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This Milk Company Is Willing To Bet You’re Not Actually Lactose Intolerant

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In 2016, overall sales of milk dropped 5%, representing a loss of more than a billion dollars for dairy producers. That caps more than 10 years of declining sales of conventional milk. Amid a new environment in which more than 25% of Americans now identify as lactose intolerant (and many more others avoiding animal products), the stuff from cows is losing market share to “alternative milks.” To stop the churn, the industry has fallen to desperate measures: A Wisconsin state legislator recently introduced the Dairy Pride Act, which would place limits on what exactly deserves to be called “milk,” claiming that many nut, seed, plant, and algae alternatives are often less nutritious, which may mislead customers about their health benefits and damage the inherent value of that once classically cow-made drink.

One bovine-based company has taken a different tactic: Why not sell real milk to those supposedly lactose intolerant people instead? That’s the promise of The a2 Milk Company, an Australia-based venture, which formally entered the U.S. market in 2015 after success in Australia and China. The company’s basic argument is that while milk may cause digestive issues, most Americans who believe they are lactose intolerant actually aren’t.

Lactose-fearing consumers have their own internal “feedback mechanism” to tell pretty quickly if the beverage works or not. [Photo: A2]
“The reality is, research shows only 4% to 5% of people in the U.S. are really lactose intolerant,” says a2 Milk U.S. CEO Blake Waltrip. “So what that leaves is a huge swath of consumers, say 65 million or 70 million people in the U.S., who have a milk intolerance that is very likely not lactose-[based]. It’s something else.” Waltrip’s big bet is that the true problem is from exposure to what’s called A1 beta-casein protein, which only certain cows produce and has also been linked to digestion issues. While it’s only associated with two-thirds of cows, the milk industry combines product from numerous herds into large batches, so A1 gets swirled into nearly everything that’s offered in traditional cartons and gallons at the grocery store.

To solve that, a2 Milk doesn’t source from A1 protein-making cows at all. They recruit farmers to corral only those capable of producing a differently structured variation called A2, which one-third of cows still do. The result is still milk. It has the exact same nutritional value any A1 iteration. Except this version should be drinkable by nearly everyone.

Cows didn’t use to cause this kind of trouble. Roughly 1,000 years ago, scientists hypothesize that cows produced only what’s been classified as A2 beta-casein, a different type of protein that didn’t cause any stomach problems. That changed with industrial farming practices, when herds were rounded up, bred often, and put into milking lines to increase yields. At some point, there was a genetic mutation that occurred within some European herds, leading to lineages that now produce either entirely A1-based proteins or an A1 and A2 blend, along with just A2-specific cows from those who don’t carry the trait. “The A1 protein is very likely the culprit creating that gut inflammation in these people’s bodies, and that creates symptoms that mimic the same kinds of symptoms you would experience if you were lactose intolerant,” Waltrip says.

Sales of specialty milk have risen 16% year-over-year as of late March. [Photo: A2]
To avoid that, a2 Milk producers start with a bovine genetic test (it requires a hair sample) to spot A2-specific cows, and then milks those separately, requiring farmers to segregate their herds and do numerous tests to ensure everything remains pure during processing.

It’s a complicated selling point that ultimately requires a leap of faith. “I sometimes say this is . . . a completely natural innovation,” says Waltrip, who notes tactfully that lactose-fearing consumers have their own internal “feedback mechanism” to tell pretty quickly if the beverage works or not. “If I have a milk sensitivity, I’m going to know within an hour or two whether this solved my problem, and I think that’s pretty phenomenal in terms of consumer benefit,” he says. (For the record, Waltrip used to avoid conventional milk because of his own digestive issues, which appear linked to A1 sensitivity. He now happily drinks his own product.)

The a2 Milk Company’s offerings cost about a third more than conventional milk, as much as $1.50 more per gallon. Because it has the same nutritional profile as any other milk, though, it solves the alt-milk nutrition issue: The exact product claim is “six times more calcium than soy milk, eight times more protein of almond milk, and six times more potassium than rice milk.” That still doesn’t help consumers who might be uncomfortable with the ecological footprint of dairy operations, but it does help struggling farmers. Waltrip says he pays his ranches a premium to do the work because it’s more intensive.

In supermarket, A2 lives alongside lactose-free options in the specialty milk category; sales in that category have risen 16% year-over-year as of late March. In 2016, the company, which is also available in Australia and China, earned $222 million worldwide. In the first half of 2017, overall sales are up 84% year-over-year. They’re now expanding nationally through a network of different retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway, Kroger, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Publix.

Waltrip knows a thing or two about selling seemingly healthful groceries. He worked previously as the CEO of Ancient Harvest, which delivers quinoa-based foods, and before that as chief marketing officer at Celestial Seasonings tea. He also supports the Dairy Act. “We . . . agree that plant-based alternatives should not be able to use the term ‘milk,’” he writes in an email, noting that “plant-based alternatives do not deliver . . . nutritional benefits in the same way.” (That’s not to say that innovators can’t offer an even more enticing substitute for some people: Pea-based Ripple, for instance, promises similar protein levels and 50% more calcium than standard 2% milk.)

As with all aspiring entrepreneurs, Waltrip sees a2 Milk not just as a milk company but as something much bigger: expanding to capture more of the shopping cart, through lines of yogurt, cheese, cream, and ice cream. Meanwhile, the company already has a line of infant formula that’s doing well overseas. “Look, we started as a milk company and that was our foundation, but what we really are is a dairy nutrition company,” he says.


I’m Facebook’s Head Of People—Here’s What We’re Hiring For Right Now (And Why)

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When I joined Facebook in 2008, we could’ve fit all of the company’s employees into a single movie theater. There were just a few hundred of us, mostly based in Palo Alto. Now, nine years later, we’d need a stadium. As the company has grown nearly 35 times—to 17,000 people in more than 50 offices in 30 countries—we’ve recruited entire teams we never imagined we’d need.

So it’s no surprise that our recruiting process has had to evolve with us. Here are three key factors we want job candidates at Facebook to show our recruiters and hiring managers—no matter at what level, on which team, or where in the world we’re hiring.


Related:This Is How To Get Hired At Facebook In 2017


1. Your Strengths (Well Proven Or Otherwise)

Yes, this sounds totally obvious, but it isn’t in practice. Very few companies actually work hard enough to understand and identify candidates’ talents, then successfully match those to their hiring needs. In fact, some recruiting experts suggest that past performance isn’t a good indicator of how someone will do on the job—that hiring for potential is often smarter than hiring for performance.

But sometimes the things somebody’s already done really do hint at even greater things to come. In both cases, it makes sense to focus on strengths. People in jobs that play up their talents and let them do work they enjoy are more engaged and perform better than people in roles that don’t play to their strengths.

So I like to ask candidates, “What were you doing on your very best day at work?”—and then give them a hint: “It was probably a day when you lost track of time because you were so engrossed in your work.” We want you to do that not just on your best day but every day.

2. The Skills To Build It Yourself

Builders look at the world with fresh eyes. They see things that are good, but could be better, and figure out how to make it so. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg still really likes to code; just last year he built an artificial intelligence system for his own home. We look for candidates who’ve got that same building mind-set, whether they’re applying for executive roles or internships.

Hyla Wallis, a university recruiting programs manager, who hires hundreds of Facebook’s interns, told Fast Company recently about “a student who actually collected a database to show events or activities [and] volunteering opportunities within their community.” This information wasn’t all in one spot, so the candidate “built something and shared it out,” Wallis said.

If you can show a hiring manager at Facebook something you yourself thought of, put together on your own, and then convinced other people to start using, you’ll stand a better chance of sticking out.


Related:Here’s What It Takes To Start Your Career At Facebook, BuzzFeed, Nike, And Refinery29


3. Comfort With Learning The Hard Way

Tomorrow’s technology depends on the imagination of the people we hire today, which demands genuine intellectual curiosity, not just a great GPA. This kind of learning often involves risk-taking and resilience—and it isn’t always easy to find.

While other companies might look for people with a constant stream of successes to point to, we look for a steep learning curve. Have you tried something really hard and failed the first time, and the second, maybe even the third—and learned from it? You can’t envision and iterate on brand-new platforms, devices, or uses for AI and virtual reality without a deep and serious love of learning—not to mention the resilience to push through the stumbles along the way.

So when you’re interviewing for a job at Facebook, don’t hesitate to talk about the blunders you’ve made in the pursuit of big ideas—we want to hear about those as much as your wins. If you’re a builder with a learning mind-set, give your strengths some real thought first: What are you good at? What have you tried to make? And what did you learn from the experience—no matter how it went? If you can explain that, then Facebook might be the right place for you to do the very best work of your career.


Lori Goler is Head of People at Facebook.

I’ve Planned The Met Gala For The Last 8 Years. Here’s What I’ve Learned

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Sylvana Durrett is out of breath, but that’s not completely due to a massive workload. The cofounder of the newly launched children’s e-tailer Maisonette is simultaneously working her other job as Vogue’s special projects consultant. Her main responsibility right now: Planning the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit–also known as the Met Gala–that’s happening on May 1. Oh, and she’s nearly 34 weeks pregnant with her third child.

This is no small feat.

For the uninitiated, the Met Gala is a sumptuous, star-studded charity event that revolves around a central exhibition in the Costume Institute. (This year’s cohosts are Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams.) The 2017 event celebrates the Japanese avant-garde designer Rei Kawakubo, marking the Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since 1983. The gala plays host to upwards of 600 guests, but the size varies from year to year. Durrett would not discuss any numbers, but tickets for the invite-only party in 2016 cost $30,000 a piece, and tables went for $275,000. Not everyone purchases a ticket. Brands will invite celebrities, and the gala’s chairwoman and Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, invites up-and-coming designers.

However, under the supervision of Wintour, Durrett is the one managing every aspect of pulling this off, from schematics to seating charts. Her efforts behind the scenes were part of the documentary First Monday in May, which chronicled the planning of the Met’s China exhibit and the accompanying gala. Durrett was lauded as a scene stealer. A more appropriate word might have been “steeler,” for her unwavering calm in the face of bringing together such disparate elements as negotiating a performance fee with Rihanna and orchestrating the installation of a 30-foot-tall “porcelain” vase constructed of thousands of white and blue roses.

Durrett has been heading up the planning of the gala and 35 other events a year at Vogue officially since 2009 as director of special projects. She started as Wintour’s assistant in 2003 and worked her way up to the role that she stepped away from last year to launch her business. Even as consultant for the gala planning, Durrett says the wheels are set in motion nearly a year before each event. “Simple things like getting a seating chart blown up 100 times,” she explains. “There’s just so much detail. We have a whole fashion GPS system that tracks the guests and their arrival times. From the red carpet to dinner, there’s so many steps in between.” On the day of the event, says Durrett, the full-time staff of five are joined by about 100 others involved in every aspect of pulling the whole thing off.

Through the years, Durrett has learned what works and what doesn’t, not only for the gala, but for her career. Here are some of the lessons she shared.

On Taking Over Such A Big Responsibility

Especially having worked at Vogue for as long as I had at that point, the entire office is working on it [in some capacity], so you have a different perspective. There was always this perfection of the Met [Gala], and we all sort of looked in awe at the team that put it on every year.

​So once I was sort of called upon to lead that, I was understandably stressed and overwhelmed. But I think that’s the beauty of the way that Anna [Wintour] mentors and leads. Working for her and working for Vogue, you get this great work ethic, and you learn to delegate and make things smaller and focus on those things and then build as you go.

On How Not To Feel Overwhelmed

Understand what you do well and what you need help with. I think we’re only as good as the people that work with us. For me, I think day one, it was about building a team who brought a skill set that really complemented my own. When you’re dealing with such an enormous entity, something that feels so big and overwhelming, it was about breaking it down and making sure that you compartmentalize each part of it, and you give each one of those parts its own committee.

​And so that’s the way that we work, which is we break it down and we have lanes. Everyone’s in charge of their lane. I make sure that at the end of the day, all of those lanes are moving in the right direction before Anna sees them, and I think that helps in making it less overwhelming. You are able to take one point at a time.

On What She Will Delegate . . .

Once you’ve been doing something for a while, it becomes second nature. I’d never say it’s easy, because it’s not. Every year has its own challenges. But you get into a rhythm and a cadence and you come to lean on people, year after year, who you know won’t disappoint you. And so once you get to that place where you have a trusted group, you know that delegation becomes easier and easier. And you’re still responsible at the end of the day for anything that happens. ​So it’s obviously incredibly important.

I should probably be less anal these days. But I’m not. I try to remind myself that these people know what they’re doing, and you’ve entrusted them with this amount of responsibility, and that’s okay. The exact things that I’m comfortable delegating really comes down to minutiae. It’s the things that I shouldn’t be spending my time on any longer, because the event will suffer from it. I was sitting there typing or printing out names, it’s not a good use of my time.

. . . And What She Won’t

I’m incredibly involved in [the seating arrangements]. That is something Anna and I work on very closely together, just because it’s the essence of the event. It’s why people come, and keep coming. It isn’t just about fashion or business or art. It’s about all of it. We take pride in our seating because people routinely come up to us and say, “I’m so happy you sat me next to this person. I would have never thought to talk to them.”

There’s networking going on, and there are fragrance campaigns that are set because of the people who are sitting next to each other. So it’s a fun way to get people involved and excited about talking to new people and learning about new industries. People have come to trust that we are very cognizant of what we’re doing, and that fun is definitely what we have in mind when we’re seating. That’s why we take it so seriously.

On What To Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned

We’ve had anywhere between 500 and 800 attendees. Eight hundred was probably when we decided we were too big. We do want the experience to feel intimate for our guests, so in the past few years, we’ve really scaled back and dropped numbers by almost 200 or 300 people. We also wanted to be mindful of budgets. We are constantly evolving and learning from all sort of things.

You can’t please everybody. We always like to think there’s not a bad [seat] in the house, which really there isn’t. You have to come away confident in the notion that you are doing your best, and that inevitably not everyone will be happy. But we have a pretty good track record. The instances are few and far between, and we always try and work more closely with them the next year to manage expectations.

On The Importance Of An Advocate

I’m thankful to Anna. She stands behind me and her decisions and our decisions, and so it’s nice to have somebody in your corner who is telling you you didn’t do a terrible job, and that this happens, and that this is life. The next day will come and the sun does come up. So you try to take it in stride. At the end of the day, we’re planning a really, really beautiful and fun party to celebrate this incredible exhibition. And so you have to try to have some perspective as well. While we certainly aim to please, if anyone’s upset, you have to continue with your life.

On Why Boundaries Are Good For Creativity

There are elements every year that we like to change that are like tent poles. For example, the big reveal when guests come is the information booth when you enter into the great hall. If you’d go into the Met every other day, it’s just a circular booth with brochures on it. And we have to make that into something incredible every year. It’s an opportunity that’s a challenge on a yearly basis, how to make it cooler, bigger, more interactive. So while that’s the same thing every year, it changes.

The first year I planned the Met Gala, we had this 50-foot helium balloon that we brought in on a truck from the middle of the country. It said “American Woman” on it and it was this incredible spectacle. But then once we have an idea, we have to figure out how to make it happen. And a lot of times, it can’t happen, and so we have to start over again and think about another way to do it.  Obviously we want to be incredibly respectful of the museum–it’s harder because you have a lot of restrictions– but we also want our guests to have a new and surprising experience every time.

On Balancing Entrepreneurship, Work, And Family

This is my third child, and I’ve been pregnant for two other galas. So the first time I think was the most daunting. I kept telling myself I knew I could do it. But then I didn’t really know if I could. Then once I did, I felt like, “Okay, I guess I can do this.” I’m obviously very cognizant of my own energy and my own limitations. But it’s a nice distraction from [pregnancy]. I really try to use what I’ve learned at Vogue, which is that you delegate and you’re more efficient with your time. It’s not about face time. It’s not about being the martyr. It’s about getting your work done and then taking the time that you need. And particularly when you’re pregnant, you need a little bit more time.

On Anna Wintour As An Incubator For Women-Owned Businesses

This woman is incredibly decisive. She is the queen of delegating. She’s the queen of hiring the best people at what they do. So it’s hard for that not to rub off on you. She’s so accessible. As her employee, we’ve had so many conversations over the years about my next move and what I should be thinking about. And she’s been such an ambassador and a champion of anything I’ve wanted to do. She treats all her employees that way.

I remember when I interviewed for the assistant job, she asked me then, “What do you see yourself doing in life?” And the answer she wanted to hear was not something at Vogue. She likes people who have this vision for their lives, who are more than just about the magazine and fashion. She likes a well-rounded, interesting human being, who has a ton of interests and is well-balanced. That’s why she has such a strong magazine, because she cultivates these really great teams.

When I talked to her about Maisonette, she was not only excited, she’s been incredibly helpful. The magazine covered our launch. So it does not come as a surprise to me that so many of her former employees are so successful. And I think we all sort of carry that with us.


Related:What It’s Like To Be Interviewed By Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, And Anna Wintour 


 

Would You Get Picked? New Pedigree Ad Turns The Tables On Dog Adoption

Your Creative Calendar: 77 Things To See, Hear, And Read This May

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There are pretty much only two movie seasons each year, Summer Escape and Oscar Bait. Although the first of the two categories is sometimes indistinguishable from March and April fare (hello, F8 of the Furious) there’s something indelibly summer-y about the cinema of May. This year is no exception with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 kicking in the Summer Escape door, like an emergency hatch on a space ship. Lest that intergalactic comic book adventure not signal summertime enough for you, the MTV Movie Awards–now rebranded as  the Movie and TV Awards–rolls in a couple days later, reminding viewers of a certain age about summers of yore. Have a look below at Fast Company’s Creative Calendar to see what else lies in store, in the worlds of music, books, TV and beyond.

Movies In Theaters

Movies To Watch At Home

Albums You Should Hear

Things To Watch On Your TV Or Computer

Books To Read

  • One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul, out May 2.
  • Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, out May 9.
  • Trajectory by Richard Russo, out May 2.
  • The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris, out May 2.
  • Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane, out May 9.
  • Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, out May 2.
  • The Leavers by Lisa Ko, out May 2.
  • Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley, out May 16.

[Photo Mash Up: Adriana C. Sánchez for Fast Company; Source Photos: War Machine: Francois Duhamel, courtesy of Netflix; Anne: Caitlin Cronenberg, courtesy of Netflix; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Eric Liebowitz, courtesy of Netflix; House of Cards: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword: courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures; Alien: Covenant: Mark Rogers, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Chuck: Sarah Shatz, courtesy of IFC Films; Downward Dog: Craig Sjodin, courtesy of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.; I Love Dick: Leann Mueller, courtesy of Amazon; House of Cards: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix; Master of None: courtesy of Netflix]

How To Write A Cover Letter That Doesn’t Just Recap Your Resume

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All too often, people feel that they’ve already mentioned everything worthy of note in their resume, and, unfortunately, their cover letters just become shortened, regurgitated versions of that same information. That’s a bad move—here’s how to avoid it.

Weave Your Bullet Points Into A Narrative

This isn’t something you want to do. Instead of a mirror image of your resume, think of the cover letter as your opportunity to expand on some of the key points that were included there (while also showcasing a bit of your personality). Cover letters let you use full sentences, so that means you have a lot more freedom to expand upon whatever your resume enumerates much more concisely. In other words, you can explain why you’re the perfect fit for this particular company based on your experience, rather than just listing what you’ve done for which employers.

For example, instead of saying, “I was in charge of assigning quarterly budgets,” you’re much better off using that space to elaborate into, “Through the process of establishing and assigning quarterly budgets, I gained a deep knowledge of AcmeCorp’s internal financial systems—and I also became adept at negotiating between multiple stakeholders across the business to come to consensus.”


Related:I Had Career Experts Make Over My Terrible Cover Letter


Talk Up Yours Skills, Not Your Excitement

First, it’s important to note that while you don’t want to copy and paste the contents of your resume into a new document, slap a “Dear Mr. Smith” on it, and then simply call it a day, there are a few things on your resume that are worthy of some repetition here.

Your key skills are one of them: You don’t want to take a chance of anyone missing the things you truly excel at. Try pulling out two or three key skills you want to be sure to emphasize (by looking at both the job description and your resume). Then, for each of the skills you choose, think back on some specific projects, achievements, or assignments that directly relate to your expertise in that specific area.

Next, explain those skills in your cover letter. One effective way to do this is to include a sentence like, “As a candidate, here’s what I bring to the table:” after your introduction. You can follow that up by breaking down your two or three key skills, with an expanded explanation of how you’ve used them in previous employment experiences—as well as how you’ll use them to benefit the company.

Lots of job applicants emphasize why they want that particular job. But that’s a common mistake. It’s important to remember that the hiring manager already knows you want the job—he or she is looking out for the best fit for the role, not necessarily the person who wants it most. So make sure to highlight the value you’re offering, and resist the temptation to go on and on about how much you’d love to land the position.

Share An Anecdote

Again, this is your chance to go beyond bullet points and share a little more of both your story and your personality. Remember, hiring managers hire people, not robots.

Kicking off your cover letter with a brief but attention-grabbing anecdote will demonstrate a little more about who you are personally. And you can bet it’ll stand out a lot more than a standard “I’m writing to express my interest in the Sales Coordinator position” line. The more you grab their attention, the better your chances are at actually having your letter read.

Of course, any anecdote you tell should be related to the position you are hoping to fill. Perhaps, for example, you first discovered your passion for sales while working at your childhood lemonade stand. Or maybe a recent volunteer opportunity ignited your interest in the new career field of educational consulting. Whatever it is, craft a narrative about how your experiences led you to this very job.

Here’s an example:

When I was growing up, all I wanted to be was one of those people who pretend to be statues on the street. Thankfully, my career goals have become a little more practical over the years, but I still love to draw a crowd and entertain the masses—passions that make me the perfect Trade Show Coordinator.

My last boss once told me that my phone manner could probably defuse an international hostage situation. I’ve always had a knack for communicating with people—the easy-going and the difficult alike—and I’d love to bring that skill to your Office Manager position.

Last December, I ousted our company’s top salesperson from his spot at the top of the sales leaderboard—and I’ve been there ever since. Now I’m ready for my next big challenge, and the Sales Manager role at X company just might be it.

While you won’t find the title “Community Manager” listed on my resume, I’ve actually been bringing people together online and off for three years while running my own blog and series of meet-ups.

This cover letter doesn’t read anything like the candidate’s resume—and that’s a good thing.


This article is adapted fromThe New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career by Alexandra Cavoulacos and Kathryn Minshew, cofounders of The Muse. It is reprinted with permission.

Maybe It’s Time To Treat Facebook Like A Public Utility

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Here’s a thought experiment: What would happen if every few weeks an anchor on Bloomberg TV or Cheddar pulled out a gun and shot and killed someone live on air? Those companies would shut down the program as fast as you can say “over-the-top television service.” And if such acts of violence happened that often on your local TV news broadcast, that station would probably be taken off the air and face hefty fines.

Such questions inevitably arise every time a horrific act of violence is streamed on Facebook Live or uploaded and shared in a post shared on the platform. In just the last week and a half, the social network made headlines when a disturbed man in Thailand streamed on Facebook Live the murder of his young daughter in front of his wife, and when Steve Stephens filmed his murder of an elderly man in Cleveland and uploaded the video to Facebook. In both cases, it took time to remove the horrific videos—only after 24 hours for the Cleveland video and after a Thai government official and the BBC alerted Facebook for the infanticide video. And those are just the offending videos that we know about. Who knows what other content is being uploaded as we speak?

Facebook admits this is a problem, and says it’s doing everything it can via artificial intelligence and human moderators to filter out such content. Yet it keeps happening, and with 1.8 billion monthly users and a strong focus on video, it’s bound to become a perennial problem for the company.

That’s because Facebook–and other social media giants like Twitter and YouTube–treat their content somewhat duplicitously. On the one hand, these juggernauts rake in billions of ad dollars against the content people upload. At the same time, Facebook doesn’t consider itself responsible for this material and argues that it’s just a platform for the distribution of content by its users. (This is why the Thai government, in a recent example, is unable to sue Facebook.) Were Facebook legally deemed a publisher and not a platform, it would have to dramatically rethink how it approaches uploaded content.

But given that Facebook makes advertising revenue off of all the content published on it, why shouldn’t we begin treating Facebook more like a publisher? Or, if you want to get even crazier, why not look at Facebook videos as something akin to broadcast TV, thus under the regulation of the FCC? This government agency has guidelines about what can and cannot be broadcast—and it’s clear that murders and acts of torture wouldn’t make the cut (at least not outside of a news-gathering capacity).

This, of course, is a farfetched idea. It’s highly unlikely–especially in our current anti-regulatory political climate–that any lawmaker would seriously consider classifying Facebook as a broadcaster, to say nothing of rewriting digital content laws. In fact, the Trump administration is already targeting net neutrality rules, arguing that high-speed internet service should no longer be treated like a public utility.

The laws protecting these platforms from being liable for their content were written in the 1990s, and digital culture has dramatically changed since then. These once-tiny startups tinkering with the idea of “online content” are now leading the business world. They make billions of dollars off of uploaded material while eschewing any responsibility for it. In the wake of near-weekly social media fails, perhaps it’s time to force all these companies–Facebook, YouTube, Twitter–to be responsible for their content, just like any publisher.

Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things—who writes and researches the monopolistic tendencies of Silicon Valley companies—says the legal questions stretche back decades. He cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a copyright law that limits liability for websites that host infringing content. As Taplin describes it to me, this act essentially “gave these companies what’s known as a safe harbor [so that] no one can sue them for anything that’s on their platform.” In short, this perennial problem of Facebook avoiding responsibility for murder videos uploaded to its platform stems from the DMCA.

Similarly, section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is what grants platforms legal immunity from the content they publish. But, as Ars Technica points out, it’s getting fuzzier and fuzzier whether or not what Facebook does with uploaded material means it should still be protected by this clause. As it exerts more control over how it delivers content–all in the name of maximizing ad revenue–it pushes more toward the actions of a publisher and not a platform, even if Facebook continues to claim it is unable to control what’s uploaded.

So maybe it’s time to rethink how the law views Facebook’s content. Just like other services that have become vital parts of Americans’ everyday lives—such as electricity, water, and increasingly broadband internet services—maybe Facebook itself is too important to be left unregulated, growing in size and impact with every passing day.

As Taplin puts it, the idea that these companies have no control over what the users put on their platform is “actually a fiction.” Websites like Facebook and YouTube have quickly figured out how to filter out things like pornography. The reason, he posits, is that raunchy content is unseemly for advertisers–they would pull their funding immediately if it was associated with porn. The only content that Facebook and other companies seem to feel responsible for–and act swiftly on–are posts that interrupt the flow of ad dollars. The way to stop this, says Taplin, is to remove the safe harbor so these companies become legally responsible for what’s posted.

This is precisely why shocking and abhorrent content continues to be uploaded onto this site–Facebook has no business imperative to filter out this content. Other online broadcasters do; they are legally and financially responsible for the material they put up. And until companies like Facebook are forced to confront the consequences of their users’ most disturbing instincts, the issue will surely persist.

Here’s How Heineken Made That Awesome Antidote To Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner Ad

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You’ve seen the ad already, right? If not, please take a moment to acquaint yourself.

We’ve already gushed about it as the perfect counterpoint to Pepsi’s tone-deaf take on social conscience but still wondered how the brand, along with creative and PR partners Publicis London and Edelman, pulled it off.

We emailed with Heineken’s UK Marketing Director Cindy Tervoort about the ad, how the idea came about, the insight behind it, and the biggest challenge making it happen.

Fast Company: How did the idea for Worlds Apart/#OpenYourWorld come about?

Cindy Tervoort: Heineken wanted to bring meaning to its value of openness. It’s been a process of about six months to deliver this campaign, and it began with the realization that perhaps we’re not as open as we all think. We’ve got used to only hearing views that are the same as our own in our cozy echo-chambers, and that results in people becoming more polarized and divided. At times we’re all guilty of labeling people based on their views, rather than understanding the person. Heineken wanted to challenge this. As a brand whose end line is ‘Open Your World’,  we wanted to not just say we believe in openness, but seek to prove that even the most divided people can open up when they find something that connects them.

But we also wanted some science to prove when we connect with one another we become more open and it’s a good thing, so we turned to Dr. Chris Brauer of Goldsmiths University, a leading expert in human behavior at Goldsmiths University. He says the absolute core of common ground is truly hearing the interests and concerns of another person, openly and without judgment.

FC: What was the most significant consumer insight that’s reflected in the work?

CT: There is more that unites than divides us. Despite our differences, we can always find something that connects us. The simple act of sitting down and having a conversation can be the first step to opening up and overcoming our prejudices. It is better to engage, rather than to pretend our differences don’t exist.

This insight led us to partner with The Human Library, a unique not-for-profit organization that uses conversation to challenge stereotypes. Every ‘book’ in The Human Library is a real person with an extraordinary background–from street sleepers and refugees to transgender and people with life-changing illnesses. Each ‘book’ can be loaned out for a conversation with someone you may not otherwise engage with.

With this campaign, we feel it important to not just be saying but doing. Through our Human Library partnership, we will be bringing people together to overcome prejudices through a series of events which will happen in the UK later in the year.

FC: What was the biggest creative challenge in getting it done?

CT: Getting the right participants was crucial. We wanted to find people who had strong opinions that they felt passionately about from both sides of the argument.

But it was also vital that they had no idea what the experiment would involve, or why we had chosen them–no easy task. We spent two months searching through varying methods (a press and web search, internet forums and chatrooms, approaching specific bodies or organizations, local groups, communities) and simply interviewed them to get to know them. As they stepped into that warehouse that was the first time they even realized the experiment would be with someone else.

FC: Were you confident the subjects would get along in the end? Were there any cut out?

CT: We designed the experiment together with Dr. Govinda Clayton, a conflict resolution specialist, but regardless of planning it’s always a gamble when you film an unrehearsed and unscripted piece like this. You never know what you’re going to get. The only control we had was some written instructions for the pairs to follow and the occasional guidance from the director on a loud speaker if they got stuck on a task. So you can imagine when each pair met each other for the first time, we all had our noses pressed to the monitors to see what would happen. We were confident though that when you give people the chance to get to know each other without seeing only a label, everyone can connect.

We filmed nine pairings in total, and three were made into the film. But all of the pairings were amazing to watch, so we’ll be creating some new films with a few of those pairings to be shown too.


This Startup Wants To Be The Antidote To Exploitive On-Demand Platforms

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Five years ago, Chanson Cooley gave up her job as a high-level executive assistant at talent agency Wilhelmina to become a massage therapist. On her way out, she tapped into the concierge services she had become friendly with and also hooked up with a booking agent. It was a good start, but she soon discovered that some potential clients wanted more than just a massage. 

“Very early on I was kind of exposed to people wanting afternoon delights, which I wasn’t going to partake in,” she tells Fast Company. Concerned about her safety, she immediately decided to limit the kinds of clients she worked with to just women and the occasional couple. She also started sticking to trusted referrals. Over the years, as her business blossomed, Cooley continued to use a booking agent, who handled scheduling and payments for her, but that led to its own problems. “I wasn’t getting any new clients and she was taking 30%,” says Cooley, referring to her agent.

This issue of booking agents taking too much money from independent contractors isn’t a new or particularly unusual problem. But it’s one that is being exacerbated by a rash of on-demand platforms promising everything from last-minute massages to same-day house cleaning. In an era of widespread entrepreneurship, there are plenty of middlemen that will gladly connect you with more work—services like Handy, Zeel, and Glamsquad, to name a few—but they will also take a fat slice of your earnings. For workers trying to survive in the freelance economy, it can be a Faustian bargain. 

“These people feel commoditized and marginalized by a lot of these on-demand platforms that take exorbitant fees and actually don’t want them to have relationships with their clients,” says Scott Belsky, founder of a new platform called Prefer, which seeks to be the antidote to exploitative intermediaries. 

Prefer officially launches in New York today, flush with 600 active service professionals. The platform taps into a person’s address book and lets them recommend service providers to friends. Rather than connecting people to a giant matrix of anybodies, Prefer enables small networks of friends to selectively trade credentials for their favorite yoga instructors, handy-people, or home cleaners. So far 1,800 people have joined.

Prefer supports messaging and, for service providers, booking and transaction processing. In exchange for these services, it charges a 3% fee on credit card settlements to merchants and an additional 2% fee on any appointments made with new clients found on the platform.

[Photo: courtesy of Prefer]
Dacia Jarrett, who runs a small cleaning service, says the arrangement is “way better” than something like Handy. She joined the on-demand cleaning platform a few years ago when she was getting started as an independent cleaner. Jarrett says she was lured by the company’s $20 per hour wage promise, but she found that after handling her own taxes and covering the expense of materials, she wasn’t making enough to support herself.

“Handy is basically a company hiring staff, saying they’re independent contractors, and they decide how much you make,” she says. “With Prefer, you’re in a network where it realizes and respects your company and it’s not based on what they think you should be paid.”

It’s All About Who You Know

Belsky is no stranger to on-demand economies. He also founded Behance, a network for creative professionals, which sold to Adobe in 2012 for $150 million. Prefer is a different kind of idea, but it will have competition. In many ways, it’s similar to the feature set that Facebook is seeking to roll out—a sort of replication of word-of-mouth testimonials. The social network with its scads of friendships wants to be able to help people connect to merchants big and small. In the last year it’s rolled out a recommendation tool that maps out suggestions from friends in your news feed. And at its F8 conference this year, Facebook Messenger announced new ways to discover business bots with which consumers can place orders or book appointments.

“Facebook would be probably our biggest competitor, because that’s where it happens today,” says Belsky. “But right now it’s not optimized for that.” While Facebook has lots of users and myriad business pages, people are unlikely to be connected to all the service providers they use. “You’re probably not friends with your accountant on Facebook,” he says.

To make Prefer effective for linking customers with businesses, he’s built what he calls a “referral graph” based on a user’s address book, where people are connected to both the services they use and their friends.

Facebook has other problems, too, says Jarrett. Ads are the primary way she finds new clients using the platform, but it hasn’t been particularly effective for her. “They would call,” she says of prospective clients. “But it may not lead to a booking and then sometimes, when they do call, they’re looking for a job.” The same is true of Thumbtack, she says. By contrast, she’s gotten eight or nine new clients since becoming active with Prefer earlier this year.   

Benchmark Capital led Prefer’s seed round, though the company declined to say how much was raised.

Belsky plans to expand to other locations, but says he needs geographic density within a market for the recommendations to work. In the meantime, he’s building a playbook for their next rollout. In addition to growing to new cities, he wants to build out more tools for managing clients and even more options for business owners to recommend other service providers. But his big hope is that this product will work across different income brackets and locales. “A lot of single parents who work have people who come into their home who are neighbors that cook for their children or babysit,” says Belsky. “Those are also people in their address book who sell their time.”

What To Do When All Your Productivity Hacks Fail You

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Imagine flying through your to-do list every day and having plenty of free time left over. Sound like a dream come true? That’s the promise of productivity hacks. But as somebody who’s tried almost all of them, I’ve found that this fantasy doesn’t always become reality.

The good news is that there are plenty of other options—in fact, thanks to the internet, I’d say almost endless. But if that sounds overwhelming to you, fear not! I’ve gone through all the most famous productivity tips and come up with alternatives for each one.


Related:How To Prevent Your Next Productivity Boost From Eventually Losing Steam 


1. Schedule Difficult Tasks For When You’re At Your Best

The Eat the Frog concept, created by author Brian Tracy, is all about doing your most important task first each day. While it can help make sure your top priority is taken care of, getting down to business first thing in the morning might not be the most convenient time for you.

So if you’re not at peak performance until later in the day, try scheduling your top task for the time that suits you best. So, whether you’re most energized after your coffee break or more motivated just before leaving the office, do your most important work then.

2. Create Tiny To-Dos You Can Complete In 10 Minutes

The Eisenhower Matrix method of classifying tasks by urgency and importance and doing them in that order can definitely work for some. But, if you struggle with getting started, the pressure of having to work on high-priority and high-urgency tasks can scare you into procrastinating.

Keep a list of tiny to-dos that you can finish in just 10 minutes and run through them first. You’ll feel motivated by the win of knocking out a couple of tasks quickly and ready to handle more serious work. Plus, you’ll probably have the cleanest desk and the most organized inbox in your office.

3. Don’t Feel Bad About Taking All The Breaks You Need

The Pomodoro Technique involves working in 25-minute intervals with five-minute breaks in between. You might find that this gives you fantastic focus. But, it might not be possible for you to get everything done in such a short time period.

When you’re more the type who likes to do tasks from start to finish in one sitting, you should adjust your plan to fit with your focus. So, feel free to sometimes stick with a task until it’s completely done, and then take a break. (No really, take that break! Studies say you need it.)


Related:Why Your Best Productivity Hacks Still Come Up Short (And What Really Needs To Change)


4. Make A “Done” List

With the “don’t do” list, you can write down the things that you know sabotage your productivity to remind yourself not to do them. But, then how do you know what you should be spending your time on?

By writing down all the tasks you complete, you see where your time goes. So, this method is a twofer: You can make better decisions when you have hard data on your work, and you’ll be motivated to keep at it when you can actually see your progress.

5. Add Tasks As You Go

Fans of the schedule-everything method say you should assign all your tasks a certain day and time in your calendar to make sure you can fit it all in. I keep wanting to return to this method myself, but seeing my crammed calendar just causes me stress.

My solution for dialing it down while still keeping an eye on timelines is to fill my calendar only once a week. So, I keep a master list with all my to-dos (broken down into the smallest tasks possible). Then, I add the tasks to my calendar on a weekly basis. I find this regular review gives me more flexibility, but still lets me meet deadlines and stay on top of longer-term projects.

6. Batch Your Tasks

The two-minute rule encourages you to do any task that takes 120 seconds or less right away. That saves you the time of writing it down and gets it taken care of. But, it can also mean that you never have time for deeper work.

Instead of reacting to things as soon as they pop up, jot them down and then later do a bunch at the same time. This prevents them from constantly interrupting your workflow, while still making sure everything gets done.


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

More From The Muse:

A Courtroom Designed For Fairness, And Other World Changing Urban Designs

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It takes an average of 37 seconds for a judge in Chicago’s Cook County to set bond: the amount of money a defendant must pay to stay out of jail before trial. When that sum is unaffordable, defendants might spend months in jail, even if they’re accused of non-violent, low-level crimes. One man who stole toothpaste and breath mints spent 308 days in jail. A pregnant woman who stole candy bars and plums spent 135 days in jail. For someone working a low-wage job, even a day or two of missed work might mean losing employment.

“Can physically altering a space change the narrative for a criminal justice system?” [Image: Cannon Design]
Judges currently make these potentially life-changing rulings inside a noisy, distracting, chaotic courtroom. Designers at CannonDesign saw improving the physical environment as one step toward fairer decisions, by allowing judges to give full attention to a defendant and clearly communicate.

“We immediately jumped at the notion: can physically altering a space, can the inclusion of design, change the narrative for a criminal justice system that has a couple of different spotlights on it right now?” says Timothy Swanson, who leads the city design practice at the Chicago office of CannonDesign.

“It’s important for designers to work on these type of government challenges because our creative work can lead to valuable change.” [Image: Cannon Design]
The CannonDesign team, working with the court system and the local Civic Consulting Alliance, spent the summer and part of the fall of 2016 observing bond court proceedings before coming up with a plan that improves acoustics, minimizes distracting movement, aligns parties with the judge, and features signage that clearly explains the bond ruling process to family members waiting in the corridor outside. The new courtroom, which won the urban design award in the 2017 World Changing Idea awards, is set to open this spring. (You can read about the rest of the finalists below.)

“It’s important for designers to work on these type of government challenges because our creative work can lead to valuable change,” Swanson says. “It’s equally important for designers to be engaged in these challenges from the outset. Often, when government agencies receive money, they need to spend it quickly and thus they may be forced to make the easiest changes in the least amount of time. However, if these agencies have engaged with designers about the challenges previously, they’re ready with a road map to act on when they do receive funding. This is key to success.”

“This can make an immediate, localized impact and it can hopefully catalyze even greater systematic improvements in the justice system.” [Image: Cannon Design]
After the bond court redesign, the designers hope to work on other courtrooms. “Given the bond court is truly the entry point for most into the judicial system, we believe there’s also strong opportunity for this to improve fairness throughout a city’s justice system and/or the national system–but we’ll need to build on it,” he says. “We can’t have people entering bond courts designed for equity and then advancing through the system into other courtrooms that don’t value their dignity. So, this can make an immediate, localized impact and it can hopefully catalyze even greater systematic improvements in the justice system.”

Here’s more about the finalists in the urban design category:

Border City

FR-EE

While Trump plans a border wall that could cost more than $20 billion, Mexican architect Fernando Romero proposes building a border city instead. Straddling the border between New Mexico, Texas, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the city would move goods and people as easily as possible rather than keeping them apart.

CitySpaces MicroPAD

Panoramic Interests

By building tiny, 160-square-foot apartments in a factory–at a size that can easily fit on a standard truck, and then be stacked on site–developers from Panoramic Interests have created a system that can be built twice as fast as a typical apartment building. The company plans to build the MicroPAD in cities like San Francisco to help provide higher-quality, less-expensive housing for the homeless. Each unit is designed with features specific to the needs of a homeless person, such as a UV light under the bed to kill bedbugs.

Infarm

Infarm

Infarm’s small, modular vertical farming units can be used alone–to grow produce for a restaurant or supermarket–or stacked in hundreds of units to create an efficient urban farm. The system uses sensors to track growing conditions, and will eventually be used to forecast demand and plan seeding schedules across a citywide network. The company is developing its first network across key hubs in Berlin in 2017.

Heijmans One

Heijmans

To help provide affordable urban housing for young, single people in the Netherlands, Dutch developer Heijmans designed tiny houses that can be quickly installed on temporarily vacant lots. Designed for energy efficiency, the Heijmans One house also runs on solar power. When the lot is ready for permanent development, the house can be moved to new vacant land.

Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City

ZGF Architects

In 2016, this development 18 miles north of Tokyo became the largest neighborhood in the world to earn a LEED Neighborhood Development Plan platinum certification. A smart grid, connected to wind and solar plants, optimizes energy use. A massive “plant factory” tests vertical farming technology. Wearables track resident health at a large scale. Research projects also focus on health, such as a model town designed to minimize chemical use.

NewTown Master Plan

Perkins+Will

In Brooklyn and Queens, the neighborhoods around Newtown Creek–an infamous Superfund site–have long been industrial. This design envisions how they could become mixed-use “MakerHoods” with more affordable housing, new types of manufacturing, better transportation, and a cleaner environment.

The Dutch Mountains

The Dutch Mountains

This design imagines a building as a collection of services–providing light, heat, upgradable walls and floors, and even food and furniture– rather than an object that is finished when construction stops. Sensors collect data designed to make the offices, hotel rooms, restaurants, and other parts of the multi-purpose building more comfortable, easier to use, and healthier as time goes on. The building is also designed to use energy, water, and other resources in sustainable, closed-loop systems.

Avalon Village

Avalon Village

When the city turned off the streetlights in her neighborhood in Highland Park, Michigan–because it couldn’t afford the electric bill–Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris partnered with a nonprofit to install a solar-powered light. Then she continued to transform her struggling block, buying up vacant lots to create an ecovillage. One lot became a community park, an abandoned garage will become a cafe, and a home rebuilt with geothermal and solar power will become a place for local children to study. When it’s complete, Avalon Village will also include a community grocery store, affordable housing, a center for female entrepreneurs, and an urban farm.

The Storefront Theater

Matthew Mazzotta

In tiny Lyons, Nebraska, population 851, most of the businesses on Main Street have closed. At one store, all that was left of the building was a freestanding wall in front. Artist Matthew Mazzotta helped create a new use for the space: using hydraulic pumps, the wall lowers down to become seating for a new community theater.

Yoshino Cedar House

Airbnb and Go Hasegawa

Like other parts of rural Japan, the small town of Yoshino has struggled as younger generations move away to cities. Airbnb worked with the town–which is a popular place for cherry-blossom viewing–to build a beautiful new building from local materials that can double as a community center and a place to host visitors. It’s designed to foster interaction between locals and tourists and keep local traditions alive.

The Underline

James Corner Field Operations

Under Miami’s MetroRail, underused space is turning into a 10-mile long urban park filled with green space, art, and better paths to walk and bike between neighborhoods in the southern part of the city and downtown Miami. The path will also connect with the East Coast Greenway, a 2,900-mile long bike and pedestrian path that goes from Maine to Florida.

Corridors of Power

Centre for Policy Alternatives

This exhibition in Sri Lanka used architectural drawings and models as a way to visualize how the country’s constitution has evolved since the 1970s. Through 3D designs, it illustrates the power dynamics at work in the constitution and the document’s flaws. 

New Songdo City

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

This newly-built district in South Korea, near the capital of Seoul, was designed to be as sustainable as possible. A Central Park-like green space fills the middle of the area. Residents can walk, bike, and take public transit so easily that they shouldn’t ever need to drive, but shared electric cars are available. The district is designed to use 40% less energy than a typical development. By 2020, 40% of water will be recycled. Waste travels through pneumatic pipes instead of on garbage trucks.

Heidelberg Village

Frey Architekten

Part of the world’s largest “passive house” development, this new complex in Heidelberg, Germany, is designed to be both sustainable and have a social impact. The apartments bring together people of all ages. For the elderly, it offers on-site health care and handicapped accessibility. For young families, there’s on-site child care. Solar panels on the walls provide shade in the summer and renewable energy all year.

South Side Soapbox

Method Products and Gotham Greens

Built on a brownfield site on Chicago’s South Side, this LEED-certified factory has the world’s largest rooftop farm on the top. Inside, manufacturers such as Method–known for its sustainably-designed soap–make products using the building’s renewable energy. Half of the power comes from on-site sources such as solar and wind turbines, and the other half comes from renewable energy credits.

LinkNYC

Intersection

Making use of New York City’s obsolete pay phone booths–more than 7,500 phones in five boroughs–LinkNYC will be the largest free public wi-fi network in the world. The kiosks, which began rolling out in January 2016, also provide device charging, phone calls, and tablets that can access city maps and services.

El-Space: Creating Dynamic Places Under the Elevated

Design Trust for Public Space

In New York City, hundreds of miles of elevated rail and subway lines, highways, and bridges have created underused, often unpleasant space underneath. In the El-Space project, the city’s Department of Transportation and the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space are exploring ways to add lighting and green space beneath the infrastructure, reconnecting neighborhoods.

The Brooklyn Strand Action Plan

WXY Architecture + Urban Design

This community-driven vision looks at how downtown Brooklyn–which is currently filled with outdated, mid-20th-century car infrastructure–could be better connected, creating a strand of walkable, bikeable paths between the center of downtown and the waterfront and nearby neighborhoods. In total, more than 80 acres of publicly-owned space would shift from use mostly by cars to use by pedestrians and cyclists, helping support the growth of a new innovation district.

How Silicon Valley Companies Can Fix The Enormous Regional Traffic Jam They Created

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The typical Silicon Valley tech office still looks a lot like it did in the 1970s: a box-like concrete building next to a huge parking lot, in the midst of the suburban sprawl of Santa Clara County, where 86% of commuters drive alone to work.

A new report asks why most tech companies–which embrace early adoption of everything else–are stuck in an outdated physical environment, and how that can change.

Rethinking the Corporate Campus, a report from the Bay Area planning nonprofit SPUR, found that out of more than half a million jobs added in the region from 2010 to 2015, only 28% of new offices were built within a half-mile of regional transit. (If San Francisco–with its network of subways, buses and light rail–is excluded, that drops to 9%.)

“I do think businesses understand that their future financial well-being is contingent on helping to solve this problem.” [Photo: Derek_Neumann/iStock]
Bay Area drivers now spend 70% more time stuck in traffic than they did in 2010. In the nation, only Los Angeles drivers have more stress on their commutes. And pollution from cars is now the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the area.

Most companies realize that something has to change. “I do think businesses understand that their future financial well-being is contingent on helping to solve this problem,” Allison Arieff, editorial director for SPUR and one of the authors of the report, tells Fast Company. “The current scenario of people spending two or three hours in their car to get to work–and companies starting to no longer schedule morning meetings because employees can’t get to them–that’s not a really tenable outlook for Silicon Valley. Companies are already now slowly moving jobs out of the region.”

The traditional pattern of corporate campus development, which began in the middle of the 20th century, has been persistent for several reasons. Some developers, who’ve had success selling suburban buildings in the past, see no reason to change. Some tech companies like the privacy and security that comes from a building set back from a street that few people walk on. Huge suburban buildings offer large, flexible floorplans. Many of the cities and towns in Silicon Valley, between San Francisco and San Jose, have restrictive zoning in the areas near their regional train stations that make it more difficult to build.

A company that wants to be near a train station–realizing that most of its young employees want to live in the city, not the suburbs–may not have that option because few offices are available. “I think a lot of people tend to focus on the Apples and Googles of the world,” says Arieff. “But most companies don’t have those resources and capital, so they can’t be as selective, and then probably aren’t building from the ground up, so that’s part of it.”

The report suggests multiple solutions. If companies evaluate how their location affects their ability to attract and retain employees, and the costs of getting those employees to work–including the free shuttles that most tech employees expect if they have to work deep in the middle of sprawl–they’ll likely find that an office near transit makes more sense.

Some companies are already making that choice. In 2015, Box moved its office from hard-to-reach Los Altos to Redwood City, directly above a train station, and bought transit passes for employees instead of running shuttles, which saved money. The same year, Samsung completed an office in downtown San Jose, next to a light rail station. SurveyMonkey moved to a new development next to a rail station in San Mateo, which allowed it to expand its office space (from an office in downtown Palo Alto) without moving into a traditional suburban office park.

“Companies are already now slowly moving jobs out of the region.” [Photo: Flickr user Patrick Nouhailler]
Companies can also help discourage driving by charging for parking or offering cash to employees who choose not to drive. Bike parking and showers can encourage more people to ride to work. Cities can push companies to make these choices–part of the reason Google offers shuttles from San Francisco and transit station and other alternative transit incentives is that the city of Mountain View imposed a cap on the number of car trips allowed in the area.

The report also suggests that cities should plan for dense development near existing regional transit, improve transportation, and retrofit suburban office neighborhoods to include a mix of housing and retail. Old zoning–which usually designated large areas as “commercial” or “industrial” and required large parking lots–can be replaced by zoning near rail stations that includes apartments, stores, and jobs. Consolidating development along transit corridors can also help shift buildings out of neighborhoods that are at risk from future sea-level rise.

Denser building is likely to be a challenge in an area where a “not in my backyard” attitude has also slowed housing development, pushing rents higher. The mayor of Palo Alto has argued that the growth both housing and jobs should slow down.

“You can put your foot down and say ‘we don’t want any more people, we don’t want any more jobs,’ but if every city and town between San Francisco and San Jose says that, it’s not like people are going to stop moving here,” says Arieff. “So housing stock gets more expensive and rarer, office space gets more expensive and rarer, traffic gets worse. You can either make an active and conscious decision to prepare for this growth that is happening, [or not].”

As Silicon Valley tries to shift to more walkable, bikeable, liveable, transit-rich neighborhoods, other cities could also learn from the region’s mistakes–particularly those, like Nashville and Austin, that are working on building their own versions of Silicon Valley.

“We’ve had people come in and ask, ‘What can we learn as we try to become the next Silicon Valley?'” she says. “Well: planning. Try and mitigate the effects of gentrification before they happen. Try and anticipate–to the extent you can–how sprawl might emerge from this sort of expansion, and how you might design around rail and invest so it doesn’t. I think there are a ton of places that stand to grow a lot right now as jobs, frankly, leave here and go to other places. And if they can learn any lessons from some of the mistakes that we made, then I think that would be good.”

This Gigantic Art Octopus Is The Key To A Coral Reef Revival

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On a rainy day in mid-April, a group of artists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and locals gathered on the shore of Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands to watch the Kodiak Queen, one of five boats that survived the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, sink to the bottom of the ocean. At one point, they thought she was going to flip. It was a tense moment.

For months before, a team of artists had devoted themselves to cleaning the boat and transforming its many chambers into an interactive art experience, adorned with a hollow rebar and mesh kraken whose 80-foot tentacles extend along the length of the deck. At the bottom of the ocean, the Kodiak Queen would become the Project YOKO BVI Art Reef, a unique new dive site in the BVI that would act as both a tourist site and a way to draw attention and conservation efforts to the region’s plummeting coral reef populations.

“We had this fun, wacky idea to catalyze play and joy to unite people around a project.” [Photo: BVI Art Reef]
If the boat flipped on the way to the bottom of the ocean, much of the artists’ work would have been compromised. But just as the Kodiak Queen sank under the surface, she righted herself, and a cheer went up from the crowd on the beach. “Watching this ship, which has so much history and so many hours put into it, go down was a joyful thing,” Aydika James tells Fast Company. “It felt like a beginning.”

James is the art director of Secret Samurai Productions, a collective of artists that aims to solve real-world problems through art. She’s also a member of Maverick1000, a group of entrepreneurs who meet annually on Sir Richard Branson’s private Necker Island in the BVI.

When a local mechanic brought the ship to the attention of Richard Branson, the entrepreneur and philanthropist decided the way to save it would be to turn it into an artificial dive site. [Photo: BVI Art Reef]
That meeting last year, James says, is how the idea for the Project YOKO art reef came about. During the course of the week-long meeting, Lauren Keil, the foundation manager for Unite BVI–a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the islands, particularly its children–gave a presentation on the challenges the BVI community and oceans were facing: namely, that global warming and overfishing of the goliath grouper species have impacted the health of 90% of the region’s coral reefs, which account for 45% of the tourism industry in the BVI. Keil also addressed the fact that despite the BVIs being surrounded by ocean, more than one in 10 local children do not know how to swim, and as such, are disconnected from the health of the marine environment around them.

But Keil also presented on another, more esoteric issue: the WWII fuel barge that was discovered, a few years ago, to be languishing in a junkyard in Road Town, the capital of the BVI. When a local mechanic brought the ship to the attention of Branson, the entrepreneur and philanthropist decided the way to save it would be to turn it into an artificial dive site.

“An old abandoned ship is a great platform for an art piece, and an art piece could be a great tourism draw.” [Photo: BVI Art Reef]
It didn’t take long, James says, for her and a team of Maverick1000 entrepreneurs to connect the dots between the issues, and propose Project YOKO (a mashup of Kodiak Queen and the boat’s former name, Navy fuel barge YO-44), as a solution. “I thought: An old abandoned ship is a great platform for an art piece, and an art piece could be a great tourism draw—we could tie dive proceeds from this eco-tourism site back into marine health maintenance efforts and swim instruction programs for the island’s kids,” James says. The idea was to transform the ship, and partner with marine science cause partners would use the site as a base to conduct research and rehabilitation efforts.

James and her team pitched the proposal to the Maverick1000 conference last spring; on the spot, fellow Mavericks and Branson pledged enough funds to support the project’s development. Though a local BVI blog estimated the project cost over $4 million, James says it was accomplished with a fraction of that sum, but won’t release the actual cost.

The Secret Samurai Productions team, led by James, started work on the ship almost right away. “Once we were on the ground in the BVI doing this build, half the people who walked by, James says, “just looked at us and asked, ‘What the heck are you doing?’’ But as it started to come together, James says, “we had tremendous support from the government and locals—young schoolchildren came by to pain their names on the ship, and one woman, who learned that the proceeds would go back to children’s swim education, offered to cook for our team.”

And in the process, the network of partners backing the Project YOKO art reef brought in the environmental research nonprofit Beneath the Waves, which will use an emerging technology called environmental DNA, or eDNA, to collect data on the entire marine ecosystem around the vessel. That hollow kraken actually plays a role here: The body and tentacles will act as a protected environment in which scientists will foster the repopulation of the dwindling goliath grouper, whose presence in the waters helps form the ecosystem that is essential to the health of the coral reefs. Had the ship rolled, like James initially feared she would, the height of the kraken in the water would have shifted, and created a less optimal habitat for the grouper. As the ship rests now, it’s at the exact location scientists need to start rehabilitating the species.

“Watching this ship, which has so much history and so many hours put into it, go down was a joyful thing.” [Photo: BVI Art Reef]
Now that Project YOKO is at the bottom of the ocean and preparing to welcome divers, its organizers are working with local BVI dive operators to ensure that people who dive the art reef commit to a $10 donation (diving reefs is usually free) that will funnel back into marine health research and children’s swim education.

“We had this fun, wacky idea to catalyze play and joy to unite people around a project that would touch on a number of different challenges in the BVIs,” James says. While it took a complex network of organizations and actors to bring it about, “the whole purpose is that eventually all the people who put this together will be forgotten, and the new life and economy the reef will create will remain.”

Here’s Why The PR Industry Is Failing

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It’s hard to say an industry is failing when it’s growing seven percent annually, and its ranks have swollen to nearly five professionals to every single journalist, a ratio that’s more than doubled over the past decade.

But when it comes to the current state of the public relations industry, it is.

If you have any doubt, just ask a journalist. Or just follow a few on Twitter and Facebook. You won’t have to wait long to hear them complain about bad practices in the PR industry.

Does that mean PR people are the problem? No. These same reporters will quickly point out specific publicists upon whom they rely and respect.

So what’s the problem?

In most cases, it’s outdated tools, or services that facilitate bad behavior.

Consider wire distribution services. It’s well known within PR circles that the best way to kill your chances of getting press is to issue a press release. Why? First of all, reporters generally don’t read PR Newswire or other wire distribution services. Secondly, once it’s on a massive distribution list like that, it’s no longer news. Reporters want the news before it becomes public.

These wire distributions services mask their ineffectiveness with content-sharing relationships that proliferate press releases far and wide across the internet to sites that no one really reads. But it gives the impression of press coverage when it’s simply reprints—in fact most sites will label such content as “via PR Newswire” or similar credibility-killing terms.

Then there are media databases, which are the modern day version of massive Rolodexes of journalists, their contact information, and interests. The problem is the data are updated manually, which means they’re perpetually out of date, at best. A couple years ago I looked up GeekWire’s Todd Bishop in Cision, the most popular of the media databases. Todd is one of the most influential technology journalists in the country, but Cision told me he worked at the Puget Sound Business Journal, a position he’d left four years earlier.

Screen shot captured in March 2015, four years after Mr. Bishop cofounded and started writing for GeekWire.

Even worse, however, is the ability these databases offer publicists to create massive media lists and then indiscriminately email journalists on that list en masse. Or as journalists call it, “PR spam.” Consequently many business reporters get more than 200 emails a day from PR people.

What about PR agencies? The truth is most PR agencies are staffed with quality people with solid press relationships. The biggest beef that journalists have is getting an agency representative who’s too junior and really doesn’t know the business he or she is pitching. But really, the agency folks do a good job. If you can afford it, go for it and you’ll likely get good bang for the buck. PR is a relationship business after all, right?

Yes, but consider this: So is Sales. And HR. Not to mention customer relations and supplier management. Lots of people work in these industries, but the main difference between them and PR is that PR has not seen the kind of automation the others have.

That’s what’s next: There are a handful of companies out there seeking to disrupt the status quo. Everything from analytics services like AirPR, to media relations services such as PressFriendly, or services that help agencies and big brands manage their data and connections like IrisPR.

They key for some is flipping the equation from an unbalanced obsession with the companies seeking promotion to focusing on the real customer in the PR process: the journalist.

These “PR Tech” vendors are on the fringes for now. In part because no one ever got fired for using PR Newswire.

And that’s part of the reason the PR industry is failing.

Smart publicists are availing themselves of newer technology solutions to help stretch their budgetary dollar. They are testing the bounds of possibility and pushing an industry forward that is ripe for disruption. The early adopters could breathe life into an industry that is failing, and in the process reap the rewards.

Bill Hankes is a longtime public relations veteran, having served as director of Bing Public Relations at Microsoft, and vice president of corporate communications at RealNetworks. Today, Bill is CEO of Sqoop, a startup he founded that helps journalists find the information they need to develop stories, some of which comes from PR professionals, but most of which doesn’t.

Mark Cuban’s “Dave” Spots You No-Interest Loans To Avoid Overdraft Fees

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To borrow a word Donald Trump used while describing health care, balancing your checkbook can be “complicated.” And it’s always great if you have a pal—or a parent—to call to help cover the hole in your wallet between downing your last Moscow mule and payday.

Time and time again, however, the shortfall in your checking account creeps up on you—and bam! Another $34 “Insufficient Funds Fee.” Really Chase?

A new fintech app called Dave (portrayed as a cuddly, bespectacled bear) wants to help make those ridiculous overdraft penalties a thing of the past. Dave warns you when you’re going to blow your budget and will even lend you up to $250—with no interest—until your next payday.

“Everybody involved with the company has been a chronic overdrafter,” says Jason Wilk, the founder and CEO of the Los Angeles startup. Even billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who sank $3 million in Dave, has said he “got crushed by overdraft fees in my twenties.”

Dave’s aim is to “outsmart overdrafts” so users don’t ever need the bear to spot them some. For $1 a month, the app syncs with customers’ checking accounts to monitor their spending habits and predict when they’re at risk of overdrawing their accounts.

Dave’s pop-up warnings are different than bank texts that alert customers when balances are low in that it anticipates regular outlays—like rent or the utility bill—and more adamantly warns bad budgeters that danger’s ahead.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that consumers spent more than $33 billion on overdraft charges in 2016, citing data from research firm Moebs Services. That’s the highest rate since 2009, just before regulations went into effect requiring banks to offer customers overdraft protection services. The average American pays $136 in overdraft fees a year, according to data from Dave.

“Overdrafting is such a widespread problem,” says Wilk. “It’s like the ultimate, most expensive form of credit.”

Dave’s target users are millennials—think of a young professional straight out of college who doesn’t quite have the financial discipline to always keep his or her account balances positive, or enough savings to serve as a buffer when unexpected expenses pop up. “Amazon is the number 1 place in Dave that people spend their money,” notes Wilk.

Not everyone is Dave-worthy. Users must share their checking account histories the same way money-managing apps like Mint require, Wilk says.

If things look a little too reckless, the bear will walk away. Dave looks to verify users have the income to pay back a loan—generally two or three months of income history is required to get approved. The company doesn’t pull credit histories so users won’t see an impact to their credit scores from using the app.

The checking history data lets Dave’s machine learning systems predict when users might need a loan. Those algorithms let the app display an estimate of the lowest point users’ balances will reach over the next seven days. And if Dave predicts a recurring expense such as a bill, or weekly trip to the grocery store, is likely to trigger an overdraft, the app will let customers know.

“We send them a notification letting them know that they’re at either elevated or high risk of an overdraft, depending on how far in advance we’re giving them the notification,” Wilk says. The company aims to give customers a week’s notice, ideally giving them time to trim discretionary expenses like Uber rides or pricey grocery items and avoid the need for a loan altogether, he says.

Sharing data with the company will likely seem creepy to some, though Wilk says Dave has no plans to ever share anyone’s financial histories with third parties. The CEO also says the company doesn’t charge any fees beyond those optional gratuities, and a $3 instant transfer fee passed on to Dave’s payment provider if customers need a loan within the hour to keep their account balances in positive territory.

Wilk says the company is working with providers to lower that fee and ultimately make instant payments free as well.

Loans are by repaid automatically from the user’s bank account on payday, Wilk says, though the company says for an extra $10 fee customers can pay by check instead.

Customers are of course free to pay Dave back early and the company says they may get an increase in the amount they can borrow for doing so.

 

Beyond that fee and the monthly dollar cost for Dave, the app also brings in revenue through an unusual way for a lender: voluntary tips. Users are asked if and what they want to tip when the loan is paid off.  Customers can choose a percentage level to tip, similar to other payment apps, or choose not to tip at all.

A watchdog group expressed some concern over the tip system. Consumers may feel compelled to tip, National Consumer Law Center associate director Lauren Saunders says, even with the company offering assurances it’s not necessary.

“I suspect that it may not end up being so voluntary, or the tips could really add up,” she says, and ultimately not be too different from an interest rate.

The company’s terms of service say unambiguously that tips are “100% voluntary” and won’t “alter the service” or a customer’s ability to access funds.

Dave’s not the only online financial services firm to suggest users tip—startup Activehours offers a somewhat similar model, letting customers scan electronic time sheets to receive bank deposits for the amount they earned that day, then pay the company back come payday.

Dave does try to entice customers to tip by pledging to plant a tree in Sub-Saharan Africa, in conjunction with the nonprofit Trees for the Future. For example, a 6% tip on a $100 loan will generate $6 and the planting of six trees.

“By helping us plant trees, you give families the ability to transition from unsustainable farming techniques to a Forest Garden system,” the charity says on its website. “Your donation not only sustains and empowers them, but also changes their lives forever.”

In early prerelease tests, Wilk says the company made over 100 loans.

“Right now, every single person has paid us back in full,” he said before the launch.


“There Are No Rules”: Rag & Bone’s CEO On Challenging The Status Quo

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After the turmoil of the most recent presidential election, Marcus Wainwright had an epiphany.

“It just confirmed to me that there are no rules,” says Wainwright cofounder and CEO of retailer Rag & Bone. “Why not break the mold? Why not try something original and see what happens? You can’t just accept the status quo because someone else has told you that’s how it should work.”

Rag & Bone has always been somewhat unconventional. With no formal training in fashion, Wainwright cofounded his company in 2002, designing clothes that focused on perfecting the basics (jeans, T-shirts, etc.) in order to give the wearer a blank canvas for adding their personal style. That idea of turning over the keys to someone else’s creative vision has been a staple in Rag & Bone’s marketing strategy as well, most notably with the ongoing DIY project (getting models to take their own photos in Rag & Bone clothes with no Photoshop or hair and makeup styling) and most recently with the short film Hair that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Directed by actor John Turturro, Hair stars Turturro and Bobby Cannavale as themselves musing about the significance of hair. Although both actors are wearing Rag & Bone in the five-minute short, there’s nary a forthright brand mention or much talk of clothing at all.

“Is it putting the clothes first and foremost? No, but that’s the entire point. It’s about personal expression and how you can use Rag & Bone to create your own aesthetic,” Wainwright says. “Our overall marketing strategy has always been to try and do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and to challenge the status quo of this assumed set of rules that the fashion world operates in. It’s an imaginary set of rules that everyone abides by, and for many years it definitely worked. But it’s been very obvious that that old way of communicating is not really relevant these days.”

There’s certainly been a growing trend in the fashion world to create short films where the clothes have little to do with the action, other than the fact that the characters are wearing them, e.g., Kenzo tapping Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein to direct The Realest Real and David O. Russell guiding Allison Williams, Kuoth Wiel, and Freida Pinto through a Hitchcockian nightmare for Prada. Rag & Bone even went down this same road before last year with Michael Pitt directing and starring in The Driver.

“When it comes to these projects, rather than us specifying you need to do this, it’s finding people that we admired who are original thinkers and have an original point of view and to let them use Rag & Bone in a way that works for their concept,” Wainwright says. “The acid test for us is if you take something like Hair and you ignore the fact that Rag & Bone had anything to do with it, is it good? Does it have the authenticity of thought behind it? If the answer is yes, then we’ve achieved what we’re trying to achieve.”

“And it’s the same with the clothes,” he continues. “If you take a pair of jeans, does it have integrity? What are the details like? What was the thought process that went into making that pair of jeans? Who made the fabric? Where did the indigo come from? It’s not about brand splayed everywhere, it’s about the integrity of the product itself.”

Marcus Wainwright

Aside from the election giving Wainwright the silver-lined feeling of anything being possible, the state of the fashion business itself has reinforced his stance on Rag & Bone running counter to staid principles. As long as a project has integrity behind it and a personal connection to whoever is anchoring it, Wainwright believes that’s enough to make Rag & Bone resonate in a crowded and competitive industry.

“At the moment, the fashion system is in a lot of flux—the fashion calendar is changing, the way people consume fashion is changing, advertising has changed drastically, political landscapes changed the way people view and prioritize their lives, so you’ve got to try something new,” Wainwright says. “You can’t just keep jamming fashion shows down their throats if it’s not working and connecting with the consumer. It’s inspiring for me to be able to work with these people and see how they interpret what we do with the clothes. We’re not turning our backs on the fashion side of things–that’s obviously hugely important–but we are just exploring different ways of communicating with people. And I think that’s the future.”

Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology?

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Here’s the thing about an ad: If you can’t recognize it, it’s worth nothing to the advertiser. That’s the fatal flaw with web-based ads. No matter how much ad technology evades ad-blocking software by disguising itself, it still has to be recognizable to a user and potentially clickable.

Researchers at Princeton and Stanford believe they have shown how to end the escalating blocker/anti-blocker battle as a result of that crucial point, and in favor of user choice. While a “war to win our eyeballs” sounds like the theme of a Guillermo del Toro film, it describes the interplay between advertisers (and ad-technology companies) and the visitors who reject the panoply of tracking techniques and page bloat that come with current online ads.

Some sites go beyond just trying to route around blocking techniques used by Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, and others by showing a scolding message when they detect blocking action in use. A visitor often has to disable an ad blocker or add a rules exception to proceed to a site. But Princeton and Stanford’s academics have determined it’s possible to identify ads with an extremely high degree of reliability without using any of the current ad-blocking tricks of identifying underlying page elements, domains, and the like, and also block counter-defenses from sites and adtech companies.

In a paper currently in draft form, the authors detail an interlocking set of theory, code, and legal reasoning about the state of ad blocking and the response by ad networks and site publishers. It’s been assumed that the blocking and anti-blocking war would escalate indefinitely, with battles fought as a series of measures and countermeasures. The researchers lay out the case that browser users and browser makers have the upper hand, and that in any given skirmish, publishers will quickly lose.

The Telltale Signs Of Advertising

Instead of looking at network and code, the proof of concept the authors first deployed as a Chrome plug-in–which identifies ads on Facebook–uses computer vision, optical-character recognition of text rendered as images, and other cues. It allows ads to load and scripts to run, at which point it can determine what on a page is an ad.

To discourage robots from automatically filling them out, text-based CAPTCHAs became ever more baroque to avoid scripts puzzling out the results, to the point where they frustrated many users as well as the bots. That can’t work with ads; it even stopped working with CAPTCHAs, as scammers adopted deep-learning computer vision techniques. “So long as advertisements, even malicious advertisements, are recognizable by users, you should be able to use these techniques to find them,” says Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate in computer science who coauthored the paper with Arvind Narayanan and Dillon Reisman of Princeton and Jonathan Mayer of Stanford. (Mayer is currently at work in the FCC’s enforcement bureau as chief technologist.)

Blocking ads on Facebook.

Their approach relies in part on legitimate advertisers, ad networks, and publishers complying with U.S. regulations and with guidelines for industry self-monitoring. Reputable ads have labels and other attributes that make them stand out. It might be subtle to a user, but it’s obvious to a trained machine-learning system. (Other countries vary in their practices, though some have even stricter laws and industry self-monitoring.)

As the researchers note, “In order to defeat a filter list [such as is used by conventional ad blockers], all that is required is moving an advertisement to a different URL; in order to defeat a perceptual ad blocker, an entirely new ad disclosure standard must be approved.” The researchers limited their testing to ads on Facebook pages and ads that comply with regulations and industry practice. “For this paper, our focus was on this well-behaved universe, where there are certain sort of norms that are being followed,” Storey says.

The researchers’ system is modular and adaptable, and could be trained to recognize unlabeled ads, although the researchers have found that over time more advertising on more sites has proper labels and disclosure. Their framework doesn’t encompass “malvertising,” or the delivery of malware via ads. Anti-malware, Google Safe Browsing, and other software and services better handle that separate from identifying them as ads. Nor does it block the trackers that are often part of ad serving, but are a concern because of privacy issues rather than than visual interaction.

[Photo: Flickr user Phil Roeder]

Uncanny Accuracy

In their testing, the Facebook extension, in the field for several months, matched 50 out of 50 ads, including those in both the news feed and sidebars. The four researchers also report they saw no false negatives or positives in their personal use over six months.

On the broader web, they tested a module that looks for disclosures under the AdChoices program, used in North America and Europe, and which the papers’ authors found was used in over 60% of ads in a sample of 183 ads from top news websites. Their AdChoices module correctly labeled over 95% of AdChoices ads from 100 sites randomly selected from the top 500 news sites.

The researchers’ technology could create a beneficial feedback loop, too, as users who might employ ad-detection software could complain to advertisers, sites, ad networks, state attorneys general, trade groups, and the FTC about commercial messages that were identifiable as out of compliance with regulations and industry guidelines. (In fact, this approach could be automated by nonprofit and governmental consumer-protection groups to identify out-of-compliance ads.)

On top of ad identification, the paper offers a further step in dampening the powder on the adtech side of this battle. Because the technology the researchers tested comes in the form of a browser extension, it has privileges that extend far beyond what JavaScript code can do in a browser. That allows developers to turn a loaded web page into a kind of “brain in a jar,” which they label a “rootkit,” because of its advantageous position in the browser. The researchers can use this fact to prevent anti-blocking software from determining whether an ad blocker is in use, even if the software detects that it’s been sandboxed.

And, with a similar approach, the researchers tested whether it’s possible to create a differential examination of a page, by loading it once and applying ad blocking and then loading a “shadow” version that executes all page-modifying JavaScript code. The two versions could be compared to see if anti-ad blocking messages or changes took place. By figuring out what elements are being tracked, the extension could return responses that the publisher would expect only from a page showing its ads, thereby allowing it to block ads without detection. (The authors didn’t implement this in code, but tested whether it would be effective.)

Blocking AdChoices-compliant ads.

These techniques, and another exploration into blocking the execution of anti-blocking code altogether, raise ethical concerns that are addressed briefly in the paper, because such tools could be used in advertising fraud, a large industry in which automated scripts attempt to rack up page views and perform clicks while appearing to be legitimate actions by humans.

The research might offer more insight to fraudsters in preventing detection by using extensions, but, Storey notes, “there are still other ways to detect the ad-fraud bot that should available” and these techniques don’t work for fraud systems that load in a browser. The researchers also omitted a few details to prevent releasing full details on their technique.

The brain-a-in-jar method could be escalated further if browser makers go further and either provide deeper access for extension creators or build in ad blocking directly. Google reportedly is considering changes to Chrome that would prevent certain kinds of irritating ads from loading or bar all ads from loading on pages that use any of those forms of irritating ads.

The only way to win most wars is to avoid conflict in the first place. As web-ad revenue has slipped away to Facebook, Twitter, and mobile apps, among other places, publishers have developed adtech or signed up with networks that offer it. That’s led to heavier use of invasive techniques such as pop-up ads with hard-to-click Xs to close and auto-play video, as well as large downloads for the web code to support them.

JPMorgan Chase recently discovered that automated advertising on 400,000 sites brought clicks only from 12,000. It winnowed that list to 5,000 handpicked sites and saw no overall change in results. That would indicate that aggressive techniques to deliver ads to users aren’t working for advertisers, either.

Princeton and Stanford’s research, combined with results like those from Chase, might force publishers to rethink ad approaches entirely. That could lead them to back out of the blocking/anti-blocking situation, finding a way to attract users into viewing well-behaved marketing and leaving the tricks behind.

What I Learned From My Nightmare Job Interview

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Crappy job interviews are a fact of life. Some are more bizarre, infuriating, and embarrassing than others. But even the most disastrous interviews can teach you something that might prove helpful later in your career—at least according to the people who’ve survived them. These are a few of the more useful lessons.

It’s Okay To Walk Away

When the hiring manager told me I’d be meeting with Larry later, I expected to be taken to his office. I wasn’t. Once our profoundly weird conversation had ground to a standstill (more on that in a moment), the interviewer turned to her right and yelled, “Larry!” A wall that I hadn’t realized was just a partition then slid open, revealing the gentleman in question.

Still seated in his swivel chair and clutching the armrests, the director of the nonprofit rowed into the room using his legs to propel him forward. One shirttail had wriggled free from a bulging waistband and sat limply in his lap; a combover crowned his head. “Larry doesn’t usually look like this” was the hiring manager’s peculiar introduction, which I took to mean that he was unwell. Then she rushed to clarify: Larry had recently gone boating (a favorite pastime) and was merely tanner than usual.

By the time the interview ended, I’d been asked personal questions about my family, whether I had as many male friends as female ones, and whether I’d mind occasionally carrying Larry’s briefcase, “which would be more of a task that women typically do.” For his part, Larry told me that I wouldn’t need to inform his wife if he abscond with the hiring manager to Istanbul for a week (this elicited riotous laughter from her), but that I should do so if he were to skip town with any other woman.

As soon as I got home, I wrote an email saying that I no longer wished to be considered for the administrative assistant job. This was the very first position I’d interviewed for after graduating, so it was an early lesson in something career coaches tell candidates all the time: You’re also interviewing them, and if you aren’t impressed, it’s okay to back out. Nobody wins when you slog through a hiring process you aren’t excited about anymore.


Related:How To Walk Away From A Hiring Process You’re No Longer Interested In


Sweat The Small Stuff—It All Matters

Rebecca Arian is a human rights lawyer at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, an advocacy organization headquartered in Jaffa. But in the spring of 2010, when she was less than a year out of college, she landed an interview for a paralegal position at a big corporate law firm in New York.

“I spelled LexisNexis on my resume ‘Lexus Nexus,’” Arian admits. “The guy called me out on it, and basically the interview ended there—but not before I interviewed with a paralegal who currently worked for the company and told me once she worked a 36-hour day and took a 10-minute nap under her desk.”

Looking back, Arian says the experience was a wakeup call on two counts. First, she says, “I learned that details are crucial. One of my strengths as a candidate—in any position—is that I am detail-oriented, so to not showcase that on your first interaction with a company is really problematic,” she understood.

And second, Arian’s chat with the paralegal taught her to look for the sorts of work-culture issues that candidates often have a hard time detecting, even if they seem obvious in retrospect. “I learned that the culture of the company was that they expected their employees to not have any work-life balance.” The realization that this was a deal breaker for her forced Arian to reckon with what she really values in her career—and to size up future job offers based on those values.

“In any position I interview for,” she says, “I am always looking for companies that value employees who have a diversity of interests beyond work . . . I just know that if I don’t have downtime in my life, I won’t be effective and great at what I do in the workplace.”


Related:Five Hidden Ways To Find Out If You’ll Hate Working Somewhere


Don’t Work For Someone Who Dismisses Your Ambitions

Trevor Begnal was hitting it off with his hiring manager, the head of marketing at a Philadelphia ad agency. It was the summer of 2013, and he was being considered for an internship, but he felt in his element. “I really pride myself on my people skills,” he says, so the back-to-back interviews the agency had scheduled that day didn’t faze him. Begnal had discovered that the hiring manager “was a big foodie, and at the time I worked part-time at a restaurant that was pretty big in Philly. I even had a menu on me for some reason and gave her that, and she was like, ‘This is great!’”

Then the hiring manager’s two direct reports arrived for round two—both of whom Begnal would be working with closely if he got the gig. One asked Begnal about his overall career goals in what he says was a sort of snide tone. Begnal replied that he’d like to run his own creative agency one day. This earned a dismissive retort. “He goes, ‘That’s pretty ambitious!’”

“When you have an interview like that, you kind of self-doubt,” Bengal reflects. But it pushed him to defend his drive as something genuinely valuable, even as an intern. “If you can’t dream big or make something that’s rather a big goal, then what’s the point of even trying—of doing even the small stuff?”

Begnal now brings this experience up in every job interview he goes on, as a way of explaining his willingness to contribute however he can, from grunt work to stretch assignments. The encounter also taught him that if an employer can’t see potential in even its lowest-level hires—or respect and value what motivates them—it probably isn’t a great place to work.

Begnal never heard back about the internship, but he doesn’t consider it a missed opportunity. These days he manages a retouching studio, which can mean overseeing anywhere from 10–20 people, from finance to HR, at any given time. “I know I’m young, I’m the youngest in my office,” says Begnal, who’s 26. “But I wanted this responsibility, I’m eager to take it on.”

What hiring manager wouldn’t want that?

Playstation Knows It Can’t Market VR The Same Way As Regular Video Games

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Back in October, Playstation launched its first major ad campaign around its new virtual reality platform PSVR with a spot that dropped one gamer into the cockpit of an X-Wing. Soon after, it was an immersive peek inside the Batcave.

By February, the company reported it was surprised by how well the PSVR was selling–more than 900,000 units in four months–and talked about the need to restock certain markets that were sold out.

Now, the brand is launching its third commercial in the “Two Worlds” PSVR campaign, this time around a new game called Farpoint. The strategy remains the same–educate and delight. For both Playstation’s senior vice-president of marketing Eric Lempel and agency BBH New York chief creative officer John Patroulis, the challenges in marketing something like PSVR are decidedly different than that of a traditional console game. Instead of just showing off the cool graphics, cool story, and engaging gameplay, a huge part of the job is to show just how different–and amazing–strapping on those giant gaming goggles can be.

“It’s a new technology. You say virtual reality, and that means different things to different people, so we need to help educate gamers and the audience on just how simple it is, and what that experience looks like when you’re in the middle of it,” says Patroulis. “You’ll notice, in each of the films, it starts with the gear and the gamer putting it on. It sounds like a really small thing, but it’s showing something new that many in our audience haven’t seen yet. It illustrates how simple it is. Put on the headset, grab a couple of controllers, and away you go. That becomes part of the story, a part you don’t need with traditional console gaming.”

Part of the challenge is the very definition of VR, and how people have so far experienced it in a variety of ways. Through an immersive Oculus or Samsung-type experience, or simply watching a cool 360-video from the New York Times. It’s such a new technology, that it means different things to different people.

“Marketing VR is a challenge,” says Lempel. “This is something new that the majority of people out there don’t really know what it is, or they’ve experienced some form of it that isn’t quite Playstation VR. So going into this, there were a few things we wanted to make sure we did, which was trying to pass along some of the magic of the PSVR experience through a spot.”

Part of that was to show gamers what it would be like. All the spots start off in the real world, then it blends into the gaming world.

“We’ve been marketing games for years, but this is different,” says Lempel. “With VR it’s tough to convey, so our primary goal was to show just how immersive it was.”

Lempel says another key goal was to get the PSVR into the hands of as many people as possible. The brand put an extra effort behind retail activations, with more than a half a million trials to date. And since the technology and gameplay are so new, the brand purposely picked two very familiar environments for the first two ads–Batman and Star Wars. Even the new spot around Farpoint, drops the gamer into a familiar sci-fi shooter scene, even if the game is new.

“These are about an experience, and we’re using specific [game] titles to convey that experience,” says Patroulis. “Traditionally, when you’re marketing around a specific title you go into the narrative. What’s the story, who’s the character, and how do you bring that to life in an interesting way? Because this is so different, we didn’t spend a lot of time on narrative, in favor of look how easy this is, and look how physical it is. That’s what it became about.”

Shelves are being restocked around the world, so Playstation is hoping the next stage in its marketing campaign will inspire a similar bump in sales.

This New Platform Lets Your Coworkers Rate You Whether You Like It Or Not

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Yesterday I received two emails informing me that I just got reviewed on Completed, the new platform that its founders are billing as “Yelp for professionals.” My profile was created and filled in without my consent with some basic information that was pulled from my public LinkedIn and Twitter profiles by algorithm. My ratings (which were submitted anonymously) were top notch: five stars.

The reviewer(s) didn’t leave any additional comments that detailed why they thought I was so stellar.

How It Works

Completed algorithms pull in data from publicly available sites like social media accounts, but people can also create profiles for themselves or others that they may want to rate. There’s no hard and fast rule on who gets a profile, but Michael Zammuto, CEO of the San Francisco-based startup, has big goals for the platform: His plan is to have 10 million profiled on Completed by mid-summer, and keep growing from there.

“In the next three years, nearly every business professional in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand will have a Completed profile,” he asserts. This is an important step because it makes it easier to find people and leave reviews for them, Zammuto says.

Completed won’t stop at just the star rating, though. Rather, it’s meant to provide detailed and constructive feedback to a whole spectrum of professionals including your colleagues,  your CEO, and even service workers you deal with says Zammuto. Completed, which just launched out of a monthlong private beta this week, is catering to what Zammuto calls “an appetite and strong demand” for reviews that are both trusted and constructive.

“Reviews are incredibly important for all decisions in our lives,” Zammuto explains, “from hiring a doctor (RateMD) to retaining legal counsel (AVVO) to hiring a good developer (Upwork) to rating a restaurant (Yelp).” He points to the fact that there were approximately 7,000 users that actively participated in the beta test, who created a total of 150,000 entries of people into Completed’s database from reviews. 

But What About The Trolls?

 Zammuto is elusive in addressing how this will happen. He says that Completed is partnering with “some very large data originators” that will provide the “top-quality information” necessary to make the platform a valuable tool. “We want to make sure we have single verified data sources for all so that it’s consistent and up-to-date,” he says. Zammuto also points out that they are not talking to data brokers who simply buy and sell data, but are in negotiations with the small number of organizations that create data packages to then resell.

He asserts that on the surface, such data seeded profiles do work like PeopleSearch or Spokeo that both offer a lot of personal information like addresses and relatives. However, Zammuto notes that no personal information like birth dates or locations will be published. The verification is embedded in the platform’s backend.

“Completed has invested heavily in a patent-pending algorithm that seeks to publish reviews that are trusted based on a number of criteria from location of the reviewer, patterns of reviews left by the reviewer, IP matching, language filtering, and more,” he explains, adding, “We don’t reveal exactly how our algorithm works, just like Google.”

If all this still smacks of opportunity for trolls and cyberbullies, Zammuto says not to worry. (Yes, he’s familiar with Black Mirror’s horrific people-rating episode, as well as the people-rating app Peeple that generated controversy when first introduced.) The algorithm is also responsible for Completed’s strict anti-bullying policy. According to the website, “Any reviews that we deem as harassing, threatening, embarrassing, or targeting will not be posted. We only allow constructive criticism that provides constructive feedback for people to improve in business.”

When asked about how that is going to work, Zammuto was vague, saying he couldn’t discuss the details of how machine learning would be able to pick apart the constructive from the destructive. He did say that Completed currently has a quality assurance team of two people that review the reviews, in addition to his own involvement. His representative tells us, “Michael is actively involved in the quality of the reviews right now and will continuously be, similar to how Sergey Brin and Larry Page are always deeply involved in the results that their search engine produces.” This is not an uncommon practice. Google has large teams of human raters who test their algorithms.

You have to hope that they have the same opinion of constructive as a user because, Zammuto says, “Just like Yelp, Completed profiles cannot be deactivated. These are permanent profiles that will track an individual’s performance in business for a lifetime.” This is unlike Peeple, which first gave users 48-hours to broker a change in review before going live and now doesn’t post any review without the person’s consent, after receiving much criticism. But again, Zammuto points out that this is a site for professionals and not meant to review an individual’s personal attributes.

Zammuto insists that previous work experience in the rating and reputation business including Brand.com informs their attempt to forge a drastically different and more useful path. “One of the things we really saw was how horrible user-generated reviews can be,” he says. “What we are trying to do is offset that,” Zammuto contends, and provide valuable information about employees for their future managers and colleagues. It’s meant to seed a true meritocracy, but also a path to monetization.

Completed has already received $250,000 from an angel investor (and former Googler who prefers to remain anonymous) and Zammuto says they’ll be looking to raise a Series A round of funding in the summer. Right now he says, they aren’t focused on a money-making strategy, but to make the user experience as streamlined and trustworthy as possible.

Eventually, though, he sees potential in helping companies hire the best candidates by bypassing jobseekers’ provided references. “Everybody has somebody who thinks they did a great job,” Zammuto observes. “Our business creates a real market demand,” he says among recruiters and hiring managers who want to research what candidates’ strengths and weaknesses are, “not just internally but through the entire ecosystem.” He explains that if an employee goes out of their way to help someone on the job, their boss may never know about it, unless the person receiving the excellent service takes the time to write a letter to their supervisor. Completed makes it simple to rate and review the individual.

But what if you didn’t create your profile and someone left you a poor rating? “If a person did not create his/her profile and doesn’t want one, there’s nothing you can do,” says Zammuto. It can’t be taken down, unless there is a case of libel or slander, he says.

Eventually Completed will move from what Zammuto currently calls a minimally viable product to something much more sophisticated. “We will have geo-location technology released that will act like Tinder, where you can review those closest to you,” says Zammuto. “We are also investing in facial recognition software.” The mobile app will make it easier to post and share reviews on social media to encourage others to do the same.

Personally, I’m going to be hyperaware that my profile is up (even though I didn’t put it there) and anyone I interact with on a professional level can now rate me. Even in a restaurant or store, handing over my credit card gives that person my name. Theoretically they can find me and ding me if I forget to smile and tell them to have a nice day. And what if I have a complaint? The future of AI at work is here, and I’m not so sure I (or anyone else) is quite ready.

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