Startups operating in the gig economy typically use software platforms to assemble disconnected armies of freelance contractors to perform simple tasks. Think of Uber, which allows customers around the globe to summon drivers to take them places from practically any street corner,  using nothing more than a phone app.

Computer engineers at Stanford are taking things a step further for more skilled workers in the knowledge economy. They’ve invented something called flash teams. Although still somewhat experimental, flash teams use software platforms to break down complex work that requires collaboration, such as engineering and web design, into modules of specific tasks that the network hands off from freelancer to freelancer, in a virtual assembly line. Once the work is complete, those teams are dissolved, but they can potentially be recombined for other types of work in the future.

The Stanford engineers’ concept was put into practice in 2014 with a software platform called Foundry, which has used flash teams of about half-a-dozen people, to design web apps and create videos. Now a New York-based website design company called B12, launched in 2015, is using flash teams as a key part of its process.

Founded by venture capitalist Nitesh Banta, the company has at its core a software platform called Orchestra. The platform, based on the research used to create Foundry, uses artificial intelligence to accomplish some of the rote tasks involved in website development. For example, it uses web crawlers to scrape up information about new customers from social media profiles or other information on the web. That information is used to complete an initial website prototype within 60 seconds, and to build what Banta calls a scaffolding for the project. Like Foundry, Orchestra breaks down the web design process into component tasks that are farmed out in modules to human workers, who are all freelance contractors.

How It Works

B12 has a distributed workforce of several dozen workers including website designers, photo editors, and copywriters located in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. When new work arrives, Orchestra sends those contractors an email with something it calls a staffbot, which contains details about the project. Workers can say yes or no to the project, for which they will be paid a previously agreed-upon rate.

Once they are assigned to the work, Orchestra sets up a dedicated Slack room for communication, and then plays umpire for the workflow, ensuring tasks are completed in order and on time. For example, the system will prompt web designers to build the various website templates in one module. Once they’ve completed their work, the system creates another module for photo editors to insert and lay out images. Copywriters will next be prompted to add in the text they’ve composed.

Along the way, Orchestra assesses project efficiency, such as the length of time it takes its human workers to complete their assigned tasks. Based on this efficiency data, it also makes determinations about which website creators work well together, with the object of pairing them together in the future.

Banta says this workflow system helps B12 delivering designs up to twice as fast and at about a tenth of the cost of many competitors with dedicated design teams.

Is This The Future Of Work?

This method of combining gig workers with AI might be part of the future of work, but it’s not without its downsides. University of Michigan management professor Jerry Davis, whose research focuses on the vanishing U.S. corporation and its impact on workers, says the gig economy works well for Uber and others because they pair one person with one well-defined task, such as picking someone up and driving them somewhere. That model begins to break down with the web of interdependencies necessary to complete more complicated tasks, particularly when strangers are involved.

“Intellectually it is a much more intriguing problem, how you hire people for interdependent work and get them to work as a team,” Davis says. He adds that one possible disadvantage of the flash team model is the potential for job stagnation, as there’s no real impetus from an organization to develop workers. Another is the danger for all manner of work to become like a Home Depot parking lot, he says, with day laborers lining up for every type of job.

Banta has thought about that too. B12 has structured into its workflow a system it calls hierarchical review. That process pairs less-experienced workers with more experienced ones, who review the work and offer critiques like mentors.

Banta says his experts also benefit because they can put their skills to work more consistently. As opposed to hunting for their own projects, Orchestra gives them access to a stable stream of work. And they’re learning ways to collaborate with workers they’ve never met and who are far afield, he says.

And that may just be the beginning. “In the old way that work was put together, you needed a corporation to organize a team of people around a common mission to accomplish work,” Banta says. “But new software can now quickly organize people with a mission to do a particular job, so the challenge is to offer new ways to use technology to offer more fulfilling work.”

Jeremy Quittner is a freelance writer in New York. His work has appeared in Business Week, Fortune, and Inc.

Researching the options and considering all of your possibilities sounds like a great way to make a decision, but it’s possible that process is causing regret, too. While the outcome has an impact on our overall satisfaction, how you go about making a decision impacts your health and happiness too, according to researchers from the University of Waterloo.

People who perform an extensive search looking for the best option are called “maximizers,” says Jeff Hughes, a doctorate student of social psychology and coauthor of the study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “It sounds like a rational way to make a decision, but people go about this goal in two different ways,” he says.

The first is promotion-focused, says Hughes. “This person strives to attain ideals and is particularly concerned with approaching gains and avoiding non-gains,” he says. “When put to a series of tests, it turns out this type of maximizer is able to find the best choice in a way that is satisfying and avoids regret.”

The second kind is assessment-focused, approaching a decision with concern for evaluating and comparing options. This type of decision strategy is much more negative, being associated with greater depression and regret, lower life satisfaction, and more procrastination, says Hughes.

It also leads to FOBO, fear of a better option: “They want to find the absolute best option,” he says. “They become so focused on doing the ‘right’ thing that even after they make a decision, they still ruminate on their earlier options, which leads to frustration and regret with the decision process.”

FOBO robs you of the happiness you already have, says Hughes. If you’re this kind of decision maker, you can avoid regret by trying three tricks:

1. Give Yourself a Deadline

Maximizers often put off making decisions as long as possible so they can continue to find better options, says Hughes.

“Instead, set a time limit–an hour or a week, for example,” he says. “This will help force yourself to let go of searching for other options.”

2. Trust Your Gut

Assessment-focused maximizers often reconsider options that were previously dismissed, and that’s problematic, says Hughes. “You keep thinking about all the options you had to leave behind, rather than enjoying the option that you chose in the end, and that can cause a lot of frustration and regret,” he says. “Instead, don’t let it sit in the back of your mind. If an option didn’t make you happy when you first evaluated it, drop it and move on.”

3. Strive For Good Enough

Forget about the search for the absolute best, says Hughes. “Ask yourself, ‘What is minimum quality I could be happy with?’ Look for something that meets that criteria and stop.”

While this is not good for important decisions, it works for less important decisions. “Important decisions are important for a reason and you don’t want to gloss over things and end up unhappy with option you went with because you didn’t look at what was available,” says Hughes. “But if you’re as thorough with your decisions for lunch as you are with your decisions about your career, this could be a problem.”

When President Donald Trump arrived in Nashville on March 15 to stump for his new health care and school reform polices at the city’s Municipal Auditorium, he was greeted by something unexpected. Several hundred protestors waving signs were already marching through town against him.

That uprising wasn’t really supposed to happen. Anti-Trump forces had learned of the trip just a day or two earlier, and on short notice, grassroots organizing is difficult: Rallies generally take time plan and have to come together through lots of decentralized chatter. (There’s the flurry of Facebook and web-page posts, phone trees, even fliers). The Nashville effort, however, was plotted differently. An organizer tagged the upcoming event to a map within the a new political action platform called People Power. As others learned about it, they RSVPed their interest and were kept in the loop via whatever kind of communication they preferred, including up-to-date blasts from text messages.

People Power, which is backed by the ACLU, launched just days before on March 11. It represents a proactive move for the nonprofit civil rights group, whose primary mission for the last hundred years has been to challenge discriminatory practices, policies, and actions in court. In addition to defending people’s rights when they are violated, the group is now hoping to enlist more people to lobby for the rights of others in ways that could lead to policy or law changes that afford people more civil protections before they get targeted.

Fiaz Shakir, the group’s national policy director, says that because the current administration is enacting sweeping changes that could lead to widespread civil rights, like foreign travel bans and mass deportations for undocumented workers, it was time for their own countermeasures to evolve. In fact, their supporters expected it.

“After the election we saw that people were rushing to the ACLU with their financial contributions and with their e-mail address sign-ups to tell us that, you know, ‘Tag you’re it: You’re the leader of the resistance movement,’” Shakir says. “The most common question I was being asked was, ‘What can I do, and how can I do it with others to help?’”

The result is something he calls “Organizing 2.0”: On People Power (site logo: several fists raised in unison) anyone can sign up to plan or volunteer for an event. By doing so, they also share their contact information, which allows the ACLU to notify them of events that are happening in their immediate area. Each event is plotted on public map, which lets people join more nearby efforts, and organizers figure out what other organizers they might want to contact to join forces. Anyone who registers for the service can add an event. An internal team at the ACLU then reviews what’s being scheduled; it will reject anything with offensive language or partisanship. Not everything needs to be a direct action. “Our goal is that the platform be used as a tool for all grassroots groups and actions that work toward resisting the Trump administration’s attacks on our civil liberties,” notes a spokesman in an email to Fast Company. That includes more mundane coffee-talk style “meet-ups” for activists to mingle and learn more.

At its most basic, this is an expedient way to organize the kind of protest that happened in Nashville. (The ACLU’s local affiliate planned that one.) But the ACLU broader plan is a bit more complicated. During the People Power launch at the University of Miami’s Watsco Center, which was viewed by more than 1 million people and included a celebrity endorsement from Padma Lakshmi, Shakir debuted the “Freedom Cities” campaign. It involves community groups organizing on their platform, and then presenting a list of nine law enforcement reform policies to their local town or city officials, which can be adopted to help municipalities constitutionally resist overreaching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection actions within their community. That includes refusing to arrest, detain, or transport suspects for ICE or CBP unless there’s an official warrant to justify the action. And not authorizing the surveillance of people based on “actual or perceived religion, ethnicity, race, or immigration status.” (You can read the full set here.)

“We asked everyone to meet with their local law enforcement officials to discuss whether this city is going to be a welcoming city, a freedom city, or not,” Shakir says. Their publicly posted blueprint includes guidelines for how to interact with officials to ensure each meeting request is legitimately considered and responded to appropriately.

That’s a lot different than attending a march. “That’s kind of a high bar . . . There’s a lot going on there,” Shakir admits. When done on a city-by-city basis, however, it has the power to create national change just as powerfully as federal mandates. Such places would be telegraphing their status as safe havens, assuring those who live there that no local order-keepers will be participating in blitzkrieg tactics. By extension, the policies limit ICE’s and CBP’s access to both the local man power and facilities that they’ve come to rely on to carry out some missions. “I think it has the most meaningful impact,” he adds. “I’m honed in on the question of what could really change the way Donald Trump conducts business.”

To create the platform, Shakir tapped members of both the Bernie Sanders campaign and President Obama’s former White House tech team. More than 200,000 people are now active on the platform, and in roughly two weeks have planned at least 500 events. Most are Freedom Cities-related–a meeting with the sheriff of Harvey County, Kansas, for instance, or another with a representative of the Oro Valley Police Chief in Arizona. The trickier part will be maintaining that momentum. Sanders, who used similar tactics in his presidential bid, was asking people to rally around a single person (himself) with an immediate, singular goal (to be elected). That’s different than asking people to back a cause group that represents multiple issues that aren’t easily resolved.

In reality, what the ACLU has built works more like a political social network. The platform is designed around individuals promoting those events that matter most to them–it’s not ACLU specific. Shakir expects representatives from other groups like Indivisible and Move On to advertise actions there too, which would bring in more supporters to collaborate on efforts where their ideals overlapped. In the near future, the ACLU plans to add functions that will let event hosts build and maintain their own RSVP lists, and communicate directly with other hosts within the platform to speed up how they can combine forces.

In the meantime, the ACLU will be continuing its policy-driven change strategies. “While I would say we’re going to focus on calls to action that are consistent with the ACLU’s mission, we are also opening up the platform of People Power for you to submit events of your own choosing. And we’re not going to try to discriminate there,” Shakir adds. “I would say the value of the platform is A) that it’s active, and B) that it’s targeting like-minded people.’”

If you’ve been to the DMV to have your driver’s license photo taken, there’s a good chance your face is in a little-known group of databases that functions like a digital police lineup. Except, in this case, you needn’t even be suspected of a crime, and soon the searching could take place virtually anywhere, anytime.

It’s just one example of the exploding use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement, and it’s raising major concerns among lawmakers and privacy advocates.

“I’m frankly appalled,” Representative Paul Mitchell, a Republican from Michigan, told Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI’s deputy assistant director of criminal justice, during a House oversight committee hearing last week. “I wasn’t informed when my driver’s license was renewed my photograph was going to be in a repository that could be searched by law enforcement across the country.”

Watch the exchange between Rep. Mitchell, the FBI’s Kimberly Del Greco, and Alvaro Bedoya of Georgetown’s Law Center:

Mitchell’s face and those of more than 125 million Americans—more than half of the country’s adult population—are thought to be stored in a vast network of databases used by local and federal law enforcement to scan photos and videos of individuals. Many of these faces, which can be searched without reasonable suspicion, belong to people who have never been charged with a crime and have no idea they are being searched.

Yet there are few guidelines or legal rulings that govern exactly how face recognition, like a number of other new technologies, should be used by police. In a report last May on the FBI’s system, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the FBI had “not fully adhered to privacy laws and policies and had not taken sufficient action to help ensure accuracy of its face recognition technology.” In response to the report, which urged the FBI to conduct regular audits of the system, “the Department of Justice and the FBI disagreed with three recommendations and had taken some actions to address the remainder, but had not fully implemented them,” the GAO said.

“No federal law controls this technology, no court decision limits it,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, and the coauthor of “The Perpetual Lineup,” a report on the FBI and state face recognition databases. “This technology is not under control.”

While a few attempts to set limits are inching slowly through state legislatures, the technology is racing ahead. Those advancements are widening the scope of the lineup too: Via body-worn police cameras, which are rapidly proliferating, face searches could happen up-close, at street level and in real-time—anticipating a future in which anonymity in certain public places could disappear.

It’s this pairing of technologies in particular—the ability to scan and identify faces on the street—that is the “most concerning” from a privacy and First Amendment perspective, said Jason Chaffetz, Republican representative from Utah and chairman of the House Oversight committee. A 2014 Justice Dept. report also highlighted the combination, warning that using body cameras with “facial recognition systems and other new technologies like live feed and auto recording . . . may pose serious risks to public privacy.” In the legal vacuum surrounding their use, agencies exploring these technologies should “proceed very cautiously,” the report said.

“Imagine the world where the cops are going down the street and they’ve got Google Glass on and their body cameras are recognizing people,” says Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at New York University School of Law. “And it’s not just recognizing them, but they’re getting their security scores at the same time, and people are getting colored based on how dangerous the algorithms think they are. That’s one scary world.”

Already law enforcement is pairing real-time face recognition software with footage from surveillance cameras, and police officers around the country are using face recognition apps on mobile phones to more quickly identify suspects they stop on the street. In New York, it emerged this week that police are beginning to acquire face recognition technology to scan the faces of all drivers commuting between the five boroughs.

Questions Over Legality And Accuracy

Of immediate concern to Congress was the legality of the FBI’s system. With the FBI’s Del Greco in the hot seat, a number of committee members questioned why the agency hadn’t published a privacy report of its face recognition system until 2015, years after it first deployed the technology in public, in 2010, as illustrated in the GAO chart below.

Had anyone at the FBI been reprimanded for the delay? Rep. Mitchell asked.

“I have no knowledge,” Del Greco said. “There are days ignorance is bliss,” he fired back.

Del Greco said the FBI had advised its privacy attorney internally throughout the roll-out of the system.

“We don’t believe you,” Chaffetz said, “and you’re supposed to make it public.” He also alleged that the FBI “went out of its way” to exempt its facial recognition database from the Privacy Act.

“So here’s the problem,” said Chaffetz. “You’re required by law to put out a privacy statement and you didn’t and now we’re supposed to trust you with hundreds of millions of people’s faces.”

Del Greco defended the agency’s use of what she referred to as “face services,” saying it had “enhanced the ability to solve crime,” emphasized that privacy was of utmost importance at the FBI, and said that the system was not used to positively identify suspects, but to generate “investigative leads.” In one recent positive outcome for the technology, Charles Hollin, an alleged child molester, was caught after spending 18 years as a fugitive, thanks to a database that contained his passport photo.

Currently, 18 U.S. states let the FBI use face-recognition technology to compare suspected criminals to their driver’s license or other ID photos. These, in addition to criminal and civil mug shots, and photos from the U.S. State Department’s passport and visa records, are part of a set of databases used by the FBI and police across the country. Over the past decade and a half, 29 states have allowed police agencies and the FBI to search their repositories of drivers’ faces during investigations.

“I have zero confidence in the FBI and the [Justice Department], frankly, to keep this in check,” Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said, joining the committee’s bipartisan chorus.

After the hearing, Bedoya, a former chief counsel for Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, noted that the topic had inspired a rare moment of agreement on both sides of the aisle. “The opposition to the use of driver’s licenses was remarkably strong and remarkably uniform across party lines,” he said. “In my five years as a Senate staffer, I never saw anything like it on a similar privacy issue.”

In some ways, the FBI’s approach to face recognition resembles how police traditionally try to match fingerprints at a crime scene to those of criminals. In this case, however, the “prints” include the faces of millions of innocent people, often collected and scanned without their knowledge, according to the analysis by Bedoya and his colleagues. It estimated that around 80% of the faces searched by police belong to individuals who have never been charged with a crime.

In under half a decade, they found, the FBI searched drivers’ faces more than 36,000 times, without warrants, audits, or regular accuracy tests. In Florida, police are encouraged to use face recognition “whenever practical.” (Individually, dozens of states also use face recognition to crack down on fraudsters applying for duplicate driver’s licenses, for instance.)

To access the FBI’s networked databases of faces, an authorized, participating police agency need only show that its search is for “law enforcement purposes,” said Del Greco of the FBI. Those criteria are determined by individual states, she noted.

Imagine going to the DMV to renew your license, Bedoya wrote in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post. “What if you—and most other teens in the United States—were then asked to submit your fingerprints for criminal investigations by the FBI or state police?”

In scope, he argues, the face-matching system resembles the National Security Agency’s call-records program, which logged the metadata of all Americans’ phone calls. “This has never happened before—not with DNA or fingerprints, which are kept in smaller national networks made up mostly of known or suspected criminals. Yet law-enforcement face-recognition systems have received a fraction of the NSA’s oversight.”

The possibility of misidentification and false positives is also worrisome, especially because the FBI has not been keeping track of such failures. “It doesn’t know how often the system incorrectly identifies the wrong subject,” explained the GAO’s Diana Maurer. “Innocent people could bear the burden of being falsely accused, including the implication of having federal investigators turn up at their home or business.”

More worrisome, research shows that facial recognition appears to disproportionately impact minority communities. A report that was co-written by the FBI in 2012 found that the technology exhibited a higher number of failure rates with darker faces, a function of the kinds of data that humans input as they train the algorithms.

“If you are black, you are more likely to be subjected to this technology, and the technology is more likely to be wrong,” said Elijah Cummings, a congressman for Maryland. “That’s one hell of a combination. Just let that sink in.”

The FBI, like other law enforcement agencies, has argued that the algorithms are race-blind, and reiterates that face searches are only used as “investigatory” leads. “This response is very troubling,” Cummings noted. “Rather than conducting testing that would show whether or not these concerns have merit, the FBI chooses to ignore growing evidence that the technology has a disproportionate impact on African Americans.”

Friedman notes that racial concerns aren’t exclusive to face recognition. “A lot of these technologies, just because of how they’re deployed, come with racialized aspects. If you’re using license plate readers in more heavily policed neighborhoods, you’re picking up more data in those neighborhoods. That’s something we need to be very aware of and thoughtful about.”

Related Story:Police Body Cameras Will Do More Than Just Record You

CHILLING EFFECTS

A plethora of private companies already have your face in all of its biometric glory, provided it’s ever been uploaded to the servers of Apple, Google, and Facebook. As these companies pile millions into AI research, a number of startups are also racing to automatically analyze video of the world’s images. One startup, Kairos, aims to let Hollywood and ad agencies study audiences’ emotional responses and help theme park visitors more easily find and purchase photos of themselves. Another, Matroid, launched this week by researchers at Stanford, focuses on analyzing television appearances and scanning surveillance video.

“Google can give you pictures of cats, but not cat with grandpa or cat with grandpa and Christmas tree or with your son,” Pete Sonsini, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, which is funding Matroid to an unspecified tune, told Bloomberg. “It’s really powerful for any human to be able to create a detector that can identify any image or set of images or face from their dataset.”

Banks are using biometric technology to provide better personal verification, eventually allowing people to pay with their face. Airlines are imagining using biometrics to let passengers board an airline without a paper ticket. At a conference this week in Orlando, NEC, the Japanese company whose facial recognition algorithms are considered the most accurate by the Dept. of Homeland Security, released new features for its software suite which include a “virtual receptionist” and a system by which “age/gender recognition can trigger tailored advertisements/greetings and can trigger notifications to sales personnel for immediate follow-up and interaction,” said a press release.

Another app, installed on a hotel’s cameras, would notify hotel receptionist and concierge services when a VIP or high value customer arrives at any of the building’s entrances. “This will allow them to receive them in person, greet them by their name, and provide them a better service. Also this can be used to identify any staff that were terminated when they enter the property and take appropriate action.”

At Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park, meanwhile, biometrics are already being used to ration toilet paper, CNN reported last week: “The facial recognition program keeps the dispenser from offering another round to the same person; if you need more, you reportedly need to sit tight—literally—for nine minutes.”

Still, the most profitable applications for biometrics lie in the fast-growing law enforcement and public safety sector. Industry executives and police experts say that the next stage of the technology—automatically scanning public places for faces and objects in real time—could help more quickly find armed and dangerous or missing persons, identify critical moments amid torrents of body and dash cam footage, or even perhaps identify biased policing.

In many communities, automatic license plate readers—brick-sized cameras mounted on the back of patrol cars—already do something similar with cars, archiving and cross-referencing every license plate they pass in real time to check for outstanding warrants or traffic violations.

These are also the most worrisome applications, privacy advocates say, given the general secrecy that surrounds them, the few restrictions on their use, and the ability to track individuals. Pairing face-matching algorithms with body cameras, said Bedoya, “will redefine the nature of public spaces.”

Even the mere prospect of the technology could have a chilling effect on people’s First Amendment rights, privacy advocates warn. In some cities, police are restricted from filming at protests and demonstrations—unless a crime is thought to be in progress—for this reason.

Other police departments, however, have routinely filmed protesters: In New York, for instance, the NYPD sent video teams to record Occupy and Black Lives Matter protests hundreds of times, and apparently without proper authorization, agency documents released this week show.

“Will you attend a protest if you know the government can secretly scan your face and identify you—as police in Baltimore did during the Freddie Gray protests?” Bedoya writes. “Do you have the right to walk down your street without having your face scanned? If you don’t, will you lead your life in the same way? Will you go to a psychiatrist? A marriage counselor? An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?”

Rep. Chaffitz appeared to support one controversial application of face recognition: using it to find undocumented immigrants. The Dept. of Homeland Security stores the faces of every visitor in its own database, and is determined to better track those who overstay their visas; in 2015, the agency estimated 500,000 overstays.

“I think it is absolutely a concern that face recognition would be used to facilitate deportations,” Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel to the Brennan Center’s National Security Program at New York University School of Law, told The Intercept‘s Ava Kofman. “We’re seeing how this administration is ramping up these deportation efforts. They’re looking much more widely.”

Generally, however, Chaffitz urged firmer limits. The technology “can also be used by bad actors to harass or stalk individuals,” he said. “It can be used in a way that chills free speech and free association by targeting people attending certain political meetings, protests, churches, or other types of places in the public.”

“And then having a system, with a network of cameras, where you go out in public, that too can be collected. And then used in the wrong hands, nefarious hands… it does scare me. Are you aware of any other country that does this? Anybody on this panel? Anybody else doing this?”

Neither Del Greco nor other members of the panel responded.

Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that “we don’t yet appear to be at point where face recognition is being used broadly to monitor the public.” But, she said, “it is important to place meaningful checks on government use of face recognition now before we reach a point of no return.”

Real-time face recognition is coming to law enforcement; the question is how the technology itself will be policed, and what role the public will have in dictating its use. “If we’re going there, then we better be going there together,” said Friedman, of the Policing Project. “Did we all discuss this and agree to this?”

To improve the use of face recognition, Bedoya and other privacy advocates say the FBI should only access face databases with express consent from state legislatures, and only in cases of felonies in which police have probable cause to implicate the subject. The FBI should also regularly scrub its databases to remove innocent people, conduct audits to ensure the software meets privacy requirements, and be more transparency about how it uses the technology, they say.

Policing veterans have also expressed discomfort with the use of the technology. In December, a guide to body cameras published by the Constitution Project, a nonpartisan think tank, and co-authored by a handful of retired police officials, warned that the privacy risks of video “tagging” technologies were “immense” because they “have the potential to end anonymity, catalog every person at a sensitive location or event, and even facilitate pervasive location tracking of an individual over a prolonged period of time.”

In an interview about the future of body cameras, Bill Schrier, the former chief information officer at the Seattle Police Department, told me that “most reasonable people don’t want potentially dangerous felons or sex offenders walking around in public and would, I think, support such use” of real-time face recognizing body cameras in those cases.

But used to catch people wanted for “misdemeanors such as unpaid traffic tickets or pot smoking,” real-time face recognition could be dangerous. That, he said, could “seriously undermine faith in government, and start us down the road to a police state.”

If you work at Acato, a digital agency in the Netherlands, your boss will now pay you to ride your bike to work. The company is one of the first to try out a new app designed to track employee commutes and automatically detect when someone is on a bike rather than in a car, and then let the company reward the ones who make the more sustainable choice.

“We want to create healthy employees,” Jose Diaz, cofounder and CEO of ByCycling, the startup that created the app, tells Fast Company. “We know that companies are willing to spend some money to create a healthy lifestyle for their workforce–that way, they can save a lot of money through less sick leave and more productivity.”

The app uses an algorithm to detect your speed and identify when you’re biking, without requiring you to push a button to track the ride. As it logs the distance you’ve traveled, it creates a leaderboard to promote competition between workers or departments.

“We found that the two best motivators for people to even consider cycling to work are financial incentives and the social aspect of the initiative,” says Diaz. “We found that 70% of the people think that the best incentive for them to ride to work is cash; 72% of people also believe that they do cycling to work initiatives because another colleague encouraged them to do so.”

At the end of a month, an employer can convert miles logged by an employee into cash or extra vacation time. Companies choose their own budgets, but typically pay around 25-30 cents a kilometer. Acato estimates that someone riding to work regularly in its program can earn a little more than $50 a month.

The agency says that many of its employees already cycle to work (it is the Netherlands, after all), but it wanted to test the app both to reward that behavior and encourage others to start riding. Roughly a third of the company’s 45 employees–everyone who has an iPhone, which the app currently requires–are participating. “We do believe that the app and the incentive program behind it helps to change the behavior initially,” says Valentijn de Jong, a managing partner at Acato. “We believe that through this people will notice that cycling is fun and will make them feel better. The latter will, of course, be the main reason in the long term that they will keep on commuting by bike.”

KPN, a large telecommunications company that is also piloting the app, says that the newly launched program is already encouraging non-cyclists to ride. “We have people who normally commute to work by public transport because of the distance–around 15-20 kilometers–but now make to effort to come by bike once a week,” says Alessia Padalino from KPN.

Others have attempted to pay people to bike to work in the past, with varying results. In France, when several companies offered to pay employees roughly 43 cents a mile to ride to work in a six-month trial in 2014, a relatively small number of people participated–roughly 200 people out of more than 8,000 who were eligible.

A cash incentive is likely to work better in a place that already has good bike infrastructure, such as the Netherlands, rather than somewhere with incomplete bike networks, where a cyclist has to navigate through heavy car traffic, says Ralph Buehler, an associate professor in urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech.

“We just know from many studies that a big part of society is not willing to cycle under those conditions,” he says. “So even if you offer them money at work, only a certain group would be willing to put up with the conditions on some of these roadways.”

In the U.S., he says, cash for cycling is most likely to be a motivator in cities that have relatively strong bike networks, such as Minneapolis or Portland, Oregon. In Washington, D.C.–where there were just three miles of bike lanes in 2001, and there are now nearly 80 miles–the city council is also now considering a bill that would require employers that offer free parking to offer cash or transit benefits to people who choose not to drive.

A series of studies in Los Angeles found that programs that let employees “cash out” the value of a parking space could reduce the number of commuters who drive alone by 17%. But cash for cycling may work best if companies don’t also still offer free parking as an option. In another study, Buehler looked at the impact of other incentives to ride to work.

“What we found is that the free car parking at work sort of drowns out the effect of these other things,” he says. “On their own, having showers attracts more people to cycle to work. Having lockers and bike parking attracts more people to cycle to work. But when you have free parking at the same time, the effect of the free parking seems to be much stronger than the effect of these other incentive policies.” (The study didn’t look at cash for cycling because it wasn’t an option at the time, but found that free parking had a similar effect on the use of free transit passes.)

For companies that are serious about encouraging employees to bike to work, the first step might be ditching parking passes–and then offering cash for cycling as an extra motivator.

The app is currently available for iOS on the App Store, and will soon be available for Android.

Correction: We’ve updated this article to use the correct name of the app.

It may not be the first brand you’d think of when it comes to making a social statement, but P&G’s Vicks new campaign “Touch of Care” uses the opportunity to extend the meaning of caring for your family to advocate for trans rights.

The new ad, created by Publicis Singapore, is based on a real-life story of an orphan and her newfound mother. We meet a young girl named Gayatri, as she talks about her relationship with her mom, Gauri, and see just how lovingly normal it all is. Until it’s subtly revealed that Gauri faces more challenges as a transgender woman.

In a statement Nitin Darbari, chairman and CEO of P&G Teva JV China, and marketing director for Asia, Middle East and Africa said, “Vicks has always been about the gentle touch of a mother’s care, as she caresses and gives relief to her child. With the #TouchOfCare campaign we are going a step further and expounding the importance of care beyond just the traditional perception of family. The campaign shows how people who, though not connected by blood, end up being family through care itself.”

Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis APAC chief strategy officerEd Booty said, “Great brands don’t just reflect safe and accepted norms, instead they dare to set agendas in culture at large. That is our ambition with this work for Vicks–to give the timeless idea of Family Care a fresh and contemporary meaning.”

In 2014, the Indian Supreme Court granted transgender citizens recognition under the law as a “third gender.” But despite that ruling, social and legal discrimination against transgender people still persists in India, with activists still fighting for rights and protections.

Stop. Wait. Don’t ditch that old bicycle with the drooping chain just yet. Instead, bust out your toolbox and get busy tightening up the gears.

That’s what Jaime Facciola would want. A former corporate sustainability executive, Facciola is the founder of Repair Revolution, an organization based in Oakland, California that was formed in opposition to the planned obsolescence built into tech products constantly dropping from Silicon Valley. Facciola’s company, which she launched in the fall of 2015, takes your broken stuff—clothes, furniture, televisions, you name it—and outsources it to local expert fixers. As the group says on its website, “Buy what you love. Fix what you buy. Love what you fix.”

Facciola believes this “circular economy” helps keep things “at their highest function for as long as possible.” It’s an idea that’s catching on. The popularity of the informal gatherings known as repair cafes is growing. By Facciola’s count, there are now about 1,100 such places in more than 30 countries.

Even governments are getting on board. “Scotland has thrown around the idea of setting up repair [goals], as part of the EU’s Circular Economy Package,” she says. To learn more about this burgeoning revolution, we called Facciola on an iPhone 6 that we hope to keep using for many years to come.

Fast Company: How does Repair Revolution work as a business?

Jaime Facciola: The vision was always that it’d be a repair salon. When I go to a hair salon, I’m always excited. I know I am going to feel better when I leave. I love that feeling. I thought, “Man, if we really loved our stuff, we should have that sensation when we get it fixed.” Right now, repair shops are just these dingy, dungy man dens. Repair right now isn’t convenient; it hasn’t been modernized.

FC: You’re talking about shifting consumer attitudes on a large scale—which seems really hard.

JF: Right now our economic structure is really just built by surveying the cost. Everything is based on the bottom line and the least cost, and that does not fully account for the true cost of things. If we were actually paying the true cost of pretty much anything—shoes, oil, clothes, food—things wouldn’t be as inexpensive as they are.  And that’s not entirely a bad thing if that means that we are producing more quality goods with quality jobs, and people are taking better, longer care of the things they own, and they respect those things because it took more to get them.

FC: With all the talk of bringing jobs back to the U.S. lately, is there a way for this kind of thinking to be part of that conversation?

JF: Repair is a huge part of the economy that’s disappearing. I’m certain that within 10 years there won’t be any of these tiny little shops left. The owners’ kids don’t want to take them over. Nobody wants to be a repairman, and that’s a big aspect of what Repair Revolution is trying to do: change the narrative. Repair is a skilled job, and we can bring that integrity back, in the way that we’ve done with makers.

FC: It does seem like this fits in the age of artisanal everything.

JF: Right? We love homemade stuff. We love locally sourced stuff. When I go to [repair] shops, they are not dead; they are slammed. That was one of my key learning points. The ones that remain are actually doing great business. They all complain that they’re not making enough money, and I don’t think the public is going to pay much because things are already so cheap. That just depresses the whole system. But there is not a shortage of demand.

FC: Eventually, though, every product dies for good.

JF: Things have to be designed in a certain way, not full of gross toxic stuff, and they can be made into other stuff. In the natural world there’s no such thing as waste. Everything becomes something else. It’s a crazy idea that we produce things that have no other use than going to a landfill. Someday we’ll look back in embarrassment that we ever thought this was going to be a sustainable approach.

FC: How do ideas like this gain traction in a place ruled by Silicon Valley and planned obsolescence?

JF: We’ve created such insane expectations of customers. That everything can be delivered…by tomorrow. That you no longer need to actually talk to the person you’re buying something from. And repair is counter to all of that. Everything is repairable, and there is a really cool thing happening right now called visible mending. It’s about celebrating the repair. Why are we always trying to hide it? Why is this not a badge of honor?

FC: So you win consumers’ hearts and minds by improving the optics of the experience?

JF: In my mind that’s the revolution. We need to alter our behavior and our appreciation of reusing our things. It’s related to all those things we do in our regular life: We buy organic and we go to yoga and we try not to smoke and we do all these things. Like, driving a hybrid used to be weird, and now it just makes sense and has become mainstream. I think repair is in an early stage, but can and should and will follow the same pathway as these other behaviors that have become more mainstream.

FC: Good branding helps, of course. You look at something like those Freitag bags. People are proudly wearing truck tarps. And they are super expensive.

JF: That’s the thing. It’s all connected. The cheaper the goods we buy, the less incentivized we are to fix them and the more expensive it appears to fix them because we are charging living wage labor to fix things that we never paid the true cost for. We didn’t account for the shipping, we didn’t account for the pollution, we didn’t account for the human rights. We have built a system that has pretty much usurped repair.

What inspires me is when I look at the food movement and I think, “Holy cow, Walmart now sells organic food!”

FC: You could be the Alice Waters of repair.

JF: That would be so amazing. What I don’t want to lose is the richness that stuff can develop into. There is as much stuff as food. How are we not capitalizing on it? As jobs, as waste reduction, as innovation—economic prosperity can be sold just like food.

FC: I have a 12-year old daughter who won’t buy anything new except for underwear and socks.

JF: She’s, like, my champion. I love her! This is what truly gives me hope. This mindset just skipped some generations. Obviously, all of our grandparents understood this. This was the only way they knew how to be, in many ways because of scarcity. But there is scarcity now, it’s just that the market is perverted and we don’t feel the price signals to let us know when it’s happening.

Last fall, despite strong opposition from farmers, California became the first state to pass legislation to curbing cow-produced methane. The so-called “anti-flatulence” bill aims to mitigate climate change by calling for a 40% reduction in methane–created mostly in the cow’s manure though yes, also in their farts and burps–by 2030. Farmers were dismayed: Short of reducing the size of their livestock operations, which can, in some cases, number more than 3,000 cows, what could they do to limit the emissions from their farms?

Eungsung Kan, a chemical and environmental engineer at Texas A&M University, is working on what might prove to be a solution to California farmers’ woes. Last year, Kan has received a $1 million grant from the university to research the viability of his concept for a “closed-loop” dairy farm, which reuses wastewater, emits zero waste, and powers itself using the damaging methane from the manure. Kan’s concept has three main goals: to treat wastewater with dairy manure-derived biochar (a carbon material similar to charcoal, which is produced by gasifying manure); to produce bioenergy from manure; and to capture greenhouse gasses with biochar.

In addition to the climate-change repercussions of dairy farms, “farm operations have been implicated in higher-than-normal levels of nitrogen and phosphorous, antibiotics, heavy metals and hormones in surface and groundwater downstream from facilities,” Kan tells Fast Company. Too much nitrogen and phosphorous in surface water produce algae, which reduces water quality and wrecks aquatic ecosystems; dairy wastewater also contains pathogens like E.coli that can cause endocrine disruption in humans. That is unpleasant enough but then consider the fact that the USDA has estimated that the manure from 200 milking cows produces as much nitrogen as the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people, and the magnitude of the issue becomes even more obvious.

Currently, manure is generally stored in giant outdoor pits called lagoons, where it’s treated with water and repurposed as fertilizer. However, this system is flawed: Contaminants escape from the lagoons and into the surrounding environment, and the lagoons fail to capture the greenhouse gasses created by the decomposing manure.

For dairy farms to be sustainable in the long term, Kan says, they need to more effectively treat and repurpose wastewater, and efficiently minimize emissions.

Kan’s closed-loop concept, which he’s currently developing at lab scale, will address both requirements. In the closed-loop system, the first step is to separate out solid dairy manure from liquid wastewater. The dairy manure is converted to syngas (energy-rich gas) and biochar by gasifying the manure in an on-site reactor at temperatures of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Using an installed on-site combined heat and power (CHP) system, the syngas is converted to heat and power for the dairy farm; excessive power could be sold to a local utility company, Kan says.

The gasification process creates biochar–a fine-grain charcoal which effectively absorbs nutrients. Columns filled with biochar would act as a water purification system that would filter out nitrogen, phosphorous, and other harmful contaminants from the liquid as it passes through. The water could be used for agricultural irrigation and washing and watering cows; the biochar, Kan says, can then be repurposed as fertilizer because it so effectively traps soil nutrients (it also traps greenhouse gasses from the ground that otherwise would be released into the atmosphere)

After Kan completes the lab-scale demonstration of the closed-loop system, he’ll apply the process to the Tarleton Southwest Regional Dairy Center in Stephenville, Texas, a facility with around 400 dairy cows. Testing at Tarleton for two to three years, Kan says, will help his team at Texas A&M anticipate any problems that might arise before scaling the system up to commercial farms.

Apart from the installation cost to the Tarleton dairy farm of roughly $300,000 for the pyrolysis reactor and the CHP system, the annual operation of the closed-loop dairy concept is not expensive, Kan says. The whole process will require around two people to operate the system over the course of a year, and the concept will actually result in savings for the farm. Because a medium-sized dairy like Tarleton spends roughly $3,000 per month on energy, it will reclaim that money through generating power on-site. The same is true for water: Kan estimates that a farm goes through around 170 pounds of water per cow each day (accounting for irrigation, washing, and watering); the closed-loop dairy will recycle as much as 70% of that water.

Dairy farms continue to grapple with how best to curb emissions without scaling down operations; California is doing its part to assist farmers in reducing emissions by directing $50 million in fees collected through its cap and trade program toward supplying dairy farmers with methane digesters, which, like in Kan’s model, convert manure into energy. Currently, only 12 of the state’s 1,500 dairies are equipped with digesters. Kan believes that his more comprehensive closed-loop dairy system could play a significant role in making the dairy industry more sustainable.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that advancements in mitigation technology are not enough to curb the massive environmental burden posed by the dairy and livestock industries: A 2014 study found that even if farms become more productive and implement technical mitigation measures, the livestock and dairy industries would still account for over half the acceptable volume of greenhouse gases by 2070. The thing that will really tip us toward sustainability? Cutting down how much meat and dairy we consume. That might be a tough pill for non-vegans to swallow, but that’s what embattled plant-based milk and the Impossible Burger are for.

A man walks into a pizza shop with an assault rifle, fires it, and points it at an employee. This isn’t the start of a joke. It’s what happened in Washington, D.C., in early December. A scruffy young conspiracy theorist had come to Comet Ping Pong Pizza brandishing and firing a gun in search of a purported child sex trafficking ring tied to prominent liberal politicians supposedly run out of one of its backrooms.

It’s not clear who gave birth to “pizzagate,” which cropped up shortly after WikiLeaks released John Podesta’s hacked emails. But much of the theory’s fleshing out happened on the social news aggregation site Reddit through a group of pseudonymous Donald Trump supporters on one of the many subreddits where conspiracy theories and far worse things sometimes flourish.

When CEO Steve Huffman eventually banned r/pizzagate from the site in an effort to prevent online witch hunts, users unleashed a spate of negative comments about the exec on the pro-Trump subreddit r/TheDonald. In turn, Huffman heightened fears of censorship when he admitted to editing some of those comments. Later he called the move a prank, and apologized. “The irony,” the CEO told Recode in December, “is they’re on my platform. I’ve defended their right to be on our platform many times. I don’t want to take your voice away. I just want you to stop being assholes.”

The pizzagate debacle represents one of the biggest challenges for CEO Huffman and cofounder and executive chairman Alexis Ohanian in their attempt to make the site profitable and sustainable in the long term. But despite years of trying to impress advertisers without alienating the community—one known for its fierce resistance to change—as well as to monetize the site through paid subscriptions and merchandise, Reddit has largely come up empty.

Today, in its latest bid at evolution, the site is launching a new interface for its self-service ad platform. The revamp is aimed at making Reddit, now more than 10 years old and boasting 12 billion monthly views, a real revenue generator. This latest push for ads comes as Reddit is also trying to appeal to more users. Last week, the site introduced profile pages, a repository for a user’s threads and commentary that aims to make Reddit more social, not unlike Facebook or Twitter. (Not surprisingly, the announcement unleashed a torrent of comments by hardcore redditors.)

Its first ad offering, released in 2009, sponsored links that appear in the Reddit feed were often down voted by users, lowering their overall placement. User commentary on sponsored posts don’t shy from the issues. Former employees and others who have either personal or ideological contentions with a brand might speak directly on the brand’s posts. And if users smell even the faintest whiff of inauthenticity, they will call it out, as they did when it appeared Nissan loaded softball questions into a conversation with its CEO.

If you’ve never been on Reddit before, it looks like a site from a bygone era when message boards and chat forums were the way people met on the web. Its homepage, which has changed very little since it first launched in 2005, is a list of blue phrases that link out to articles, images, videos, and conversation threads posted by users. The hierarchy of each is determined through a community voting system. Discussions cover a broad spectrum of topics covering everything from Plato’s The Apology of Socrates to how to put in hair extensions. Users can also find like-minded individuals inside subreddits, which hosts content on a specific subject matter.

But Reddit, like its contemporaries Twitter and Facebook, was reluctant to dictate what sorts of conversations it would not tolerate and it was slow to mitigate hate speech. Over time, Reddit developed a reputation as a platform where bigotry and abuse were allowed to run unchecked. An unintuitive user experience also stagnated Reddit’s growth over the years, much like it did for Twitter. Condé Nast, which bought the company from its founders in 2006, oversaw the launch of a premium membership called Reddit Gold in 2015; the next year, it spun Reddit out as its own independent entity.

Since returning to Reddit in 2015 after a six-year break—and after a volatile period that saw the departure of interim CEO Ellen Pao—Ohanian and Huffman have cracked down on the site’s worst offenders. That includes the recent dissolution of two subreddits popular among white nationalists. “Literally one of the first things we did was update that content policy and build a team around it to enforce it,” says Ohanian, a tall man with a closely cropped beard and the most boyish of grins. Meanwhile, he’s also focused on generating revenue. Reddit now has over 270 million users and this year the company launched its latest ad-format: promoted conversations.

Steve Huffman: “Reddit Has Been Home To Some Of The Most Authentic Conversations”

“Hundreds of thousands of people come here every day to have neutral discussions about politics in America and the world,” says Ohanian, “I don’t think there are many other places where this exists.” Ohanian believes much of this traction was due to the election as Reddit became a prime location for people to discuss politics. This year it was ranked the top seventh site in the U.S. in terms of traffic by Alexa analytics.

Still, the company’s repeated efforts at profiting from advertising, including adding ad targeting for subreddits last October, have been slower going than some in the company had hoped, The Information reported last April. Internal documents obtained by the website showed projected revenues of $20 million for 2016; the year before it made under $10 million. Reddit did not share financial numbers with Fast Company.

Reddit’s more recent forays into advertising has looked more promising. Brands can now create conversation threads that are then seeded to relevant users. In December, Toyota launched a campaign on the platform around its new self-driving concept vehicle and the future of mobility. It hosted a Reddit Live announcement of the vehicle plus three “Ask Me Anything” style posts. The campaign generated more than 650 comments in 12 hours and reached 80 million plus people.

To avoid some of its past brand debacles, Reddit has helped advertisers to run campaigns that are Reddit-ready. As one piece of its campaign, Toyota asked redditors what they would name a Mars colony if they were the first to arrive in exchange for Reddit Gold. Not only did Toyota award the Gold to answers users deemed satisfactory, the person running the account decided to only respond to questions and comments in Imgur meme form and doled out some sick burns. The hand-holding Reddit provides to brands is key to what make its new slate of ads succeed.

Global digital ad spending is expected grow this year, accounting for 33% of the market media intelligence firm GroupM estimates. “Advertisers are looking for other places to invest,” says eMarketer analyst Catherine Boyle. “They’re not so comfortable having all their eggs in one basket.”

But gaining a foothold in this arena will be difficult. Google and Facebook are still the dominant ad platforms with 32% and 13% share of the market worldwide respectively, according to eMarketer. Reddit doesn’t even yet register.

However, native ads, like the kind Reddit is hocking, are particular hot among advertisers because they are believed to be the antidote to ad-blocking technology. But good native content isn’t enough on its own, says Boyle, “That type of branded content would have to be a compelling experience on a mobile device.”

This year in particular Reddit has made ads a priority. Today’s self-service ad platform redesign was done to be more attuned to the expectations of the industry. Through the update, advertisers will be able to run campaign with multiple sponsored posts and get access to more detailed performance metrics. Advertisers will also be able to pay at the end of the campaign—prior to this latest iteration they had to prepay for campaigns and let Reddit balance out the spend difference later. For the mean time, larger campaigns, like the one Toyota ran earlier this year, will continue to be handled by account executives at Reddit. The ad-product team at Reddit has aspirations to offer more automated services to those clients later this year. “We’re trying to get to where we should have been already,” says Jamie Quint, lead product manager at Reddit.

The ad platform redesign follows a handful of consumer facing updates. Nearly a year ago, Reddit finally launched its own mobile app. More recently it added profile pages to give users a landing page to aggregate their activity on the social site. Reddit is now in the process of developing a new on-boarding method that will make the platform easier to navigate for new arrivals. If the overall Reddit mobile experience is slick for consumers and it can continue to give brands more control over campaigns, advertisers might just pay attention.

When the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, it was the U.S. government’s first comprehensive attempt to curb human trafficking and involuntary servitude in the country–including everything from involuntary sex work to forced labor across a range of industries, including beauty and hospitality. It defined a trafficking victim as anyone coerced into labor against their will and makes punishable the means of coercion used by traffickers to control victims, like trickery and seizure of documents, where were difficult to prosecute under existing laws. Over the past 17 years, it’s been reauthorized four times and has effectively criminalized trafficking, which was previously undefined and prosecuted as a patchwork of crimes.

But the gains from the new law have stalled. “The prevalence of trafficking, from year to year, is actually not going down,” says Bradley Myles, CEO of the anti-slavery nonprofit Polaris, on a phone call to talk about their new report titled The Typology of Modern Slavery: Defining Sex and Labor Trafficking in the United States. “We’re not winning this fight.”

Trafficking in the U.S. is largely understood in the context of two overarching categories: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. But in its new report, Polaris identifies and defines 25 types of modern slavery–including escort work, food service, peddling, and beauty services–in an effort to more specifically address and eradicate trafficking in its various forms. For each category, Polaris describes a unique trafficker profile, recruitment tactics, the standard victim profile, and method of control.

“The lack of data that shows really at a granular level how human trafficking operates has been a persistent challenge in the field,” Myles says, adding that the broad definitions of trafficking have worked to obscure the way various networks actually operate and have resulted in an inability on the part of advocates and law enforcement to break up those networks.

In December 2007, Polaris launched the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which victims and survivors can call to be connected with advocates who offer support and services to get help and stay safe. Between then and December 2016, the organization fielded 32,208 potential cases of human trafficking and 10,085 potential cases of labor exploitation; the BeFree Textline, which launched four years ago, contributed to that total. Polaris’ research team combed through the calls and text, and cataloged those that contained enough data to classify (around 55% to 60% of the cases).

The resulting data set analyzed in the report is the largest on human trafficking in the U.S. ever compiled and publicly analyzed; however, Polaris says the numbers in the report are likely undercounts, as many victims may not know there is a hotline to call, or may be unable, because of their circumstances, to reach out. “If you can’t count the problem, you can’t fix it,” Myles says. “And because human trafficking is so diverse and heterogeneous and dynamic, you can’t fight it all at once; there’s no silver bullet solution. You have to break it up and fight it type by type.”

The report notes that “many efforts to combat trafficking have generalized across too many types and created overly generic resources and responses. For example, if an anti-trafficking group is providing training for hotels, generic ‘Human Trafficking 101’ training is less effective than training that focuses on the types of trafficking that actually use hotels as part of their business model.” Traffickers in the hospitality industry are often labor recruiters or brokers that subcontract with hotels to provide cleaning staff and other service workers; because the labor broker mediates employment, the hotels may not be aware of their workers’ conditions. Many workers who fall into trafficking in the hospitality industry are men and women from Jamaica, the Philippines, and India on H-2B visas, which allow U.S. employers to hire immigrant workers on a part-time or seasonal basis. Traffickers will hire workers with false promises of higher wages and fair working conditions; once employed, workers face wage withholding and other intimidation tactics that keep them bound to the job and fearing to seek help.

That looks very different from the profile of someone forced into escort services, who is more likely to be a female U.S. citizen coerced into work through a fake modeling contract offer, or by a trafficker feigning romantic interest. Those victims are often isolated from society and manipulated into believing their trafficker is the only person who cares for and can support them.

For the stakeholders–from labor unions to advocacy groups to law enforcement–who have a vested interest in eradicating slavery and human trafficking, the Polaris report will be a breakthrough manual. Speaking on the same call as Myles, Janet Drake, a senior assistant attorney general in the Colorado Attorney General’s office, says that the evidence-based information in the report will educate law enforcement about the various trafficker profiles, victim profiles, and recruitment methods, and help them identify and investigate organized crime rings.

Because so much trafficking in the U.S. for so long has slid under the radar of law enforcement and prosecution, “if you think of trafficking as a business, traffickers have perceived that they can make a high profit at a very low risk,” Myles says. “The strategy with this report is to start to flip that equation: How do we decrease traffickers’ perception of profit? How do we increase their sense of risk? And how to we support survivors and provide services to help them rebuild their lives and break out of the cycle of exploitation?” The answer, Myles adds, begins with understanding what to look for.

Let’s take a quick moment to talk about April Fool’s Day. Much like an impeccably timed, earnestly chipper tweet, brands just can’t see to get enough of it. Man, you jokesters you. But in a world in which Pizzagate can happen, is it safe to assume your audience is all starting from the same basic common sense that would tell us that, say, Burger King won’t actually be selling toothpaste? (They aren’t are they? Just checking.) Onward!

Carl’s Jr. “Carl Hardee Sr. Returns”

What: A new campaign that blatantly marks a shift of focus from the babes back to the burgers.
Who: Carl’s Jr., 72andSunny
Why We Care: For more than a decade, Carl’s Jr. has marketed itself as the frat-bro fast-feeder, with as many bikinis as burgers in its ads, courtesy of models like Kate Upton, Sara Underwood, and Emily Ratajkowski, and Hannah Ferguson. Here, Carl’s Jr takes a (totally silly) left turn by bringing the (completely fictional) adult back into the room. A pretty bold, but necessary move for a brand whose ad approach had become predictable.

Samsung “Ostrich”

What: New Samsung ad takes on a new perspective for the inspirational potential of its Gear VR.
Who: Samsung, Leo Burnett
Why We Care: Unveiled at the launch event for the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus smartphones, the spot eschews specs in favor of style by the truckload. Elton John and a charming, giant flightless bird cannot go wrong. As opposed to say, a more overtly familiar concept.

Vicks “Generations of Care”

What: Vicks uses the universality of a loving mother-daughter relationship to make a statement on social justice.
Who: P&G, Vicks, Publicis Singapore
Why We Care: P&G is taking the opportunity with Vicks to take a stand on an issue of human rights, which is probably impressive enough. But doing so in such a thoughtful, wonderfully shot story elevates the statement even further.

Northwell Health “The Return”

What: A short documentary chronicling the creation of a new, more functional prosthetic leg for swimming.
Who: Northwell Health, JWT New York
Why We Care: A cool story made even better (from a marketing POV) that the idea for not only the story but the actual amphibious prosthetic started as an advertising conversation. Read more about the campaign here. 

Tommy John “Cradle”

What: One of 22 short videos in Kevin Hart’s new series for the brand “Kevin Hart’s Morning Briefing.”
Who: Tommy John, Preacher, Hartbeat Productions
Why We Care: Okay, this is less about this individual ad–which is funny–and more about the overall project. Did Tommy John win the small brand lottery when Kevin Hart declared himself a fan of the product and essentially became a spokesperson out of the blue? Of course. But the brand is also embracing working with the comedian in such a way that looks to be taking full advantage of the situation. (And you can read what Hart has to say about it all here.)

‘Tis the season for bad press releases. One thing tech companies just love to do is have fun and joke around on pseudo-holidays like April Fools’ Day. Usually this involves sending a fake announcement about some inane product that is at best unfunny and at worst offensive. Remember Google’s bungled “Mic Drop” setting? It had users inadvertently emailing animated Minion gifs, which resulted in a ton of backlash.

Many times these announcements are taken seriously and reported on in earnest by media outlets (though that’s certainly less true nowadays), which leads to confusion, anger, and all the other stages of grief. By this time tomorrow, there will likely be at least a few outlets that fall for the pranks.

But in the age of fake news, the idea of playing gotcha with the media feels especially bad and unfunny. After witnessing an election influenced by hoaxes and now contending with a president who constantly tweets demonstrably false information, people don’t want to guess what’s real and what isn’t anymore. We’re tired. Much of what we encounter daily on Facebook is already fake, and it’s not in the name of a dumb holiday. Isn’t it time we ended this trend?

At one time, such pranks might have been a good way to show the world that, hey, tech companies are just like us. But we know now they are not. Jeff Bezos is the second richest person in the world, and Silicon Valley companies continually prove they are far removed from the everyday consumers who use their products. We’re in a new era, and we just don’t need more bad jokes from capitalist overlords.

Not to mention these jokes were never that good. Google “launched” its Google Nose joke in 2013 to let people know what their searches smell like. That same year, Twitter’s “Twttr” announcement claimed it would charge a premium for vowels. (In retrospect, that may have actually helped the company monetize better.) And last year, Virgin America (RIP) told us its new logo would be boobs. None of these are horribly offensive, but they’re not funny either.

They’re just kind of bad attempts to level with consumers, when the best way to do that would be to focus on making good products and creating workplace cultures that are more inclusive and equitable.

This won’t, of course, stop companies from still doing it. Today is March 30 and Lyft has already gone live with what I am pretty sure is its annual its joke: a gag wearable device, which looks like a glove and lets you “anonymously” hail a ride without using your phone. It’s called Mono. The fact that I just can’t discover the implied humor here proves it’s a bad attempt. I believe it’s that people can “get mono,” but that’s just a guess.

Alas, this practice will surely continue well into the age when Facebook and Google have taken over the world. We’ll get more cute gags to remind us they’re people too as social media and ad networks continue to perpetuate the information war we’re in now. That’s too bad. It would be better if these companies put the energy they exerted building these pages toward more useful things, rather than focusing on what is literally fake news.

Travelers flying from the Middle East to the United States and the United Kingdom now face an unexpected snag: A ban on large electronics like laptops and tablets in the cabin on many flights. Those passengers are now required to check tablets and laptops in with their baggage. Depending on who you talk to, the move is either a response to a recent terror threat involving a fake iPad or a protectionist measure designed to steer business travelers toward American and British legacy carriers.

The laptop ban impacts all flights, direct or connecting, that depart Egypt’s Cairo airport, Jordan’s Queen Alia, Kuwait’s Kuwait International, Qatar’s Hamad, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz and King Khalid airports, Turkey’s Ataturk, Mohammed V Airport in Morocco, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports in the United Arab Emirates. The ban does not extend, however, to Israel’s Ben-Gurion or Lebanon’s Beirut-Rafic Hariri airports.

For American and British travelers returning from these destinations, this poses a big problem: You either have to leave your laptop or tablet at home or risk having your expensive electronics stolen from your checked luggage.

It’s a big headache for business travelers. Andrew Sheivachman, a writer for business travel site Skift, tells Fast Company that “This will definitely hurt business travelers more than leisure travelers. Business travelers almost always travel with a laptop, and often work in the cabin during a flight. There is also a major data security issue for companies here; if your workers are going to have to check laptops containing sensitive information, it presents a large security risk. I would expect companies to have workers simply avoid these direct routes by using a connecting flight that won’t be affected by the ban. Most leisure travelers tend to leave their laptops at home.”

We spoke to the experts, and learned about a few options. Keep in mind that not all solutions fit every traveler. Vacationers visiting the pyramids, business travelers meeting with clients in Istanbul, and human rights activists working with dissidents in the Gulf all have very different needs and risk profiles. And, as always, ask your airline for guidance on the laptop ban as this is a developing situation.

But even if the laptop ban is a real headache, there are still a few ways to have a productive business trip or use your iPad on vacation:

Check Your Electronics… But Be Careful

Different airlines are reacting differently to the in-cabin electronics ban. Emirates and Turkish Airlines, for instance, are letting customers keep their electronics up until boarding, when they are then collected by employees and placed in the cargo holds. At other airlines, passengers may have to place their electronics into their checked luggage–if you’re on a flight departing from one of the impacted airports, ask your airline for guidance.

Mark Deane, the CEO of ETS Risk Management, recommends business travelers “wipe your laptop of all data, storing it in whichever system your company uses like a secure cloud or server. This is also best practice when traveling to counter corporate espionage and for data protection.”

“Then place only the files that you need in an encrypted portable drive and/or a secure cloud service like AWS,” Deane added. “When your laptop goes in the hold, your data is not at risk. Your encrypted thumb drive stays with you.“

First-class and business-class passengers on Etihad are also getting complimentary use of iPads during their flight.

Buy A Cheap Computer Or Tablet For The Trip

If traveling internationally, it’s not the worst idea to leave your usual laptop at home and buy a cheap, temporary tablet or laptop for the trip. A new Amazon Fire tablet costs less than $50 these days, and a serviceable (though not great) netbook or Chromebook can be purchased online for less than $200.

There’s a second bonus–these devices can help protect business travelers from unwanted snooping at the hotel, coffee shop, or airport. Jordan Arnold, senior managing director at K2 Intelligence, tells Fast Company that “In the digital age, visiting certain countries means bringing home unwanted souvenirs that you never saw or even knew you acquired. Alternatively, you can travel with clean devices and leave any potential cyber baggage at the curb.”

Mail Your Computer Back Home

There’s an additional option: Bringing your regular iPad or laptop with you, and shipping it back home using either the local post office or an international service like UPS, FedEx, or DHL.

This helps avoid the airport check-in bottleneck, but has several negatives: It’s expensive, you need to pack carefully to avoid breaking your electronics, and in some countries (such as Egypt or Turkey), you’ll need a working knowledge of the local language to navigate the post office.

Ditch The Technology

We bring our computers and tablets everywhere these days. Although this option isn’t tenable for many business travelers, you could always just leave your laptop at home and enjoy a computer-free trip.

Gabe Rizzi, president of Travel Leaders Corporate, recommends “Breaking out the pen and paper. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to map things out and plan by writing it down. Or make an old-fashioned to do list. Also, get to know your fellow travelers. If people are in the mood for conversation, you could meet a valuable business contact—maybe even your next client.”

But, let’s be realistic… you’ll probably be doing this with your phone in your pocket. As of press time, you can still use your smartphone on flights departing all these international airports. So plug in your Bluetooth keyboard, get your mobile productivity apps ready, and start crankin’.

In 2012, when David Blake launched Degreed–an online platform where individuals and organizations can discover, track, and measure all their learning and skills–his mission was, as he puts it, to “jailbreak the degree.”

Blake was taking on the educational establishment, which, he believes, “has given universities a monopoly on credentials and defining who is educated. They have the keys to opportunity in the market, and they are a gatekeeper at the front of the path towards upward mobility. I thought that was really unfair.”

Five years later, his company has raised over $30 million and has more than 2 million people using its platform on his bet that grades and test scores don’t predict success in hiring. Rather, what matters is hiring the right people with a proven ability to learn who can take ownership of their learning.

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings,” says Blake, recalling a remark from Laszlo Bock, the former senior vice president of people operations for Google.

Blake shares the story of meeting one such person in the early days of Degreed. He asked a woman who he estimated was in her mid-50, to tell him about her education. She replied, “Oh, I’m not educated. I didn’t go to university.”

“Here’s a woman, aged 55, and what she did 30 years ago as a 20-something is no longer relevant,” he says. “Yet it’s a lens by which she framed herself and her experience as an uneducated person.”

He offers a comparison: “Think if I asked you, ‘Tell me about your health.’ And you told me that you ran a marathon in 1983. That’s absurd.”

Rejection of Entrance Exams

When Blake took the ACT in high school, he was frustrated by the results. “I scored well, but I did not score proportionally well to how invested I was in my academics. That felt so unjust to me.”

He says, “I realized what university I’m going to get into is half the equation to what jobs I’ll have available to me, and what job I get after university is the rest of the equation for what career I might end up on. Here I am, I’m 17, and I recall thinking that the way the system is set up is crazy.”

Forging His Own Path

Despite his reservations about the education system, Blake ended up attending college and graduating with a degree in economics and took a well-paying job in management consulting. It was the path his father wanted for him, but he felt something was missing. He tried to meet the need by volunteering as a pro bono consultant at Kiva and the Taproot Foundation (which I founded).

“I think back to those days of Kiva and Taproot. Those were the two things I had exposure to where I just felt like a new way of building tech platforms is emerging. It gave me a lot of optimism.”

Then, two weeks before having his first child, he got a call from a tech startup, Zinch. Their tagline–“students are more than a test score”–spoke to him. He was immediately reconnected with his purpose, and despite a 60% pay cut, he joined their founding team.

“I ultimately went back to my parents, and asked if I could move my young family back into their basement so that I could pursue this ambition and this dream.” For his father, this decision went against the advice he had given his son for years, “‘You have a great job. Great benefits. Here you are, beholden to me, you want to live in my basement? So you can pursue your ambition? That’s selfish, and it’s wrong,'” he recalls his father saying.

“To his credit, once he knew I wasn’t going to be pushed off my dream, he supported me and loved me, and we lived in his basement for a while,” Blake says. While working at Zinch for the next three years, his vision for how to change the educational system became clearer in his mind.

Disrupting the Degree

“Ultimately, my ambition is that more people have more pathways to pursue their personal development and learning. Skills, which they can use to become upwardly mobile,” Blake says. Degreed has introduced three disruptions that Blake believes will force the education system to change.

First, it has put an emphasis on skill development. “I think the market wants to speak the language of skills but it can’t, so it speaks the language of degrees.”

Second, it is helping people get credit and track their learning from a wide range of sources. The platform allows you to track your learning from curated classes, but also based on your experience and what you read online, from news articles to YouTube videos.

Finally, it is making learning portable. As you move from one employer to the next over the course of your career you can keep your learning profile and continue to get credit for your learning. When a Degreed customer moves from, say, Bank of America to Citibank, their profile moves with them. This enables our “our skills and our learning be interoperable and travel with us,” he explained.

Finding Comfort in Learning

Blake himself uses the platform. “On a busy day, when things haven’t gone well, sometimes I just give myself permission to take 45 minutes, go sit down, and go find a great article. Take a little “me” time. Watch a great TED Talk.”

In this way, learning becomes a real, daily activity rather than a detached certification process. And it can help build resilience within individuals and across organizations.

You Just Learned Something

In reading this article, hopefully you learned something. It’s now part of your lifelong learning and something Blake believes should always be part of your “learning transcript.” With the Degreed browser extension, you can click on any article that was meaningful to you and it will become part of your learning profile.

“If you can make yourself read everything that is published on a specific topic, you can become one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on that thing. You just need to commit to yourself,” as he points out, using the same principle that a crowdsourced site like Wikipedia relies on.

Blake’s enthusiasm for daily learning is infectious. And it’s something anyone can do without spending a penny–avoiding the six-figure debt created by higher education. It also enables us to stay educated, preventing us from resting on the degree we got 20 years ago as evidence of our skills and knowledge. It helps create the kind of people Google wants–people with the humility to own their learning.

This article is part of a series of articles by Aaron Hurst exploring how leaders find purpose and meaning in their jobs. Last fall, Hurst’s company, Imperative, released a global survey of the role of purpose at work, in partnership with LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which found that those who are intrinsically motivated to find purpose in their jobs consistently outperform their colleagues and experience greater levels of job satisfaction and well-being, regardless of country, gender, or ethnicity. They are also 50% more likely to be leaders. This series will profile those leaders, and how they connect with what’s meaningful to them in their role and the organizations they lead.

This month we picked up some productivity secrets from Googlers and Apple employees, found out which email sign-offs boost your chances of getting a reply, and discovered what happened when one job seeker tried to game the system by building an application-sending bot.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership in March 2017:

1. Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive

There’s a reason why the likes of Apple, Google, and Netflix produce such great products and services: their employees. Not only do these companies have great people working for them, but they also know how to utilize their high performers. This month we found out how top tech firms’ star employees drive greater output and higher profit margins.

2. What Happened When I Gave Up Gluten, Sugar, Dairy, And Coffee

Sometimes it takes a detox to get our bodies and minds back on track. One writer felt this need at the beginning of 2017 after noticing that her holiday diet was leaving her constantly sluggish and tired. Despite encountering some initial difficulties, here’s why she ultimately decided to stick with it.

3. I Built A Bot To Apply To Thousands Of Jobs At Once–Here’s What I Learned

This nonprofit director wanted a career change, so he tried applying for openings at tech leaders like Google, Facebook, Slack, and Squarespace. To game the application system, he built a machine that aggregated hiring managers’ contact information and formulated tailored emails with his resume and a personalized cover letter. This month he explained what that scheme taught him about the power of good, old-fashioned networking.

4. Use These Words At The End Of Your Emails To Increase Your Chance Of Getting A Reply

Emails can take a long time to write, especially when you’re hoping a finely crafted message will elicit a reply. But there’s one part of an email that we often overlook: the sign-off. A data scientist analyzed over 350,000 email threads and found that certain closings resulted in higher response rates. Here’s a look at which ones work best.

5. The War For Talent Is Over, And Everyone Lost 

For every employee who adds value and feels engaged with their jobs, there are many others who are underperforming, underemployed, and extremely unhappy at work. Twenty years after McKinsey researchers declared a “war on talent,” a psychologist and a talent management expert pronounce it a struggle with no victors. Here’s how they believe we got here, and what it might take to make things better.

6. Five Common Habits That Can Kill Your Career

Most of us think our work habits–like our talents and abilities in general–are above average, but that’s just not possible. According to a recent survey of managers, there are five leading behaviors that prevent people from working well on teams and are difficult to change. This week we learned what they are.

7. Why This CEO Appointed An Employee To Change Dumb Company Rules

In a company’s lifetime, some of the rules that need to be implemented during the startup period stop serving their purpose as the business grows. The CEO of Hootsuite came up with a creative solution after finding out how much time was being wasted on simple tasks–like chasing down approvals to spend $15 on a T-shirt.

8. How To Finally Stop Taking Useless Notes At Work

Most of us first learned how to take notes while at school, but those practices aren’t always useful when we move on to the workplace. Here are some note-taking tips and habits that recent studies have shown to be more effective.

9. Six Ways To Write Emails That Don’t Make People Silently Resent You

When writing emails, it can be tough to strike the right tone. Too long and formal and it can waste the receiver’s time, while too short and succinct and it can sound disrespectful. Since we’re hardwired to interpret email negatively, paying close attention to phrasing is crucial. Here’s how to get it right.

10. Four Words And Phrases To Avoid When You’re Trying To Sound Confident

Everyone is always selling something to someone, whether they’re a job seeker, a recruiter, or an entrepreneur. But in the pursuit of self-promotion, we sometimes resort to expressions that we think make us sound more self-assured but in fact make us seem less so. Here are some of the most common ones to watch out for.

Meet Sarah Sedo, who according to her LinkedIn profile is a food service manager at The Big Carrot. If you’ve never heard of The Big Carrot and aren’t sure what a food service manager does, Sedo’s profile won’t enlighten you right away–because, as personal branding expert and Fast Company contributor Kristi A. Dosh points out, “Sarah has allowed LinkedIn to automatically populate it with her current job.”

That’s a common mistake, says Dosh. “The headline, to me, is your chance to showcase your personal brand and really stand out in search results.” Those are two distinct yet related challenges, and they apply to the entire LinkedIn profile, not just the headline field. Unfortunately, many people fall short of both, either opting for generic, bare-bones information or leaving a lot of things blank. You want your profile to do more than just recap your resume: It needs to land in front of recruiters in the first place, then grab their attention once it does.

How do you do that? To find out, Fast Company asked three experts to size up three professionals’ LinkedIn profiles and offer a few pointers. Here’s what they said.

1. Personalize Your Headline And Summary

“I strongly encourage people to customize their headline,” says Dosh, whose own headline reads, “Publicist; Writer; Public Speaker; Corporate attorney turned national sports business analyst,” a litany of titles that already suggests the breadth of Dosh’s strengths, and hints at the career evolution that’s helped her build them.

And it’s good advice, too, considering that it’s echoed by LinkedIn’s own employees. Katharine Coombes, Asia-Pacific head of talent acquisition at LinkedIn (headline: “Visionary Talent Leader; Aspiring Mum of the Year; Speed Reader”), recommends using the headline field “to highlight skills, awards, or personal elements that would be interesting to a recruiter.”

Dosh points out that it isn’t just recruiters who use LinkedIn–potential freelance clients and even event organizers in search of speakers comb it for the right talent. And “if you simply use LinkedIn to list your jobs, and your responsibilities at those jobs, other people will define your brand for you when they check out your profile,” she says.

“Instead, use your summary to tell people exactly what you’re known for–or want to be known for–and how your past experience positions you uniquely in the marketplace. Don’t leave it to others to figure out why you changed industries or why you went from one job to the next.” Dosh points out that Sedo skipped writing a summary, as did Jonathan Ng, a software engineer whose LinkedIn page I also asked her to critique.

“His headline is a job title,” Dosh points out. “What kind of software engineer is he? Does he have a specific specialty or niche?” If you’re going to skip the summary, your headline needs to be that much more compelling, she says. “I’d include that in the headline, both so it shows up in more specific searches but also to give someone taking a quick glance a better idea of who he is.”

2. Share What You Did . . .

Tina Arnoldi, an SEO expert, explains that precision is key. Benjamin Samuel lists two titles in his headline–“Director of Programs at the National Book Foundation” and “Editor-at-Large at Electric Literature”–but Arnoldi says he still has room to tell a more coherent narrative about his career. Where Samuel’s summary reads, “Working to build community through books and literary activism,” Arnoldi asks, “How are you building community? I see a lot of job posts for community managers, meaning people who are managing online channels, so it’s important to flesh this out, since it means something different to people based on their industries.”

Many LinkedIn users save these details for the descriptions of their roles, but they don’t always paint a clearer picture when they do. Where Sedo writes that she “headed department evaluation, strategic development, and implementation of a drastic menu and service overhaul within one year’s time,” Dosh wants to know how she pulled it off and what the impact was. “For example, did the menu overhaul result in a 10% increase in revenue in the first 30 days?”

3. . . . And Who You Are

This is a common issue with resumes, too, where enumerating your job duties doesn’t always say what the impact was or what that achievement meant to you personally. But unlike a resume, your LinkedIn profile can be a lot more narrative and informal, saying something about you that your resume can’t.

This is particularly challenging for technical roles, where hard skills may feel like bigger selling points than anything else. Take one bullet under Ng’s last job, as a software engineer for Stroll Health: “Produced full-stack app in Angular, Node/Express, and Mongo, using responsive design, RESTful API, iterative development, and TDD.” Dosh says this leaves Ng’s profile feeling “very technical and sterile. I don’t get any sense of the person behind the profile. What’s his passion? Why is he in this field? What does he enjoy doing?”

She adds, “He’s really missing a key opportunity to tell his story and differentiate himself” in a competitive pool of developers who all have similar expertise. “Use the job description to give a brief introduction to their role,” she suggests, “discuss goals going into the role when possible, and then focus on achievements, not just job duties.” That can help you shift from just describing a role to describing the actual human who’s in it.

Uncomfortable talking about yourself? Let others do it for you, Coombes advises. “A recommendation on your profile from a former colleague, manager, or mentor can provide this credibility and validation.” Recommendations can also shed light on your character, she adds.

4. Don’t Skimp On Aesthetics

Of the three profiles under review, only Samuel’s includes a header image, but Coombes still finds room for improvement. “Your photo is your virtual handshake, and members who include a profile photo receive up to 21 times more profile views,” she says.

But “visually, Benjamin’s profile photo, banner, and media are not very engaging. I would recommend he update his banner photo to be inspiring and easier to comprehend [and] choose a clearer and more engaging headshot.”

5. Add Examples Of Your Work

Since LinkedIn lets users add multimedia work samples, Coombes says Samuel should do more of it. He has two media links for his role with The National Book Foundation, but no examples of his work as an editor at Electric Literature.

Dosh says even a developer like Jonathan could try this, even if it’s not something most coders would do. “For him, maybe screenshots showing his work make some sense. Not only does that media allow people to learn more about his skills, it also adds a little color to an otherwise bland profile.”

Bland profiles, after all, are the bane of recruiters who spend hours slogging through LinkedIn to find top talent. The good news is that it only takes a little thoughtful tweaking to liven yours up. Remember: You already have a resume, so let LinkedIn do for you what your resume can’t.

If Wendi Whitmore had pursued her dream to become a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, she might not be fighting cybercriminals as the global lead of IBM’s X-Force Incident Response & Intelligence Services (IRIS), who help businesses dealing with security breaches and eradicate future threats. But a presentation by a female alum at her alma mater, the University of San Diego, changed everything.

How I Got This Job

“I attended college on an Air Force ROTC scholarship,” Whitmore explains. Yet while she was majoring in computer science and positioning herself for a flying career, she admits, “I didn’t seem to love it as much as many of my peers did.” That’s when she says “dumb luck” steered her toward attending alumni day and listening to the female cybersecurity professional. “Wow,” Whitmore recalls thinking, “that job sounds really fun. She gets to carry a gun and do investigations.”

Whitmore was already doing the heavy lifting required to put her on the path to a career in cybersecurity. “I was majoring in computer science,” she says, and had been a good student in ROTC. In the early 2000s, the Air Force had invested a lot in computer crime. They were working with the FBI, the Secret Service and with other military organizations like NCIS, and were training those organizations to deal with cybercriminal activity, too.

Flash forward 15 or so years and cybercriminal activity continues to increase, as does demand for skilled professionals to prevent and deal with attacks. Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that demand for cybersecurity jobs is expected to grow by 53% over the next two years, as a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report revealed that 82% of participants in eight countries had a shortage of cybersecurity skills in their organizations.

Whitmore believes it’s important to raise awareness of the field as job opportunities continue to grow among all demographics. “College curriculums have changed,” she observes, to keep pace with the developments in technology and the sophistication of hacks. But at this point, she says, “We need to be increasing awareness [of the career track] at as young of an age as we can,” and suggests exposing students to computer forensics as early as elementary and middle school.

What This Job Is Like

Exposure to the field and a degree isn’t all that’s required of a cybersecurity professional. “My team would say I am very calm in moments of chaos,” says Whitmore. That’s a prerequisite for a job where long hours are spent in tense situations that naturally follow a security breach. That’s because, as Whitmore points out, every minute spent trying to identify the source of the hack and repair the damage costs a company money.

How much? Whitmore cites the most recent research from Ponemon Institute. On average, it took 170 days to detect an advanced attack, 39 days to contain it, and 43 days to remediate it in 2016. The average cost of a data breach is $4 million. Incident Response teams like the one Whitmore leads can reduce that cost by nearly $400,000 on average.

Although legal agreements require Whitmore to stay mum on sharing the particulars of any case, she says every situation is different. But she’s seen malware so destructive it’s wiped out entire systems and hit their backups as well. Helping to respond and rebuild after such an attack is by nature very stressful. That’s why, she says, a cybersecurity professional–like a firefighter, law enforcement officer, or military personnel–must “remain calm, focus on the facts, and answer as quickly as possible.”

In crisis situations, Whitmore says it’s important to focus on the root of the problem and what information is currently available. Then, it’s helpful to guide the communication to other parties. During breaches, those other parties are upper-level executives and board members who need to be versed in what types of questions they’ll be fielding, and they need help getting connected to legal assistance. “You’re almost serving as a voice of reason,” she explains. “A lot of times, if you have a good conversation, you hear a sigh of relief.”

Empathy plays a big role in this. Whitmore says she’s learned to put herself in the position of a company’s staff who are dealing with a hack. “What kinds of pressures are they facing, what concerns do they have?” she asks herself. “Am I going to lose my job if this information gets released to the public?” The answers help inform how she communicates.

The Future of Cybersecurity

Finding solutions requires sifting through a lot of data, she concedes, both before and after an attack. The job requires staying up to date on the latest types of threats and new malware as well as dealing with attacks as they happen. The introduction of IBM’s Watson for Cyber Security, which uses AI, machine learning, and natural language processing capabilities, has helped security analysts make better decisions more quickly, says Whitmore.

Related:Chief Security Officer May Be The Job Of The Future That No One Wants

However, she doesn’t see AI supplanting human workers any time soon. “It will allow smart people in the field to focus on the next challenge,” she maintains. And smart people are certainly welcome to apply to join the industry.

I confess: I’m a sucker for life hacks.

Who doesn’t fantasize about getting work done faster and getting more out of life, especially when, after rushing around all day, you’ve barely made a dent in your to-do list, emails keep pouring in, and that one big project you’ve been meaning to work on gets kicked to the following week?

Some of the advice for working smarter is excellent, and developing the right productivity skills is critical. But both have their limits. In truth, all the life hacks in the world can only get you so far. Because both the problem and the solution to doing better work so you have more time for life are bigger than just you—possibly a lot bigger.

According to a new report by the behavioral-science research group ideas42 and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a resource book I contributed to, it all comes down to systems change: What if instead of expecting workers to “fix” themselves on their own, we designed work environments that led everyone to make better choices?

You’re Really Doing Three Kinds Of Work

Change is hard for humans. We tend toward what behavioral science researchers call “status quo bias,” which is exactly what it sounds like: We do things a certain way because they’ve always been done that way, often without question. We can get stuck in unhealthy patterns, even when we know better.

That bias is making work itself too complicated. Technology is changing the nature of work—take group messaging apps like Slack and HipChat for instance—but often only by fits and starts; many workplaces that have brought in new tools have yet to let go of older ones. And those they do institute may not be implemented very well. Flexible work policies now let more people work different schedules in different locations, which heightens the need to communicate digitally. Yet layer that new system on top of the longstanding expectation of face-time and in-person meetings, and you’ve created the perfect conditions for overload at a companywide level.

I think of work in three ways: First there’s “real work,” which describes your actual job duties. Then there’s “work around work,” the technical and administrative tasks that help you execute the real work. And finally, there’s “performance of work,” but more on that in a moment. Too often, our time and limited cognitive bandwidths are consumed by that second component, the work around the work—endless email chains, meetings, updates, and check-ins that have become part of the modern culture of over-collaboration. These are the things all those productivity tips and hacks and techniques are supposed to change.

But there’s another reason we get the work wrong, too, and it’s much older than HipChat or that new email strategy you’ve just read about—or email itself. It’s the fact that as social creatures, humans are deeply influenced by social norms. We tend to do what everyone around us is doing, whether we consciously realize it or not.

Why Overwork Is The New Normal

And right now, the social norm is overwork. This is news to precisely no one. We’ve been talking about it for decades, but ideas42 has uncovered one likely culprit: The systems we’re using are out of date and need to be redesigned. Because so many employers still use time to measure performance despite any new tools they’ve introduced, their work cultures continue to equate long hours with excellence.

That may not sound like a shattering revelation, but stop to think for a moment why you can’t seem to overdo it. If you knew what was causing you to mismanage your time so badly, you wouldn’t have clicked on those last dozen time management articles. But as helpful as that advice may be, none of it gets at the deeper cause that’s a lot harder to self-diagnose: You intuitively do what the people around you do—and this is the “performance of work” part—then internalize that as valuable.

We don’t see people on vacation. We do see late-night and weekend emails. And if they’re from the boss, research shows we’re inclined to respond to signal that our dedication to work matches theirs. That’s also one reason why “unlimited vacation” policies often lead to fewer vacation days.

In fact, flexible work hours tend to extend the actual number of hours you work. Heejung Chung, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent who studies flexible work, has found that that’s only true, however, in countries where flexible work is seen as a privilege, not a right or as just the way to do business. “In the Netherlands, for instance, the right to work flexibly is a much stronger right, legislatively, rather than seen as a gift from an employer,” she said. “That’s when we see the negative consequences reduced.”

Your Badge Of Honor Is Now A Mark Of Failure

What if organizations stopped adopting collaborative tools for their workers—and instead redesigned the systems that controlled the social norms technology alone can’t rewire? And what if employees gave up scrambling to learn new productivity hacks and habits? As Dan Connolly, a senior associate with ideas42, puts it, “How do you shift social norms, so that overwork goes from being virtuous to being shameful? Can management, at a senior level, begin to treat long work hours as a sign of failure—the result of poor planning, or poor management—rather than a necessary or toughening experience?”

What about requiring employees to schedule vacation, making it easier to take? (Some companies have even resorted to paying their employees to do so!) Or circulating the research on how healthy, rested workers do better work, while burned-out ones make costly mistakes and are less creative—then taking that into consideration in evaluating performance? What if teams used technology to make it harder to send a late-night email or schedule an all-call meeting that isn’t carefully planned?

For 10 years, Bonnie Crater worked long hours at Oracle, sometimes pulling all-nighters, as one of the few women in senior management in the competitive high-tech industry. She wasn’t sleeping, exercising, or eating well. She barely saw her young son. Then she saw outtakes from video she filmed at a consumer electronics show. “I looked so horrible, like Tiny Tim,” she told me. Crater hadn’t realized how run-down all that work was making her. “It was a real wake-up call.”

Today, Crater is the CEO of a sales and marketing analytics company in the Bay Area. To get a job there, which Crater did in January 2011, workers are required to have a hobby. “People who have balanced lives do better work,” she said. Crater herself plays tennis and volunteers.

So yes, chunk your time, limit email checking to three to five times a day (if you can), stop multitasking, work in 90-minute pulses, and take breaks. Employ all the life hacks that make sense. Just remember that the real key to finding work-life balance is bigger than you.

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

Brigid Schulte is the author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One has the Time and director of the Better Life Lab and The Good Life Initiative at New America. Follow her on Twitter at @BrigidSchulte.

When Trump signed his recent “energy independence” executive order, he claimed it would fulfill his campaign promises to bring back coal jobs and end environmental regulations that he falsely claims stunt economic growth. The centerpiece of the order is an attempt to stop the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, a major Obama-era policy to cut emissions from power plants that became tied up in the courts before it took effect. But even if Trump prevents the Clean Power Plan from ever becoming law, it may not be much help to the coal miners who posed with him as he signed the order, because the collapse of coal means that emissions from electricity production may actually drop as much as Obama planned–regardless of what Trump does. The problem is that the Clean Power Plan’s goals were never very ambitious in the first place. They needed to be just a starting point, not the best possible option.

The plan aimed to cut carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production to 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. It would have required states to make plans to cut emissions through means of their own choosing, such as increasing efficiency or replacing coal with natural gas or solar power. It hasn’t taken effect yet–after the rule was finalized in 2015, it landed in court, challenged by multiple states, including the now-head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, when he was attorney general in Oklahoma. While a circuit court deliberates, the Supreme Court has ordered the EPA to halt enforcement. Now, it may never take effect: The executive order asks the EPA to review the plan and potentially suspend, revise, or rescind it. But the drop in emissions it was designed to create is already well underway. By 2015, emissions had dropped 21%, roughly two-thirds of the way to the goal.

One researcher estimates that in 2016, the U.S. may have achieved a 25% reduction. “Getting to 32%, from that perspective, isn’t so ambitious,” says Dan Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. “In fact, we would have to slow down progress to get there [that late].”

The drop in emissions has been largely unrelated to regulation. Fracking–the drilling technique with other questionable environmental impacts–launched a natural gas production boom a decade ago and made gas so cheap that many power plants started using it instead of coal. Renewable power has also dramatically dropped in cost. And improvements in efficiency have helped reduce demand for electricity generation in general.

“It started with the shale boom in 2007,” says Jeffrey Peters, a postdoctoral fellow in studying complex systems at Stanford University. “At that point, coal probably produced about twice as much electricity as natural gas in the U.S. . . . by 2016, gas overtook coal power in total generation. Gas only produces about half as much CO2 as coal power. So you also saw a significant drop in emissions from power.”

“State policies will be the big driver of innovation for the next four years,” says Cohan. “And what states do to cut their emissions is going to be absolutely crucial.” States have also proved the feasibility of the plan’s targets; even Texas has already met its 2030 targets, because of the market forces and federal incentives that led to a shift to natural gas and renewables such as wind power. “The idea that this standard is unattainable is just false,” he says.

In California, as cities have stopped using coal power and emissions have dropped, the economy has grown. “This gives lie to the idea that that we’re going to save money by going to coal,” says Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Climate Resolve, who previously worked in the city government helping L.A. divest from coal. “That’s simply not the case. What is happening is that what Trump is doing is actually taking us backward. The United States will become less competitive in the global market, in developing new technologies for energy, and we’re going to cede the marketplace to other nations.”

Though Trump billed the executive order as a way to help bring back jobs for coal miners, that’s not likely to happen, nor is it likely to significantly increase coal-fired power production on its own. Even Robert Murray, head of the coal company Murray Energy, told the Guardianthat Trump’s actions can’t bring jobs back. (Solar power, on the other hand, already provides twice as many jobs as coal).

“I think California is going to be in a position to have a strong economy going forward,” says Parfrey. “Frankly, I fear for the rest of the nation. I fear that the places that are highly dependent on fossil fuel will simply get left behind. Because right now, there are contracts coming in on photovoltaics that are far less expensive than either natural gas or coal. Why are we attaching ourselves to an energy source whose time has come and gone, rather than investing in energy for the future?”

For the coal industry, desperate to make whatever profits it still can, these changes in policy could make production a little easier. Still, because of economics, new coal plants are unlikely to be built now. In a recent survey of hundreds of utilities across the U.S., the majority said that they expected to source more power from renewables and natural gas over the next decade, and expected to get less from coal. Duke Energy, which used a significant amount of coal in the past, plans to invest $11 billion in natural gas and renewable power, aiming to cut emissions 35% by 2026 from 2005 levels.

The use of coal power is only likely to rise if natural gas becomes more expensive, and existing coal plants that are underused ramp up production. While that’s possible–and the Clean Power Plan would have protected against an increase in coal power in that scenario–it’s unlikely to happen if current trends in pricing continue. The Trump administration isn’t trying to impede the growth of natural gas.

All of this means that the Clean Power Plan targets may still be on track–but that doesn’t mean that climate problems are solved. The plan only targeted electricity’s carbon dioxide emissions, not other greenhouse gas emissions, and its targets were modest.

“Natural gas is still a fossil fuel,” says Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “At the power plant it burns cleaner than coal, but it still has emissions. It also has methane emissions with the production and distribution chain. Study after study has shown that it’s not going to be enough to switch from coal to gas in terms of reaching our longer-term climate goals. We do need policies that are really going to double down on the deployment of truly low-carbon resources like renewable energy, rather than just a coal to gas switch.”

Some of the other rules that the executive order attempts to roll back–such as regulations on methane emissions–would have helped make even more progress.

Cleetus suggests that the Clean Power Plan could have been amended over time to make the targets more ambitious as technology continues to improve. But it’s also possible that the current fight will lead to new policy from a future administration that’s even more stringent.

“The Clean Power Plan was written at a time when natural gas was much more expensive, when wind and solar were much more expensive, and so it seemed ambitious to try to get 32% cut by 2030,” says Cohan. “Now we’re way faster paced than that already. It doesn’t seem so ambitious anymore.”

It might, for example, lead to a carbon tax during the next administration. “The carbon tax proposed by the elder GOP statesmen would have raised the price of coal power by about four cents a kilowatt-hour–would have completely priced it out of the market,” he says.

The Clean Power Plan itself won’t immediately go away. The EPA is required to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act. After a review of the current rule–which could take months–if the EPA decides that the rule should be changed, it will have to create a new proposal through a lengthy rule-making process and fight off lawsuits. The administration has asked the Court of Appeals to delay ruling on the case over the current rule (and even if they did reach a decision, the case would likely go to the Supreme Court, further delaying a change).

One lawsuit will challenge the administration’s idea that the rule–which is finalized–can be held in limbo while the new rule goes through the legal process. “We are going to oppose this very vigorously,” says David Doniger, director and senior attorney for NRDC’s climate and clean air program. “That is a fight that will take place in the next several weeks.”

“It’s a rule of basic law that an administrative agency can’t just announce a new policy, nor can a president,” says Doniger. “They have to propose regulation, and take public comment on that, and they have to have a strong legal basis and factual basis. Then after the public comment, you have to issue a final decision with an even stronger rationale for why you’re doing what you are. Then, anyone who’s upset with this gets to bring another lawsuit. In other words, the same difficult, multi-step process it took to build this building up, the Trump administration has to use the same process to tear the building down. If they break the law in doing it, then we can stop them.”

In the meantime, the economics of coal may help keep carbon dioxide emissions from electricity on a downward trajectory–though without the guarantee of the Clean Power Plan, and without the more aggressive action that researchers say is necessary.

“We’re losing time here,” says Cleetus. “And it’s time–from a climate science perspective–that we really don’t have.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says automation isn’t something he loses sleep over: “It’s not even on our radar screen . . . [it’s] 50 to 100 more years” away, as he said at an event organized by Axios. “I’m not worried at all,” he added. “In fact I’m optimistic.”

Mnuchin’s statements contrast with warnings issued by the last administration, which produced reports looking at the economic impact of automation. It said, for instance, that 1.3 million to 1.7 million truck drivers could lose their jobs as a result of self-driving technology. “We are going to have to have a societal conversation about how we manage [robots and automation],” Obama told Wired.

You can put the divide between Obama and Mnuchin down to politics (surprise!). The Trump team has blamed trade policies, overregulation, and immigrants for job losses in the heartland, not automation. But the contrast is also reflected in the views of economists. Some say robots will replace humans in the workplace, causing widespread job losses. Others say these fears are overblown: that automation, like previous technological upheavals before it, will displace some workers, but create new ones to compensate.

The trouble with the debate so far is this: It’s impossible to know because it’s based on future projections and less-than-scientific methods. The we-should-worry camp points to research showing automation’s potential–for example, one highly cited Oxford University study showing that 47% of U.S. workers are at risk over the next 20 years. It hardens its case by pointing to novel technology appearing every day, including delivery and security bots. Meanwhile, the we-shouldn’t-worry camp points to analogies like washing machines in 20th-century England and how many highly industrialized societies, including Germany’s, are at or near full employment (that is, everyone who wants a job has one).

Acemoglu and Restrepo are unambiguous about how robots in automotive and other factories reduced employment. They say that each new robot has reduced the need for up to 6.2 workers in certain isolated areas, and that due to the adoption of automation, wages fell by between 0.25% and 0.5% (about $200 for an average annual paycheck).

“Because there are relatively few robots in the U.S. economy, the number of jobs lost due to robots has been limited so far (ranging between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs . . .),” the authors write. “However, if the spread of robots proceeds as expected by experts . . . the future aggregate implications of the spread of robots could be much more sizable.”

The paper found that automation affects women and men equally but that, according to the economists’ model, men are almost twice as likely not to return to employment. That could be because women are more likely to accept new jobs at lower wages, Acemoglu has said.

The International Federation of Robotics says there are about 1.5 million industrial robots in the world today. The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that to grow to 4 million to 6 million by 2025. If the increase in robots corresponds with Acemoglu and Restrepo’s ratio of job losses, the job losses could indeed be sizable, running to the many millions. And that’s before we talk about automated machines outside industrial settings, including in offices, retail stores, and fast-food eateries.

We can continue to debate the impact of automation on employment, but probably it should be on our radar screens and we should be debating ways to deal it, including greater investments in training, supporting contingent forms of work, and even a basic income. Robots are going to break apart the workplace long before 100 years are up.