnout due to too much work and too little pay is a problem, those are not the only contributing factors. There are some others that HR professionals can control, without having to pump more money into everyone's paychecks.

Among them: poor management, employees seeing no clear connection of their role to corporate strategy, and a negative workplace culture. Fast Company recently reported that corporate culture and values are becoming ever more important, both in terms of making a workplace inspiring and how much it resonates based on how much a person earns.

In both instances, culture can make or break retention efforts—especially if a company's core value (explicitly or otherwise) is rewarding working long hours or being on call all the time.

In a 2015 survey of nearly 9,700 full-time workers by the professional services firm EY, some 50% of managers worldwide reported working over 40 hours per week, and four in 10 say the hours they put on the clock have increased in the last five years. And managers with kids at home may be faring worse: Those who are full-time working parents (41%) have seen their hours increase more in the last five years than those who don't have children (37%).

How AI Can Help

"Advances in technology are keeping employees working around the clock without additional pay incentives, causing them to burn out and quit their jobs," Dan Schawbel, research director of Future Workplace, tells Fast Company. "Leaders need to start having conversations around work flexibility with their employees or will otherwise have to suffer high attrition rates as a consequence."

But not all technology is contributing to burnout, according to the Kronos/Future Workplace survey. Nineteen percent of HR professionals believe their current work is suffering from a lack of automation. More specifically, they reported their current technology requires them to tackle repetitive administrative tasks manually. That takes away time from coming up with ways to fix bigger issues like retention.

The good news is that artificial intelligence and automation are already at work in this arena, almost exclusively in recruiting and hiring. We're only now seeing startups taking on more daily challenges. The question now is whether the pressure that technologies take off of human workers will be passed onto the workers themselves.

On that question, some are optimistic. Glassdoor's chief economist Andrew Chamberlain believes that 2017 will be the year human resources transforms itself into "people science," in part by tapping into workforce data and analytics. Chamberlain says that metrics tracking every stage of an employee's progression through a company, from onboarding through training and promotions, can prove to be major assets in accomplishing this makeover.

The additional challenge the Kronos/Future Workplace survey uncovered was the lack of budget to spend on automated tools to make HR professionals' jobs easier, or to spend on programs to boost engagement and retention. This includes the 16% of respondents who cite lack of funding as the primary obstacle for retention efforts over the next 12 months, and the 27% who say limited resources are holding back much-needed HR-related tech efforts.

But even if budgets don't suddenly balloon in 2017, allowing AI-powered solutions to take work off employees' (and HR managers') plates, a little extra investment may go a long way. In his report on future workplace trends, Chamberlain argues, "There are many low-hanging fruits today for better data science in HR," and they don't cost much.

Sixteen of the 17 hottest years have occurred this century and we know it's because of a changing climate, not changes in weather.

NASA and NOAA jointly reported that 2016 was the warmest year on record. That's no surprise, as the first six months of the year were all exceptionally warm.

Yet the news is significant for what it says about global warming: Before 2016, the 10 hottest years on record occurred since 1998. And last year was the third consecutive year a new global annual temperature record has been set.

Despite the ongoing record-breaking heat planet-wide, skepticism over anthropogenic, or human-made, global warming remains. To some, the fact that meteorologists can't reliably forecast the weather days in advance is proof that scientists can't predict the Earth's climate years or decades from now.

Why do scientists like myself have confidence in predicting record heat months in advance, and how do climate predictions differ from weather forecasting?

Weather Forecasts Based On Motions Of The Atmosphere

Weather forecasts take into account the evolution of weather systems, including atmospheric pressure patterns. Atmospheric pressure is the force exerted by the weight of air molecules. Areas where air is sinking have high pressure, and generally warm and fair weather. Low pressure systems, also known as cyclones, occur where air rises and typically produce cooler and wet weather.

The accuracy of weather forecasts up to around two weeks out has improved greatly in recent years. But atmospheric systems don't persist long, and predictions beyond that time frame become much less accurate.

For example, forecasting the formation of low-pressure systems (cyclogeneis) and movement across the east coast of the U.S. presents a challenge. A deviation from the forecast track of just 50 miles east or west can mean the difference between a blizzard, a windswept rainstorm, or a near miss.

Similarly, forecasts of the amount of rain that will fall on a hot summer day can be very uncertain. When a forecast calls for "isolated thunderstorms," factors controlling storm formation, such as daytime heating, moisture flow, and upper-level winds, are expected. But those factors evolve considerably during a given day, making it difficult to forecast total rainfall, particularly over a small area. So it's hard to say if it will rain on your parade or the next town over—the term "pop-up" thunderstorm is apt.

That's not to say that warnings for severe storms should not be trusted. In this case, forecasts of severe weather are often made for larger geographical regions, and only when the conditions exist. The factors that produce severe weather span a larger area compared with those leading to isolated storms. Technological improvements, including better radar and the use of supercomputers, are also leading to more accurate severe weather forecasts.

Role Of Ocean Heat

In contrast to forecasts based on the movement of transient weather systems, climate predictions around temperature and precipitation, for example, use completely different sets of data.

To forecast several months to several decades into the future, scientists make use of ocean variations, other natural factors (solar variations, volcanic eruptions), and the overarching influence from rising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere. These variables evolve and exert their influence over months and years, unlike atmospheric pressure patterns which can change within hours or days.

One important factor with an effect of several months to about a year is El Niño, the periodic warming of ocean temperatures across the tropical Pacific. This pattern of ocean warming and associated effects on the atmosphere exerts a strong influence beyond the tropics that can factor into climate predictions.

Data on ocean temperatures are critical because most of the sun's radiation striking Earth is absorbed by the world's oceans. Driven by this energy, oceans and the atmosphere distribute heat around the globe.

Years following an El Niño tend to be warmer than those with near-normal (also called neutral) or La Niña conditions. The presence of La Niña often results in a lowering of global temperature. This tells us that the relative amount of heat in surface waters of the tropical Pacific can be used to predict global temperatures several months in advance, which is exactly what happened in forecasting last year's record temperature.

In December 2015 the U.K. Met Office predicted that 2016 would be record warm, between 0.72 and 0.96 degrees Celsius above the long-term (1961-1990) average. Their announcement today that 2016 was 0.77℃ above average is within the predicted range. In early 2016 Gavin Schmidt from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies predicted that 2016 would be 1.3℃ above late 19th-century temperatures – remarkably close to today's reported 1.2℃ rise.

What about 2017? In its Jan. 12 update, NOAA forecasted a transition from weak La Nina to neutral conditions through the first half of 2017. La Niña's influence early in the year is central in predictions that 2017 will be slightly cooler than 2016, but still among one of the hottest years on record.

It should be added that the record 2016 warmth was not due to El Niño alone. Indeed, El Niño years are becoming warmer, as are those with a La Niña, due to the overall warming trend from rising GHG concentrations.

Combined Influence Of Human And Natural Factors Over Time

Beyond ocean effects, other natural factors are known to influence the rate of warming. Large volcanic eruptions, particularly those in the tropics, can have a cooling effect globally by blocking solar radiation. For example, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 resulted in a drop in the average global temperature of about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6℃).

Cooling, however, is typically short-lived and ends when the volcanic aerosols—the small particles that block sunlight—rain out.

Variations in solar output can also influence climate. The observed warming trend over recent decades, however, cannot be attributed to changes in the sun. The impact of solar variability on climate change is evident, but the effect of GHGs has been proven much more considerable in the short run.

Projections of warming at longer time scales—multiple decades or longer—are based on simulations by climate models and our understanding of how sensitive the climate system is to future increases in atmospheric GHG concentrations.

What models have shown is that future warming is expected to be dominated by the rising GHG levels as compared with the variations from internal ocean variability and other natural factors. The warming will be amplified by feedbacks involving the carbon cycle, atmospheric moisture and other factors. For example, water vapor is a potent GHG, so rising atmospheric moisture amounts will enhance warming. Also, emissions from the Arctic are a particular concern and threaten to switch the Arctic from a sink of carbon to a source.

Sixteen of the 17 hottest years have occurred this century. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that human actions are warming the planet.

At the same time, we continue to improve weather and climate predictions, which will lead us to a deeper understanding of climate system behavior over different time periods and across multiple spatial scales. This research will improve the accuracy—and confidence—in projections for the future.

The author is an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and manager of the Climate System Research Center. This story originally appeared at The Conversation.

To spread his message and rise to power, Trump relied on an open internet. Will his administration now kill it?

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, one of the biggest tech-related questions surrounding his administration is the future of net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama has taken steps to prevent internet service providers from favoring certain kinds of content over others, thereby preserving the core principles of a free and open internet. But so far, it's unclear whether Trump's future FCC appointees will pursue the same policies or adopt the more hands-off approach favored by many Republicans.

Either way, experts say, the new administration could have profound consequences for how consumers use the internet and how internet-based companies connect with their customers.

Signs of a major policy shift are already in the air. In a report issued last week—just 10 days before Trump is to be sworn in—the FCC warned that AT&T and Verizon may be violating net neutrality rules by privileging their own streaming video services over those from competitors. But a Republican member of the FCC quickly denounced the document as a "regulatory spasm" unlikely to have significance after Trump takes office.

Both companies also criticized the report, saying their zero-rating programs have been welcomed by their customers, even as a group of Democratic senators praised the FCC's ruling as a victory for consumers.

"This report evaluating whether zero rating plans violate net neutrality will help make sure the internet remains the free and open platform that it's always been," said Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, in a statement.

In the meantime, commentators on both sides of the debate are expressing skepticism that regulators will continue on the same trajectory under the new administration. Trump and other prominent Republicans have critiqued the FCC's policies as unnecessary regulation of a still-evolving industry, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, an Obama appointee, is slated to depart the commission upon Trump's inauguration.

That will leave the FCC's board of commissioners with a Republican majority and an impetus to reverse course. "This report, which I only saw after the FCC released the document, does not reflect the views of the majority of Commissioners," said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a Republican, in a statement. "Fortunately, I am confident that this latest regulatory spasm will not have any impact on the Commission's policymaking or enforcement activities following next week's inauguration."

Pai reportedly met with Trump this past weekend and has been floated as a possible candidate to replace Wheeler as FCC chairman.

A Non-Neutral Issue

In 2015, the FCC's commissioners enacted its current net neutrality policy, known as the Open Internet Order, in a 3-2 vote along party lines. The order asserted the FCC's right under federal law to regulate broadband internet similarly to traditional phone service, drawing praise from Democratic legislators and civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation. They had expressed concern that internet providers could slow or even block controversial content or content from publishers unwilling or unable to pay to have it expedited to consumers.

"The FCC did the right thing by adopting strong rules for a free & open Internet," Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, tweeted at the time. "This is a huge victory for the little guys."

But telecom industry groups and Republican leaders slammed the ruling as a regulatory overreach, while Trump warned in a 2014 tweet that neutrality regulations would be used to "target conservative media." Internet providers and trade groups sued unsuccessfully to overturn the order—a D.C. federal appeals court that had blocked previous net neutrality rules upheld the FCC's right to regulate broadband similarly to other telecom services—and urged Congress to limit the agency's authority.

Trump hasn't commented publicly on the issue since his election, nor has he indicated who he'd nominate to fill Wheeler's position or another open commissioner's seat at the FCC. But some of his top tech advisers have backed calls to reduce the telecom regulator's clout. Adviser Mark Jamison, an affiliate of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, seemed to call in October for sharply shrinking the agency. Internet mogul and Trump ally Peter Thiel has also questioned the need for net neutrality regulations.

"In terms of net neutrality, I think their intention is to deregulate the cable and telephone industry completely," says Ernesto Omar Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think that's their intention right off the get-go, and I think that's a fight that we'll have to engage in pretty quickly."

Traditionally, the FCC doesn't issue major new policies in the absence of a permanent chair, as will be the case after Wheeler's departure, but it's unclear whether the regulator will maintain that tradition under Trump, Falcon says. But any push to revoke the existing Open Internet Order would require a period of public comment and could potentially spur Congressional hearings as well, he says.

And while Republicans and telecom groups have publicly denounced the FCC rules, business groups are also averse to regulatory uncertainty and shifting legal frameworks, says Harold Feld, senior vice president at the pro-neutrality group Public Knowledge.

"Ted Cruz once said that net neutrality is Obamacare for the internet," Feld says. "That turns out to be true, in that it turns out to be something that's very complicated to repeal and replace, because the internet is critically import to everybody and businesses have invested lots of money in the understanding that this is a stable platform that's gonna have some kind of net neutrality."

A spokesman for the NCTA, an industry group formerly known as the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, declined to comment.

Trump in 2014 expressed concern about the rules stifling conservative voices, negatively comparing net neutrality to the FCC's onetime Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to present balanced coverage of controversial issues before it was rescinded under President Ronald Reagan. But more recently, Trump has repeatedly slammed mainstream media organizations for perceived bias against his campaign and rising administration.

"It is a totally one-sided, biased show—nothing funny at all," he wrote in a post-election tweet about Saturday Night Live, broadcast by the Comcast-owned NBC. "Equal time for us?"

And Trump and his supporters may now worry about ISPs discriminating against conservative publishers like Breitbart News, the controversial website where Trump senior advisor Steve Bannon served as chairman, Feld suggests.

"I can't see Trump or Steve Bannon—both of whom used unfiltered access to social media as a critical tool in their rise to power—want a situation in which the media companies they distrust like Comcast or AT&T can do what they like," Feld wrote in a December blog post. "While they will certainly be all for deregulating companies, they will want to keep the threat of regulation over their heads."

Will you rescue Cheez? Baobab Studio's interactive short Asteroids! encourages viewers' participation by tapping into their emotions.

When Eric Darnell talks about what makes for good storytelling, he knows of what he speaks. The screenwriter and director of all four Madagascar films and the director of Antz, Darnell has been studying what works and doesn't in stories for years.

But recently, he's found the silver screen somewhat constraining because the audience can't ever really interact with the story unfolding on it. That's why he's migrated to telling tales in virtual reality as the chief creative officer of Baobab Studios. Based in Redwood City, the startup has attracted a wealth of talent from throughout the film and games industries, and raised $31 million to pursue its goal of creating great VR stories.

Baobab's first piece, Invasion, is a six-minute film about invading aliens and the white bunny that sends them racing back to their home planet. Released last year, the movie is narrated by Ethan Hawke, and it went to the top of the VR charts, surpassing one million downloads.

Now the aliens, known as Mac and Cheez, are back in Asteroids!, which Baobab is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this week for HTC's high-end Vive VR system. The second "episode" in a series, Asteroids is a 10-minute interactive buddy film that takes us into space with our two alien friends. We explore the nooks and crannies of their spaceship and delve into the nature of friendship as the two pals squabble before ultimately demonstrating their mutual affection. These two are Laurel and Hardy-like bumblers. Mac is the OCD one, always working to make sure everything on board is spotless. When we meet him, he's cleaning a window, obsessively wiping the same spot again and again. Cheez, who is voiced by the actress Elizabeth Banks, is more of a slob. That conflict tends to result in Mac getting upset about the untidy state of the ship.

As the movie unfolds, we get a subtle lesson in how emotion and empathy impact story. And that's why Darnell left Hollywood behind for Silicon Valley; to him, VR is the best storytelling medium for adequately reflecting the science of communication.

"Because of the immersiveness of VR, and feeling you're really there, our goal is to have characters that are really compelling and invite you into their world and communicate directly with you," he says. This, he believes, allows the audience to develop a deeper sense of empathy.

In real life, we do all kinds of things that subconsciously signal our feelings or emotions. For example, Darnell explains, if you're having a good conversation with someone and you cross your arms, they likely will too. Similarly, if you watch two lovers having dinner together, they'll likely be mirroring each other's body position.

He mentions a study in which researchers found that if you're doing a sales pitch and quietly match the body pose of your target, they're 35% more likely to buy what you're selling.

All of that goes to show that there are powerful ways of communicating that we use without even thinking. The storytellers at Baobab are eager to tap into that. That's why, as you tour around Mac and Cheez's spaceship, one of them will probably mirror your body motions, maybe tilting its head like you.

Although Baobab has plenty of in-house video game expertise—including CEO Maureen Fan, former vice president of games at Farmville maker Zynga—the action in the studio's films isn't built around winning or finishing a mission.

The trick is helping viewers have realistic expectations as they strap on their headset and take hold of their controllers. If people imagine it's going to be like a game, they'll be disappointed. If they think it'll be like a movie, they won't expect to have any agency.

"It's not about solving puzzles or overcoming challenges," Fan says. "It's about you being part of [the story]."

The idea is to subtly encourage viewers to develop empathy for the characters, and then to turn that empathy into action. When Cheez is accidentally knocked out of the ship and into a nearby asteroid field, Mac realizes that all their petty differences matter little and that what's important is their friendship. Then a rescue gets underway.

This is where things get interesting, at least from a filmmaking perspective. The viewer, who always plays the role of a small robot on board the ship, is asked to participate—if they want to. "If you care enough about the characters," Darnell says, "you can step in and help [save Cheez]."

But you don't have to. If you do nothing, Mac will frantically try to bring his friend back on board by himself. If you do choose to help, the story is enriched in a way that's intended to suck you further in.

For example, Darnell explains, Mac will change his attitude from not taking you seriously to treating you like a member of the team. That's especially true if you do enough to actually save Cheez. "You [can] bring Cheez back from the dead with your little robot powers," Darnell says.

As the son of a doctor, Darnell spends a lot of time studying scientific research, and over the years, he's come to believe in the idea that storytelling is in our DNA. One of the chemicals our brains release when we're stressed is cortisol, which can be generated when we're exposed to stories.

But that's only true, Fan notes, if a story follows a certain structure, and that structure begins with creating empathy.

But Baobab can't know for sure that viewers are, for example, going to help Mac rescue Cheez, so the story must go on either way "because that's real life," Fan says.

Still, Darnell and his crew try hard to instill the desire in their viewers to take action, as it's simply more interesting and engaging. "A great piece of music depends on pacing and rhythm and structure, with everything building to [an] epiphany," Darnell says. "The same is true of storytelling."

Even, it seems, when the dialogue is in a foreign tongue. The Asteroids! characters communicate solely through alien-speak, which, according to Baobab, viewers should be able to follow without missing a beat. Darnell explains that he wrote an English version of Cheez's lines, which Banks used to infuse a certain emotion into her performance. "Then she'd take the alien language and give it the same intonation," Darnell explains. "The viewer will be able to understand by her intonation and the physical performance of the character."

Emotion, it's the universal language.

Even in the era of Super Mario Run, Nintendo is serious about pursuing its own vision and building its own hardware. Here's why.

Link, the elfin hero of the Legend of Zelda series, has been rescuing the princess for over 30 years and 17 games. With the latest installment, Breath of the Wild, he ventures to a new place: Nintendo's next-generation console, the portable Nintendo Switch.

After the tepid sales of Nintendo's Wii U, released for the holiday 2012 season, the Japanese game giant announced in March 2015 that it was working on new hardware that featured a new concept, codenamed NX. In October, via a teaser trailer, it revealed the Switch.

And last week, at an event in Tokyo, the company showcased the features of the device, games coming this year, and the all-important launch details. The Switch will be released March 3 for $300 and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the flagship game available on day one.

From the very first glimpses of the hardware via that teaser video, it was evident that Nintendo was once more embracing the blue-ocean strategy that has taken the company to uncharted waters far away from its competition in the gaming industry.

"Our competitors are going down their own strategy, Sony and Microsoft, arguably, very similar strategies," says Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. "They need to figure out how they are going to compete with each other, and they need to figure out how they are going to compete with us."

"From a Nintendo perspective, we believe in creating products and experiences that are unique and really can't be copied by our competition. That's our mentality. I don't really care what our competitors do. We need to do what plays best to our strengths, and what we believe is going to motivate the consumer to engage with our products."

Console To Go

Rather than take on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with another expensive box packing high-end processing power, Nintendo will release a device that looks like an iPad Mini tablet, but with detachable controllers on the sides. The whole thing goes in a dock, letting you play games on a TV as with past living-room consoles. But it can be removed to continue playing on the go—seamlessly, in mid-game.

That means that the Switch isn't just Nintendo's successor to the Wii U. It's also the company's newest handheld, following the successful Nintendo 3DS, which had sold over 60 million units.

Beyond launch details and upcoming game releases, the presentation from Tokyo last week included multiple surprises. The Switch's detachable controllers, Joy-Con, include motion sensors, allowing for experiences reminiscent of those found on the blockbuster Wii console. One of them has an embedded camera that can capture images of the world and recognize gestures. The other has an NFC chip for use with Nintendo's popular Amiibo smart figures. Both the left and right Joy-Con controllers have "HD Rumble," letting them provide intricate vibration feedback all along the unit to different areas of your hands.

Inventive little details like these are what has made Nintendo...well, Nintendo. With 1996's Nintendo 64, for instance, the company added an analog thumbstick for more precise control. Other gaming companies soon released controllers with their own analog sticks. 2006's Wii would bring motion control to gaming, and both Microsoft and Sony would try to capitalize on its success with their own motion-sensing technologies. But neither Microsoft's Kinect camera nor Sony's PlayStation Move would have anywhere near the Wii's impact.

Nintendo's focus on innovation extends all the way back to its founding in 1889, as a maker of Hanafuda—playing cards, with floral illustrations, used for Japanese games. "Nintendo was the first to have plastic-coated Hanafuda cards," Fils-Aime says. "We were the first to have a licensing arrangement with another IP holder, which happens to be Disney, to have branded Hanafuda cards. So we're always thinking about how to be differentiated and not do what our current competition is doing. That is a core part of our history."

More recently, through 30 years of consoles and handhelds, Nintendo has developed innovative hardware and then leveraged it to create new and memorable gaming experiences, from Tetris to Super Mario 64 to Wii Sports. Even its failures, such as 1995's idiosyncratic Virtual Boy, are products that only Nintendo could have come up with.

The Switch is new proof that this approach lives on, even though the company is now also releasing its own smartphone games, in partnership with mobile gaming company DeNA, starting with last year's Miitomo and Super Mario Run. (Nintendo is also part owner of the Pokémon franchise, which made a mobile splash last year with Pokémon Go, developed by Niantic.)

"With Switch, you are able to bring the game anywhere you want," says Eiji Aonuma, a director and producer of previous Zelda titles and the producer of Breath of the Wild, via an interpreter. "And because we created a game that the users get really into, I am hoping that everybody will be able to bring it anywhere. They can start playing it at home and then bring it out to wherever they want to."

That's only possible because Nintendo kept Apple-esque control over the entire Switch platform. "People that work on the software and the people who work on the hardware all work in the same building," says Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and many other classic Nintendo franchises, via an interpreter. "So people that work on the graphics engine, the physics engine, the CPU, they all communicate with each other. Specifically speaking about Breath of the Wild, people working on the basic programming language were in close proximity with people who were building the system. And producers had opportunities to really check out and test out some of the interface."

The Making Of A Legend

Ever since the first Legend of Zelda for the original Nintendo Entertainment System console back in 1986, players have traveled through a world, found hidden places, and slain monsters. With 1998's Ocarina of Time, players finally got to journey in a 3D environment. In 2011's Skyward Sword, they swung the sword themselves, using motion controls. And now with Breath of the Wild they have freedom to truly explore.

For the first time, the entire land of Hyrule is seamlessly traversable. That cliff to your side? You can climb it. That volcano in the far distance? You can go straight there. You'll probably want to grab a horse first—the world is twelve times larger than the already huge Twilight Princess.

It was important to the team working on the game to instill a sense of freedom. "When we developed the very first Zelda, it was a game built with freedom," Miyamoto explains. "But as the Zelda series developed it became more and more like a singular, linear path. At one point I had people ask me, 'What do you think about games with freedom?' We decided to stop and go back to the origins of what really makes a Zelda game a Zelda game. It's the idea of freedom. Within that freedom, you decide where you want to go, how you want to tackle the game."

Such open gameplay is fitting for a device that gives players real-world freedom of their own. Using the Switch, they can game from their home or outside. They can show their friends the quest they are on, continue defeating enemies on an airplane flight, or solve various puzzles and riddles while hanging in a park.

Another unique thing about the Switch: It enables multiplayer gaming all by itself. The left and right Joy-Con controllers can be removed and turned sideways so that two players have their own small game controllers. Which means that you can challenge anyone you meet to play Mario Kart 8 on the fly. It's multiplayer console gaming anywhere, something that has never been offered by another gaming company.

Past And Future

The original Legend of Zelda starts with you walking Link into a cave where an old wizard gives him a sword. In the opening moments of Breath of the Wild, Link wakes up from a long slumber and soon meets a mysterious old man, who gives him a torch—telling him it can either be a weapon or light his way forward.

This homage to the original is not the first time the series has made call-backs to previous titles. Often, Zelda games feature reimaginings of previous enemies, dungeons, and other elements. And they usually have the hero Link rescuing the princess Zelda from the evil Ganon.

"I want to make sure the Zelda fans really love the game," says Aonuma. "That's one of the core thoughts when I am developing the game. I believe that when I create a Zelda title like that, then newer fans will come along and also enjoy the game. It doesn't necessarily happen that way; because the Zelda franchise has such a long history, a lot of new players think that you need to know the history to enjoy the new title. And getting rid of that doubt is one of the most difficult things."

One only needs to look at this past holiday season to see how much Nintendo capitalizes on nostalgia. The company's highest-profile release was the NES Classic, a shrunken re-creation of the original Nintendo console that comes with 30 games installed. It lets people who grew up in the 1980s relive the games of their youth on modern televisions—including the original Legend of Zelda—and even introduce them to their children. So many folks have found the proposition irresistible that Amazon was forced to run a banner across its shopping site alerting customers that the Classic was sold out.

But Fils-Aime argues that rather than relying on nostalgia, Nintendo wants to be a force that helps push gaming forward. "Our passion for innovation leads to such progress for the industry in total. Imagine the concept of a first-person-shooter game without the invention of the joystick," he says. "The fact of the matter is that if you look at all of the controllers out there, they may call it something else, but it's ABXY buttons and a directional pad. It has shoulder buttons. It has thumbsticks. These are all things we've driven into the industry."

"When we're developing hardware, we are not trying to cater a specific age range or demographic," says Miyamoto, who emphasizes that Nintendo aims to create a platform with universal appeal. But he adds that the company can't just keep doing what's worked in the past, or grow dependent on veterans such as himself and Aonuma. (Their combined Nintendo tenures add up to nearly seven decades of experience.) "It's...important to let the younger generation take the reins in our game development process, being really open to all of the ideas that the younger generation has," he says.

Brave New Nintendo

As Nintendo has become all too aware in recent years—a period when its financial performance has often disappointed—it's no longer just competing within the game industry. Its real rivals are all the other entertainment companies jockeying for people's time and attention. That's why it's breaking out of its own hardware ecosystem in a way that's new, most notably with its smartphone games, but also on other fronts.

Nintendo merchandise has always been out there, but now the company is working with more partners to spread its characters and franchises. There is the deal with Vans that resulted in Nintendo sneakers last summer. In partnership with Universal, Nintendo is also planning to open a Nintendo-themed area at the Universal Studios amusement park in Osaka in 2020. Outposts at Universal's Orlando and Hollywood parks will follow.

"We believe there is this symbiotic effect, whether you're engaging in our licensed merchandise business or mobile, that it all gets reinforced in the dedicated gaming experience," says Fils-Aime. "Our goal is to continue creating those type of examples, where you love a particular IP, you play it on your smart device, engage on the dedicated console, wear branded shoes—it all fits together."

The psychology reflected in Nintendo's new willingness to change with the times can't help but influence its games, even when they're new installments in venerable franchises. In Breath of the Wild, Aonuma says, "there is morning and night, as well as rain, snow, and different weather elements. Depending on the time of the day, you experience different things. So these changes are a big thing in this world. There is the physics engine too. So this overall direction that we created, it wasn't something I aimed for, but because of all the things that were involved, this continuous change is something we organically created."

He further explains, "This a game where I had to go back to zero and revisit the game and make changes again. I had to do that so many times. But honest to God, I never felt tired of replaying the game. And this is because every time I play it is a different experience. I would remember, 'Last time, I found this there, so I'm going to go back there.' And then I would go back and then I can't find it. And so I'm basically lost there, but then while I'm lost, I will find something new and then get sidetracked."

Like Link, Nintendo itself is about to explore the boundaries of gaming once again, with new ideas, new tech, and new gameplay. Along the way, it could discover untapped riches, a la the jewels that Link collects. Or it might be badly defeated in a boss fight against the monster that is the attention-drained public. Either way, the journey begins now.

The rise of collaboration tools and the mixed workforce of full-time and freelance staff that use them means more security risks.

These days every company is a tech company, thanks to cloud technology, social media, connected devices, and yes, automation and artificial intelligence.

As technology continues to power pretty much everything we do in ever more complicated ways, it's no surprise that CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the technology industry, projects that the global IT industry will grow 4.1% in 2017, making it a $3.5 trillion sector. CompTIA also estimates the IT industry's employee headcount at some 5.98 million workers, a cohort that includes technical positions like software developers and network administrators, as well as non-technical roles like sales, marketing, and HR, both full-time and freelance.

Of course, this upward trajectory isn't without challenges, and CompTIA's most recent report reveals two in particular that could impact vast segments of the global workforce—not just the folks working behind IT desks.

Sorry, But That Spam Filter Won't Cut It

For starters, there's the threat to information security that you probably already know about, especially after last October's cyberattack on Dyn, a company that controls a massive portion of the internet's domain name system. Experts were calling the DDoS attack the largest of its kind, and the outage affected major sites such as CNN, Reddit, Twitter, and Netflix. The perpetrator: a botnet made up of connected devices like DVD players, not computers.

Despite this and other massive data breaches at major retailers and hospital systems, "the headline-making breaches of the past three years have not put companies out of business, and research studies show that most firms are not fully prepared for a cyberattack," the report's authors write. What's more, CompTIA researchers found that this recent series of major security incidents aren't driving companies to overhaul their security measures.

Indeed, in a recent study by Intel Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 82% of the companies surveyed reported a shortage of cybersecurity skills in their organizations. And many had already paid the price: One in four confirmed that their organizations had suffered cyberthefts of proprietary data due to this lack of qualified experts on staff.

Bring Your Own Device's (Vulnerabilities) To Work

Compounding these growing threats are a couple of workforce trends that make them more likely—namely, the rise of workplace collaboration tools. CompTIA's report points out that as more workers take advantage of BYOD ("bring your own device") policies and use their own smartphones and laptops for work purposes, the use of project-management platforms and apps has risen in order to keep everybody connected.

A new study from Okta, an identity and device management provider, based on data from its own customers who generate an estimated million+ logins, found that more than 50% of apps accessed through its service are not provided by IT departments.

This means workers are using Okta to secure their personal apps and data as well. But among the business tools accessed, videoconferencing app Zoom, Cisco's Umbrella, and Slack topped the list. From this, it's not unreasonable to infer that a lot of employees are mixing business and play on their own devices, as well as those of their employers.

And the more companies rely on part-time and freelance talent to supplement their full-time staff, these vulnerabilities are likely to grow, CompTIA researchers warn. According to a survey commissioned by the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit organization that advocates for independent workers, and Upwork, the largest online freelance marketplace, this part of the workforce numbers 55 million strong, representing 35% of the total U.S. workforce. And among those who aren't currently freelancing, 81% said they would "be willing to do additional work outside of [their] primary job if it was available and enabled [them] to make more money."

Platforms like Upwork and Upcounsel make it even easier for more freelancers to connect with employers for project work, all of which CompTIA suggests could magnify the existing security issues. After all, freelancers may be even more likely than full-time staff to work remotely and rely on their own equipment, devices, applications, and platforms to accomplish their tasks.

Enter The Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, And The Risks They Pose

And let's not forget that many companies are starting to experiment with the use of artificial intelligence, both to automate certain tasks and to engage with customers.

Voice-activated digital assistants like Amazon Alexa can dim the lights in a conference room, explains Tim Herbert, senior vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA, but that's just the start. Any job functions that deal with high volumes of information and pattern recognition can deploy AI technology more deeply than before, he says. But keep in mind that was largely Internet of Things (IoT)–connected devices like these that last year's DDoS attack leveraged.

Herbert explains that just as communication and collaboration platforms, like Slack or HipChat, let users create custom bots to handle basic tasks inside companies, bots are being used outside companies, too. And while some brands are already finding success using chatbots for front-line customer support, all of these come with their own security risks. For instance, as machine learning gets better at making chatbots sound more like real people—and since they can be programmed with untraceable points of origin—the risk of phishing scams duping unsuspecting users is going up.

So what does that leave increasingly fretful IT teams to do? There are a few things.

Plugging The Holes As They Pop Up

Perhaps the easiest issue to tackle first involves the so-called "blended workforce." Herbert suggests that companies can minimize the security risks posed by contingent workers by taking steps before, during, and after engaging them.

"Similar to the hiring practices of full-time staff, companies should have a vetting and onboarding procedure in place for contingent workers," Herbert advises. That includes some basic, low-tech measures, like using reputable recruiters and making sure onboarding includes a review of the corporate security policy. "If there is the possibility [that] new intellectual property could be created by the contingent worker, an appropriate legal agreement should be in place," he adds.

Then, while the independent contractor is working for the company, Herbert suggests giving that worker dedicated, limited, and temporary login or access credentials. "Sharing passwords or accounts of full-time staff with contingent workers is a risky proposition," he cautions. "Access should only be granted to the work at hand."

Additionally, he recommends compartmentalizing corporate systems and files to prevent contingent workers from viewing sensitive information. "This is especially critical in the era of cloud applications, where it may be easy to provide blanket access," says Herbert. After they've completed the work, any logins, passwords, or access credentials should be immediately disabled.

As the workforce and work itself continues to undergo rapid evolution at the hands of technology, IT teams—and companies at large—will continue to have their hands full. They'll need to address skills gaps among their own employees, different modes of communication and collaboration with existing staff and customers, plus figure out how to implement AI. Each of these knotty issues comes with their own set of security questions.

As the CompTIA report's authors note: "As with any 'shadow IT' scenario, however, organizations must balance the potential benefits of greater worker productivity and job satisfaction with security and corporate IP risks." It's that cost/benefit analysis that's sure to be part of all business leaders' conversations—and IT managers' worries—in the months to come.

Thousands of women will be wearing pink cat-eared hats during the Women's March on Washington. We spoke to the women behind the phenomenon.

We're in a time of rapid, dramatic change. People are angry, and scared, and ready to fight for what they believe in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the organizing of the Women's March on Washington, a protest against the rhetoric used toward women and minorities in the last election cycle.

Cassady Fendlay, a spokeswoman for the organizers of the march, told the New York Times that they're expecting up to 200,000 participants at the D.C. march alone. There are over 600 sister marches organized in cities and towns all over the world. Planned for January 21, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, the protest has a clear mission: "In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join in diversity to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore."

Born from this protest was the Pussyhat Project, a movement with a mission to knit a pink, cat-eared hat for marchers in D.C. and cities across the country. The vision of cofounders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman borders on magical realism: a sea of pink, cat-eared hats forcefully marching toward the White House. The inspiration for the hats are the comments about sexual assault made by Trump in the infamous Access Hollywood video.

The project launched Thanksgiving weekend, an idea that grew from Suh's and Zweiman's recent introduction to knitting at their local L.A. yarn store, the Little Knittery. After hearing about the march, Suh, who is planning to attend, realized she had the basic need for a warm hat and a strong desire to make a statement.

"She thought if she could knit a hat, then other people could knit a hat and send them in," says Zweiman of her cofounder. "I thought about how this is an incredible advocacy project where all these people, who can't necessarily go to the front lines, can really show themselves and really have representation."

And from there, the project took off. Kat Coyle, who works at the Little Knittery and is a bit of a rock star in the knitting community, designed the simple pattern, allowing people of all knitting levels to be part of the project. While some knitters are making hats for themselves or taking orders, others are dropping hats off at one of the 100 drop-off locations around the country to then be flown to D.C. and distributed to marchers at no cost.

Knitting stores across the country are reportedly running out of pink yarn, and this project has grown to be bigger than either Suh or Zweiman ever imagined. As of January 19 (their most recent count), an estimated 100,000 hats had been knit, crocheted, or sewn, and gifted from knitters to marchers.

I spoke to Zweiman about the unexpected success of this project.

What was the thinking behind the Pussyhat Project ?

It was sort of a twofold idea. We were imagining this sea of pink hats making a really large statement. So, there was a big goal. I think having that visual creates an impetus for people to really get involved. For people who are knitters and not marchers, it's a way of representing themselves. To physically make something is really special in this day and age where a lot of stuff is very virtual. [The knitters] have the opportunity to send a note to a marcher, so they connect with someone directly if they want to. It's great for both introverts and extroverts.

It's also these knitting stores; what we noticed is that a lot of these knitting stores across the country work as these really beautiful little community hubs, and so in thinking about these hubs and these really wonderful spaces where it's predominantly women, these are already active participants. The project is creating real connections with people, physical connections, not just virtual ones.

What is it specifically about this project that is making people turn up?

Overall, this is an incredible advocacy project. It's giving visibility to all the people who want to show up. And I think that it's really special to make something physical and share conversation at the same time. We are opening it up for people to personally represent themselves through someone else, and support them, it's something a lot of people want to do. They want to be positive, and I think you can be politically active and positive at the same time.

How would you describe the knitting community this project grew from?

I am new to the knitting community, so I feel like I can't speak for everyone, but what I've found is that whenever I'm within a knitting community, it's extraordinarily supportive and positive. I'd say that knitters really care for and respect each other. Knitters are a very supportive, smart, active bunch, and they're a really good model for a great kind of community, and everyone is welcome.

There has been some criticism of the project. One Washington Post writer said the project "undercuts the message that the march is trying to send." What do you think about that?

It's important to understand that in this project, all these people who want to be at the march, who support women's rights, who can't be there (often because they're caregivers, which is usually women's work) or have medical issues, or financial issues or scheduling issues, are all showing up in the form of these hats. That's a very powerful thing—it's creating more representation.

This project is very much about creating connections among women on the local level, and it has galvanized people into action, even for the first time. We had a 70-year-old say, "I've never been political before, but now I am." That way of recognizing that being an activist can take many different forms is an important to recognize.

How has this project spread?

It's been a combination of a number of things. One is Kat Goyle who made the pattern and is our knitting instructor, she is really highly regarded. It also took off on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has been really good for conversation and news. And Instagram has been really great to show who is involved. From there media caught on.

I think this is different from a lot of ways that people have been active. I think everyone should stand up for what they believe in. We don't know the effects of what we put out there. If we knew, then we'd only do the things that had an effect. But I think that we're seeing the effect in the process of making these hats. That's something that we always like to witness, and that's really exciting.

Following the march, what's next for the Pussyhat Project?

Keep wearing your hats. Loudly, proudly for the next march. Wear it around town, wear it to the grocery store, talk about women's rights. Or if you're not going to wear it again, if it's not your style, give it to another feminist you know. You can also donate it to someone who needs the warmth of a hat, which would be great. There are so many things that these hats can do after.

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who filibustered for women's rights, reached out to us asking for a hat. We're really hitting on this note of potential for feminist activism. And it's really wonderful to have a physical symbol to show that. People as individuals are so powerful. People in the Pussyhat Project aren't just sending something along on the internet. They're connecting and creating communities, actively participating. We're trying to make a space so that everyone can do it.

You can look at it so many different ways. It can be seen as a huge art project or a huge installation of people or an architecture project or an urbanism project on how to connect people together. It's really exciting.

Seconds after our conversation came to an end, Jayna called me back to add:

We've been asked to be part of a permanent collection at Michigan State University's museum. They want to preserve this as an important piece of feminist history. Women in the U.S. have been using craft as a form of protest since the American revolution. We're part of a historical precedent, and I think it's really important to not undermine what's considered traditionally women's work. Thought and care and creativity goes into all these hats; knitters who are really experienced or who are new, they're really displaying that. And that is incredibly powerful.

Organizers have reason to exaggerate, but AI and eyes in the sky are starting to provide a much better estimate of how many people show up.

Public events are a numbers game. If a hundred people show up at a protest in Washington, D.C., who cares? But a hundred thousand? Okay, let's hear what they have to say. With a country fiercely split politically, each side will be bringing out as many supporters as they can today and tomorrow: conservatives with the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump on Friday, and liberals with the Women's March on Washington on Saturday. The high estimate for the Inauguration is 800,000 people, while 215,000 people have registered for the Women's March on the event's Facebook page. (There are also Women's Marches planned for other major U.S. cities.) Each side will have an incentive to exaggerate their turnout, and expect plenty of heated debate about the numbers this weekend. But technology is making it harder for them to stretch the truth.

We can expect especially accurate estimates for the Women's March in D.C., though the best count probably won't be out until several days later. Unlike Friday's Inauguration, which is a no-fly zone, the Saturday protest will be photographed from the air. At least one firm, Digital Design and Imaging Service (DDIS), will do a tally based on a combination of high-tech tools and grunt work.

The company gained notoriety (and the ire of organizers) for counting Glenn Beck's August 2010 Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial. NBC estimated 300,000 attendees, and Beck said there might have been up to 650,000. CBS, which hired DDIS to do a count, came up with 80,000 using a pretty thorough method.

Divide And Counter

For that rally, DDIS surveyed the National Mall before the event and produced a 3D map dividing it into different sections; it also estimated where people are most likely to congregate (like by the stage or under trees in hot, sunny weather). The company flew a tethered aerostat balloon carrying a nine-camera array a few hundred feet over the event to capture 360-degree panoramic images at various heights (to get different angles on the crowd).

Then came the grunt work: Counting heads in the photos. Fortunately, they didn't have to count every single person. Rather, DDIS categorized the grids by how densely people were packed. If there were 500 people in one grid, that count was multiplied by the number of grids that it estimated to be equally dense with people. DDIS used the same method for the Steven Colbert-John Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in October 2010 (estimated at 87,000).

It will fly again over the Women's March on January 21, providing counts for two media organizations, says company president Curt Westergard, without naming the clients. The technology hasn't changed much since 2010.

"Our 3D computer-generated, hand-counted polygon system is pretty well perfected. No evolution needed on that," boasts Westergard in an email. "Any advance would be airspace politics," he adds, noting that he won't be able to fly over the inauguration with a balloon (or drone). Westergard did fly over the site of Barack Obama's first inauguration, in 2009, but for security reasons (outgoing President Bush arrived earlier than expected) had to bring the balloon down long before the event started and the full crowd materialized.

The View From Space

Satellites will by flying over Trump's inauguration, as they did in 2009. Journalism professor Stephen Doig, one of the gurus of crowd counting, used an image from satellite company GeoEye to estimate a crowd of 800,000 people for Obama's first Inauguration. Official estimates for the event, though, were over twice as high, at 1.8 million, which may actually be impossible, say researchers. DDIS modeled how big a very tightly packed crowd of a million people would stretch back from the Capitol building along the Mall: It would extend across the Potomac River into Virginia.

Attendance at Trump's inauguration is forecast to be up to 800,000, according to the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Task Force, which supports the ceremony. When final numbers come in, the 800,000 estimated for Trump may also prove wildly optimistic.

DigitalGlobe, which bought GeoEye in 2013, will be releasing photos of the inauguration, as well as the Women's March; other satellite firms will likely be taking pictures, too. There are some drawbacks for shots from so high up—nearly 400 miles versus about 700 feet for a balloon.

"Although satellite imagery is a very good resource for crowd counting, using only satellite imagery is not going to be the most accurate method," says Charlie Loyd, imagery engineer at Mapbox, a mapping company that uses satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe. Its new satellites can capture details down to a resolution of about a foot (30 centimeters) across. "That's on the edge of what works reasonably well for crowd size estimation," says Loyd, in an email. "You still get problems like people standing in each other's shadows and therefore not being fully resolved." However, it's an improvement from the 20-inches (50cm) resolution in the 2009 photos.

AI To The Rescue?

Cutting-edge satellites, 3D modeling, and hand-counting people's heads make for an incongruous combination. The artificial intelligence wave that's sweeping across what seems like every business is finally coming to crowd estimates. In 2015, researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) debuted algorithms that proved to be as accurate as hand counting, and a hell of a lot faster. The first big test came in counting the turnout at a September, 2015 pro-independence rally for the Catalonia region of Spain. Researchers at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona provided 67 photos that together covered the entire crowd. Within a half hour, the Central Florida team had a tally: 530,000. That might be big by U.S. protest standards, but it's considerably less than the estimates given by the Catalonia organizers.

The Barcelona academics checked the results by hand-counting some of the images. "They were fairly close to each other, so that's why they didn't bother manually counting for all of them," says Haroon Idrees of the UCF team. Their system works on several levels, all based on machine learning—analyzing many photos of crowds to recognize how people may appear. If the crowd is small enough, like a few thousand, the system can often pick out individual's heads from an areal view. "You need 15 x 15 [pixels per person] or slightly more than that, to get good accuracy," says Idrees. This is where the accuracy roughly matches what a human can do, but it's far faster.

UCF's system can keep counting when the images are too poor for people to make sense of. "Even if the humans are not able to count by hand, our algorithms still give good results, because we can train our algorithms based on some blurred images," says Idrees. "The accuracy may go down slightly but still the accuracy will be better than human counting." The UCF effort can go even farther, sampling patterns of light and dark pixels, for instance, to make a guess at how many people are present in a photo where nothing that a human eye would recognize as a person is present.

UCF's system probably won't be used for the Inauguration or Women's march. The university provides the technology for crowd counting, but only works on specific projects when other people, like the Barcelona researchers, approach them. "Regarding the anticipated Washington crowds, we haven't been contacted by anyone so far," says Idrees.

The university's biggest collaboration right now is with a Saudi Arabian organization that counts crowds of worshippers visiting Mecca. The annual Haj pilgrimage suffers from unwieldy crowds that often break into fatal stampedes. It's one major public event where organizers are actually hoping and praying for a smaller turnout.

"Ghost restaurants" with no physical location are popping up across the country. Can a restaurant succeed if it's delivery-only?

Hungry New Yorkers ordering meals through such online services as Seamless or Eat24 order everything from sushi to burgers to tacos. But when they order from certain restaurants like Leafage and Butcher Block, they might not realize that those restaurants aren't restaurants at all. They are virtual eateries created by a company called the Green Summit Group that operates several food-delivery services out of central commissaries in midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago. In New York alone, Green Summit's brands offer all sorts of cuisine "concepts," including meatballs, salad/sandwich/juice, and burgers/grilled cheese.

Green Summit is just one example of a growing wave of ghost restaurants that skip the storefront and bring food straight to the customer. These places range from the David Chang-backed delivery startup Maple to ready-to-eat meal services like Munchery to new business models like the integrated kitchen/delivery firm Good Uncle.

The Rent Issue

For Green Summit, which has an exclusive agreement with Seamless/Grubhub for delivery, there's one major benefit to operating a virtual restaurant: You can't beat the cheap rent. The company's midtown Manhattan commissary at 146 East 44th Street has had a big advantage from the start: It doesn't have to devote square footage to customer seating and waiting areas.

In a phone interview, Peter Schatzberg, Green Summit's cofounder, says that a restaurant like Chipotle or Pret A Manger has to dedicate 75% of their space to seating, while 90% of their customers just grab and go. By comparison, a company such as Schatzberg's can open inside a kitchen with as little as 200 square feet of space and operate a viable restaurant business with a minimal footprint.

Schatzberg and his partner Todd Millman started Green Summit in 2013 with approximately $1 million of investment. Their first online-only concept, Authentic (which still operates, see sidebar), launched in August of that year. According to Schatzberg, the restaurant made $20,000 in its first week of sales.

"To the consumer, it's very much a kitchen," Schatzberg says. "There's an area with a grill, people working and portioning, and a room adjacent to the kitchen where orders are assembled. They're all made to order, and stations are set up by category. For instance, there's a sandwich area producing sandwiches for multiple brands. All the ingredients across brands are in the same areas, but you get specialization in staff where they focus on making salads and sandwiches, for instance. That's all they do. It makes a better quality product, which ties into economies of scale."

This business model works thanks to Green Summit's reliance on external food-ordering platforms. In New York, a person ordering from Green Summit's restaurants has to order through Seamless/GrubHub (which merged in 2013). The now joint company plays a crucial role in Green Summit's growth: GrubHub loaned Green Summit money for their expansion beyond midtown Manhattan. According to Green Summit, it pays GrubHub/Seamless the same commission rates as other restaurants.

While, hypothetically, it would be possible for Green Summit brand to set up its own e-commerce websites and avoid the third-party fees, delivery services such as Seamless, Eat24, UberEats, and Doordash effectively serve as gatekeepers for any urban restaurant hoping to build a delivery business in 2017. In big cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, most diners are more likely to open a delivery app on their phone than rummage through drawers for dog-eared delivery menus.

Not having an actual storefront means Green Summit can switch menus rapidly. Schatzberg mentioned, for instance, that the company quickly dropped a Middle Eastern concept for midtown Manhattan after encountering lower-than-expected sales.

It also means more versatility in the food they can offer. Similar or identical menu items show up across many of Green Summit's online storefronts, and largely hews to a template of delivery-friendly dishes like salads, sandwiches, and grain bowls.

"There's a lot of cross-utilization because at some point the universe of ingredients becomes finite," Schatzberg says. For instance, when poke, a Hawaiian fish salad, became popular, he says Green Summit could jump on the trend because most of the ingredients were already in house for an existing sushi concept. "You don't have to source new ingredients; you just train staff to cut fish differently or prep rice differently," he says. "That ability to maneuver and build new brands is exponentially easier on a cost basis."

Schatzberg estimates that it would cost traditional restaurants about $800,000 to test out new concepts like poke. Meanwhile, Green Summit told Crain's New York that it loses as little as $25,000 if a new menu flops.

While Green Summit declines to offer historical revenue information, the company confirms plans to expand to New York's financial district in February of 2017 and open a second Chicago facility in Q2 2017. Schatzberg says Green Summit aims to end 2017 with seven to eight locations and a run rate of approximately $25 million if same-store growth and location openings skew close to both projections and historical performance.

Marrying Restaurants With Logistics

Other companies in the ghost restaurant world are trying slightly different approaches. Maple, for instance (which Fast Companyrecently visited), and Sprig, have their own in-house delivery teams. But another startup is taking meal deliveries from commissaries one step further—and turning logistics into the center of the business model.

Good Uncle is a New York-based startup which is currently test-marketing at Syracuse University in upstate New York. The company sets up agreements with established restaurants with limited or no delivery service in Syracuse to license their recipes and then recreate them in the Good Uncle commissary. Users—college students are a current target market—then order meals through the Good Uncle app or through GrubHuband pick them up from one of several stops along a predetermined campus delivery route.

At press time, Good Uncle has licensing agreements with New York restaurants Croxley's Ale House, Ess-A-Bagel, Joe's Pizza, Sticky's Chicken Fingers, and No. 7 Subs.

The company recently raised $2.2 million; founder Wiley Cerilli is an early stage Seamless employee who later founded SinglePlatform before selling it for $100 million in 2012. Cerilli says Good Uncle's cooks use the exact same ingredients as the restaurants they license menu items from and train with those outlets' own cooks so dishes can be replicated as precisely as possible.

Good Uncle sells these meals at college student-friendly price points that range from $7 to $16 per item. And because customers pick up their food at a central pickup point, they pay no delivery fee.

According to Cerilli, the company keeps costs low through bulk delivery. In Syracuse, Good Uncle's drop-off points are mainly in front of dormitories. "If it's 6 p.m., they pick what they want to order, and the next page has a map showing the next delivery at the dorm will be at 6:45." He points out the efficiency of this system. "Instead of in New York, where you deliver to my 40-story apartment building and then go to my apartment, and leave the building after—that takes a lot of time." Good Uncle's model for their delivery-only restaurant, he says, is "almost a bus route for the food."

A Future In Profitability?

Unlike India's Dabba wallah system, which dates back to the 1890s, the concept of meal delivery is relatively new in the United States, only becoming widespread in the 1950s. Now, as the newest business models in this category, ghost restaurants are all grappling with a common quandary: How to turn a profit when the restaurant business is notoriously unprofitable and delivery is an inherently expensive operation?

A Cornell University study estimates that approximately 26% of restaurants fail in their first year of operations alone. While online delivery-only services might have lower overheads than a conventional restaurant, they miss out on the significant cash infusion that alcoholic beverage purchases provide... as well as the loss of walk-in foot traffic.

Leaked financials from the end of 2016 show just how tough a business this is. The documents revealed that Maple lost money on average on each meal in 2015, with the result of an operating loss of $9 million on $2.7 million in gross revenue. For 2016, the documents forecast operating loss of $16 million on top of $40 million revenue. Munchery weathered a difficult 2016 as well.

Of course, no restaurant will be in business long if it fails to deliver the single most important ingredient of all: the food itself. Good Uncle has the constant challenge of recreating the exact flavor of existing dishes far away from the restaurants they originated in. Green Summit's always-try-new-concepts approach has had its share of hits and misses. Williamsburg's Leafage, for instance, has four out of five stars on Grubhub, while Braised's midtown location averages only two, with 33% of customers complaining of receiving inaccurate orders.

Opening up your delivery bag to discover someone else's dinner? Maybe the solution to that all-too-common problem will come in the next phase of food-delivery innovation.

CEO David Mandelbrot spoke with Fast Company about what the platform is doing to stand out from the crowdfunding crowd.

Kickstarter is for creative projects. CrowdRise (acquired last week by GoFundMe) is for nonprofit fundraising. And Indiegogo is for... well, exactly what does differentiate Indiegogo from the rest of the crowdfunding universe?

Until recently it was hard to answer that question, and the company's momentum was suffering as a result. Then, last January, COO David Mandelbrot was installed as CEO. Over the last year, he has given the platform a renewed focus on product entrepreneurs and built tools and capabilities to better serve those organizers. In November, that strategy culminated in the launch of equity crowdfunding, managed in partnership with MicroVentures, making Indiegogo the first of its peers to experiment with Title III of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act.

Mandelbrot's strategy is already paying off: Yesterday, Indiegogo said that entrepreneurs on its platform have raised over $1.4 million from equity backers in just two months—a sizable portion of the nearly $20 million that founders on all platforms have raised through equity (or "regulation") crowdfunding so far. (The wider pool of capital raised through other aspects of the JOBS Act is now in the billions.) Mandelbrot spoke with Fast Company about how Indiegogo has evolved, and where the platform is headed next.

Why have you decided to focus on entrepreneurs?

To try to be all things to all people raising money would stretch us too thin and wouldn't allow us to develop a compelling proposition. Many of the most successful campaigns on our platform were campaigns for product entrepreneurs. Frankly, it was also a segment of the market that we felt was underserved by other platforms. We realized that this was a group of people that we were in a position to really help in a unique way.

Where does equity crowdfunding fit into that vision?

Our strategy was to move beyond crowdfunding and help entrepreneurs through all phases of the life cycle. Not just raise money, but also help them with manufacturing, design, retail. Equity crowdfunding was a very natural extension of that strategy.

What makes Indiegogo better positioned on equity crowdfunding than a platform like Crowdfunder, which is focused exclusively on equity?

We have a lot of experience in knowing how to effectively expose the issuers on our platform, how to tell their stories in a compelling way. We also bring to it a very large audience of backers, people wanting to get behind those latest innovations—11 million people visit Indiegogo on a monthly basis—and a large base of entrepreneurs. The other thing is that we do offer basic crowdfunding. Backers can see the success of the business in real time, and then invest in real time. Perk campaigns validate the market.

What kinds of products are doing well on the site right now?

There were a lot of wearables and drones a few years ago. Since then there has been a shift toward manufactured products that are more mainstream. For example, we've seen a substantial rise in products that people use in their kitchen. And larger companies are using Indiegogo to go direct-to-consumer with their product. GE launched a new ice maker on Indiegogo, and it raised over $2 million. We've also seen an increase in mobile devices, as in devices that make people more mobile—electric bikes, electric scooters.

Is GE's presence part of a deliberate move toward enterprise campaign organizers?

We launched our enterprise program last January. Every month we're seeing new enterprises use Indiegogo as a platform to enable market validation and connect with their customers directly. They can learn what users are interested in, they can get feedback. GE doesn't need to raise money. But they use Indiegogo to figure out which of the products in their lab are going to reach an audience that's excited. They say it's much better than surveys.

What comes next?

The big thing for us in 2017 is continuing to help entrepreneurs take their ideas from concept to market. That means more partnerships, and more product features that help entrepreneurs beyond the crowdfunding phase. The second thing you'll see is more solutions for early-stage entrepreneurs that are interested in reaching a new audience but may not be interested in a crowdfunding campaign. Indemand [ecommerce] has been fastest growing part of our business over the last two years.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Our language seems to be evolving faster than ever before. What are the consequences?

They don't even make fucking adults anymore. These little privileged shits. Everybody's a fucking pussy. You can't say shit to anybody. You can't even be a fucking human being anymore. You know what I'm saying? How are you supposed to be a human being?—Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton) in Goliath

Thanks to the internet, the American language seems to be exploding at an almost unclockable pace. Polyglot social media has exposed American English, with its historically promiscuous embrace of new idioms, to more digital pidgins, foreign words, microdialects, pictograms, neologisms, and cryptic symbols than any one language user can ever expect to brook. And yet anyone who so much as glances at Facebook picks this stuff up. Only six months ago, deplorables, #maga, bigly, Drumpf, and #notmypresident would have read as nonsense. Now they are the building blocks of public-square discourse—and often the cause for our deepening cultural and political divides.

When a language is radically disrupted at every level, from spelling to grammar to semantics, it can feel hard to just be a human being anymore, as words we use to convey insight, wit, and charisma become archaic, inaccurate, offensive, curdled, or actionable. A short survey of Fast Company staff millennials highlights how a number of now obsolete terms that just a few years ago were considered cutting edge have already been rendered passé: bae, on fleek, slay, #blessed, turnt, yas, and even basic (as one young linguist put it, "it's basic to say basic now"). Compare this rapid-fire evolution to the prominence of the word "groovy", which remained popular for years during the '60s and '70s.

In an illuminating study published in September in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Informatics, several linguists from Microsoft, Columbia University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology examined millions of North American tweets and tracked the spread of slang words like jawn, hella, and ctfuu (look 'em up). Using methods from epidemiology, they found that such coinages tore through populations like infectious diseases, with single and then multiple contacts occurring fast and furious in the close, unsanitary quarters of Twitter. Join a heap of snotty, fevered preschoolers—a useful analog for Twitter—and you're going to wake up with strep. It's hella inevitable.

Most adults, with English as a first language, know between 20,000 and 35,000 words, according to data released in 2013 by TestYourVocab.com, an independent research project. Kids who read regularly learn about 4.5 words per day. (By contrast, kids who rarely read learn about a word and a half daily.) It's all downhill from there. By adulthood, we acquire about one new word daily, and in middle age, "vocabulary growth basically stops," says the study. And yet that contracting brain is the one confronted these days by a language that is exploding: emoticons, emojis, bitmoji, memes, ascii, hashtags, at-handles, gifs, links, and text abbreviations, many of which engender fully formed dialects. Meanwhile, regional American dialects from across the country and from within different cultures are merging online, too. Hundreds of millions of us, at older ages, are being exposed to this exploding language as the population of the internet swells. Learning all of this—or any of it—is taxing. It's intimidating. It's infuriating. No wonder so many adults loathe (often out of proportion) the demands made on them by Twitterspeak. Whatever our politics, we're being asked to recruit language-learning muscles that previous generations were allowed to let atrophy.

After all, it's not just slang that is evolving. Take the decades-long transformation of "staff" to "team" to describe a collection of employees. It was a barely detectable change. For millennials, "staff" sounds creaky and hierarchical, and even a touch power-mad. The loss of "staff" puts a cognitive burden on a new boss. She must split her consciousness, endeavoring to act as one of a team, while at the same time assuming all the risk and responsibility of a CEO.

As the American lexicon expands and becomes more heterogeneous, so naturally do the opportunities to erect prohibitions on what can be said and written. America has no equivalent of the Academie Française, France's Sanhedrin of French, which serves as a border police force against foreign words that might adulterate it. In a language with zero formal governance, a generalized anxiety now haunts many of its speakers—especially if they often "speak" on the internet.

It's not purely political correctness that contorts the language (after all, the PC debate rages in France, too), though it does promote inquiry, both healthy and neurotic, into words' moral inflections by exposing people who botch even PC's finest points to charges of bigotry. When PC's goalposts seem to move—around the letters in LGBTQ, say—the frustration older language users often express is that their cognitive failure (to learn the new sequence) is being framed as a moral failure. And so they invent furious defenses to cover their shame over cognitive decline and show they're not sinners, and the language leaps and curls on itself again. Take one of the most devilish trolling locutions online, one that's a product both of political correctness and of its backlash: The word "racist" is lately used to stand in for the n-word.

On the internet, the language moves far faster than any single brain can metabolize it. Why should a man who grew up in a Midwestern town with a 20th-century idiom set be aware that calling a woman "bossy" is considered sexist speech? That is, until he calls a female tweeter "bossy," and encounters the wrath of the feminist horde...

These situations play out in art, too: Faced with his vocabulary's inadequacy, and his drunk mind's inability to expand it, Billy McBride, the shabby hero of the television show Goliath, sulks into his scotch. The old words that used to win him laughs or dates or even lawsuits (he's a litigator) now just seem to bug people. He can't put a foot right. Can't say shit to anybody.

This very complaint issues from all quarters of the culture. Some of the fancier complainers are hailed as heroes by all who love liberty. Take the brass at the University of Chicago, whose florid non-support of pussies last fall—the ones who need, as the school's memo sneeringly put it, "so-called 'trigger warnings,'"—is styled as a rigorous commitment to academic freedom. This 24-hour moral gym can be exhausting, and requires more linguistic confidence, finesse, and adaptability than most of us have. A cry of pain can be heard at all hours on Twitter: "I didn't say that! I didn't mean that! I'm a good person!" Sometimes only silence seems to count as compliance.

I recently wrestled over whether to try a word I hadn't used before on Twitter—or just shut up and study its connotations more deeply first. The word was "cuck." A devilish invention that only recently went prime-time, "cuck" is an epithet—with a handy proximity to more familiar obscenities—something like "cuckold." I wanted to know more about how hard the word hits as an insult, but I wasn't sure whether I could even use it in quotation marks (is that too precious?), as it's in heavy rotation with right-wing trolls. "Cuck," like a misuse of "transvestite" or dated language from hip-hop, could well set off negative social evaluations of my linguistic competency, the sine qua non of life on Twitter. As the study I mentioned earlier puts it, "In the case of linguistic markers intrinsic to social media, such as phonetic spellings and abbreviations, adopters risk negative social evaluations of their linguistic competency, as well as their cultural authenticity."

Tentatively I asked my Twitter followers about "cuck," hoping to blunt its power. I waited anxiously for a pile-on. But surprise: My grenade was a dud. As many people gallantly mansplained to me, "RW trolls" (another expression unknown to our grandmas), are the keepers of "cuck," which may have begun on 4chan, and draws its special poison from a genre of racist porn. But if you can dismiss RW trolls, with their brutish idiom, as paid or clinically moronic, it's evidently not hard to let the word roll off you like water off a cuck's back. Greg Connors, a writer and copy editor at the Buffalo News, astutely pointed out that being called a cuck is "like being cursed at in a foreign language." Right. Maybe it's not "like" that; it is that.

In any case, cuck is a crude word, and a common complaint about the internet is that it's choked with obscenity. But it's not simply locker-room talk—an idiom set every bit as high-handed as political correctness—that disorients American English. It's tempting to say that the brutes are "coarsening" the language, and try to take that language "back" for some imagined time of high literacy. But American English, like American democracy, has always thrived to the extent that it registers every voice, the soprano and the bass, the silky and the coarse. It's nothing unusual that our language is evolving—that is its very nature. What's disruptive is the pace and scale at which it is currently occurring.

And so American English is metamorphosing in large part due to the breakneck rate of change in a symbolic order convulsed by digitization. This convulsion keeps even the most linguistically sensitive of us in awe. Even if you do well with pronoun skirmishes around trans identities, for example, your mind must occasionally perplex at newer conundra. When is "white nationalist" too soft, and is "white supremacist" the only phrase that contains enough condemnation? The crowd parsing of diction—now at fever pitch as media and social media alike run hard diagnostics on Trump's every sphinxlike tweet, or even my or your more innocent postings—can be confounding. But it also invigorates the language by keeping speakers on their toes. We are far from complacent about our language, despite all the cultural stress and even personal trauma our debates can cause. We are literary critics, all of us, constantly scrutinizing the effects of our evolving words: The social effects, the emotional effects, and—perhaps most importantly as we brace for the inauguration—the political effects.

Digital wallets are suddenly ubiquitous, but bigger changes are to come.

When graduate student Drew Newman went on vacation to India earlier this month, he found a nation in the throes of transformation. "Even in small cities, you'd see handwritten signs on tuk-tuks saying 'We accept Paytm' or another type of mobile payments system."

It had been two months since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to remove 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation—86% of the country's overall currency—and the surprise shift in policy was still disrupting daily life for India's 1.3 billion people, as well as foreign travelers. One day, Newman and his wife visited Kumbhalgarh Fort in Rajasthan. "The admission price was 400 rupees a person. I pulled out a 2,000 rupee note, and they didn't have change," he says. And yet, even as snaking lines continued to form at ATMs, "without exception everyone seemed to be happy."

Interviews with business leaders in India confirm that impression: Citizens, by and large, see demonetization as an effective means to root out tax evasion and counterfeit currency, which has been linked to terrorism. Pundits in the U.S.—not to mention comics in India—have ridiculed the Reserve Bank of India for its management of the demonetization process. But Indians are looking beyond the short-term "cash chaos" and toward the policy's longer-term benefits.

"They feel empowered," says Karan Sharma, a director in the financial advisory group at Avendus Capital's Mumbai office.

And so are technology companies. Digital wallet providers like MobiKwik and Freecharge have seen enormous jumps in activations; market leader Paytm, already well positioned thanks to its user engagement strategies and Alibaba backing, has gained 20 million customers. (As context, roughly the same number of Indians have a credit card of any kind.) In this first wave of adjustment, the big story has been local merchants' adoption of digital payments point-of-sale solutions. On CNN, for example, a reporter visited a street food market and found snack-seekers buying samosas via QR code.

Yet digital wallets, and their effect on local vendors, are just the beginning. In the background, digital wallets are helping to construct an infrastructure that will better support credit and e-commerce, two areas in which India has been lagging behind Western economies and rival China.

Jainesh Sinha, COO of student loan startup GyanDhan, anticipates that his company will benefit in direct ways from the government's new policy. In the past, families and friends would gather together thousands of dollars worth of cash to pay the tuition for a promising son or daughter's college education (only 7% of Indian students take out educational loans, according to the Parthenon Group). Removing rupee notes from the system has made such arrangements more challenging.

"Now more and more people will have to turn to credit for paying for education, which is good for business," says Sinha, who previously worked for Capital One outside Washington, D.C. Now back in New Delhi, he partners with banks to offer educational loans of up to $45,000, based on GyanDhan's estimation of a student's future income.

"People have gotten a taste of how convenient digital payments can be," Sinha says. Even his local vegetable vendor, in his 60s, has started accepting Paytm. "For the first few days he was like, I don't understand this, it's fake money." Now, like many other merchants, he sees that digital has its advantages.

Digital wallets are also paving the way for growth in online shopping, which has until now been hampered by "cash on delivery" payment norms. Four out of five Indian smartphone owners under age 35 "window shop" online, according to an eMarketer survey, but just 28% make a purchase at least once a week. Retailers like Alibaba, which is preparing to enter the market, are betting that digital wallets will start to change that behavior.

For Amazon and Flipkart, which have been fighting for primacy while grappling with India's transportation infrastructure, e-payments present an opportunity to accelerate sales. Amazon has made significant investments in India and is increasingly well positioned, thanks in large part to the draw of its low prices (and despite some unfortunate cultural stumbles). The company has yet to unveil a proprietary digital wallet for consumers, but recently launched Prime.

Flipkart operates its own digital wallet, called PhonePe, which enables online shopping as well as bill payment and peer-to-peer transfer services. Down the road, it's easy to imagine Flipkart, which has emphasized big-ticket items like electronics and appliances, using the wallet to offer customers credit in the form of loans or installment payments.

Is it possible to train your brain to cope with an ever more fast-paced world? In some cases, more tech might save us from tech overload.

It's no secret that technology advancements have affected our brains. With instant messages, push notifications, wearable technology, and many other tech-driven distractions, the pace at which we are expected to respond has accelerated. We're multitasking with unfortunate effects.

How much more can our brains take? And is it possible to future-proof them for all the technical advances yet to come?

Performance expert and Australian medical practitioner Jenny Brockis, author of Future Brain: 12 Keys to Develop Your High-Performing Brain, thinks so. Our brains are designed to adapt, but there's a difference between adjusting to change and expecting an organ to endure relentless stress without time to renew, she says. So the first step to future-proofing our brains lies in good physical care, including nutrition, exercise, sleep, and downtime, she says.

"We have developed workplace practices that actually require us to be using our brain in a way in which it wasn't designed. This includes multitasking, which is adding to our cognitive load and making it harder for ourselves to have that clarity of thought and the mental agility and flexibility required to deal with the increasing level of complexity in our lives today," says Brockis.

Becoming Better Gatekeepers

Cognitive load is an important concept to understand. It's essentially the amount of effort it takes for your brain to learn something new. If it takes too much effort, then learning will be hampered. So if our brains are already overtaxed, it's going to be tough to learn new things, she says. Understanding more about this impact can help us learn new things faster.

In addition, we need to get better at prioritizing where we focus our attention. We've gotten into the habit of treating everything as urgent and important, which can lead to increased stress and multitasking and diminish our effectiveness. Learning to focus on one thing at a time and moving through our tasks sequentially will still be the best way for most of us to produce our best work, even with advances in technology, she says.

The Tech Solution

Nathan Wilson thinks that technology will help us with navigating the future, including that prioritization. Wilson, equal parts brain scientist and tech expert, is the cofounder and CTO of Nara Logics, an artificial intelligence company focused on helping businesses make better decisions. He says that a confluence of factors, including the deluge of information and the need to make faster decisions, will create a need for technology that can create systems to help us stay "above that ocean of information, systems that can help us prune things that are not relevant, and really bring to attention things that we do need to focus on," he says.

What does that look like? Perhaps AI-powered tools that help distinguish "fake news" from news based in fact or proven information, he says. Also, perhaps applications and devices that become "smarter," and begin to recognize information that is and isn't important to us. While this is happening on a basic level—you can indicate which contacts are more important than others on your smartphone, for example—he sees the potential of a true assistant that can gather relevant data, synthesize it, and present it to you for consideration.

"We're really trying to crack the code into the evolving art of how the computer can tell the human what it's doing while trying to reach the decision rather than saying, 'Okay, human. I've reached this decision,'" he says.

Futurist and emerging technology expert Gray Scott agrees that technology may ultimately be the key to helping us deal with technology. He's fond of saying, "Technology is a portal inward, not a portal outward." It lets us see our brain waves and understand our physiological responses.

He points to the MUSE headband that uses an accompanying app to help users actually see themselves relax as they meditate. As you get deeper into meditation, the clouds on the app become more still. As your brain waves become more active, so do the clouds. Similar technology could be used to read your own cues to help you understand the best time of day for you to do certain tasks, he says.

"If you could align your biomarkers and your biometrics with your productivity so that you know the best time for your body is between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., you move all the most critical work during those time periods," he says.

The experts agree that adapting to our tech-infused future will also need to include something counterintuitive: time away from technology.

"You also have to have some self-discipline in this age, in this transition. You have to know when to step away from all of this. The body, our culture, our species, has not had time to evolve at the same rate as technology. You have to give yourself some time away from technology and to know how to pace yourself," Scott says.

The science of how much technology will change our brains continues to evolve. But for now, the answers to effectively preparing our brains for the future lie in a combination of tried-and-true care methods, as well as using the power of technology to help us adapt.

As President Obama leaves office, entrepreneurs and tech leaders weigh in on his legacy.

Barack Obama was, in many ways, the first president who was truly plugged in. Over the course of his 2008 campaign, Obama famously embraced social media like no candidate previously had, and upon assuming office, he became the first president to appoint both a chief technology officer and chief data scientist. Last fall, Obama hosted South by South Lawn, a festival inspired by Austin's South by Southwest that quite literally celebrated the "spirit of innovation" at the doorstep of the White House.

During Obama's last days in office, Fast Company asked execs from the tech industry and leaders of social entrepreneurship what Obama's presidency has meant for startups and the tech industry—and to explain what, if anything, made the 44th president an arbiter of innovation. Here's what they had to say.

He Launched A Tech Startup In The White House

"From day one, Obama was an innovative president," says Katie Jacobs Stanton, CMO of genetic testing startup Color Genomics, pointing to the Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government, a commitment Obama signed a day after taking office in 2009 to making federal agencies to embrace collaboration and more public accountability.

"Eight years later, we take these things for granted and [they seem] obvious," Jacobs Stanton says, "but at the time, this was a tremendous breakthrough." Also on Jacobs Stanton's list: Obama's decision to create a chief technology officer (CTO) role for the government and bring in the team that formed the first-ever U.S. Digital Service (USDS), choices Jacobs Stanton says have since "made it easier for tech rockstars to come in and serve their country."

He Advocated For Women's Health Care And Reproductive Rights

Meika Hollender is cofounder and co-CEO of the female-friendly condom brand Sustain Natural, a venture that's had to wade through a slew of cultural and political issues since its founding in 2013.

"What's been really special about creating Sustain with Obama in the White House," says Hollender, "has just been that all of these issues that women have faced, and have been taboo for so long, were sort of brought front and center in many ways, even starting with Obamacare."

With the fate of the Affordable Care Act now hanging in the balance under a Trump administration, those issues don't seem likely to slide to the margins. "It's crazy," Hollender adds, "My sister, who is 21, can't even remember what it was like paying $50 to get your birth control every month. We've watched unplanned pregnancy decline; we've watched teen pregnancy decline. Women have so much more affordable access to birth control—which is really, in my opinion, the keys to their future—than they ever did before."

Should any of that change in the years ahead, consumers of products like Sustain Natural's will have more at stake that they can fight to preserve than they did eight years ago. And having launched such a business under Obama, Hollender suggests, further validates its importance. "It's been so incredible to build this business alongside a president and an advocate for all of these issues."

He Saw The Big Picture

"I think what really separates Obama from most is his long-term thinking," says Tristan Walker, founder and CEO of Walker & Company Brands, a health and beauty company for people of color. "And if you think about the applications of technology and what we do, that's all we can think about."

In Walker's view, Obama understood the American economy's need to move from manufacturing to new forms of work, and "to educate a new type of workforce" to do it. That long-term vision, Walker believes, extended to health care and medicine, urban infrastructure and "thinking more deeply about clean energy," and more—all of which signaled to innovators in the private sector that they and Obama were all thinking in similar timelines. For instance, adds Walker, "A president that believes in climate change is the type of president that I care a lot about."

He Pushed Diversity In Tech

Laura Weidman Powers, cofounder and CEO of tech diversity nonprofit Code2040, points out that Obama "was the first president to leverage social media as a tool for mass communication, and his presidency coincided with the rise of important technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and self-driving cars." Yet, crucially, Weidman Powers believes, Obama "saw technology as a human issue. He understood that America is stronger and more effective when we empower all of our citizens with the tools to build the innovation economy."

That's given validation and urgency to efforts within the tech community to widen diversity, says Weidman Powers. And at a personal level, it's "what convinced me to accept an offer to join U.S. CTO Megan Smith [the third, after Todd Park and Aneesh Chopra, to hold the role] at the White House for a six-month 'tour of duty'." During that stint, Weidman Powers worked with Smith to "compile a best-practices report on diversity in the tech workforce," an action plan she hopes can continue to guide the tech sector's efforts on those fundamentally "human" issues in the years ahead.

He Invested In Digital Infrastructure

Obama recognized that infrastructure was more than just roads, bridges, and tunnels, says Linden Tibbets, cofounder and CEO of task automation service IFTTT. He saw that "in the future our digital infrastructure will be no less important. Obama's administration, arguably, was the first to try and tackle this on a large scale."

Tibbets points to the creation of the Open Data Policy and the launch of Data.gov, two efforts to encourage more API-driven government services. "Data.gov is mandated to publish publicly," he notes, and "in machine-readable sets, any data the government collects that is not private or could impact national security."

For the federal government to make a commitment to promoting open data, Tibbets says, "That's huge! No app or website can be as transformational as the right data in the right hands. It can empower government, businesses, and—most importantly—individuals. Access is how we build a more connected world."

He Made The White House Cool Again

For Miki Agrawal, founder and CEO of period-proof underwear startup Thinx, Obama's relative youth played a big part in his innovative approach to governing. As she sees it, Obama "understood and appreciated the current entrepreneurial landscape, which has had a boom in the last decade." Agrawal sees the decision to house South by South Lawn, which she attended, as a powerful way "to show the relevancy of the White House and how much [Obama] cared about new innovation."

The message that sent will continue to resonate among younger Americans even after Obama leaves office, she believes. "I think I am not the only millennial to think that the White House is antiquated and that its processes are slow and dated." But "Obama brought a young spirit to the place," says Agrawal, "and I really appreciated him for that. I also think he called on young people to give their opinions on various matters way more than most presidents have done in the past."

He Saw The Value Of Collective Action

"Our organizations are as effective as our systems," notes Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Network, an organization that helps nonprofits leverage technology for social change, as well as a Fast Company contributor. That means, as Weidman Powers agrees, that technology is first and foremost about people, an idea that the Obama White House led by, says Sample Ward.

"Obama's campaigns and continued engagement strategies while in office focused on the strength of community organizing, and showed the power of collective action." That's had a clear impact, she believes. Today, Sample Ward says, "I see so many organizational leaders taking on this same focus—encouraging their staff and aligning their strategies with community-powered processes and programs."

Finally, she adds, "There's something about Obama's earnestness—that when he speaks, even a speech that is obviously prepared and rehearsed, he is truly speaking his own mind and opinion honestly." That may have nothing to do with technology per se, but Sample Ward still sees that quality as innovative. "That has set the expectation for leaders to be able to articulate what the community may be feeling or needing to hear, whether it's in difficult times or inspiring moments."

This week's top stories may help you design less insufferable slide decks and ditch the work habits that pay diminishing returns.

This week we learned how to put together an effective slide deck even if you aren't a graphic designer, why good habits can turn into drawbacks over time, and what the most productive people to do keep their workdays running smoothly and efficiently.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of January 16:

1. Why The Most Productive People Do These Six Things Every Day

Highly productive people know the difference between important tasks and urgent ones—and they arrange their workdays accordingly. Here's a useful roundup of some of their tips for working smarter, not harder.

2. PowerPoint Isn't Dead Yet: Three Presentation Tips That Still Work In 2017

Wish you'd never have to see another slide deck? It's probably in vain. One communication expert explains that while we may be stuck with PowerPoint presentations, they don't all have to be so boring. And the good news is that you don't need to be a graphic designer to create more effective slides.

3. How I Successfully Pitched Investors As A 22-Year-Old Startup Founder

Alex White and his cofounders at Next Big Sound were fresh out of college when they began pitching VCs to fund the fledgling data company, which is now part of Pandora. Here's White's take on what he and his team did to convince investors they knew their stuff.

4. Why Your Good Habits Might Actually Be Holding You Back

Early in your career—or in your tenure as an entrepreneur—you're likely to lean on a certain set of strengths in order to get the ball rolling. But as your successes build and circumstances evolve, you may have a hard time scrapping the habits that used to work great but do so less and less over time. Here's an inside look at that psychology, and what to do about it.

5. What Happened When I Stopped Saying "Sorry" At Work For A Week

Sometimes apologizing is more of a verbal tic than an expression of remorse ("Sorry, but..."; "Oh, sorry..."), which one writer explains can still send the wrong signals. Here's what happened when she tried saying "thanks" each time she felt the impulse to apologize.

Datto chief Austin McChord never dreamed he'd get caught up in one of the most consequential political dramas ever.

Months after the election, we still don't know for sure what happened to all of Hillary Clinton's emails, the ones that passed through her private email server, a question that remains unresolved and continues to infuriate some of President-elect Donald Trump's die-hard supporters. But one clue to unraveling the mystery may lie with a low-key tech company based in southwestern Connecticut and its 31-year-old freckle-faced CEO, who handed over up to 17,448 deleted Clinton emails to the FBI.

Datto, a data protection company, had been backing up Clinton's messages for years, yet nobody seemed to know about it—not the techie who tended to the Clintons' private email server, not the Clintons, not even Datto's CEO Austin McChord and his employees. When the company's role was first revealed last spring, Datto was thrust into the spotlight, and McChord's face ended up at the top of Drudge Report. The drama caught the redheaded technology entrepreneur by surprise. The man who nine years ago had started his now billion-dollar company in a basement, building his first product partly out of Legos and hot glue, was even forced to buy a suit when it looked like he might have to testify on Capitol Hill.

McChord and Datto found themselves cast in bit roles in the mystery to end all political mysteries: What happened to Hillary Clinton's deleted emails? You know, the some 30,000-odd thousand missing messages—out of more than 60,000—she sent and received while serving as secretary of state, using not the government's system but her own private email server. Clinton has maintained all along that they were nothing more than personal correspondence, dealing with plans for daughter Chelsea's wedding, family vacations, and yoga routines.

But FBI investigators found several chains of work-related emails, some classified, that weren't included in those turned over by her lawyers. In total, the bureau has "recovered from additional data sources" 17,448 of Clinton's emails, according to an FBI report released last summer. Some of those emails may have come from Gmail accounts of Clinton associates that were hacked (the Obama administration blames the Russians) and later published by WikiLeaks. Others presumably came from Datto—the FBI report only lists three sources of the emails it recovered: Clinton, WikiLeaks, and Datto.

In any case, the revelation that Clinton had been using a private email server for her missives prompted Clinton's right-wing critics to assume a conspiracy afoot: Clinton must have deleted these personal email messages because she had something to hide. Eleven days before the election, FBI director James Comey rocked the presidential campaign by announcing that the bureau was reviewing a new cache of emails that agents discovered on a machine shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. In the days after Comey's announcement, public opinion shifted toward Trump by four percentage points, according to polls. When those emails didn't turn up any red flags, a fact the FBI director revealed just two days before the election, it was probably too late to blunt any impact it may have had on her candidacy. It's difficult to determine the true extent of Comey's actions, but Clinton blames the FBI director for costing her the presidency.

There are plenty of theories about what happened to the deleted emails. William Binney, who architected the National Security Agency's surveillance program and later became a whistleblower, claims his old agency must have them. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton thinks the Russians got them. U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who helmed the House Benghazi committee, is less sanguine, saying he believes they are "where even God can't read them."

Far From The Madding Crowd

Unlike many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have built successful technology companies, Austin McChord operates far outside the limelight. He cares little for fame and considers himself a geek's geek. Few know who he is outside of tech conferences, where he's hounded for his autograph. Instead of hobnobbing with the tech cognoscenti, he spends his spare time building and racing drones, which he joyously crashes to the ground . . . just because.

McChord's Norwalk, Connecticut, data protection company, Datto, Inc., isn't sexy, and until recently most of the media coverage it received was from the trade press. That's because Datto isn't like Apple; it doesn't sell must-have consumer products that change how we interact with the world. Unlike Twitter, it doesn't provide a platform for journalists, celebrities, trolls, and 300 million other people, or bring together more than a billion people around the planet like Facebook. Datto is more like an insurance policy (without the wry gecko mascot or clever TV commercials).

Datto provides what it calls a "hybrid cloud solution." This involves a small box that sits atop a server and takes a complete snapshot of everything on it every 15 minutes, half hour, hour, or day, depending on how it is set. That snapshot, which includes all operating systems, applications, emails, and any other content, is encrypted and transmitted to Datto's servers that are housed in Pennsylvania.

In essence, Datto acts as a time machine. It's a hedge against the unexpected. A customer who has been hacked or suffered an outage can travel back to a point just before trouble started. The server can be rebooted and the data retrieved on demand in as little as six seconds.

Nine years ago, McChord started the company in the basement of his father's office. Then 22, he was taking time off from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied bioinformatics. One day he set his mind to cobbling together a backup and data recovery device with a smattering of Linksys parts, a few Lego pieces, and gobs of hot glue in his dad's office basement. His tool of choice: a soldering iron. His company's first product, the Datto 100, was born.

Today Datto is one of those big companies you've never heard of, operating in the background much like its technology does. More than 50,000 mostly small and mid-sized businesses rely on Datto, which handles more than 250 petabytes of data, performs a million backups a day, and protects hundreds of thousands of physical and virtual servers globally.

Datto's hellacious growth owes much to the rampant increase in ransomware, a kind of malicious software that blocks access to a computer network by encrypting files until the victim pays a ransom. Kaspersky Security Networks call such attacks a "pandemic." Symantec estimates that throughout 2015, ransomware infections fluctuated between 23,000 and 35,000 per month, impacting one out of every two organizations.

Digital thugs hailing from Russia, India, and Kazakhstan, where many ransomware fraudsters live, don't intimidate McChord. But FBI agents, congressional committees, and journalists like me all demanding answers are a different matter. After meeting with me once, McChord would only agree to answer my questions about the Clinton server through his company lawyer and chief marketing officer.

BlackBerry Addict

After Hillary Clinton was appointed secretary of state in early 2009, she insisted on using her BlackBerry to stay in close contact with a small group of trusted staffers who fielded inquiries to her without going through the hassle of finding safe, secure modes of communication. When Condoleezza Rice served as secretary of state during the Bush Administration, she had managed to wrangle a few secure BlackBerrys for herself and some aides. Clinton requested a similar arrangement—pointing out that President Obama had a secure BlackBerry for personal use. Each time the State Department's assistant director for security infrastructure, Donald R. Reid, asked for such a device for Clinton, the NSA, citing security concerns, turned them down. (For his part, President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly worried he won't be allowed to use his beloved Android phone after he moves into the White House.)

Clinton reportedly has never used a personal computer and was leery of email in any case because she worried about leaving a paper trail after years of being the target of what she deemed a "vast right-wing conspiracy." At a private fundraiser in 2000, she was caught on a private video telling a donor, "As much as I've been investigated . . . Why would I ever want to do email? Can you imagine?"

Donald Trump isn't tech-savvy, either. As recently as 2013, Trump, a compulsive tweeter, admitted he used email "rarely," and when he did, often dictated messages to an assistant. In the second presidential debate, he threatened, if elected, to send Hillary Clinton to prison for the "emails that you deleted and that you acid washed," calling it "an expensive process" (it's not). He was referring, of course, to the 31,830 personal emails that her lawyers had expunged from her home-brew server with the aid of a free, open-source software called BleachBit—although Trump made it sound like they had relied on a chemical process for stone-washing jeans in the 1980s.

Given Clinton's tech ignorance and paranoia about protecting her privacy, it's easier to understand why Clinton could have made such a colossal error in judgment in allowing State Department email accounts to be set up on the Clinton family server in her basement in Chappaqua, New York.

11 BlackBerrys, 5 iPads, And A Few Clunky Servers

At the start of her tenure at the State Department, Clinton, along with several of her aides, started using a personal clintonemail.com account hosted on a server in her basement in Chappaqua that already handled email for the Clinton Foundation. The antiquated server was plagued by service outages and delays and was later upgraded to a Dell PowerEdge 2900, which is what served email for the entire four years Clinton served as secretary of state.

Maintenance and upkeep had been haphazard. At one point, an external Seagate hard drive was connected to the server, conducting daily backups, with a full backup performed weekly. Given the volume of email, the Seagate was a poor choice. As it filled up, the oldest backups were deleted on a first-in, first-out basis to make room for new messages. Thousands of email from her early years at the State Department tenure were erased, although they remained on the Clinton home server. Eventually the overtaxed Seagate device was upgraded to a more appropriate storage system, a Cisco Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. It's not clear how frequently the NAS captured backups of the server.

Clinton's attachment to her BlackBerry only compounded the problems. While serving as secretary of state, Clinton would stash her BlackBerry in a desk drawer at a guard station located outside her seventh-floor office, which is considered a secure location. For convenience's sake, she refused to carry two separate devices, nor would she use a secure computer, and mingled her official State Department email with her personal account. Like a smoker forced to leave the building to light up a cigarette, throughout the day Clinton would grab her BlackBerry and go to the State Department's eighth-floor balcony. When she was on the road or at home in Chappaqua, she also read and replied to email on an unsecured iPad.

Clinton went through 11 BlackBerrys and five iPads in four years. Some of her Blackberrys were destroyed by a staff member (he used a hammer to smash them to bits, which is standard operating procedure). Others were given away to staff. Still more remain unaccounted for. The 62,320 emails Clinton sent and received from hdr22@clintonemail.com may sound like a lot, but it works out to an average of 296 emails a week, or about 1,300 a month.

To put it in perspective, consider the George W. Bush administration's email scandal, one that dwarfs Clinton's. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush administration "lost" 22 million emails written during a tumultuous time that included the Iraq War and the scandal over the politically motivated firings of federal prosecutors. The private server handling the White House email was owned and operated by the Republican National Committee. Not only did the White House not retain these emails as required by law, it refused to comply with a congressional subpoena. Imagine if Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee had done that.

For her part, Clinton later told the FBI she did not recall receiving any emails she thought shouldn't be on an unclassified system. According to the report, "She relied on State officials to use their judgment when emailing her, and could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address."

The FBI report notes several attempts to hack the Clinton server, although none were successful, as far as the agency could determine. The same cannot be said of the State Department's email system, which ran on antiquated Wang machines well into the 2000s until Colin Powell ordered an upgrade. Since then, it has been hacked repeatedly. In November 2014, the State Department took its email system offline over the course of a weekend in a bid to improve security. The following year, a federal law enforcement official called a series of Russian-linked cyberattacks on State Department computer systems over the course of 2015 as the "worst ever."

The only times that Hillary Clinton's State Department emails have been made public has been through Wikileaks, which has shared a large number of emails stolen from the accounts of longtime Clinton associates John Podesta and Sidney Blumenthal. That is astounding, given how insecure and haphazard Clinton's computer security was.

Think about it: Hillary Clinton's lightly attended, home-based email server turned out to be more secure than the State Department's ostensibly well-fortified computer network.

Where Are The Deleted Emails?

A Datto reseller, Denver, Colorado-based Platte River Networks, a small company with no official government security clearances, took over administering the Clinton server in June 2013, moving it to Secaucus, New Jersey. The Platte technician intended to use Datto to provide backups in case the server failed. Though the company took Clinton's old Cisco server and migrated the contents to their own machines, it's not clear how much data was recovered and how far back it went, according to an FBI report.

This was several months after Hillary Clinton left the State Department, but that didn't matter to the Datto box. Its purpose was to capture everything on the server from the moment the box was switched on. Platte River technician Paul Combetta set up the server to automatically delete email every 60 days, as he had been told to, and installed the Datto device to provide localized backups in case the server suddenly went down or hackers managed to take root. The Datto box was also configured to delete anything older than 60 days. What he didn't realize was the local Datto device was beaming a complete snapshot of the Clinton server multiple times a day to Datto's cloud servers—and those backups were not being deleted every 60 days. In fact, they weren't being deleted at all.

When Hillary Clinton's lawyers turned over 33,000 work-related emails to investigators, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills ordered Combetta to delete all emails on the server that weren't work-related. Five months later, on March 3, 2015, the day after the New York Times reported that Clinton had used a personal server while serving as secretary of state, the House Republicans' Benghazi committee ordered all emails on the private server to be preserved. Combetta told FBI investigators that he had what he called an "oh, shit" moment when he realized he hadn't actually deleted those 31,830 personal emails.

After a conference call involving Mills, Clinton's legal representatives, and Platte River Networks staff, Combetta used BleachBit to delete the emails, despite later admitting to investigators that he "was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the PRN server." Combetta claimed he received no guidance from anyone on the meaning of the preservation request. Both Mills and Clinton stated they were unaware that the emails had been deleted after the Committee on Benghazi requested they be preserved.

It wasn't until August 2015, more than two years after Platte River had taken over administering the Clinton server and four months after Combetta deleted the emails off the server, that anyone realized that cloud-based backups existed. In an email dated August 6, Sam Hickler, Platte River's VP of operations, wrote: "When we made the purchase, it was under the understanding that we didn't want to back up to Datto's data center."

Datto investigated and discovered that the device Combetta had installed was automatically syncing with Datto's cloud servers and storing the data there—even though Platte River hadn't been billed for the service.

Treve Suazo, Platte River's CEO, replied: "This is a problem. This data should not be stored in the Datto Cloud, but because the backup data exists, we cannot delete it . . . "

A few days later, Datto's general counsel, Michael Fass, sent a letter to Platte River attorneys, informing them that Datto planned to disconnect the cloud-based server. Fass said that Datto had been following news reports concerning various investigations into Clinton's emails and had concerns. "It may be possible that information contained on the Datto device" is "subject to legal retention requirements," he said. "We are concerned that if no immediate action is taken," then "information may be improperly deleted."

The following month Datto received its first written request from the FBI (there was no subpoena).

"We received permission from both Platte River and the Clinton organization to hand over to the FBI information relevant to its investigation including physical equipment from our cloud, which we did," Datto CEO Austin McChord told me through his attorney.

Datto provided the physical cloud storage equipment as well as individual syslog files and additional logs to the FBI.

The question is: Did Datto maintain the integrity of these cloud-based backups of Clinton's emails after Platte River asked it to discontinue secure cloud backups?

All McChord would say after consulting his attorney was: "The FBI Report provides that Platte River Networks used Datto to back up the Clinton IT infrastructure. It also states that Platte River Networks used our solution to back up servers that had Mrs. Clinton's emails on them. The report also indicates that the FBI was able to recover emails that were not previously provided."

Is that a yes?

"Datto has no direct knowledge to suggest those emails were recovered from the Datto servers."

How about indirect knowledge?

Datto pointed me back to the FBI report, which stated that the bureau recovered "from additional data sources" 17,448 emails that were sent to and from Clinton's hdr22@clintonemail.com and were not previously provided to the agency. Some might have come from Wikileaks' hacked email from Podesta's and Blumenthal's Gmail accounts. The vast majority, however, might have come from Datto's backups.

After handing over Datto's servers and logs that held the Clintons' emails, McChord says Datto hasn't heard anything more from the FBI and has no indication that the Bureau had trouble decrypting those files.

But what was in them? Datto isn't entirely sure. Nonetheless, it's the missing emails that Clinton sent at the time of the Benghazi attacks that led to the investigation in the first place. The attack occurred during the final months of Clinton's tenure at the State Department. Recall that the Seagate external hard drive that a techie installed on the Clinton server in 2009 deleted the oldest messages first as it filled up. These more recent Benghazi-era messages could have been stored and transferred to a newer server, taking the place of the older, antiquated one, if we have connected all the dots properly. Of course, we don't know for sure that they were still on the server when Datto handed over its data to the FBI. Comey has never clarified this (and neither the FBI nor the Clinton campaign responded to my requests for comment).

As long as the whereabouts of these emails remain a mystery, this story is not going to die. Some of them really might be gone forever; some might be somewhere no one has even thought to look. The whole mess is a stark reminder that our most private data could be in places we least suspect. Even when we think we've deleted them, these zombie emails can linger on servers run by companies we've never even heard of before.

Meanwhile, McChord is still in Norwalk, running his company, smashing homemade drones, and like many Americans, trying to put the drama of this tumultuous presidential campaign behind him. And he's relieved he never had to wear that new suit to a hearing in Congress.

Mike Boston turned his pickup truck into a recording studio for city kids. Now he's using it to ease tensions between cops and civilians.

Mike Boston is frustrated by the city that coincidentally bears his name. It's not just that Boston and nearby communities in Massachusetts struggle with gun violence, racial tension, and strained relations between police and citizens. Many U.S. cities do. And while these issues certainly confound the 41-year-old musician and entrepreneur, so does this one: There are few, if any, famous rappers hailing from his hometown.

Of course, these gripes—police violence and local hip-hop bragging rights—sit on opposite ends of the seriousness scale, but Boston thinks he might have a solution for both. Mobile Stu is a basic recording studio that he runs out of his pickup truck, driving from neighborhood to neighborhood and letting kids in each community take a turn spitting rhymes into the microphone.

The mobile music creation project, which Boston first dreamed up nearly a decade ago, was recently used to launch a campaign called #BlackWithBlue aimed at de-escalating police-community tensions in Boston. The campaign kicked off last month with a collaborative song titled "One Beat For Peace," which features both police officers and local kids rapping verses alongside one another. It's part of a broader collaboration between A&G, the Boston Police Department, and the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester aimed at creating a dialogue between the community and law enforcement through roundtable discussions between police, activists, and community members.

"They're just thirsting to express themselves, but they don't have the access to the equipment," Boston says of the urban, mostly African-American youth that his mobile studio aims to empower. "A lot of these kids don't realize that these creative opportunities exist. They just see rappers coming up out of nowhere and they're like 'why not us?' They're feeling undervalued."

Mobile Stu got its first real burst of momentum in early 2016 when it won an internal "Idea Sabbatical" contest held at Allen & Gerritsen, the advertising agency where Boston works part-time. The Shark Tank-style competition invited A&G employees to present ideas for entrepreneurial side projects, promising that the winner would be given time off and other material support to pursue their project. While Boston hasn't yet taken an extended sabbatical, he's managed to turn Mobile Stu into a serious philanthropic effort in his spare time, with support from his colleagues at A&G and outside partners.

It's a natural convergence of passions for Boston, who in addition to being an artist and recording engineer, spends time working with a criminal justice-focused nonprofit called Roca, which helps ex-offenders in their late teens and early twenties integrate themselves back into society in an effort to decrease recidivism rates.

Mobile Stu is designed to ease tensions in communities like the Dorchester neighborhood in Boston. After a deadly shooting of a 16-year-old there last year, Boston drove through the neighborhood with Mobile Stu and invited young men and women to record themselves. What at first appears to be a nondescript pickup truck turns out to be a recording studio, which is pretty much the last thing people expect in the wake of a tragedy.

"I'm showing up at a bad time, usually," says Boston. "They don't expect somebody to show up and let them get that off their chest."

Indeed, the initial reaction of skepticism and hostility quickly melts away as soon as people notice the microphones and start piecing together what they're seeing. Before long, one or two dozen people—some of them drug dealers and others hardened by the socioeconomic realities of urban life in America—surround the Mobile Stu, eager to take their turn on the mic.

"In Boston, what you've got is a lot of hatred," says Boston. "To see them respond in a way where they want to be a part of this blows my mind."

The reaction for these young men is, as Boston puts it, "sheer astonishment." And the younger kids, often ranging between 9 and 12 years of age, could hardly be more excited. "Their mouths are wide open. Jaws dropped. They think, 'I matter enough that this thing came to my neighborhood.'"

"I remember the first time I ever heard myself recorded, it inspired me to keep recording," says Boston. "It made me learn how to make my own income out of it. I wanted to show other people that, but a lot of them can't afford to go to major studio."

Although technology has dramatically decreased the cost of music creation, access to even the most basic recording gear is still elusive to many in lower-income neighborhoods. The Mobile Stu, which comes equipped with microphones, Beats headphones, a laptop loaded with a suite of modern recording software, and a MIDI controller for making beats, is about as bare bones as you can get for a recording studio. But it works, not just for laying down tracks, but for alleviating the access-to-technology problem by bringing the gear directly to people who may not have studio-grade microphones lying around at home.

The initiative comes at a time of heightened national tension and contentious debate over police violence and accountability, fueled by a seemingly endless series of fatal police shootings of black, typically unarmed civilians, many of which are caught on smartphone video. If the national backdrop of the last few years was a fitting context for Mobile Stu's launch and the #BlackWithBlue campaign, the project can only get more relevant as we move into 2017. The inauguration of the vocally "law and order"-focused President Donald Trump, along with the impending confirming of his controversial (and critics charge, racially insensitive) Attorney General pick, Jeff Sessions aren't exactly inspiring optimism among criminal justice reform advocates.

However federal policy shapes up, the Mobile Stu and the #BlackWithBlue movement is one example of how community-police relations can be eased in a direct, tangible way on the local level. "Recording and getting stuff off my chest always helps me so maybe that will help them," reasons Boston. "Music brings people together. I've seen it work."

While Mobile Stu continues to drive around Dorchester and other Boston neighborhoods, there's already talk of expanding the project to other cities. Chicago and Philadelphia are high on the list. The mobile studio's concept and branding is already ready-made for a cookie-cutter expansion to other markets. But since there's no formal business model, additional resources would be needed in order to scale it.

"The best rappers are on the street corner," says Boston, who has years of music recording and production experience. "There are so many people better than me out here. I want to shine a light on those guys."

In the process, who knows? He just might find the next Kanye West. Either way, he gets to relish an inescapable sense that, even on a small scale, he's helping to make a difference.

"Hardcore guys soften up right in front of you," Boston says. "It never gets old."

With VR struggling to become mainstream, Dear Angelica needed to showcase the best of the Oculus platform. It succeeded tremendously.

Get ready to step into, and walk around in, a series of surreal, lucid dreamlike memories. At the Sundance Film Festival today, Oculus Story Studio, the filmmaking arm of Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus, released Dear Angelica, its third film project and a beautiful example of what this emerging medium has to offer. It's the story of a recently deceased mother, voiced by Geena Davis, whose glamorous life as a movie star is recalled in one vivid memory after another by her grieving teenage daughter, who is there with her at her deathbed.

The Story Studio is tasked with developing rich content that showcases the best of what's possible on the Oculus platform, and by extension, in VR itself, which is essential as the nascent consumer technology struggles to become mainstream.

With Dear Angelica, there can be no doubt that they've succeeded.

The film is gorgeous, taking full advantage of "positionally tracked" VR, in which users can physically walk around in a virtual environment—rather than just having a 360-degree view from a fixed position—with graphical elements floating and blooming all around you as you move. It's a tour de force of dreamscapes, beautiful artistry, and technical achievement that lets us feel the aching pain of the daughter, played by Mae Whitman, yet also relish her many memories of her mother, which are actually brief flashbacks to scenes from her movies.

More than a year in the making, Dear Angelica will be available for the Oculus Rift later today. When the Story Studio leaders hired artist Wesley Allsbrook to realize their vision for a film that explored what it would be like to step into, and live inside, a painting, she soon informed them that there was no existing technology that made it possible for her to actually create what she was imagining. Thus was born Quill, a purpose-built VR production tool (now available to Oculus Rift users with Touch Controllers) that allowed Allsbrook to "draw in space and time," as creative director Saschka Unseld told Fast Company last year.

Step Inside A Painting

Imagine that van Gogh's "The Starry Night" were a three-dimensional painting. Imagine that you could move around inside it and peer, up close, at each of the Dutch artist's perfect strokes. That's kind of what watching Dear Angelica is like.

And although dozens of people worked to bring the project to fruition, Allsbrook painted every stroke herself, by hand—meaning the film retained 100% of her vision. That's something the Story Studio is quite proud of. As it wrote in a blog post, it's "a significant moment for animation, whether based in VR or otherwise, as the field heavily relies on increasingly large teams of concept and production artists."

As the story progresses, each memory unfolds with the rendering of individual strokes, a manifestation of a Quill feature that records an artist's every stroke, in order, and then allows you to play them all back later.

"That became basically the way the story unfolds," Unseld told me earlier this month at Story Studio's San Francisco office. "I never wanted to have a moment where it feels like things [in the story] are not drawing in and out around you. That ability of [Quill] became the language of how we progressed through" Dear Angelica.

Another important element of the film's storytelling is the ability to pause playback, yet still allow the viewer to walk around inside the imagery, exploring each and every detail of what Unseld called the "living painting."

Unseld, who was previously an artist and short film director at Pixar, noted that pausing a normal film is boring, because everything stops. But in Dear Angelica, not only can viewers walk around and examine everything they see, but the Story Studio team also built in a series of Easter eggs that only materialize when you get very close to them, meaning there's a richness to the visual narrative that's not evident without working for it.

For example, he explained, there's a moment in the film when the focus is on a tiny version of Angelica's hospital bed. But if you turn around and peer into the darkness behind it, a life-size bed appears.

There are other hidden details as well, such as a tiny illustration of the daughter in every illustration of one of the mother's movies. One such scene plays out a surreal shootout in a diner, and tucked away in a corner is a tiny daughter watching the movie unfold.

Interactivity

Beyond the fact that you can pause, rewind, and fast-forward the film—and explore the details as they materialize—Dear Angelica features no other interactivity, and doesn't utilize Oculus's Touch Controllers.

Unseld said his team wrote a version of the story that did leverage the controllers, but didn't end up implementing it because that kind of interactivity would have had to be integrated from the ground up.

Still, he predicted that all future Story Studio projects will feature some kind of interactivity since the Touch Controllers—which bring users' hands into an experience—are a "really, really intriguing thing to add to any kind of narrative."

Here's a straightforward way to make sure your interpersonal and problem-solving chops shine through.

First things first: Soft skills play an important role in hiring. Employers aren't looking for robots that can only execute on a job description. They need people who can positively impact the culture and see what's around the corner—people with depth (this goes triple for executives, by the way). Soft skills are a way to address this.

However, doing so credibly is something that trips many jobseekers up. Simply put: If you've got a keyword section on your resume that has things like "Goal-oriented" and "Emotional Intelligence" in there, you're doing it wrong! Here's a better approach.

Identify The Most Important Soft Skills To Highlight

Soft skills are like dessert—quality is more important than quantity. The first step is to thoroughly evaluate target job postings to identify the major soft skills that employers are on the lookout for (and that you possess).

Let's say you do this and identify the following skills:

• Interpersonal: ability to work in teams, relate to people, and manage conflict
• Project management: organization, planning, and consistently taking initiatives from start to finish. This isn't just for dedicated project managers anymore, by the way; many employers want to see this as a skill set for employees of all stripes
• Problem solving: ability to use creativity, logic, past work experience, and available resources to solve issues

Your next task is to show how those skills helped you reach specific professional achievements. If you've ever come across a resume that truly pops, chances are it's because soft skills have been tightly integrated with the highlighted accomplishments.

Hard numbers may reassure an employer that you're a safe bet, but they inspire little passion. "Dry" resumes that do nothing but list one metric after another tend to make recruiters' eyes glaze over.

But when you add soft skills into the mix, ideally in a way that lends depth to you the person, not just you the candidate, you've got something special.

Reframe Your Accomplishments

To do that, you need to get away from listing out your day-to-day responsibilities. What wins did you pull off? What projects would have crashed and burned without your efforts? How did you better things?

Now break down what you've come up with using the "STAR Method":

• S = Situation: What was the problem? Be as specific as possible. Overly general accomplishments do not work
• T = Task: What's the goal?
• A = Action: Which specific steps did you take to reach the goal? Focus on what you did, not the team. If you're describing team contributions, be sure to credit them or risk looking like an egomaniac!
• R = Result: Final outcome. This is the time to talk yourself up. Take credit for what you accomplished, and if you can highlight multiple positives, even better!

Now that you have your STAR accomplishments, integrate them within your resume. Remember: Resume accomplishments are most effective when you highlight the result first, followed by how you got there. Here are examples of soft-skills-based accomplishments that hew to this structure:

• Interpersonal: Established risk management as a key pillar of the organization, building and training 20-person in-house team responsible for ERM systems and processes development, as well as major cross-divisional initiatives.
• Project management: Delivered over $5 million in annual cost savings, along with improved business agility, through total project management of paper-to-digital record archiving initiative. Worked heavily with teams across Houston, Toronto, and London offices to attain aggressive one-year implementation target.
• Problem solving: Increased revenues by 12% by overhauling outdated and ineffective proposal process, consulting with SMEs within the industry, developing standardized language and offerings, and training eight U.S. sales teams in adopting new approach.

One last tip: Don't confine soft skills to just your resume! Weave them into the stories you share during the interview, and show employers that you consider them to be crucial to your worth.

A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.

Most employers try to wrap up performance reviews in January, so now's the time to build a case for yourself.

While you're making your New Year's resolutions to go to the gym, eat healthier, and meditate more, add "rise up at work" to the list. The most opportune time to get a promotion is during your annual review.

In fact, at many companies, the only time of year that employees are eligible for a raise and promotion is during their annual review. The pressure is on and the stakes are high, so you'll want to go into it as prepared as possible.

Most employers try to wrap up annual reviews by the end of January, so if you haven't had yours yet, these are a few things you can still do this month in order to ace your annual review and set yourself up for success in the New Year.

Create A Brag Sheet

Don't wait until the night before your annual review to write down all your accomplishments (or worse, try to wing it during the meeting).

"Preparing for the review should be a yearlong process of you continuously tracking and monitoring your skill development and goal achievements as they happen," says Larissa Holmes, vice president of customer development at the Toronto-based performance review software company WIRL.

There are three benefits to keeping a list of your wins: It helps you highlight any accomplishments that have been overlooked by management; it helps you build your case for a raise or promotion; and it helps you achieve your goals throughout the year.

"It has been proven that tracking your goals helps motivate you to actually accomplish them, generally contributing to personal development," says Holmes. "As an added bonus, leadership will likely be impressed by your initiative and take that into consideration in their review."

Quantify Your Achievements

If you want to make the case for a raise, you need to tell the story of how you've made money for the company and become more marketable over the year. Even if you're not in the kind of job where you can use numbers to demonstrate your success, there are other ways to show how you've helped your company's bottom line.

Angelina Darrisaw, founder and CEO of the New York City-based career-coaching firm C-Suite Coach, recommends describing how your achievements have contributed to the company's success. Before your annual review, she says to take your brag sheet and use it to tell a story about your strengths and how you've exceeded expectations and furthered the company's growth.

Similarly, Jessica Holbrook Hernandez, president and CEO of the Jacksonville, Florida-based resume consultancy Great Resumes Fast, says to create a list of professional courses, certifications, or credentials you acquired throughout the year. You'll show that you've proactively invested in your career growth and performance (and that you are more of an asset to the organization).

Prove How You've Outgrown Your Position

If you're asking for a raise or promotion, it's not enough to show that you are good at your job. You have to show that you've outgrown your current role and can take on additional responsibilities. (And if you've already taken on more responsibilities and gone above and beyond, now is the time to mention it!)

"People get raises because they've earned them, so don't include things like your own increased expenses or length of service," says Nancy Halpern, an executive at the New York City-based executive coaching firm KNH Associates. "Show that you've added value beyond expectation and have more to offer."

Halpern recommends making a list of the responsibilities you've taken on that are above your current title. Then research the title and salary for the promoted role. Bring those stats to your meeting when it's time to ask a raise.

Show That You're A Goal-Getter

Be proactive with your goal setting to show your manager that you're serious about working hard, making change happen, and getting ahead.

"Create a list of the top three career goals you have for yourself in 2017, then plan how you want to make those goals come to life," says Darrisaw. Bring this list to your meeting and talk about it with your manager.

"Make sure you walk away with a targeted plan for next year. If your manager says you need to improve on something, ask, 'How will we measure my success and growth in that area?'" she adds. "Ask questions like, 'How will we know if I've exceeded the expectations?' The most important thing to do is work to ensure you and your manager have shared expectations of what success in your role looks like."

A version of this article originally appeared on Monster. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.