The service helps companies spruce up their ads in order to engage more with the platform—and also keep Facebook ahead of its competitors.

Baked founder Matt Lewis never thought about hiring an ad agency to help boost holiday sales at his three bakeries in New York City, but he did want to run some kind of campaign this year to get people to preorder pies for Thanksgiving.

A former ad man himself, Lewis thought he was capable of making social media content that was good enough to draw in some customers. In the past, he's hired photographers and considered hiring a design agency to spruce up the Baked website. But the costs are high. A photographer would cost him $1,500 a day, and a video shoot, about $3,800 a day. "We don't really have those funds," says Lewis, whose warm smile and calm demeanor might lead you to think he's a yoga teacher, not a baker. "There's no return, or the return would be so small after you've paid everybody out. It wouldn't be worth it."

This past fall, Lewis participated in a 12-hour, Facebook-hosted workshop to learn how to create dynamic ads and general content using a mobile phone and some apps. Prior to the class, Baked's Facebook page was largely comprised of static photos of swirly cake tops and colorfully iced cookies. But with a budget of $50, a little arts and crafts, and the help of Facebook's Creative Shop, Lewis was able to produce more dynamic content. Using cardboard, fabric, clamp lamps, and production mobile apps, Lewis and his team learned how to shoot stop-motion videos, add moving graphics to still shots, and cut together appealing product videos.

The ads appear to be working. Baked's staff was instructed to ask new customers where they heard about the bakery and, Lewis, says, "Almost unanimously, everybody who had never heard of us was either from a friend or from the Facebook ads." Baked saw a 40% increase in pie sales compared with Thanksgiving 2015. In addition to the preorder campaign, Baked ran a series of Facebook ads to attract new customers. "We had a 70% increase in capturing email addresses as well as actual physical addresses," Lewis says. "And then we actually lowered our cost of [customer contact information] acquisition by about 32%."

The Creative Shop

Facebook's Creative Shop is not the single, centralized place that its name implies. Rather, its 150 employees are scattered around the company's many offices worldwide and have been helping major brands develop Facebook-specific content for roughly seven years, says its director, Tom Brown. Most recently, the Creative Shop worked with Airbnb to advertise its new Experiences product via a series of live tours of cities led by Airbnb hosts. The videos, all roughly 30 to 45 minutes long, take potential customers through activities that only locals might know about, like cooking classes in Miami, marine explorations in Cape Cod, and a performance art workshop in Paris.

In the last year and a half, the Creative Shop has drawn together a four-person team to create tools and tutorials for small businesses like Lewis's bake shop. The experiment was part of an effort to see if tutorials might push small and local businesses to engage more with the platform, whether through paid advertising or organic content. "[Small businesses] don't think that they have the equipment in order to create great content. That they don't have the money to spend to hire somebody else and they just don't have the knowledge," says Keara Tanella, creative strategist at Facebook's Creative Shop. "They're not creatives at heart. They're not advertisers. These are small to medium business owners." To test her hypothesis, Tanella brought together three merchants to try out a series of instructional videos aimed at helping them make beautiful content on the cheap. The businesses included Lewis's Baked as well as eyewear company Felix Gray and hair product specialists Twisted Sista.

Mobile Studio Techniques

There were two major techniques Tanella tried to impress on the small business owners: 1) Use what you have; 2) Spend very little on what you don't. To do that, Tanella suggested sprucing up old product shots. Baked, for instance, had 36 images of cake that the company had shot but never used. If Lewis and his crew didn't have imagery or needed new assets for a campaign with specific goals in mind, Tanella showed them how to snap a photo with natural lighting. The group also learned how to utilize an array of free mobile apps to tweak and polish their images.

"You don't need to have a long-form storytelling video and have complex editing," says Tanella. "You do some really simple techniques."

Like Baked, Felix Grey and Twisted Sista enjoyed better returns on their ads than previous efforts. Felix Grey lowered its cost per customer acquisition by 63%; cost per click decreased 44% and click-through rate increased 1.9%. For Twisted Sista, which was hoping to build brand awareness, 77% of its web traffic started coming from Instagram after a series of revamped ads ran there. The company also spent less money to reach 29% more people in one-tenth the time. What all these statistics say is that polished DIY content worked to drive interest among consumers.

Small Businesses And The Big Picture

Small businesses are becoming increasingly important to Facebook as it strives to become the single platform for consumers to coordinate the concerts, book clubs, birthday parties, and myriad other events that make up your offline life.

In the last year, a series of features have cropped up to this effect. Now when friends post restaurant recommendations, Facebook plots out each suggestion on a map published at the top of the post. Beneath individual suggestions, users see a card with the name of the business, its rating, price range, and a link to its own Facebook business page. This year, Facebook also broke out events into a standalone app and integrated ticket purchasing through Ticketmaster and EventBrite.

These new tools are just the beginning. Eventually, Facebook wants its platform to do everything, from booking a hair appointment to finding the right holiday gifts at a local store. This will be harder to pull off than mapping out a recommended restaurant, though VP of Engineering Andrew Bosworth thinks it's merely a matter of striking the right partnerships.

"We've got all the sides of the marketplace, we just don't have the stuff like the connector," he says during an interview in New York. He means that while Facebook has buyers and sellers, it doesn't have the infrastructure for transactions. To become a commercial hub, Facebook needs the right integrations.

Right now, the Mobile Studio represents an opportunity for Facebook to draw in incrementally more ad revenue through small businesses. But eventually, once the company figures out a way to better link consumers to businesses using its platform, those small business advertisers could act as the "connectors" Bosworth spoke of.

Despite soaring ad sales in 2016, Facebook CFO David Wehner said during Facebook's third-quarter earnings call that investors should anticipate slowdown in 2017 because the network will soon max out on the number of ads it puts in front of users. Ad load, which is Facebook lingo for measuring how many advertisements it can pack into feeds, has been a big driver of growth for the company, so when it reaches its limit, Facebook won't be able to sustain the same revenue jumps it's been making.

As a result, the company is pushing its premium video ad products more. Since it can't stuff more static ads into feeds, it's hoping to grow the number of video ads. Recently Facebook began testing ads that roll out midway through a video. Now, Mobile Studio is part of the effort to grow the Facebook stock of video ads.

By teaching small businesses how to make more effective video content on the cheap, Facebook is encouraging businesses to spend a little extra to promote it. The hypothesis is that if businesses know they have good creative that drives sales, they'll be willing pay to promote it and extend their potential ability to reach customers (rather than just posting organically). Baked, Twisted Sista, and Felix Grey represent just three of the 60 million businesses with Facebook accounts, and the social network is keen to make all of them paying advertisers. So far, only 4 million of the businesses on Facebook advertise (Baked, Felix Gray, and Twisted Sista are among them), but they spend big. In the third quarter of 2016, Facebook pulled in $6.8 billion in advertising revenue, up 59% from the same period a year before.

The Google Dilemma

Facebook has one major competitor when it comes to the small business arena: Google, a company that not only earns more digital ad revenue than Facebook, but also has been pursuing small business ad spend for a lot longer. For years now, Google has courted businesses as a way to build out its index of services and stores. As it's driven deeper into shopping, the tech giant has continued to create tools for businesses to help drive both online and offline sales. "A lot of paid search in the retail space has converted over to our shopping format," says Allan C. Thygesen, Google's global head of SMB sales. "I think that is just a more compelling format and a better experience both for consumers and merchants."

And Google is also staying ahead of innovation for small businesses. In June, before the launch of Facebook's Mobile Studio, YouTube rolled out the Director's App: guided video creation for small businesses. It enables people to create a short, relatively professional looking video about their business in under 10 minutes. This all gives Google a natural advantage. Internet search still plays a vital role in most people's shopping process; it's how 60% of people research potential purchases, according to Synchrony Financial's Fifth Annual Major Purchase Consumer Study.

So the question is: With its Mobile Studio tools, can Facebook convince small businesses with limited ad cash to spend that its platform is the most valuable? That may be a matter of how big the company plans to scale its small business efforts. Right now, the Creative Shop is reaching out to small and medium businesses via targeted advertising on its platform, webinars, and live workshops. "We've created videos that show how to actually remix content using your phone and send them out in ads in the news feed to small business owners," says Tanella.

This, after all, is Facebook's edge: the ability to place hypertargeted ads within a news feed. If that translates into increased visibility for businesses, then it may very well be worth the ad spend.

Our brains' penchant for efficiency means they aren't great at syncing our behaviors with our core principles in every context.

Admit it: You hold a few contradictory beliefs—maybe more than a few. We all do. Many of them we aren't even aware of, and the reason we aren't aware of them has to do with the way our brains process, store, and retrieve knowledge. And in order to do that well, they turn us all into self-contradicting messes, at least some of the time. Here's how, and how come.

Your Core Principles Probably Clash

There are lots of contradictions in people's strongly held beliefs. Someone might preach self-sufficiency in politics, but coddle their children. An individual might oppose abortion on the grounds that human life is sacred and may still support the death penalty for convicted murders. A person might argue for the freedom of individual expression in the arts but want hateful speech to be regulated.

There's a pragmatic reason for these contradictory beliefs. A core principle that you hold and don't want to have violated is called a "protected value," which you don't even like to consider violating. Observing other people violate one's own protected values can cause feelings of anger and even outrage. And when we contemplate violating our own protected values, we feel guilt and shame.

The thing is, once you have more than one protected value, those values are very likely to come into conflict at some point. People who oppose abortion and physician-assisted suicide, but who favor the death penalty for murderers and deadly military force for regimes perceived as threats to American lives and values, are experiencing this kind of conflict. They have two deeply held values—the sanctity of life and the prime importance of security—and different circumstances require making a choice between the two.

Such choices are rarely explicit, and most people aren't aware of the inconsistencies in beliefs like this until it's pointed out to them. To be fair, philosophers and ethicists have spent centuries untangling dilemmas like these, and many would argue (often compellingly) that clashing ideals—political or otherwise—are perfectly defensible, as are contingent approaches toward acting on them. And maybe so. But our brains don't care about any of that.

In other words, if you learn some new fact that turns out to be inconsistent with something else you know, there are no automatic mechanisms in your brain that point out the inconsistency and force you to resolve it. Instead, you simply end up with two different beliefs that are not consistent.

All Beliefs Are Contextual

Almost any statement you can make about human behavior is true only in certain circumstances. The trick to understanding behavior is to know the circumstances in which behaviors are going to happen.

The same thing is true with beliefs. When someone says, "I believe that human life is sacred," or "I believe in individual freedom," that statement includes an unstated disclaimer that goes something like "all else being equal." But there are nearly always circumstances that lead to the violation of any broad belief or value statement.

It would be too much work for the brain to have to enumerate all of the exceptions to the rules you believe in, so it does something easier instead: It associates beliefs with specific situations and makes it easier to retrieve those beliefs in the situations with which they are associated.

Suppose you travel to a national park. There are signs all over the park warning people to beware of bears, so you learn that you shouldn't go near them—you should be afraid to. Later, you go a zoo. There's a bear there, too, but you needn't fear it because there moats and fences to protect you.

Theoretically, your brain could first learn a general rule to deal with this, like, "Be scared of bears," and then learn all kinds of exceptions to that rule. Or it could simultaneously learn both the rule and the context in which it was learned—which is exactly what your brain does. That makes it easier to recall the information again, in the right context, in the future.

How Your Brain Handles Your Contradictions

Because this system works pretty well, most of the time you don't need to think about the fact that your beliefs may be contradictory as a result of being contextual. But calling to mind your contradictory beliefs leads you to notice that they aren't consistent. (There seems to be an endless reservoir of people who delight in pointing out your inconsistencies to you, particularly on the internet.) In those situations, you have two options.

One is to follow the "it depends" strategy: You make a mental note that your beliefs aren't really contradictory. Instead, one belief holds in one set of circumstances, and the opposite holds in other circumstances. This has the benefit of being cognitively true.

Sometimes, though, you resolve the contrast between beliefs by choosing one over the other. This strategy is the one we use in science. In a scientific study, there are often competing theories that attempt to explain some aspect of the world. When two theories conflict, researchers use data to decide which one to believe. Relying on the collection and analysis of data to determine whether theories are wrong is itself a protected value in science. The whole process forces conflicting ideas into stark juxtaposition in an effort to resolve conflicts.

Individuals, however, are less often forced into such quandaries day to day. One belief can happily coexist with other conflicting beliefs until someone or something highlights the contradiction. The resulting dissonance in some cases may lead to a careful reexamination of values, or it may lead to an expedient rationalization and a quick change of topic. All the same, we're capable of effortlessly holding disparate beliefs, even when they're directly challenged.

"Do I contradict myself?" Walt Whitman wrote. "Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)." He was right.

This article is adapted from Brain Briefs: Answering Questions to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind by Art Markman and Bob Duke. It is reprinted with permission.

Your boss has feelings, too. Here what the research says about how and when to appeal to them.

Quick—think of one thing that would make your job better.

Maybe you're itching to work from home once a week, lead a new project, or get a promotion. You have solid reasons why it would benefit you and your team, but that's not always enough to convince your boss.

That's because how you make your case is going to impact how effective it is. Quantified Communications, the company I work for, conducted linguistic analyses on hundreds of communication samples from Fortune's list of the world's greatest leaders to find out how some of the most successful people structure their arguments.

It turns out that just leaning on facts and logic in every discussion isn't the best approach. You also need to know when to use appeals to emotion and intuition. And to see the best results, you have to use all three of these tactics and apply them to the right situations. Here's how.

1. When You Want To Change A Company Policy

Strategy: Lean on emotion.

If you want to work from home every Friday—or are asking your boss to relax the dress code, or boost the parental leave policy—focus on emotional appeals. Because these kinds of decisions often feel abstract (i.e., they're not as easy to correlate with company performance), the best way to get your boss on board is to make him or her her feel personally involved.

Research has shown that when we use emotional language (think: narrative elements like vivid sensory language) to make our points, listeners can see the messages in their minds' eye and they're more likely to align their thinking with ours.

So, asking to work from home would sound like this:

I'd like to discuss the possibility of working from home one day a week. For the most part, the fact that we talk through problems and bounce ideas off each other really makes us a more cohesive, creative team. However, I find I often have a hard time changing gears and focusing on independent tasks. I want to be there for my teammates when someone poses a question. And I feel antisocial if I'm wearing my noise-canceling headphones all day long. Working from home once a week, with no extra chatter or distraction, would help me put my head down and dive deep into my work. Then I'd come back to the office the next day ready to give my full attention to collaborative projects.

This argument is compelling because you shared how the work environment makes you feel in a relatable way. You want your boss to think, "I get that," as it'll make them more open to your proposed solution.

2. When You Want To Take The Lead On A Project

Strategy: Appeal to intuition.

When you want to persuade your manager to let you lead a project, your best bet is to play to their intuition. Our analysis shows this is the most common approach successful people take, and when you think about it, it makes total sense.

To get someone on your side, you've got to convince them to trust you by building up your own credibility and expertise. Brands do this by citing awards and publishing rave reviews from top clients, and you can adopt similar tactics to help nudge the boss's "gut feeling" in your favor. Your pitch would sound like this:

I'm excited about our plans to host a conference later this year, and want to discuss spearheading the effort. As you know, event planning was a regular facet of my last job, and I planned something similar there. In addition, our local clients enjoyed the networking dinner I organized last quarter—and I'd love to offer that kind of value on a much bigger scale.

By highlighting successes and citing others who believe in your work, you foster the trust that might land you the gig. Intuitively, it "just makes sense" to let you lead the project.

3. When You Want A Promotion

Strategy: Make a logical argument.

Logical appeals are most effective on audiences who are deeply familiar with your work and value. When you're asking your boss for a raise or a promotion, he or she is looking for cold, hard facts. Unlike in the prior instances, it's not enough to state that it would make you happier, or that other people love your work.

Your goal is to show what you're worth, and to do that, you have to lead with logic. That means concrete data, research, and statistics. Head to your performance review with a speech like this:

This year I implemented an automated reporting system that saved me six hours per week. That allowed me to focus on activities that helped the company sign five new clients and grow eight existing accounts by an average of 12%. Based on the value I've already added to the company, and the strategy I've built to increase that growth by 25% over the next six months, I'd like to ask you to increase my salary by 5%.

Your boss is concerned with your company's bottom line, so a concrete demonstration of how you've added to it is the best way to persuade him or her to give you a raise. When they review the numbers, they'll be thinking about the ones you shared as well.

Asking for what you want can be daunting. But choosing the right technique and strategizing before you ask will help you lead an impressive conversation—and increase your chances of success.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

The habits you adopt to cope with a crappy boss can get in your way once you finally start working for a good one.

Until recently, I'd never had a truly great manager. Decent managers? Yes. Straight up bad managers? Also yes. But great ones? Not so much.

Having a truly exceptional boss changes everything—how you feel about your day-to-day responsibilities, your ability to manage the challenges you face, and the progress you can make toward your long-term goals. Researchers have even found that employees' relationships with managers is one of the most decisive factors in the decision to look for another job versus stay put.

So when you finally do get that kind of support, it's important to reflect on the new type of relationship it leads to—and decide whether your old working habits may need a rethink. With the newfound trust and security your manager has gifted you, you may find it's time to scrap some of the hacks and workarounds you'd devised for dealing with a less-than-stellar manager.

Here are four habits to break when you finally get a really effective boss. Some of your coping mechanisms will be obvious and easy to brush off, but others may be subconscious and take a little more time and introspection to unravel for good.

1. Assuming The Worst From A Check-In

You know that coworker you were having trouble with? That project you faced a technical challenge on? That presentation you were nervous about giving? If you're coming off a string of bad or just okay managers, you may be used to never or rarely getting follow-ups to make sure things went okay. So it may surprise you to learn that great managers proactively check in to help whenever they can—not just when your performance is slipping.

Effective managers know that they can't sit on information or advice until it's convenient to their schedule. If a manager checks in outside of your normally scheduled one-on-one meeting, relax. Don't automatically assume the worst and put your guard up. Consider the possibility that rather than trying to micromanage, your new boss may be trying to find ways to help, so be more receptive.

2. Not Asking Questions For Fear Of Looking Dumb

I once had a manager who believed that depending on your seniority, asking certain questions was not allowed. We were discouraged from asking questions that were considered "too junior" for a given level. The result? Everyone wound up too scared or embarrassed to ask anything at all, and learned instead to troubleshoot with our peers instead of our manager.

The best bosses know that no question is dumb, and if you're asking it, there's a reason, and it's best to work on it together. They appreciate questions as a way to get to know you and your strengths and weaknesses better—all of which will help them to help you, in both the short and long term.

If it's your first time working with a collaborative manager, it can feel uncomfortable to admit you don't have all the answers and to ask for help. Remind yourself that it's okay to be vulnerable, and start with smaller questions if you're afraid to dive into meatier ones right away. The more support and collaboration you get from your manager, the more confidence you'll gain in asking questions more regularly.

3. Relying On Your Boss To Communicate With Higher-Ups

Bad managers take all the credit for your work. Decent managers don't take the credit directly but don't encourage you to represent it, either. Great managers not only find ways to share your great work to others but also empower you to talk about your accomplishments and share the results at every level of the company.

They rightfully insist on giving you agency to represent your work, rather than taking the mic themselves. In this new arrangement, you're an agent of your own destiny, and that can be unsettling. The best antidote is just to become a little more proactive than you're used to, and start sharing and speaking to your own work.

That means not waiting for your manager to provide the cue or assuming that they will offer an appropriate summary of your work. Instead, take the initiative to represent yourself—not only among your peers, but among leadership as well—knowing you'll have a boss who's proud of you and has got your back when you do.

4. Never Calling In Sick

Working for a less than effective manager, you may get into the habit of never calling in sick, or calling in sick and still working from home. Or maybe you've always just hesitated to take vacations.

We've all been there—napping a cold off but setting an alarm clock to dial into a "can't-miss" meeting, or going on vacation but continuing to check email "just in case" your manager needs you while you're off in Europe, on a road trip, or on a remote island where you're supposed to be unplugging. When you're used to having managers who make you feel like you can never take a day off no matter how sick you are or how much you need a vacation, you get used to never truly taking time away when you really need it.

So it may surprise you to finally have a manager who encourages you to stay home when you're feeling under the weather, and to actually cancel all your meetings so you can fully rest and recover. It may shock you to see your manager not only encourage vacations, but take vacations themselves—even long ones! The best way to fight the urge to keep working? Take their lead. Listen to your manager, and listen to your body. The best managers know that time away from work is not only okay but actually good for you, and therefore good for the company.

As humans, we're remarkably adaptable creatures. Many of us are capable of getting on just fine under less-than-perfect managers. But when we're finally lucky enough to work for a great one, many of us face an unfamiliar task of self-management: Learning to undo the habits that have gotten us by this far. But if you can kick these four, you'll be well on your way.

Google faced some unique hurdles in making the Android ecosystem school-friendly.

Google is trying to extend its lead in classroom computer sales by bringing Android apps to Chromebooks for education.

School administrators will soon be able to create lists of approved apps and install them onto students' laptops. Android apps are arriving this month in beta for a handful of Chromebook models, similar to last year's rollout on consumer Chromebooks.

Android apps could address one of the biggest complaints about Chromebooks—which is that the operating system, while simple and secure, is too limiting. Until now, Chromebooks have only been able to visit websites and run a relatively small number of web-based apps. The update will allow schools to choose from millions of apps in the Google Play Store.

"Bringing these two things together means that many, many students that are going to be using Chromebooks in the classroom will now have many more things that they can do with those Chromebooks," says Rajen Sheth, Google's senior director of product management for Android and Chrome for education and enterprise.

But making Android apps work in an education setting is more complicated than bringing those apps to consumers. Here's what Google has (and, in some cases, hasn't quite) figured out as part of its Android app push for schools:

New Hardware Was Necessary

While dozens of older Chromebooks will become compatible with Android apps, Google and device makers are also launching new hardware to take advantage of the software.

Acer's Chromebook Spin 11, which is launching this spring, has a screen that flips around 360 degrees, and a camera just above the keyboard. Students can hold up the Chromebook like a tablet and shoot video on the opposite side of the screen.

"That way, you can turn this device into a microscope, or you can turn it into a video camera, you can turn it into a lot of things that are needed for students in the classroom," Sheth says.

Acer's Chromebook also has active Wacom stylus support, allowing for pressure-sensitive digital pens that don't need batteries and only cost a few bucks each. "Students can actually share these styluses and replace the styluses inexpensively," Sheth says. "Things like that are really important."

The App Install Process Needs Optimizing

Part of Chromebooks' allure is how quickly they get up and running. Because everything's web-based, students can log in and have all their apps and accounts ready to go, but that speed isn't guaranteed if the system has to install a bunch of Android apps with every session.

With the addition of Android apps, Sheth says Google had to make "a variety of optimizations" to keep things speedy. While there is a small delay in being able to access Android apps when students first log in, the Chromebook should still be able to access the web in the meantime.

"You can get in and up and running and working in less than 10 seconds, and then start to access your Android apps, but we're going to continue take that further, and make continued improvements and continued optimizations," Sheth says.

To that end, Google is looking at ways to avoid re-downloading entire apps every time a student logs in. Presumably, if one classroom is pushing the same apps to every Chromebook, it might make sense to leave those apps installed, while wiping individual students' data between sessions.

"We know that every student logging in on that device will access that same application. Are there things we can do to optimize that and not have to re-download the application? Those are things we're going to be working on down the line" for Chromebooks, Sheth says.

Android Apps Could Use Some Tweaking

Nearly every Android app was built with phones and tablets in mind, rather than the big screens, keyboards, and trackpads that come standard on Chromebooks. While Google has tried to work around this—for instance, by simulating touch input through trackpad clicks—the company is also trying to convince developers to make their apps more laptop-friendly.

"We've actually created a list of all the key applications, and over the course of the last year we've reached out to developers who haven't optimized their apps for this kind of form factor," Sheth says.

One of those developers is Adobe, which has tweaked the Android versions of its Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop Mix, Lightroom Mobile, Illustrator Draw, Photoshop Sketch, Adobe Comp CC, and Creative Cloud Mobile. Optimizations in these apps include landscape mode and formatting for larger displays, keyboard shortcuts, proper support for the Esc key, and support for Chromebooks' cameras and image galleries.

Granted, the push to make Android apps more accommodating to laptops will affect consumer Chromebooks as well as classroom ones. But Chromebooks are much stronger in the education market, making up 54% of Q3 2016 shipments to K-12 classrooms in the United States according to IDC. Developers might have a greater incentive to add keyboard, trackpad, and big screen support if their apps have any educational appeal. Perhaps that will set the stage for a big consumer Chromebook push this year.

"As these devices get out there, I think the developer community will start to optimize even more," Sheth says.

The latest Glassdoor data reveals not just which high-paying jobs are in hot demand, but how they stack up by workers' satisfaction, too.

Lots of people are looking for new jobs this year. One recent survey found that nearly half of workers could leave their posts in 2017 because they're dissatisfied, disengaged, don't like their management—you know, the usual suspects.

Glassdoor's newest annual ranking of the best jobs in America could suggest some ways to change that. Jobs were scored on a five-point scale (5 being the best) based on weighing these three factors equally:

1. Earning potential (median annual base salary)
2. Overall job satisfaction
3. Number of job openings

According to Glassdoor, to be considered for the top jobs list, a position had to have received at least 100 salary reports and at least 100 job satisfaction ratings shared by U.S.-based employees over the past year. The number of job openings per job title represents active job listings on Glassdoor as of January 1 this year.

Overall, four of the top 10 positions were also in the top 10 in last year's report, and data scientist still holds the No. 1 slot.

For additional comparison, LinkedIn's list of the most promising jobs for this year only showed one overlapping job title, that of data engineer, which ranked at No. 9 on its list.

Read More:These Are The Jobs With The Most Potential In 2017

Both lists were heavy on tech and health care jobs, a fact that Glassdoor's chief economist Andrew Chamberlain chalks up to two things: One, that the best jobs, as a rule of thumb, are highly skilled and ahead of the curve when it comes to automation. The other is demand. "Any organization today with a mobile app, web presence, or digitized data," he points out, "are struggling to fill jobs like data scientists, software engineers, and mobile developers."

And while LinkedIn's ranking didn't account for workers' satisfaction with their jobs, Chamberlain believes that the high job satisfaction ratings on Glassdoor's list aren't just about their earning potential (although that's part of it). "Money can buy happiness, but other workplace factors actually have a larger impact on your overall satisfaction, including culture and values, career opportunities, and the quality of senior leadership," he says, referring to a previous report that found the bigger the paycheck, the more likely the company's culture and values are driving employees' satisfaction.

If money brings great talent through the door, it's not always what keeps them happy once they're there. "Where competition for talent is fierce," Chamberlain adds, "we're not surprised to see highly sought-after positions like data scientist and dental hygienist reporting high satisfaction." 

Read More:The Cities With The Best Opportunities For Job Seekers This Year

From ignored emails to unpaid invoices, a look at the phenomenon of professional ghosting and how to avoid it.

Rose Dawydiak-Rapagnani, a San Francisco-based communications strategist, recently struck out on her own to start a consultancy. In the first months, she signed up a company that made a strong impression. But after she wrapped up the job and sent along an invoice, the client disappeared off the face of the map. She followed up with them four separate times, and eventually escalated to seeking legal counsel.

"I still have not heard back from this person," she says. "It was a perfect storm of being too generous with my time and hoping for the best." Now, she is taking a more hard-line approach with clients by asking for some money down and discontinuing work if a payment is late.

Dawydiak-Rapagnani is far from the only victim of this kind of practice, which some call "professional ghosting." "Ghosting" is a term that is most frequently used in the online dating world, and it involves a romantic prospect neglecting to respond to texts or calls after a few dates.

Career experts say this practice is increasingly spilling over into the workplace, ranging from being fairly innocent—an overlooked email in a flooded inbox—to downright nefarious, such as avoiding paying consultants after they've completed their work.

Why Does It Happen?

"Professional ghosting is far more common these days," says Wendi Weiner, an attorney and career coach based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "It's about avoiding being the bad guy." In Weiner's view, younger professionals who rely on technologies like text and email to avoid face-to-face contact are more often the perpetrators of professional ghosting. And they're also typically the victims of it, as they're relatively early in their career and potentially easier to ignore by a higher-up.

Weiner says her clients most frequently experience this kind of behavior in the recruiting context: when a prospective employer fails to respond after a round of seemingly promising interviews. But it also happens the other way around: A client of hers will take a meeting or two with a prospective employer, and never get back to them about the job if they decide to stay put or take an alternative offer.

For Weiner, this kind of behavior could be "career suicide," as it often leaves the other party with a bad taste in their mouth that will stay with them. Even if her client isn't taking the job, they might interview or work with that person in the future. For clients that aren't comfortable making a phone call to receive or deliver bad news, she suggests a polite text or email instead. Anything is better than leaving another professional hanging, she warns.

How To Avoid It

Ellen Leanse, a veteran of both Apple and Google, recalls how clients would neglect to pay her for a consulting project earlier in her career. "My invoices were first greeted with a 'great, we'll pay you right away' message and then, when that didn't happen, by a litany of 'oh, thanks for the reminders' or 'we'll get right on it'," she recalls. "Well, they never paid."

Since then, she's taken steps to protect herself from this kind of behavior. With her current consulting work, she requires an "initiation invoice" with any new client. This ensures that she is paid a reasonable amount up front before starting work. She'll also routinely ask for references from former consultants that have worked with the client. That might seem untrustworthy or confrontational, but Leanse recommends playing with the phrasing. "You can ask to speak to someone who can share insights on the best way to work with them," she says.

Leanse believes that she may have lost some jobs by taking this kind of approach, but it also helped her avoid wasting her time. "Thinking like this signals (to clients) that I'm all business and I expect a win-win partnership here."

Another way to avoid being ghosted, suggests Leanse, is to minimize connections or time spent with people who are likely to engage in this kind of behavior. That might seem challenging to predict, but she has found ways to spot potential red flags. "Learning to clarify expectations and agree to next steps before meetings or conversations is the best way to limit the ghost potential of an interaction," she says.

For Weiner, a lawyer by training, the key is to get contracts in writing. "You want agreements and signatures as much as possible," she explains. "You have to be more savvy than ever in today's business environment."

New American shoe and bag companies are making classic Italian craftsmanship accessible to the masses via direct-to-consumer business models.

Amanda Carye stumbled on the idea for her shoe company, Idoni, when she moved to Italy for a six-month business course.

Strolling past gelato stands and chapels in Venice, she came across shops selling furlane, a slipper invented during the Second World War, when resources were scarce. At the time, Italian shoemakers—whose craft is still passed down from generation to generation—took pride in being able to make a beautiful shoe out of pretty much anything. They used old bicycle tires to create soles with good grips, jute bags for a waterproof interior, and lush recycled fabrics like velvet curtains or silk dresses for the upper. The result was a shoe that looked like a cross between a ballet flat and a smoking slipper, with a colorful exterior and excellent traction. "Old ladies remember wearing furlane when they were children, running around in the countryside," Carye says. "The shoes are highly functional, but they are also very elegant."

Carye's plan was to modernize the furlane for American women, many of whom struggle to find footwear that is comfortable but doesn't look like sneakers or (horrors) orthopedic shoes. While in Italy, she began to search for a factory where a master shoemaker could help her engineer a flat shoe that offered good arch support, stability, and cushioned insoles without sacrificing beautiful design. As Carye began the search, she found dozens of family-owned factories that had been making shoes for some of the world's best known luxury brands, including Prada, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Manolo Blahnik. She landed on a factory in the Brescia region, two hours east of Venice, where the owner was just as excited about prototyping her ideal shoe as she was. Her brand, Idoni, was born.

Carye's shoes go for $135, rather than the usual $600 you'd expect to pay for an exclusive "made in Italy" shoe. She's able to set a reasonable price because she only sells the shoes on her website, following the model pioneered by Warby Parker and Everlane that cuts out retailer markups. "Americans spearheaded the buying online and direct-to-consumer business models as a part of our everyday life, which allows American companies to go back to Italy or Spain or wherever the expertise is," Carye says. "Everyone wants products that are handmade by the most skilled artisans in the world. In turn, this model allows European artisans to find a broader audience."

J.Crew was among the first brands to mass-market Italian-made products—namely, shirts and shoes. Back in 2011, the company released a three-part documentary short series that took the viewer on a trip to old Italian mills and factories. Alessandro Giammattei, a Florence-based shoemaker profiled in the series, had spent 50 years honing his craft. "You breathe shoes around here," he says on screen. "It's in the blood. We make shoes that have nothing less in quality than Prada and Gucci." And still, J.Crew was able to sell these shoes for about $150.

These days, J.Crew is competing with a wave of American fashion startups that manufacture in Italy—Idoni, M.Gemi, Cuyana, Tamara Mellon, Oliver Cabell, Greats, and Everlane to name a few—and offer their products at a fraction of the price of traditional luxury brands. All of these companies are selling shoes and bags at what is described as an "affordable luxury" price point of between $150 and $300 per item, which makes them accessible to a broader spectrum of buyers beyond than the usual one-percenters.

The Changing Landscape Of Italian Factories

Luca Bagante has had a front-row seat to this wave of American companies making a foray into Italian shoe factories. He's a third-generation shoemaker in Padua whose grandfather opened a factory in the post-war years that produced footwear for famous brands like Rossimoda. These days, he still uses this factory to produce his own shoe line, Apepazza, but he's also started a consulting firm that connects footwear startups from around the world with the right factory for their needs. "Italian shoe manufacturing is hard to navigate if you're not Italian," Bagante says. "Our network is made up of a lot of independent stores and factories."

Italy is the second largest footwear exporter in the world, after China. Italian shoes generated $7.7 billion in revenue in 2016, but Bagante says that after the 2008 global recession, factories lost about 30% of their business. He's noticed, however, that interest from American and European direct-to-consumer brands has contributed to Italian factories' recovery.

According to the most recent data, released in 2014, there are more than 5,000 footwear manufacturers in Italy, employing about 77,500 workers. This means that the average factory only employs 15 people. Shoemaking skills are often passed down from parent to child; some businesses can trace their origins back to the medieval period, when a shoemaking guild was established in Florence and transformed the trade into an art governed by rigorous rules to ensure quality. "When Asia came into the global shoe market, it was impossible to compete with their cost of labor," Bagante says. "In Italy, it was very important for us to emphasize our legacy of quality. Luxury was the only option for us to express our capabilities."

Karla Gallardo, founder and CEO of Cuyana, which makes bags in Italy, points out that superior Italian workmanship has a lot to do with the fact that craftsmen are knowledgeable about the materials they work with because their factories are often located close to leather tanneries, allowing workers from both industries to collaborate to make the best possible product. "Leatherworkers in Italy are familiar with different grades of leather and know which parts of the hide works best for different products," she says. "We've found that the quality of the workmanship goes down when leathers are flown in. It often means that [the factories] are importing cheaper, poorer-quality materials, and the craftsmen don't have an intimate understanding of that particular material."

Shoe factories are spread all over Italy. Marche, in the center of the country, makes the greatest volume of shoes; Veneto is known for its high-end luxury women's shoes, hosting the factories that make produce goods for Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent; Apulia has factories that specialize in sneakers. There are also hubs in Tuscany, Lombardy, and Naples. But not all factories are created equal. The city of Prato just outside Florence has become a hot spot for low-end garment and shoe manufacturing. While inferior in quality, what's produced here can still tout the "Made in Italy" stamp. The vast majority of the factories in the area are run by Chinese immigrants who have ties to Asian factories and tend to be focused on driving down the price as much as possible. The products often end up in fast-fashion retailers like Primark, Topshop, and H&M.

Artisans willing to take a chance on foreign startups that buck established industry traditions have been rewarded with a spike in business, allowing many of them to return to pre-recession capacity. "There are those who are smart enough to know that they have to react, change their business model and production," Bagante says. "They are open to new ways of distributing their product."

But it can be difficult convincing cobblers that a new business model can work. Carye, for instance, had to explain her online-only approach several times to the factory owner with whom she wanted to work. "He had heard of Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom," she says. "He had even heard of selling products on Amazon or Yoox. But the idea of selling a product on your own website sounded insane to him. He wasn't sure anybody would buy the shoes." Eventually, he took a chance on her.

A Post-Luxury World

One of the keys to these companies' direct-to-consumer models is the idea of "post-luxury": the craftsmanship and meticulous design of luxury without the artificially inflated prices and exclusivity. Maria Gangemi's been familiar with this concept her whole life.

Growing up in Sicily, Gangemi remembers visiting boutiques that sold beautiful, high-quality shoes and bags made in local factories without massive markups. Over the years, however, she observed that Gucci, Prada, and other luxury brands were bringing more and more business to these factories in an effort to expand their output and global footprint. In the process, they edged out smaller brands that charged less for their products. Soon, the well-crafted heels and handbags that Gangemi loved stopped appearing in local shops.

She decided to take the model she had observed as a child and modernize it by selling her products online. This way, she could sell her shoes for between $150 and $300, about a third the price of Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks. To do this, she had to build relationships with factories. As a native Italian, Gangemi has had an easier time navigating the manufacturing landscape than her American counterparts, but finding the right partners was still challenging. She spent months traveling around the country, talking to cobblers about the kind of shoes she wanted to make. Some factories exclusively make leather pumps; others specialized in driving moccs. As she expanded from heels and flats into boots, sneakers, and men's shoes, she had to find other craftsmen with a variety of different skills.

These days, her New York-based company, M.Gemi, works with eight family-owned factories concentrated in the Florence region. She convinced these manufacturers to work with her by promising to order shoes throughout the year, rather than following the traditional two-season fashion calendar (which is itself becoming a relic of a bygone era). Gangemi wants to treat these factories like partners, collaborating with them on everything from shoe design to annual workflow. She hopes that by building long-term relationships with them, rather than just treating them like contractors, M.Gemi will be able to release a regular stream of fashion-forward shoes that are of the highest quality. "Commercializing shoes is very complex, particularly when it comes to fit," Gangemi says. "We have very high standards because we're an online brand, so the sizes need to be extremely consistent, which is a lot of work. But our factories are willing to work with us because they see that the partnership is very mutually beneficial." Some of the factories now work exclusively with M.Gemi.

So far, M.Gemi's approach has been working. Every Monday, the company "drops" new limited-edition shoes on the website—a clever way to give customers a reason to keep coming back. The shoes often sell out that week. Business has grown 181% over the last year, and half of all new customers visiting the site make a second purchase. That's an encouraging sign, Gangemi says, that the products are hitting the mark, quality-wise. M.Gemi has caught the eye of investors like Accel, General Catalyst, and Forerunner Ventures, who have poured $32 million to help the company expand.

The Future Of Italian-Made

M.Gemi's success has spurred other fashion startups to consider making their products in Italy. It's partly what gave Amanda Carye the gumption to launch Idoni. It also prompted Scott Gabrielson to launch his bag and accessories brand Oliver Cabell.

Gabrielson ended up in Italy after touring factories around the world to get a sense of how they all function. In China, for instance, factories tended to be large operations, often hiring hundreds or thousands of workers who are quickly trained to cut, sew, and operate machines as fast as possible. By contrast, Italian factories were mostly small, family-owned affairs that employed a limited number of highly trained craftsmen. "Many Italian factories are happy to make only a few dozen products a day," Gabrielson says. "Even if their customers are looking to expand production, they say no because they worry they won't be able to sustain the same level of workmanship."

.[Photo: Alberto Bernasconi]

[Photo: Egomezta]

[Photo: Alberto Bernasconi]

By launching an Italian-made bag brand, Gabrielson is betting that the tastes of the American consumer is changing—a view shared by several of his fellow entrepreneurs profiled in this story. At 28, he's a millennial who believes that his generation is tired of the cheap, disposable products that flooded the market with the rise of fast fashion. "I believe that today's customer is interested in value, not cost," he says. "That's a critical distinction. They don't mind spending a bit more for a product if they realize that it is well made and will last a long time."

If he's right, Italian shoe factories could look forward to booming business for years to come.

This plug-and-play wireless screen works as a wireless presentation display, digital whiteboard, and video conferencing tool.

If there's one point of agreement that can unite workers across different industries, age groups, and countries, it's this: Meetings suck. Today, Cisco is attempting to change that with a new product called the Spark Board, a $4,990 digital whiteboard and video conferencing system that aims to take some of pain out of teamwork, at a price point that will put it within reach of lots of companies.

Cisco, which is currently the market leader in enterprise collaboration products, earns $5 billion in annual revenue from its existing video-conferencing systems, telephones, and web conferencing and chat products. Its hardware, and products that compete with it, are a big business, but they also come with imposing price tags. It's possible to spend tens of thousands of dollars equipping a room with Cisco video-conferencing equipment; even Microsoft's Surface Hub—itself designed to undercut the cost conventional big-company video conferencing systems—starts at around $9,000. (Google plans to release its own smart whiteboard, the Jamboard, later this year for "under $6,000.")

"If you want a great experience, you're going to pay a lot of money. If you want to do video conferencing and you don't want to spend a lot of money, you're going to have a crappy experience. There isn't anything that's in between. There's no great experience that's affordable, it just doesn't exist today," says Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's IoT and Application Business.

That middle ground is what Cisco is trying to fill with the Spark Board. Equal parts whiteboard, wireless presentation display, and video conferencing tool, it's a 4K display that looks a lot like an HDTV and can be mounted on a wall or used on a stand. The company designed it to allow an average human being to get it up and running, setting it apart from other enterprise video conferencing solutions that typically require an AV team to not only mount the display but also install microphones and other gadgetry around the room. With the Spark Board, everything you need is built into the screen.

So Many Ways a Meeting Can Fail

Beyond the Spark Board's low price tag, Cisco thinks that its plug-and-play experience will set the device apart from the competition.

We've all been to meetings that are hobbled by technical difficulties. Someone can't find the right cable to connect a laptop to the display. The wrong dial-in number got distributed to remote workers. Or the remote control has somehow disappeared, so you can't figure out how to turn on the display in the first place.

"We wanted to build something that anyone can hang on a wall and connect, and have it automatically ready to go off to the races," says Trollope. "We needed a product where anyone could come in the room and without having ever seeing the device or even knowing what its name is, automatically wirelessly connect."

To make that happen, Cisco built technology that allows computers, smartphones, and tablets to pair with the board using high-frequency audio. That means you don't have to deal with cables, Bluetooth, NFC, or anything else to get connected. The board itself puts out a sound wave that is so high-pitched that the human ear can't hear it—but computers and phones can. That sound encodes the name of the Spark Board and its pairing key. When you launch the app for the device while you're in the same room as the Spark Board, your device can automatically pair with the display to wirelessly transmit your project.

Rather than install microphones around the room, the Spark Board uses a 3D-audio technology called beamforming. Twelve microphones mounted at the top of the display find the active speaker in a room, and then suppress the volume on other noises so that speaker's voice comes through.

It Even Sounds Like A Whiteboard

The Spark Board is far from the first digital whiteboard, but the others have struggled to catch on. "The category has been stagnant and hasn't really gone anywhere," says Trollope. "The reason why is that those products aren't good replacements for whiteboards: they're expensive, they don't work very well."

Part of the problem, he adds, is that existing products don't quite feel like the real thing. Oftentimes, they use 1080 displays, similar to a traditional high-definition television. While that works for people watching a presentation from their seats, it means that a presenter standing at the board can see the pixels. Many of those boards also use IR touch sensors to detect where your hands are on the screen, which means there's a bit of a lag before the board responds to your input.

The Spark Board's 4K panel ensures that it looks good both to people at the back of the room and the one who's writing on it. Writing can be done with a finger or with a stylus, and Cisco's stylus is designed to mimic the feel of a dry-erase marker. (The display even makes subtle marker sounds as you write.)

More importantly, the Spark Board has a capacitive multitouch screen—the same technology used by smartphones and tablets—with the aim of guaranteeing snappy response to your touches and jottings. The display also lets you share your screen or a PowerPoint presentation quickly and wirelessly.

Instant Collaboration

Perhaps the most compelling part of the Spark Board is how it enables teams to collaborate. The digital whiteboard functionality, including the ability to write on the board, can be accessed from anyone in a meeting, be it the presenter, someone sitting across the room, or a remote colleague across the world. Finished whiteboards are also saved back to a chat channel that everyone who participated in the meeting can access, so the collaboration can continue even after they've left the meeting.

If you're conferencing with another group that also has a Spark Board, then the whiteboard shows up on both, so it feels more like you're all in the same room. You can also swap between boards fairly easily, so if the group needs to quickly take a look at a whiteboard from a previous meeting it can be loaded up onto everyone's screens, then replaced with the current one in seconds. And it can all happen simultaneously with a video conference session, so you can see the other people you're working with.

The Spark Board's $4,990 price may be thrifty by the standards of the high-end systems that Cisco is known for, but the company isn't trying to turn a profit solely by selling hardware. Instead, the device will require a monthly $199 subscription for its accompanying cloud service, help desk, and software upgrades. Cisco plans to make the 55-inch version of the Spark Board available later this month; a 70-inch version will eventually hit the market at a yet-to-be-determined price.

Startup Sewbo has figured out how to get a machine to sew an entire garment, and it may finally push clothing factories to fully automate.

Jonathan Zornow got his big idea while watching TV.

The former Seattle software developer has an unusual bedtime addiction: Binging on the Discovery Channel show How It's Made.

"[The show] just tapes machines doing their thing over and over again," he says of the educational manufacturing series. "I find it serene, just watching stamps go up and down and the wheels spin around."

The meditative ritual usually lulled Zornow to sleep, but one episode on blue jeans woke him up. Zornow was stunned to see the complicated steps put into creating a simple pair of pants: The stitching process is still dependent on armies of human laborers.

"It really bothered me," he recalls. "It seemed strange that we wouldn't have more automation in that field. I had assumed that robots were making all of our clothes."

It's why Zornow came up with Sewbo, a process that chemically stiffens fabrics in order to allow automated sewing robots to produce a full garment. Currently, factories rely on humans to guide fabrics through machines and weave them through assembly lines.

"It seems crazy to me that there was so much labor being spent on these relatively simple goods," Zornow tells Fast Company. But once I learned more about it . . . clothing manufacturing is pretty complicated, and getting robots involved has been a huge struggle."

So despite great strides in manufacturing for the automobile and aviation industries in the last few decades, apparel factories remain relatively unchanged. They just moved from the U.S. to the other side of the Pacific where low labor costs helped meet consumer demands for more inexpensive goods. According to a recent study by the United States Fashion Industry Association, 43% of American fashion companies rank rising production or sourcing costs as their greatest or second-greatest business challenge.

While Zornow doubts the U.S. will ever be a net apparel exporter again ("That ship has sailed," he says), he's hopeful that at least a portion of manufacturers could return once they recognize automation's strength.

"I think that automation will be an important tool for the burgeoning reshoring movement by helping domestic factories compete with offshore factories' lower labor costs," he says. "When automation becomes a competitive alternative, a big part of its appeal will be how many headaches it relieves for the industry."

Sewbo is only a year old, but Zornow says he is already fielding dozens of inquiries from overseas factories, where almost all of the clothes on U.S. backs are now made. Domestic apparel manufacturing fell from 50% in 1994 to roughly 3% in 2015, reports the American Apparel & Footwear Association. That means 97% of clothing sold in the U.S. is imported.

How It Works

In the past, companies tried to create complicated mechanical devices to emulate the way a human sews, which "is a very difficult and complicated approach," explains Zornow. Instead, he took a different tack, manipulating the materials to make them compatible with robots.

He realized that if he stiffened the fabrics by drenching them in liquid polymers, they could be turned into thermoplastic composites and treated like hard materials. And robots need hard materials.

"They're stiff as a board, but they can be molded: You can apply heat and reshape them, and when they cool down, they'll hold their shape," explains Zornow. The machine sews through the stiffened fabric to produce a perfectly finished product. (The process can be used with any sewing machine and most robotic arms, which generally cost about $35,000.) Afterwards, the polymers can be easily washed off with water, no detergent necessary.

There are, however, some limitations. Since the material needs to be completely wet, certain fabrics such as wools or leather are out of the question. But overall, even dry-clean-only goods like silks can go through the process. During a demo, it took roughly 30 minutes for the Sewbo process to complete a T-shirt, but Zornow believes it will take less time once it's put on a manufacturing assembly line.

"I can say with some confidence that when it goes in the production environment, it will be at the same speed as a human sewer," he holds. Unlike a human sewer, however, robots do not need breaks and are rarely subject to error.

Even though there has been strong industry interest, Zornow has had difficulty building out a U.S. team. He has yet to make an additional hire because there are so few industrial-scale manufacturing experts in the U.S.

Changing The Industry

Slow progress in the apparel technology sector is something that concerns Whitney Cathcart, founder of Cathcart, a consulting firm focused on automated processes, robotics, and digital innovation.

"Our industry, in terms of manufacturing, is so archaic," says Cathcart. "You have a lot of people in senior-level executive positions that have been doing the same thing for a long time . . . It's so common to hear, 'Well, that's not how we do things.'"

Cathcart points to the challenges of brick-and-mortar institutions and the underwhelming performance of heavyweights such as Kohl's and Macy's during the holiday season. She believes apparel companies failed to adapt to the last decade's digital revolution: Instead of focusing on how clothing is made, they only focused on improving e-commerce and marketing strategies.

"Maybe people thought the fashion industry was untouchable," she says, highlighting Amazon's growing success. "We're buying differently as a society . . . There are brands you once thought were untouchable that are now going away."

Cathcart was quick to contact Sewbo as soon as she found out about it. In Sewbo, she sees the capability to change how apparel is made. It's an exciting and lucrative proposition, seeing how sales across the global apparel market are expected to exceed $1.4 trillion in the coming year.

"What he's creating is completely disruptive," says Cathcart, who thinks it might help bring automation to factories—and potentially jobs back to the U.S. While the initial investment in robotics seems daunting, Cathcart is confident it will pay for itself over the years, especially as the technology further evolves.

"You look at robots and artificial intelligence, which is still so nascent, and how quickly it's moved in 24 months, so imagine what it will look like in the next 24 months," she says of rapid evolvement in the robotics industry. We don't even know what we don't know yet."

It's a sentiment shared by Zornow, who sees a large opportunity for the U.S. manufacturing community. As of 2016, most manufacturers only have a couple hundred thousand robots deployed. Considering our output, he believes we should have far more.

"This is a big open field for them," says Zornow. "I think it's gonna be a land rush to see who can potentially double or more the number of robots they have deployed by getting access to these apparel factories."

Atnyel Guedj, purchasing manager at global manufacturer Delta Galil Industries, is more skeptical. Having overseen production for numerous labels in various countries across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., Guedj does not foresee apparel manufacturing returning stateside or drastically changing anytime soon.

"I don't see anyone in the U.S. spending money on expensive machinery," says Guedj, who sees numerous obstacles in overhauling current industry trends—namely, that apparel production, especially for fast fashion, requires expensive machinery and timely delivery at a very low price. With such challenging margins, companies are forced to seek out the lowest wages possible and are unlikely to invest in new technology. Even China is racing to keep up with increasing outsourcing to Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, says Guedj.

At the same time, Guedj admits that a technological advancement such as Sewbo "is very exciting" and a step in the right direction. At a certain point, he admits, the hunt for cheaper and cheaper labor must come to an end. Technology is the only way out. "[Automation] is the only way forward, and maybe the only way for the industry to save itself from itself," he says.

Zornow isn't naive about the industry's general distrust of new practices. "It will be a very long time, if ever, before things are 100% automated," he explains. Fabric production, garment dyeing, and finishing are already highly automated, says Zornow. There is still human labor involved, "but they're able to leverage machines to achieve incredible productivity, to the point where the labor cost to manufacture a yard of fabric is usually de minimis."

That is what he hopes Sewbo can do for apparel assembly. The future won't be entirely run by robots—people are still a necessary component—but factory production can be far more fruitful. "The response has been overwhelming," says Zornow, adding that the industry "is desperate for automation, and they're excited about what this could potentially do."

As he decides his next steps, he's still loyally watching his favorite show.

"It's the only thing I'm paying for on Amazon Prime now," he laughs. "At this point I can call it professional research."

There's actually a plethora of talented women coders all over the world. Silicon Valley just needs to reconsider the pipeline.

If you've heard about the tech industry's diversity problems, you've probably also heard about the narrow "talent pipeline." That's the name given to the supposed lack of qualified diverse candidates, which tech leaders plaintively invoke as a reason why Silicon Valley's diversity numbers haven't budged much lately and to explain why pay parity is also still far from reality.

But we know from several reports that the problem isn't the pipeline. It's rooted in unconscious biases that are threaded throughout employers' recruiting, hiring, and retention efforts, all of which, to be fair, are manifestly difficult to unravel.

While tech companies busy themselves with unraveling those, however, they may be able to start widening their talent pipelines just by changing the way they look at candidates. Recently, HackerRank, a startup that helps companies find qualified developers by testing global tech workers' coding skills—rather than rely on academic pedigree—set out to identify the world's most talented female developers. Nearly a quarter (24%) of the developers in HackerRank's own dataset of over 2 million coders, as of 2016, are female. The country with the highest proportion of women coders testing their chops on the platform is India (22.9%), compared with the U.S. at 14.8%. At the bottom is Chile, where fewer than 3% of the country's developers using HackerRank are women.

The platform's analysts are quick to point out that more doesn't always equal better. India may have the biggest representation of women, but the country placed 18th overall on algorithms tests. Russia's female developers, who account for just 7.8% of Russian coders on the platform, ranked number one on algorithms tests. Following just behind Russia are Italy and Poland. Women codes in U.S. come in at 14 out of the top 20.

CEO and cofounder of HackerRank Vivek Ravisankar tells Fast Company that while it's tough to say why some countries have more high performers than others, there is one discernible trend: The nations at the top tend to foster stronger coding cultures for kids.

"Last year, for instance, we highlighted a story on these amazing three teen sisters from a European country who won third place in one of our coding competitions," he explains, pointing out that the youngest was only 11 years old. China also inculcates coding skills in teens, says Ravisankar. "They even host national programming contests for young programmers, like NOIp [the National Olympiad in Informatics] in provinces."

What's the takeaway for U.S. tech companies still struggling with diversity issues? For one thing, it means getting past the notion that the diverse talent is in short supply—it may just be that they're stuck looking in the usual places and measuring talent by scholarship rather than proven skill. And for another, says Ravisankar, it means "encouraging young people early on." That way, he believes, "we can start to chip away at the gender stereotypes and biases ingrained in the male-dominated programming culture"—in Silicon Valley and far beyond it.

Social emotional learning has become popular in schools. On Sesame Street, it's been there from the start.

Sesame Street's Cookie Monster has undergone a transformation in recent years. Once a caricature of impulsive behavior, he now sings along to Icona Pop-inspired songs about self-control. "Me want it, me want to eat it, but me wait!" he wails, blue fur flailing, while his muppet friends dance in the background. "Me have strategies that can calm me down."

Cookie Monster's message is part of a deliberate effort on the part of Sesame Street to emphasize social and emotional learning (SEL). For example, the show has developed a toolkit for parents and educators about resilience, one of SEL's top buzzwords. Then there's Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame, a mobile app that helps children learn to problem solve in the face of new challenges.

But less explicitly, Sesame Street has been teaching social and emotional learning from its very first years on air. Back then, there was no major research on the value of SEL—indeed, the term itself didn't exist in an educational context until 1994. (In the years since, studies have shown that SEL programs can increase academic gains by 11%, and also have a positive impact on life outcomes including incarceration rates.) Now educators generally agree on SEL's core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. We went back through the Sesame archives and found examples of each.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness, according to Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), involves recognizing one's emotions and accurately perceiving one's strengths and limitations. On this dimension, Kermit (who was part of the original Sesame Street cast) is a star: he knows how to name his emotions.

Self-Management

Kermit also embodies effective self-management, including setting goals and maintaining self-discipline. "I made myself a promise, as a young polliwog: I'll be on top!" he sings, defiant, after a fellow frog mocks his ambition to climb the corporate ladder.

Social Awareness

Many shows for kids take place in an alternative reality, where fairy tales and legends reign. Not Sesame Street. The show's urban setting is central to its mission, and provides plenty of opportunities to introduce concepts like empathy and respect for others. Simple songs like "Who are the people in your neighborhood?" encouraged children to be curious about their neighbors and appreciate their contributions to the community.

Relationship Skills

Nearly every Sesame Street skit addresses relationship skills in some form, from Ernie and Bert's gentle domestic disputes to Grover's mounting exasperation with customers at the restaurant where he works. But some tackle relationships head-on, with lessons on communication and teamwork that would look perfectly at home in a modern classroom. "Cooperation makes it happen!" urban gardeners sing in one skit. In another, Cookie Monster and Ernie bond over a shared loss.

Responsible Decision Making

"The ability to make constructive choices about personal behavior," as CASEL defines responsible decision making, is a tough concept for a preschooler to grasp. Thank goodness Sesame Street wrote the song "Kids Just Love to Brush," which illustrates in an over-the-top, joyful fashion what it means to forsake short-term rewards (playtime after lunch) in order to achieve long-term benefits (healthy teeth). Bonus points for the bewildered parents.

Simon & Schuster's defense of its values rings hollow, says one former editor. That hypocrisy is baked into the business.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

I look for help in unlikely places when the world feels upside down. Just yesterday morning, I bought crystals, of all things (emerald for healing energy, rose quartz for transitions), and in recent weeks I've turned to authors like Jeff Chang and Rebecca Solnit and Claudia Rankine and Brit Bennett—talented writers whose urgent, necessary messages have helped me sleep through the night since November 8. That's how I've responded as a lover of books, anyway.

As a producer of them, I see things a little differently.

I'm now a literary scout for a small firm in New York, but previously I was an editor for two imprints at Simon & Schuster, the book publisher whose CEO Carolyn Reidy wrote yesterday to the company's authors defending its decision to publish a forthcoming book called Dangerous, through the conservative-leaning Threshold Editions, by the right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos. In her letter, Reidy claimed that "neither Threshold Editions nor any other of our imprints will publish books that we think will incite hatred, discrimination, or bullying." She also wrote that she expects Yiannopoulos's book will contribute something of substance—rather than hate speech—to "social discourse," a function that book publishers ideally see themselves performing.

Working in the book industry, I know well that it's a business like any other. But unlike most industries, it purports to serve a moral purpose bigger than its bottom line. The unfortunate reality, though, is that it's fallen far short of those ideals long before signing an author like Yiannopoulos.

Reidy's letter sounds some familiar notes. Several years ago, in a contract dispute with Amazon, far and away publishers' leading distributor, many in the book world argued that the e-commerce giant's profit motive would strangulate the free exchange of ideas that publishers exist to promote. Publishing wasn't just another business, they claimed, it played a civic function, too.

This argument, admittedly, has always been a little thin—and that's now apparent even to many of the industry's insiders. Recently, over 160 children's book authors and artists (many of them published by Simon & Schuster) wrote an open letter to the publisher claiming that Yiannopoulos's views are antithetical to their sense of publishing's social mission. "Irrespective of the content of this book," they wrote, "by extending a mainstream publication contract, Threshold has chosen to legitimize this reprehensible belief system, [Yiannopolous's] behaviors, and white supremacy itself."

That's if you take publishing's claims to preserving a lively, diverse "social discourse" at face value. I don't, for two reasons.

The first concerns book publishing's own composition. What even well-meaning critics like the 160+ signees overlook is how their industry is already plagued by racism, sexism, and—yes—white supremacy. I could cite personal accounts of identity-based tokenization I've experienced in my six-year career in book publishing, or those of the 49 publishing colleagues of mine who did so at length alongside me in a Brooklyn Magazine article last year. I could also point to the We Need Diverse Books campaign, which grew out of a shameful lack of diverse authors and subject matter represented at one of the industry's leading trade conferences a few years ago.

But I don't need to, because the statistics speak for themselves.

According to a Publishers Weekly survey last year, 88% of the industry's employees are white. 88%, according to a separate survey, are straight. 78% are women, but Publishers Weekly found they earn an average of $35,000 less than the sector's men. Only 8% are disabled. These figures have barely budged year after year, mirroring the near-standstill of diversity efforts in the much higher-profile tech sector over a similar period.

The second reason to doubt book publishers' commitment to the values Reidy alludes to has to do with their business realities—the market exigencies that far less high-minded industries also face. For book publishers—especially publicly traded ones like the CBS-owned Simon & Schuster—staying in the black depends on a handful of breakout titles, often by authors with already sizable audiences. It isn't likely that Threshhold signed Yiannopoulos because it expects Dangerous to become one of those record-busting titles, but it's quite likely that the imprint inked a deal with him because his fan base assures the book a predictable ROI. Every editor swings for a grand slam when they run a P&L for an author's advance, but they're happy to hit a solid double.

Playing the game for either level of success doesn't always leave room for the values that publishers claim not just to hold dear but to actively advance. Their businesses, like most businesses, simply aren't set up to allow them to. Simon & Schuster, as a company, may not condone hate speech, but it continues to vie with other publishers to award book contracts to people who do. It's rightly been observed that the publisher also publishes Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and now-President Donald J. Trump.

So while the book industry's workers, including its top brass, may personally reject everything Yiannopolous stands for, book publishing itself manifestly doesn't. At the same time, it's naïve to home in solely on his book deal as an indicator of the sector's prejudices. Indeed, the pearl-clutching indignation among Simon & Schuster's critics suggests much the same self-righteousness (not to say hypocrisy) that underlies statements like Reidy's. You can't make uncompromising declamations about your supposed values when they aren't reflected in your business—especially not when you hold those values up as your industry's raison d'etre.

What's saddest about this is that book publishers still can and do perform values-driven work, even though that isn't the kind of work that drives the whole system. In my four years at Simon & Schuster, I met some of the most inspiring, clever, and engaged people I'm ever likely to call colleagues. Books—and the industry that makes them—have always been a haven for me. But that doesn't negate the reality that publishers' business, so far anyway, don't always let them to live by the values Reidy confidently professes.

I worry that that's never going to change. And to me, that prospect is far more dangerous than Dangerous, once it's finally published, ever could be.

Megan Reid is a senior scout for Sanford J. Greenburger Associates' literary scouting division. A former editor at Simon & Schuster's Touchstone and Emily Bestler Books imprints, she has contributed to Refinery 29, Boston Magazine, and Self. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A step-by-step survival guide, from the moment your boss breaks the news to when you land your next gig.

You're called into your boss's office, and he or she breaks the news. Your mind is racing and your heart is pounding, but your body freezes up. Even if you've seen the writing on the wall, on some level it still feels like a surprise. Perhaps you've made some mistakes, or saw that the organization was moving in another direction. One way or another, the end result is the same.

You've just been laid off. Here's what to do next.

1. Keep Calm And Carry On

"Stay calm, that's the first thing," advises Elaine Varelas, managing partner at Keystone Partners, a Boston-based talent management firm. "Don't have an emotional reaction, if you can help it."

Those who can't help it, says Varelas, should try to stay composed while explaining that they feel overwhelmed at the thought of leaving their colleagues and achievements behind. Responding with anger, shouting, or violence of any kind is never acceptable. "Silence is a much better choice," she says.

You might rapidly reflect on all the time you've spent at the company, how you're going to break the news to friends and family, and what you're going to do next—simultaneously—but it's important to be patient and take note of your manager's feedback. "There's a lot of valuable information there," says Varelas.

Of particular importance to those who have just been laid off is severance benefit continuation—including health care, 401k contributions, and outplacement, says Varelas. They should also ask about company computer and phone policies, any non-compete clauses they may not be aware of, unemployment benefits, potential for rehire, and whether or not they will receive a reference. "You can also offer to transfer information [to your replacement]," says Varelas. "That's a tough task but very impressive."

2. Go Into Spin Mode

Once the meeting has concluded and you've gathered all the feedback you can, the next step is to consider how you're going to present the news to those that will inevitably ask. "There's a really tight circle of people to whom you can tell the brutal truth," says Varelas, including close friends and family.

Beyond that circle, however, those who have recently lost their jobs need to choose their words carefully when describing what happened, and craft a "public statement" that sums up the situation in a measured, factual manner.

"That's going to be something like, 'The company changed direction, and as a result a number of people were transitioned out of the organization, so now my focus is on finding a new job,'" says Varelas.

The concise and accurate public statement can be used to provide an explanation to potential future employers in online profiles, job interviews, and while networking. It will also inevitably be used by contacts speaking on your behalf as you begin to network.

"That public statement becomes really important, because that's the statement that's going to travel without you, so you want that statement to serve you well," says Varelas. "Your spouse, your partner, your older kids need that public statement as well, because people are going to ask them what happened."

3. Beef Up Your Online Presence

According to the Jobvite 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, 92% of recruiters admitted that they use social media to find candidates. As a result, job hunters need to ensure that their online presence is up to date and optimized for potential future employers before they begin shaking hands and handing out resumes in person.

That includes deleting any less-than-professional photos and posts on public social media profiles, updating online portfolios and personal websites to reflect your latest achievements, and building a LinkedIn profile that sends the right message to recruiters.

LinkedIn career expert Blair Decembrele says that those looking for their next career opportunity shouldn't be afraid to say so in their profile. She says that details such as the type of position they're looking for, their location, and whether they're willing to relocate makes it easier for recruiters to consider them for potential positions.

"Adding a summary of 40 words or more makes your profile more likely to turn up in a future employer's search," she says. "Review desirable job descriptions for your field on LinkedIn, and include those keywords in your profile."

4. Avoid The Job Board Black Hole

One of the most common traps people fall into after getting laid off is focusing too much of their efforts on applying for jobs on online job boards.

"People go to the online job sites, apply to lots of different jobs, and don't get any responses because their application goes into a black hole," says Scott Uhrig, a partner with executive search firm Whiterock Partners. "Number one, you're not making any progress, and number two, you're not getting any feedback, which you interpret as rejection. So you've just been laid off, now you're getting rejected, you're getting no responses, and you start this downward spiral of despair."

While Uhrig suggests avoiding online job boards altogether, he says that if you do come across a role that seems to be a particularly good fit, there are other ways to apply effectively. "Try to network your way into the hiring manager, or contact someone you know already in the company," he says. However, he warns that "competition for posted jobs is insane," and that once a job is listed online, it's probably already too late.

5. Force Yourself To Network

Those who have been laid off need to meet with people face-to-face. In fact, 85% of people [url=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled-via-networking-lou-adler]surveyed by LinkedIn found their current gig through networking.

Uhrig says that most job seekers only spend five to 10 hours of their week knocking on doors and meeting their contacts for coffee when they should be dedicating upwards of 30 hours a week to networking efforts. "It's amazing how little time and effort people who are looking for jobs actually spend networking," he says.

Filling a schedule with that many coffee and lunch dates may seem daunting, but it's important to get creative with sources. Start with industry contacts, former colleagues, and others in your direct circle, but cast a wide net, suggests New York-based executive coach Ann Mehl.

"The individuals in your personal circles may not seem like good sources at first glance," she says, adding that research has found that most people find jobs through second- and third-degree connections. Mehl advises job seekers to "make a list of names from your holiday card list, cell phone directory, email contacts, professional circles, and alumni network."

6. Be Realistic

While these steps can help, it's important to maintain reasonable expectations. For example, Mehl advises job seekers to look at the networking process as a way of staying up to date on what's happening in their industry rather than as a direct path to the next job opportunity.

"These are low-risk conversations; you're simply checking in," she says. "Treat this as an exploratory expedition. You're getting back into the mix, gaining some data on the market, and building momentum."

The slow-and-steady approach is far more likely to produce positive results in the long run. In fact, research has found that half of all jobs never get advertised publicly, and only 2% of applicants who submit resumes online are interviewed.

"If you start developing meaningful networking relationships with people at organizations that hire people like you, over the course of the next three to six months, there's going to be a position that opens up, and they'll contact you before they post that job," he says. "Now your competition is five people, not 500."

Staying Prepared In The Event Of Another Layoff

When it comes to maintaining a steady career, the old adage, "Hope for the best while preparing for the worst," rings true. Once you're back to work you can prepare for that worst-case scenario by continuing to network with your contacts, helping out others in your industry whenever possible, and keeping a running list of career accomplishments, just in case they're suddenly needed again.

There are three common types of burnout. Once you figure out what's going on, you can take steps to fix it.

We've all felt like we're in a rut, uninspired, and burned out. Often the feeling lasts a few days and then goes away, but if it persists, it's important to get to the root of the problem.

"Burnout is like a smoldering fire: If you don't put it out quickly, you'll soon have a full-fledged conflagration on your hands," says Don Maruska, serial entrepreneur and coauthor of Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life. "Job No. 1 for every person is self-management. If you aren't at the top of your game, how can you win and enjoy the success?"

Research from the University of Zaragoza in Spain identified three types of career burnout:

• Frenetic burnout that comes when you work increasingly harder, to the point of exhaustion.
• Underchallenged burnout that occurs when monotonous conditions fail to provide satisfaction.
• Worn-out burnout that happens when you have prolonged stress or a lack of control or acknowledgement.

How you cope or handle your burnout will depend on its source.

Frenetic Burnout

As a surgeon, Akram Alashari, author of The Power of Peak State: Massively Enhance Your Personal Potential, has experienced burnout and witnessed it in his colleagues. "Health care has the highest rate of burnout compared to any other industry," he says. "It is very important to unplug from work and to relieve ourselves from daily hassles."

If you're in a workaholic mode it can be hard to make time for rest, so the first step to being able to unplug is to fully understand, both intellectually as well as emotionally, the benefits of unplugging. "Taking a mental vacation and unplugging allows the individual to escape the daily grind, and better appreciate the bigger picture," Alashari says. "This means engaging in deep meaningful thought, and reconciling thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes about one's life and place in the world."

It's also important to evaluate your life story so that you do not identify yourself with your occupation. "Identifying yourself as your profession can severely narrow your perspective and cause you to think and behave in ways that are only consistent with that profession," says Alashari. "For example, I am a doctor, but I identify myself as a human being who is trained and specialized in medicine and the healing process. This allows me to better understand the world and other peoples' perspectives. Improving your personal narrative can greatly reduce the stress of work."

Unplugging will give you a break from worries and obligations, providing time to spend on doing something that brings joy for the sake of happiness itself. "Creativity, euphoria, flow state, and peak experiences often occur while one is in an elevated mood during recreation," says Alashari.

Underchallenged Burnout

Sandy Gould, senior vice president of culture, coaching and communicating for Yahoo!, experienced career burnout in 2016 and announced he was leaving the company, which was reported by Fast Company.

A literal dream just before he left the role led to a change of heart, a reinvention of his responsibilities, and a move to New York, keeping him at the helm of Yahoo's HR efforts.

"Ask yourself what you love doing and really want to do," Gould suggests. "The goal is to find something you are as passionate about as Luke Skywalker was about joining the rebellion, or as Spider-Man and Superman are about saving and protecting people. When you do what you love and use your superpowers for good, you will create in the best, most powerful, and fulfilling ways."

Gould shares his seven-step process for getting through underchallenged burnout:

1. Identify what you love. "What do you love doing at work?" Gould asks. "What have people said you are good at? What do you want next: a title, more money, a role, or a skill?"
2. Find and build your superpowers. "What successes have you had, and what superpowers helped you achieve them?" Gould asks. "What do you do differently than others? How will [you] do the job in a way that reflects [who you are], leverages [your] superpowers and creates something awesome?"
3. Seek advice and get feedback on what people think you love and are great at. "Also ask people how they have found their destiny," he says.
4. Build a plan to take steps that lead you to your destiny and use that plan to move forward.
5. Don't follow the plan. "As my friend [fashion stylist] Joe Zee wisely said, You have to have the plan, but then break it when opportunity leads you down an even better road," Gould says.
6. Focus on what matters to you. If job, title, compensation, experience, or people are your priority, focus on that, because that will make you happy. It's what you need. Don't listen to conventional wisdom that says you are supposed to do something at this time, this way, or care about this the most.
7. Customize the job to your unique approach.

Gould had been trained in Rabbinical studies, philosophy, psychology, leadership, and counseling, and his first job in human resources demanded sales and recruiting. "I blended counseling, coaching, management consulting, and ethics with sales and recruiting," he says. "I offered my clients more consulting services and I focused on building relationships with clients and candidates, as opposed to a transactional focus on generating fees. As a result, I was the top producer for seven years and promoted to VP in record time because of my unique approach. Most importantly, I loved my job and the experience, connections, and learning."

Worn-Out Burnout

Worn-out burnout happens when you encounter stress and lack the motivation needed to get through it. Fantasizing about quitting might help you get through the day-to-day, but finding ways to reduce or eliminate the problem is better.

"In surveying the popular literature on the topic of employee burnout, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that diagnosis and treatment rests almost exclusively on the individual's pro-action or self-help," says Martha Bird, business anthropologist at the human resources services provider ADP Innovation Lab.

First, reconnect with your intention, suggests Maruska. "Find a generous listener who will ask you, 'What are your hopes about your work?' and reflect back what they hear," he says. "Encourage them to probe deeper and ask, 'Why are those important to you?' These questions stimulate positive, constructive thinking and help you refocus on what's important to you. They renew your mental energy."

Next, examine what's getting in the way and be prepared to address it. "Create a chart and list everything, even minor items that contribute to your feeling of frustration or burnout," says Maruska. "If you've been in your job for a while and are candid with yourself, you probably have dozens of items. Often, we accept conditions as givens when actually there are ways to change them. We just haven't seen how yet."

Then act. Worn-out burnout often happens when we give our power to someone else, says Maruska. Take back ownership of your story instead of waiting for someone else to make things better.

Employee burnout is at epidemic levels, and companies would be wise to pay attention, says Bird.

"While there are many triggers to worker burnout, some not even directly related to work, it is clear that those companies that take an active role in building caring workplaces with workers who at the end of the day feel well taken care of will be profitable—profitable for the individual, for the community, for the customers, and for the products," she says. "Failing to understand the cultural contexts and specific human needs in which burnout flourishes or fades ensures it will remain a pressing concern for companies seeking competitive advantage today and in the near future."

When you're the only one making choices about your schedule, staying on track can be tough. Here's what the experts suggest.

If you're a connoisseur of productivity methods—and even if you aren't—you've likely heard about "monotasking," the alternative to multitasking in which the name of the game is to stop juggling multiple tasks and instead focus deeply on one thing at a time. There are a handful of different ways to monotask, but one of them is a technique sometimes called "batching" or "mode-based scheduling," which author and productivity expert Michael Hyatt describes as "setting aside an intentional amount of time for intentional tasks and making an intentional effort to not allow the distractions or interjections of others break that focus."

Sounds great, right? If you're a freelancer, though, you may already be rolling your eyes. When you work independently, it's up to you and you alone to wrangle your ordinary workday—and ultimately, your whole workweek—into some sort of structure. Since there's nothing but your own personal decision-making that actually holds you to that structure, though, it's especially liable to come crashing down at any time.

But some freelancers and productivity experts have found a few ways to make batching work for them—not just on a daily basis but week after week, too. Here are a few ways to stick with monotasking if you're a freelancer fighting an onslaught of distractions on a regular basis.

1. Different Days For Different Types Of Focus

Many freelancers use mode-based scheduling to organize their entire workweeks, not just individual workdays. To do that, start by looking at your calendar at the beginning of the week and assigning a specific focus or task to individual days. For example, Mondays might be just for administrative work while Fridays are saved for making headway on a client project.

If that sounds like a pipe-dream, keep this in mind: Whenever an interruption threatens to break the focus you've set for a particular day, you can always trade that day's focus with whatever you'd earmarked for a different day.

"In the case of daily batching, if something comes up, you have the ability to swap days," says business writer and professional blogger Jennifer Mattern. "For example, if a client delays a major project you planned to work on, you might be able to move your admin day up a few days to account for the change without losing work time overall that week."

2. "Batch" Your Days Instead Of Your Weeks

If batching your entire week doesn't offer quite enough flexibility for you, there's no harm in breaking up individual days into smaller chunks of time. These focused periods will still keep you zeroed in on a given task, but you'll have a little more wiggle room to adapt when unexpected needs arise.

"Rather than having a complete mode-based day, maybe have the morning or afternoon block for certain activities, so as things crop up you can schedule them in for the corresponding open time," suggests freelance writer and online business marketing consultant Gina Horkey. "If you wake up and start writing—ignoring your inbox, Facebook, and the world at large—and write for two to four hours," she points out, "it's so much easier to get the rest of your tasks done that don't include focused writing."

The key is still to carve out a big part of your day to get just one thing done—then do that every day, week after week.

3. Experiment With Different Modes

Mike Vardy, writer, speaker, and founder of productivityist.com, says mode-based scheduling doesn't have to be restricted to just hours or days. Freelancers don't necessarily have to monotask on a timed basis, though, where a given day or chunk of hours is set aside for just one task. They can also batch work according to their energy levels, or even the amount and quality of resources on hand at a given time. In other words, there are multiple reasons to pick multiple modes, just so long as you're only adopting one of them at a time.

How do you know which one to go with? "You tap into one of the types of modes by asking yourself some questions," says Vardy, "things like, 'How energized am I right now?' or 'How much time do I have between now and my next appointment?'" This way you can hang onto your focus when you need it and fend off distractions in the process.

4. Use Tools To Keep You On Track

If batching can help you monotask productively when you're the only one responsible for your work schedule, you may need to lean on some tools to help you stick with it. Luckily, there are browser extensions, apps, and simple software programs designed expressly to help you maintain your focus on individual tasks.

"When facing interruptions during the day, like phone calls or texts," author and writing coach Jim Woods suggests using free extensions like Momentum to block out the daily barrage of distractions. It's a personal dashboard built for Google Chrome to help users stay productive, and it also offers a dose of motivation.

But low-tech tools can work just as well for monotasking freelancers. "Another way to stay on task," says Woods, "is to have a physical reminder like a piece of paper or calendar with your focus for the day on it." Sometimes a good old-fashioned to-do list can still pack a punch.

5. Catch Yourself When You're Over-Scheduling

Easier said than done, right? Not necessarily. If you work alone and are trying to adopt any of these methods in order to monotask consistently—even if it's a rocky transition—you're already well positioned to catch yourself overcommitting.

Why? Because simply by trying to look at your work in terms of batches of tasks you focus on individually rather than simultaneously, you'll be able to watch your workday (and ultimately your workweek) fill up—and stop it before it does. When you're picking a mode or batching session, simply leaving blank times open in your schedule can leave you the flexibility to handle unexpected tasks or overflow projects.

Sometimes avoiding over-scheduling just means sticking with what you already know works. "If your admin days tend to be light, for example, keep them that way. Don't schedule other things for those days," suggests Mattern. "It might help to schedule your lightest day at the end of the week as well, when you could use any extra time to complete tasks you didn't get to earlier in the week."

It's true that monotasking—and most of the mode-based methods that support it—may seem too rigid for some freelancers. But maintaining a single focus doesn't mean dispensing with flexibility. Instead, Vardy says it can add just the right amount of structure to stay consistently focused and on track all week long.

And that includes knowing when to temporarily scrap batching. "When you have no need or desire to focus exclusively on a project, working by mode can help you achieve without feeling as if you've accomplished random items on your to-do list," Vardy adds. It just takes practice. "Once you recognize the power of working by mode, and do it over an extended stretch, you'll find how powerful and effective it can be."

Bree Brouwer is a professional B2B blogger, copywriter, and content marketer who specializes in online video and digital media. Follower her on Twitter at @BreeBrouwer.

Throwing processing power at raw images lets smartphones and cameras do some amazing things—and the best is yet to come.

Since the birth of photography almost 180 years ago, the relationship between a photographer and a camera has remained mostly unchanged. You open a shutter and capture an image. Though you might manipulate lenses, exposures, and chemicals—or, in recent years, bits—there was a nearly one-to-one relationship between what the lens saw and what you captured. But you've likely taken thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pictures in recent years that break that relationship without knowing it.

Computational photography takes a swarm of data from images or image sensors and combines it algorithmically to produce a photo that would be impossible to capture with film photography or digital photography in its more conventional form. Image data can be assembled across time and space, producing super-real high-dynamic range (HDR) photos—or just ones that capture both light and dark areas well. Multiple cameras' inputs can be fused into a single image, as on some Android phones and the iPhone 7 Plus, allowing for crisper or richer images in a single shot and a synthetic zoom that looks nearly as good as one produced via optical means.

But as much as computational photography has insinuated itself into all major smartphone models and some standalone digital cameras, we're still at the beginning. Google, Facebook, and others are pushing the concept further, and researchers in the field say there are plenty of new ideas circulating that will make their way into hardware—mostly as part of smartphones, the biggest platform for taking pictures and leveraging innovative imaging techniques.

The coming developments will allow 3D object capture, video capture and analysis for virtual reality and augmented reality, better real-time AR interaction, and even selfies that resemble you more closely.

Smartphones Ate Cameras

In recent years, we've watched the just-good-enough cameras in smartphones become better-than-good-enough, eating the heart out of what was once a fast-growing market for point-and-shoot digital cameras. While smartphones can't beat the combination of lens, high-count sensors, and other factors that make digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras the pinnacle of the market, they continue to creep up the curve, with computational photography providing some of the tricks.

When HDR first appeared in the iPhone's iOS 4.1 release in 2010, it followed a typical practice by professional and serious photographers of bracketing shots: taking multiple images manually or with automatic settings at different exposures or other settings. Before image-editing software, photographers would pick among their photos and sometimes use darkroom techniques to combine them. Photoshop and other apps could mix multiple exposures of the same space to great effect, and some iOS apps were already offering this as a feature when iOS 4.1 shipped.

Having HDR built directly into a smartphone OS transformed it from a trick into a mainstream technique, even though the early versions weren't great. (Android followed the iPhone's lead and added it as a core feature.) Apple gradually shifted from capturing three bracketed images to what photo app developers tell me is a much more elaborate set of captures and adjustments that are analyzed and fused in software to produce the HDR result.

And that's where things mostly stalled for years, despite a proliferation of academic investigation. Gordon Wetzstein, a professor who leads the Stanford Computational Imaging Group, an interdisciplinary research group at Stanford University, says that of hundreds of papers in the field on computational photography, it "boils back down to one, two, maybe three different incarnations that end up being simple enough that they're actually useful." This is partly because of power constraints, phones' and cameras' form factors, and other elements that limit practical use.

Adding multiple rear-facing cameras was an idea that kicked around for quite a while. While the first dual-camera phone shipped was the HTC One (M8) in early 2014, its abilities were ahead of the software and image-processing hardware. The potential started to be realized with the Huawei P9 (April 2016), which combined color and grayscale cameras, and Apple's iPhone 7 Plus (October 2016), which has a wide-angle and nominally telephoto pair. In both cases, the multiple cameras' images capture different aspects simultaneously, which software combines for an arguably better result.

With two cameras combined with software that performs object recognition in scene, a system can extract depth. The iPhone 7 Plus uses this with Apple's still-in-beta Portrait mode, which fillets a subject in the foreground from all the background layers, allowing it to pleasingly blur the background and thereby create the effect known as bokeh. This look simulates the one that a photographer would previously get by using a DSLR paired with a lens with a very short depth of field.

Wetzstein notes the potential for the depth recognition to have an impact behind photographic effects. By analyzing objects in a scene by depth, a two-camera system could automatically produce better pictures, building on the face, smile, and blink recognition features that are standard in cameras and smartphones today.

But if two lens/camera combos are good, surely more are better? Researchers have tested cobbled-together multi-input systems, sometimes quite elaborate, as with the Stanford Multi-Camera Array, which sported 128 separate cameras. These were fixed installations and not practical for commercial (or amateur) use.

The low cost of smartphone-size lenses may change that. Instead of using a single, large expensive lens, as on a DSLR, performing computation on photos collected from many smaller lenses and integrating the results computationally could achieve high-quality results. This is the thinking behind the L16, cited by Wetzstein as an example. It's a camera made by a company simply called Light, with 16 camera elements across three focal lengths. (The $1,700 device isn't shipping yet and its preorder allotment sold out.)

Depending on lighting and zoom factor, the L16 fires off a different combination of 10 of those lenses across three focal lengths to fuse a 52-megapixel image using a package not much bigger than a smartphone or typical digital snapshot camera. It may be a gimmick or it may be a way to pack a wallop in one's pocket; we'll know when it hits photographers' hands.

A different hardware approach brought Lytro to the market, a single-lens camera that could refocus a photograph after it was taken and produce 3D images. Lytro's technology relies on a large image sensor, the elements of which were grouped into super-pixels that allowed its software to capture a light field, effectively knowing the incoming direction of light as it hit the sensor. This light field could be reconstructed by its software later. The system never caught on in either its original prosumer or later professional model, and the company adapted its approach to VR capture hardware.

Here's a refocusable photo taken with Lytro's ultimately unsuccessful consumer camera:

Going Deep

Rather than capturing light fields or combining image data, some experimental efforts in the hands of developers rely on a synchronized infrared (IR) sensor that captures depth information. Google's Tango is a practical testbed for this approach, allowing the capture of structured light and time of flight.

Structured light relies on projecting a pattern onto a scene that a sensor then reads and uses to estimate distance and surface displacement. Time of flight, by contrast, measures the time between projecting a signal and its reflection, omitting a grid and providing more direct measurement. IR is invisible to the naked eye, and is most commonly used.

Microsoft's Kinect sensor add-on for the Xbox started with structured light and shifted to time of flight, and in both versions were the first mainstream uses, but in a fixed location and for a single purpose: capturing motion for gaming and other inputs. Tango, while still a work in progress relevant to developers rather than the masses, brings the technology to mobile devices in a practical form. It's already available in Lenovo's Phab 2 Pro smartphone.

At first glance, these types of depth-finding may not seem to meet the definition of computational photography. In effect, an IR sensor (paired with an emitter) is a camera, paired with a standard photographic camera to build a depth and object map.

Any method of obtaining depth plays right into advancing augmented and virtual reality systems and practicality by allowing a mobile device to better identify what's in its visual field. The more immediate benefit is for AR: Overlaying an existing scene with information requires vastly less computational power than generating VR's full-blown 3D graphics and letting people interact with that world.

Wetzstein says that structured light is a power-hungry technique because it requires the constant projection of a grid. Time of flight should have greater impact, but he says it will require years more development to make it fully capable.

3D VR photographic capture could come at some point from a combination of multiple lenses and depth perception, but probably not any time soon. Wetzstein says that although phones can capture panoramas easily enough, creating both video and stereo panoramas that can be stitched together and remain synchronized currently requires gear in the $15,000 to $30,000 range, such as that used with Facebook 360 and Google Jump, relying on more than a dozen cameras and huge apparatuses.

Solving The Shoebox Problem

Besides its role in AR and VR, computational photography could help solve much more routine problems by marrying itself with computer vision (the study of machine-based perception) and machine learning (teaching machines to recognize what they perceive).

Irfan Essa, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, heads the school's Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning. He says that an ever-stronger connection among those areas "has grown into more object-centric thinking." Computational photography moves beyond just capturing pixels, he says, into capturing light, which allows it to extract the geometry of a scene. "If you know where the object is and what surface it's on, you can do more with it," he says.

This helps with depth, as noted above, but also with one of the most common problems facing average smartphone owners: It's easier to take photos than manage them. "We're just capturing too many pictures," Essa says. "I take pictures at the dinner table with my family and I end up having 40 to 50 pictures." By better analyzing the contents of a scene, photo software could automatically identify the best pictures.

Some third-party apps already do this, and Apple's burst mode in its Camera app tries to detect the "best" pictures of a set taken in fast succession. But these early stabs at the idea rely on a handful of cues instead of full-blown recognition. As the photographic tech in smartphones gets better, researchers will be able to take the idea further, Essa says.

Essa also expects to see improvements in color matching, tone adjustment, and selfie correction. He notes that despite the decades of work that Adobe and Kodak have put into technologies to allow the same color to appear in the same way everywhere, it's only recently that these ideas have hit the mass market. Apple's 9.7-inch iPad Pro, for instance, introduced what Apple calls "True Tone," a sensor that measures ambient light color and conditions and adjusts the display to provide a consistent set of colors to the viewer, no matter the temperature of the light in which they're using the tablet.

Better color management relies on better cameras as well as better displays, and Essa says it will ultimately produce a pipeline that computational photography will aid by integrating similar sampling technologies into the image-creation chain. He notes that skin tone is an area where the most improvement could come. "Most selfies look like crap, but they're getting better," he says.

One of the pioneering academics of computational photography, Marc Levoy, taught at Stanford, inspired and advised the founders of Lytro, and released an early iPhone app that created faux bokeh. He's now at Google, and deferred my questions to the firm's press relations department, which didn't respond to a request for an interview. This isn't unusual: Many researchers in this field have founded or joined startups or become part of teams at computer companies and dotcoms. That's a reminder that there's likely a fair amount more happening behind the scenes at smartphone makers, some of which will find its way into our hands.

A neuroscientist finds several troubling clues.

One of the most revealing things about a person is their workspace. Not only can a person's office or desk reveal how they like to work, it can shed light on deep-seated psychological and personality traits, says Colin Ellard, an environmental psychologist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, whose latest book, Places of the Heart, explores how our workspaces and other daily environments affect us and those around us.

"For many of us, other than the room where we sleep, our office is the place where we log more hours than anywhere else, so (it) can be very revealing," says Ellard. And it's not just whether a person chooses to keep their desk neat or messy that reveals something about them.

"In part, what we're trying to do is to establish dominance over our territory—to mark it as our own," says Ellard. "Territoriality has everything to do with interpersonal interaction. We're personalizing, establishing dominance, as a way to send a signal to others. The signal may be meant to produce an emotional state in visitors (fear, awe, friendliness for example) or to convey a message of some kind."

In other words, Ellard says, we often use our office space as a way of telling some kind of story about ourselves. Or as he puts it, "The office can be a carefully crafted tableau."

As of last Friday, the most powerful and well-known office in the world—the Oval Office—has a new occupant: Donald Trump. While the Oval Office generally changes very little with each new president, Trump's other office—the one he's held for years on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower in New York reveals a much richer story about the most powerful man in the world.

"At first glance, one might suppose that this is the desk of a man who is busy with a lot of different projects—he's a multitasker," says Ellard, who notes that despite having such a large desk only about 10% of its surface is actually visible, the rest of it buried under stacks of items. When I present him with photos of Trump's business office that were first obtained by the Daily Mail. But on closer inspection, Ellard says, the sheer number of items on Trump's desk tells a different story. "A remarkably large number of the items on his desk seem to be about Donald J. Trump. That is, it doesn't look as though his desk is filled with materials related to ongoing projects so much as books, articles, and photographs about (himself)"

Ellard does concede there are plenty of items on Trump's desk which he can't easily identify, which might relate to his business interests, but "the top layer seems to contain a lot of Trumposity." Here are the most telling items in Trump's office that strike him as revealing:

The Photograph Of Trump's Father

"I find it remarkable that the only photograph that we see on Trump's desk, other than those of himself, is an image of his father," says Ellard. "Note that it's just his father and it isn't an intimate family photo, but a fairly stern looking professional portrait of the man in business attire."

While Trump has frequently talked about the influence of his father's business acumen, a financially frugal man who was rather ruthless in building a property empire based around low-income housing, not a lot is known about the personal relationship between father and son.

"It does strike me, though, that this photo, occupying pride of place on the desk, near the telephone, might suggest that one of the motives underlying some of Trump's hard battle to promote his own ego might be some underlying competitive instincts toward his father, or perhaps a deeply rooted primal drive to prove himself to the parent. But what I really want to know is where's mom?"

Post-It Mountain

"This might seem like an odd thing to pick up on, but in one of the images I can see what I'm fairly sure is a big stack of tablets of yellow Post-It notes. There might be as many as six tablets. If I'm right about this, then it's quite curious. Why does one need more than one?" says Ellard, who goes on to note that in the images that show the stacks of Post-Its, there are plenty framed pictures on the walls—most of them cover stories in Playboy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines, about Trump. But there also seem to be more stacks of framed images leaning against the wall behind Trump, with at least one of them still in its wrapping.

"All of this, combined with the large stack of newspapers makes me wonder about a tendency to hoard," says Ellard. "Hoarding disorder is slightly more common in men than in women (though you might not realize this because women seem somewhat more willing to talk about it) and is associated with a range of other difficulties including deficits in self-control and attentiveness."

"Of course a stack of Post-Its and newspapers is a far cry from a serious case of hoarding that might see junk piled so high that the office door can't be opened, but this makes me wonder—could the pile of yellow pads stand in weird proxy for the stacks and stacks of real estate holdings of the Trump foundation? Could an inability to let go of objects be related to Trump's unwillingness to divest his financial self-interests while he is president? Or is it the case that sometimes a Post-It note is just a Post-It note?"

The Mysterious Banker's Box

"I can't see the entire office from the photos, but it makes me note that there is very little visible storage space. Everything I see is exposed—the crowded window sill, the counter space beside the desk, and of course the desk itself. But there's this one banker's box, hidden from the sight of visitors, apparently filled with rolled up posters? Plans?" Ellard says, noting his eyes can't help but be drawn to it.

"What is it that's so important that it takes a position crowded in beside Trump's feet? It makes me feel as though perhaps he wants to make the impression that all is visible to visitors, everything is out on the surface, yet there are a few secrets hidden away, out of sight. There's a little place to put things that he doesn't want visitors to see and it's overflowing."

Arrangement Of The Wall Displays

"This isn't a single item, but I'm trying to make sense of the framed material on the walls of the office. I see lots of awards and magazine covers and one or two photos of Trump himself (one with JFK Jr for instance), but what stands out for me is that all of the material I see has to do with his business interests. What does the man do for fun? What brings him pleasure? Is it just the running of businesses?" asks Ellard.

"I'm also curious about the group shot that is hung low on the wall beneath all of the Trump plaudits. I'm guessing that this might be a shot from a Miss Universe competition. I'm a little tickled that the only photograph of women that is visible to a visitor (and very close to the line of sight on the visitor's side of the desk) is one of a large group of beauty contestants."

The Family Windowsill

The final thing about Trump's office that caught Ellard's attention was not a single item but a tightly clustered set of framed photographs sitting on the windowsill behind Trump. "Are these the missing photos of his family?" asks Ellard.

"Their tiny size, in contrast to all of the other images that we see, and their position in the room, suggest to me that these images may be just for Trump and for nobody else (in contrast to much of the other material in the room). If there is any signaling here at all, it is exactly that—a modest nod to the family that he treasures—a little cue to visitors that these people are in his life—but a reminder that he might prefer to keep family matters private. This is in stark contrast to the prominent roles that he has given some family members in his administration and one wonders how this will play out over the next few years – his desire to shield family matters from the eyes of the world but also to surround himself with them in his working life as he takes on what is probably the most public job on the planet."

What Trump's Office Reveals About The Man And His Leadership Style

Taken individually, every item in Trump's office tells its own story—just like any item in our workplace tells a story about us. But taken as a whole, the magnum opus the collection of items in Trumps
office—and the state of his office—reveals much about the new leader of the free world.

"The sheer volume of items on Trump's desk suggests that this is the working space of someone with perhaps a short attention span, but what screams out to me is that this is a man who is very interested in, and perhaps protective of, his image," says Ellard. "It might not be fair to go so far as to suggest narcissism based solely on the positioning of the objects that I see, but it does strike me, given some of the objects on display that it's a possibility."

Ellard says that based on this, he suspects that Trump's presidential leadership style won't be much different than what we saw on the campaign trail: someone who can't always help being preoccupied with how he is seen by others.

"Even when he might have the best of intentions, it will probably be as important to him that he be seen as strong, powerful, and influential," says Ellard. "There may even be times when his preoccupation with how he is seen by others will overcome his judgment about how best to serve. In addition to this, his clear intention to establish powerful dominance over his territory and to perhaps cow outsiders already seems reflected in the thrust of many of his proposed policies."

The deal, completed last year but not publicly announced, is part of an effort to bring transparency to the murky issue of drug pricing.

GoodRx, a company that provides discount cards to consumers to access cheaper drug prices, recently merged with the digital health startup Iodine.

Fast Company has learned that the merger took place at the end of 2016, but was not announced publicly. Iodine CEO Thomas Goetz confirmed the deal, but declined to share the financial terms. The San Francisco-based company will not relocate to GoodRx's Santa Monica, California, headquarters and will continue to operate with the same team, Goetz says.

The digital health sector has seen a slight slowdown in the number of exits in 2016, compared to the prior year. It's still early days for the sector, so most exits tend to involve digital health companies acquiring each other or merging together, according to venture firm Rock Health.

Since it was founded in 2013, Iodine has raised more than $2 million to develop a website and suite of free mobile apps that help consumers compare medications, communicate with each other, and track their side effects. The company cofounded by Goetz, a former Wired journalist, was selected as one of Apple's first CareKit partnersfor its app Start. Start is designed for patients who have been prescribed antidepressants and want to determine if they're working.

A Healthy Match

GoodRx and Iodine initially started working together in August 2016 on a project to incorporate drug-pricing data into Iodine's existing content. As Goetz puts it, the founders saw an opportunity to jointly develop a better "consumer experience around medicine and medications." A merger made sense, given that both companies are aligned and financially vested in helping consumers find medications that work for them, rather than ceasing to take them altogether.

In a statement, GoodRx co-CEO and former Facebook employee Doug Hirsch described the companies' respective missions as being "a perfect complement."

"GoodRx focuses on affordability of prescriptions and Iodine has created insightful, in-depth, and yet easy-to-understand content that helps consumers understand their drug choices and benefits and potential risks of their prescriptions," he adds.

GoodRx bills its service as saving patients up to 80% on their medications, letting them print out coupons from its website. Another popular feature lets consumers to compare drug prices at different nearby pharmacies to ensure they get the best price.

Iodine has seen a major bump in traffic since the election, says Goetz, particularly for its tool to help users find the right birth control at a time when reproductive rights are under threat.

Goetz is hoping that the merger will result in more opportunities to guide consumers to make better choices and bring transparency to the murky issue of drug pricing. "People are being exposed to very expensive prices for drugs and they don't understand why," he says.

NASA is increasingly looking to private rockets for space travel, but an agency panel still has concerns about SpaceX's fueling method.

Earlier this month, SpaceX delivered 10 new Iridium satellites to orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket in a flawless launch from California, and then landed one of the rocket stages on a ship. It was the company's first flight since its disastrous launchpad accident in Florida this fall, which destroyed a rocket and $200 million in equipment. But the success came just days after a NASA report to Congress that again raised questions about the risks that the company's fueling procedures could pose to astronauts.

The new annual report, by NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, raises concerns about SpaceX's "load-and-go" rocket-fueling process, which calls for the fueling of super-chilled liquid oxygen to be conducted after astronauts have boarded the spacecraft, in order to keep the fuel as cold as possible. The approach is a break from conventional wisdom about space travel—typically rocket fueling occurs before a crew is aboard—and the report indicates possible challenges to that plan within NASA.

This isn't the first time the panel has expressed concerns about the fueling method. After the SpaceX explosion in September, which took place during routine fueling procedures, the panel called for renewed attention to the issue, which it had raised at least once before.

Even determining the level of risk posed by the rockets is challenging, according to the panel. "Despite testing at the component and subassembly level, systems often display 'emergent' behavior once they are used in the actual operational environment. We are concerned that any determination of risk associated with 'load and go' would have significant uncertainty," it said.

In a statement to Fast Company, a SpaceX spokesperson reiterated the company's commitment to making its approach "the safest and most reliable possible" through its NASA-led certification process for upcoming launches, and to incorporate lessons learned through its investigation into the September explosion. The ASAP report does not comment on those lessons because it was completed before the conclusion of SpaceX's accident investigation.

According to SpaceX's findings, which were issued two weeks ago and accepted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the explosion was caused by a bad reaction between liquid oxygen in the fuel tank and one of three small vessels containing very cold helium that are used to maintain pressure in the tank. The company also said it had identified "controls" against potential safety hazards and that these had been approved by NASA's Safety Technical Review Board in July 2016.

Fueling Issues

SpaceX's "load-and-go" approach to fueling, which fuels rockets only a half-hour before launch, is risky, critics say. SpaceX's fueling technique uses a special kind of liquid oxygen; it also requires crews to board Dragon rockets before fueling begins. NASA is particularly sensitive to safety concerns: Both the Columbia and Challenger disasters resulted in the deaths of two Shuttle crews, as well as exhaustive investigations and holds on future space shuttle flights. Given past incidents, some at NASA are worried that incidents at private space travel companies could not only result in tragedy but potentially derail future public-private manned space travel partnerships.

In the past, NASA flew astronauts into space on its own. Since the end of the Shuttle, the U.S. has sent missions to the International Space Station by renting seats aboard Russian-flown Soyuz rockets, at around $80 million apiece. Next year, NASA intends to begin relying on SpaceX and Boeing to deliver astronauts to the ISS at a cheaper price, and to extend its relationship with other space firms like Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Earlier this month, NASA ordered four additional flights from SpaceX and Boeing, tripling the companies' contracted missions to the ISS.

The flipside of NASA's work with the private sector, however, is less control over the inner workings of private vendors. This shift shows up in NASA's contracts. When NASA had direct control over the Space Shuttle's design specifications, they gave contractors between 10,000 and 12,000 requirements that they had to meet. By comparison, in NASA's Commercial Crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX only have to meet 280 design requirements. The same contracts also assume a certain risk of things going catastrophically wrong; they demand that the new space capsules keep their crews safe in 99.6% of missions. By that math, NASA believes that 1 of every 270 missions could fail. NASA has to account for everything—even the mathematical likelihood of fatal incidents.

NASA's reports also raised concerns with fault tolerances on Boeing's new Centaur rockets, which are expected to be used in NASA's commercial crew program. In an email, Boeing spokesperson William Barksdale told Fast Company that the "ULA [United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin partnership] and Boeing are committed to mission success and flying crews safely aboard the CST-100 Starliner that will launch atop the Atlas V. The Atlas V with a Centaur upper stage has a proven track record of 100% mission success, with 68 single-engine launches. Though not all components are fault tolerant at the individual component level, the Atlas V design is robust, and can compensate for anomalies, should they occur, due to overall system redundancies and margins, to ensure mission success."

In the text of the report, NASA's panel also spoke in unusually tough language about the need to pore over investigations of SpaceX's 2016 launchpad accident with a fine-toothed comb:

"We strongly encourage NASA top management to scrutinize this issue and ensure that any decision to accept additional risk or novel risk controls with large uncertainties is justified by the value that will be gained. The decision should not be unduly influenced by other secondary factors such as schedule and budget concerns."

In addition to the safety controls SpaceX is implementing, the company spokesperson also cited the Crew Dragon launch abort system, which is designed to eject astronauts to safety at the instant an anomaly is detected. CEO Elon Musk has said that the system would have been able to save any astronauts had they been aboard the rocket that exploded in September.

"SpaceX has designed a reliable fueling and launch process that minimizes the duration and number of personnel exposed to the hazards of launching a rocket," said the spokesperson. "Over the last year and a half, NASA and SpaceX have performed a detailed safety analysis of all potential hazards with this process . . . As needed, any additional controls will be put in place to ensure crew safety, from the moment the astronauts reach the pad, through fueling, launch, and spaceflight, and until they are brought safely home."

The company said it also recently met with the International Space Station Advisory Committee, and its chair, Maj. Gen. Thomas Stafford, "to provide them detailed information on our approach and answer a number of questions."

The report arrived the same week that the Wall Street Journal published leaked SpaceX financial numbers from 2015, showing a $260-million loss following another incident, the explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket shortly after its launch in 2015, as well as big expectations for its satellite-based internet service.

It also came days before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, whose administration has signaled an interest in public-private space collaborations and who has invited SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to be an advisor. On Tuesday, Musk met with Trump and other CEOs for a third time. In an investor note last week, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas described the benefit of the "important line of communication" Musk has with Trump. "We believe this level of coordination with the new administration could actually evolve into greater strategic value than with the prior administration," Jonas wrote.

SpaceX's next two launches—a commercial satellite scheduled for January 30th and a resupply mission to the International Space Station in February—will occur at Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A. It will mark the first use of the launch pad that sent humans to the Moon since the days of the Space Shuttle.