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How Satellite Data Caught Gulf Oil Companies Hiding Enormous Oil Spills

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In the Gulf of Mexico, which accounts for 17% of U.S. crude oil production, appetite for drilling is ticking up amid President Trump’s drive for energy deregulation. In late March, the Department of Interior auctioned off over 900,000 acres of leases in the Outer Continental Shelf of the Gulf for $275 million, up from $156 million last year. That might be worrisome, given that the area is still recovering from the Deepwater Horizon spill, but don’t worry: The oil industry often contends that, barring the occasional mega-disaster, offshore drilling is by and large a safe, if not overregulated, practice.

However, according to a new report from three Louisiana-based environmental groups, offshore oil accidents in the Gulf of Mexico are a more regular and serious occurrence than the industry is willing to admit. The report—released in March by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, 350 Louisiana, and Disastermap.netpulled directly from a Coast Guard data clearinghouse and found 479 reports of offshore oil accidents in the northern Gulf in 2016. That’s an average of about nine spills per week, dumping a total of nearly 18,000 gallons of oil and other substances into the environment.

The public is being misled about the severity of day-to-day pollution associated with offshore oil development.” [Photo: courtesy Gulf Monitoring Consortium via SkyTruth]
Compared to the size of the 2010 BP disaster, which released anywhere from 134 million to 176 million gallons, that might seem small. But even that 18,000 gallon estimate could be seriously lowballed, say report authors. The Coast Guard data, collected under the National Response Center (NRC), is actually self-reported by the oil companies responsible (the NRC also accepts reports from the public, but these are less common).

“When is the last time you told a police officer you were speeding?” asks Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental activist group and one of the March report’s authors. “There’s no doubt there are a lot more accidents than we know about.”

To find a more independent estimate of the scope of daily oil spills, the report’s authors drew on an analysis of that same NRC data by SkyTruth, a nonprofit that uses satellite imagery—mainly from the European Space Agency, one of the few free resources—to monitor the environmental effects of industrial activity. Using SkyTruth’s numbers, report authors say the total amount of oil spilled in the northern Gulf last year was closer to 875,000 gallons, or about 50 times larger than official estimates.

“When is the last time you told a police officer you were speeding?” [Photo: courtesy Gulf Monitoring Consortium via SkyTruth]

Eyes In The Sky

SkyTruth, which also analyzes impact of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia and tracks commercial fishing activity around the world, has neither the ability nor bandwidth to analyze every single oil spill from space. Contrary to popular belief, says John Amos, president and founder of SkyTruth, satellite and radar imagery simply doesn’t exist for everywhere on Earth at all times. Even if it did, the organization’s small team wouldn’t be able to keep up with the thousands of accidents that occur every year.

Instead, the company has developed a formula that acts as a second opinion to the self-reporting of polluting companies. Any time an accident occurs, oil companies are required to report an estimate of the aerial dimensions of the spill. Because reporting on total volume spilled is, shall we say, inconsistent, SkyTruth comes up with its own volume estimate.

First, it assumes that 100% of the reported area is covered in oil—in other words, there are no holes in surface coverage inside the spill zone. Second, it assumes that any spill observable from space is at least one micron (one thousandth of a millimeter) thick. As a general rule, satellite imagery is only able to pick up spills at least one-tenth of a micron thick, but that is under test conditions, not the open ocean. Amos concedes this is an imperfect science. But, he says, neither the organization’s methods nor analyses have ever been challenged.

“For some spills we are going to be overestimating,” says Amos. “For others, I think for most, we are probably underestimating it. Because for most human-caused spills, these are not molecules-thick spills that result. They are generally chunkier than that.” The massive BP oil spill in 2005, for example, was centimeters thick in some places.

Amos had a chance to test his approach in a 2013 study with Florida State University that methodically matched satellite archive images with years of NRC spill data. They found consistent underreporting of spill size to the NRC.

Almost 100% of the time, the slick that we observe on the satellite image is significantly larger than the slick the polluter reported,” says Amos. He points to a systematic underestimating of both the dimensions and volume of a spill by polluting oil companies.

“There are two stages of underreporting,” he says. “One is they are underreporting the aerial dimensions of the slick. Then they are reporting a volume estimate that doesn’t even match that, if you use the one micron assumption.”

Almost 100% of the time, the slick that we observe on the satellite image is significantly larger than the slick the polluter reported,”  [Photo: courtesy Gulf Monitoring Consortium via SkyTruth]

Data Leakage

Under U.S. law, oil companies can face legal repercussions for failing to report a leak or spill, even small ones. But investigations into all but the largest spills are rare, and there appear to be no penalties for misreporting the actual size of the damage.

According to the March LBB report, one of the most egregious under-estimators is Taylor Energy, a now-defunct offshore drilling company responsible for a leak off the coast of Louisiana that began in 2004. Though the company has ceased operating, the leak continues, and SkyTruth estimates the actual volume to be about 232,850 gallons, or about 178 times larger than the 1,300 gallons Taylor Energy reported in 2016. The company says nothing more can be done to stem the leak, which regulators warn could last for more than a century if left unchecked, and has sued the federal government to recover money placed in a leak response trust.

Both Amos and Rolfes stress the powerful cumulative effect on the environment of these leaks, no matter the size or duration. “It’s the death by 10,000 cuts,” says Amos. “The public is being misled about the severity of day-to-day pollution associated with offshore oil development” which makes it easier “to sell the public on offshore drilling in places where it is not already happening.”

The impact of coastal industrialization goes beyond just oil spills. In Louisiana, decades of oil and gas activity, including widespread dredging for canals and pipelines, has directly contributed to the ongoing coastal land loss crisis. The state has lost about 1,900 square miles of its coast since the 1930s to the combined effects of land loss and sea level rise caused by climate change.

State authorities are working to implement a $50 billion Coastal Master Plan to help stop the loss of as much as 2,800 square miles of additional land over the next 40 years through land restoration and protection projects. But the state shows few signs of slowing oil and gas development in coastal regions, a major source of income.

“It is not consistent to say on the one hand we need to spend billions of dollars to repair our coast but on the other allow the oil industry to destroy our coast,” points out Rolfes. Her organization, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, has called for an end to offshore drilling leases and is also fighting the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which connects to the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline and would cross over 160 miles of Louisiana wetlands.

As President Trump pushes an aggressive pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulation agenda, Rolfes and other activists are facing an uphill battle to stop any oil and gas projects from moving forward. Trump’s proposed budget cuts are also causing consternation over the availability of spill and other environmental data.

“We’re worried that [this data] is going to disappear for sure,” said Rolfes. “It’s a real, real risk.”

Amos is hopeful technology will one day be able to supplant the current role of government agencies in monitoring polluting industries like oil and gas. In the meantime, though, he predicts SkyTruth and similar watchdogs will have a greater role to play over the coming years as “even the weak systems that we had in place to inform the public about what was happening out there are possibly getting weaker or even disappearing.”


“American Gods” Builds Its Mythology Around The Immigrants Who Built America

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Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, published in 2001, is the story of an ex-con named Shadow who accompanies the Norse god Odin–who goes by the name of “Mr. Wednesday,” a play on the Norse naming conventions of our days of the week–on an epic road trip across the United States as the old god seeks to consolidate power against the new ones. The book’s theme of pitting religion and mythology against technology and pop culture resonated strongly 16 years ago, but in the adaptation of the show, which debuts on Starz on April 30, the most timely and relevant theme the show explores might be that of immigration.

That’s something that the show’s creators, Bryan Fuller (who created the cult favorite Wonderfalls and Hannibal) and Michael Green (who cowrote Logan, Alien: Covenant, and Blade Runner 2049), were aware of as they developed the show–and something that came into much sharper focus after the election. Suddenly, they realized that a show about the gods and myths that are brought to America’s shores by immigrants was resonant–and the way that those cultural totems come to define America, too.

“We wrote and produced the show before the regime change,” Fuller says. “We were crafting the show in a progressive administration, and now we’ll be airing the show in an insane administration. That brings out a certain politicization of the story. That wasn’t something we intended, but it’s something we wanted to be authentic. We wanted to tell stories that were genuine from the perspectives of the characters, who themselves are representing different cultures and ethnicities. And then everybody went crazy regarding immigrants. And that’s the heart of our story, so we stumbled upon a much louder platform than we had anticipated.”

Green says that the show was still in its editorial process when “the asteroid hit and leveled America,” but that the opportunity to have a voice that comments on the America that the show will find itself premiering in isn’t something they take lightly.

“It was a strange experience, because we were working on an episode that deliberately was going to be about gun culture, which was an issue that we knew had some heat behind it, but we wanted to explore all sides,” Green says. “Suddenly, things that we were discussing with the network and the studio about, ‘Oh, are we pushing too far’ became plain. Certain images we had that we thought would look satirical suddenly looked like the news. I wish it didn’t.”

If American Gods is going to be pushing some hot buttons, they have a cast that’s equipped to do it. Ricky Whittle, who plays Shadow, brings a quiet, restrained intensity to the role of the ex-con who knows that the system tends to be stacked against men like him–big, dark-skinned, with a record. Relative newcomer Yetide Badaki, in her highest profile role to date, brings a regal authority to the part of Bilquis, the Queen of Sheba–one of the old gods looking to have her power restored. And Orlando Jones–who proved he could thrive in dramatic roles in fantasy-inspired series in Sleepy Hollow–makes his first appearance as “Mr. Nancy” in the second episode.

Whittle, paired with Ian McShane’s Mr. Wednesday, carries the show on his back, and Badaki stars in the pilot’s most memorable scene, but it’s Jones’s work in that second episode that helped reveal to Green and Fuller that they had something especially poignant and resonant on their hands.

“When we got the dailies back from Mr. Nancy’s coming to America, there’s a scene where the slaves are coming en route to America–not as immigrants, but as slaves–are praying to Mr. Nancy to come to some sort of aid because they didn’t understand what was happening,” Fuller says. “And Orlando Jones gives a fantastic monologue as Mr. Nancy to these slaves about what is waiting on these shores in the land of honey and opportunity for people who are black. And that’s there is no honey and there is no opportunity–you’re slaves, and a hundred years after that, it doesn’t change. And a hundred years after that, it doesn’t change. And a hundred years after that, it doesn’t change. And a hundred years after that, you’re still being shot at by police. And in the moment, we were just trying to be authentic to the black experience as we understood it as two white guys, historically, and the 40 actors who were playing the slaves on the ship gave Orlando Jones a standing ovation. And that has to do with how vividly Orlando brought that to life. Watching those dailies with our postproduction team, we realized, ‘Oh, this is an important conversation to have.'”

All of this is very much an opportunity that seems more relevant than ever because of the current political climate. Orlando Jones’s monologue was developed after simmering in a culture of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter; regardless of who won the election, the themes of immigration and how what immigrants bring to America ends up defining what America is were being teased out in the midst of an election cycle that saw “Build the Wall!” chanted as the biggest applause line at rallies. But it’s also based on material that existed in the original text of Gaiman’s 16-year-old novel.

That means that American Gods doesn’t just reveal a sharp, unexpected look at America through the myths behind all of these gods–it also serves as a reminder of just how resonant these themes have been for decades in America. Our conversation around immigration has certainly taken a sharp turn, but it’s hardly new. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” may have only been coined a few years ago, but the issue of institutional police violence against people of color in the United States didn’t just emerge with the shooting of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown. Shadow may be a rare hero for a television fantasy series simply by virtue of being played by an actor of color, but he was written that way 16 years ago, too. “We owe a lot to how prescient Neil Gaiman’s book is,” Fuller says. “It speaks to how ever-present these issues are.”

Gaiman himself is actively involved in the adaptation of American Gods for Starz–he created the new character of Vulcan (Corbin Bernsen) for the show–and he reads every outline and script, reads the revisions, and watches the cuts and dailies each day. Fuller and Green rely on Gaiman for guidance (“He’s a rock-solid uncle-slash-rabbi who’s there for us whenever we need him,” Green says), and they’re hopeful that he’ll return to the world of American Gods in an even more hands-on way by writing episodes of the show’s second season or further beyond.

There’s a risk, when a show touches on hot-button issues and which is being created at a time when essentially all art is political simply because of the political environment in which it’s being created, of being preachy. But one of the things that Gaiman delighted fans of the book with is something that Green and Fuller are able to tap into as a way to drive home the larger political theme of American Gods, too, while also keeping the focus solidly on the storytelling and the characters: Namely, the vignettes in which we see how each character arrived in America, which provide a strong way to capture the struggles common to any immigrant who arrives in a new country, while also ensuring that the theme of the show doesn’t overwhelm the story it’s telling.

“It becomes about the characters. We have this wonderful cast, and we’ll hopefully add to this wonderful cast.” Green says. “And you want to ground them in their personal emotional experience. What are they struggling with? What are they trying to make better in their lives? What are they trying to leave behind, or what are they aspiring to? So seeing how they metaphorically or literally stepped foot on American soil is the origin story for that person as a new American entity, struggling with their new American identity. And it really all comes from that place.”

At Last, Silicon Valley May Have Found A Trump Proposal To Like: His Tax Plan

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After grappling with the Trump administration over the travel ban, climate change, and the rollback of broadband privacy rules, Silicon Valley may have finally had reason to cheer the White House today. The White House’s one-page outline of its tax plan includes a reduction in the corporate tax rate and a one-time tax break for companies that repatriate their profits—Apple, Alphabet, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft have the biggest overseas cash holdings of all corporations.

The policy staffers and lawyers at those tech giants have been paying close attention to the issue—or, more accurately, the timing of the debate—since the first days of the new administration. And while Trump spoke about tax reform on the campaign trail, and staffers spoke about it publicly after the inauguration, the one-page document released by the White House today represents the first time the White House has put anything resembling a real plan in writing.

The top lines of the coming tax bill, for tech companies, are:

  • A large cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent
  • A one-time tax repatriation of profits that corporations have parked overseas
  • A new “territorial” approach to taxes that would minimize taxes on profits made in overseas markets

All of these policies would have a major impact on tech companies big and small, depending on the fine print, which is not available yet, and is likely being worked out behind the scenes in discussions between the administration and members of Congress.

One of the key numbers to be worked out is the exact tax rate on the trillions of dollars now parked overseas by large companies like Microsoft and Apple to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. Though it was previously reported that it could be reduced from 35% to 10%, today’s release was vague about the specifics, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just saying that it would be “very competitive.”

Steven Mnuchin [Photo: U.S. Department of the Treasury via Wikimedia Commons]
According to estimates in late 2016, U.S. companies hold about $2.5 trillion abroad. Tech companies have long held that the tax of 35% on profits returning to the U.S. is unreasonably high, and that they’re breaking no law by avoiding it.

The administration is eager to get the foreign funds back into America, one source told me. Trump has suggested that companies will invest the repatriated money in new factories to create new jobs in the U.S., though economists say that this is very unlikely to happen on a broad scale.

The administration is painfully aware that last time such a tax amnesty was tried, U.S. companies spent the repatriated money mainly on stock buy-backs and shareholder dividends. This time the administration may try to impose rules on how the repatriated money can be spent, which is sure to draw loud protests from the tech community.

Still, chances are very high that some form of repatriation will be included in the final bill.

Apple, for one, would likely be happy about a one-time repatriation of earnings, depending on the details of the plan. In 2016, the European Union, after a lengthy investigation, ruled that Apple parking earnings at its Irish subsidiaries (to avoid paying U.S. taxes) amounts to the tech giant receiving “illegal state aid” from Ireland. As a result, Apple may be required to pay around $14.5 billion in back taxes dating back to 2004. Apple has appealed the decision, and Ireland has so far refused to collect the back taxes from Apple.

Apple would be one of many companies to bring money back, says Matt Gardner, the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (the research umbrella for Citizens for Tax Justice) in an email to Fast Company. “Any company with substantial offshore cash will be thrilled to have the opportunity to pay a super low tax rate on this cash, and will likely be equally happy that a territorial system will give them an even lower tax rate (that is to say, zero) on profits they shift into tax havens going forward,” he writes.

Gary Cohn [Photo: World Economic Forum via Wikimedia Commons]
If Mnuchin is able to push through a new “territorial” approach to corporate income tax, repatriation might become a moot point in the future. He gave no details about the approach, but the term “territorial” typically refers to a policy whereby the government only taxes profits generated from domestic sales.

Tax repatriation is a hot-button issue that’s connected to the overarching wealth distribution and fair taxation themes of the election cycles in both the U.S. and Europe last year. Though Trump’s populist position on the issue won out, his views on the issue appears contradictory. On the one hand, he repeatedly promised to remove tax policies that have in recent decades helped transfer billions from the middle class to the wealthy. Such populist rhetoric is included in the White House’s one-pager, with its directive to “eliminate tax breaks for special interests.”

On the other hand, he is very pro-business and wants to give large tax breaks to corporations. Those tax breaks, if passed, will almost certainly be paid for via cuts in entitlements for the middle and lower class.

It all comes down to the specifics. “An aggressive effort to eliminate loopholes would reduce the cost of this tax cut substantially, and could mean that there are specific companies that don’t enjoy huge tax breaks for this deal,” Gardner says. “But if that phrase is as content-free and toothless as it usually is when policymakers say it, then this could be a straight-up tax cut bonanza for almost every corporation,” Gardner says.

Mnuchin said he hopes to have the tax plan passed by August. The White House, however, have backed off from that goal.

One clue to the fate of tax reform is the progress of health care reform, one policy person told Fast Company, explaining that both issues are chronologically and fiscally linked. That is, the administration would like to pass a health care bill that would substantially reduce the government’s health care spend; and those savings would then be rolled into a tax bill that would significantly reduce the government’s revenue intake.

Trump hopes that his tax plan will fire up the economy, but it’s widely expected to result in a federal deficit and a deepening of the national debt. Mnuchin dodged the question of whether the plan is “revenue neutral,” saying it will “pay for itself with growth and with reduced reduction of different deductions and closing loopholes.”

Democrats are vowing a hard fight, calling the tax plan a giveaway to the wealthy, and a throwback to Reagan-era supply-side economics.

How To Make Managing Someone Older Than You Less Awkward

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You worked hard and finally landed that promotion. Now you’re the boss—and in charge of a number of team members who are significantly older than you, and who may have complicated feelings about reporting to a younger manager.

“A lot of millennials haven’t done a lot of supervising yet,” says workplace diversity expert Jennifer L. FitzPatrick.“In a way, you may want to look at [the management role] as if you’re coming at it from a different discipline. You’re not going to know everything that the employees who’ve been there longer know, she says. And that will usually make your team stronger.

Get off on the right foot with your reports and defuse any potential conflict by following this expert advice.

Set Aside Your Ego

Lance Vaught, vice president of operations at Penn Station East Coast Subs, started in a management role there nearly a decade ago, when he was 24. Being a young supervisor with so little work experience and supervising people who were expecting their first grandchildren was daunting, he admits.

“You’re not yet proven. You’re not battle-tested,” he says.

Vaught had to earn the respect of people who were 20 years his senior, he says. It may sound trite, but he did so by tamping down any desire to prove he deserved the job and, instead, listening. By getting to know the employees, showing respect for their contributions, and understanding what they needed to get the job done, he soon won them over. It also helped to put in the hours and show his reports that he was working harder than they were, he says.

Find Points Of Connection

FitzPatrick says finding commonalities can help bridge divides in the workplace. Get to know your employees as people. You may find that common interests—sports, hobbies, or even children—can create stronger relationships.

Whatever you do, avoid language that could be considered ageist or create distance. “When you’re generation Y and you say things like, ‘Oh, that was before I was born’ in reference to something, you’re creating more distance between you and your employee,” she says.

Learn Their Strengths And Use Them

The No. 1 thing any employee wants from a manager is help doing their job well, says performance consultant Gerald Acuff, CEO of business consulting firm Delta Point, Inc. To figure out what your team needs from you, you need to get to know them. Ask questions that show you care about what they have contributed and what their priorities are, he says.

When Acuff was a young sales manager, he was supervising an older salesperson who was No. 1 in the company. After conducting the first sales call himself, he watched his new report do the second one. Acuff was blown away by how good the salesperson was, and it drove home the point that his employees could continue to teach him, even as he managed them.

Give Them Authority

Show your employees that you have confidence in their experience and ability by giving them the autonomy to make decisions, Vaught says. After all, they know what they’re doing—let them have some decision making power. Not only does it make the employee feel good because of the vote of confidence, it also frees up your time to devote to other issues that need attention, he says.

Address The Elephant In The Room

If there’s conflict or resentment over your appointment, you may need to address it head on, says FitzPatrick. If the person you’re supervising applied for the job and didn’t get it, for example, and it’s clear that they’re harboring resentment, have a discussion.

“If someone did apply to the job, sometimes it’s really a good idea to just hit it head on and just say, ‘Hey. You know I just want to let you know I have respect for your abilities. I know that you attempted to get the job.’ Sometimes just making that comment can really help, as most people are going to respond to a little bit of vulnerability,” she says. You might also talk to that person about their goals and help them find assignments or ways to contribute that align with their career goals.

Supervising someone older than you doesn’t have to be an angst-ridden experience. Ask questions, don’t be too eager to prove yourself, and show your employees respect for what they know, and you may very well avoid many of the common challenges young managers face.

Cloudflare Shores Up Defenses For Internet Of (Easily Hackable) Things

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Security experts have long warned that the connected devices that make up the so-called internet of things are way too vulnerableto hack attacks. These gadgets—fridges, fitness trackers, thermostats, sleep monitors, your next piece of jewelry—are like the zombie soldiers of the internet, often poorly secured and easily vulnerable to the will of hackers. Small medical devices and industrial control systems can be manipulated to do serious harm, and smart home appliances can be hijacked to steal personal data or even spy on their owners, as owners of smart TVs vulnerable to CIA spy software recently learned from a WikiLeaks report.

To counter the growing risk, Cloudflare, which protects websites and networks from digital attacks, launched a new service on Thursday aimed at fending hackers off a range of connected devices, from sophisticated industrial equipment to home appliances. The San Francisco company also said it was working to create a security organization to form best practices and standards for protecting IoT devices that are often considered highly vulnerable.

Perhaps the most serious threat surrounding connected devices so far has been when they’re hijacked in concert at a massive scale: Last fall, tens of thousands of wired devices including internet routers, security cameras, and DVRs were infected with malware called Mirai, which organized the machines into a botnet that launched the largest distributed denial of service attacks in history, reaching 1.2 terabits (1,200 gigabits) per second at its peak and disrupting access to major sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Netflix. In total, around half-a-million devices around the world were thought to be part of the mysterious, malware-formed network at the time, but only an estimated 10% of those were involved in the attacks.

Recent data suggests Mirai wasn’t an isolated incident—a report released this week by security firm Symantec found attempted attacks per hour on the company’s set of test machines nearly doubled over the course of 2016. The scale of attacks is only limited by the market for the devices themselves: Some estimate that there could be more than 20 billion such internet things by 2021.

“If Something Went Wrong, Someone Would Die.”

The Mirai attack was a wake-up call for many IoT manufacturers, says Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare. His seven-year-old company had in recent years been getting more inquiries from makers of internet-enabled devices about how its tools could be of use, something that only accelerated after the Mirai botnet.

Cloudflare is best known for its secure content distribution network, which effectively sits between client web servers and consumers’ internet browsers, speeding up delivery of online content and filtering out malicious content like denial-of-service attacks and SQL injections. The company says its network handles almost 10% of all internet traffic.

At the time of last year’s botnet surge, Cloudflare was already hearing from makers of systems for industrial operations like power plants, or computers that would be used in cars, where failures could have serious consequences, says Prince.

“About 18 months ago, we started to get calls to our sales team from various IoT manufacturers that were asking, could we be of help in protecting their devices,” he says. “These tended to be manufacturers who, if something went wrong, someone would die.”

The new service, Cloudflare Orbit, is directly geared toward manufacturers of consumer-grade IoT devices. In addition to protecting servers from attacks by malware like Mirai, Cloudflare will provide secure connections for potentially vulnerable internet devices themselves, keeping them from being reached by hackers or malware.

So far, Cloudflare says about 25 IoT manufacturers have been using the system over the past six months, including connected lock startup Lockitron, industrial monitoring company Swift Sensors, and Karamba Security.

With Orbit, device makers work with Cloudflare to ensure their devices are only able to communicate with remote servers through Cloudflare’s secured network, which would function like a VPN for the internet of things. Depending on their needs, they can use Cloudflare’s software development kits to implement firewall rules that restrict communications to the secure connection, or introduce more complicated rules that use cryptography to verify that each piece of data is actually passing through the Cloudflare network.

Then, the manufacturers can use a digital dashboard to set rules for what type of traffic is allowed to pass through the network. That can let manufacturers address security vulnerabilities effectively instantaneously, without having to distribute security patches to all of the devices in the field, he says. If manufacturers learn that a factory-configured password can give hackers access to their systems, for instance, they can quickly tell Cloudflare’s systems to block network traffic containing that string of text, or restrict it to situations they deem safe.

“In the simplest form, you’d just look for that default password, then you can simply block those requests,” Prince says. “You can require that those requests have some additional piece of information for them to pass through, so you could have an additional level of security—essentially in order to use that default password, you have to enter another password.”

Read More: After Years Of Warnings, Internet Of Things Devices To Blame For Big Internet Attack

When manufacturers do want to release security updates, having the network security in place can let them do so at a more leisurely pace, he says, leaving more time to test and debug fixes, than if devices were otherwise immediately vulnerable. The company said that pricing will be based on the number of devices protected and the amount of requests sent to and from those devices.

Historically, security experts have warned that many makers of IoT devices, especially ones designed for consumers, have treated security and privacy as an afterthought as they rush to get devices to store shelves. Default passwords, unencrypted web connections, and software with known vulnerabilities have allowed hackers access to some devices, and many vendors haven’t always quickly fixed security bugs in the software on their devices. And with IoT technology, from hardware to communications protocols, not nearly as standardized as comparable technology in the PC or smartphone industry, plugging security holes in one device doesn’t necessarily make the industry as a whole safer.

An estimated 23 billion devices worldwide were a part of the internet of things in 2016. The number is projected to increase by more than 5 billion in 2017. [Graph: Sage Business Research]
“All of the potential weaknesses that could afflict IoT systems, such as authentication and traffic encryption, are already well known to the security industry, but despite this, known mitigation techniques are often neglected on these devices,” Symantec researchers warned in a 2015 report. “IoT vendors need to do a better job on security before their devices become ubiquitous in every home, leaving millions of people at risk of cyberattacks.”

Larger IoT providers—the Googles and Amazons of the world—may build their own comparable secure networks, Prince acknowledges, just as their scale has made sense for them to build their own secure content distribution networks. And its network-based technique isn’t the only way companies are approaching IoT security: Chipmaker Micron Technology and Microsoft recently announced plans for secure hardware-based technology that would ensure only trusted and demonstrably secure systems could sign in to cloud servers. And San Francisco-based Bastille has focused on what the company calls the “internet of radios,” monitoring the airwaves inside businesses to understand what the devices on-site are transmitting digitally.

Many companies will likely take a hybrid approach: One early Cloudflare Orbit client, Karamba Security, says it intends to use Orbit in conjunction with its own tools that seek out and block suspicious code, in order to maximize protection for automotive systems.

“We view Cloudflare’s Orbit as a complementary solution that enables secure connectivity between the cars’ hardened controllers and the car company’s data center for trusted, over-the-air updates,” CEO Ami Dotan said in a statement.

The market for IoT network security is likely to continue to grow, with research firm Markets and Markets predicting IoT could be a $36 billion industry by 2021. Researchers at Gartner placed security at the top of their list of top 10 IoT technologies for 2017 and 2018, noting, “IoT security will be complicated by the fact that many ‘things’ use simple processors and operating systems that may not support sophisticated security approaches.”

And that will likely mean more than one firm taking Cloudflare’s network-based approach, Prince says, especially as new attacks emerge. “My hunch is we won’t be the only provider of solutions like this.”

These Are The 3 Traits Of Bosses That Everyone Wants To Work For

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People don’t work for companies; they work for people–namely, their bosses. In a recent employee report done by workforce engagement software provider TinyPulse, 1,000 working Americans were asked what one thing they wished they could change about their manager, and the second most popular answer was to have their manager quit. Ouch.

“We know that people don’t leave companies; they leave their bosses. If you want to attract talent that will stick around, then you’ll want to do whatever it takes to increase your magnetism,” says Roberta Chinsky Matuson, leadership consultant and author of The Magnetic Leader: How Irresistible Leaders Attract Employees, Customers, and Profits.

A magnetic leader is someone who attracts and retains great talent. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work for a magnetic leader, then you know how much of an impact he or she can make on your productivity, attitude, and engagement, says Chinsky Matuson. “When he or she asks you to do something, you do it,” she says. “You’ll follow this person to the ends of the earth or to their next job.”

While a handful of leaders are born magnetic, the good news for the rest of us is that this type of leadership can be taught, but you’ll most likely have to teach yourself. “Most managers these days are tossed into management with little more than a prayer,” she says. “Management training programs went the way of full reimbursement for health care premiums. You have to invest in yourself and do the work that’s required to make this transformation.”

Here are the three traits magnetic leaders have in common, and how you can learn to possess them, too, says Chinsky Matuson:

Authenticity

Magnetic leaders don’t try to be someone else, nor do they change who they are based on office politics, says Chinsky Matuson. “They are true to themselves and are honest in their dealings with others,” she says. “They are not afraid to share their mistakes or shortcomings.”

To bring an authentic and trustworthy leader, you need to be truthful. That can take courage, but it’s worth it. A 2017 Trust Barometer survey done by the PR firm Edelman found that trust in CEOs in the U.S. has reach an all-time low.

Be willing to admit that you don’t know everything. “The people you oversee deserve the truth from you, including the fact that you are also a work in progress,” says Chinsky Matuson.

It also helps to share your backstory, such as your professional journey and history with your company. “We tend to look at people who have risen to a certain stature in their careers and forget they weren’t always at the top of the food chain,” adds Chinsky Matuson. “Sharing your backstory is a way for leaders to make a deep connection with their people, which can lead to a more trusting relationship.”

Vision

Visionary leaders are the dreamers who make us realize anything is possible, says Chinsky Matuson. “They have a vivid imagination that inspires others to get on board and come along for the ride,” she says. “Instead of asking the question, ‘Why?’ they ask, ‘Why not?’”

To assess where you are on the visionary scale, ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Am I focused on everyday tasks or long-term outcomes?
  2. How often do I take time out of my day or week to think about the future?
  3. Who in the organization has potential that is not being realized, and what can I do to help unleash it?

Your answers will help you realize in which areas your vision may be lacking. Then plan to correct it by reassessing your schedule and reevaluating your team.

Selflessness

Leadership is a service business, and service comes with sacrifice, says Chinsky Matuson. “Magnetic leaders put the needs of their people in front of their own,” she says. “And who wouldn’t find that irresistible?”

To become more selfless, ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Are people following me because of what I can do for them, or are they doing so because of what I can do to them?
  2. Do I take more than I give?
  3. What have I done today to put others before myself?

Being selfless requires you to shift your mind-set, and it’s one of the hardest things you’ll do as a leader, says Chinsky Matuson. “It’s human nature to take the quickest path to fame and fortune,” she says. “Think for a moment about what you’d like your legacy to be. Do you want to be known as the person who served his people well, or would you prefer to be remembered as that crappy, selfish boss a former employee is now writing a book about?”

Then focus on your employees’ concerns. “[You] also have to give more consideration as to how they can help their people achieve their hopes and dreams, and be willing to do what it takes to make this so,” says Chinsky Matuson.

Amid Crackdown, Immigrants Are Dying Of Neglect In ICE Detention Facilities

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Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

Late last March, Osmar Gonzalez Gadba, a 32-year old Nicaraguan immigrant, was found hanging by a bedsheet at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Adelanto Detention Facility. About two weeks later, ICE reported that a second detainee, Sergio Alonso Lopez, 55, of Mexico, had died in a nearby hospital of internal bleeding—the fifth detainee death since Adelanto opened in August 2011, and the sixth fatality to occur in ICE custody so far this year. The California facility is run by the country’s number two for-profit prison company, the Florida-based Geo Group.

Now a 41-year-old woman detained at Adelanto tells Capital & Main that she has lost full use of her right arm and leg after suffering stroke-like symptoms, and alleges that her treatment has been poor.

The Geo Group’s stock has soared on news that the Trump administration plans to greatly expand the ICE detention system, as has that of Core Civic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America), the U.S.’s largest for-profit prison company. Human rights groups, however, are concerned about the already poor quality of health care for detainees across the country and worry that expansion will make it worse. After the 2015 death of 44-year-old Raul Ernesto Morales of colon cancer, the Adelanto facility was pressured to improve care. But the company that Geo hired to do so has a poor record in jails, prisons, and detention facilities across the U.S.

What is more, a report scheduled for release in early May by Human Rights Watch and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) will show that in ICE detention facilities nationwide, health care services are still substandard, and perhaps dangerous.

Last year Human Rights Watch examined 18 in-custody deaths in facilities across the country that occurred between 2012 and 2015, and concluded that substandard care likely contributed to the death of Morales and six others.

Morales, who was from El Salvador, had been in ICE custody for four years at the time of his death, three of them at an Orange County jail, with his last year at Adelanto. An ICE detainee death review showed he had complained of gastrointestinal symptoms for two years before his cancer was diagnosed. ICE investigators noted that three days before Morales’ death, guards shackled and transported him to a hospital emergency room in a passenger car instead of an ambulance, after an outside doctor who’d been treating him said he was “bleeding out.” The investigators called the move “highly risky.”

Investigators also noted that half the nursing staff at Adelanto was inexperienced and untrained in conducting clinical assessments of patients. Off-site medical appointments were at times canceled or delayed because lab understaffing meant test results were sometimes unavailable when expected.

ICE investigators didn’t determine that poor care contributed to Morales’s death. Last year, however, a review of the ICE investigation by Human Rights Watch concluded that it probably did.

“Had Mr. Morales’ gastrointestinal symptoms been evaluated much sooner as was clinically indicated, it is possible that the malignancy from which Mr. Morales died might have been caught at a time when it was still treatable,” the report noted, quoting a medical consultant who analyzed the records.

Human Rights Watch researcher Clara Long said her group’s new report will show that health care in immigration detention has not improved. The study reviews medical records of detainees who died, as well as those who have survived but who said they had received poor care.

Long added that the Trump administration’s plans to build more detention facilities will mean “more deaths due to subpar care and more serious medical issues undetected and untreated.”

Wrongful Deaths And Denial Of Care

In late April, ICE Los Angeles field director David Marin led reporters on a tour of the Adelanto lockup. It sprawls across 108,000 square feet of high desert 40 miles north of San Bernardino. It is the state’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, with some 1,700 people from 70 countries living behind its bars. It’s run under a contract arrangement with the city of Adelanto.

Inside the walls, Marin showed off medical-examination and X-ray suites, a psychiatric observation area, and a dental suite. Carlos Deveza, health services administrator for Correct Care Solutions (CCS), the Tennessee-based for-profit that provides health care at Adelanto, said the facility is fully staffed with a physician and mental health personnel. Marin told Capital & Main that CCS came on board in 2016 when ICE made it clear to Geo that its health-care services must improve in the aftermath of Morales’ death. But ICE declined to provide the agency’s most recent Adelanto oversight reports that would show whether its own inspectors have found that health care, especially in the areas it criticized, had gotten better.

The company is among the largest for-profit providers of prison medical and mental health care in the country, with 11,000 employees in prisons, jails, ICE detention centers, and community corrections facilities in 38 states. Like other for-profit prison health-care providers, it faces a deluge of lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths and denial of care. Currently more than 260 such claims are pending against CCS alone in more than 30 states.

For example, attorneys for the family of 38-year-old Jennifer Lobato alleged in a 2015 complaint that she died a preventable death of dehydration and electrolyte imbalance as she withdrew from methadone in a Colorado jail cell, and received no medical attention from CCS staff. In California, Armando Vargas, a jail inmate with a long history of mental illness and suicide attempts, hanged himself in the Mariposa County Jail, allegedly after being denied his medication while in CCS care at the jail. His attorneys further allege that no one attempted to administer CPR when they found him hanging in his cell last August. And, last year, The Nation reported that the parents of Nestor Garay sued CCS and the government for wrongful death after their son suffered a stroke in a Texas prison and later died. They alleged their son was forced to wait five hours before being transported to the hospital after his stroke.

Nurses Called Her Episode A “Freak Show”

In Adelanto, detainee Norma Gutierrez shuffles slightly, dragging her right leg as she enters a tiny interview room on the women’s side of the massive facility. The right side of her mouth droops and her right arm seems weak and trembles.

“I look in the mirror and I’m not the same,” she says tearfully.

She recalls the time she awakened on the floor of her dorm, after collapsing into the arms of her dorm mates last January. She couldn’t move her mouth or her eyes, and she felt stunned and disoriented.

She was taken to a San Bernardino hospital where, she said, she had blood tests, an MRI and X-rays, but claimed hospital nurses refused to answer any questions about her condition, simply telling her she was fine. The next night, she said suffered another collapse. Gutierrez claims her roommates reported that nurses called her episode a “freak show,” while a guard with the rank of lieutenant also reportedly made inappropriate comments about Gutierrez.

This time, she says, she wasn’t hospitalized. Instead, she was taken in handcuffs to a cold room with a bed, a toilet, and two blankets. Gutierrez says she remained alone there for four days. The only medical attention she received was from a nurse who took her pulse and brought her previously prescribed medication for depression and anxiety. Later, a psychologist told her that her attack had been psychosomatic. She was returned to the dorm where she suffered a third episode. This time, she says, she didn’t bother to report her symptoms.

One detainee defended the care CCS has provided recently. He told Capital & Main that in the past there were long delays before detainees could get appointments with nurses and doctors. It’s better now, he said.

But Gutierrez says she’s no longer requesting care at Adelanto — she’ll wait to see a doctor on the outside.

Geo Group vice-president Pablo Paez declined to comment on the issues Gutierrez raised and responded to questions by Capital & Main with a statement expressing confidence in the care CCS offers:

“GEO provides high-quality, around-the-clock medical care at Adelanto in partnership with its health care subcontractor Correct Care Solutions. Medical care at Adelanto and all other GEO ICE facilities is provided pursuant to mandated, performance-based national detention standards set by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and also adheres to guidelines and standards set by leading third-party accreditation entities including the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.”

Likewise, CCS spokesman Jim Cheney declined to answer questions, both about Gonzalez’s case and the company’s policies and practices, and instead provided a statement identical to that of Geo.

David Marin, the ICE field director, said he and his colleagues are proud of the facility and the care it offers. In an email, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that her agency will review the Adelanto deaths, and cited the thousands of medical, mental health, and dental visits conducted at the facility, and the fact that ICE covers the cost of treatment in the community when it’s necessary and approved.

Denver-based civil rights attorney Dan Weiss, however, said CCS makes it a practice to deny care, understaff its facilities, and assign medical staff to duties beyond the scope of their professional licenses.

“Among civil rights lawyers, everybody knows what they do—they kill people for a living,” Weiss said, pointing to cases like that of Jennifer Lobato. “But outside that narrow slice of America, people don’t know. People assume they’re providing a valuable service. People don’t realize how dangerous it is to go to jail and get sick.”

Where Profit Trumps Care

Health care at Adelanto and other ICE facilities, however, may draw greater scrutiny in coming months as the state legislature considers a bill by State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens).

Lara’s Senate Bill 29, which passed the state senate judiciary committee in late March, would require detention centers to meet the latest ICE standards for medical care and other conditions of confinement, and give detainees the right to sue in state court. The bill would also prohibit California cities like Adelanto from acting as intermediaries between ICE and for-profit prison providers.

“Immigrants bear the brunt of a business where profit often trumps care,” Lara said as he urged judiciary committee members to move SB 29 to the appropriations committee, where it currently awaits a hearing.

Human Rights Watch’s Clara Long said Lara’s bill could help ensure that detainees in California get humane treatment. “It might prompt ICE to change their ways,” she said.

In Washington, D.C., Mexican Embassy spokesman Ricardo Alday said his government also plans to investigate Sergio Lopez’s death. While problems in ICE detention have existed for years, he said, now any abuses might be a result of the “perception that anything goes because of the current [political] climate.”

What Happened When I Started Saying “Not Yet” Instead Of “No”

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A decade ago, I was a fresh-out-of-college entrepreneur trying to convince a Sri Lankan tea seller to make a deal with me. It wasn’t going very well.

I wanted the seller, who owned a boutique tea company, to become a supplier for the loose-leaf retail tea business I was trying to get off the ground. I could sense the man’s skepticism—in fact, his first instinct was to refer me to his distributor—but even so, he heard me out. Rather than a flat-out “no,” be basically told me, “not yet.” Eventually, I managed to convince him to give me a shot.

This ended up being the right decision for both of us. His teas helped fuel my startup’s early growth, and he now enjoys a huge contract as one of the suppliers to DAVIDsTEA.

The experts like to claim that learning to say “no” is one of the most crucial leadership and career skills around, and they aren’t exactly wrong. But in my experience, that will only take you so far. There’s a subtle art—and power—in turning someone down while keeping the door open (a type of conversation I’ve been on both ends of by now). It’s an investment. It’s a calculated risk. It’s a networking tool. But it isn’t always easy to get right.


Related:The 3 Types Of “No” You Need To Master In Your Career


Right now, I’m preparing to launch a new food venture. I recently reached out to a potential supplier of a crucial ingredient a few weeks ago, and they basically said to me, “There’s no way you’re going to do our minimum, so this won’t work.” I hung up the phone and found myself thinking about that early deal I almost failed to strike with the Sri Lankan supplier so many years ago, if it weren’t for his thoughtful “not yet.” Here’s what I’ve learned since then about defaulting to “not yet” whenever I’d otherwise have just said no.

The Logic Of “Not Yet”

What’s so powerful about this two-word phrase? Saying “not yet” isn’t about procrastinating. It’s not just a tool for delaying a decision—far from it. Instead, it makes room to start a dialogue and build relationships, which is what every successful entrepreneur needs to do. Giving a hard “no,” on the other hand, is a way to terminate a relationship or forestall one from starting. What’s worse, some people reject proposals in a way that makes you feel you’re not good enough for them. This adds insult to injury, and in the end, everyone loses.

I’ve been guilty of this myself on some level. Several years ago, I met up a few times with an entrepreneur for breakfast at a cafe in Montreal. He had an idea for an app that would provide spaces where on-the-go urbanites could meditate or stretch. I didn’t think it had legs and never took it seriously. I basically said “no” after a few conversations, and the discussion ended there.

That idea was iterated on a few times and eventually became Breather, an app for renting small, easily accessible office spaces by the hour to busy business travelers. If you haven’t heard of it, you might soon. The business has attracted a loyal following in its native Montreal and expanded to New York in 2014. Late last year, Breather closed a $40 million round of additional funding.

In retrospect, it would’ve been so easy for me to set some milestones for follow-ups or to offer to check out the founder’s pitch deck when it was ready. Instead, I mumbled a few platitudes and let the connection lapse. It’s hard to see the business logic in that.

Getting Better At “Not Yet”

You obviously can’t consider every half-baked idea that crosses your path, and not every email from some random person asking you to transfer funds is worth a reply. For that reason, the first step in embracing the “not yet” mentality is being selective about who you respond to in the first place. Personally, I’ve learned to have no shame about hitting “delete” when it’s clear after a quick glance that a given message isn’t worth my time.

The real judgment comes in once you’ve whittled down your inbox to those that are worth your time—including requests, offers, and opportunities you’re planning to reject. It’s crucial to approach those with respect and a sense of responsibility. I’ve found that as a leader, if you simply shoot someone down, you send a message to that person that they aren’t valued. Simply swapping a “no” for a “not yet” not only leaves the door open a crack, it also requires you to explain your decision and provide context. This forces you to make better, more informed decisions overall.

In the early days of DAVIDsTEA, for example, I hired an exceptional assistant. Long story short, she was ambitious and began clamoring early on for significantly more responsibility. In this case, I was smart enough not to say “no.” Instead, I explained that she had tremendous potential but just needed a little more training and experience.

The goal isn’t to discourage people, it’s to redirect them toward the best use of their talents and energies right now—always keeping in mind that it’s impossible to know what the best uses of their talents and energies might be later on. Recognizing that is humbling; as a mentor, leader, or prospective business parter, you simply can’t anticipate who your most valuable employee or biggest customer will be down the line, you can only make educated guesses.

That executive assistant went on to become my VP of marketing and completely changed the course of our company. Today, she’s the cofounder in my new venture.

That’s the power of “not yet.” It’s sad to say, but I’ll probably never do business again with that supplier who snubbed me a few weeks back—but not out of vindictiveness or wounded pride. They’re simply no longer on my radar as worthy potential partners. That bridge has been burned before even seeing if it was worth crossing together.

It may get good ratings when high-powered business moguls crush entrepreneurs’ hopes and dreams on reality TV shows like Shark Tank or The Apprentice. But in reality, it’s just bad manners, bad karma and—most importantly—bad business.


David Segal is an entrepreneur, speaker, and retail thought leader best known as the cofounder of DAVIDsTEA, which launched in 2008. Follow him on Twitter at @_davidsegal.


HAIM Returns with a Paul Thomas Anderson-Directed Video That’ll Get You Pumped

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WHAT: The first new song in years from sisterly indie-pop trio, HAIM.

WHO: Director Paul Thomas Anderson.

WHY WE CARE: HAIM didn’t exactly pull a disappearing act after releasing their debut album nearly four years ago. They toured and took a lot of Instagrams with Taylor Swift, and released the occasional life-giving remix. In terms of a new album or even the promise of a release date, though, HAIM has been nowhere to be seen. Until now. Following the addition of some mysterious billboards in LA earlier this month, the Haim sisters have returned this morning with a brand new song and a video by GOAT-contender filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. The last time Anderson went behind the camera for a music video, he emerged with Radiohead’s hidden message-laden visual puzzle, “Daydreaming.” For HAIM’s slow-burning “Right Now,” he goes simpler but equally alluring, with a video that follows the band as they record the song live in studio, seemingly in one take. By the time two of the three HAIM-ers are banging drums in unison in the final minute of the song, viewers may notice a sudden increase in feeling pumped about life. “And that’s how you fucking do it,” notes one of the sisters as the video concludes. We couldn’t agree more.

Six Reasons Why Your Argument Failed To Persuade

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Many people think persuasion is essentially “debating lite.” To make your argument successfully, you’ve got to pick out flaws in somebody else’s way of thinking, showing them that their perspective is off-base—as long as you do it nicely.

That’s wrong. Persuasion doesn’t work this way. You might succeed at getting others to concede a point temporarily, but they’ll often revert to their old ways of thinking as soon as whatever logic or enticement you’ve used to “win” them over to your views is no longer there. Being persuasive is a lot more about emotions than cold, hard logic, and like all skills and competencies, you can get better at it with practice.


Related:The Emotionally Intelligent Person’s Guide To Being Persuasive


But first you need to unlearn the bad habits that make you less persuasive than you might hope—starting with these:

1. You Tried To Win A War Of Ideas

Think about the last time you argued with someone. Chances are you both got defensive, right? It’s a natural reaction. When you’re trying to be persuasive at work, you might be generating the exact same response, minus the shouting. Trying to compel other people to adopt your ideas can feel like coercion, not persuasion.

In order to get around that, you need to make the other party feel that you’re both on the same side. That doesn’t mean retreating from your ideas altogether or pretending that they don’t differ when they do. It’s more about acknowledging what you do agree on already, and how your difference of opinion starts from a shared premise.

2. You Didn’t Listen Actively

When someone feels like they’re really being heard, they become more open to your ideas. So to create that openness, you need to avoid the common trap of thinking about how you’ll respond once somebody else is done talking. Listening is just as much a skill as argumentation, but it’s often harder to teach. One simple way to let others know that they’re being heard is simply to repeat back or paraphrase something you’ve just heard them say, then ask for clarification. This way you can delve deeper into what they’re expressing, instead of just bluntly countering their perspective with your own.


Related: 5 Ways To Improve Your Listening Skills


 3. You Did Half The Talking

If you’re trying to be persuasive, you’ve got to make the other person feel they’re in control of the situation, not you. It’s often said of the best listeners that they talk a lot less than other people—and that’s true of the most persuasive people as well. While the other party is speaking, listen for opportunities to connect and agree with them. See if you can get insights into their values and the reasons they think the way they do.

If you’re struggling to do that, chances are it’s because you’re yammering on too much. Keep your mouth shut more, and tune in. The more common ground you can stake out with somebody, the better your shot at persuading them. We’re all more likely to trust people who we think share our beliefs, values, and interests.

4. You Gave Too Few (Sincere) Compliments

If there’s something about the person or their idea that you admire or think deserves praise, let them know. Everyone loves to receive a compliment, especially from somebody with whom they sense they might disagree about a few things. But the key here isn’t to slather it on thick and disingenuously—your compliments need to be sincere, not just seem that way.

If you can find something you genuinely appreciate about the other person and get that across candidly, they’ll be a lot more open to anything else you have to say. It also strengthens your relationship and makes them think of you more favorably. Your ability to see the positive in them elevates you in their eyes and gives more credibility to everything you say and do.

5. You Didn’t Let Them Think It Was Their Idea The Whole Time

This one’s tricky, and frankly it’s not always achievable. But one of the best ways to persuade others of your idea is to plant it in their minds and let them believe they came up with it. The best way to do this without being manipulative (or a professional hypnotist) is simply to make suggestions, framing your ideas as possibilities.

It’s all about leaving the other person feeling empowered enough to make their mind up themselves. Again, it’s not about trying to win a contest between two opposing points of view. Take your ego out of it and allow them to take credit for the idea. An idea that we believe we came up with—or even that we’re partly responsible for—always appeals more than one that someone else exclusively generated.

6. You Didn’t Seem Confident And Knowledgeable

If you aren’t confident about your views, or your grasp of the facts isn’t that solid, you can’t hope to inspire others to get behind them. We’re predisposed to put our faith in people who sound confident and appear to know what they’re talking about. If you aren’t totally convinced yourself, your hesitation will show through and undermine your credibility in others’ eyes. Even if someone is seriously considering your idea, they might back away from it if you sound unsure.

So while you should work on projecting confidence (and here are a few tips), you’ve also got to deepen your knowledge base enough to actually feel confident for good reason—do your homework, this way you won’t have to fake it.


Related:What I’ve Learned In 38 Years Of Surrounding Myself With Confident People


Becoming more persuasive is really just about brushing up on the soft skills that get us ahead in lots of situations, not just when we’re trying to persuade people: the ones associated with listening, relating to others, and finding common ground to connect. Persuasiveness really can’t be forced, but by weeding out these common bad habits, you’ll be well on your way of getting to “yes” more easily and more often.

Weight, Sobriety, and Trump: How Rob Delaney’s Reality Informs “Catastrophe”

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If Catastrophe makes viewers fundamentally uncomfortable, it’s a feeling they share with the show’s creators–and it comes from a very real place.

In most cringe comedies, the wincing and face-shielding come as characters ineptly navigate their careers or the dating world. With Catastrophe, however, the leads are married with two kids, and the discomfort stems from the kind of lived-in tensions that flare up when two people know each other so intimately they almost resent each other for the invasion. Married life is well-trod territory for television, but what distinguishes it in this case is Catastrophe’s stomach-sinking realism. The show’s creators and stars, Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, lean into areas like bed farts and basement-masturbation, from which similarly premised programs often shy away. What adds an extra sheen of authenticity to the proceedings, though, is how much of their own lives Delaney and Horgan inject into the mix.

One of the more realistic elements of the show began by accident. The two creators were so used to laughing at each other’s jokes in real life, as normal friends are wont to do, they didn’t quite realize they were doing it in character, too, on the show. It seems like a minor feature, a married couple demonstrably finding each other funny. This recurring detail quickly helped set the show apart, though, from the legion of sitcoms where audience applause is piped into the austere, laughless void across which the leads lob zingers at each other.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” Delaney says. “I didn’t know we were doing it until people started telling us we were doing it.”

Much of the show’s remaining verisimilitude, however, is 100% deliberate. Both creators plug in details from their own lives, such as their actual children’s troubling ‘bitey’ phase. In the third season of the series, which already aired in the UK but arrives in the US on Amazon this Friday, Rob Delaney gets especially personal. He plays on insecurities from the present and weaknesses from his past, and it all ends up helping to make this season both funnier and more achingly real than its predecessors.

Rob Delaney [Photo: Robyn Von Swank, courtesy of Amazon Studios]

Sobriety

One of the first things a Delaney novice might learn from scouring the comedian’s earlier output is that he’s a recovered alcoholic. By the time Catastrophe came along, he’d already artistically processed the gory details leading up to his sobriety through standup, a book, and variousarticles. He was ready to move on. However, Horgan suggested making the character “Rob” sober in the first season. It was an idea that proved more and more prescient and valuable as the series went on.

“As things grow more difficult for [Sharon and Rob] in the second season, the sobriety thing became a really good pressure release valve; very problematic thing for Rob to deal with,” Delaney says. “So really it was just sort of a story consideration instead of ‘we’ve got something to say about this.'”

Knowing the comic’s real-life history only makes it more difficult to watch Rob fall off the wagon toward the end of the second season, though, and start the third season a long ways removed from said wagon. Marc Maron, another famously sober comic with a TV show, pulled a similar trick in his show’s final series last year. Just like Maron as well, playing out the nightmare hypothetical failed to resurrect any long-dormant demons for Delaney.

“Maybe because I’ve been sober for 15 years and I genuinely have no desire to drink, it didn’t feel like either dangerous or drinking tourism,” he says. “In fact, I would say the drunk scenes were a tiny bit more fun than your average scene to act in.”

Weight

There’s an insidious disease that affects certain humans as we age, the primary symptom being sudden, sustained weight gain if we don’t work out and eat well literally all the time. Rob Delaney counts himself among the many afflicted. He began to notice recently that despite a vigorous exercise regimen, his lifelong eat-whatever ethos had begun to fail him. At a certain point (on the bathroom scale), he decided to actually address it on the show. Delaney is 6’3″ with proportionate brawn, so it won’t be immediately apparent to viewers that he’s put on weight. The subject is brought up again and again, though, throughout the new season.

“I’m kind of wrestling with [extra weight] now, and I’m joking around with it in the show,” he says. “The reason is because I think 1) it’s our sworn duty to make an entertaining comedy program and there’s laughs in this,  2) I think people can relate to it, and 3) it’s just something that’s on my mind.” He adds, “I would like to weigh less, but I don’t know how that’s gonna happen—I’ll have to talk to NASA or the jet-propulsion laboratory to find out how’s that going to take place.”

Unlike sobriety, incorporating the weight element into the show was not Sharon’s idea, but Rob’s. He brought it up early on and ran with it, in the absence of any objections from his co-star. This process is in keeping with how the two generally handle the potentially thorny issue of personal insults for each other. They write the insulting lines on the show for themselves, and not for each other.

“I remember one time, I wrote a thing for Sharon to say, and left a blank spot, and it was like ‘dialogue dialogue dialogue, Sharon put something here that you don’t like about your body, dialogue dialogue,’” Delaney says. “I didn’t want to say anything. Not my place. We’re pretty good about putting things in that sound monstrous, but we know we’re just doing it for laughs, and we wouldn’t put anything in there that the other one wouldn’t want to do or say or even think about.’

Who could come up with better insults for oneself than one’s self anyway?

[Photo: Mark Johnson, courtesy of Amazon Studios]

The Political Climate

Because the show’s creators have trained themselves to use the whole emotional buffalo, they had to consider current events while putting this season together. The Brexit vote went through while they were writing the season, and Trump got elected as they were shooting. When this second shoe dropped, Delaney found himself profoundly affected.

“I remember, I called a meeting in my trailer the day after Trump got elected, with Sharon and our director and producer; just to have a little powwow before we went on with the day, because I was so upset,” Delaney says.

[Photo: Mark Johnson, courtesy of Amazon Studios]
Aside from a vent session and a speed bump in keeping the day’s schedule, this meeting sparked a conversation about whether these real-world events should play a role in the season. Ultimately, they ended up mentioning both Brexit and Trump in the season opener and leaving it at that.

“We generally would like the show to exist out of time, so the goal is for it to be evergreen and not commenting on specific things,” Delaney says. “But we figured these things were big enough epochal seismic events that for at least the rest of our lives we’ll know what those things were.”

These references pop up not in a bid for topicality, but rather because they’re the kind of black swan events that create tension in a marriage and make people lose sleep. The way Delaney and Horgan chose to handle their preoccupation, with a signal flare mention at the top of the season, means that viewers might remember that this political pressure hangs in the air during the remaining episodes–another ingredient in the stew of marital anxiety the creators have expertly cooked up. Making TV’s most personal relationship comedy means leaving nothing on the table.

4 Habits Of Endurance Athletes That Can Power Your Career

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Imagine adding a part-time job to your already crazy schedule. Turns out your friendly neighborhood triathlete has. Training for an Ironman—a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2 mile run—requires a minimum of 20 hours per week for six months, the equivalent of adding a part-time job to the athlete’s schedule. Even a marathon with its relatively lower physical demands still necessitates four or five hour-long runs, speed training sessions, and at least one 10-plus mile run weekly.

It’s easy to imagine athletes as the endurance equivalents of surf bums, people who work at a running store just often enough to pay for all of their race fees. After all, who could possibly train on top of a real job? But nearly half of athletes registered with USA Triathlon are white-collar workers, and 19% are doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. Ultra-marathon and marathon runners also fit a similar demographic.


Related:This CEO’s Secret To Work-Life Balance? Ultra-Marathons


If you’re struggling to make time for spin class after work, it may seem impossible to reconcile a serious training schedule with an equally high-powered career. But not only do endurance athletes survive this insane schedule, they thrive on it, often registering for races the morning after their last one.

Whether you’re planning an Ironman or your company’s five-year strategy, you can apply some practices of endurance athletes to your own professional life. Here’s how they do it:

1. They Don’t Manage Time, They Master Time

But as you’ve probably learned through painful experience, good intentions don’t compensate for poor planning. Since they have so little time to waste, endurance athletes plan every aspect of their day to death. They’ll pack their gym bag, lunch, and recovery tools the night—or maybe even a full week—before each workout. They’ll check the weather to protect against any surprises the following morning. They might even sleep in their running clothes to save a few sleepy seconds the next morning.

And after months of training, athletes don’t take chances on race day. They won’t sample a new breakfast food for fear of indigestion. They won’t wear the new shorts they found at packet pick-up the day before. Both during regular workouts and race days, athletes conserve all of their mental energy for the race at hand.

Their adherence to a strict schedule translates well to the workplace. After all, how many times have you stopped to check a few emails at 9 a.m., only to look up and realize that it’s time for lunch?

2. They Anticipate Deviations To The Plan

Even the best-laid plans can be derailed by last-minute emergencies. With time on their hands before a big race, endurance athletes will forecast any and all potential disasters. “What if my bike breaks down? What if the weather gets too hot? What if I crash halfway through the race?” With these nightmare scenarios in mind, they can prepare themselves for the unforeseen obstacles.

“If my bike breaks down, I’ll move off the road and find a race official for assistance. If I start overheating, I’ll grab ice and slow down. If I lose my energy, I’ll ingest more carbs.”

Triathlon coach Matt Fitzgerald suggests that our amount of suffering stems from expectations: We’re less disappointed by setbacks when we’re not shellshocked by them. Approach your high-stakes projects with a similarly cautious mind-set. Once you’ve envisioned the worst-case scenarios and game-planned some alternatives, you’ll respond to unexpected setbacks more gracefully and rationally. While nobody is psychic, a proactive mind-set makes it less likely that a shoddy Skype connection or unreliable partner will sink your success.

3. They Get To The Root Of Their Underperformance

Have you ever put “spend three hours on social media” or “put off that performance review” on your to-do list? We never arrive at work excited to procrastinate the day away, nor do we strive to shoot ourselves in the foot. Yet we routinely undermine our own productivity by avoiding unpleasant tasks at work. Why, you ask?

When we ignore a specific work situation, we’re really resisting the underlying negative emotions that they produce. Not preparing for your big pitch to management? It could stem from your belief that you’re not worthy of success, anyway. Faking sick from another networking event? You could assume that you can’t spark interesting conversation, or that your skills and connections couldn’t possibly help anyone else.

But these self-defeating thoughts aren’t always based in reality, and Ironman and marathon finishers are as susceptible to them as us mere mortals. That’s why when ultra-marathon runner and adventure racer Travis Macy noticed that his own dysfunctional beliefs were undermining his training, he recognized them as fictional “stories” that can be rewritten.

In his book The Ultra Mindset, he counsels readers on how to rewrite their own stories to improve their performance, both in sports and in life.

  • Step 1: Sit down and write the negative story.
  • Step 2: Read it and reread it. Recognize it for what it is: just a few words—nothing that should have the power to rule you.
  • Step 3: Write out a positive alternative that can be used to battle it, and find a new “plot” for your positive story. Could it be a new goal? Changing a behavior? Eliminating the negative?
  • Step 4: Turn one or more of these positive affirmations into a mantra.
  • Step 5: Determine what you will do to prove that the negative story is not true and that the positive story is true.
  • Step 6: Repeat the actions above, in any order, as many times as they need to be repeated.

Next time you’re saving your presentation to the last second or skipping a networking event, investigate whether your own negative stories are behind that behavior. Once you answer those questions, you can attack the underlying issues and stop self-sabotage in its tracks.

4. They Optimize Work Conditions To Maximize Efficiency

Endurance athletes are constantly seeking an edge. In their attempt to grow stronger, they become students of their sport, often taking up additional activities like strength training and yoga to reach new levels of fitness. As he increased his weekly mileage to 110 miles per week, ultra-marathon runner Scott Jurek explored every possible avenue to become stronger. In his book Eat and Run, Jurek describes his own open-minded process of development.

“I was reading more about posture and stabilization and core strength. I hit the gym, working on my upper body, because I was beginning to realize how much a strong torso and arms could propel tired legs. I experimented with Pilates. I took up yoga for flexibility, body awareness, and centered focus. I even tinkered with my breathing.”

Jurek’s experimentation has netted him enormous success: He’s won more than 10 100-plus mile races. So whether you’re an executive or an entry-level employee, seek unconventional ways to broaden your skill set. Learning how to use a new piece of software may not turn you into a Silicon Valley billionaire, but your knowledge could save you some time and headache in the future. Practical benefits aside, lifelong learning has also been found to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and depression among seniors.

Whether you’re training for an Ironman or gunning for a promotion, take some productivity tips from the endurance pros. Pace yourself. Get fit. Plan for the long term. Eke out every performance boost you can.

After all, your 40-year career is the ultimate endurance sport.


A version of this article originally appeared on Zapier. It is adapted with permission.

Are Dorms For Adults The Solution To The Loneliness Epidemic?

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More Americans are single than ever before, and more are living alone. That fact is one of the reasons we’re also starting to die earlier: one study found that living alone increases mortality risk 32%. Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. surgeon general, has called isolation the most common health issue in the country.

Architect Grace Kim thinks that a solution may be differently designed housing. “Loneliness can be the result of our built environment,” she told an audience at TED 2017.

“It turns out when you eat together, you start planning more activities together.” [Photo: Bret Hartman/TED/Flickr]
Even couples or families, she said, can be socially isolated in the typical house, and barely know neighbors (social isolation, as opposed to living alone, increases mortality risk 29%). In an apartment building, residents might be more likely to stare at their phones in the elevator than start a conversation. Kim, by contrast, lives and works in a cohousing community she designed in Seattle, where families or individuals each have their own homes, but the space was designed for interaction.

From the outside, the community looks like any other small apartment building, and the nine apartments inside have individual living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and baths. But the design, modeled on Danish cohousing communities that began to grow 50 years ago, has a central common house and courtyard.

“Loneliness can be the result of our built environment.” [Photo: courtesy Schemata Workshop]
In the common house, everyone dines together three times a week, taking turns cooking for each other. Kim only cooks once every six weeks; two other times, she helps with prep and cleanup. “All those other nights, I just show up,” she says. “I have dinner, talk with my neighbors.”

Those meals lead to more connections. “It turns out when you eat together, you start planning more activities together,” Kim says. “When you eat together, you share more things. You start to watch each other’s kids. You lend each other power tools. You borrow each other’s cars.”

[Photo: courtesy Schemata Workshop]
Some cohousing communities take forms beyond what Kim shared in her presentation. Common, launched by one of the cofounders of General Assembly, provides private furnished bedrooms and weekly cleaning. Others combine co-living with coworking. In the Bay Area, where high rents have given people another incentive to live together, startups like OpenDoor have repurposed old mansions into shared housing. These experiments haven’t always worked–Campus, a startup that had dozens of locations, folded in 2015. But in general, cohousing is becoming more common.

Kim thinks that’s critical. “When I said earlier that cohousing is an antidote to isolation, what I should have said is that cohousing can save your life,” she says.

Why Even Our Water Supply Is Not Safe From Hackers

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There’s been a lot of attention lately on the U.S. “mother of all bombs,” Russia’s “father” counterpart—and North Korea’s nukes—but there’s another WMD lurking that we all need to be afraid of. Very afraid.

It’s cyberattacks, and not the ones that steal your personal info to go on a J.Crew shopping spree. The new warfare is taking place on the industrial internet, with hackers targeting the tech that controls everything from automated manufacturing to the power grid. And as one attack showed last year: Even our drinking water is in the crosshairs.

In early 2016, it was revealed that the control system of a massive water utility serving millions was hacked—and it was not just a garden-variety data breach. Verizon Security Systems reported that attackers had tampered with computers that manage water chemicals that make H2O safe to drink.

The location of the plant was not made public but it turned out there was a common theme that comes up time and again in these breaches: The utilities cybersecurity protocols were a decade out of date.

“Weapons of mass destruction don’t have to be physical bombs that move from one location to another—they can be these ticking bombs in these control systems that …cause severe damage and bring down the critical infrastructure of a country.” says Eddie Habibi, founder and CEO of the Houston-based ICS security firm PAS.

The need for increased industrial cyber safety extends far beyond water plants (there are more than 150,000 public water utilities in the U.S. alone). Around the same time the Verizon report came out, New York federal prosecutors charged seven Iranian hackers with  hacking dozens of finance firms and gaining digital access to a dam in suburban Westchester County. If the dam hadn’t been undergoing maintenance, the hackers would have been able to manipulate a sluice gate used to protect nearby properties from flooding, prosecutors said.

“The infiltration of the Bowman Avenue dam represents a frightening new frontier in cybercrime,” said Preet Bharara, Manhattan’s then chief federal prosecutor.

State-sponsored hackers have also had success remotely tampering with industrial equipment abroad—Stuxnet, the specialized malware believed to be deployed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence, famously sabotaged control systems used by Iran’s nuclear program, and Russian hackers are believed to be behind attacks on electric  power plants in the Ukraine.

The other sector that is playing catch-up in securing its digital controls is manufacturing, where saboteurs can cause millions of dollars of damage to factory equipment and disrupt supply chains.

Because private customer data is generally not in play with industrial controls, there has been less publicity and less public and legal pressure to avoid digital breaches.

“Manufacturers haven’t had those regulatory pressures that other industries have had—even health care has had higher pressures, because of things like HIPAA and HITECH,” says Sean Peasley, a partner  in Deloitte’s cyber risk services practice, referring to federal health information privacy laws. “Manufacturers are a little bit behind in terms of their capabilities and their maturities.”

That gap is creating opportunities for software vendors and security consultants with experience in both industrial computing and digital security.

IBM Security reports that its clients in manufacturing experience 62% more attacks than average clients, and a number of high-profile hacks have made the news. A German steel mill reportedly sustained “massive damage” in an attack reported in 2014, after hackers tampered with blast furnace controls.

“Overall, financial services is one of the most heavily attacked, but manufacturing is certainly in the top five,” says IBM’s Diana Kelley, an executive security advisor.

Among the challenges is servicing the often esoteric software used to command equipment in facilities like power plants and factories. A report released last year by Deloitte and the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation found that nearly a third of manufacturers hadn’t conducted cyber risk assessments. The systems can end up falling into a security no-man’s-land, with neither corporate IT departments nor factory managers guarding the store.

And if industrial systems are connected to office computers, hackers and malware can jump from one network to the other, using vulnerabilities on one side of the business to endanger the other. That was the case in the water plant described by Verizon: Attackers broke into the control system through computers used in customer service.

The same annoying ransomware that hits home PCs can also potentially shut down production or destroy critical factory data.

“Their systems are compromised, information is kind of scrambled, and everything just comes to a halt,” says Matt Kozloski, vice president for professional services at the Kelser Corp., a Glastonbury, Conn., consulting company.

Security experts suggest companies limit access between industrial and office machines, or even isolate industrial networks entirely from other systems and the internet—a practice known as air-gapping—but in practice systems can be connected and configured in ways even system administrators don’t fully understand.

“They might say that there’s no way for somebody in the industrial control system to be able to access the internet, or be able to gain access that way, but when we go and perform vulnerability assessments, a lot of times we find there really is no air gap,” Peasley says.

The need to protect industrial networks has created opportunities for companies. Kelser, located near Connecticut’s Naval Submarine Base in New London and a number of defense-oriented manufacturing firms, has been assisting clients in meeting an end-of-year deadline for federal suppliers to implement a recent standard for safeguarding restricted information, like sensitive product designs.

“If that diagram is on the office PCs or the office PCs have access to it, then that would naturally fall into protecting those machines,” Kozloski says, and if the file is also loaded onto an industrial milling machine, that system would have to be provably compliant as well.

Keeping industrial systems secure can involve more complex decisions than the typical office PC, says Robert M. Lee, CEO of the D.C.-area industrial cybersecurity company Dragos. Even if a system has security issues, it’s not always possible to shut it down or disconnect it from a network without doing more harm than good.

“If you try to block something in an ICS environment—an industrial control systems environment—you could be blocking safety critical communications,” he says.

In one case, he says, a client in the electrical power sector had a worker accidentally infect company systems with malware through a contaminated USB key. The infection found its way to what Lee calls a “sensitive system,” but simply shutting down the machine could have led to electrical outages. The company ultimately decided the malware itself wasn’t a risk to operations, and left it on the computer—under careful supervision—until a scheduled maintenance cycle two months away.

“They needed to clean it up, but they didn’t have to right then,” he says.

At the same time, accidentally misconfigured control systems can be just as damaging as deliberate digital sabotage, says PAS’s Habibi. The company has developed complex models of a wide variety of industrial systems—and notifies administrators and engineers when something seems off.

“We monitor for configuration changes that are anomalous, and unexpected, and unauthorized,” Habibi says.

The PAS system works in conjunction with more traditional security tools like firewalls and can catch dangerous settings whether they’re the result of human error, industrial sabotage, or a sophisticated attack by a hostile foreign power looking to damage domestic industry, he says.

“Nation states are actually the biggest threat, in our view, to the global critical infrastructure, and we’re not the only ones with that view,” he says.

Empowering News Readers To Take Action, And Other World-Changing Apps

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In recent months, reports of people and communities under threat–Muslim immigrants being barred entry to the U.S.; hate crimes against religious and ethnic groups in this country–have flooded the news. It’s difficult to scan to the bottom of an article and respond with a sentiment other than: “I just want to do something.”

When the browser extension Information for Action (IFA) becomes available this summer, it will directly connect people looking to get involved with ways to do so. After installing the extension, which earned the top spot among apps in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards. (You can read more about the other finalists below), online news readers will see a bubble pop up with opportunities for action at a local and national level. These can range from community meetings, to volunteer opportunities, to organizations in need of donations. “We’re trying to rebrand activism,” co-founder Emily Thomas tells Fast Company. While “slacktivism”–the idea that people can effect change through a quick text or a share on social media–has come under fire lately for not being all that effective at fostering real community, Thomas and her co-founder John Toner think that IFA will tangibly translate online activity into real, community-driven change.

“Part of our tagline is ‘we believe change should meet you where you are, when it matters,’” Thomas says. “The thing we’re excited about is connecting opportunities to people, so they don’t have to open another browser tab and search for ways to get involved: Instead, it’s just right there.”

“The thing we’re excited about is connecting opportunities to people, so they don’t have to open another browser tab and search for ways to get involved.” [Source Image: Jezperklauzen/iStock]
Thomas and Toner are engaged, and over the course of their relationship, they got interested in combining their respective backgrounds in journalism and international development to create a tool that would meet the need for action they both observed. Coming from the world of online journalism, “I was seeing through comments and social media how many people after a natural disaster or breaking news were asking for ways to help,” Thomas says. And after his experience working as a consultant for the United Nations and figuring out how to best use technology to deliver aid, “I really discovered the promise of data and technology to solve critical problems,” Toner says. After gathering community feedback from local organizing meetings they attended in Brooklyn, Thomas and Toner landed on IFA as a way to direct the outpouring of concern that Thomas observed toward the causes that need it most.

Since relocating to the Bay Area last year, Thomas and Toner have been hard at work developing the platform with a team of advisers with experience working for places like Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, and the New York City Department of Education. Since February, they’ve been operating IFA as a pilot in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, and Kentucky (where Toner is from); some of the organizations they’ve onboarded to post actions and test the platform include the Kentucky YMCA Youth Organization, the Queen’s College Center for Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Understanding, Impact Justice, Woman Inc., and Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. IFA will be free for both organizations and individuals to sign up for; Toner and Thomas have gone the traditional bootstrap-startup way of securing initial funding from friends and family, and they’re in the process of seeking out investors. They were also named finalists in the Big Ideas @Berkeley competition earlier this year; with funding from that program, Toner and Thomas are now working on onboarding hundreds of organizations representative of every region in the U.S.

According to research from Google, around 49% of the U.S. population could accurately be classified as “interested bystanders”: they’re paying attention to what’s going on around them, but not actively getting involved. “We think there’s a real need to reinvigorate activism and get people involved,” Toner says. But IFA, he adds, will get people outside the online echo chamber and into the communities and organizations that need the aid. “One of the remedies to the polarization we’re seeing now is actually solving problems together, in person,” he says. “We want to really inspire stronger relationships and stronger communities.”

Here’s more about the finalists in the food category:

Look Up

Ekene Ijeoma

Walk down the street in pretty much any city, and you’re more likely to see people with their eyes glued to their phone than taking in the sights around them. Designer Ekene Ijeoma created Look Up as a way to remind people to appreciate the city they live in–and the people that live there with them. Responding to the energy level at a particular intersection, the app buzzes to remind users to look up from their phones. In that way, it also functions as a safety measure–not only is wandering streets as a smartphone zombie isolating, it’s also more likely to lead you unawares into oncoming traffic.

Stuffstr

Stuffstr

Think about your closet: How much stuff do you have in there? How much of it do you really need and use? Over 80% of household items are used less than once a month, and the average American throws away 70 pounds of clothing per year. Stuffstr, an app and public benefit corporation dedicated to reducing waste and excess, wants to help people be more conscientious about what they own and purchase. On the app, you can track each item you own and purchase, and connect to online marketplaces that facilitate repairs, resales, and donations. The idea is to enter every purchase into a circular economy, extending its lifecycle and curbing our culture’s wasteful tendencies.

Give a Beep

Edelman Deportivo

Speeding through London’s streets, cyclists ring their bike bells to signal fear or frustration, or to tell pedestrians to get out of the way, stat. Give a Beep adds another layer to the bike bell by connecting it to a smartphone app that sends an email to the London mayor’s office, signaling the points in the city where cyclists feel most at risk. Over the course of 2015, the 500 cyclists who downloaded Give a Beep and received the connected bike bell sent 5,000 emails to the mayor’s office, calling for concrete improvements to cycling infrastructure.

Earth’s Changing Climate simulation

Amplify

In a series of gamified simulations, students can manipulate factors like population, livestock, sunlight, and methane to see how their choices and lifestyles directly impact climate change. The science education experts at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science developed the Earth’s Changing Climate simulations for Amplify Science–a program that motivates students to solve real-world problems using science. Watching different climate scenarios unfold, students collect data and make predictions and learn to respond to situations like scientists.

Open Library

Worldreader

Across the world, 250 million young children lack basic reading and writing skills, and, in Africa, 40% of schools have few or no textbooks at all. Mobile phones, in contrast, are ubiquitous. The Worldreader Open Library has adapted 18,000 titles in 43 languages to a mobile-phone-friendly format to increase access to books for children and families in the developing world. The available titles traverse all genres, from educational books for early learners, to thrillers and romance novels for adults. By packing books into mobile phones, the app aims to boost literacy rates and make reading as common as placing a call.

Turo

Turo

Turo is a rental car platform for the sharing economy: When users arrive somewhere new, they can rent a vehicle from local car owners at the fraction of a cost of mainstream rental companies. It’s a win-win for renters and owners: Owners can earn a bit of extra cash on a car they may not use all the time, and renters can get a cheap ride, and maybe get some local recommendations in the process.

Ballot

Ballot

Imagine the democratic process distilled down into app form. That’s Ballot: a platform that integrates important information on upcoming elections with candidate profiles, a Tinder-style candidate-matching quiz based on policy preferences, and voter registration. Despite the high drama of the 2016 presidential race, voter turnout remains low in the midterms and local elections: In many cities, less than 20% of people show up to vote in local elections. Ballot imagines a more engaged citizenry and a more accessible government; creating a platform that supports transparency and access, the founders believe, is the first step.

NBA Math Hoops

Learn Fresh Education Co.

Math is one of the clearest indicators of the achievement gap faced by low-income students of color; without good-quality education, students struggle to master fundamentals and move onto more challenging classes. But when it’s combined with basketball, math becomes much more accessible. NBA Math Hoops is the app version of a popular board game; on the app, students compete to score points by solving math problems based on real NBA and WNBA players’ stats. Math is a lot less of a slog when you’re trying to figure out how to make your app version of Russell Westbrook average a triple-double (and if you’re not a basketball fan, Learn Fresh Education Co. CEO Khalil Fuller is in talks with the NFL about a similar game).

ShareTheMeal

World Food Programme

Every time you sit down to eat, the ShareTheMeal app reminds you that one in seven children in the world doesn’t have enough to eat that day–and that feeding them takes just 50 cents. When smartphone users (who outnumber hungry kids 20 to one) open the app, they can send a meal to a child in need; ShareTheMeal shows where the meal was directed, and checks back in with updates on how the kids are progressing. So far, more than 12 million meals have been shared through the app; its founding organization, the World Food Programme, hopes it will contribute to a zero-hunger future.

Intellivisit

Intellivisit

What if you could get a medical diagnosis without even having to leave your house? Intellivist makes health care more immediate and accessible through an artificial-intelligence-assisted app that diagnoses patients and connects them to care delivered by local doctors and nurses. By streamlining the diagnostic process, the app could cut costs associated with in-person visits, and limit the use of emergency rooms as (very expensive) initial treatment options. The founders estimate that 550 million primary care visits in the U.S. could be replaced by virtual visits at half the cost of an office appointment.

Owlet Smart Sock

Owlet Baby Care and R/GA

A balm for new-parent paranoia, the Owlet Smart Sock ensures that a baby’s vital signs are constantly accessible by tracking heart rate and oxygen saturation percentage through a sock that contains a monitoring device. The wearable delivers data to an app, which alerts parents if their newborn stops breathing in the middle of the night, or when they’re otherwise separated from their infant. Owlet is the next phase of baby monitor, adapting hospital technology to give parents data-driven peace-of-mind.

Voting Information Project

Thirteen23

Voter turnout has been trending downwards, and the team at Thirteen23 realized that the accessibility of the voting process might have something to do with it. To break down barriers to participation, the Voter Information Project developed an SMS-based system that allows any cell phone (including non-smartphones) to receive polling place and voter-registration information through texting a simple code. By translating the app into 10 languages, the app hopes to increase diversity in the U.S.’s voter demographic and support equal participation in the democratic process.


One Specific Wavelength Of UV Light Might Be The Secret Weapon Against Superbugs

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After he saw a friend die of an antibiotic-resistant infection–following a minor surgery, despite the friend’s overall health–physicist David Brenner decided to devote his own research to the challenge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

It’s a problem that’s likely to get much worse: while around 700,000 people around the world died from superbug-related diseases last year, by 2050, that number may be 10 million. Due to a number of factors, including overuse of antibiotics, bacteria are evolving faster than the drugs used to kill them.

Bacteria are evolving faster than the drugs used to kill them. [Source Photos: Gile68/iStock, Jennifer Oosthuizen/CDC/James Archer]
“It seems pretty clear that we’re not on a good road, and the drug-based approach is not working,” Brenner told the audience at TED 2017. “I’m a physicist, so I wondered if we could take a physics-based approach to this problem.”

One UV wavelength is strong enough to penetrate through microscopic organisms, but not our skin. [Source Photos: Gile68/iStock, Jennifer Oosthuizen/CDC/James Archer]

He focused on ultraviolet light, which can kill any bacteria; because it uses a different mechanism than antibiotics, it can kill drug-resistant bacteria as easily as any other type of microbe. It’s currently used for sterilization in some places, such as operating rooms. But because it’s not safe to use around humans–with the potential to cause skin cancer and other diseases–it can’t be used in many of the places where disease is most likely to spread.

Working with a team of physicists, Brenner realized that a particular wavelength of ultraviolet light might be able to kill bacteria and viruses, but not harm humans. It’s strong enough to penetrate through microscopic organisms, but not our skin. Over five years of research in the lab, he’s found that this wavelength of UV light does work: it effectively kills bugs and seems safe.

Brenner envisions that it could be used in hospitals, food preparation areas, schools, airports, and anywhere else where disease is most likely to spread. More long-term safety tests are needed, and regulatory approval, so the technology isn’t guaranteed to come to market. As a previous TED speaker pointed out, we also don’t understand the function of the thousand species of microorganisms that live on our skin–or the millions in the environment. Killing them indiscriminately could have negative implications. But if further research shows that the technique makes sense, it could be a low-cost way to stem the spread of superbugs.

Now That It Knows Who’s Talking, Google Home Might Reach Its Potential

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Until recently, the Google Home connected speaker didn’t have much of a purpose in life.

While Home has been an effective showcase for Google’s voice recognition skills and its deep understanding (or occasional misunderstanding) of the web, it’s also been strangely disconnected from Google services. In lieu of deep ties to services like Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Allo, and Duo, the $130 speaker was little more than an Amazon Echo imitator.

That’s why support for multiple accounts and the ability to distinguish between speakers, which arrived last week, is a big deal. Now Google Home can make sure it’s talking to the right person before it grants access to personal information, making it more practical for families and roommates. Down the road, this should allow the speaker to tie into a greater range of Google services.

At the same time, that personalization will help fulfill Google’s underlying business goal of serving up targeted ads. Just as the Echo is, on some level, a path to to shopping more on Amazon, Home’s personalized interactions will allow Google to advertise more effectively.

To Each Their Own Assistant

The way Google Home handles personalization is pretty clever. Each account requires a separate iOS or Android device, each with a unique login for the Google Home companion app. If all you have is a single smartphone, there’s no way to add or manage multiple accounts.

While this approach may sound restrictive, it allows for maximum personalization with minimal effort. Once users have trained Google’s neural network to recognize their voices—a breezy process that involves saying “Okay Google” and “Hey Google” into the smartphone app twice apiece—Google Home can immediately offer individual calendar agendas, Google Play Music playlists, shopping lists, and photos (which can be beamed to a nearby Chromecast).

Users can also dive into the Google Home app to customize further. Each user, for instance, can choose different preferred news sources for a daily briefing, select from multiple work locations for commute information, and connect to third-party services using their own individual accounts. After connecting with Todoist, for instance, Google Home offered access to separate task lists based on who was talking.

Still, Google Home remains limited in the number of Google services to which it can connect. You can’t, for instance, send emails, take notes, schedule appointments, place calls, and exchange text messages through the speaker, even though Google’s Assistant on Android phones allows you to do all those things. (One notable exception: You can now shop by voice through Google Express, with voice recognition eliminating the need for a security code.)

Perhaps Google is holding off on more capabilities as it refines its voice recognition, which in my experience hasn’t been flawless. On a couple occasions, Google didn’t recognize my wife’s voice when she asked for personal information, and suggested either trying again or retraining the voice model. But I also got Google to give up my personal information on one occasion while speaking in an intentionally silly and high-pitched voice. So either Google is frighteningly good at recognizing me at any pitch—unlikely, given that it rejected my request in an exaggerated deep voice—or the system isn’t foolproof.

Getting a connected speaker to recognize different voices from across the room is a tough technical challenge, because the same signal processing that eliminates background noise and reverb can also wipe away a voice’s defining characteristics. With voice shopping, you still get email confirmation and can cancel erroneous orders before they’ve shipped. But Google might not want to open up more potentially sensitive functions for its connected speaker until these glitches are worked out.

Getting To Know You

Google has plenty of motivation to improve its voice recognition and open up Google Home to more services as the company looks to monetize those interactions through targeted ads.

This goal is not a secret. On Google’s privacy FAQ page, for instance, the company notes that it treats voice commands similarly to searches on Google. That means the company can use Google Home interactions to deliver more personalized ads on other devices.

In the future, Google could also use those interactions for advertising on Google Home itself. When asked last year by Forbes how Google might monetize its connected speaker and virtual assistant, CEO Sundar Pichai hinted at the possibility of sponsored results.

“Inherently, when information needs are commercial, you are connecting users with people who provide services. I think there are natural opportunities,” Pichai said.

With voice recognition, it’s easy to see how this might play out: If a user asks Google Home to order some food, it can look up the kinds of restaurants that user has searched for or visited in the past, and offer a suggestion from whatever company pays for top placement. Or when a user asks for his or her daily briefing, Google could insert a promotion based on what it knows from that user’s search history.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an ad-supported business model, but it can be challenging to pull off without seeming overly intrusive or obnoxious. Last month’s snafu in which some Google Home users were treated to a lengthy Beauty and the Beast promo during their daily briefings was an example of the company missing the mark. Now that Google understands who’s talking, it can try to do a better job.

This Program Gets Rural Schools Online. Will It Survive Trump’s FCC?

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Earlier this year, Arizona officials announced a plan they say could harness more than $100 million in federal funds to bring broadband internet connections to schools and libraries across the state.

Arizona’s unique geography, which ranges from mountains and rivers to steep canyons and sprawling deserts—makes wiring many of the rural parts of state for modern connections difficult and costly.

“We have three sort of major urban hubs here, and once you start getting out of those hubs, connectivity presents a huge issue,” says Arizona Department of Education spokesman Stefan Swiat. “If you’re a telecom company and you go out to a small community in the deserts of southern Arizona and there’s 100 people, you don’t want to install million-dollar fiber there, because you’re not going to get a return on your investment.”

But experts say changes made in 2014 to a federal funding provision known as the E-Rate program have dramatically helped matters in just a few short years. The program uses fees paid by telecom companies (and ultimately paid by consumers as part of their monthly bills) to help wire schools and libraries for phone and broadband service. In 2013, only 30% of school districts could offer internet connections at a federal target rate of 100 kilobits per second per student, while in early 2016, 77% of schools met that target, according to a January report from officials at the Federal Communications Commission.

“We’ve seen 30 million kids connected over the last three years who previously didn’t have sufficient connectivity in their classrooms,” says Evan Marwell, founder and CEO of EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit focused on boosting school connectivity.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai, appointed in January to head the agency by President Trump, has generally spoken in favor of the E-Rate system. “Regarding E-rate, Chairman Pai strongly supports the program,” an FCC spokesman wrote in an email to Fast Company on April 24. But the FCC retracted the largely favorable January report shortly after Pai’s appointment, and it remains to be seen whether he will seek to make changes to the E-Rate rules approved under his Democratic predecessor, and what effects that may have on the program.

Getting Kids Connected

Officials behind the Arizona program plan to couple federal E-Rate money with money from the state’s own Universal Service Fund and the state budget to connect schools in far-flung corners of the state. Getting schools online enables teachers to use digital learning tools that have already become familiar in wired districts, like real-time online quizzes that can instantly show teachers which students are struggling with material, Marwell says.

“Suddenly they know a lot better about which of the kids are getting it and which of them aren’t getting it,” he says.

And broadband can also enable access to entirely new resources, like remote access to Advanced Placement courses and other options that often aren’t available in smaller schools.

“We’re going to have rural kids taking AP classes that they wouldn’t have been able to take because the school doesn’t have the resources,” Swiat predicts. “But now, nothing can stop them.”

Some schools in the state have already seen success from boosting internet access: When Yuma, in southwestern Arizona near the Mexican border, pushed to integrate broadband into the schools and distribute tablets to every student, students gained access to new educational opportunities. Swiat says one high school student was even awarded a full scholarship to the University of Arizona after winning a statewide science award.

“A couple of years ago, that kid had no chance,” he says. “And now, [she won] a full-ride opportunity to learn from great professors and pursue a passion that she discovered through broadband.”

The E-Rate program approved more than $1.6 billion for educational institutions, including including schools in almost 24,000 districts, for the 2016 funding year, according to a recent report from the Universal Service Administrative Co., which oversees the program. Its recent success stems at least in part from 2014 changes that shifted funding from voice to broadband and set the national 100 kilobit per student standard. In-school Wi-Fi programs also made it easier for districts to build their own broadband networks where no provider could offer affordable service, and boosted transparency to let districts comparison shop for broadband by seeing what other school systems.

“I think we’re making tremendous progress,” says Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, a professional group of school tech professionals. “E-Rate is working for at-school broadband and Wi-Fi connections.”

The program provides funding to school districts via a need-based formula whereby schools can receive up to 80% of costs for approved expenses, determined by such factors as the percentage of students eligible for subsidized lunches. The program also provides additional matching of state grants up to an extra 10%, meaning some districts in participating states can see expenses fully covered, which can make a big difference for schools in particularly poor areas, according to Matt Gress. Gress is policy adviser to Andy Tobin, a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state’s utility regulator.

An Uncertain Future

Whether E-Rate will continue in its current form under the Trump administration and the Republican-led FCC is still an open question. Some conservatives have spoken out against the E-Rate program altogether; a 2015 set of budget recommendations from the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated phasing out the program.

Historically, Pai has expressed support for ideas behind E-Rate. But in 2014, when he was an FCC commissioner in the Obama administration, he voted against the rule changes that focused E-Rate on broadband and Wi-Fi, which supporters have since said expanded access to more schools. Among other criticisms, Pai wrote in a 2014 statement that the changes didn’t do enough to reduce bureaucratic requirements that made it hard for rural schools to participate, and that the funding plan could lead to cost overruns.

“And it is devastating substance for America’s teachers, librarians, parents, students, and library patrons, many of whom I’ve met over the past several months, and all of whom believe, as I said almost one year ago, that ‘E-Rate is a program worth fighting for,’” he wrote. “After the band packs up and goes home, and after the happy headlines fade, they are the ones who will have to wait years more for 21st-century digital opportunities—for real E-Rate reform.”

Concerns that the program could be reshaped contributed to a push in Louisiana earlier this year to boost school broadband. Officials sought to apply for E-Rate funds to connect the state’s schools through the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, which delivers high-speed broadband to the state’s universities.

“A lot of my folks were looking last fall, when the new federal administration was coming in—there was some indication they might change the rules,” says Joseph Rallo, the state’s commissioner of higher education. Rallo wanted to see how, with the help of E-Rate funds, the state university system and its fiber network could help get local schools online.

“We thought it an opportune time to see if we might partner with the K-12 [schools] and see what we could offer,” he says.

Eight of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, the equivalent of counties in other states, have no broadband access in their public schools, Rallo says. The tentative plan was for the state optical network to wire two locations as network hubs in each participating parish—such as a high school or a central library—and let local officials build their own networks from there. But with the idea only recently hatched, and some uncertainty about costs to finish wiring those local networks, only a handful of parish school boards joined the plan in time for the federal E-Rate deadline. That left the effort on hold for now, though officials may try again next year—depending on the state of the E-Rate program.

In the meantime, E-Rate supporters are doing what they can to make sure Pai—who has moved quickly to condemn other Obama-era FCC policies on net neutrality and broadband privacy—is aware of the benefits the current program has brought, says Krueger.

“We are doing everything we can to educate him and members of Congress that E-Rate works,” he says.

The Fight For The $400 Billion Business Of Immigrants Sending Money Home

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“Dollars wrapped with love.” That’s how Dilip Ratha describes remittances—the money immigrants send home to their families and friends. “There are millions of people who migrate each year. With the help of the family, they cross oceans, they cross deserts, they cross rivers, they cross mountains,” Ratha, an economist, said in a 2014 TED talk. “They risk their lives to realize a dream, and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family, which has helped them before.”

For a long time, economists tended to overlook these dollars, but recently they’ve come to appreciate their importance. Remittances, which totaled $429 billion in 2016, are worth three times as much as all the foreign aid doled out by governments worldwide, and it’s likely the money is more effective dollar-for-dollar. Unlike aid, which is notorious for passing through corrupt middlemen and inefficient bureaucracies, remittances go directly to recipients, where they pay for schooling, medical expenses, and new fridge-freezers. In some poor countries, like Somalia or Haiti, remittances make up more than a quarter of national income. And statistics show that remittances tend to hold up even in times of crisis. After the financial crash of 2007-2008, the intra-family flows continued even as private capital ground to a halt.

Sending money to Africa from the U.S. or Europe sometimes costs an extra 15%, and within Africa, the fees can be stupendous. [Illustration: mooltfilm/iStock]
But that’s not to say that remittances couldn’t be more effective. New startups are aiming to do for international payments what Venmo and others have done for domestic transactions: make transfers mobile, painless, and social. “In 5 years or 10 years, the whole idea of a remittance or cross-border payments will be gone, just like we don’t have cross-border email, or cross-border web browsing. It’s just the internet,” says Jeremy Allaire, CEO and founder of Circle, a blockchain-based service that’s working on the remittance market.

Currently, it’s expensive to send money overseas, which is especially damaging for the immigrants sending small savings home to the developing world. The World Bank says transaction fees average 7.45% globally, and, in many remittance corridors, they’re a lot higher than that. Sending money to Africa from the U.S. or Europe sometimes costs an extra 15%, and within Africa, the fees can be stupendous. To transfer 33,000 Angola Kwanza (about $200) from Luanda to Namibia costs about $50, according to the World Bank’s price database.

But in the last 10 years the average global fees have fallen by about 2.5%, which equates to about $90 billion in extra love-dollars, the World Bank’s Marco Nicoli says. The D.C. institution works to bring more transparency to remittance pricing (the database lets you compare providers), and it lends money to poorer countries to beef up their payment systems. A further 5% drop in fees would mean $16 billion in extra annual income for recipients, it says.

In his speech, Ratha suggests several reforms, including loosening money laundering regulations on amounts lower than $1,000, ending monopoly arrangements between post offices (which often disburse remittances) and money transfer companies, and creating a new low-cost remittance system funded by philanthropy. But new technology and the boldness of an emerging group of money transfer startups–like Circle, and others like Abra, Transferwise, and WorldRemit–could also have a profound impact. The combination of the internet, mobile phones, bitcoin, and the blockchain could dramatically reduce the cost of sending money internationally, say experts. That is, if the startups are allowed to grow unimpeded by unnecessary regulation and special interest griping, including from banks and exchange companies that currently gain handsomely from the fees and inefficiency in the space.

“Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor.” [Photo: Flickr user Peter Robinett]

The High Costs Of Sending Cash

There are several reasons why the cost of sending money cross-border is currently so high. Nicoli notes that most payments start and finish as cash, which means that human agents need to be employed to receive and disburse the money, raising the price for everyone.

Bill Barhydt, founder and CEO of Abra, points to all the “hands in the pie” in traditional transactions, like those orchestrated by market leaders like Western Union, MoneyGram, and RIA. Remittances can be initiated via an agent (like those affiliated with Western Union or MoneyGram), a bank branch, a post office, the internet, and via mobile. So there’s someone at the cash window taking the money. There’s the agent’s bank. There are “correspondent banks” on both sides of a national border. There’s the bank for the agent in the receiving country. There’s the disbursing agent. There’s Western Union or MoneyGram itself.

Founded in 1851 as a telegraph company, Western Union has more than 550,000 agents in 200 countries. It completed 268 million consumer transactions in 2016, worth $80 billion. Together with MoneyGram and RIA, it controls more than a quarter of the international market. And, as its longevity implies, it’s been adept at beating back competition before now. The company generated revenue of $5.4 billion in 2016, with operating income of $484 million.

In an interview with Fast Company, Western Union’s chief information officer David Thompson says the cost of regulatory compliance, including new anti-money laundering regulations introduced after 9/11, raises the cost of sending money internationally. (Banks and transfer companies are now required to identify customers and report transactions in excess of $10,000). But the compliance burden also makes it difficult for new entrants to eat into its business.

“Western Union is in a highly regulated industry globally, requiring licenses in every jurisdiction you operate in. You need a strong money laundering and broad risk program in place,” Thompson says. “Technology doesn’t solve all those business and regulatory issues. Some pure technology plays forget that. We live in a world with criminal networks and entities that you have to keep out of your infrastructure. There’s a pretty high barrier to entry because of the risks associated with the market.”

In his TED talk, Ratha has a less complicated explanation for the high cost of remittances. “Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor,” he says. Development groups often point to a lack of competition and financial regulation in poorer countries. African migrants in particular pay a so-called “super-tax” on international transfers, and the market power of MoneyGram and Western Union is likely one proximate cause. In a 2014 report, the London-based Overseas Development Institute said the “two companies account for $586 million of the loss associated with the remittance ‘super tax,’ part of it through opaque foreign currency charges.” Ratha says governments should require higher standards of transparency from money transfer companies on exchange rates, and the fees and taxes they charge both senders and recipients, so it’s easier for immigrants to shop around. Some smaller exchange providers even charge fees to people collecting remittances, further inflating costs, he says.

The promise of bitcoin and blockchain-based startups is that they dis-intermediate corresponding banks from the settlement process. [Illustration: mooltfilm/iStock]

The Disruptors

The good news is that a string of competitors are now appearing, aiming to cut prices and improve transparency. London-based WorldRemit calls itself the “WhatsApp of Money.” Started by Ismail Ahmed, a Somali-born former United Nations official, it facilitates mobile money (or airtime) transfers to more than 140 destinations and now does 580,000 transfers every month. The London startup has received more than $150 million in venture capital from investors who backed Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and Slack. Ahmed’s seed money actually came via the UN in the form of compensation for wrongful workplace treatment. He had alleged corruption in the UN’s development program in Somalia and faced retaliation (a potential employer was told not to hire him) after making his claims public.

TransferWise, set up by two former Skype employees, tries to bypass bank wire fees. It pairs up people needing to send money in different directions, so the money never needs to go cross-border. So, if you want to send $100 from the U.S. to Germany, you put the money in the company’s U.S. account. TransferWise then finds someone who wants to send money from Germany to the U.S. and that person pays their money into its German account. Instead of either side paying a hefty wire transfer fee, the transfer is made domestically, with TransferWise covering the balance. The idea has been called “Hawala with paperwork” after the traditional Islamic banking system whereby value moves around an international network of brokers without physical money ever actually being transferred. TransferWise charges 1% of the transfer amount up to $5,000, with no additional charges hidden in the exchange rate conversion (Banks, it says, will often exchange your money at less than the official rate, pocketing the difference on top of a fee).

TransferWise, which has Peter Thiel and Richard Branson as investors, recently announced that it’s integrating with Facebook’s Messenger Chat service, as are a host of other major players, including PayPal, MasterCard, American Express, and Western Union. The latter also has mobile partnerships with Viber and WeChat (though this hasn’t stopped criticism that it obfuscates pricing through a mixture of fees and exchange rate mystery).

The promise of bitcoin and blockchain-based startups is that they dis-intermediate corresponding banks from the settlement process. Remittances have traditionally been settled using wire or SWIFT–transfers within a network of international banks. But they don’t allow small payments of $5 or $10, and, because of fixed fees, they’re relatively expensive for amounts of, say, $200 or $500, say remittance experts. Many new startups (though not TransferWise) offer greater convenience at either end of the transfer (the money appears on your phone’s wallet or in your online bank account). But they still go through the traditional banking system, so their potential in lowering costs is limited.

“We have seen more innovation in the delivery channel stage of the transaction where players allow transactions to be initiated over the internet in different forms,” says Nicoli at the World Bank. “Ultimately, however, most of these models have to rely on the corresponding banking network. This is where where the potential of [distributed ledger technology] and blockchain innovation is.”

Though bitcoin itself has a sometimes unsavory reputation, the distributed ledger technology underlying bitcoin is now being developed as a settlement engine for all kinds of financial products, from stocks and bonds to loyalty points and insurance contracts. Blockchains–ledgers running simultaneously on millions of devices–offer cheaper, more secure record-keeping than the banking system. And, they can be used to transfer virtual currencies (like bitcoin) as proxies for traditional currency exchanges. Thus, they have potential to dramatically reduce costs.

“As blockchain technology matures, it has true disruptive potential to bring the cost of remittances to nearly zero and facilitate instant secure payments anywhere in the world,” writes Talie Baker in an Aite Group report about emerging remittance startups.

Abra’s customers never know they’ve just undergone a bitcoin transaction.

Abracadabra

Abra, which says it can reduce transaction costs by up to 90%, has an ingenious way around the international settlements system. It uses bitcoin to transfer value instead. You load money from a bank account or human “teller,” to a mobile phone wallet. Abra converts the money into bitcoin, transfers it across the digital currency’s blockchain, then settles the amount in a local currency on the other end.

Importantly, customers never know they’ve just undergone a bitcoin transaction: Abra’s app looks and feels like any one of dozens of money transfer apps (like Venmo). And Abra also offers a service for people who don’t have bank accounts. It signs up “tellers” in different countries who, like Uber drivers, act as “human ATMs” on its behalf. Using the app, you find someone nearby willing to convert your cash to bitcoin. You meet up, hand over what you want to send via Abra, and the teller takes a small fee for offering the service (they set the rate themselves). In such a way, Abra hopes to build out an extensive network of agents, but without making a hefty investment in infrastructure.

Having launched in 2016 in the U.S.-Philippines corridor, in March the company expanded to 155 countries and now accepts and disburses money in 54 local currencies. Abra, which has received capital from American Express Ventures and other high-profile VCs, charges no fees for transferring money (though you need to pay your teller if you don’t want to use the bank account method). It makes money on the exchange rate, though it claims to offer better prices than Western Union.

Barhydt says Abra has tellers in 150 cities so far. Each has to undergo a one-to-one interview to ensure suitability. Most are already trading in bitcoin either independently or via a digital currency exchange (like Kraken).

Unlike other remittance startups, Abra doesn’t have banking licenses in all its locations, instead classifying itself as “non-custodial” and therefore exempt from regulations. Circle, on the other hand, uses bitcoin for transfers but takes possession of funds during transfers. It’s focused less on unbanked consumers and remittances, though that’s also part of its target business.

As Baker says in her report, using bitcoin is not without risks, because bitcoin’s legality is still questioned in some places. “Bitcoin is still an experimental currency in active development, and nobody can predict its staying power. It is not an official currency, and some jurisdictions even consider it illegal,” she notes (though Baker is excited by Abra and Circle, describing them in an email as “viable business models” with the potential to give Western Union and MoneyGram “a run for the money.”)

Allaire, at Circle, expects the exoticness of blockchain and bitcoin to retreat into the background as the technologies gain wider acceptance, including for remittance payments. “Consumers don’t care about the name of the technology. They want services that let them do things faster and cheaper,” he says. Backed by Goldman Sachs, Circle is already transacting more than $1 billion a year.

Western Union is still working out its approach to blockchain and bitcoin. It has invested in Digital Currency Group, a major fund for such startups, and last year it ran a small pilot program with Ripple, a payment protocol provider. But Thompson says the trial didn’t deliver “significant business value” or “return sufficient value for our shareholders,” and the idea isn’t being pursued.

For the moment, Western Union isn’t prepared to tear up its existing business, even as it migrates to mobile and Facebook Messenger. “We feel that the investment we’ve made in our infrastructure, our team, our processes and policies are our secret sauce, and that’s why Western Union has been in business for 165 years,” Thompson says.

Maybe so. But, with all the startups gunning for its business, Western Union is going to have to work harder than ever to maintain its position. The next few years will dictate if Western Union can last another 165 years or whether its high-fee model–one that appears injurious to many immigrants around the world–can survive in its current form.

Heineken’s Anti-Pepsi Ad, Ikea’s Real Blue Bag: Top 5 Ads Of The Week

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See, sometimes brands can get it right. Like, really right. Like, let’s crack open a Heineken and talk about it right. Right? The past few weeks seem to have been custom designed to leave brands so bloodied and bruised, they look like they just got bumped from a United flight. Heyooh. All the hubris (Pepsi!), ol’ fashioned core audience alienation (Shea Moisture!), and well . . . physical violence coupled with tone-deaf response (Guess who!), brought into sharp focus the challenges in brand relationships with culture–how they attempt to reflect it, influence it, or are forced to confront it. And then along comes Heineken. Onward!

Heineken “Worlds Apart”

What: An experiment to illustrate that, despite our differences in social and political opinions, it’s best to chat about it all over a beer.

Who: Heineken, Publicis London

Why We Care: If you read that description you know immediately this could’ve gone horribly wrong. At best, a great idea that comes across forced and awkward. At worst, the brand looks like a culture tourist, crassly slapping a logo on a profound cultural issue. This was neither, and it was pretty awesome.

Ikea “How to identify an original Ikea Frakta bag”

What: A fun response ad to French fashion house Balenciaga unveiling a new leather bag that looks strikingly like Ikea’s iconic blue shopping bag, but cost $2,144 more than the Swedish retailer’s.

Who: Ikea, Acne/Ikea Creative Hub

Why We Care: Brand cheekiness at its best. How can you not laugh at a $2,145 bag that’s the spitting image of its 99-cent inspiration?

Nespresso “Comin’ Home”

What: Nespresso answers the age-old question of what it would’ve been like to see George Clooney in classic flicks like Psycho; Easy Rider; The Muppets Movie; Seabiscuit; and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

Who: Nespresso, McCann Erickson

Why We Care: Here’s an ad that’s so transparently revels in its own gimmick that it’s practically unbearable. And yet, somehow the combination of Clooney’s inherent Clooneyness, and the chosen movies and scenes, it can’t help but be charming as all hell. Dammit.

Spotify “Dinner”

What: A reminder from the streaming service that everyone has their own emotional connection to music. Even your mom.

Who: Spotify

Why We Care: It’s not the first time Savage Garden’s declaration of love has been used in an ad–remember the greatest Valentine’s Day sports ad ever?–but here it’s hilariously utilized to sell Spotify’s family plan. Obviously inspired by HBO’s amazing 2014 “Awkward Family Viewing” campaign, it’s an admirable audio nod to its predecessor.

StubHub “Machines”

What: A reminder from StubHub, of all places, that in the dystopian future of the machine apocalypse, you may have some regrets.

Who: StubHub,Goodby Silverstein & Partners

Why We Care: Look, we all know the new machine age is coming. I mean, many of us are actually hoping it will get here sooner rather than later. But here StubHub goes completely off the rails with an unexpectedly funny take on its product. We all have our own version of Sia. For the love of AI, go do it before it’s too late.

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