During the WWDC keynote last week, Apple announced that the Apple Watch’s next OS (watchOS 4) will allow the device to establish a direct Bluetooth connection to other devices such as blood glucose sensors (for people with diabetes) or smart tennis rackets (yawn).

Or surfboards. Wait. What? Actually, an Apple Watch with a direct connection to a sensor mounted on a surfboard could prove to be a game changer for some surfers.

Apple VP Kevin Lynch briefly mentioned an Apple Watch app called Sessions by a small Green Bay, Wisconsin, company called Xensr. The app works with a sensor (the $200 Xensr Air 3D) mounted on the surfboard to capture both wave data and the performance of the surfer.

The GPS radio inside the mounted sensor device, says Xensr founder David Troup, allows it to act as a “wave buoy” that collects all kinds of data about the waves in the area, and can even help forecast future waves. The gyroscope in the device tracks all motions of the surfboard; the number, locations, and sizes of waves surfed; the height of jumps off waves; and the lengths of waves surfed.

Until now Xensr users have waited to get back to shore to check out wave and performance data on their phone screen. That’s because the sensor has to sync with a phone to transfer the data. But the new direct Bluetooth support in watchOS 4 will let surfers see the data (in small bits) on their wrist while they’re out on the board, paddling between waves. The data might help a surfer adjust their game in situ to catch more waves and ride them longer.

Example: A big part of the art of surfing is sensing the best time—and best location on the curve of the wave—to get up on the board. This is called the takeoff point, and picking the best ones is probably the hardest thing about surfing. The Xensr app might add some science to the art.

“It’ll give me a map of all my takeoff points on all my best waves,” Troup told me. That knowledge could inform the choice of takeoff point on future waves. “I may get two or three more turns on that same wave just because of the takeoff point,” Troup says.

Or the app might guide a surfer to better waves. “It might tell me that I need to be a little bit further to the west of where I’ve been surfing,” Troup says.

Stephen Baxter, a 37-year-old lifelong surfer who lives in Santa Cruz, California, said the Xensr app could be a useful addition to an Apple Watch user who wants to measure a surf session for fitness, just like athletes measure a run, swim, or bike ride.

Baxter says the Xensr/Watch combo can be compared with the Rip Curl Search GPS watch ($400), which shares many of the same features as the Xensr app and comes in a sturdy, purpose-built case.

Other products like the Trace sensor ($199) also mount to a surfboard and track similar information such as speed, length of ride, and turn radius. As with the Rip Curl Watch, Trace relays information to a smartphone for review after surfing.

“If you own an Apple Watch, and you’re the kind of person who wants that kind of instant info, it could be useful,” Baxter told me.

The biggest worry about the Xensr Apple Watch app might be the Watch itself. Surfing presents problems even for conventional watches, Baxter points out. “They often won’t even tell time after exposure to salt, sun, sand, water, and wind–not to mention potential impact with surfboards, rocks, and reefs.”

Assuming your Watch survives, Troup says the Session app will, in the near future, give surfers the benefit of data gathered by other surfers’ Xensrs. This might be especially helpful for surfers who are trying out a spot for the first time. Xensr will also explore a social aspect of the app, which will allow surfers to talk smack among themselves about who owned the gnarliest waves on any given day.

You might expect a company like Xensr to operate out of a bungalow in Venice or Malibu, but Xensr hales from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Troup, who holds a degree in artificial intelligence, says he does his surfing (and windsurfing and kitesurfing) on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.

The five-year-old company of seven employees has a “field team” of professional boarders in Maui who test the sensor out on the waves. “About the time we’re finishing our software builds here in Wisconsin–around noon–our people in Maui are getting ready to go out surfing,” Troup said. “So when they come back in for breakfast, they can give us their feedback.”

Xensr is funded almost entirely by Troup, with some help from local Midwest investors. He’s been talking to West Coast VCs about a fresh round of capital for the company. The West Coast VCs might be a little more appreciative of Xensr’s virtues than the Midwest firms, Troup believes. He’s right. Because many VC people in California are also surfers.

Xensr will release its new Sessions app this month, and Apple will begin updating Apple Watches with watchOS 4 this fall.

On a humid August afternoon in 2011, a small group of government executives gathered around the desk of Mayor Michael Bloomberg to seek his approval for New York’s first bike-share program.

Former Department of Transportation Secretary Janette Sadik-Khan helped lead the pitch. According to Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg wasn’t exactly an easy sell, but the Mayor’s mood brightened when he heard the program would be privately operated at zero cost to taxpayers. All the City Hall team had to do was secure a sponsor that could make an eight-figure investment, and one that shared the city’s pedigree. “You don’t want a grocery store logo up there,” Sadik-Khan told me. “This is New York. We needed a brand that matched ours.” Nike and Apple were approached, but to no avail.

Edward Skyler is Citibank’s EVP of Global Public Affairs. Before his current role, he served as deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration. Shortly after Skyler arrived at Citibank, Sadik-Khan reached out regarding the bike-share program. Skyler made it clear he was willing to entertain the idea, but he would have to be convinced. Fortunately, there was already a similar program in London, sponsored by Barclays, which provided key learnings. Moreover, there was undeniable serendipity in the name Citi Bike. After all, it was just two letters away from Citibank. Six thousand bike frames could be a lovely canvas for the company’s Pantone 286C blue.

Though Citibank was still recovering from a public drubbing for its role in the financial crisis, it had a fairly long and mostly impressive track record of public-private partnerships. Over its two-century history, the bank had financed the Marshall Plan, the Panama Canal, the transatlantic cable, and the space shuttle. Though an untested bike program presented obvious risks, the huge branding opportunity was the clear reward: 2012 was the company’s two hundredth anniversary. The entire organization was searching for ways to make a positive statement. Citi Bike could be the big swing the company need to rehabilitate its tarnished mark.

Skyler was enthusiastic, but he knew he would need support from other senior execs. “I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to do what seemed liked imposing it or ramming it down people’s throats.”

The point became moot when his colleagues in marketing got excited, and Citi Bike began to be understood as a very different animal, namely as advertising, only in a less familiar form.

Michelle Peluso is the recently appointed CMO of IBM. Before that, she served as global chief marketing officer at Citibank, where she oversaw the company’s ad budget.

“Ed called my team and basically said, ‘I’m handing this off to you,'” Peluso explained. “‘I’m not the marketing person here. I have no idea if this makes any sense.'”

As a marketer, Peluso had been searching for way “to make Citi real and authentic again.” Banks typically produce some of the less compelling advertising on the planet, an increasingly precarious approach in a world of unprecedented clutter. Peluso was searching for another way, a search complicated by the fact that her industry was loathed on a massive scale. She knew this wasn’t the time to simply run old-school commercials during NFL games. She was also strongly against a proposed idea to bring a full-blown Grand Prix race to New York. That just didn’t feel right.

“I felt like we needed to be doing something really good for real people,” she told me. “So when Citi Bike first came over the wire, it felt like, yeah, this is what we’re talking about.”

Peluso drafted an internal memo to Citibank’s head of consumer finance. The subject: bicycles and why Citibank should stand behind them. Budgets were tight that year, but she was prepared to be convincing. “Our stock had gone from ninety dollars to ninety-nine cents. Understandably, people did not want to take risks. There was always talk that people were going to get killed, that it would be on the front page. Some people decided it was lowbrow. After all, we were an aspirational brand and biking is, you know, not.”

Part of Peluso’s strategy was to use Citi Bike to reexamine the qualitative standards of Citibank’s advertising, and how the bank could do better through better communications, for the city and for its own employees.

“It just felt like were doing a bunch of traditional marketing, but we weren’t really changing the game,” she said. In an interesting pivot, the company began to simply look at Citi Bike as a new, more innovative form of its existing out-of-home advertising—an alternative, ironically enough, to the passive ads one sees on the subway and other static billboards or via stadium sponsorships.

Of course, this was a bank, and no decision, especially the idea of embracing New York’s first bike-share, could be made purely on instinct. Fortunately, initial research indicated positive associations with the concept. So from late 2011 to early 2012, the Citibank team began to investigate whether this was truly something that the company was willing to do, and how it might get comfortable doing it.

Vanessa Colella had taken a circuitous route to the role of Citibank’s head of North American marketing. A West Coast native, she’d been a teacher for many years before deciding to get a Ph.D. at MIT and joining McKinsey as a consultant. She’d spent years at Yahoo before coming over to Citibank in 2010. When Citi Bike was first proposed, she was commuting from San Francisco to New York, spending a great deal of time in airports and traffic jams. She had a lot of sympathy for new forms of public transportation.

“There was a lot of healthy skepticism,” Colella told me. Questions abounded: What if the bikes didn’t work? What about helmets, for instance? Was this really something that would wind up being a positive thing for the city?

Like all good marketers, Colella was driven by a genuine sense of purpose. “We couldn’t just put out messaging to solve our problems; we needed to deliver a service to the community that we thought could make a difference. We had to show, not tell.”

Citibank also had to find a way to quantitatively measure the massive risk it was about to manage. That meant calculating the return on investment, which at this point had been tagged at a tidy $41 million over five years. As one might imagine, a great deal of cost-benefit analysis took place. “It’s hard to get a mental model of what six thousand bikes look like,” Colella told me. “Would this really create enough density to be noticed in this city? We needed to know.”

To do this, Citibank began to see the bikes and the kiosks they required as white space. They’d be creating a new channel rather than reflexively defaulting to an old channel so bloated with ads that it was effectively invisible. Instead of putting their messages in places where people have been habituated to ignore them, Citi became the Jackson Pollock of their industry, painting in a new way that had never before been seen in New York.

“There is a lot of slapping one’s logo on things,” Sykler said. “People don’t necessarily associate you with the product. Here, we were the product.”

Unfortunately, much of the press didn’t see it that way, at least at first. And software glitches, controversy, and Hurricane Sandy-inflicted delays didn’t help. As launch day approached, the New York Post filed daily attacks on Citi Bike, pillorying the program as a death trap. Perhaps most cruelly, it went so far as to suggest that bikes seemed vaguely… French.

“There just aren’t many things we do in this crowded field of marketing that people want to talk about,” Colella said. “Not only did we get brand uplift in New York,” Sklyer adds, “we got it globally. Municipalities all over the world studied it.”

Was the mission accomplished? The lift in brand health, the very needle Citibank was trying to move, is certainly compelling: From its launch in 2013 to the fall of 2015, favorable impressions of Citibank rose some 28 points to 72 percent, according to Citibank’s internal data. Meanwhile, the number of people who would consider acquiring a Citibank product has gone up 43 points. Perhaps most remarkably, the program has a nearly flawless safety record. “People thought would be blood on the streets,” said Sadik-Khan. “Today, we have more than forty-four million miles ridden and zero fatalities.”

Those success metrics may be impressive, but as a former advertising executive — one who had no role in the program — I now believe that Citi Bike has gone on to become perhaps the greatest advertising campaign of all time. Rather than squandering that eight-figure investment on increasingly ineffective traditional marketing, Citi built something additive that also reduces our carbon footprint. When a corporate behemoth expands its communication strategy from traditional ads (which in all fairness, Citibank sadly still makes) to providing bikes for six thousand New Yorkers to pedal across the Brooklyn Bridge, the time-space continuum has truly changed.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see more advertisers follow suit and create new paths rather than befoul existing ones? One example might be targeting our aging infrastructure, our blighted bridges and highways, as a media channel. After all, it’s perhaps the last place where human beings are still receptive to advertising, and the timing couldn’t be better: City and state governments are broke. The serendipitous confluence of municipal poverty and secular change in marketing practices presents a unique opportunity for a new breed of public-private partnerships. And the advertising industry still has a cool trillion, give or take a few hundred million, to spend on more appreciated forms.

So why don’t more brands aspire to projects like Citi Bike? Why do so many choose the opposite of delighting us? If there’s a lesson to be learned from this story, it’s that a critical component to reinventing advertising is a company led by people who believe they must stand for something—from a communication perspective. This is an important clarification. It’s nice to have principles and purpose, but companies must also bring principles to how they advertise, and must accept that this idea—especially in the age of ad blocking—is just as important as what they advertise.

Sadly, few companies, especially the ones that spend large sums of money on advertising, consider such principles. This must change or there will be consequences. In an era of unprecedented noise, producing pollution in the form of unwelcome advertising, what George Orwell famously called “the rattling of a stick inside a swill pail,” represents the height of an unprincipled approach and, more worrisome, is likely flat-out bad for business. The correlation may be hard to conclusively measure at the moment, but I believe that bad advertising will increasingly have negative repercussions to an offending company’s bottom line.

What will it take for other companies to support such an approach? The quick answer is the right people coming together at the right time. And maybe just a little luck.

“I think it might just be that Citi Bike was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Ed Skyler said.

Andrew Essex is the CEO of Tribeca Enterprises and the former Vice Chair and founding CEO of creative agency Droga5. This article is an excerpt from his book, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come.

Trying to sleep in an economy seat on an airplane can feel quite hopeless, especially if you’re too short, too tall, or prefer not to sleep flat on your back like a weird cat.

Fly Legs Up makes it a wee bit more bearable. For adults, the product works as a sort of DIY footrest that hooks onto the back of the tray table. (It won’t disturb the person in front of you.) It looks and feels like a nylon bucket, but thanks to a few inflatable pillows, that bucket works wonders, making it easier to get comfortable on a long-haul flight. For kids, Fly Legs Up can turn an economy seat into a cot, meaning kiddos can actually sleep instead of staying up watching inappropriate movies on the in-flight entertainment system while mommy and daddy are napping.

While avoiding the possibility of your kid watching Game of Thrones while you snooze is a big plus, perhaps more important are the potential health benefits. There’s a lot of evidence now about how changing positions while you fly can help prevent deep vein thrombosis, leg swelling, and back pain. Gadgets like this can give flyers the opportunity to change position by stretching their legs or elevating them, even while trapped in a window seat next to someone snoring along with Prince Valium.

Fly Legs Up’s product has been around for a few years, but after testing it out on a recent flight from New York to London, I can attest that it makes long-distance economy class travel not that awful—and that is truly something.

Americans toss out, on average, 72 billion pounds of safe, edible food each year. Around 52 billion of those pounds flow from manufacturers, restaurants, and grocery stores into landfill. Feeding America, a nationwide network of over 200 food banks, has developed a new tech platform called MealConnect to intercept some of that trash-destined food and divert it toward the one in eight food-insecure people in the United States.

The way that Feeding America reaches the approximately 42 million people in the U.S. who struggle to afford food is through managing a wide-ranging web of 600,000 partner organizations and efforts—including soup kitchens, pantries, and meal programs like the Summer Child Nutrition Program—that source produce and meals from Feeding America’s food banks. And while Feeding America (the largest hunger-relief organization in the country) is certainly effective at reaching people in need, the process of the food banks collecting donations and distributing those resources out to its partner organizations could use some streamlining, Feeding America’s organizers felt—and by doing so, could bring more donors into the fold, Justin Block, a senior manager for Feeding America, tells Fast Company.

That, at least, is the driving idea behind MealConnect, which officially launched in early June, after a three-year pilot period. The platform acts as a dashboard to manage the flow of excess food in the communities around Feeding America’s 200 food banks. Accessible in both website and app form, MealConnect allows business donors—whether it’s a retail chain like Chipotle, a local mom-and-pop shop, or a farmers market—to create a free account, where they can upload information about excess food they have to donate, and select a date and time they’d like it to be picked up. On the Feeding America side of the platform, an algorithm sorts through the available donations and matches them with a partner organization, like a soup kitchen, based on need and timing. Once a donation is matched with a partner, someone from the partner agency will drive to collect the excess food from the source.

MealConnect, essentially, works to streamline a fairly disjointed donation process. Block paints the picture like this: Before MealConnect, if a restaurant offered, say, a lasagna lunch special, and ended up not serving five trays of the dish and would like to donate it, they’d have to call up the food bank, and wait for the receptionist to route them through to the staff member in charge of donations. That person would then have to put the restaurant worker on hold while searching for a partner agency who could field the donation, or figuring out if the food bank itself could take the trays. “Who knows how long that could take?” Block says. “It was essentially a lot of hours and phone calls and setbacks.”

Both from the Feeding America perspective and the perspective of the donors, MealConnect is (as its name suggests) designed to get food to people who need it as quickly as possible. “We tried to make the platform simple and streamlined, while also collecting all the information food banks and agencies would need to decide whether or not a particular donation is viable, and what partner organization would be the best to go pick it up,” Sam Harris, account manager for MealConnect, tells Fast Company.

On the app, donors snap a picture of the food, and fill out the reason for donation, ingredients, and sell-by data, if possible (for retailers who tend to consistently have the same type of food to donate, a lot of this can be saved and filled in automatically, Harris says); they can also include instructions for pickup logistics. For each donor account, their donations live on a dashboard they can access to view past transactions, which, Harris says, will save many headaches during tax season.

On the Feeding America side, food bank employees oversee all incoming donations, and monitor how the food is being distributed out to their partner agencies. The platform can automate the whole process, but food bank employees can also jump in and override the suggestions from the algorithm. For instance, if a retailer had several thousand pounds of produce to donate, which would be too much for a smaller partner agency to accommodate, the food bank may decide to use one of its trucks to field the donation itself.

But the whole point of MealConnect is that those smaller, easier-to-manage donations can bypass the food bank process entirely and just get straight to where they’ll do the most good. The platform was developed with a $1.5 million grant from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org; another $1 million grant from General Mills will help it scale out to more communities and organizations—around 2,500 are currently using it, and that number is growing quickly, Harris says. So far, the platform has facilitated 737,000 pickups and moved over 333 million pounds of food–enough for 278 million meals.

MealConnect is designed as a business-to-business platform, not necessarily for individual do-gooders. “If you had a party last night and have a couple trays of food left over, this would not be the right avenue,” Block says. (But a platform like LeftoverSwap, which operates on a more person-to-person level, might be.)

But given what a chunk of food waste in the U.S. comes from the retail sector, Feeding America is hoping to make significant progress toward solving hunger. The nonprofit currently saves around 2.8 billion pounds of food each year and has stated that its goal is to end food insecurity by 2025.

One of the scariest movies of 2016 wasn’t a scary movie at all.

Krisha is a microbudget indie drama about an estranged aunt who wrecks the rest of her family’s Thanksgiving. There’s a reason the film topped BuzzFeed’s list of 2016’s best horror movies, however. Aside from using the horror genre’s cinematic grammar, it’s because the claustrophobic family dynamics on display felt both universal and deeply personal to the filmmaker. They captured something from all of us while inflicting elements of writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ very own familial demons upon us. Shults’ follow up, the just-released It Comes At Night, may have veered out of the suburban milieu and into full-blown horror territory, but it turns out this project is just as rooted in the personal as its predecessor.

“With Krisha, the relationship between the Trey character and Krisha is inspired by the one I had with my dad,” Shults says, “and It Comes At Night was actually inspired by my dad’s death.”

Indeed, the stench of death figures heavily into the new film—a tight, tense, nail-biter whose every scene is fueled by desperation and dread. It Comes At Night opens with the passing of a patriarch, felled by some mysterious disease whose provenance will have viewers guessing, but whose effects are inescapable. The dead man’s daughter (Carmen Ejogo), son-in-law (Joel Edgerton), and young grandson (Kelvin Harrison Jr) spend the rest of the movie attempting to survive the disease, which has apparently wrecked havoc all over civilization, in a creepy house out in the woods. They do not have an easy go of it.

After his freshman year in college, the director spent a summer in Hawaii at his aunt Krisha’s place. Since she had a thriving career acting in ads and doing voiceover spots, Krisha helped her nephew land some jobs working on the crew of some Hawaiian commercials. Eventually, he lucked his way into working with director Terrence Malick, lugging a heavy IMAX camera up the side of a volcano to help shoot footage for what would become the birth-of-the-universe scenes in Tree of Life. He had such an illuminating experience doing it too that he ended up dropping out of school and traveling around the world with Malick’s director of photography, eventually landing an internship at the post-production office in Austin.

It was an unofficial film school education, which helped Shults develop his own aesthetic enough to create a short film. It was based in part on the hurricane of actual Shults family drama surrounding a cousin’s holiday relapse, and it featured a juicy part for his aunt Krisha. Using long takes, slow zooms, and POV shots to immerse viewers in a troubled person’s headspace, Krisha borrowed the visual language of horror movies to stunning effect.

“It wasn’t an intellectual thing like, ‘I’m going to make this movie on addiction and make it feel like a horror film.’ It was more just a matter of how do I put you in the headspace of this character,” Shults says. “I’m not stupid, I knew I was doing horror movie techniques, but it was just what felt right to me. This woman dealing with her demons, this is what feels right.”

The eventual feature-length version of this film went on to win a Grand Jury Prize at SXSW in 2015, and screened at Cannes. By that point, prestige studio A24 sensed a kindred talent and reached out. The team loved Krisha, and asked Shults what else he was working on. The burgeoning filmmaker sent over the script for It Comes At Night, which he’d written in a frenzied state in between making the short film and feature-length version of Krisha. A24 was so confident in the draft, the studio made a deal with Shultz to both distribute Krisha and then produce Night. The director’s pseudo-horror movie would be followed up by a straight-up horror movie next–or Shults’ version of that, anyway.

Although it seems like a well-constructed plan to transition into horror, he swears it isn’t. Rather, he just started off writing his second film from a deeply personal space–just like he did the first time–and it organically turned into something even darker.

“The final script [for It Comes At Night] was just a part of my grief,” Shults says. “That opening scene where Sarah is saying goodbye to her father? That’s what I was saying to my dad. But right from there, it launched off into this whole fictional narrative. What it’s about from then on, thematically, is what I was wrestling with at the time, because my dad on his death bed was so full of regret. The rest of the movie, it all comes down to fear, death, and regret.”

The other influences on Shultz at the time are easy to spot in the finished product. He was reading books on genocide, looking at Pieter Bruegel paintings (one of which makes it into the film), and thinking about the breakdown of societal order. All this input converged and crystallized into a bleak and haunting interpretation of the future.

As for Shults’ creative future, he won’t say much about what his next film, but the chances are it will again come from a personal place. There will just be one glaring difference from his first two efforts, however.

“I’m sick of single-location movies now,” he says. “I’m ready to jump out and do something different next.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook has finally elaborated on his company’s plans in the self-driving car area in an interview with Bloomberg TV, calling it “the mother of all AI problems.” And at WWDC last week the terms “machine learning,” “neural networks,” and “computer vision” were sprinkled liberally throughout the many software and hardware announcements.

It’s not hard to miss that Apple is talking a lot more about AI in 2017 than it did in 2016. It’s not because the company was throwing fewer resources at its AI work last year.

What changed between 2016 and 2017 is Apple’s marketing and PR strategy around AI and related technologies. In fact, it made a conscious decision to start talking more about its AI efforts last summer, just before the publication of Steven Levy’s behind-the-scenes look at Apple AI in August. The company has been more vocal about its AI efforts–and the people behind them–since then.

The way Apple presents its products to the world is arguably as important to the company’s bottom line as the features in the products (which more often enter established markets than create new ones). The messaging helps people feel okay about paying premium prices for Apple stuff. The marketing and PR people may be the ones most responsible for establishing and defending Apple’s famously high profit margins.

Now AI is becoming an important part of the messaging. Until pretty recently, Apple liked to avoid saying too much about the nerdy stuff, preferring to let cool new AI-powered features speak for themselves with their smarts and utility.

But, as Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi pointed out to me after the WWDC keynote, consumers weren’t connecting the dots between the features and the AI. And with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others talking loudly about the technology inside their products, it’s become important that Apple not look like a laggard.

AI Everywhere

The AI team at Apple operates in much the same way as other service-oriented groups within Apple devoted to matters such as industrial design and security. It works with other teams across the company, adding brain power to hardware, software, and services.

You can get some idea of the breadth of AI’s influence by listening closely to the contexts in which Apple people referenced machine learning and other AI tools at WWDC. During the 120-minute-plus keynote presentation, they described how machine learning is used to inform the personalized data displayed in the new Siri Apple Watch Face, how it’s used to help Safari detect and prevent unwanted web tracking, and how devices use it to extend battery life by predicting usage patterns.

Machine learning, Apple said, is used in the iPad to detect (and ignore) when an Apple Pencil user’s palm hits the touch screen, and to recognize a Pencil user’s handwriting and index it in Spotlight. Computer vision helps the Photos app to detect places, objects, and user interests.

Apple also talked a lot about enabling machine learning work by third-party developers. It announced two new AI APIs that will let developers build Apple’s own computer vision and natural language chops into their own products. Computer vision will be brought to bare in the augmented reality experiences developers create with Apple’s new ARKit tools. The company also talked about how the powerful graphics processors in new Macs support the computationally intense calculations necessary for machine learning.

This Isn’t A Horse Race

The conclusion of WWDC 2017 last Friday marked the end of the season of developer conferences. Over the past few months, we heard Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple talk at length about their own flavors of AI. After witnessing all this, some people came away thinking Apple is still trailing its rivals in AI and its applications.

I’m growing increasingly skeptical of this point of view. Not because I believe Apple AI is necessarily getting a bad rap, but because I don’t believe you can look at AI as a horse race. All the above-mentioned companies (and Amazon and IBM and others) have very different takes on AI and different uses for it, and they’re all coming at it from slightly different strategic directions. It’s Apple and a bunch of oranges.

Also, “machine learning” and “computer vision” have become marketing buzzwords. Their use in corporate messaging may distort or overplay a company’s real work with the technology, misrepresenting a company’s real investment in AI. Should IBM refer to itself as an “artificial intelligence company” or is that just an aspirational wrapper for its refocusing efforts?

Apple’s original take on AI–that we should focus on useful features rather than obsessing over the technologies behind them–may be exactly the one consumers (and journalists) should adopt.

After voting to officially legalize marijuana nationwide starting in July 2018, Canada has the next year to figure out exactly how the drug will be sold and regulated. Canadian health experts face some concerns about how to create more availability of the drug, but also do it responsibly. To them, the danger isn’t legalization, but the commercialization that accompanies it. What happens when profit-minded suppliers compete? Business 101, of course: In order to thrive, most companies generally try to attract more customers and/or convince existing ones to use their products more often.

When it comes to controlled substances, though, strategies like that might cause some trouble. There’s a fine line between popularizing use and enabling abuse, the fallout of which can already be seen both in some newly legal weed markets and, historically, with other products associated with unhealthy behaviors like tobacco, alcohol, and, more recently, opiate-based medications.

The group would be able to ensure a proper standard for testing to affirm the safety, strength, and uniformity of the product, as well as place limits on packaging promises and marketing messages, in addition to tracking what’s being sold. “If people want to use, that’s their own thing,” says Gagnon. “[But] we tend to see more harm from these products, so we want [people] to stay healthy and alive.”

In Canada, cannabis use is at its lowest in a decade: Just 15% of the population reports getting high within the last 12 months. Gagnon is lobbying for a rollout with practices that continue to stress “harm reduction”—curbing things like accidents while driving or operating heavy machinery, addiction (yes, it can happen), and future respiratory disease.

Based on a report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction, it seems as if relaxed laws alone don’t necessarily correlate with increased consumption. In fact, a study tracking countries over a 10-year period found that in some places where the penalties have decreased over time, notably the U.K. and Greece, there were actually similar drops in use rates. In Italy, when the consequences went up, so did the number of people toking, while in Slovakia, the risk of greater repercussions simply had no effect.

Two more charts, which Gagnon often trots out in his webinars, show something completely different happening in the U.S. First, once medical marijuana was legalized for medical purposes in Colorado in July 2009, the number or program registrants jumped nearly tenfold in one year, from about 11,000 in July 2009 to nearly 100,000 12 months later.

Second, there was a massive spike in reports of stoned driving, which causes drivers to be twice as likely to have fatal accidents.

Since cannabis became fully legalized, Colorado has recorded the highest use rate of all states: 17% of adults have used the drug within the last month, more than double the overall rate elsewhere. Post-legalization, cannabis-related poison control calls have spiked, as have hospitalizations.”I think part of the reason use has been going up in Colorado from before legalization is because [cannabis] has been aggressively promoted there,” says Gagnon.

For perspective, even Amsterdam isn’t really interested in living up to its tough-puffing reputation anymore. After realizing that spikes in both use and tourists being ridiculous correlated with the proliferation of federally sanctioned “coffee shops,” the Netherlands has actually reduced its number of available shop locations in recent years, leading to reduced use.

Gagnon thinks his model will work perfectly in Quebec, which already has state-controlled wine and spirits shops, and has created extensive nonprofit partnerships to improve everything from its kindergartens to affordable housing. “It is impossible to know what elected officials will decide,” he adds in an email. “Public statements made in Quebec are not always coherent, but overall indicate that everything is on the table right now.”

It’s less likely that other provinces would follow suit, simply because they have less experience with similar regulations. If all else fails, nonprofits would probably still be able to apply for retailing licenses, Gagnon adds, allowing groups to create an alternative point-of-sale network, with perhaps more trust and less profit motive.

Gagnon’s fully baked model has been successfully piloted elsewhere already. Since legalizing cannabis in December 2013, Uruguay has controlled sales (and health concerns) through the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis, which monopolizes purchasing and distributes through a network of pharmacies. Before going on sale, THC-contents are tested, ranked, and branded accordingly.

Across Canada, the door is still open for nonprofit growers, too, although they might have to compete with commercialized counterparts. In Quebec, particularly, Gagnon foresees the potential for people to eventually contract directly for shares of local farmers’ harvests, the cannabis equivalent of CSA farming. The province already supports a robust community-based, vegetable sourcing network. (Belgium does something similar for weed already.)

Long term, designing a system that increases liberty but limits health risks makes pretty good financial sense. Collecting tax revenues from a new industry is one thing, but when it comes to controlled substances in unrestricted markets, those fees don’t generally keep pace with the toll of related medical costs and lost work. The U.S., may collect $27 billion in smoking-related taxes, but it loses $170 billion in smoking-related health costs.

The suggestion that people are either left- or right-brained has long since been disproven, but today we still persist with the idea that each of us must naturally be hardwired to be “creative” or “logical.”

For some reason, we pay lip service to the idea of the holistic organization: We seek creative-minded data scientists, or innovators with a head for hard business, yet still we can’t resist putting them into buckets. You’re either a CTO or an ad director, a chief data officer or creative lead.

In its third year, Lions Innovation will bring art and science even closer together to create world-class creativity. Designed to educate and inspire delegates about the heights creativity and technology combined can achieve, Lions Innovation is all about developing amazing, creative technology solutions that answer the problems of modern advertising.

On the surface, digital disruption relies solely on technology. But look a little deeper and you’ll see that it’s a perfect synergy of tech and creativity that is creating this exciting new era.

Uber is not a complex piece of tech for ordering taxis. The interface and devices it uses are standard. It’s on a smartphone and everybody’s got one. But where Uber triumphs is as a creative improvement to everyday life. It removes a moment of friction in consumers’ lives so effortlessly, that you’d be mad not to use it.

The same principle needs to apply to the marriage of technology and creativity in communications. Creativity is not the window dressing that sells the tech; the technology is in the service of creativity—enhancing and enabling it—but no less vital for it.

Nor does bringing technology into the creative process end with a robotic assembly line of ads dictated by data and nothing else. Quite the opposite. Technology is the engine that helps creativity reach new heights. Match this with a laser focus on strategy and you’ve got the creative’s silver bullet.

The Guardian sifted through a selection of award-winning entries from Cannes 2016 and identified that, while there were many examples of creative and technological brilliance, the two had yet to fully come together to deliver world-class ads. It cited ING’s “The Next Rembrandt,” in which data points gathered from the painter’s extant body of work led to the creation of a brand-new “authentic” Rembrandt.

ING wanted to “stimulate a conversation about data and creativity in the art world”, and the Guardian agreed it was an incredible piece of work but suggested “The Next Rembrandt” was created without the necessary partnership between technology and creativity (and creatives’ closeness to business goals) that could have enhanced its strategic importance.

The use of social media, with all its intimacy and immediacy, is another area where creativity supercharged by technology can reap real rewards. Snap has made a huge impact with advertisers, moving far beyond its purely disposable message remit.

Stories, mailing list targeting, in-app purchasing–these are all direct-to-revenue models advertisers crave. It has become obvious that the creative power of image-led content with tech-backed capability is the way forward to reach online audiences. Evian recently announced it was ditching its TV ads in favor of a Snap-led social campaign featuring the “Live Young” babies.

There is no doubt that the marriage of technology and creativity is reaping rewards. Entries to Cannes Creative Data Lions have risen by 16%, and there was a leap of 69% in the Innovation Lions, echoing the continued movement toward data- and tech-led creativity.

The call from business is clear. Advertisers are desperate for the insight data can deliver and the spectacular, attention-grabbing campaigns technological capability can build. But there is also a deep need for the creative and technology union to be tightly linked to strategy. We need the creatives and technologists to cross the Croisette, as the future of our industry lies somewhere in the middle.

Jose Papa is the managing director of Cannes Lions. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity runs June 17 to 24. 

Back in March 2016, The Most Interesting Man in the World was given a majestic send-off by Dos Equis, shot into the heavens to live among the advertising immortals. In retiring the famed spokesperson, the beer brand took a calculated risk in capping the award-winning campaign off at nine years running. But as just the agency that created the legendary ad character bid farewell to its longtime client, now the man who once ran a marathon because it was on his way, whose blood smells like cologne, and who’s won a lifetime achievement award twice, is back. And he’s drinking… tequila?

That’s right, actor Jonathan Goldsmith, who portrayed The Most Interesting Man for its entire Dos Equis run, is the newest pitchman for Astral Tequila. Sitting in a familiar setting–in a leather high-back chair, bookended by beautiful women–Goldsmith looks into the camera once again and says, “I told you, I don’t always drink beer…”

Well, no one can accuse him of lying. And it’s not even his first time cashing in on his Dos Equis fame, having shilled for Luma Wi-Fi systems by the end of 2016, with a new ad for them launching later this week. He’s gone from The Most Interesting Man In The World, to The Most Available Pitchman To The Highest Bidder, in about nine months. All that, and he’s got a new memoir out called, Stay Interesting: I Don’t Always Tell Stories About My Life, But When I Do They’re True and Amazing, in which he tells tales that include his unlikely friendship with Barack Obama.

Spokespeople switching brand teams can be a jolt to the system. It doesn’t actually happen that often thanks to rigid contracts, noncompete clauses, and the public’s ability to determine when a pitchman’s time is up. If used sparingly, however, it can be a fun moment, like the original Sprint spot starring former longtime Verizon “Can you hear me now?” guy Paul Marcarelli. Though the laughs got predictably thinner as his campaign wore on.

Astral Tequila will get an understandable brand bump from this–witness this very article–but should be careful just how often they enlist Goldsmith from now on. Too much of a good thing just isn’t very interesting.

You might think every recruiter is different. That’s why you tailor your cover letter and resume to each job you apply for, hoping to show each prospective employer what they want to see. But to a certain extent, every recruiter or hiring manager who reads your resume thinks the same way.

Human beings only have so many ways to make choices—that’s just the way our brains are built. And once you’ve gotten your job application past the “robots” and in front of a real live person, that person’s psychological process for deciding whether to interview (and later, to hire) you is going to look a lot like the next’s. It takes place in stages, with recruiters’ decision-making strategies shifting slightly at each stage. Here’s what you need to know to get through each one.

The Stages Of Choice

Most recruiters’ jobs start with a stack (whether digital or physical) of applications to sift through, ultimately narrowing them down to a short list to which they will give closer attention. From this group, they’ll pick an even smaller number to call in for an interview.

This means that recruiters’ initial focus is on rejecting applicants. When their brains are in rejection mode, they’re scanning for candidates’ limitations—their weaknesses, red flags, and disqualifying factors. Psychologically, this actually requires a recruiter or hiring manager to zero in on your flaws before fixating more closely on your strengths.

An applicant with less experience than others or who’s had a string of jobs with short tenures might get rejected on that basis in favor of other candidates without those drawbacks—irrespective of their comparative strengths.

Related:How Your Brain Makes Decisions When You Hate All Your Options

Once they’ve whittled down to a short list, though, a recruiter has to shift their mental focus from reasons to reject candidates toward reasons to learn more about them. At this point, they’ll start to weigh your application’s advantages more heavily.

So what can you do about this mental mode switching that you can’t exactly control but can pretty much always expect? A few things, actually. First, you need to read your own resume to scan for its most glaring potential weaknesses as well as its great strengths. Most job seekers understandably focus on dialing up the best aspects of their resumes, pushing those tidbits to the top and looking for ways to emphasize the positives. But that’s only half the battle.

There may not be much you can do about some of the weaknesses on your resume, like lack of experience. But sometimes you can get creative about how you organize the information you present. One good approach is to pair each weakness on your resume with a key positive statement. Wherever possible, embed the negatives in statements that also highlight a positive feature of your record. The aim is to make it hard for recruiters to dismiss your application out of hand while their minds are in rejection mode.

Related:Why You Should Hire Job Candidates With These Three “Weaknesses”

Show How You’ve Grown—And Still Can

At both stages of the review process, recruiters can get bogged down trying to size up candidates according to the specific requirements of the job description, which may lead them to miss your best attributes. But it’s important to remember that nobody is ever completely ready for a new position they’re applying for. Instead, most applicants have a basic set of skills. What really separates good new hires from great ones is their ability to learn on the job.

But while recruiters typically grasp this, the decision-making process they go through while reviewing job applications can make growth potential hard to see—which means you need go out of your way to help recruiters see it. For previous positions you’ve held, you should highlight the ways you developed your skills in each of those roles. It isn’t enough to say that you’re a “fast learner”—give specific examples of what you learned.

In fact, writing your resume in a way that highlights your growth potential is the best way to turn potential weaknesses into strengths. For example, if you’re leaving one industry for another, then you’re able to bring your wealth of experience in that area to the new role. If you’ve worked for a company that ultimately failed, then you have a number of lessons you can bring from that organization to help your new one succeed.

Related:A Former Google Recruiter Reveals The Biggest Resume Mistakes

The main idea is to help a potential employer to see you dynamically. A resume is a document of your past accomplishments. When faced with a stack of resumes, recruiters are liable to see them as a pile of static snapshots. But your actual career is a process. So your cover letter and resume need to create a sense of the activity you’ll bring to the new role.

Load both up with action words. Show recruiters not just what you’ve done but what you’re doing—and still hope to be able to do. That can help you power through both stages of a recruiter’s thought process and earn a seat at the interview table.

Jessamyn Stanley likely isn’t the person you picture when you think of a yoga Instagram celebrity. As a self-described “fat femme,” she’s far from the stereotypical body type. And that’s exactly the point. The 29-year-old wants to change Americans’ perception of yoga. You could say she’s trying to democratize wellness.

“The more that I travel, the more it nauseates me how inaccessible [yoga] is,” she says.

Stanley boasts over 300,000 Instagram followers, a new book, Every Body Yoga: Get on the Mat, Love Your Body,  along with a burgeoning fitness class empire. The body positivity advocate posts intricate poses and inspirational videos for people who feel excluded from the practice: minorities, the overweight, disabled individuals, and pretty much anyone suffering from body image issues. She’ll photograph herself doing the splits upside down, showing off her curvaceous body in an industry generally exemplified by a size two and toned abs.

Yesterday, @drinkbai premiered a short film about my life as part of their "Unbeliever" series at @tribeca- it's all about people who roll their eyes at the standards of society and walk on the wild side. After the screening, I was humbled out of my mind to receive the @tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award along with a group of other recipients who individually transcend the idea of inspiration. To say I'm honored would be an understatement. Shout to @henrybusby and the awesome @voyagercreative crew that came down to the Old North State and followed me and my squad around. The full length video makes me smile especially hard at the end because it's mostly just me and my friends kicking it in our element- you can watch the full video at drinkbai.com/unbelieve and the link is on my instastory!

A post shared by Jessamyn (@mynameisjessamyn) on Apr 26, 2017 at 6:09pm PDT

“They want to see another person that’s like them,” says Stanley of her followers, many of whom, she says, feel intimidated by the average yoga studio. The average U.S. women’s size is 16, and 9.5% of adults practice some form of yoga, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics. The author believes a large swath of Americans want to practice yoga, but feel put off by traditional instructors as well as the mainstream media’s unattainable depiction of yogis.

“You rarely see a larger body practitioner,” says Stanley, adding, “you could say that of the whole wellness space.”

Related: You Make Your Fat Friends and Colleagues Feel Terrible And You Need To Know Why

Stanley made a bold name for herself by taking a confrontational approach to weight size and her battle with depression, albeit with a heavy dose of sincerity and an amusing touch of profanity. While many “fitfluencers” have perfectly orchestrated, well-lit backgrounds, designer athleisure-wear, and post upbeat mantras, Stanley broadcasts from a bare bedroom and posts captions like “Don’t they know that I don’t give a fuck?”

“You know, my yoga Asana practice isn’t pretty,” she writes in one post. “It’s fucking gruesome most of the time. It’s a lot of sweating, crying, swearing, falling down, and picking myself back up again. For most of us, the gruesome reality of an Asana practice is shocking. I mean, it’s all fun and games when you’re looking at Instagram photos, but real life is on some different shit.”

Throughout, Stanley repeatedly refers to herself as “fat”, a word more whispered behind backs than posted in public. She wears the term with pride, using it nonchalantly, humorously, and with a near sense of endearment.

Related: Being Fat In the Workplace Is Hard. Standing Up For Yourself Is Harder

“Fat has become synonymous  with being dumb, unworthy, ugly, lazy, it’s almost like a profanity,” Stanley says of modern society’s use of the description.

Stanley’s repeated use of “fat” is an effort to reclaim a word she believes undeserving of its attached negative attributes. “The only way you can let go of a weapon, especially in the form of a word, is to take the weapon back,” she says. “I can be fat, but I can also be healthy, I can also be athletic, I can also be beautiful, I can also be strong. I don’t have to be limited by this word.”

Her insistence to fight for further inclusion of various body shapes struck a chord within the Instagram community. She has thousands of likes and comments, with followers admitting they cry watching her videos and find strength in her honest depictions of attempting a healthier lifestyle.

“You’re representing a lot of people but most importantly you represent you,” writes one. “You are a inspiration to the ones that don’t look like the so called ‘model-type,'” writes another.

But for every fan, there’s a”troll” who argues she’s “glorifying obesity” and encouraging unhealthy habits. She’s accustomed to these attacks, sighing in resignation to life within the social media eye.

Related: The Hidden Discrimination Against Being Fat At Work

“I don’t promote unhealthy lifestyles,” she asserts. “You can be healthy and fat.”

“I Am The Norm, I Am Not The Minority.”

Stanley began pursuing yoga only five years ago, rather reluctantly. While grieving a family death and dealing with depression during her second year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina, a classmate “dragged” her to a Bikram yoga class.

“[At first], I was like, ‘absolutely not,'” she recalls. “I tried it once when in high school and had an awful experience.”

Stanley also didn’t feel she had the funds to take up yoga, for which studios generally charge $20 a class. She felt similarly of the entire wellness industry, citing how she sees expensive items like coconut water “to be the absolute sign of financial prosperity.”

Her friend wore her down, pushing her to try one class before swearing it off entirely. Stanley attended, though she felt isolated from the very start.

“I was the largest person in the room,” she says, noting how the majority of attendees were “perfectly slender, usually white, [and] obviously has some kind of money to afford all those leggings.”

Despite her self consciousness, Stanley pushed past her insecurities. Pose by pose, she felt herself energized to stretch beyond her comfort zone. “It’s been a medicine that has helped me maintain sanity in my life,” she says of yoga’s calming effects. When she decided to wanted to further refine her practice, she decided on what she calls the “most body-positive studio of all time:” Home.

Stanley signed up for online yoga classes from the comfort of her Durham bedroom. The privacy provided her the space she needed to master the basics without worrying about stares or keeping up with fellow students. After several weeks, however, she realized she needed feedback on the more complicated poses, a benefit one can’t obtain from one-way tele-education. So, in 2011, she started photographing herself.

I've said shit in the past 5-6 months that has pissed some of you all the way off. Trust me, my mentions have got the receipts. And, if I'm being completely honest, I'm kinda glad. I mean, respectability politics are soooo fucking lame- all they do is create divisions. It's not important that we all agree with one another, but it IS important for us to be honest with one another. Honesty is the key to forward movement and evolution- prancing around difficult topics is just…stupid. Sometimes my honesty can be more than what some of y'all want to hear, particularly if you think yoga is all about sunshine and rainbows-but the beauty of social media is that it cuts across demographics and makes space for dialogue that would never happen in real life. As a black queer fat femme, my opinions may be intersectional as fuck but they're DEFINITELY not mainstream- and I know they ruffle more than a few feathers. That's ok. Feather ruffling is ok. We don't have to agree, and I love that we're all bringing our individual voices to the table. So if you're pissed at me for my political views, please know that I'm not pissed at you. And for those of you who think I hate cis gender white guys…..when did I say that. Like, actually. When. (Unrelated, there's lots of #EveryBodyYoga book tour updates on my website + info about my @1440multiversity yoga retreat and #hawaiiyogafestival classes- check it out at jessamynstanley.com!) Bodysuit- @lanebryant Headphones- @beatsbydre Photo- @justincookphoto at @thedurhamhotel

A post shared by Jessamyn (@mynameisjessamyn) on Mar 29, 2017 at 6:46pm PDT

At first, she shared simple poses in hopes of alignment critiques from Instagram’s fitness circles. With her Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, Stanley set a 30-second self-timer app and documented her daily progress. She quickly received feedback, but she was surprised by how many people—not just yogis—applauded her athletic vulnerability.

“I was overwhelmed by people [who responded] ‘Wow, I didn’t know that fat black people could practice yoga, I thought it was only white skinny women,” she says, adding, “there were a lot of people who think that I’m a unicorn.”

If anything, she says, “I am the norm, I am not the minority.” Minorities in yoga, she holds, only “have a visibility problem.”

The hundreds, then thousands, of strangers who reached out via Instagram motivated Stanley to keep the account going and further increase her postings.

“I quickly found my place in this virtual community and with it, a sense of inclusion and encouragement that I’d never felt in any yoga class,” she writes. “Apparently, when you show the internet your fat ass in a yoga pose, everyone wants to know how the hell you managed it.”

The postings were helpful in mastering her moves, and within a year, studios from all over America to Antarctica were requesting private tutorials or that she teach a class. But Stanley was self-taught and wasn’t really qualified to teach others.

“I did not want to be a yoga teacher,” she admits, noting that the world “has too many” yoga teachers already. Beside, she could not afford to go into training. Yoga teacher training traditionally requires between 200-500 hours and can range from a few thousand dollars up to $10,000.

Stanley was content to keep it a hobby until a flurry of press erupted in 2015. By then, Stanley had dropped out of studying performing arts management in graduate school and was contemplating her next move. Following profile pieces in New York magazine and on Good Morning America, the reluctant yogi got a final push from her father, a UPS truck driver, who offered her a loan (“no small thing, he’s working class,” she explains) to enroll in a local yoga training institute.

Stanley understood she possessed a unique perspective on the yoga learning process and only through formal training could she further advocate for getting more voices on mats.

“It is so imperative that many [different types of] people teach yoga because every single experience is unique, and my experience and my practice might not resonate for every human being, but it could resonate for least one,” she says.

Over the years, yoga has become my ultimate escape- any time I need to get a grip on reality, I always end up stepping on my yoga mat. I had a blast trying out the new @polarglobal #androidwear while popping up into #headstands all over my hometown and @seeitallmedia was there to capture all the fun. No matter what continent/country/state/city/neighborhood I’m in, my yoga practice is always there to keep me grounded and strong. No matter what, my #magicminute is always just a few deep breaths away. Yes, this post is #sponsored- but the opinions are all mine, y’all. Btw, my #yogahasnosize sweatshirt is courtesy of baby girl @donnanobleyoga & @curvesomeyoga

A post shared by Jessamyn (@mynameisjessamyn) on Dec 9, 2016 at 2:10pm PST

Building A Body-Beautiful Empire

In 2016, Jessamyn began teaching weekly classes with a pay-what-you-can donation suggestion at Durham’s public parks and community centers. Earlier this year, she extended into online teaching for digital fitness portal Cody, which charges $29.99 for eight classes. Now, she’s released her book which is meant as an amuse-bouche for yoga beginners who “don’t feel comfortable walking into a studio,” says Jessamyn. In it, they’ll learn 50 basic poses and how to tailor the practice for all body types, with tips on how to move around with a large belly or how to tape down one’s boobs.

“I wrote [the book] for every person who is self-conscious about their body,” stresses Stanley.

In the last year, Stanley also found a place for herself among household-name brands eager to introduce new faces to the $3.7 trillion wellness market. She starred in campaigns for Kotex (“Find Your Fitness”), Motrin, FabFitFun, and REI (“Force of Nature”), as well as partnered with several nonprofit organizations benefitting women. Last month, she volunteered with Job Start, a prison-to-work transition program, to teach yoga to incarcerated women.

“Those are the people who really need it,” says Stanley.

Stanley is on a roll, but you won’t see her opening a yoga studio anytime soon (“the market is oversaturated,” she yawns). She’s busy finishing up a follow-up book, then working on launching her own nonprofit organization in the fall. Her goal is to set up a scholarship fund called PWYC (Pay What You Can), based on the donation model, that can be adopted by yoga studios around the country, specifically areas in which residents cannot afford classes. She hopes to launch the program in major cities by early 2018.

Check it out, y’all- I’m hosting my first FREE yoga class on the @codyapp Online Studio tomorrow! There are TWO chances to catch it — 9am and 4pm Pacific! “Bare Your Soul, Find your Flow” is a 60-minute Vinyasa flow packed with dynamic heart and hip openers to help you get out of your head and onto your mat. I fill the class with no-pressure modifications so this class is perfect for all levels! Follow the link in my bio to learn more and RSVP for a reminder email so you don’t miss it! Also, shout out and big love to @mikefolden & @griff_j for capturing the magic of this class + whoever edited/cut this clip (@reidvisions? @paosanchez?) bc every time I watch it I'm reminded of just how effing fun and awesome the energy was in the room that day ????????

A post shared by Jessamyn (@mynameisjessamyn) on Aug 1, 2016 at 7:49am PDT

Stanley will also dip her toes into content media. She’s launching a podcast that examines how the teachings of yoga extend to mental health, relationships, politics, and all things in between. She wants yoga to be associated with more than, as she calls it, “buying things.” Stanley predicts the overpowering consumerism associated with the wellness market is an unsustainable trend that “will disappear in a decade.”

“A lot of ways that people understand the practice is through capitalism,” Stanley says, referencing fashion, pricey foodie items, and “all the gear” one thinks necessary for yoga. Despite her current involvement with brands, she thinks most companies are “just about selling stuff … and you can sell weight loss.” (The ad and promo campaigns she’s affiliated with, she insists, have some sort of body acceptance message.)

The podcast’s name, in a nod to what Stanley calls her “apathy for the [yoga] industry,” will be titled, Don’t Call Me a F**cking Yogi.

Stanley’s inclusive mentality extends to even those who, at first, might have been just the ones to intimidate her at yoga studios.

“Everyone is always shading Gwyneth Paltrow,” says Stanley of the GOOP founder, whom she respects for her ability to let criticism roll off her back. “She doesn’t care at all. I love that. I live for that.”

I was still a student in the Netherlands when I watched a TED Talk that changed my career–and it was about washing machines. In it, the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling argues that the washing machine was one of the most revolutionary technological inventions of the modern age, having freed millions of homebound women from hours of manual labor. I was inspired–and had a hunch I could improve on the appliance’s social impact even further.

So a month before graduating with a degree in business administration, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer to launch my startup, a washing device that saves even more time than conventional washing machines and runs on zero energy. I packed my bags and moved to Ahmedabad, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Building A New Network From Scratch

Launching a new business is hard–everyone knows that. To make it through the tough times, most founders develop support networks to fall back on and seek advice from. They might call family friends for accounting help, have sit-downs with business mentors, or brainstorm solutions with other entrepreneurs over a few drinks. But when I packed my bags and moved abroad, I surrendered all those crucial, informal support structures.

I knew that was a risky move. In one survey, 78% of founders told The Economist Intelligence Unit that informal networking “will be important or is important to their business” already. But when I arrived in India, I didn’t know anyone. I had to start from scratch and build my network from the ground up.

Related:Five Lessons I Learned In The First 24 Hours After Launching My Startup 

So I submerged myself in the day-to-day affairs in the city, like drinking chai at roadside shops near universities. I cold-called local entrepreneurs and asked to meet to seek guidance from them, and went to networking events to become part of the local entrepreneurial community. My friends even gave me a local name, “Kanubhai,” which definitely helped to break the ice.

Many immigrants arrive in new countries, immediately join expat communities, and build networks with other foreigners. But for me, networking with the Indian community is what really helped my business to grow. I was able to get an “in” to local business deals, understand local customs better, and learn more about the Indian market. Best of all, I met my cofounder.

The funny thing is, networking in a new environment was actually more effective than networking in a more familiar one. I didn’t initially have friends to hang out with at these events in India, so unless I wanted to stand alone in a corner, I had to force myself to converse with people I didn’t know.

Not every young entrepreneur will find themselves in a new country and without a network, but it’s important for all founders to go outside their comfort zones and engage with the unknown. Immerse yourself in unfamiliar communities to learn more about your target market, show up at events alone to perfect your elevator pitch, and introduce yourself to people you’ve never met. It’s a mind-set you have to be willing to adopt, but it can really pay off.

Dealing With The Unfamiliar

As you get better at that, you’ll begin noticing that those seemingly strange rules abroad do have a purpose. After being in India for a few months, I decided to go for a swim at a local club. My first visit, I arrived too late for registration. The second time the on-duty officer wasn’t there. The third time I was finally able to register, and after answering a few formalities, the official in charge asked if I knew how to swim. “Why would I be here if I couldn’t?” I thought. But even after answering yes, I was asked to swim two laps to prove it.

In a foreign country, you constantly have to adapt to rules and regulations that might not make sense to you initially. But if you can stay flexible and self-aware, you’ll come to understand why certain rules are put in place.

Related:The Legal Issues You Need To Know If You’re Launching A Startup In 2017

Mind-set aside, that’s also just good practice for setting up a new business. Startups need to have their financial books in order, pay the required taxes, and keep all their ducks in a row, legally speaking. In my experience, day-long trips to the bank, standing in long lines at government offices, and struggling to understand official explanations of difficult processes in a second language will make any administrative tasks back home feel like a breeze.

Switching Up Your Own Habits

Living away from home comes with plenty of highs and lows. My limits were tested every day in India–the food, the weather, and the culture are entirely different. And the cultural change also affected the way I managed my nascent business. In the Netherlands everything is structured and carefully planned, but in India I had to adapt to a system that was entirely different–a more go-with-the-flow approach where I had to be ready for anything, anytime.

I also learned to  get my head around the art of indirect communication. Back home, I was taught to ask why and to be direct about what I think. In India this comes off as extremely rude and can lead to uncomfortable situations. In fact, in most conversations, people just aim to keep the peace—and in a country of 1.3 billion people and some 780 languages, I quickly grasped the value in that. In my experience, business relationships are valued so highly that they take a longer time to form. I found that I needed to strike up a strong personal relationship first, before we could talk business–and sometimes that meant waiting three weeks just to get a quote from a vendor.

Related:Five Lessons I Learned When I Started Doing Business In Latin America

Every day, I had to adjust my own values and behaviors. Changing your habits is never easy, especially when the next day you have to do it all over again. While this was sometimes a frustrating experience, it was a fantastic way to learn about myself and better understand the things that motivate and challenge me.

Jetting off to India to launch my startup certainly came with a lot of obstacles, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The proof is in the stamps on my passport: I’m still here.

Coen Vermeer is the co-founder of MONONO, the company behind gentlewasher, a washing device for delicate clothes that runs without electricity.

You arrive at work and one of your coworkers immediately stops and asks if you can help them with a project. If you say “yes,” you might be making a mistake, according to a study from Michigan State University. Assisting coworkers in the morning can lead to bad behavior in the afternoon, and that can create a toxic work environment, says Russell Johnson, lead researcher and associate professor of management in MSU’s Broad College of Business.

“Helping in the morning leads people to feel depleted or mentally fatigued in the afternoon, which then leads to them helping less in the afternoon,” he says. “They switched from being other-oriented in the morning to being selfish in the afternoon.”

And that includes doing some self-serving behaviors. You might be tempted to take credit for someone else’s ideas, badmouth a coworker in front of your supervisor to improve your own standing, hoard company resources, equipment, or information, or show favoritism toward those who can potentially benefit you, says Johnson.

“Any behavior that unfairly props oneself up while at the same time disadvantaging others,” he says.

Working remotely brings additional challenge to helping coworkers in the morning. “It might in fact be even more depleting or fatiguing because the nonverbal cues and feedback from the help recipient are missing,” says Johnson. “Communication is easier and more efficient when done face to face, because nonverbal cues convey useful information. Thus, helpers must expend even more cognitive resources to make sense of the situation, without the aid of nonverbal cues from the help recipient.”

What If You Can’t Say “No”?

If saying “no” or “not now” isn’t an option, you can avoid the negative consequences by taking a break immediately after helping. “When employees feel mentally fatigued or depleted, it has repeatedly been shown that they can recoup their cognitive or attentional resources by psychologically disengaging from work for a period of time,” says Johnson. “By not thinking about work, people feel more replenished or refreshed when they resume or re-engage with their job.”

But be careful. “If I have lunch with work colleagues and spend the period talking about work, I won’t feel replenished,” adds Johnson. “If, on the other hand, I spend it with work colleagues but we talk about non-work issues, such as family, sports, or entertainment, then the lunch period will be cognitively replenishing.”

Even a five-minute break can help. Johnson suggests taking a quick walk or bike ride to disengage. “The five minutes of ‘lost’ time that is taken for this activity will be more than made up for by the gains in performance and cooperation afterwards,” says Johnson. “When I am feeling mentally fatigued, I leave my office, pop in my headphones, and listen to music while I take a short walk. I come back feeling great afterward.”

What Leaders Can Do

If breaks aren’t possible, managers should make sure they encourage proper separation from work once employees return home. “They can start by not assigning ‘homework’ and by not emailing or texting employees in their off-hours,” says Johnson. Research has found that working at night from home can disrupt sleep and make employees feel disengaged.

“It is possible to delay the delivery of emails and messages so that they go out early the next morning, rather than at the end of the day or in the evening when the supervisor actually composes the message,” says Johnson. “That way, employees will not feel any undue pressure to respond or deal with work in their off hours.”

Managers should structure their own workday so that cognitively demanding activities that include helping coworkers are separated by less demanding activities and breaks. For example, providing feedback, especially if it’s negative, is a very challenging and demanding activity, says Johnson. Managers should schedule performance reviews over a few days, with breaks between sessions.

“Otherwise the feelings of mental fatigue build up and, before you know it, the depleted manager will be engaging in selfish and interpersonally destructive acts directed at others, such as verbal abuse, discounting, and blaming,” he says.

Victoria Kotongan grew up in the Native Village of Unalakleet, Alaska, where she still lives and hunts grouse for subsistence. A few years ago, she was cleaning a couple of the birds she shot, and noticed all of them had worms coming out of the breast meat. Had she found a worm in just one of the birds, she might not have worried, but this was all six of them, and she’d never seen this disease before.

Kotongan is a member the Local Environmental Observer (LEO) Network–a digital citizen science platform that connects people, like Kotongan, with deep traditional or indigenous local knowledge with scientists to identify and document signs of environmental change. The nearly 1,678 members of the network are concentrated in North America and include tribal elders, scientist, fishermen, and hunters. The 728 unusual natural occurrences tracked on the LEO Network’s interactive map since 2012 cluster in the U.S., but a handful have been reported in Africa, Australia, and Europe; they range from low water at the banks of the Klamath River in northern California to southern flying squirrel species migrating north in Ontario.

“The thing is, with climate change, everything is changing,” says Mike Brubaker, who founded the LEO Network in 2012, through the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), a health-service nonprofit for which he serves as the director of community environment and safety. “And if people are immersed in their local environments, they’re going to be really good at noticing when something’s different.”

Brubaker grew up in Alaska, and over the course of his life he’s watched the vegetation transform on the Chugach Mountains in the southern part of the state; once Brubaker started at the ANTHC in 2008, he began to travel to more remote parts of the state, where he spoke with native communities and subsistence farmers who “have such amazing familiarity with the landscape and the weather, that they were able to make really very subtle observations about the kinds of changes that were occurring,” Brubaker says. “We realized that this kind of knowledge was crucial as we try to make these connections between the changing climate and changing environment, and the effect it has on people and populations.”

“The key question is: Are you noticing environmental change based on your knowledge?” Brubaker says. “If so, then it’s probably significant and appropriate to share.” As the LEO Network grows, Brubaker envisions collaborations between observant citizens and scientific researchers informing the debate around the environmental effects of climate change, and connecting that debate more strongly with the people whose livelihoods are affected by the changing landscape. Tom Okey, a Pew Marine Fellow under the Pew Charitable Trusts’ conservation program, told the British Columbia-based Times Unionist that the local knowledge aggregated through the LEO Network could fill some of the gaps that more mainstream systems fail to catch when seeking out signs of environmental change.

While the most active people on the LEO Network either have a science background or have lived close to the land, anybody with an interest in citizen science, or following the changes tracked on the platform’s interactive map, can sign up. “I hope people recognize the value of signing up just to be a part of the discussion,” Brubaker says. “Part of the solution for dealing with this rapid change is creating a community of people with this knowledge to share.”

Prisoner advocates have long complained about the high cost of making phone calls from the nation’s correctional facilities. They accuse phone and prison companies, and some states, of profiteering from inmate populations, charging up to $17 for a 15-minute call (plus interconnection costs) in some cases.

Under Democratic leadership, the Federal Communications Commission came to the advocates’ aid by capping the amount service providers can charge (at 13 cents per minute in state and federal prisons). But that effort was just dealt a severe blow. In a 2-to-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the F.C.C. had exceeded its regulatory authority, handing a victory to phone companies and several states who had brought the appeal.

The ruling affects the F.C.C.’s decision to cap charges for in-state calls, which make up the majority of calls made from prisons. The court also struck down an order ending “commissions” paid by companies to prison operators. Prisoner advocates argued that these commissions–phone companies giving prison operators a percentage of the call charges–were in effect “kickbacks.” One estimate by a coalition of advocates for inmates said phone companies paid at least $460 million in 2013, either to private companies or states that run facilities.

With the election of President Trump, the F.C.C. is now under Republican control. New F.C.C. chairman Ajit Pai previously voted against regulating the issue and chose not to defend the F.C.C.’s orders in the new action. In a statement today, he said he would work with “all stakeholders to address the problem of high inmate calling rates in a lawful manner.” It’s not clear how that might happen, though several states, including New York and New Jersey, have their own phone charge caps.

Prisoner advocates were aggrieved by the court decision but promised to keep litigating the issue, possibly to the Supreme Court. “It is profoundly disappointing and will result in serious continuing harm to untold numbers of families and loved ones of incarcerated people,” Andrew Schwartzman, an attorney with Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, told the Washington Post.

The campaign for lower prison phone calls dates back to 2003 and a single Washington, D.C. grandmother, Martha Wright. Wright made regular Sunday calls to her grandson, Ulandis Forte, an inmate, and struggled over time to meet growing phone costs–up to $100 a month–and began an effort to cap them. Prison advocates say lowering call costs keeps inmates in touch with their families, helps with rehabilitation, and even reduces reoffending rates.

Sometimes, whether we want it to be or not, the answer is just “no.” No, you’re not going on in the interview process. No, the hiring manager isn’t interested. No, the recruiter doesn’t think you’re a strong enough fit. No.

Unfortunately for you, people aren’t always stellar at saying “no.” Maybe they don’t like having uncomfortable conversations. They don’t want to (gasp) disappoint you. Or perhaps it’s because they’re simply lazy or inconsiderate.

Regardless, it’s important to be able to spot the signs that this isn’t “the one.” This way, you can redirect your energy and focus toward opportunities with genuine promise. Here are five indicators that it’s probably time to move on:

1. A Super Responsive Recruiter Suddenly Becomes Hard To Reach

It’s kind of like the non-appearance-focused spouse who suddenly races out and buys a bunch of new clothes and a gym membership. When someone starts behaving completely out of character, you smell trouble.

This is also the case when working with a recruiter. If he or she has been totally Johnny-on-the-spot in the correspondence and follow-up–and then suddenly becomes tough to reach or turtle-slow with responses–this may well be a sign.

Agency recruiters usually make money only when they close deals. Corporate recruiters are typically evaluated on how successful they are at filling open positions. Thus, if it becomes clear to them that you’re not going to go the distance, they may blip off the radar on you and focus on the favored candidate.

Related: How To Avoid Being Professionally Ghosted 

Is it cool? Nope. Do you deserve closure? Absolutely. Does it happen every day? Yep. (And if this is news to you, you’ll probably love this article.) Again, people aren’t always exactly graceful about delivering difficult news. Don’t let it unravel you. Focus on what you can control, and keep pushing forward.

Side note: I don’t advise giving the other party a piece of your mind if you’re not 100% certain it’s called for.

2. You’re Told She’s In A Meeting, Every Time

This is thematically like the suddenly unresponsive recruiter, but arguably worse. In this instance, she simply goes dark without any sort of explanation. And when you call her office to see if you can gain some clarity on what’s going on, she’s in a meeting. And another meeting. And yet another meeting. Or maybe she starts (uncharacteristically) sending all your calls right into voicemail.

Here’s the thing: A recruiter’s job relies on prompt correspondence. We sink or swim based on our ability to communicate with and update our candidates. Thus, if you’re dealing with one who shifts into “completely unavailable” mode, it’s a sign that she’s both rude and, likely, no longer interested.

3. You Get The “I Think We Have A Bad Connection” Treatment

Years ago, one of my recruiting colleagues earned the infamous reputation as the master of the bad connection. He was so terrible at having the, “I’m sorry, but they’re not interested and here’s why…” conversation with his candidates that–when they started to become a bit pesky with the follow up calls–he’d pretend he couldn’t hear them.

“Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?” Meanwhile, they’re on the other line, talking to him clear as a bell.

Related:Why Your Leadership Skills Won’t Get You Hired (But These Four Other Things Might

And it appears that my coworker isn’t the only “professional” who uses this technique to close things out with candidates they no longer want to deal with. I recently coached a client who, upon following up to ask why he wasn’t moving on in the interview process, got the exact same response. When he hung up and called back, he went right into voicemail, multiple times. She was the VP of the company.

4. He Contradicts Himself On Social Media

Social media can also provide you with evidence that someone doesn’t want to talk with you anymore. Case in point: I once hired a copywriter to support a substantially large project. I paid the deposit and she went to work preparing a project outline. Shortly thereafter, she flat-out vanished. I tried every which way to connect with her to see what had happened and how we were going to resolve this most unexpected turn of events.

When I finally (after weeks of trying) got a response, she said she’d been so sick that she couldn’t reply to any emails or correspond at all. Interestingly enough, I discovered that she was not too ill for Twitter or Facebook. Not only was she there, none of her posts gave any sort of indication of an illness at all.

If you’re a job seeker dealing with what feels like the runaround or a fabricated story, mosey over to that person’s social media platforms. You may uncover signs that he simply doesn’t have the gumption to tell it like it is.

5. She Consistently Has Something Urgent To Attend To

Via phone, this may be in the form of an audible doorbell or secondary phone ringing that the other party “has to” attend to, stat. If this is an in-person conversation, it may be a glance at their mobile followed by the urgent need to rush off to a faux emergency.

Don’t get me wrong: Stuff goes wrong sometimes, for all of us. In fact, my own kids have an uncanny talent for texting me with their “unsolvable problems” right when I’m in the middle of things like client meetings. I get it.

However, if you’re interacting with someone who seems to have these mini-emergencies with frequency, this could mean that she’s trying to get away from you. These signs may annoy you or make your job search feel even more challenging. But my intention is not to create despair. To the contrary, I want to help you spot game-playing or evasiveness swiftly. From there, you can decide how you want to play it.

Maybe you just table that opportunity and turn your focus elsewhere. Maybe you seek out another contact within the organization. Whatever your strategy, don’t let one opportunity or one unresponsive recruiter unravel you.

Fine-tune your performance as needed. Control what you can control. When you dwell on the “no’s,” you take energy away from the activities that could lead to a “yes.” Certainly, you should give every opportunity that interests you your full effort and attention.

But when it’s time to move on from a job rejection? Move on. (And trust that karma will even everything out in the long run.)

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

More From The Muse:

• 6 Reasons You Didn’t Get The Job (That No One Will Ever Tell You) 
• How To Move On When You Didn’t Land The Job 
• 4 Reasons You Didn’t Get The Job–Despite Following All The Rules 

We all want to be great negotiators, but most of us don’t do it that effectively. How many times have you tried to make a deal, only to blink first and give up the one thing that you cared most about?

A new research project from Facebook aims to help us get more of what we want—and save us the hassle of having to go head-to-head to do so. The project, from Facebook’s artificial intelligence research group (FAIR), builds on the social network giant’s work over the years to enable tools like chatbots to engage in short, natural-language conversations. But while current publicly available bots are capable of doing things like booking a restaurant table, they’ve proven less adept at carrying on a meaningful conversation due to the challenge of understanding what we’re saying and combining that with their knowledge of the world we live in.

The new project—which is not expected to result in a consumer product anytime soon—is meant to demonstrate that it’s possible to build chatbots that can think ahead and plan, said Druhv Batra, a FAIR research scientist visiting from Georgia Tech. “What we’d like these agents to discover,” Batra said, “is that you have to think a few steps ahead to come up with natural-language plans and come up with something that makes everyone happy.”

As with many Facebook research projects, the company is planning on open-sourcing the work.

It’s not yet clear how sophisticated the bots’ negotiating skills will become—and no one should expect them to be working out treaties or anything complex. But in the early going, FAIR imagines that they could be good at scheduling meetings between two busy people, or finding a mutually satisfactory time to go to the movies, or settling on a desirable sale price for some consumer product.

At the core of the project is a brand-new technique that Facebook calls dialogue rollouts, in which bots simulate the direction that a negotiation might go all the way to its end in order to figure out the best possible outcome.

The idea is that both sides would give a score to their own best outcome—via a system in which the bot asks you questions related to the negotiation at hand—for example, what type of cuisine you prefer, what nights you could work late, or when you might make exceptions to an otherwise busy schedule. Then, the two dueling bots would be incentivized to search for the outcome with the maximum score. Fail to reach an agreement, and both sides score nothing. Obviously, a score of zero benefits no one, so the system is built to maximize the chances of the best possible outcome for both sides.

Stalemates

As Mike Lewis, a FAIR research scientist who worked on the project, put it, one of his team’s big challenges was getting bots to learn to compromise, since both sides can’t always get what we most want. So the goal is coming up with a deal that will make both sides at least somewhat happy.

In the project’s early days, it hasn’t kept track of negotiation results. But Lewis said that the FAIR team plans on exploring ways to teach the system to learn over time so that one side can’t be exploited time after time by being forced to accept a less-than-ideal outcome.

It may be working. In a paper on the research, FAIR wrote that over the course of the project, they found that in negotiations between dialogue agents and humans, their bots were increasingly sending the last message less often, “which we can insinuate means they’re proposing the final agreement more often than accepting the counter offers.”

In the meantime, Batra explained, one of the best things to come out of the project has been watching the bots learn good negotiating strategies, including one that many of us probably do understand—initially asking for more than we want and then settling for something closer to our true aim.

“They figure out that one negotiation strategy is to ask for more than what you want,” Batra explained, “and then concede. No human told them that. It emerged naturally.”

In the future, there may be no reason to ever leave the great indoors. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a drug that can give even the most ardent indoorsman a healthy, tanned glow without sunlight or damaging UV radiation.

The drug, specifically a protein called salt-inducible kinase (SIK), according to Cell Reports, tricks the skin into producing melanin—the pigment that causes tanning and darker skin. The results have been promising so far, with the compound triggering the skin to produce a temporary tan before reverting back to the natural skin tone once the treatment ended. Dr. David Fisher, one of the researchers, told BBC News, “Under the microscope it’s the real melanin; it really is activating the production of pigment in a UV-independent fashion.”

That means it’s a “real” tan, unlike the assortment of bronzers and spray tans favored by the cast of Dancing With the Stars.

The team hopes that the pill will serve as a “novel strategy” for reducing cancer, as it could mean fewer people will resort to laying out in the sun, despite the increased skin-cancer risk that comes with such activities. The new compound should work on all skin types, too, because it merely ramps up the body’s natural melanin production. However, researchers believe it will be most effective on fair-skinned people who are at greatest risk for developing skin cancer.

It’s important to note that while increased melanin does provide some UV protection, the pill is not a replacement for sunblock. Eventually the scientists hope to combine their tanning drug with sunblock for maximum protection.

The pill is still a ways off, though, as it has only been tested in the lab. So far the drug has resulted in some very tan mice.

Figure 1 has made a name for itself as a social network that lets medical professionals discuss photos of patient conditions with colleagues around the world.

“They can learn in real time from other people experiencing and seeing cases,” says Dr. Joshua Landy, a practicing physician and cofounder of Figure 1. “If you’re seeing a case, you can take a picture of it, you can describe it and ask for help, and you can even page a specialist.”

Now, the Toronto company sometimes referred to as the “Instagram for doctors” plans to introduce artificial intelligence into the mix, starting with a feature to turn photos of electrocardiograms into digital data. The company is planning to formally announce the feature later this month at the International Congress on Electrocardiology in Portland. At first, experts will be able to weigh in on the meaning of the measurements, but in the future more advanced machine learning systems may be able to provide their own insight into what particular readings mean.

Related:On “Instagrams For Doctors,” Gross-Out Photos With A Dose Of Privacy Concerns

Electrocardiograms translate electrical impulses in the heart into line graphs that doctors can read to diagnose patients. While they’re naturally useful in checking for heart attacks and other cardiac issues, experts can sometimes also spot other conditions in ECG readings, from pneumonia to Parkinson’s disease, Landy explains. And the readings, often considered a vital sign on par with body temperature, blood pressure, and pulse rate, are standardized enough to be a natural target for digital processing.

“They are almost perfect fodder for computer vision and machine learning,” Landy says. “They’re self-similar, they’re stereotypic, they’re immediately recognizable by an algorithm.”

Experiments testing how machine learning can potentially be useful in health and medicine have been more common in recent years, but so far they haven’t had much impact on the average doctor’s practice, Landy says. That echoes what independent experts in the field have said as well.

“We examine applications of deep learning to a variety of biomedical problems–patient classification, fundamental biological processes, and treatment of patients–to predict whether deep learning will transform these tasks or if the biomedical sphere poses unique challenges,” a group of 27 researchers wrote in a paper released last month. “We find that deep learning has yet to revolutionize or definitively resolve any of these problems, but promising advances have been made on the prior state of the art.”

Related: This Doctor Is Using Telemedicine To Treat Syrian Refugees

Figure 1 hopes to change that with a tool that the more than 1 million doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals on the platform can immediately use to their advantage.

Even a first iteration of a machine-learning algorithm for detecting ECG images had about an 85% accuracy rate and the company, which is collaborating with researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, is working to further hone its approach. Figure 1’s library of medical images, including ECGs, provides an easy training set for code to detect ECGs and extract data. The company is partnering with a number of institutions to assemble a broader sample still.

“We’re only going to be using aggregated, anonymized data to collect a training set,” says Landy.

He says there may be future applications in other fields of medicine in the future, especially in other cases where lots of photos are  “stereotypical and self-similar.” That could mean photos of dermatological conditions, or in common medical situations like caring for a wound, where doctors routinely observe the same feature on a patient.

A smart app could one day take a series of pictures of a wound, and confirm that it’s shrinking in size without the need for physical measurements, Landy says, though the company is likely to test to make sure any features it introduces are actually useful to its users.

“The most important thing in building software is making sure you’re actually building something people want to use,” he says.

Most food crops, from apples and almonds to coffee and chocolate, depend at least in part on pollination from bees and other pollinators. But as those species decline–40% of invertebrate pollinators now face extinction–it’s difficult for farmers and researchers to track changes in real time. One thing that could help: an app and other tools that can capture the sound of buzzing as bees work.

Recording buzzes can’t be used to count the population in an area, but it can indicate how active bees are and how they’re pollinating. Conservation biologists could use the system to find hotspots of activity to study in more detail. Farmers could use the system to quickly identify places where bee activity was slowing down or to measure results after implementing bee-friendly practices like planting wildflowers.

“It could be helpful for farmers to know how well their bee-pollinated crops are being pollinated right away, without having to use a fancy trapping system,” Galen says. “Then they can take steps either to bring in honeybees commercially to supplement pollination or potentially, if it’s a very valuable crop, use some sort of hand pollination methods if they know they’ve got a problem.”

Organic farmers could use the system to identify when pesticides are blowing on their crops from neighboring farms. “This would be sort of like a monitoring system to say ‘Uh-oh, you’ve just had a crash in your bee population, let’s look at the pesticide records from around your farm and see what’s going on,'” she says.

The team is also collaborating with other researchers who are developing a visual, facial-recognition-like tool for bees to identify species, which could eventually be used in combination with a microphone recording buzzing. A new app that the researchers are developing, which may include both sound recording and image recognition, could help crowdsource data about populations of the more than 20,000 species of wild bees, along with other pollinators.

The sound of buzzing may also later be used to provide other clues about bees populations. When bees visit a flower, they buzz differently; the researchers hypothesize that because getting pollen out of a flower is harder work than flying, the sound of that buzz could help indicate a bee’s health. “If we could make those connections, that could be very useful as a sort of early warning system for parasites and pathogens in bee populations,” says Galen. Disease, along with pesticide use, climate change, and several other factors, is one of the stresses thought to be causing the decline of pollinators. “We would use it sort of like a doctor would use a stethoscope, but for a bee.”