You can’t pick your family, and it’s usually the same with your coworkers—it’s often just the luck of the draw whether you wind up spending your workdays with wonderful people or annoying ones. That means there’s likely to be at least one person in your office who sets your teeth on edge.
Maybe it’s someone with a strong opinion on just about everything who takes the liberty of voicing it all the time. Maybe it’s just their work habits—like sending a million emails to resolve an issue when it really only takes one or two. Or maybe it’s just the way they crack their knuckles, snap their gum, or hum to themselves while you’re trying to work.
When your biggest office distractions aren’t things like Slack or meetings or your own Facebook account but other people, your options for getting back on track may feel limited. The bad news is that they are pretty limited; when you get down to it, there are really only two potential courses of action open to you. The good news, on the other hand, is that you don’t need to learn a complicated mind hack to help you focus or to download yet another productivity app. Here’s a straightforward guide to prevent your irritating colleagues from driving you crazy.
The first thing you need to figure out is how important your coworkers’ annoying habits really are. This isn’t the same as ranking how annoying they are: A colleague who talks way too loudly on the phone is pretty aggravating, but that distraction isn’t exactly dangerous.
The coworker who constantly shares her strong opinions, on the other hand, might be creating divisions in your workplace, which is a potential problem that goes beyond just your ability to focus. Someone who cuts corners on their work or harasses you or your fellow team members may be crossing the line into a serious HR issue.
It’s worth getting clear on this first because there’s a risk of overlooking other problems when your own immediate productivity is at stake. Feeling frustrated because you can’t get your own work done can sometimes cloud out other issues that might be more important. At any rate, it’s always worth thinking about what bugs you about someone before figuring out how to respond. If you’re creeped out by the way someone looks at you or stands around you, that might not be merely distracting. When in doubt, have a quick chat with a human resources rep, even if just to express your concern.
Sometimes an annoyance is just an annoyance, though.
If the distracting thing your coworker keeps doing isn’t something you need to report, then it’s time to turn the focus back on you—which is to say, on your brain. Annoyance and frustration are simply the emotions you experience when you have a goal that’s being blocked and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This psychological process matters because it’ll dictate your response. Psychologists have a concept called “locus of control.” It refers to whether you think your own actions can affect a situation. When you have an internal locus of control, you believe you do have the power to change things; having an external locus of control, on the other hand, describes that feeling of powerlessness when you’re being buffeted by circumstances and can’t do anything about it.
And it’s this external locus that really causes you frustration, not your incessantly humming colleague. Their humming only grates on you because you feel trapped by it.
This may sound obvious, but breaking it down this way can help you see that there are really only two ways to make your annoying colleagues less annoying: Either reframe what they’re doing in a way that bothers you less, or seize control of the situation.
Option 1: Reframe It
The things that tend to bother us the most—including around the office—often have as much to do with ourselves as with other people. But it can take some real effort to see it that way.
So if your coworker is aggravating the crap out of you, make the effort to find something you actually like about them. Yes, this will be difficult. But it’s possible to do it without trying (and inevitably failing) to overlook their annoying habit. Whenever you encounter them, use their irritating behavior as a reminder to think about something you like about them. Think of the annoying or distracting thing they do like the bells on an ice cream truck, signaling that there’s actually something nice in the vicinity.
For instance, a colleague who spouts ideas that get under your skin can be frustrating to talk to. So use those discussions as an opportunity to learn about what people who are radically different from you actually believe. It’s frustrating when someone’s trying to change your mind and you know you’ll never agree with their stupid opinion. But when you’ve reframed those interactions as though you’re just doing anthropology, it can actually be quite interesting.
Option 2: Take Charge
If you can’t find any way to like (or at least not to hate) those aspects of your annoying colleague, then there’s really only one other thing to do: You need to seize control of the situation so you no longer feel trapped by it. Shift that external locus of control to an internal one.
One thing you can do is simple: Talk to your colleague. It may be that your coworker has no idea that the thing he or she is doing is annoying or distracting. Your humming colleague may not even realize other people can hear. Sometimes just having a discussion that might feel awkward can lead them to change their behavior.
Another thing you can do is to preempt the annoying behavior. If your coworker is constantly complaining, don’t give them the chance to start the conversation along a track that bugs you. Walk up to them with a big smile and tell them what a beautiful day it is and ask them what great things are happening to them today. Now you’ve taken the reins on the conversation and set the tone before they’ve had a chance to.
Finally, you can try to manage your environment a little differently. If you’re in an open office and there are sounds in the area that bother you, get a noise machine to cover up the random background noise that’s bothering you (with free sites and streaming channelslike these, sometimes it’s as easy as plugging your headphones into your computer and opening another browser tab). Or just find another place to work when you really have to concentrate. Talk to your manager to find out what options you might have for quieter workspaces.
Annoyances may be petty, but they aren’t trivial—especially when they come from the people you interact with day to day. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re feeling frustrated, and there’s an added risk that you’ll start lashing out at your colleagues when your aggravation with them bubbles to the surface. But even if your options are limited, you still always have options. Remembering that is your first step toward making things a little more bearable.
Hollywood, like many other industries, has certain ways it does things. When it comes to shooting live action that will then be composited with computer-generated imagery, that means using tried-and-true motion-capture techniques that involve actors wearing suits covered in ping-pong-ball-like sensors and doing their performances on stages surrounded by special cameras.
Rokoko, a Danish startup, thinks there’s an entirely different way to go—inexpensive suits with embedded sensors that can capture actors’ motion no matter where they are, without the need for cameras, and at a fraction of the cost.
Today, Rokoko starts shipping its $2,500 Smartsuit Pro, a garment packed with 19 sensors evenly distributed across the arms, legs, and body, capable of recording an actor’s movements and either sending them to a computer in real-time over Wi-Fi or storing them in a small drive tucked into the fabric.
The idea? To completely upend professional motion capture, making it far cheaper, and, just as important, possible to do anywhere and anytime.
In a demo for Fast Company, Rokoko CEO Jakob Balslev showed how simple it is to use his company’s new suit. He climbed into it and then quickly began making a series of motions. On a monitor across the room, a digital mannequin mirrored his every movement.
“It’s completely mobile,” Balslev said. “It turns any space into a motion-capture stage.”
The value proposition here is clear, he argued. Doing Hollywood-grade mo-cap costs a fortune, given the need for dedicated space, the suits covered in markers, and technicians to work with the resulting data and incorporate into their projects.
Rokoko’s software also makes it easier to generate copies of an actor’s digitally captured motion. That would, for example, make it simple to create something along the lines of a synchronized dancing scene.
Similarly, the software lets creators quickly and easily change the digital mannequin into some other digital character, as well as incorporate the motion-captured figure or figures into a customized background—like a grassy field.
[Photo: courtesy of Rokoko]
The suit supports up to eight individual actors per access point, and multiple access points can be used in concert, making it possible to record mo-cap data for a dozen or more actors simultaneously.
Balslev acknowledged that in some cases, traditional mo-cap systems may be somewhat more precise. “If they want the most accurate position possible,” he said, “they would probably still use optical systems.”
Jakob Balslev [Photo: courtesy of Rokoko]
That’s an important point, given that in making Hollywood films, precision is vital when incorporating live-action imagery into digital backgrounds. Still, Balslev argued that Rokoko’s system is capable of 90% of what existing mo-cap systems can do.
“You can record on location, outside a studio, and you don’t have to build anything in [your] studio,” Balslev said. “For all those use cases—fighting, dancing, for all of that, they can use [our system] tomorrow.”
While Rokoko sees a large potential market for its suits among filmmakers, it sees video gaming and virtual and augmented reality as the next potentially substantial markets. That’s because game developers and those making VR content will likely also benefit from access to inexpensive mo-cap technology.
Further, Rokoko, which has raised $3 million in seed funding and plans on seeking an A round of venture capital this year, expects to produce a different kind of device in the future for individual gamers. Balslev imagines that next product as the ultimate input systems. Walking, talking joysticks, as it were, that could render the highest-quality handheld controllers moot.
But that’s the future. For now, the 15-person company’s suits are aimed at filmmakers, given the maturity of the existing Hollywood motion-capture ecosystem. And that explains why both Sony and animator Scott Kravitz were among the initial 300 customers who bought Rokoko’s suit as part of a preorder effort.
In an interview, Kravitz, who has worked on numerous major feature films, explains that he wished he had had access to technology like Rokoko’s when he’d worked on his last feature, Chappie.
Although he purchased the suit to record motion capture for an augmented reality project he has in the works, Kravitz said he thinks it has a lot of advantages, particularly for doing mo-cap on location. Previously, he would have had to work with unwieldy wired suits or wireless suits with poor or unreliable signals.
[Photo: courtesy of Rokoko]
And though he hasn’t worked with it at length yet, Kravitz believes Rokoko’s suit could well be a good alternative for filmmakers.
He also said he thinks the suit could be the best solution for those doing mo-cap for AR projects like the one he’ll soon be producing. Right now, he said, the best choices for those without access to a full-fledged mo-cap stage are workarounds that utilize off-the-shelf tools like a Microsoft Kinect or other computer-based cameras.
“I believe that [Rokoko’s suit] is going to get a much more precise read on a body,” Kravitz said, “than a camera mounted to my computer.”
Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
The United States runs the largest immigration detention system in the world and it’s set to grow dramatically due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, promising huge profits for the private prison industry that houses the majority of detainees. There are an estimated 35,000 undocumented immigrants in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on any given day. The system’s size has nearly doubled in the past 15 years and, last week, Congress reached a budget deal that will make it even larger, funding more than 5,000 additional beds.
This growth is a coup for for-profit private prison companies, which house more than two-thirds of ICE detainees, but especially for CoreCivic and the GEO Group, the two largest such companies. More people in detention mean greater profits for both CoreCivic and GEO, which have recruited former high-ranking government officials to top posts and spent millions to lobby Congress and federal agencies. On Monday, news broke that ICE deputy director Daniel Ragsdale will soon step down to take a position at GEO. The company previously hired Democratic operative Anthony Podesta to lobby Congress and the Department of Justice on DOJ and Board of Prisons appropriations, while Thurgood Marshall Jr., a former Clinton administration official and son of the Supreme Court Justice, sits on CoreCivic’s board of directors.
Immigrant rights advocates, however, argue that the system can’t handle additional detainees because, they contend, medical care in detention is already dangerously inadequate. This week, Human Rights Watch and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), released a report, Systemic Indifference, that documents preventable deaths and risky conditions for people who get sick in detention. Among the cases the groups cited:
Manuel Cota Domingo, 34, died of heart disease, untreated diabetes, and pneumonia in 2012 while in custody in an Arizona CoreCivic facility. He was taken to a hospital eight hours after he reported trouble breathing, a delay that contributed to his death, according to HRW medical experts.
County jail staff in Orange County, New York changed a schizophrenic detainee’s prescription for an anti-hallucinogen to Benadryl, and the man was placed in what amounted to solitary confinement for a minor infraction likely related to his mental health.
ICE detainee Carlos H. (a pseudonym) suffered knee pain for eight months in California after falling in a Yuba County Jail shower. After surgery, Carlos collapsed because he had trouble breathing, after which a licensed vocational nurse failed to check his respiration or blood pressure.
Also in California, 54-year old Jose L. (not his real name) was working in the kitchen at the GEO Group’s Adelanto Detention Facility, when he fell on his hip and back. His pain was manageable at first, but after several months he could no longer stand for more than five minutes. The facility delayed his visit to a surgeon for a year and a half, a delay that an HRW medical expert found “not reasonable.” The facility’s records don’t show what the surgeon recommended or whether medical personnel at Adelanto followed his recommendations. Also, while in custody, Jose became legally blind in one eye, after the facility repeatedly delayed care for diabetic retinopathy.
Three physicians who consulted for HRW’s report studied the medical records of nine other patients in ICE custody in recent years—the group found that poor care contributed to seven of 18 in-custody deaths from 2012 to 2015, including Cota Domingo’s.
“We’ve uncovered a medical care system that doesn’t provide adequate care for people in detention,” Clara Long, an Oakland-based HRW researcher, told Capital & Main.
The report additionally found systemic problems, including short staffing, unqualified staff, delays or denials of care, grossly substandard mental-health care, poor recordkeeping, and lack of informed refusals of care.
“Because the system is stretched to hold hundreds of thousands of people a year, there are incentives to save money by not providing adequate medical care,” Long said.
ICE spokeswoman Jennifer D. Elzea responded to the Human Rights Watch report in a statement, noting that ICE spends $180 million a year on detainee health care.
“ICE is committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care,” she said, while disputing the report’s findings that ICE doesn’t ensure that health care is adequate in a facility before placing detainees in it, doesn’t sufficiently oversee health care, and doesn’t correct glaring deficiencies, even when they are brought to ICE’s attention.
In California, some 5,000 ICE detainees are held in four county jails (in Orange, Sacramento, Contra Costa, and Yuba counties) and in four ICE detention centers operated by private companies. The GEO group runs the Adelanto Detention Facility in San Bernardino County and the Mesa Verde lockup in Bakersfield. CoreCivic operates the Otay Mesa Detention Facility in San Diego, while a smaller private firm, Management and Training Corporation, runs the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico.
Health care in ICE detention is delivered by a patchwork of providers whose contract terms, including staffing requirements, vary from facility to facility, HRW reports. The government’s ICE Health Services Corps (IHSC) provides care in slightly less than half of all detention centers, including those operated by CoreCivic. Private prison health care providers cover other detention centers, while detainees in county jails get care from jail health care workers. Human Rights Watch medical consultants found problems with all three types of providers. One consultant, Dr. Marc Stern, who once ran correctional health services for Washington State, told Capital & Main that IHSC is the best qualified to provide care and should take over more of it.
The Adelanto Detention Facility in Adelanto, California.
Still, the report concludes that the best solution is to detain fewer immigrants. Immigration detainees aren’t locked up as punishment, but to ensure their appearance for deportation proceedings, and advocates argue they can be adequately supervised in the community at lower cost.
Congress, however, has moved in the opposite direction, despite its action last week to repeal an Obama-era requirement that ICE keep 33,400 detention beds filled at all times. Clara Long contends that its repeal is not likely to reduce the number of people in detention, since lawmakers have already voted to expand the system beyond the former quota.
Neither the Geo Group nor CoreCivic responded to specific questions about the adequacy of the current system and the consequences of its expected expansion. But GEO spokesman Pablo Paez wrote in a statement, “We’re proud of our long-standing record providing high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe, secure, and humane environments.”
In earnings calls to shareholders, however, both GEO and CoreCivic made clear that growth drives income, and growth is determined in no small part by immigration policy. GEO founder and CEO George Zoley noted that a big increase in the company’s profits was partly due to its new 780-bed Georgia facility that is expected to generate $21 million annually. CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger highlighted U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session’s plans to prioritize immigration offenses for prosecution, the administration’s goal to hire additional border agents, and its directive to the Border Patrol to detain illegal border crossers rather than releasing them pending a court hearing.
Indeed, both companies have kept a close watch on Washington, investing large sums to buy influence. Human Rights Watch reported that CoreCivic spent $18 million in federal lobbying between 2004 and 2014, while GEO spent $4 million. Since then, the pace of GEO’s spending in the nation’s Capitol has intensified, with GEO pouring nearly $1.8 million into federal lobbying since 2015, while CoreCivic’s has slowed, albeit spending about $3.8 million in the same period.
CoreCivic has relied on a group of D.C.’s most prominent lobbying firms, including Democrat and Republican operatives, for more than 15 years.
Detainees work out in the yard behind double fencing and barbed wire at the Adelanto Detention Center. [Photo: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty] ImagesGEO, however, appears to have spent more strategically, depending on who held power. Last January, when President Trump took office, GEO turned to Brian Ballard and Dan McFaul, both of Ballard Partners, a Florida firm that had just expanded into Washington, D.C. Ballard was a Trump fundraiser and served as a lobbyist for Trump in Florida. McFaul worked on Trump’s presidential transition team, vetting appointees for federal agencies, the military, and intelligence posts. David Stewart, who was an aide to current Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was a senator from Alabama, began lobbying for GEO in the fall of 2016. Stewart, who works for the Alabama-based firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, lobbies for the company on Homeland Security funding and private prison contracting, among other issues.
In addition to advocating in the halls of power, the companies have taken advantage of a briskly revolving door between government and industry to bolster ties with the agencies that hire them. In addition to Ragsdale’s hiring, former ICE director Julie Myers Wood, who served in the George W. Bush administration, sits on GEO’s board. The man who leads GEO’s business development efforts is David Venturella, who headed ICE’s deportation and detention operations before joining the company in 2012. Both companies include leaders who formerly helmed the Federal Bureau of Prisons—Norman A. Carlson is a GEO director emeritus, and Harley G. Lappin is a top CoreCivic executive. CoreCivic’s board of directors also includes Stacia Hylton, who headed the U.S. Marshal’s Service during Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House.
With the release of the Human Rights Watch-CIVIC report, Long said she hopes Congress will also hear her group’s call for less detention, even as big lobbying dollars amplify the voices of those who want more.
“I hope it spurs Congressional representatives to push back against President Trump’s budget request for expanding detention, to require better oversight and better transparency, but above all to detain fewer people,” Long said.
I get it: You need a job, a charitable contribution, or funding for your brilliant startup idea. But your mass email asking me for help, feedback, introductions, or money is incredibly annoying and will earn you none of the above.
Listen, I appreciate that writing individual, personalized emails is hard work, and in a lot of business situations it just isn’t possible. So, if you must send me a mass email, write it as though you’re a living, breathing, thinking human being. So many of the messages I get seem to be generated by the same robot, one that cares only about open rates and click-throughs, but not humanity. No one wants to receive nonsense word salad.
As somebody whose job involves capturing people’s attention by email (I cofounded a firm that, among other things, recruits leaders for the nonprofit sector), I’ve learned a thing or two about how to write a mass email that isn’t totally infuriating. Here’s what you’ll want to avoid.
1. The Subject Line Didn’t Say What Action To Take
NEW Thompson Ad: “Fighter”
Special Election RUINED [bad news]
These are two actual subject lines I received from two congressional candidates in special elections. Guess what the first one was about. Correct: It was about a new TV ad that Candidate Thompson was running, and it contained a request for some extra money so the ad could run more often.
Now guess what the second one was about. You can’t, because it actually wasn’t about anything, really. It was an appeal with a whole lot of “if” clauses about what would happen in the special election if I didn’t immediately hand over some cash. To make matters worse, I received three fundraising appeals from this same candidate with the word “RUINED” in all caps—in just a single week. Plus, I received two other fundraising appeals with the same all-caps “RUINED” from a second candidate, and a third from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
Methinks someone is using the same consultant to write the same crappy emails, based on the fact that once upon a time, the word “ruined” resulted in decent open– or click-through rates. By the time I’d seen two of these subject lines, the senders had ruined whatever magic that term had once possessed.
The first message made it clear that an ad had launched; it signaled a specific event within the campaign, so I didn’t have much trouble guessing that I’d be asked to take a specific action accordingly. The second message, by contrast, was merely shrill and alarmist. No matter what you’re trying to accomplish professionally—win an election or pitch an investor—you need to be clear about why now’s the right time: What’s the occasion? What’s the key thing that should interest me right now about the goal you’re pursuing?
BREAKING: Senate to vote TODAY on Title X family planning
We’re missing Michelle
These are two subject lines, both from the team that writes mass emails for Cecile Richards, CEO of Planned Parenthood. See why the first one is useful and the second one isn’t? As a result of the first message, I called my senator. As a result of the second, I deleted the email without opening it. View it as my tiny signal to the email team: If you want my attention, you’ve got to let me know what action to take—clearly you already know how to.
2. It Was Way Too Long And Had Eye-Popping Formatting
Always keep it simple and useful. That means no more than three paragraphs of relevant content, clearly presented. Too often, mass emails run way longer than they should, requiring significant scrolling in order to get through them. And the multiple blinding fonts, colors, and formatting choices senders tend to introduce may help “break up” the text but definitely don’t make it easier to read.
We’ve learned this one the hard way. For years in our recruitment work, we sent entire position descriptions to our network of interested contacts. Last year, we began testing a much simpler message than what we’d been sending: a short, one-to-three–paragraph summary of the position description. In fact, we cut our test period short because simple message outperformed the lengthier one by a healthy margin right away. (I console myself with the knowledge that, at a minimum, our fonts and color scheme were more pleasing to the eye than most of what lands in my in my inbox.)
3. You Tried Too Hard To Sound Exciting
After a recent analysis of email performance, we learned something interesting: just a touch of creativity is best. When announcing a new position that a client is looking to fill, the only two approaches that performed better than a super-straightforward “Role at Organization” were “Slightly Described Role at Organization” and “Role at Slightly Described Organization.” Dangle too much detail in a bid to sound appealing, and you’ll probably lose out. Go figure—slightly enticing yet plain English for the win.
Think of it this way: You only need to give somebody enough information to know what you’re contacting them for and why it might interest them. But you shouldn’t try and deliver the pitch and make the sale in one fell swoop—mass emails aren’t always great for that. If you must send somebody a mass email, your top goal should just to be deliver a clear piece of information and explain why you think they should care about it.
Because as the person on the receiving end, I want to believe that you’re amazing at your job, that your nonprofit is doing great work, or that your startup is going to nail it. I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on—so please write an email that doesn’t cause me to reflexively delete it.
As a comedian in the entertainment business for nearly 30 years, Jeff Garlin has made it a point to diversify his career, not only in acting, with voiceover roles (Toy Story, WALL-E), TV (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Goldbergs), and film (Becoming Bond, Safety Not Guaranteed), but also by trying his hand at writing and directing. Despite a resume with no filler, Garlin doesn’t hesitate to say his latest project for Netflix is a significant career highlight.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done where I made it,” Garlin says. “I’ve been in a lot of things that are pretty cool, but this I love and I’m very hopeful for it.”
Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie is murder-mystery comedy, co-written, directed and starring Garlin as Gene Handsome, a Los Angeles detective tracking down a killer while trying to bring everything else outside of his career into focus.
“My life is a one of where comedy and show business I find kind of easy and real life is the challenge,” Garlin says. “And so this guy is great at solving crime but in his personal life he’s kind of a mess.”
Although Garlin’s credits lean more on the acting side, writing and directing have become outlets for creative fulfillment. It’s not that he’s turning his back on acting, it’s just an experience that needs specific conditions to make it worthwhile.
“The least creative part of filmmaking is acting. You’re a storyteller, and so it can be creative depending on the director and the relationship you have. But I find it the least interesting,” Garlin says. “My favorite is probably the directing. I find writing to be, when I’m in a groove, a delightful experience. I love being alone, just pounding it out, and then I enjoy the editing process of not only the editing of the writing before I turn the script in, but the editing process and the postproduction.”
Between the creative autonomy over a film like Handsome, and the resources from a company like Netflix to make it happen, it’s no wonder Garlin feels this is his strongest work to date.
“Netflix [hires] people they believe in to make movies and television shows, and then they leave them alone and they let the creators of the shows live and die by their sword,” Garlin says. “Because the reality is an executive, no matter how much they have an ego going, they’re not going to come up with the thing that makes it a hit—the person that they hired is.”
Last year, the big news at Microsoft’s Build developer conference was a new framework that let developers build bots and imbue them with plug-and-play skills such as natural language conversation, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.
The focus of Build 2017, which will take place in Seattle on May 10-12, will likely be closely related, but not identical. The conference will feature keynote addresses on the 10th and 11th, in which we may hear new product or service announcements. The rest of the days will be filled with developer training sessions on Microsoft tools and how to use them.
Based on the items in the session agenda, Microsoft will be talking a lot about how developers can make their bots, apps, and services available—and highly functional—as “skills” in Cortana, Microsoft’s natural language smart assistant.
Cortana Gets Skillful
Developers will attend sessions on how to use the Microsoft Cortana technology to enter into a verbal back-and-forth with users to deliver their skill or service. This conversation capability is already offered to developers as a cognitive skill in Microsoft’s Bot Framework, but in this context, the back-and-forth might be voice only, with no visual aspect–more like how Alexa works via an Amazon Echo than Cortana within Windows 10.
By encouraging developers to create skills, Cortana is following a similar path as Alexa, except that Alexa has been incorporating new skills from developers for a couple of years, and now has more than 10,000 (not all of them useful). Microsoft has said that new skills would work with Cortana running on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Android, iOS, and Xbox.
Harman Kardon Invoke with Cortana from Microsoft [Photo: courtesy of Harman]
Taking On The Echo
To accompany all this, Microsoft will likely be talking to developers about how they can expose their apps and bots via Harman Kardon’s newly announced Invoke smart speaker, which came about as the result of a partnership with Microsoft. Invoke is Harman Kardon’s answer to Amazon Echo, and a new free-standing vehicle for the Cortana personal assistant. (Development of the device began before Harman Kardon was acquired by Samsung, which has its own nascent assistant in Bixby.)
The smart-home speaker wars are pulling in many of the big tech platform companies, perhaps even Apple. What’s alluring is the undeniable success of Amazon’s Echo (powered by the Alexa service) and its surprisingly quick movement toward becoming a mainstream tech product. People, it seems, like the idea of speaking to a stationary, intelligent device in the way they might speak to another person in the room.
Invoke puts a shiny new body around the Cortana brain, which might make both the device and the assistant more attractive to consumers. (Microsoft says 145 million people already use Cortana on PCs and mobile devices.) And it needn’t be limited to consumers in the home. Microsoft might be wise to leverage its massive experience in productivity tools to make the new smart speaker a useful fixture in an office environment. Workers might speak requests for communications or files into the open air instead of having to type on a desktop keyboard or tap on a mobile device. Or call out for a to-do list or meeting agenda or calendar event, or tell Cortana to initiate a Skype call with an associate.
The Bot Story
One thing to watch for is how Microsoft plays the bot narrative it made so much of at Build 2016, one of CEO Satya Nadella‘s biggest strategic decisions as leader of the company, encompassing natural language, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Microsoft employees have told me Nadella’s impassioned comments about “conversation as a platform” at Build 2016 had a galvanizing and empowering effect internally.
But that was 2016. Most people will tell you that bots were trotted out in front of the public too early and too quickly. Facebook also made a big noise about chatbots last year, and the ones they made available weren’t very useful or even all that conversational. This year, Facebook backed way off the bot narrative at its F8 conference, adding only minor additional functionality. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft doubles down on bots, or steps back.
The Kitchen Sink
What Microsoft really wants is for developers to use its entire portfolio of tools to expose functionality in a range of ways—whether that’s a web page, a mobile or desktop app, a chatbot, or a voice-only Cortana skill. All of this could be hosted in the company’s Azure cloud and delivered via a variety of different operating systems and devices, leveraging the Bing knowledge graph and search functionality. Microsoft wants developers to leave Seattle with this sort of holistic development approach in mind.
My colleague Harry McCracken and I will be in Seattle to cover both keynotes. If you’d like to watch from home, Microsoft will be live-streaming the event at its Channel 9 developer channel.
As the cofounder of Disqus, one of the biggest services powering the comments sections of websites, Daniel Ha has seen his share of uncivil discourse over the years. But since the 2016 election, the San Francisco-based CEO concedes there has been a rapid increase in conversations that veer from basic mean-spiritedness to polarized accusations and outright slurs. “Oh, it’s much bigger now,” Ha tells Fast Company. “It is absolutely related to what’s going on in society and this [presidential] administration and the perception of it.”
Disqus is one of a growing number of tech platforms under scrutiny for the websites and organizations they do business with. As the speedy downfall of Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly recently demonstrated, post-election liberal activist movements are getting much better at publicizing their causes and marshaling financial pressure, and no company with money to lose is off the hook for the relationships it maintains.
That includes not only comment platforms like Disqus, but any entity that powers the various levels of internet infrastructure—from payment providers like PayPal, to web-hosting services like GoDaddy, to social media giants like Facebook. Activists have figured out that while they can’t make everyone behave civilly, they can go after the advertisers that fund uncivil conversations and the internet services that keep them going. The end goal is to effectively silence incendiary organizations of all kinds, from white supremacist groups like American Renaissance to black supremacist ones like Nuwaubian Nation Of Moors, from the Holocaust-denying Realist Report to the anti-Semitic and anti-gay site The Right Stuff. Such groups have long been online, but now the companies that give them a platform are being taken to task.
The increased pressure brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions for tech firms. At what point does preserving civility—and possibly even safety—trump Silicon Valley’s libertarian philosophy that the internet must remain open, that information wants to be free? Is online free speech absolute or is there an internet equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater? Can companies separate commerce and business relationships from moral judgments? Is it sufficient to take action about unsavory clients only after people come complaining?
And finally, can we just ignore all this and hope it goes away? Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.
Hosted on GoDaddy
The easiest course is to reserve action for when content posted on a website actually violates the law, such as criminal transactions or depictions of child pornography. That leaves a lot of unsavory material in the acceptable zone: swastikas, burning crosses, disparaging slurs against women or minorities. And companies, forced to defend their reasoning for leaving such content up, typically employ a free-speech argument.
“We strongly support the First Amendment and are very much against censorship on the internet,” writes Ben Butler, director of the Digital Crimes Unit for GoDaddy, in an email. He adds that, “if a site promotes, encourages, or engages in violence against people, we will take action.”
But while the First Amendment may be a motivator for GoDaddy, it is not a legal requirement for it or any other company, says Sophia Cope, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Can they choose who their customers are? Can they have content guidelines? Sure,” says Cope. GoDaddy hosts at least seven Ku Klux Klan sites—all of which the company has judged to be in compliance with its guidelines.
The Atlantic captured this video of an NPI event in November in which Richard Spencer drops Nazi terms like “Lügenpresse” (lying press).
What slips by such guidelines are blanket statements that vilify ethnic or social groups, like Jewish or gay people, but fall short of a clear incitement to violence. For instance, they are common—though obscured by a veneer of intellectual discourse—on Radix Journal, a website hosted by Squarespace. Consider an essay on the site that warns against alt-right cooperation with Jews:
One might consider the analogy that our opposing forces act as a giant knife, cutting into the heart of the nation. The coterie of Leftists, anarchists, degenerates, homosexuals, self-interested elites, and others of our race make up the bulk of the blade. But with what preponderance are Jews found at the razors edge!
Radix Journal is run by the white supremacist National Policy Institute, whose website is also hosted on Squarespace. Another essay on the site, by neatly dressed, Nazi-quoting NPI chairman Richard Spencer, argues for the intellectual inferiority of black people. Squarespace even powers the online store for Radix Journal, where Aryans can pick up an alt right-themed T-shirt or a “Trump Deportation Force” poster for under $30.
Of course, this being the internet, some of the most disturbing content on those sites lives within the comment sections. That brings us back to Disqus, which hosts comments for Radix as well as NPI, commonly featuring statements like this:
Taking “measures against” Jewish influence is too little too late. When the goblins are already inside your home, eating from your pantry and fingering your children, you are several degrees past the point where forming a new investigatory commission is warranted.
We contacted tech companies about their connections to such disparaging content. Squarespace declined to comment. Disqus’s Kim Rohrer, who holds the title of “VP of people & culture,” said the company cannot discuss whether any specific site is being reviewed for violating policies. However, regarding a list of 19 controversial websites that included Radix and NPI, Rohrer said by email, “I can tell you that most of these are under review and we have explored technical and policy solutions with them.”
Richard Spencer in Radix Merch
Some companies are a little more willing to show their discomfort with controversial content than others. When we began our research, donations to Radix were handled by an online payment processing service called Donorbox. (It has since switched to another provider, called Memberful.) Charles Zhang, founder of Donorbox, expressed alarm when we informed him about Radix. “We are deeply disappointed and dumbfounded that a white nationalist movement spearheaded by Richard Spencer has a following in the United States,” he wrote in an email.
Dumbfounded is a frequent reaction by companies that host sites, comments, payments, or ad-placement services for incendiary websites. The web is becoming ever more automated, and online service companies may have no idea who their customers are until someone else comes asking questions.
Cloudflare customer The Realist Report
When Do You Call It Hate?
Radix Journal is just one of over 280 sites that a group of activists has flagged as being linked to hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC, founded in 1971, tracks such groups in the United States, everything from neo-Nazis and KKK chapters to black separatist groups, to a few U.S.-focused Islamist extremist groups (most are based overseas), to anti-Muslim organizations, to groups that oppose gay rights.
The list of such groups grew from 599 in the year 2000 to a high of 1,018 tallied in 2011. The latest count is 917, with the number of militia-type groups and KKK groups in decline but the number of groups considered anti-Muslim having doubled in just a year. The listing is used as a reference by other organizations and some companies that aren’t directly tied to SPLC.
“Hate groups increasingly function only online,” says Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, which researches hate groups. “Just like in the real world, people are moving their social activities from real-world events to online events; we’ve got a follow-on there.”
Right-leaning groups—including Christian conservative ones—often cry foul at the “hate” designation, saying they are unfairly painted with a broad brush because they hold differing moral or political views. “I think some of them, some people might say that they’re just conservative,” says activist John Ellis, who independently helped research the list of companies providing tech services to SPLC-designated hate groups.
But Beirich says that argument doesn’t hold up for groups that reject the basic idea that people should be treated equally. “What we’re looking for in the ideology is, does the organization consider an entire group of people—black people, gays, Jews, whatever it is—to be lesser,” she says. Examples she names include the Nation of Islam calling all white people “blue-eyed devils,” or conservative religious people saying that gay people are “diseased.” A group doesn’t have to advocate violence to make the list.
“A lot of times the websites are very clean, but the books they publish or what their leaders say are very different,” says Beirich. “If we listed everybody who says homosexuality is a sin or is against gay marriage, you’d be seeing tons of churches, but obviously our criteria is more narrow.” There may be room to argue over individual listings, but many entries pass the sniff test for prejudice. Among them: The American Nazi Party and a dozen sites with “KKK” in their name.
As Ellis characterizes it, these and other incendiary sites are business partners with tech companies such as Disqus, GoDaddy, and Squarespace. The Boston-area entrepreneur was surprised on February 3 to see an ad for his engineering firm, Optics for Hire, appear on Radix Journal. Ellis didn’t choose to advertise on Radix. It happened because an automated ad network (he believes it was Google’s) sold targeted ad space on the site in the tenths of a second between when Ellis clicked a link and when the page loaded in his browser. Ellis may have seen the ad because his connection to the industry featured prominently in some online advertising profile. His disdain for racism did not.
The Breitbart Effect
Online nastiness is not new. “All the internet communities, online discussions, that entire beast has always been fairly chaotic,” says Disqus’s Daniel Ha. But pressure on tech providers has grown in recent months, triggered by a fiercely polarizing election and the rise of Breitbart News from a fringe alt-right conservative site to a major internet destination, whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, became President Trump’s chief strategist.
Breitbart is not considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But SPLC did release a study indicating a sharp rise in the use of the word “Jewish” as a slur in article comments, which are hosted by Disqus. Hateful reader comments and harsh Breitbart articles (such as “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy“), have fueled a large anti-Breitbart advertising boycott effort from a group of anonymous activists called Sleeping Giants.
They and their Twitter followers have gone after advertisers on Breitbart, tweeting screenshots of ads next to controversial articles and inflammatory comments, such as, “It really is time people to [sic] start blowing up every single mosque (gangster houses).” Sleeping Giants’ campaign has convinced over 2,000 companies and organizations to blacklist Breitbart from their automated buys on ad networks. It also played a role in the O’Reilly Factor ad boycott that preceded the recent firing of Bill O’Reilly. A few ad networks, including Rocket Fuel and major player AppNexus, have unilaterally blacklisted Breitbart for all their clients.
“My inlaws are immigrants from Egypt, and they’re Muslim, and I was offended by the initial travel ban,” says Ellis, referring to President Trump’s now-blocked executive order restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries (not including Egypt). “I was interested in the work Sleeping Giants was doing using free-market principles to defund a news source that had promoted this narrative that immigration was a problem.”
Ellis started by targeting Disqus, which hosts comments on not only Breitbart and Richard Spencer sites, but also The Right Stuff, anti-Muslim site American Freedom Defense Initiative, and the white-nationalist online journal Occidental Dissent, among others. Ellis soon encountered another activist, EJ Gibney on Twitter, along with two others who remain anonymous for fear of drawing attention from the hate groups.
They began by compiling a list of sites using Disqus that hosted unmoderated discussions featuring racial slurs or threats. They expanded to researching the ties between purported hate groups and any tech providers and shared their findings with Fast Company, which we confirmed independently.
A Range Of Reactions
Independent of Ellis and Gibney, SPLC recently called out one of these companies, Cloudflare, for providing internet security and bandwidth optimization to at least 48 designated hate sites using servers based in European countries with laws against Holocaust denial or the promotion or incitement of racial hatred. Perhaps the most notorious Cloudflare client is the white nationalist forum Stormfront, run by Don Black—a prominent, longtime leader within the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. A 2014 SPLC report by Beirich tallied nearly 100 bias-related murders committed by frequent posters to Stormfront, including Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. Correlation is not causation, but even Black seemed troubled by the events. “This makes me want to pull the plug on this place and never look back. We attract too many sociopaths,” he wrote in a forum discussion about the Breivik killings.
Cloudflare maintains that it’s a conduit for its clients’ content, which is hosted with other services and would be online whether or not Cloudflare were involved. (Using Cloudflare obscures the name of the actual host with online lookup services like WHOIS.)
Beirich disagrees. “Their description is bullshit, basically,” she says, “because whatever they say, they have got to put that material on a server somewhere so an Italian, for instance, can access Stormfront quickly.” She’s referring to caching copies of a site’s content in different locations so it’s closer to visitors. The company’s terms of service state that, “Cloudflare is a pass-through network and, at most, caches content for a limited period in order to improve network performance.”
Cloudflare says its focus is on the technical services that it provides to clients. “We’re not as involved with the content, and we also think we don’t necessarily have expertise to address those issues,” says Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel. “Our approach is generally to not get involved in such things.”
One important exception is child pornography, he says, because the U.S. has strict federal laws against distributing such content. Kramer says that Cloudflare immediately sends any reports of child pornography on its network to federal officials. He says that Cloudflare also complies with law enforcement on other issues of illegal content or activities by clients. “We have a relationship with law enforcement where if they go through the steps, the due-process steps to come up with an order, we will adhere to that order,” says Kramer.
He says that Cloudflare doesn’t have the resources to go beyond the legal requirements and rattles off stats. The company has 425 employees to service 6 million websites. It handles 10% of global internet requests, amounting to almost 5 million per second. “You see increasingly people want to take tech companies and throw a lot of these difficult questions onto them,” says Kramer.
A recent article by ProPublica alleged something more dangerous than a hands-off approach. Cloudflare was forwarding complaints about abusive content to site owners, including the name and contact information of the person lodging the complaint. Such info, sent to The Daily Stormer (considered a neo-Nazi group by SPLC), led to vicious online harassment, several people reported to ProPublica. “It’s a very distasteful thing when that happens,” says Kramer. After the ProPublica report, Cloudfare revised its policies to allow fully anonymous reporting of threats and child sexual abuse material.
Cloudflare represents the far laissez-faire end of responses to handling unsavory or offensive content: Just keep the internet working, legally. “I can understand that Cloudflare is a moral absolutist, a free-speech absolutist, and I can appreciate that position,” says John Ellis. “They’re not violating their terms [of service] on hate speech because they don’t have terms on hate speech.”
PayPal and WordPress customer Vanguard America
The WordPress platform, owned by a company called Automattic, also has no such terms for the sites it hosts. “Our service allows anyone on the web to express their ideas and opinions, whether we agree with them or not—we don’t censor, moderate, or endorse the content of any site we host,” reads the company’s Freedom of Speech statement. Sites it hosts include American Vanguard (“We are White, we are nationalists, and we are Fascists.”), United Dixie White Knights of the KKK, and the American branch of Greek Nationalist group Golden Dawn, which critics consider to be a neo-Nazi organization.
Other companies that provide the pipes of the internet also tend to take a hands-off approach. “As stalwart supporters of the Constitution’s First Amendment, we believe that hosting providers should not be in the business of dictating acceptable content among its users,” writes Brett Dunst, a spokesman for DreamHost, home to sites including the American Nazi Party. Illegal activity is the one exception to the company’s hands-off approach, he says.
Google-owned Blogger is a tad stricter than most site hosts. We informed Blogger of eight controversial sites that it may have been hosting. It shut down one, the anti-immigrant Treasure Valley Refugee Watch. Three other sites, including Holocaust-denying The Realist Report, received what Blogger calls interstitials—pages that pop up and warn the visitor that the content may be objectionable.
Guilt By Association
On the other end of the spectrum, ad companies that handle automated placement on websites are sometimes the most aggressive about breaking ties with controversial destinations. That’s in part because such sites aren’t good places for its clients to be seen, says Josh Zeitz, a spokesman for AppNexus. But AppNexus also blacklists sites for moral reasons. “Our CEO is a donor to SPLC. He trusts them implicitly,” says Zeitz.
Judgments can be tricky, though. Satish Polisetti, CEO of Polymorph (formerly AdsNative), writes in an email that, “we have been internally wrestling with how to address the challenge of publishers that fall into the gray area of free speech that is considered offensive to many, but that does not necessarily cross that bright line into being hate speech.” Both companies audit all sites before they are eligible to use its network, and presence of hate speech is one of the criteria they may use to reject sites.
Google embraces a much more inclusive message than some sites that Blogger hosts.
Ad company Rocket Fuel has a list of about two dozen types of content that can disqualify a site, and hate speech is one of them, says chief privacy officer Ari Levenfeld. One of its tools is a scanning service provided by Peer39, which not only looks for keywords but also evaluates the context of language on sites. It’s easy, for instance, to disparage racial groups without using actual slur words, but instead using fudged spellings.
We inquired about six sites tied to SPLC hate groups that appeared to use Rocket Fuel for advertising, including Radix Journal and American Renaissance, which also argues the genetic and intellectual superiority of white people. Ellis, Gibney, and their team used a browser extension called Ghostery to scan sites for advertiser tracking code, but any site owner can install the code on their own, even if they don’t have a business relationship with an advertising company. All six sites with Rocket Fuel code were already on the company’s global block list, said Levenfeld.
The activists flagged 67 hate group sites as possibly delivering ads from one or both of Google’s networks, AdSense and DoubleClick. When we sent the list to Google, it said that only 10 of them were actually running Google ads. It declined to discuss specific sites, but based on some numbers it did provide, Google appears to have dropped advertising from most or all of the 10 sites, as well as proactively blacklisting some sites that weren’t even running Google ads.
Ghostery reveals third-party code on sites, but not whether business relationships exist.
Google approves only 12% of the site publishers that apply to its network, the company told us. Its restrictive content guidelines prohibit even sites that sell alcohol or tobacco products. They also ban content that “incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.”
But the search giant’s strict policies have not absolved it: It’s been under increased pressure since reports by the Times of London about ads from major corporations, charities, and U.K. government agencies appearing alongside YouTube videos promoting extremist content. Google announced in late March that it will use better machine-learning AI to keep ads off content deemed too offensive and that it will give advertisers more fine-grained control over the kind of material they appear on.
The Messy Middle
The biggest controversy is for tech companies that fall in the middle of the range on content: They may have policies against things like hate speech or abusive comments, but are accused of not enforcing them. “These same companies that promote these values about liberty and being pro-immigrant, that are pro-gay rights, that are supportive of women’s issues, they’re taking money from hate groups,” says Ellis.
Often the wording of policies is vague or complex. Disqus’s terms of service, for instance, prohibit users from posting content that “may create a risk of harm, loss, physical or mental injury, emotional distress, death, disability, disfigurement, or physical or mental illness to you, to any other person, or to any animal.” That could be almost anything.
The terms say that Disqus may remove offending content, but that it “takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any User Content that you or any other User or third party posts or sends over the Service.” Basically, it’s up to the site moderators, and of the 10 kinds of content they are prohibited from allowing, only one—”Intimidation of users of the Disqus Service”—appears as if it might apply to hate speech.
In response to mounting criticism, Disqus recently announced some new tools to fight what it calls “toxic comments,” such as the ability for users to report violations directly to Disqus if the site moderator doesn’t take action. It also promises to start using AI to flag (though not automatically remove) hate speech, but it hasn’t said when that will begin. “These seem like useful changes that will help them manage the hate issue across the platform,” says Ellis. “But at some point they need to make a clear stand about their values. When will they do that?”
Disqus does not host comments on perhaps the most virulent site: Stormfront. That falls to vBulletin, which also provides forum software for the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. VBulletin offers both a cloud service, which it hosts, and software that sites can run on their own servers. VBulletin, a division of California-based Internet Brands, did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.
The most widely used discussion platform is one you probably use yourself: Facebook. The social network’s comments plugin powers the discussions on several sites on the SPLC list, including Stop Islamization of the World, which advocates burning Qurans. Facebook has a policy of removing hate speech content, which it defines as attacking people based on numerous categories like race and gender. Facebook told us it will also remove a group that is “dedicated” to promoting hatred against those categories.
But it’s up to users to flag this content, so we did—sending Facebook a list of 18 sites that use Facebook pages or groups or its commenting service. The list includes black supremacist groups such as the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ and the Brooklyn-based All Eyes On Egipt Bookstore. The latter is connected to the Nuwaubian Nation Of Moors, whose founder, Dwight York (currently serving 135 years in prison for racketeering and child molestation), has made proclamations such as “White people are the devil.”
Facebook reviewed the list and dropped two groups: neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division and Invictus Books, which sells anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi products. The groups that the SPLC labeled as black supremacist were not among those Facebook considers dedicated to promoting hatred.
Turning Off The Money Faucet
As the downfall of Bill O’Reilly shows, advertising boycotts can be powerful tools for activists. But advertising isn’t a big source of revenue for most SPLC-designated sites. Instead, they often rely on donations and e-commerce. PayPal is a player in both categories, providing services to sites including the National Policy Institute, American Vanguard, and Occidental Dissent, among others.
PayPal has a team dedicated to “brand risk management” that consults with outside groups to help find problematic customers, the company told us, though it would not name those partner groups. It said that several sites from our list were under review for violating its brief Acceptable Use Policy, which includes prohibition of “the promotion of hate, violence [or] racial intolerance.” The company sent us a prepared statement that read in part, “PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used to accept payments or donations to organizations for activities that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance.”
Other fundraising platforms strive to remain neutral. Despite his personal distaste for Spencer’s views, Zhang says he reluctantly chose to continue providing service to Radix Journal and NPI, citing a recent legal ruling that allowed Spencer to speak at a rented auditorium at Auburn University in Alabama because the judge determined that Spencer doesn’t promote violence.
However, when Radix and NPI switched to Memberful (without informing Donorbox why), Zhang said, “Good riddance. We are happy that they are no longer using us.” Zhang says that Donorbox has dropped some customers it deemed were harassing or threatening, including Holocaust denial site The Realist Report.
Memberful falls farther on the laissez-faire end of the range. The tiny, three-person company says it wants to be a neutral service provider. Both Memberful and Donorbox are platforms that sit on top of payment’s processor Stripe, which in turn sits on top of banks and credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard. Stripe follows the guidelines of those payment systems, such as banning online get-rich-quick schemes or shady purchase arrangements that could be used for money laundering. Beyond such requirements, Stripe doesn’t have any policies around the content of sites. Stripe would not comment for this article.
Some of the most blatant sites were already shut out of the online payments system. The American Nazi Party and Holocaust denier Carolyn Yeager, for instance, take cash or money orders. The Daily Stormer takes cash or Bitcoin.
Anti-Semitic site Traditional Youth Network was cut off by online payment services. Three parentheses is the designation for Jew.
In addition to hosting sites, Squarespace also provides e-commerce or fundraising support to some of them, such as Radix Journal, and the National Policy Institute. In contrast to the “no comment” from Squarespace, we got a quick reply from CafePress, which provided online stores to Stop the Islamization of the World, VDARE, and Yahushua Dual Seed Christian Identity Ministry, which claims that “Many of the people we call Jews today are indeed descendants of Satan…”
CafePress dropped the three sites within about a day of our contacting them. The company says that it uses SPLC as one of its resources to evaluate clients (though obviously some slipped by). It has extensive guidelines, such as prohibiting hateful or racist terms or symbols.
“Once we become aware that a recognized hate group is using CafePress to sell merchandise, we remove the images and shut down their shops immediately,” writes spokeswoman Jessica Lutchen in an email.
Another large online store provider, Shopify, takes a stridently free-expression stance. It services three SPLC hate sites, including Generations, whose director, Kevin Swanson, supports Uganda’s legal crackdown on gays, which includes the death penalty. Swanson often reminds his audiences that the penalty for homosexuality is death and seems to flirt with the idea that it should be enforced if people refuse to repent. Shopify, which has also taken heat from activists for powering the stores of Breitbart and its former tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, declined to comment for this article.
A Hard Battle To Sit Out
The two ends of the spectrum are the easiest to understand. CafePress is especially strict: It provides a long list of verboten content, and claims the right to drop clients for yet more things not on the list. Cloudflare is especially lenient. It allows any content that isn’t illegal; and with the exception of child porn, Cloudflare leaves it to law enforcement to make the call. Both types of policies will have fans and detractors, but both are consistent and easy to grasp.
Life isn’t usually that simple. Disagreement is inherent in discussion forums on services like Disqus and Facebook. The filter bubble effect—hearing only from people who share your views—has possibly led to more division and extremism in the United States and other countries. A variety of views can challenge and break down prejudices, or expose them as intellectually bankrupt—in theory. But at some point, we have to ask if views go too far for a community to tolerate, or for a moneymaking enterprise to take the risk of handling.
Working to strike a balance between free expression and extreme prejudice is a messy struggle. But it’s a worthy one, says EFF’s Sophia Cope, lest we risk going too far in either direction. “If we have very aggressive companies that are making all of these content decisions … and acting in a very over-broad way, then it will be true that whole categories of speech and whole categories of people will be prevented from sharing their ideas in the marketplace of ideas that we value as a country,” she says.
Commerce isn’t exempt from controversy. Bill O’Reilly isn’t the first pundit brought down by an ad boycott, and his high-profile downfall will almost certainly embolden activists to use the tactic on other foes. Companies may argue that they don’t have the expertise or resources to take a stand on issues outside their main business areas. But in an increasingly polarized and angry world, there’s less and less appreciation for neutrality.
On days when you’re sick as a dog, you’d probably agree that it’s best to stay at home. But then you realize that you’re out of sick days—and that your company isn’t the type to say, “Hey, that’s okay. Work from home for as long as you need. Just don’t get us sick!”
And you have the terrible realization that you have to go into the office, even though you can barely breathe out of your nose and can’t stop coughing all over the place.
It’s impossible to snap your fingers and recover instantly for the sake of your teammates. But here are a few things you can do that’ll help you avoid dragging everyone down with you.
1. Work From The Most Remote Corner You Can Find
A few years ago, I went on the internet and diagnosed myself with tuberculosis. And even though my diagnosis was completely wrong, I was legitimately ill and could have used a sick day—yet my boss insisted that I come in anyway.
I was convinced that my presence would infect every single one of my friends and that nobody would ever talk to me again. But then as I walked into the office for work that morning, I remembered that there was a small room for salespeople to call their clients in relative silence that no one ever used.
Maybe for you, it’s a conference room that’s always open. Or maybe it’s an empty desk that’s a few feet away from everybody else. No matter what it is, try to find somewhere you can sequester yourself and be as sick as you want without infecting the company.
2. Bring Cleaning Supplies Everywhere You Go For The Day
This might sound silly, but hear me out. The unfortunate truth is that you’re probably going to have to be around people while you’re hacking up a lung. And while that’s no fun for anyone, you can still take matters into your own hands by preparing yourself with the necessary cleaning supplies to wipe away any evidence that you were sick—especially if you happen to do so at someone else’s workstation.
Things like hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, and a simple packet of tissues can go a long way in keeping things as clean as possible for everyone around you.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that you won’t pass on whatever it is you have. But showing your coworkers that you’re aware of the fact that you’re making their work environment a little icky will help them understand that if it were up to you, you’d be at home on the couch watching TV.
3. Avoid The Temptation To Work Even Harder Than Usual
When I landed on the idea that I’d contracted tuberculosis, I also decided that if I was going to be sick at work, I was going to work insanely hard. “I can push through this,” I said to myself. “Sure, I don’t have a choice, but I’m going to show my boss that he can count on me, even if I feel like I’m about to die!”
While your enthusiasm should be lauded, you should also look at yourself in the mirror and ask if the extra energy you’re exerting is worth keeping yourself sick for an extended period of time.
Eventually, my effort at the office got me so sick that my boss had to make an exception for me and send me home. This might sound like an ideal outcome, but trust me—when you’re feeling gross, identify the things that absolutely need to get done, and then just get out of the building when those tasks are completed.
Being sick is never fun, especially when you’re forced to drag yourself into the office. And even though this is counterproductive and I wish I could yell at your company, this is probably a reality for many of you. So do what you can to make things as easy as possible on you and the people you work with.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Take technology like the internet-of-things, mix it with trends like lactose-free, high-protein, organic, and natural, sprinkle in environmental challenges like depleted soils and oceans, and pass the stew through a commercial meat grinding machine. The sum is the present–and future–of food, where a lot of funny things happen on the way to the food market. Beer is produced by artificial intelligence. Fridges self-order your next meal. Foods cure and prevent disease as much as fill our bellies. And chefs create “an open source hyperloop of culinary creativity with the ability to deconstruct food to be sent anywhere on the planet,” says food futurist Marius Robles.
The future of food is already pretty far-out. Trends like Soylent, prawns made of vegetables, and the fact that we spend more money now in restaurants than in supermarkets, would all confuse our grandparents. And it’s going to get weirder. Before long, we’ll be slicing and dicing vegetable DNA using CRISPR and produce the majority of our calories in controlled, rather than open, environments, whether it’s vertical farms or minutely engineered endangered fish hatcheries. The changes coming to the way we produce, consume, and throw away food, could overturn the kitchenette and upset the apple cart, at least in the imaginings of Reimagine Food, a Barcelona think-tank that brings together hundreds of food companies, entrepreneurs, and future-watchers.
“Cities will be able to analyze their inhabitants’ quality of life through their food [consumption], and arable land will be rendered unnecessary,” says its Eatnomics report. “We will also discover smart nutrition for a total personalization of our diets, which will also affect the way in which food is produced and distributed.”
Its three-wave schematic, seen here, shows how the revolution could build on itself. First, about now, there’s the sharing economy, food biohacking, and food box delivery wars. Next, between 2019 and 2022, there’s food scanners that help divine more accurately what we’re eating, smart food labels, and 3D food printing. Then, in the next decade, there’s food-as-medicine, food personally adjusted to our microbiome, and food at the molecular and implantable level.
“Big data will help us create search engines to identify patterns and generate wide-reaching predictions, anticipating our desires and consumer impulses,” says Robles, head of Reimagine Food, in an email. “Sometimes, we’ll wonder where a food comes from, the laboratory or a field. We’ll experience personalized food in all its splendor, with our genome as proof, as we live in the controversial algorithm economy.”
Technology offers the opportunity to produce food more efficiently, whether it’s through the precision targeting of chemicals and water or the conservation of soils through soil-less agriculture. Surely we’ll work out ways to preserve more of the 40% of calories we currently throw away (or lose from the food chain). And, if there’s not enough available space on Earth, there are always other planets to plow.
“I’m sure that by 2022 we’ll have a series of crops growing on Mars,” Robles says. “Today, there is a preliminary expedition by some British scientists to plant lettuce on Mars in 2018. I’m sure we’ll be using Mars as a second source of agricultural resources.” First, there was agriculture, then aquaculture, then aquaponics, and, in the future, perhaps, “astroculture” as well.
On April 5th, 16-year-old Carter Wilkerson tweeted at Wendy’s asking how many retweets it would take to get a year of free chicken nuggets. The fast-feeder’s reply? 18 million. And while he hasn’t hit that milestone just yet, the 3.42 million retweets of the Nevada high schooler’s original tweet now surpasses Ellen’s infamous Oscar selfie for Samsung as the most retweeted of all-time.
Wendy’s has declared that milestone as good enough for the 12 months of free nuggets. On April 1, Wilkerson had 138 followers. Now it’s over 100,000, and #NuggsForCarter has a custom emoji featuring a box of Wendy’s nuggets. He got some help along the way with retweets from other brands and celebrities getting in on the fun.
It’s a feel-good story all around, one brands desperately need after the social media dumpster fires lit by United and Pepsi over the last month (et tu, Dove?). But let’s not kid ourselves. If Oreo’s 2013 Super Bowl tweet has taught us anything, it’s that with any one-off social brand success, we must now brace ourselves for the cavalcade of copycats that will undoubtedly follow. Please, resist the temptation.
Facebook, whose oft-stated mission is to connect the world, took one step further in that direction today with a new tool that could transform how its 1.3 billion daily users use the social network, making it easier for them to share content with their friends and family.
The company’s artificial intelligence research team (FAIR) announced this morning the completion of a yearlong project aimed at boosting language translation efficiency. The new method, which relies on what are known as convolutional neural networks, or CNNs, has successfully “achieved state-of-the-art accuracy at nine times the speed of” current systems, Facebook wrote in a blog post. It’s a vital development for the social network—after all, there are thousands of languages, and the company doesn’t want its users to have to worry that something they post will be ignored by others because they don’t understand the content.
CNNs, first developed by FAIR lead Yann LeCun, are considered the building blocks for developing scalable automated natural language understanding and image recognition tools, and even voice recognition or visual search systems, all of which are immensely valuable to Facebook. Yet, language translation has largely been the domain of what are known as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which have tended to be a better choice for the task thanks to a high degree of accuracy, Facebook wrote in its blog post.
[Image: courtesy of Facebook]But RNNs also have a shortcoming when it comes to language translation: They handle one word at a time before trying to predict the corresponding word in the target language. “This is a less natural fit to the highly parallel GPU hardware that powers modern machine learning,” Facebook wrote, “because the computation cannot be fully parallelized since each word must wait until the network is done with the previous word.”
CNNs, on the other hand, tackle all the words at the same time, and are more efficient, even as they process information in a hierarchical fashion, a step that does a better job than RNNs of capturing data’s complex relationships, Facebook says.
Historically, RNNs have done a better job at language translation than CNNs, but FAIR saw the potential of the way CNNs handle data architecture, and in the end, Facebook concluded that LeCun’s creation would be better at scaling translation between languages, and at handling more of the 6,500 languages used on Earth.
That’s why Facebook has settled on using CNNs as the basis for its translation efforts going forward, a step that will likely impact the way people across the world communicate on Facebook itself and, potentially, on subordinate services like Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
And befitting Facebook’s penchant for sharing its AI research, the company said that it is now open-sourcing the language translation research, making it available to others who might use it for their own translation purposes, the summarization of text, and other tasks.
Americans love their cars. Tens of millions of drivers hit our roads each day from Seattle to Savannah, and everywhere in between. But centers of driving technology innovation remain on the geographical fringes of the country–the coasts. And while there’s autonomous vehicle research and development happening in traditional automotive hubs like Detroit and testing planned for Ohio, much of America’s boundary-pushing progress will happen in places like Boston, Pittsburgh, and Silicon Valley. Sustainable consumer adoption of self-driving cars, however, relies on the massive population that lives in flyover cities.
There’s broad uncertainty and wariness about the value (and necessity) of ridesharing, let alone self-driving cars, in America’s heartland. The diverse, and in some cases sparse, topography between America’s coasts lends itself to mapping confusion: for now, people in landlocked areas need to drive to sustain their various ways of life. There are the key inland roadblocks standing in the way of a nationwide driverless future.
Achieving a level of mapping that covers necessary details of the country’s infrastructure and topography between coasts will prove to be an uphill battle. [Photo: LMaru/iStock]
Mapping and logistics
Connecting autonomous cars to mapping data that covers massive geographical areas and updating it with the latest infrastructure developments is the first, and perhaps most complex, step for companies hoping to bring driverless technology to America’s roads. Building an integrated system will also ensure self-driving car manufacturers make good on their promises of safer roads, efficient use of fuel, and better car performance. In addition to working with local groups around the U.S. to test technology, successful mapping will require partnerships and data sharing between public and private sector entities working to bring driverless cars to the roads.
Achieving a level of mapping that covers necessary details of the country’s infrastructure and topography between coasts will prove to be an uphill battle, especially in some of the country’s flattest areas. Concerns and regulation will continuously arise with lawmakers at the city, state, and federal levels. Despite likely complications, private sector innovators will need to work with legislators and their staffs to secure permission to survey roads and impede on daily lives of the citizenry.
Uber and Lyft are in the process of breaking into smaller market, but it’s been difficult. [Photo: AndreyKrav/iStock]
Adoption of technology
The widespread adoption of driverless cars requires buy-in from parts of the United States that have yet to embrace ride hailing as an alternative form of transportation. While ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft are prevalent around the country, there’s still a lack of interest in replacing driving with riding in the cities where these companies operate, let alone areas where they don’t. Uber, Lyft and smaller hailing services, like Curb, are in the process of breaking into smaller markets, but they often need to navigate complicated regulatory environments and understand who new drivers and riders would be before setting up shop. Companies and organizations working to bring autonomous vehicles to America’s roads will need to follow a similar path to market. But I don’t see that happening for at least decade. The reason: Americans, including millennials, simply love their cars and many have no plans to give up car ownership.
Companies looking to successfully bring self-driving technology to heartland roads need to mirror tactics used in grassroots politics: [Photo: Flickr user Foo Conner]
Wariness of automation
Many consumers living in flyover cities rely on their ability to drive for work, life and everything in between. Ordinary people, from farmers to heavy machine operators to ambulance drivers, are watching the arc of automation with interest. There are a total of 1.7 million truck drivers in the U.S. and another 1.7 professional taxi, bus and delivery drivers around the country who fear losing their jobs to automation. Most of them qualify as middle class citizens. In order to convince these Americans who drive often–and for a living–that a driverless future is a good thing, delicate consumer education and understanding and proof of safety and affordability needs to happen first. Companies looking to successfully bring self-driving technology to heartland roads need to mirror tactics used in grassroots politics: constant community outreach, persistent relationship building, and consistent giving back to the community in a way that helps locals in one way or another.
The Obama Administration already laid the regulatory groundwork for public-private partnerships across the country to address issues. [Photo: PatrickZiegler/iStock]
The last mile(s)
Technology companies who join the driverless car arms race need to incorporate mainland America early in the autonomous vehicle innovation process in order to illuminate and address local concerns. The Obama Administration already laid the regulatory groundwork for public-private partnerships across the country to address local issues. It will be interesting to see what new U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who has been a vocal proponent of driving innovation (despite news her team is reevaluating Obama-era self-driving regulations), does to advance or revamp the federally-sketched roadmap. Over the next few years, making the case to rural and suburban consumers that self-driving cars improve safety and create new career opportunities will be just as crucial as innovation to speeding up adoption of the technology.
Since Piper Kerman published her memoir Orange is the New Black, the former felon has become a staunch activist for the rights of prisoners and system reform. Jenji Kohan’s Netflix adaptation has certainly hit on very real topics like the privatization of prisons and poorly trained officers, but typically those issues have been catalysts for the larger themes of a particular season, e.g. religion and faith, race, etc. However, judging season five’s trailer, Orange is the New Black looks like it’s ready to hit Kerman’s platform hard.
The prison groups (blacks, Latinas, Red’s squad, etc.), and the cliques within those groups, seem to be setting their squabbles and differences aside for the greater good of having livable conditions, and seeking justice for Poussey’s heart-shattering death in the previous season.
As the trailer’s tagline states: “Injustice . . . Justice. Rejection . . . Rebellion. Imprisoned . . . Empowered.”
When Snap Inc. reports its first quarterly earnings as a public company tomorrow, eager investors hope they will finally get a hard look inside this typically secretive operation. Chief among their concerns is whether Snapchat’s user growth is stagnating and how CEO Evan Spiegel plans to win in a crowded social-media space dominated by larger incumbents, especially Facebook.
Snapchat is up against big competition from Mark Zuckerberg’s social-media empire, which launched a competing product to Snapchat Stories, called Instagram Stories, last year. As you can probably tell from the name, this is essentially a rip-off of Snapchat’s iconic stream of videos from all the people you follow. In its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Snap acknowledged that similar products on Facebook—as well as Instagram and WhatsApp—may stem its own user growth. The document also notes a slowdown in growth during the final quarter of 2016—the period following Facebook’s launch of Instagram Stories.
Still, Snap has grown revenues substantially in its short history. In December 2015, the company recorded revenues of $58.7 million for the year. The following year, that shot up to $404.5 million. Its average revenue per user also jumped over the same period, from 65 cents per user to $2.15 per user. That said, Facebook’s average revenue per user easily eclipses this number with $19.81, and Snap, unlike Facebook, is not yet profitable. In 2016, the company took a net loss of $514.6 million.
Snap reports first-quarter 2017 results tomorrow afternoon after the closing bell. Analysts expect a loss of 6 cents per share on revenue of $157.98 million.
Growing Up And Breaking Out
If nothing else, the company is showing it has room to grow. Next month, it’s opening up its ad platform even further to accommodate a range of advertisers and budgets, according to Business Insider. The automated ad manager will allow advertisers with smaller budgets to get in on the platform, tailoring their own campaigns and viewing analytics independently. Previously, Snap offered a more bespoke ad-building experience for more well-funded brands.
And Snapchat’s news and entertainment interface, Discover, may prove to be a key feature that will set the business apart. The ad offerings on its curated content platform are premium and are making publishers money. A recent report from the New York Times notes that despite initial upfront costs of content, publishers like Mashable are seeing the platform as a good source of revenue and a place to find loyal younger readers. Through curation, Snap has also been able to avoid the fake news crisis that has plagued other platforms.
Snap is also looking to build out its high-quality content even more. The company wants Snapchat Stories to become a hub for original show content. Over the last several months, Snap has been busy inking deals with major broadcast players for 3-5 minute shows that would play within Stories, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But even here, the company faces competition from bigger rivals like Twitter, which is ramping up live video deals with television partners like Bloomberg and the NFL. Facebook, too, is pushing further into video content and even putting an app on Apple TV. Against competitors, Snapchat touts its highly engaged audience of 18-34 year olds. The company says users over 25 tend to check-in on the app roughly a dozen times a day, spending about 20 minutes in app daily. Meanwhile, younger users spend about a half hour in the app each day.
Maybe the biggest question facing Snap is this: What is Snap? In the past, it has self-described as a camera company, launching a line of picture-capturing sunglasses as evidence last September. But its traction on Discover and investment in Stories make it look more like a content company, with hardware as more of an afterthought. Whatever Snap wants to call itself, investors will be looking for clarity on the ways it can succeed as a profit generator.
In a corner of the Swiss Alps, a snow machine pointed at a patch of ice is testing a new theory: Could manufactured snow help stop the retreat of a glacier?
Since 1860, the Morteratsch glacier in Switzerland has shrunk back 2.5 kilometers, or more than half the length of Central Park. Each year it’s losing another 115 feet of ice. Other glaciers are also shrinking quickly–but because Morteratsch draws crowds, the local community decided to reach out to researchers to try to find a way to preserve it.
“This particular glacier is a very big tourist attraction,” says Johannes Oerlemans, a glaciologist from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht in the Netherlands who was one of the researchers the community approached for help. “It’s one of the few that is very easy to reach. We always say it’s the single glacier in the Alps that you can reach by wheelchair.” Now the glacier has retreated so much that it’s barely visible from the most accessible viewpoint at the end of a road.
Since 1860, the Morteratsch glacier in Switzerland has shrunk back 2.5 kilometers, or more than half the length of Central Park. [Source Images: C. Levy (photo), Hans Oerlemans (additions)]For the last decade, a nearby ski slope has used one form of protection–a giant white fleece blanket that covers the ice each summer to slow melting–on a glacier called Dizvolezzafirn that underlies a ski run. The project works. Instead of shrinking, the glacier has thickened by about 10 meters over 10 years. Locals wondered if something similar could be done for the larger glacier.
“We think that’s impossible,” Oerlemans says. “It’s 100 times bigger. You cannot cover a glacier of that size with fleece. But then we looked at other options, and we thought that perhaps something can be done by trying to keep part of the melt zone white in summer.” A cover of snow would reflect away sunlight, and insulate the ice. “If you do this in an area that’s large enough, you may at least be able to slow down the retreat of the glacier.”
In models, Oerlemans and other researchers found that it should be possible to maintain a cover of snow on the glacier through the summer by making artificial snow from local meltwater. Using standard snow machines wouldn’t be practical–the project would require thousands of them–but the researchers think that a different kind of technology might work.
While the technology has yet to be designed, the basic idea is to attach a snow machine to an aerial tramway that is suspended between mountain peaks, so that it could move back and forth to cover a large surface with snow. “It’s not without problems, but I think in the long run it has a better chance that you can cover a large area,” he says.
“It’s not without problems, but I think in the long run it has a better chance that you can cover a large area.” [Photo: Roman Schurte/Unsplash]If it works, and if funding is feasible, the approach could potentially be used in other parts of the world, such as Peru, where glaciers provide a critical source of drinking water.
The current study, with a single snow machine dumping snow on a 200-square-meter patch of ice, is the first step in determining if the plan might work. “We’re doing a pilot study on what we call a baby glacier–it’s a very small patch of ice made artificially for us, with just one snow machine, and we have a weather station. We try to get this through the coming summer. When this works, we’ll be more confident that it could also work on a larger scale.”
Even if it does work, it’s likely to be a somewhat temporary solution. (It would also likely be expensive; the pilot study alone has a cost of 60,000 euros, plus support from partners like a cable car company.) Using two decades of weather data from the glacier, the researchers found that it’s only cold enough to make snow 5% of the time in the summer. Right now, that would work–it would still be possible to produce snow faster than it melts away. But as summers get hotter, fake snow may no longer be an option. Summer temperatures in the Alps are already rising 2.5 times faster than the global mean.
Job prospects are looking pretty good for graduates this year–the first cohort of gen Z to enter the workforce with a diploma or degree.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), unemployment rates for high school and college graduates are closing in on prerecession levels. Wages are beginning a slow climb as well, particularly for those with a college degree. Among young college graduates, average wages are $19.18 per hour—only 1.4% higher than in 2000.
Challenges Everywhere
There are other less-than-rosy findings in the EPI’s report, even though 2007’s economy is a pretty low bar. Compared to the late ’90s and early 2000s, there are a high number of graduates who are unemployed and underemployed, or neither working nor in school. EPI’s report indicates that black and Hispanic graduates have higher unemployment rates than their white peers. Although the wage gap between men and women who have high school diplomas has closed some since 2000, female college graduates still face a wage gap directly out of school, at a time when their work experience is on par with their male counterparts. Women with college degrees are paid 86¢ for every dollar paid to men (compared with 92¢ in 2000).
Despite these realities, the graduates are optimistic. A new survey from talent acquisition platform iCIMS reveals that an overwhelming majority (91%) of the 400-plus college seniors surveyed think they can land the job they want with the skills they have, and on average, expect to earn in excess of $53,000 per year in their first jobs. (Female graduates are hedging their salary bets–while 62% of men surveyed expect to earn $50,000 or more, only 49% of women expect to earn that wage.) This uptick in wage expectations may be due to mounting student loans. Last year, the average student debt load was $37,172, according to analysis by higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz. This year’s is bound to be higher as tuition for both public and private colleges and universities continues to rise.
Misplaced Optimism
But graduates’ optimism may not be very realistic.
The iCIMS report also surveyed 400-plus recruiters, and less than a quarter of them said they paid entry-level employees over $50,000. The average salary they reported was just over $45,000. What’s more, the recruiters found that as in years past, new graduates didn’t have the skills they were looking for.
Ninety-eight percent of recruiters said they get resumes from applicants that are not qualified for the position. They’re lacking some basics. Sixty-two percent of recruiters surveyed said entry-level applicants could stand to improve their familiarity with the company and its industry before interviewing. As many as 35% of recruiters said the grads should have at least three internships in their work experience. More than 60% of recruiters are most interested in hiring college students with STEM majors, yet just 23% of college graduates in the class of 2017 will have STEM degrees.
Wanted: Flexibility
Good thing this cohort is willing to be flexible. The iCIMS survey found that as many as 81% of survey respondents said they’d take a job outside their field of study. Accenture Strategy’s 2017 U.S. College Graduate Employment Study found out just how far they’d go to land a job. Surveying 1,000 students graduating from college in 2017 and 1,000 students who graduated the previous two years, Accenture found that 41% will be looking in a different city for a job, and 38% will be commuting farther and/or accepting the first offer they receive. If no offer comes, 71% reported that they’d consider taking an unpaid internship after graduating. More than half (58%) consider it acceptable to work on weekends or evenings.
Employers take heed
Despite the stereotype that young workers job hop, 62% said they expect to stay at their first job for at least three years. But gen Z workers expect employers to be flexible in exchange for loyalty. They want the company they work for to help them maintain work-life balance as well as provide training and mentoring in addition to meaningful, challenging work.
They realize a college education was just the launchpad and want their employers to help them further develop skills. Half of new grads rated communications skills as something that would make them attractive to potential employers and want to develop problem-solving and management skills. Employers should note, however, that 84% of new grads expect to receive formal, on-the-job training.
For almost as long as we’ve been typing words into Google’s search bar, we’ve been trailed by online ads based on those searches. The logic being that if they put ads in front of our eyes that are related to what we’re searching–shoes, diapers, cars, anything–we’ll be more likely to click. And even though ad tech has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last decade, that’s still essentially what advertisers are trying to do.
Recently, in order to boost its competitiveness with Nike among serious runners, and raise awareness for its Run Camp program, Under Armour targeted photos on social feeds–finding people who were posting specific models of its running shoes, specific running shoes of its competition, as well as photos that featured running bibs, belts, and other accessories. Once found, that person would be served up a short video ad about Run Camp after they’d left Instagram or Facebook.
So if you posted the new bib for that half-marathon you’re training for on Instagram or Facebook, later while browsing The Huffington Post mobile site you might see an ad for Run Camp. All because of your photo.
The tech is from Toronto-based shop Cluep, which has been working with brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Toyota, and yep, Under Armour, on text and location targeting, but now, following consumer behavior on social, is pushing hard into visuals. Cluep Pics lets marketers target people based on the imagesthey publicly post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and serve them ads in their mobile apps and mobile websites. It uses a proprietary image recognition engine that learns from every image it sees to identify brands, products, and scenarios to effectively engage people around their interests, activities, and lifestyle.
So if there happens to be a McDonald’s in the background of one of your photos, you may get a Golden Arches ad targeting you somewhere soon. To many people, this sounds pretty creepy. Of course, Cluep CEO Karan Walia (who co-founded company in 2012 with CTO Anton Mamonov and advertising operations director Sobi Walia) says the goal behind Pics is to effectively deliver advertising to the right people, at the right time, when they are most receptive based on the types of images they post on social media. Sound familiar? But contrary to creeped out, Walia says even just through beta testing, they’re already seeing conversions and click-through rates five to 10 times better than industry standards.
“Traditionally the click through rate is around 0.5-0.8%, however, we’re seeing results in metrics like video completion rates, visit lift rates, cost to drive back to store and more are between five to eight times the industry benchmark,” says Walia. “And this isn’t just in one, two, or three programs, this is the average across all the 500 campaigns we’ve done across different verticals. That would suggest we’re driving higher results than other vendors, and those engagement rates with consumers.”
Image recognition tech itself isn’t new, and Walia says Cluep’s primary competition for Pics is the social platforms themselves but believes his firm is just a couple of steps ahead.
“Right now, there is no ad tech platform that is doing image-based targeting like we are,” he says. “Getting a high enough accuracy to classify an image around a brand, logo or activity hasn’t been available at scale until now. I’m getting bombarded with back-to-school ads from Walmart on Instagram. I’m not a student and I’m not a parent. Why is this happening? Walmart is a client of ours, and now with Cluep Pics they’ll be able to better target potential consumers because they’ll see family photos or relevant photos that will let them know if these types of ads will be relevant.”
And you know what’s next, right? the growth of online social video has exploded over the last few years. It’s even been suggested that Facebook could be all video by 2021, which is also where Walia says his tech is headed. The Cluep Pics engine is a stepping stone to video, and the company hopes to launch it by Q2 2018.
“For video, the back-end is very similar to Cluep Pics because video is just still frames strung together, so the challenge is to focus on the right frames, and being able to classify not just logos, products, and scenarios, but also actions,” says Walia. “That’s going to be a big next step, allowing brands to target consumers not only based on the type of videos they’re sharing but also know that the ads are being served in safe environments. We’ve seen the concerns over YouTube. We see a big opportunity in allowing publishers to let marketers select the kind of videos their ads appear in or around.”
Corporate wellness programs are a nearly $8 billion industry in the U.S. and are expected to grow at a clip of nearly 7.8% through 2021. The Global Wellness Institute puts that number at $40 billion worldwide, even though only roughly 9% of the 3 billion-plus global workforce has access to workplace wellness programs at their jobs.
As the industry grows, technology, data, and increased insight into what encourages employees to stay healthy is shaping the future of corporate wellness programs, says Edward Buckley, founder of Peerfit, which connects employers and fitness centers. Often viewed skeptically as agenda-driven ways for employers to drive down their health care costs, Buckley and others believe that a few key trends will elevate wellness programs in the eyes of employees and, ultimately, make them more integrated into employees’ lives. Here are four that are shaping the future of wellness programs.
Even More Data Integration
The biggest driver of wellness programs will be data integration, says Buckley. Software platforms, wearables, and other data sources have the potential to deliver important insights into the wellness program options that make a difference and are important to employees, he says. And the wellness market is moving to capitalize on that opportunity. “When you look at really big health insurance companies all of a sudden starting to fund and gobble up digital health startups, that’s a big sign to me that the first thing you’re going to see from wellness is this age of digital health,” he says.
Buckley predicts that in five years, data-driven incentives will be the norm, based on employees’ locations and personal preferences. Data will tell employees about incentives to use certain features automatically—walk 10,000 steps a day and reduce your health insurance premium, for example. Wearables will track certain aspects, while others will be driven by employee need. Some employee engagement platforms, such as YouEarnedIt, integrate wellness incentives with other employee engagement activities so workers can earn points that can be redeemed for prizes. This type of gamification also increases the amount of data that employers and third parties have to work with.
In recent years, wellness programs have included some basic financial education in their offerings. But expect forward-thinking programs to move beyond webinars and lunch-and-learns about how to save for retirement or college education, says Laurie A. Brednich, founder of benefit provider marketplace HR Company Store. In addition to basic education, she believes that companies will use the data available to them to tailor financial offerings. When employees are in debt or otherwise experiencing financial issues, the stress can reduce their effectiveness in the workplace, increase absenteeism, and ultimately lead to poor health habits or illness.
Brednich sees companies offering assistance with debt reduction, more individualized assistance in planning for retirement and health care costs in retirement, and otherwise helping employees achieve a sustainable financial future. “For example, if you have a lot of people taking 401(k) loans and hardship withdrawals for non-housing reasons, that tells you that they’re having financial issues,” she says. Companies need to figure out how to use such data to offer tailored financial solutions to help employees overcome their financial challenges, she says. At the same time, they need to protect employees’ privacy, so having highly trained staff and processes that are vetted by legal counsel and HR personnel is important.
Making Life Easier (And More Fun)
With an aging population, more employees may be dually caring for children and aging parents. Brednich predicts that employers—especially larger companies—will offer more help with child and elder care. “By helping them address those situations, whether it’s mental or financial, it will, in the long run, impact their medical costs and spending for years to come,” she says.
There is also a growing bodyof research that reinforces that vacation is essential for wellness, so there is an emerging trend to create incentives for employees to take time off. While “unlimited vacation” was touted for a while, some companies found that employees took less time off with that policy.
Instead, Brednich says more companies will encourage and even enforce employee vacation time. She points to new tools like vacation savings accounts that can help employees save for and plan their vacations while using integrated social media components to interact with fellow vacation planners. Bottom line: Addressing both the immediate stressors and encouraging employees to find ways to decompress on their own will both be priorities for wellness programs into the future.
Customization
Joyce Odidison, founder of Interpersonal Wellness Services, Inc., a leadership and life coaching training institute, says that when she speaks to organizations about their wellness programs, there are often an overwhelming number of options. “I say, ‘Tell me about your wellness program,’ and they say, ‘Well, we have 150 different things that people can choose from,'” she says. How can employees know about all of them? After a while, they lose interest because they don’t have the time to research everything available to them.
Data, combined with increased insight into the benefits employees need and use, will streamline programs and help them be more effective, which can increase their credibility, Odidison says. At the same time, that data will help organizations create more holistic approaches to wellness. That will include everything from occupational to emotional and physical wellness, driven by a process that will recommend options to employees who exhibit signs of needing them, ultimately increasing adoption and helping employees get the help they need, she says.
Patroulis joins the agency after six years heading up creative at BBH New York, first as chief creative officer, then creative chairman. Under his watch, the agency turned out award-winning work for brands like Playstation, Axe, and Netflix, including last year’s Cannes Lions Integrated Grand Prix for its House of Cards campaign. His resume also includes stops as executive creative director at twofifteenmccann, as well as its spin-off San Francisco agency T.A.G., where he was global creative director/executive creative director.
Just the other week, Patroulis talked to me about helping Playstation exceed its expectations in virtual reality, by working on marketing VR gaming a bit differently. But in an email Q&A, the agency vet says that this was too big an opportunity to pass up.
“It really came down to the combination of the creative opportunity and the ambitious leadership team,” says Patroulis. “It’s a different type of gig in its scale, but you like to try to keep things simple, and creative opportunity plus great people is a nice little formula that’s worked for me so far.”
Patroulis says he’s been fortunate to work at some great agencies, and to learn from some great people, and that this felt like another opportunity to do that. “Plus, BBH NY is in a great place, with great momentum creatively, so I know they’ll go on to do great things,” he says. “Feeling that, and seeing the massive opportunity at Grey made it all come together.”
As an outsider, Patroulis sees Grey’s biggest asset as their commitment to creativity, and their ability to change. “They’ve done famous and effective work on clients big and small, and have proven their desire to double-down on creativity as the way forward,” he says. “But their proven ability to evolve and change is what makes that feel like not just a great accomplishment, but a great foundation for the future.”
For challenges, the agency’s newest creative head says it’s the same as everyone else.
“In a constantly and rapidly evolving landscape, one that changes in shorter and shorter cycles, how do you create the right balance of the established systems clients need, and evolving ones that lead clients to their next horizon, all while keeping the creative standards extremely high?” he says. “No real revelations there, just the reality facing not just agencies but clients themselves. Great leaps forward can come from brands both big and small. I think agencies of all sizes need to help lead that change, and large, connected ones like Grey are fortunately positioned to do that at scale. But none of it matters or will be effective if everything isn’t centered around the power of an idea, and the belief in what it can do. So, yeah. Sort of a big challenge. But that’s what makes it fun.”
There’s one thing job candidates share with their interviewers: Both are trying to solve a problem. The candidate is looking for career growth or higher pay, and the hiring manager is looking for somebody who can help the organization move forward. If both see a solution to each of their problems when they face one another across the interview table, there’s a match.
If you switch from traditional employment to working for yourself, it’s easy to consign this simple transaction to your past life and imagine that it no longer applies. Suddenly you feel like a salesperson, struggling with the awkwardness of self-promotion as a freelancer, consultant, or small business owner. But in fact, the standard job interview makes for a great template for any independent worker to clinch clients. Here are a few bits of familiar job interview advice that are easily repurposed for the freelance game.
As a job candidate, you know how crucial it is to establish your specific expertise—the goal is to convince the recruiter or hiring manager that what you know is what they need. Just like you want a potential employer to see you as an expert, you want a prospective client to do the same. It’s easy to automate lots of jobs these days, or to hire a Jack- or Jill-of-all-trades who’s pretty much average at a lot of things. But being great at just a few key things that are needed most will make you stand out in the talent marketplace—whether full-time or freelance.
When I interviewed for a reporter position at my last TV station, I was one of two finalists. I ended up getting the job because I showed my expertise in video editing. (Yes, many TV reporters edit their own stories.) Because I could do this and the other candidate couldn’t, I got the job. Those two crucial skills made me an expert in reporting, both in front of the camera and behind it.
And just as job candidates have to weave their skills together into a coherent picture of the expert they claim to be, freelancers need to do the same. Many, however, tend to just sell a battery of services, each one distinct from the other. “I’ve gone to hire a designer before,” says marketing expert and career coach Halley Gray, “only to find them promoting their design work on their website and copywriting on their social media. This lack of consistency decreases trust, and lowers your perceived expertise.”
2. Always Tailor Your Pitch
Great interviewees always do their research on the company they’re interviewing for, then pitch themselves to a prospective employer based on what they find out. The same goes for freelancers trying to secure projects and clients.
When I was just starting out on my own—especially on days when I had a lot of calls back to back—I’d often just wing it with a one-size-fits-all approach to pitching. Rookie mistake. These days, I’m careful to make sure that the person I’m talking to knows I’m well-versed in their brand and interested in working with them because of how much I know. I also feel more confident about what I’m saying because I’m well-informed.
“You’ve got to do your homework and learn about your potential clients before you hop on a call with them,” copywriting expert Courtney Johnston agrees. Just as you would as a traditional job candidate, “showing your clients that you’re prepared will instill confidence in your ability to do good work.”
3. Talk Up Your Impact On Others
I’m a big believer in shameless self-promotion. If you don’t put yourself out there, how will anyone know how amazing you are at what you do? Career coaches urge candidates to not just list what they’ve accomplished but to explain the effects that their accomplishments have had, and that makes for good advice as a freelancer, too.
One of the easiest ways to share your impact on others? Testimonials. Gray believes it’s important to let your past clients do the talking. Quoting them on your website and in project proposals about how great you are at what you do increases trust. “One key piece of feedback I get over and over is [that] my testimonials are one of the reasons people work with me,” Gray says.
I recently started working with a business coach, and the biggest motivator for me to buy the program was hearing about the success other clients had had. Anyone can talk about how great they are, but when someone else vouches for them, it’s different.
4. Present Yourself Well
Job interviewing 101 tells you to wear the right clothes, style your hair, and put just the right amount of pressure into your handshake. It’s all about having that professional polish, and building a business as your own boss demands the same level of attention.
“I hired a designer to create my website and a proposal template so that my proposals would feel first-rate,” Gray adds. She isn’t alone. Fast Company contributor Arianna O’Dell recently wrote that investing in professional design as soon as she started her own company was a crucial first move.
Keeping up a sharp outward presentation isn’t just about a snappy website, though. Johnston points out that “if you work online, you have to embrace video calls as if they were in-person meetings. You’d never refuse to show your face at a job interview, so get dressed—at least on your top half—check your tech, show up early, and make sure your background reflects your brand.”
5. Show Your Skills In Action
If you’re trying to get a job, you want to appear confident and in control. Many times, the person hiring you is considering putting you in a position to do what they can’t, because they don’t know how. At most jobs, it’s your job to do; you will act as a doer. But in the short, somewhat formal context of an interview, you might not have a chance to demonstrate your expertise in action (which is why many employers ask for case studies and other demos). This actually gets a little easier as a freelancer who’s pitching clients.
“In a client-based business, you’re in charge of hosting and running your sales calls and conversations,” Johnston says. In other words, the pitching experience more closely matches the actual work you’re hoping to land. “Your potential clients will want to see that you are organized and have things under control,” adds Johnston—so make it count.
