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This VC Explains How To Avoid Pitching Good Ideas Badly

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Too many startup founders’ otherwise great ideas fall flat when they pitch them all wrong. As a venture capitalist, I’ve seen pitches flounder for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s forgetting to state which problem the idea is meant to solve, or even the simple value proposition. Other times it’s failing to identify exactly who the end buyer might be.

I get it—pitching well is difficult and amazingly stressful. And sometimes a bad pitch can spell the end for what might have turned out to be a successful business. To avoid that, these are a few things to consider when you’re crafting a pitch to take to investors.


Related: Why $200 Adult Security Blankets Are A Stroke Of Startup Genius


1. Wipe “Better” From Your Lexicon

“Better” doesn’t mean very much. Talk to me in terms of making things cheaper, faster, or less risky. Those things are more tangible and usually measurable. VCs need the facts, not opinions. If you’re pitching something that’s been done before, there has to be some kind of crucial change that distinguishes it—substantively and, yes, for the better—from whatever there was in the past. “Me too” products don’t usually fare that well.

For example, years ago we saw very good returns on an investment with an online insurance-comparison engine. People were already buying insurance online, but it was still hard to get quotes from different companies without spending hours of time on the process. Folks were surfing the web for all sorts of information, so getting a reliable comparison was a small extra step that reduced risk, saved money, and saved time. That made for a great mix—and instead of positioning it as a “better” version of what was already out there, the startup made it clear their approach was actually different enough to make an impact . . .

2. Don’t Be Too Different

. . . but without overdoing it. After all, being too different adds risk to a VC’s investment.

So don’t bend over backward to tell me how wildly original and game-changing your business will be; you can actually kill a solid idea by overselling its novelty. Instead, talk to me about balancing newness with the realities of the market today. Pitch us on how you can use existing sales channels to sell your new product or service. This shows us that your new service can be used by the current players who are out there already. Even if you’re onto something brilliant, I can’t fund distribution, marketing, a brand new factory, and a supply-chain system all in one go.

When we first invested in e-sports, I initially thought it was a good idea, but too complicated. I then understood that millions were already playing video games, they loved to watch the experts play, and wanted to cheer on the leaders during tournaments. The idea of building out a professional team wasn’t farfetched at all. Most of the pieces were there already, and we could just finish the puzzle. It’s up to founders to show us that all the dots are actually there; this way we can connect them.


Related:I’ve Raised A Billion In VC Funding—Let Me Help You With That Pitch


3. Tell Me Exactly How You’ll Invest My Money

Great ideas die when the spending details are too murky. You might be surprised how many pitches don’t have this thought out in advance. I want to see a simple slide that shows me exactly what you will do with the money and why. And please, don’t tell us that our investment will be used to pay you and your fellow cofounders because you’ve all been working on this project in your garage for two years without drawing a salary. VCs aren’t here to get you out of a tough situation.

I want to know how the money will be used to grow the company, not to take care of whatever debts you’ve incurred. I want to get a sense of how quickly you plan to spend the investment, which milestones you’re planning to hit, and why you’ve picked the specific priorities you’re showing me. Give me some confidence that I’m not putting money into a black hole. “Trust me” isn’t a phrase any pitch should contain.

4. Explain How You’ll Build Your Team

Ideas are great, but companies succeed or die based on execution. Like most VCs, I’ll invest in a B idea with an A team, rather than an A idea with a B team. Almost no business plan is static; unexpected things happen, and you need to be as ready as you possibly can to handle them.

The key ingredient for doing that is a solid team. Talk to me about the people who are already on board and what makes them great at what they do. Advise how many people will work together as a team, not just as individuals. I can’t tell you how many times we have run into issues with a lot of A players that, when put together, make a dysfunctional C team!


Related:Listen Up, Founders—Gaps In The Market Don’t Matter, But Your Own Strengths Do


One of the best ideas I’ve ever heard was from an entrepreneur who was planning to hire a bunch of people as she expanded her retail outlets. She described in depth how she’d recruit by checking out the waitstaff at restaurants, or looking for energetic sales staff even at mall kiosks. If she spotted someone who had good customer skills and high energy, she offered them a job. Like Southwest Airlines proved two decades ago, it’s smart to hire on attitude. This demonstrates to investors how you’ll attract talent as you grow.

5. Be Ready To Pivot If Your Pitch Time Gets Cut In Half

Yes, we promised you an hour, but something came up. It’s unfortunate but happens all the time. So plan ahead to adjust your pitch to half or even a quarter of the time you expected. Not only do you not have to reschedule this way, but VCs often like to see entrepreneurs who can improvise and show that they’re well-prepared for contingencies. The only absolute certainty in any business is that some things will go wrong. We like to see that you can change course on the fly and still get the job done.

Connecting these elements is tough, no doubt about it. And that’s partly by design. Investors aren’t trying to make it easy for you to get our money. We review literally hundreds of ideas a year and may only invest in five or six annually. Showing us that your idea is better than every other one we’ve heard all starts with pitching it in the best light. Nail these five things, and your odds will be better than most.


Amit Raizada is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He is a partner at Vision Venture Partners and former CEO of Spectrum Business.


Self-Driving Cars Must Earn Our Trust, Says Intel’s Autonomous Chief

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Intel may have missed out on the smartphone boom, but it’s determined to get a foothold in smart cars. In January, the company unveiled a line of in-car computer systems called Intel GO; in March, it announced the purchase of Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes sensors and cameras for driverless vehicles. Now, Intel is collaborating with BMW on an autonomous car platform, which the companies hope to eventually license to other carmakers—an automotive version of the “Wintel” (Windows and Intel) duo that dominated the PC business.

Of course they have competition. Nvidia offers its own car computer, called Drive PX, which has won over automakers Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota, and Volvo. (Intel says it has more partners that it can’t name yet.) Chinese tech giant Baidu just announced its free, open-source Apollo software, which is like the Linux of self-driving cars.

Jack Weast, the chief systems architect for Intel’s new automated driving division. [Photo: Boone Rodriguez]
Intel’s strategy is to revive it’s old game plan from the PC industry. As it helped set standards for technologies like USB and Wi-Fi, Intel aims to do the same for cars, says Jack Weast, the chief systems architect for the company’s new automated driving division. That goes beyond technical standards to include a uniform way of for people to interact with cars.

Intel recently conducted a usability study, placing people in autonomous cars and gathering feedback on what they did and didn’t like, and what could be improved. The company plans to publish results in August, but Weast gave Fast Company a sneak peek when we caught up with him at the recent Automated Vehicles Symposium in San Francisco. (This conversation has been edited for length and readability.)

Fast Company: Why is the interface for a self-driving car important?

Jack Weast: How do you know it’s your car when it pulls up? How do you authenticate [it’s] you getting into your car versus somebody else? What happens if you want to change your destination mid-ride? Do you do that on your phone? Or do you do that via voice? There are important technology implications for us to make sure our products support whatever it might be–gesture recognition, natural language processing. How do you put all that together? We think this is a really important area that hasn’t been talked about enough.

FC: What were some of the things people wanted? Did they want the car to tell them what it was doing at all times?

JW: We [had] a scenario where a pedestrian darts out in front of the car. So one of the things we had the car do is both verbally, audibly, as well as on the information display, alert the passenger that, hey pedestrian detected, slowing down or stopping. It seems simple, but if [the car] wasn’t telling you what it was doing, [you’d wonder], why did it just change lanes there? What’s going on? Can I trust this thing?

It comes to human psychology, really. One of the things that’s really crucial is bi-directional, open communication of what somebody’s doing and why. So if I brush a bug off your shoulder, I’ll tell you that before I do it. Otherwise you go, why the hell did he put his arm out and touch me?

Maybe for some things, we as an industry need to agree on a common interaction. Think about cruise control. You can get into any rental car, any brand around the world, and you see Set, Resume, On, Off.

BMW engineer André Mueller works on an automated test car. The final computers will be able to fit under a driver’s seat. [Photo: Intel]
FC: Are there other things you remember from the study that people may have had a weird reaction to?

JW: One of the concepts we were exploring was a personalized display so you would know which was your car. But [what] if you’re wearing sunglasses, it’s really sunny, or the person’s blind?

It’s also interesting to think about cultural differences. How do people from different countries [react]? Do some cultures favor voice? Others maybe favor the ability to read text. Is there a geographic element to [the user interface], that these vehicles can’t just be the same worldwide? We just wanted to get it going and provide some thought leadership, because we really didn’t hear people talking about this. We’re going to publish those results…and make sure [carmakers] have products that work great technically but also that are going to be embraced by folks who don’t understand the technology.


Related: These Tesla Vets Are Taking On Tech Giants With Robo-Car Maps Made By The Crowd


FC: What do you think you might do with those results?

JW: So the results, we’ll publish, share with our customers and partners as well as the industry. But any development, particularly when you talk about in-vehicle experiences, that’s obviously the role of our customers. BMW has experience designers, so a BMW feels and looks like a BMW. And so we’re focused on, what are the things that really transcend the specific designs and need to be there from a human-machine interaction standpoint.

FC: You say there should be interface standards. Would Intel be interested in playing a role to corral that?

JW: Yeah I think that if you look at our company history, we very often see opportunities for standardization to help the industry. There are parts of [product] development that are differentiating and add value to a brand and experience, and there’s other parts [that are just] reinventing the same wheel that everybody else is doing.

We would work within organizations like [engineering association] SAE, with our customers and partners, if we all decided, hey let’s standardize the interaction model for car-to-pedestrian communication.

FC: Does anything else need to be standardized?

JW: Right now, each sensor vendor has its own proprietary [data formats]. So we sit back and say, that’s a clear opportunity to have a standard interoperability [to] make it easier to assemble these things. Certainly, cameras are different from lidar [the laser equivalent of radar]. But even then is there a standard data stream from a camera? Is there a standard way we can mange these devices, whether it’s from a power standpoint, or is there a standard way to get failure information from sensors?

Typically when you [standardize], costs go down, the barrier to entry for new suppliers is reduced. We’ve done this in many other industries. You used to have proprietary interconnects, and there wasn’t a standard way to connect an external hard drive or whatever it might be.

Intel’s in-car computer. [Photo: Intel]
FC: Coming from the traditional tech world, I just assume that everything works together.

JW: In this case it doesn’t. It takes many months of hand coding and manual configuration to get your sensors set up. So why not shave six months off your development time or provide the opportunity to swap out different sensors and try things out more easily? Maybe an automaker wants to try out different suppliers. With a standardized mechanism to interface and discover and operate those [sensors], you could do that. Today you can’t.

FC: What do you think about the Baidu initiative to do open-source autonomous car software?

JW: There’s a common bit of functionality that needs to exist in these systems. I think there’s value in having an open reference implementation for the industry to use instead of automakers inventing their own. It’s very similar to what we have with the Intel-BMW-Mobileye partnership.

FC: So BMW, Mobileye, and Intel are also going for an interoperable standard?

JW: It’s a solution that will be licensable by any other automaker in the world who wants to use it. Both Delphi and Continental [automotive tech suppliers] have said to the world that they will offer an industrialized version of that Intel-BMW solution. So if some [carmaker] comes along, they can call up Delphi and say, “hey, we want that Intel-BMW-Mobileye solution for our car that’s going to come out in 2021,” Delphi and Continental are ready to deliver it to them. OEMs that partner with us and BMW and Mobileye and license that solution will save a huge amount of money in development costs, and [will] be able to get it done faster than rolling their own, but still have opportunities to differentiate their own brand experience.

FC: Might we ever see home-brew autonomous cars? You can buy the hardware. At least the Baidu software is open source and free. If the sensors are all standardized, it would be easy to program.

JW: It would be interesting to see. The regulatory environment will have to catch up here at some point. That’s a fun thought. I hadn’t considered that.

The Radio “Bubble” That Could Shield Soldiers From Terrorist Drones

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The idea of drones carrying things cameras for journalism, aid for disaster zones, or even packages for Amazon sounds great to a lot of people. 

The concept of drones smuggling contraband into prisons or dropping grenades on soldiers for ISIS? Not so much.

That’s why there’s an increasing number of efforts to keep the unmanned flying devices from going where they shouldn’t–things like birds of prey, nets, guns, and systems meant to send drones back to from whence they came.

CEO Grant Jordan [Photo: courtesy of SkySafe]
And now, the military has awarded a contract to a company whose technology is meant to stop ISIS and other terrorist groups from using drones to attack soldiers, as well as to keep unauthorized drones away from places like prisons and critical infrastructure or first responders.

The startup, San Diego’s SkySafe, has developed technology meant to keep unwanted drones away from battlefields, stadiums, prisons, airports, and other areas where they can wreak havoc, regardless of whether their pilots have malicious intent or are simply flying recklessly. It had previously raised a $3 million seed round from the A-list Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and today, SkySafe is also announcing an $11.5 million Series A round of funding led by a16z.

The idea behind the technology, explains SkySafe CEO Grant Jordan, is to determine in real time drones’ unique identifiers–radio frequency signals, serial numbers, or other data–and even distinguish them from other drones of the exact same model.

“We focus entirely on radio frequency technology,” says Jordan. “We look at all the signals coming from the drones, and from the controllers. We build tools to detect, identify, track, and intercept drones in those spaces.”

There are other companies working on a similar approach, such as Palo Alto-based ApolloShield, which developed a $30,000-per-year system that resembles a wireless router and can detect drones flying as high as two miles above the ground.

But SkySafe’s technology, and its determination to come up with a mobile solution to jamming terrorist drones, made it an ideal partner for the military, says Sean Singleton, the director of business development and marketing at Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, the Department of Defense’s Silicon Valley-based investment arm–which has five major areas of focus: autonomy; human systems; IT systems; artificial intelligence and machine learning; and the commercialization of space.

In the last six months of 2016, DIUx awarded a total of $36 million on contracts, according to Federal News Radio, and in recent months, the organization–which has come close to running short of cash–has been servicing 25 contracts with companies, including for a device known as Sonitus that helps service members communicate in noisy environments, and one for autonomous sailboats that can collect intelligence. SkySafe is slotted under the program’s autonomy efforts.

Starting about six or seven months ago, Singleton explains, news headlines about ISIS using drones to attack soldiers began popping up regularly, leading to the creation of a DoD task force aimed at countering the strategy. SkySafe was best able to respond to the military’s request for a mobile counter-drone technology, one capable of being installed in the field and thwarting potential attacks from consumer drones retrofitted to carry, and drop, grenades.

In fact, Singleton says, SkySafe particularly appealed to DIUx and Pentagon leaders because the company saw the business benefit of temporarily pivoting from an initial business model of focusing on keeping drones away from facilities like airports to the more mobile approach needed to protect soldiers on the go in combat zones.

“They decided to do a business pivot to do mobile counter” unmanned aerial systems, he says. “We were able to bring something compelling to them in terms of use case.”

[Photo: courtesy of SkySafe]

A Protective Bubble Around Vehicles

Based on its work with DIUx, SkySafe scored the 12-month contract with Naval Special Warfare–worth $1.5 million–to develop a prototype system that it will test over the next nine months. Jordan says he expects the system will be deployed in the field sometime next year.

The idea is to provide Navy SEALs a system that can be mounted on light tactical vehicles and “create a protective bubble around that vehicle,” Jordan explains. That bubble can extend to a radius of about a kilometer around the vehicle, and the group it’s in, giving the SEALs the ability to automatically fend off potential attacks by drone that they would otherwise have to handle manually.

The technology comes in the form of a radio-system-in-a-box that’s bolted to a vehicle, and that has an array of sensors capable of searching for drones’ identifiers. An operator uses a tablet to enter in the identifiers of any drones allowed to be in the area, and the system is designed to then pick out any nearby that are unauthorized, and take over control of the device. What happens then is up to the system’s operator, but the most likely is to force the drone to return home.

SkySafe isn’t disclosing the cost of the system, which it has been testing at range facilities to demonstrate its capabilities and evaluate the effective operating distances for different types of drones.

Groups like ISIS have increasingly been modifying off-the-shelf devices, generally those from China’s DJI, the world’s-largest maker of drones, to carry, and drop, 40mm grenades. “It’s very rapidly changed the battle space,” Jordan says, “and changed the way forces on the ground have to think about tactics.”

Adds Jordan, ground forces haven’t had much in the way of effective tools for taking down drones. “They’re hard to hear, hard to see, and it’s hard to knock them down. Right now, they’re pretty much trying to shoot at them, and that’s not all that effective.”

[Photo: courtesy of SkySafe]
More problematic, he says, is that even the threat of a drone coming out of nowhere, being controlled by an unseen terrorist, is changing the mind-set of soldiers on the ground, adding just one more threat of which they have to be aware.

“In Mosul, Iraqi forces have to be thinking about [this] and looking up for potential drone threats,” Jordan says, “because they don’t know if they’re there. It makes it a lot harder to be effective. With our system, the goal is to take that out of the equation and stop drones from being used in that way.”

At the same time, SkySafe’s system was designed to minimize the burden on the military personnel, “keeping them safe,” Jordan says, “and not being a distraction.”

Domestic Concerns

What’s not clear is the full scope of the danger posed by terrorist-controlled drones. But whether or not they’re a major threat, they give ISIS and other groups the ability to attack areas that might otherwise be inaccessible, allowing a remote operator to send the weapon-laced flying device over protected barriers, says Gregory McNeal, the cofounder and COO of Airmap, a startup specializing in drone traffic management software tools.

The concerns about terrorist drones coincide with repeated reports of drones behaving badly at locations like airports and sporting events. The risk is also amplifying efforts by the Trump administration to restrict drone use: in April, the Pentagon restricted civilian drone flights over military bases, and in May the White House proposed a draft bill that would let the government take down unmanned aircraft posing a danger to firefighting and search-and-rescue missions, prison operations, or “authorized protection of a person.” The White House proposal could also address the existing upheaval around who, if anyone, regulates hobbyist drones.

SkySafe says that while the main focus of its mobile system is supporting the needs of Navy SEALs in the field, it will eventually also be suitable in domestic environments where anti-drone coverage is temporary or mobile, like during festivals and for law enforcement.

In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security in 2015, McNeal cautioned Congress against overreacting to events like the infamous case of someone crashing their DJI drone on the White House lawn. He urged lawmakers to take real-life probabilities into consideration when trying to mitigate against “‘possible’ worst-case scenarios.”

But that was before the uptick in ISIS’s use of drones in Iraq, and the limited ways that military forces can protect themselves against such attacks. Until now, he acknowledged, the main ways soldiers can take drones down is to shoot at them or try to take out the drones’ operators.

Still, McNeal said the tools for interrupting drone command and control are advancing at much the same rate as terrorists’ capabilities. “The big challenge is on the side of figuring out how to counter these malicious uses,” he said.

This Is Where You’ll Find Your Next New Employee

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If you’re looking to expand your team, chances are one of your current employees knows just the right person, according to SilkRoad’s Sources of Hire 2017 report. Employee referrals are the top source of hires, delivering more than 30% of hires overall and 45% of hires from internal sources.

“Employee referrals are a great outlet because they’re at the disposal of your recruiting team, readily available,” says Amber Hyatt, vice president of product marketing at SilkRoad, a talent activation solution provider. “These people are already versed in your organizational structure and culture. That’s why employee referrals have a proven track record of success and an excellent conversion rate.”

Implementing an employee referral program can be as easy as tapping into social media contacts. Trustwave, a Chicago-based data security service provider, lets employees refer their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter followers for open jobs. “Trustwave uses a Jobvite platform to send a company-wide message to all employees every Friday,” according to a report by the Society for Human Resource Management. “Included in the message are four featured job openings that employees can forward to people in their social media networks who may be good job candidates.”

External Sources

Right on the heels of employee referrals is the job search engine Indeed, which aggregates postings from all over web. “It’s the closest I’ve ever seen from a hire perspective,” says Hyatt. “It’s typically in the second spot but not this close.”

Indeed produced 65.27% of new hires from external sources, twice as many all other online job boards and job search engines combined, and 28% of overall new hires. CareerBuilder was the second external source with 10.65% of job board new hires, and LinkedIn was third with 8.17%.

“The volume of postings Indeed has is incredible,” says Hyatt. “Over the last couple of years they have tried to focus on becoming a one-stop shop for candidates. They’re not only seeking out active job applicants but passive job applicants, as well. That person may not be looking for a position today but could be open to learning more.”

To get your jobs listed on Indeed, you can either post your jobs directly to Indeed, or allow Indeed to aggregate your posted jobs from your career website or applicant tracking system, according to its website.

Create A Strategy

While the study demonstrates the strengths of hiring sources, managers should track data on the sources that have been most effective for their companies, suggests Hyatt. “Where have you had success not only from the volume of candidates but the sources that produced the best hire?” she asks.

Posting on job boards can be expensive, so track your results. “Many times hiring managers spend a large amount of dollars with third-party agencies or job boards but they don’t realize they’re not seeing quality return on that investment; they’re not seeing a bunch of hires,” says Hyatt. “Know your budget, and how long it takes to fill a seat.”

And understand the weaknesses of each platform. The downside to employee referrals is that it can harm diversity, as employees are more likely to recommend people who are like them in race, gender, and socioeconomic background. Hyatt recommends balancing your sourcing strategy. “You want to bring diversity of thought into an organization,” she says.

External sources are less efficient than internal sources for hiring, requiring approximately four times as many applicants to reach the interview stage and twice as many interviews, according to the study.

“We took external sources versus top internal sources head to head,” says Hyatt. “For external sources, it takes 33 applications to produce an interview, while with internal sources it takes nine applicants to produce one interview. That tells me if I need to fill a seat quickly, it’s a more effective of use of my time to convert an internal applicant.”

Finally, target your sourcing strategy instead of randomly posting and experiencing trial and error, says Hyatt. “Build out personas, which can help provide insight to your hiring and recruiting team,” says Hyatt. “Identify their characteristics, skills, and traits, then find places where they’re hanging out, such as professional associations. Knowing your audience can help you find the most effective outlet.”

Doing This One Thing Can Hurt Your Job Interview Chances

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Of course there are lots of ways you can sabotage an interview. But we’re going to assume you know better than to lie on your resume, bash your previous employer, or perhaps worst of all, show up totally unprepared. So let’s talk about one thing you might not realize is hurting your chances of landing a new job: being inconsistent.

Being inconsistent in an interview, or “Not having a consistent story about your background, experience, the reason you’re interested in this company and position, and your motivation for leaving your current one,” can crush you during the interview process, says Glassdoor human resources expert Jamie Hitchens. That’s because “the recruiter, hiring manager, and interviewers all share notes from their time with you,” Hitchens explains, and, “so, you should be telling them all the same thing.”

In other words, you don’t want to tell one manager you’re leaving your current job because you’d like more flexible work hours, only to turn around and tell the VP of the company you’re saying sayonara because you’d like to move up the corporate ladder. Neither answer is wrong, in and of itself, but when those two higher-ups talk, your different answers could inspire confusion, and call into question your honesty.

Saying different things to different people isn’t the only way you can be inconsistent in an interview. As Sharlyn Lauby, founder of HR Bartender, and author of Essential Meeting Blueprints for Managers, points out, you can be inconsistent on a resume.

For example, let’s say you’ve held many titles over your career. Your most recent move wasn’t lateral–like going from a customer service representative role at one company to another–but instead, is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper–like moving from a marketing director to a social media manager. That kind of inconsistency on your resume, Lauby says, “might need some explanation.” Same goes for listing skills that don’t mesh, or listing some accomplishments but not all.


Related:Why You Keep Getting Close But Still Aren’t Landing Job Offers


All of these inconsistencies can be a red flag to a potential employer. When you’re inconsistent in any way, “it shows a lack of preparation and in turn a lack of interest or commitment to this role,” warns Hitchens. “It shows a lack of attention to detail, and [a] potential lack of integrity.” After all, she says, “if you’re telling the hiring manager one thing because you think it’s what they want to hear and then telling other interviewers something else, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.”

Instead, you need to show a hiring manager three key things with what you write in your resume and what you say—to everyone involved in the hiring process—during your interview: trust, communication skills, and decision-making skills, Lauby says.


Related:3 Surprising Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Career 


“Inconsistency can erode trust,” Lauby warns. “If a manager gets a different answer every time they speak to [you], they don’t know which response is the right one, and that can impact working relationships.” So, always try to give an honest answer.

When it comes to communication skills, “consistency doesn’t mean that a person’s response will follow a set of norms,” Lauby explains. “It means that the candidate’s responses are explainable and don’t contradict other answers.” In an interview, try to make sure what you say on paper and out loud follows the same story, always.

Lastly, inconsistency won’t let you show off your decision-making skills—a trait employers value in employees. “Companies want to know employees are going to make the consistent decisions when it comes to customer service,” Lauby says. “Being inconsistent can send the message that those skills are not well defined.”


This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission. 

This Donald Trump Jr. Headline Had All Of Twitter Making The Exact “Same” Joke

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Misery loves company, and this year it has had no shortage.

Many who were once casual newsreaders have found their thumbs fused to iPhone screens, incessantly scrolling through endless political travesty. Time has ceased to flow in linear fashion, somehow speeding by while dragging us over the edge of each second. Pets look sadder than they once did, perhaps in an effort to mirror the giants who take care of them. If you can’t be happy, though, the next best thing is knowing certain people are also sad. Yesterday, a cathartic sinkhole of schadenfreude opened on Twitter as a legion of sads welcomed Donald Trump Jr. to the flock.

Following last week’s slowly unfolding saga of DJTJR’s 2016 Russian lawyer meeting, from which more and more people keep emerging, as if from a clown car, People published a story about the troubled scion. The headline says it all: Don Jr. Is ‘Miserable’ and Wants ‘These Four Years to Be Over’. This string of words proved irresistible to les misérables on Twitter. Many ended up greeting it in the same way. Excuse me, I meant the “same” way.

Quote-tweets involving the word ‘same’ often accompany news stories of an embarrassing or depressing nature. (Here’s a classic example.) They can also be self-aggrandizing or silly. In this case, seeing somebody who is part of the nexus that’s causing misery for so many, and who had previously been so aggressive and antagonistic about it, suddenly hoisted by his own inept petard–the irony resonated deeply. The wording of the headline seemed custom-designed for identification tweets, and boy did it ever get them! All throughout yesterday, Twitter resembled a baseball stadium crowd doing the wave, but with the “same” tweet.

See below for a whole lot more of the same.

See Just How Much Of A City’s Land Is Used For Parking Spaces

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Two of the massive parking lots next to Dodger Stadium in L.A.–together roughly the size of Grand Central Station, or twice as big as the Pentagon–have room for thousands of cars. On non-game days, they’re largely empty. A new visualization shows the footprint of each lot, arranged in a puzzle-like design next to every other parking lot in greater Los Angeles, to make a point about how cities use space.

The visualization is part of a project called What the Street? that inventories parking lots in 23 cities around the world, along with the space used for roads, rail lines and rail yards, and bike paths and bike parking. All of that space is neatly arranged in a scrolling chart, so it’s possible to compare transit modes and see, for example, that bike parking is relatively non-existent in Los Angeles, while car parking takes up 17,020,594 square meters of land, as much as nearly 1,400 soccer fields.

“What we needed to do was reduce all of the space that is out there–all of these complicated structures–to just one dimension.”

“We were thinking about how to make it most intuitively and accessibly comparable,” says Michael Szell, a researcher-in-residence at Moovel Group, the German software firm that produced the site, who collaborated with Moovel’s artist-in-residence Stephan Bogner to create the visualizations. “Basically, what we needed to do was reduce all of the space that is out there–all of these complicated structures–to just one dimension.”

The site pulls data about city spaces from Open Street Map, a system that creates urban maps through crowdsourcing (because the data is crowdsourced in a Wikipedia-like way, it may not be exact, and may sometimes miss some smaller features like bike racks). Using an algorithm, all of the parking lots are tightly packed together so the total amount of space is easy to understand. As you hover over a particular lot in the visualization, the site lists the square meters it takes up and estimates the number of parking spaces (this is a rough approximation, and may be less accurate in large lots). The code for the project is open source so it can be applied to other cities.

As you hover over a particular lot in the visualization, the site lists the square meters it takes up and estimates the number of parking spaces. [Image: courtesy Moovel Group]
Previously, as a researcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Szell studied how easily taxi rides could be shared in New York City. He then became interested in other inefficiencies in city mobility, and what might change as different transit modes such as shared, autonomous cars become more common.

At the moment, cars spend around 95% of the time parked, and only 5% of the time in use. Huge swaths of cities, either in parking lots, garages, or street parking spaces, are used as storage for cars (while, at the same time, many cities struggle to find enough land to build housing to keep up with demand). “There’s this huge space that’s basically wasted,” says Szell.

With a large shift to on-demand autonomous cars–something that some experts say could happen in a little more than a decade, as electric robo-taxis become far cheaper to use than traditional personal cars–parking space in prime urban locations could open up for other uses (though these self-driving cars will still need a place to park at times). Another recent report estimates that 2 million people in L.A. will give up their cars for autonomous ride hailing in 15 years, and similar patterns will happen in other cities.

At the moment, cars spend around 95% of the time parked, and only 5% of the time in use. [Image: courtesy Moovel Group]
In areas where parking lots are already underused, some cities are already rethinking the use of space. A parking lot in downtown Dallas is becoming a park. Others are considering future-proof parking garages that could be easily converted into housing or office space as demand for parking declines. Architects have considered how parking spaces could be better used as playgrounds or affordable housing; the winner of one recent competition envisions turning street parking spaces into tiny parks. Without the need for street parking, streets could also be redesigned to give people on bikes and pedestrians more space, or add dedicated bus lines.

Some retailers, too, are beginning to reconsider the use of parking lots. Even on the busiest shopping days, some malls and big box stores have empty space in lots; on an average shopping day, a struggling location is likely to have excessive space. (The tech company Orbital Insight analyzes satellite images of retailer parking lots to assess the financial health of the store). As ride hailing makes it easier to access stores that don’t already have public transit access, even less parking will be needed. Macy’s has identified 50 stores where it could carve out room in its parking lots for other uses, such as restaurants.

After scrolling through each chart, the website estimates how much parking space could be reclaimed in a particular city with a shift to autonomous, shared cars. In L.A., for example, 2,465,272 parking spaces could theoretically be used for something else.

LA [Image: courtesy Moovel Group]
A separate visualization shows how space is allocated in a city between modes of transit, and how that compares to how people actually get around. Unsurprisingly, use tends to follow the available infrastructure. If most people drive, Szell says, that’s most likely because most space is currently dedicated to cars. “In urban planning, there is this notion that once you build infrastructure then it will be used,” he says. If there are highways, people drive; if there are separated bike lanes, more people will begin to bike.

The data could also help city planners. “Cities like New York don’t have an inventory of their own street parking spaces,” he says. “Basically, the city does not know how much parking the city has. These kinds of tools–either crowdsourced like What the Street, or maybe in the future machine learning or computer vision algorithms, could quantify really rigorously how much space there is and how much space is necessary, or how much space could be turned into more useful space like parks.”

“We Had The Wrong Goal Initially:” Pinterest’s Diversity Chief Adjusts Course

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When Candice Morgan was appointed to head up Pinterest’s diversity and inclusion efforts in January 2016, she described the then–700-person company’s hiring goals as “aggressive for a reason.” “They were based on research, looking at the talent pool, who is available, and who is coming out of certain programs. They were thoughtfully crafted,” Morgan told Fast Company. Then she observed, “In the world of diversity, things take time.”

Time has passed, and in the year and a half since, Pinterest has added some 400 new staffers, seen some progress, and had a few hiccups.

While the company hasn’t officially shared diversity data since last December, those numbers reflected a year of dedicated effort as its headcount grew dramatically. Women in technical roles has increased from 21% to 26%, and those from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds increased to 7%. The hiring rate of engineers from underrepresented ethnic groups went from 1% to 9%.

However, in a recent Harvard Business Review piece, Morgan admits Pinterest missed its goal of hiring women into 30% of its engineering roles. “What I realized,” she tells Fast Company, “is that we actually had the wrong goal initially.” Fresh off a hiring spree, Pinterest is as aggressive on diversity as ever, Morgan explains, but approaching its goals more holistically than it has in the past—and arguably more so than its peers in the present.


Related:How These Seven Tech Leaders Are Tackling Diversity In 2017


Breaking Down Percentages

Morgan says that Pinterest’s female senior engineers “came to us and said, ‘We don’t want to create this stigma where we really skew the ratio of women engineers toward junior engineers. That’s not helpful for us and that doesn’t help us create more role models.’ And they’re absolutely right.”

Candice Morgan [Photo: via LinkedIn]
As Fast Company has reported, there’s both research and anecdotal evidence that female leadership has an impact far outside the C-suite. A survey from Weber Shandwick found 70% of women executives who report to a female CEO say their chief’s reputation influences their decision to remain at the company. A new report from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) affirms this. “Having diverse leaders in place, we find, is crucial to disrupting bias,” says Ripa Rashid, coauthor of the CTI study, because they “serve as role models for diverse employees, demonstrating that difference is valued and that diverse individuals can thrive at their organizations.”

It’s a sign that Pinterest has taken this to heart that the company has set two distinct goals: one for underrepresented professionals across the company and another for engineering specifically. Morgan says Pinterest’s leadership and recruiting team realized there needed to be more nuance when hiring. Hiring 30% women engineers “is attainable if you’re focused on volume,” she explains. “We could’ve just really focused on new graduates and attained that goal.”

But that would leave leadership ranks untouched. “What that goal doesn’t take into account is that we want women across the entire leadership and pipeline level in engineering,” Morgan says. At the senior level at Pinterest, female staff made up only 5% of all tenured employees–a big deficit. “​So for the second half of the year, we focused on just hiring senior women, and we actually did that across our engineering pool,” she explains.

The Rooney Rule Is Working

That includes Pinterest’s new head of engineering, Li Fan, who joined last September after a total of more than 10 years at Google (broken up by nearly four years at Baidu), where she held senior engineering positions including heading up Image Search.

Li Fan [Photo: via LinkedIn]
Fan’s hiring both debunks the so-called “pipeline problem” that many in tech cite—the misconception that there just isn’t enough diverse talent out there. It also proves that Pinterest’s strategy of adapting the “Rooney Rule” (a practice originating in the NFL for interviewing at least one minority candidate for senior roles) makes sense. The company began considering at least one female and one underrepresented minority candidate for every leadership position, and is steadily extending that mandate down the org chart.

“That [initiative] has actually been very, very successful for us,” Morgan says. “We actually had hundreds of candidates that we looked at who were women for the head of engineering role, even though women are under 5% of that talent pool.” The best candidate for the role happened to be a woman, she says, but Morgan sees Fan’s hiring as important for two reasons: One, appointing a female head engineer was a first not just for Pinterest but has rarely happened before in the tech sector at large. “Two, because it shows our senior women engineers that they could lead the department,” she explains. “I believe that that is a result of the extra vigilance of the Rooney Rule.”


Related:Why Salesforce’s New Equality Chief Is Thinking Beyond Diversity


Morgan also notes that in 2016, Pinterest went from having no underrepresented minorities on its executive team (the group reporting directly to the CEO) to 10%, and over 20% of those senior execs are now women—a significant change over the past year, despite being a small percentage uptick from the industry average, which hovers in the teens.

“Pre-Sourcing” Talent, Then Hanging Onto It

While Pinterest hopes to build on this progress in its upper ranks, the company is paying attention to its junior hires, too—in other words, its “pipeline.” Morgan points to Pinterest’s apprenticeship program, which got underway around the time she came on board. Since then Morgan says it’s helped the company add more people from diverse educational and experiential backgrounds to its talent pool. Pinterest hired its first three apprentices full time this year and plans to double the program next year.

On the pipeline issue, Morgan concedes “sometimes it’s an excuse not to try harder” but suggests that Pinterest prefers to see it as a challenge. For example, the company successfully raised the share of engineering applicants (including for internships) from underrepresented groups to 50%. “Previously, that number was a lot lower, so if we had just said, ‘Well, that’s okay because it’s on par with the pipeline [typically], we wouldn’t have made that progress,” she says.

Instead, Pinterest deliberately expanded the list of schools on its go-to recruiting list, adding more historically black colleges, for example. Morgan says the company also “started pre-sourcing students” before even going to campus, by meeting them at industry-based student groups, for instance, and working with the National Society of Black Engineers and other organizations. While there were more women graduating with computer-science degrees in the late ’70s and early ’80s than today, Morgan argues they’re still out there, “and if we don’t look harder for them, instead of expecting them to just come to us, then we don’t benefit.”

Having just finished a huge hiring spree, Pinterest now has to make sure its retention goals hold steady. As Morgan sees it, that involves making sure “that the hiring managers understand what we’re trying to do really well.” Faced with fewer open positions to fill, recruiters have more time to sort through candidates. “But when hiring teams are making very quick decisions,” she points out, they “need to understand how important it is to factor in that we want different types of people at the table building this product.” Speedy hiring can sometimes hold hidden costs that don’t appear until later, when people start leaving.


Related:Why Diversity In Hiring Is Just One Part Of The Puzzle


Rethinking Retention

Pinterest has become more attuned to the subtleties of retention issues in the process, says Morgan. “You can focus on making sure that the retention rates of your underrepresented communities within your workforce are no different from the overall retention rate,” she says. So if there’s spiking in the former, it’s a red flag.

Many companies focus on only voluntary attrition, but Morgan believes that’s an imperfect measure, not least because bias can influence how people are evaluated. “So we make sure that our retention goals are tracking both [of those factors].” ​So far, she says Pinterest’s retention rate for women is strong but that the company will continue to monitor departures across all underrepresented groups. Unlike Intel, Pinterest only shares those figures with senior leadership at this time.

Morgan recognizes how closely retention is tied to culture. If new hires arrive only to discover low representation and managers who don’t think very hard about inclusion, they aren’t likely to stay long. She adds, “No one wants to be a token.” she adds.

To combat this, Pinterest tries to offer employees at all levels—but especially interns and entry-level staffers—both technical and non-technical mentors to help them along. “You want to know that someone is there fighting for you, and that person doesn’t necessarily have to be of the same background,” Morgan explains, “but it has to be someone who’s actually interested in taking care of you, and is invested in your career, and likes to manage people.”

Morgan admits that keeping diversity a priority is a constant challenge, especially when a business is establishing itself. It requires the CEO and executive team to invest and keep it top of mind, both inside the company and out–“not just talking about it, but rewarding people for it,” says Morgan. “That accountability is super important.”


Shyp, Which Wanted To Transform Shipping, Is Scaling Back To San Francisco

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“Magic” may be the tech industry’s most-abused term. But when I first used Shyp in 2015, the word felt just right. With a few taps on my iPhone, I snapped photos of items I wanted to ship and summoned a courier who arrived in no more than 20 minutes. Shyp whisked my stuff off to one of its facilities, fastidiously packed it in custom boxes, and sent it off via whatever major shipper provided the best value for the turnaround time I needed. All for a fee of $5, which it sometimes waived.

In every possible way, it beat digging up my own packing materials, doing my own boxing, and schlepping to the post office. And unlike some on-demand services, Shyp worked flawlessly every time I needed it.

Magic is a wonderful experience, but whether it’s a sustainable business is another question. Today, the company is announcing a dramatic downsizing of its ambitions, at least for the time being. It’s ending service in Chicago, L.A., and New York, leaving only the San Francisco Bay Area, its home base and original market. It’s also laying off employees at its headquarters, though it won’t say how deep that cut is or how many employees will remain.

As you’d expect, Kevin Gibbon, Shyp’s cofounder and CEO, told me that the decision to make these changes was “very difficult.” But he added that “the great news is that we’ve found a customer that has a need for the product and service that we’re offering.” That would be small businesses, particularly online merchants who need help shipping out the products they sell.

Shyp isn’t cutting off consumers who want to ship out a box or two, but it’s no longer courting them. In fact, it’s leaning toward increasing the prices it charges for small-quantity shipping and may do away with its on-demand option (which already has a one-hour window instead of the original 20 minutes). Henceforth, it will focus on the needs of businesses who ship in volume on a regular basis rather than in sporadic onesie-twosie quantities and who prefer scheduled pickups to spur-of-the-moment ones.

Volume business is good for Shyp’s bottom line for reasons I don’t need to explain. Scheduled pickup times help because they allow the company to plan ahead rather than sending couriers out to cruise around neighborhoods in anticipation of on-demand requests that might or might not occur. And in general, business customers are attractive because they aren’t as fixated on the cost of a service like Shyp as consumers are.

By formally pivoting toward the needs of businesses—who care a little less about push-button simplicity, and more about advanced features and options—Shyp can serve them better, says Gibbon, who adds that if anything, he wishes the company had moved in this direction sooner. “We were trying to please too many customers and weren’t focusing on the profitable piece,” he explains.

The Challenge Of “Uber For…”

In a way, Shyp’s retrenchment feels simultaneously hasty and long-considered. On one hand, it undoes an expansion launched just last month, when the company began beta-testing service in Philadelphia and expanded its coverage areas in L.A. and Chicago. But Shyp has been shifting away from its original proposition—on-demand pickup and packing for consumers at a remarkably low price—for well over a year. Anyone who’s used the service during that time has seen it put more emphasis on small-business customers, scheduled pickups, and a cost structure designed with profitability in mind. In just the first few months of 2016, for instance, it shuttered service in Miami, laid off 8% of its staff, and began charging for packaging services rather than rolling that amenity into the shipping fee. (You can also opt to do your own packing.)

Some of the challenges the company has faced are endemic to the on-demand economy. Even startups that have built impressive logistics platforms have struggled to grow to the point where efficiencies of scale turn into profitability; whole categories of services, such as meal-delivery startups that make their own meals and personal valet parkers, have already pretty much washed away.

With its network of couriers (some on bikes, others in cars or vans, and all employees rather than contractors) and warehouse-style facilities equipped with box-cutting machines, Shyp had substantial costs it needed to cover while it built out its footprint. During the era when venture capitalists were all too happy to distribute sacks of cash to startups that intended to be the “Uber of” various everyday tasks, it raised $50 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins. Now, Gibbon says, such funding does not flow anywhere near so freely. Hence Shyp’s abandonment of any immediate attempt to get bigger in favor of doing something more modest but closer to sustainability.

“Investors are looking to put capital into businessses that are cash-flow positive,” Gibbon says. “And we are very, very close, especially in San Francisco.” In January of 2016, when he was already retooling Shyp, he told me the hoped to reach profitibility by the end of that year; now he says that he expects the newly downsized business to get there before 2017 is out.

In its business-to-business incarnation, at the prices it now charges, Shyp isn’t quite the little miracle it once was. And the lofty tagline it gave itself—”the Global Standard in Shipping“—is out of whack with the reality of what it offers. But it’s still a useful service—and Gibbon is talking about new features he hopes to add, such as linking up with a service like UberRush or Postmates to enable same-day delivery.

He also says that the plan is to get Shyp profitable so it can get more funding, and then begin expanding into other markets again. Here’s hoping. But for now, I will be relieved if the next story I write about this ambitious and inventive company isn’t an obituary.

Good Luck Getting Elected To Congress If You Are A Moderate Woman

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As I’ve written recently, the world of venture capital isn’t the most welcoming for women. But it’s certainly not the only sector where they are woefully underrepresented: In the U.S. Congress, women currently account for less than 20% of its 535 members.

A new study by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers delves into the representation of women in the 114th Congress (2015-2017), which saw 20 women in the Senate and 84 in the House. In conversations with many of them, the study’s authors found that half the battle for women was just getting their foot in the door.

“Almost all the women we interviewed want to see more women join them in the nation’s legislature, and many claim that the gender-related obstacles to getting to Congress are greater than the challenges women face once they are elected,” the study’s authors wrote.

One disparity that the study highlights is the stark difference in representation between parties: There are three times more Democratic women in Congress than there are Republican women.Over the last 15 years, the number of Republican women in Congress has hovered at around 25, give or take a few. The contingent of Democratic women in Congress, on the other hand, has seen an increase of about 25 over the last 15 years, bringing the total to about 75.
The Democratic party attracts more women, so it is to be expected that Congress will reflect that—but what does seem surprising is that the number of Republican women in Congress has stagnated for so many years. After all, the breakdown of women in Congress doesn’t mirror the overall percentage of women in each party: According to a 2016 Pew study, about 54% of women identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while 38% identify as Republican or lean Republican.

In the 114th Congress, however, that ratio was closer to 73% Democratic, 27% Republican. Women in the Republican party have historically had less representation at all levels of government, including levels below Congress, which also explains why increasing representation in the Senate and House has been slow-going. (There are currently more Republican women in statewide executive positions than there are Democratic women, but that has only happened within the last few years.)

One reason for this, as the Washington Post noted recently, is that female Republicans tend to be more moderate and to the left of their male counterparts. In an analysis of campaign financing, the Post found that it is harder for moderates to garner support from donors, who usually prefer that candidates align their values with the party’s “dominant ideology”—liberal for Democrats and conservative for Republicans—which puts more moderate women at a disadvantage.

Female Democratic donors often throw their support behind female Democratic candidates, and female Democrats tend to get the majority of their funding from female donors, as a report by the Center for Responsive Politics found back in 2013. According to the Post‘s findings, the same isn’t necessarily true of female Republican donors, who focus more on ideology and don’t vote one way or the other based on gender.

“There is more support infrastructure—including things like PACs, training and recruitment organizations, and party initiatives for women—on the Democratic side than for Republican women,” Kelly Dittmar, one of the leaders of the CAWP study, told me.

But the number of Democratic women in Congress isn’t nearly as significant when removed from the context of Republican women in Congress. “Even for Democratic women, who have seen more steady gains at the congressional level, the increases have still been rather incremental,” Dittmar said.

That said, the increased number of Democratic women in Congress has also encompassed an increase in the number of women of color elected to the House and Senate. Over the past 20 years, the number of women of color in Congress has doubled: In the 114th Congress, there were 33 voting women of color. With the recent addition of Senator Kamala Harris and eight other women of color, that number has been upped to 38 in the 115th Congress. Women of color and minorities, as a whole, are more likely to be Democrats; of the 38 women of color currently in Congress, 35 are Democrats.

But let’s remember that within a 535-person Congress, these numbers still don’t reflect the makeup of the country—and they aren’t all that comforting against the backdrop of an administration that has repeatedly threatened women’s rights.

The 2018 Pirelli Calendar Is Here With An All-Black “Alice In Wonderland” Cast

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WHAT:The 2018 Pirelli calendar

WHO: A whole bunch of bad-ass black models, actors, and musicians; and photographer Tim Walker

WHY WE CARE: The Pirelli calendar has really shown signs of maturity these past few years. The Italian tire company’s calendar was initially just ogling fodder, predominately featuring top models like Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum, and Karolina Kurkova. However, beginning with 2016’s calendar shot by Annie Leibovitz, Pirelli began shifting toward something more enlightened. With Amy Schumer’s topless, IDGAF shot seen ’round the world and Serena Williams unapologetically toned body front and center, Pirelli’s 2016 calendar ushered in a new wave of models who were being chosen less for some ideal of beauty and more for what that person represents. 2017’s calendar featured a host of barefaced actresses, and now for 2018, photographer Tim Walker is tumbling through Wonderland with a slight twist: It’s an all-black cast, starring RuPaul as the Queen of Hearts, Lupita Nyong’o as the Dormouse, South Sudanese-Australian model Duckie Thot model as Alice, and more.

RuPaul and Duckie Thot [Photo: Alessandro Scotti, Pirelli]
In an interview with The New York Times, Walker says:

“The story of Alice has been told so many times and in so many ways, but always with a white cast…There has never been a black Alice, so I wanted to push how fictional fantasy figures can be represented and explore evolving ideas of beauty.”

Of course the ideal scenario would be for an all-black Alice In Wonderland to exist as is without having to carry the weight of some sort of statement–and the same goes for Pirelli’s 2016 and 2017 calendars. But if conversations like the representation of women and minorities need to keep happening, it’s nice to know that an institution with as much cachet and influence as Pirelli is chiming in.

Check out the full cast below and Walker’s stunning images above.

Duckie Thot, Alice
Lupita Nyong’o, The Dormouse
RuPaul, The Queen of Hearts
Naomi Campbell and Sean “Diddy” Combs, The Royal Beheaders
Djimon Hounsou
, The King of Hearts
Lil Yachty, The Queen’s Guard
Adwoa Aboah, Tweedledee
Slick Woods, The Madhatter
Sasha Lane, The Mad March Hare
Whoopi Goldberg, The Royal Duchess
Adut Akech, The Queen of Diamonds
Alpha Dia, the Five-Of-Hearts-Playing-Card Gardener
King Owusu, the Two-Of-Hearts-Playing-Card Gardener
Thando Hopa, The Princess of Hearts
Wilson Oryema, the Seven-Of-Hearts-Playing-Card Gardener
Zoe Bedeaux, The Caterpillar

See What America Hates Most, State By State

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One thing that always brings people together is a specific, intense opinion. It feels good to rally around something positive (“Carly Rae Jepsen is the best!”) but there’s also a dark, transgressive thrill in bonding over a negative (“Ed Sheeran should go live on the sun!”) A new map of the U.S. reveals the ties that bind Americans in shared hatred.

The data that comprises this map comes from Hater, a dating app that connects people based on mutual pet peevery. Hater gives users 3,000 topics, which can be swiped in four directions–down to hate, up to love, left to dislike, right to like–to create a profile of pure loathing. Since each topic gets a score between 0 and 1 based on swiping, Hater can calculate this score for users and look for patterns in each state. The company has been collecting the swipes since launching in February, and with over half a million users, the hate is strong.

What the map reveals ranges from about what you’d expect to some serious surprises. Californias seem like the type who would be instantly irritated by the ascendance of fidget spinners, and I’ve never met a New Yorker who didn’t hate Times Square. Kansas’s disdain toward Seinfeld is kind of unexpected, but that’s not necessarily a reflection of the state’s occasional fits of antisemitism. That could happen anywhere.

The funniest revelation from the map is the one-two punch of Nevada and Utah, two divergent states which are hilariously right next to each other. Mormon-centric Utah users hate Porn the most, while those in the eye of the debauched hurricane that is Vegas hate feminism. Go figure.

Have a look at the rest of the map below, and let us know on Twitter what you hate more than your state apparently does.

These Projects Are Using Art To Fight The Prison Industrial Complex

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In late June, Bay Area-based Five Keys Charter Schools launched the Self Determination Project, a program that turns buses into mobile classrooms to reach kids who might otherwise not get plugged into traditional schools for lack of transportation, a feeling that they don’t fit in, or because they’re afraid to cross blocks that act like borders in neighborhood gang territory.

To be a success, however, the mobile learning hubs needed to be not just transportable but also inspirational inside, so the kids want to be there. To that end, the prototype’s interior is sleek and contemporary, equipped with skylights, a boxy lounge, and plenty of clean, well-lit space for kids to access laptops, peruse an on-board library, and learn from a cast of traveling teachers.

The project’s originator, designer Deanna Van Buren, is the founder of FOURM, a studio that looks at infrastructure as a way to create “restorative justice”—a practice for rebuilding lives in ways that improve relationships with the people and communities they’ve impacted. Her initial concept, originally funded in 2015 though an $80,000 Artists as Activists Fellowship from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, has since attracted additional investment from social entrepreneurship funders like Echoing Green and Google.

In the philanthropy world, this is an example of arts and culture funding that does more than just raise awareness—it’s impact driven. Since 2015, the Rauschenberg Foundation has been awarding these kind of two-year grants, offering up to $100,000 for artists or art collectives wiling to get less abstract about their purpose. The idea is that creativity should somehow make real social change.

“We are invested in infusing the body of potential solutions for an issue with creative thinking, new analyses, compelling storytelling, and inspiring voices.” (“We Are Human Beings”/ Familias Separadas Project). [Photo: Steve Weinek]
Not that it has to happen all at once. “With all of these projects, it should also be said that there is both a long arc towards justice and [reasonable] timeline for change,” says Risë Wilson, the foundation’s director of philanthropy, in an email. “We don’t expect a single artist to topple enormous challenges in the span of two years. Instead we are invested in infusing the body of potential solutions for an issue with creative thinking, new analyses, compelling storytelling, and inspiring voices.”

In July, the group announced its 2017 fellowship recipients, nine new projects will split $700,000 total. To maximize the impact even more, all are geared toward the central theme of alleviating the mass incarceration epidemic. More than 2.2 million people are currently incarcerated, a 500% increase over the last three decades that’s disproportionately African American and Hispanic. The judicial and correctional system as it currently works (or, rather, doesn’t) has become a quick, blunt, and often unfair tool that can destroy families and communities. That doesn’t even account for the lack of access to meaningful rehabilitation and release transition programs.

The Rauschenberg Foundation, which has and $85 million endowment, hopes its next set of fellows will create multimedia and performance work that spurs more organizing, policies, and practices to break that cycle. The funder honors the ideals of mixed-media artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose work often tackled societal issues around health, homelessness, race and the environment. He made the first Earth Day poster with proceeds benefiting an eco-action group in 1970. Today, the group works with the Sundance Institute on films about climate change, backs artists in places where free expression is sorely needed (not just New York and California), and hosts a residency program for its fellows in Florida.

“[They’re] working to help their community imagine in very concrete, practical terms what alternative policing practices.” [Photo: Ed Hille]
The 2017 fellowship class was selected from a pool of 275 applicants. It’s a diverse crew in terms of both approach and geographical location with projects ranging from “Unprisoned,” a New Orleans public radio show whose second season will investigate how Louisiana became the country’s incarceration capital, to the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, a collective that will create public memorials to the families and survivors of police brutality in that city, using artwork, historical archives and oral histories to show a connection between such dehumanizing practices and things like excessive sentencing in Illinois.

The foundation has also greenlit a Utah-based filmmaker to do a documentary on incarcerated women fighting for their right to bear children, and a Philadelphia-based organizer to launch a pop-up exhibition and workshop involving former and current incarcerated artists to humanize inmates and build more grassroots support for them in places where it may not exist. Another effort in Pennsylvania does something similar for immigrant families hurt by by detention and deportation, and the broader Latino community, many of whom suffer abuse and are unfairly targeted. In Durham, North Carolina, an arts and community group called SpiritHouse is organizing public performance series and workshops to reimagine what a “harm free” criminal justice and public safety system might look like.

“[They’re] working to help their community imagine in very concrete, practical terms what alternative policing practices could look like in their specific local context,” Wilson adds about the SpiritHouse effort. “That might sound full on ludicrous but how do we get to alternative ways of being if we don’t have the capacity to step out of the known universe and envision something new. This is the precise role artists can play that other professions may struggle to do.”

Find out more about all the projects here.

Not Everyone Has A Garage, But What If The Streetlights Were Electric Car Charging Stations?

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An old-fashioned streetlight in the London borough of Westminster–emblazoned with an ornate, golden W–looks essentially the same as it did in the 1950s. But now it’s possible to open a tiny door on the side and plug in an electric car.

The lamppost is one of dozens in London that the German startup Ubitricity has retrofitted to double as charging stations. Unlike typical chargers, the conversion doesn’t take up extra space, and since it relies on existing infrastructure, it’s also cheaper and easier to install at a time when London wants to quickly increase the number of public chargers in the city.

“Any Tesla, even one that is big and empty, will be full in the morning if you plug it in at night.”[Photo: courtesy Ubitricity]
“This is something that currently no one else can do, because no one has chargers that are as small as ours,” says Knut Hechtfischer, co-founder of Ubitricity.

Almost everything that would normally be part of a small charging station–an internet connection and display, along with sensors and technology to measure and control the charging–is part of the charging cable instead in the company’s system. Drivers buy a cable and carry it in their car (in contrast to the U.S., where charging cables are built into stations, bringing your own cable is common in Europe and the U.K.).

After a retrofit that takes less than an hour, power can be drawn from the streetlight’s existing connection to the grid. “In many cities, you have an amazingly strong connection for a streetlight,” says Hechtfischer. “You can do six kilowatts. That means any Tesla, even one that is big and empty, will be full in the morning if you plug it in at night.”

The system is designed to charge a car slowly, and the company isn’t trying to replace stations like Ecotricity’s fast chargers, which can charge electric cars nearly completely in 30 minutes. (London is investing in hundreds of new fast chargers). But since cars spend most of the time parked–the average urban car spends 95% of its time standing still–Ubitricity believes that fast charging isn’t necessary most of the time. The streetlight chargers simply provide an alternative for those who don’t have a driveway or garage with an outlet. The majority of people in London, as in many cities, park on the street.

Because the average urban car spends 95% of its time standing still, Ubitricity believes that fast charging isn’t necessary most of the time. [Photo: courtesy Ubitricity]
The technology itself is not complex; Ubitricity’s challenge was creating a viable business model. “Our idea is that you use ubiquitous infrastructure that is already existing, and with these efficiency gains, drive down cost,” Hechfischer says. “Obviously, the cheapest [approach] is to use something that’s already there. That means if you concentrate on the use case and charge residential cars overnight, then you can deal with what you already have, and then it gets ten times cheaper than the standard alternative that you have.”

The charger tracks use, and then bills users each month. The same system can also be used in outlets in other locations, such as at work. People who can plug in a car at home can use the system to charge a company car and bill the company directly for the power used, a service that Ubitricity now offers in Germany.

In London–where the government recently calculated that a switch to 100% electric cars would massively strain the electric grid–using streetlights as one main source of charging could help control the demand for electricity. Spikes in demand “can be avoided if you have long, low-power charging, that is also smart,” Hechtfischer says. The charging cables are also designed to work both ways: in the future, cars could help store energy and feed power back into the grid as it’s needed.

Ubitricity has retrofitted 82 streetlights in London, and has interest from several boroughs in retrofitting dozens more. The company hopes to raise funds to begin to build partnerships to expand to cities in the U.S.

Sephora Is Experimenting With A Boutique Format To Prepare For The Retail Apocalypse

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If you’re out at a shopping center, you’ll likely spot one of the more than 400 Sephora locations around the country. In fact, you can’t miss them. They’re sprawling storefronts, lined with rows and rows of shelves and filled with products from different brands for customers to test out. Store representatives mill about, offering advice and even full makeovers at special stations. Typically, the locations are brightly lit with loud pop music that gives the space a fun, energetic ambiance.

This format has worked well for the brand, which has been thriving in the midst of a major downturn in brick-and-mortar retail. But today, Sephora announced it is tinkering with a new kind of store: an intimate boutique embedded in a neighborhood.

The very first of these stores, which will be called the Sephora Studio, is launching on Newbury Street, the charming upmarket shopping street in downtown Boston, full of historic brick and stone buildings. The store is across the street from the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Ralph Lauren, and a local coffee shop called the Thinking Cup. While most Sephora stores make a big statement with their large storefronts, this small store attempts to blend into its locale.

I visited the store a day before it would be open to the public on July 21. It had some of the hallmarks of Sephora’s branding, including the bold black and white color palette, but with a few local tweaks. “Hello Newbury Street” is etched in cursive on the marble floor as you enter, signaling that this store was custom-built for this location. The walls are full of exposed brick that draws from the surrounding architecture. And it generally feels more serene and peaceful than a traditional Sephora.

“We picked Newbury Street because it is a classic neighborhood shopping street,” says Calvin McDonald, CEO of Sephora Americas. “There are streets in cities all over the country that are just like this, where people like to take a stroll on the weekend to pop into little boutiques.”

[Photo: courtesy of Sephora]
This new store is an experiment of sorts. McDonald explains that Sephora’s larger format stores have been successful, but the company has noticed that consumers’ shopping habits are changing. “Many, of course, prefer to shop online,” he says. “Others want to go to a store, but they don’t have time to go to a big shopping center. They want to pop by somewhere closer to home, but many of these shopping streets offer much smaller storefronts than malls.”

Rather than shrinking a regular Sephora store into a smaller space, McDonald says the brand was very selective about what they would include here. At the center of the store, there are eight makeup stations where customers can book personal consultations. The product assortment is much smaller, focused on makeup, although there is a small selection of perfumes and skin care. Staff members will be well-versed in Sephora’s broader product range and may direct customers to products that can be shipped to them for free.

“We had to make difficult decisions about what we would keep and what we would nix,” he says.

This store will also debut some new technologies. There are no cash registers, since staff members can process payments digitally, on their phones. At makeup stations, beauty advisers can take pictures of the client, then note all the products they test together, which is then emailed to the client and added to their online profile. “The goal of the Studio is to foster personal connections between our clients and our beauty advisers,” says Mary Beth Laughton, Sephora’s SVP of digital. “But we’re using technology to ease that relationship building. We’re not interested in using technology for technology’s sake.”

[Photo: courtesy of Sephora]
The success of Sephora’s brick-and-mortar stores has been surprising in the midst of the retail apocalypse that has overtaken the U.S. Foot traffic is down in malls across the country, transforming many shopping centers into retail graveyards. There have been hundreds of store closures this year, including brands like Macy’s, Sears, and RadioShack that were once anchors of the brick-and-mortar world. McDonald attributes Sephora’s success to its savvy approach to “experiential retail,” a buzzword that refers to giving customers a delightful in-person experience that is about more than buying a product.

“Customers come into our stores to tap into the expertise of our advisers,” he says. “They come here to play with products and have a good time.”

The Newbury Street store is the first of many, McDonald says. The brand is about to launch other small-format stores in similar shopping streets in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Hoboken in New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. These stores will not replace the bigger store format, but rather complement them. “Eventually, we could see as many as 80 of these sprinkled around the country,” he says.


In Its War With Apple, Qualcomm Tries To Save Its Business Model

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Qualcomm beat analyst estimates in its earnings report yesterday, but revenues were well down and the mobile technology giant forecast lower-than-expected revenues for the current quarter—a reflection of its ongoing patent war with Apple.

The forecast excluded royalty payments it would normally get for its technology used in the iPhone. Apple ordered its suppliers to stop paying Qualcomm licensing fees early this year, opening a new chapter in the long-running dispute. The missing Apple royalty fees are seriously denting Qualcomm’s balance sheet. Qualcomm’s revenues fell 11.1% to $5.4 billion in the third quarter (ending June 25). Income fell to $866 million from $1.44 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Yesterday’s earnings report helps explain Qualcomm’s July 6 decision to bring its patent licensing fee battle with Apple to the U.S. International Trade Commission, where a win could stop some iPhones from being imported into the U.S.

Taking its case to the ITC was seen by some analysts as a way to force a high-stakes showdown with Apple. But a loss there could be a lasting blow to Qualcomm’s whole business model.

The Heart Of The Dispute At The Heart Of Your Phone

Qualcomm sells modem chips that go inside cell phone and other mobile devices, and it licenses its deep chest of patented mobile communications technologies to phone makers like Apple.

The chip business is doing well: Revenue from that business unit increased 5% to $4.05 billion from last year’s third quarter. But revenues from licensing fell off a staggering 42.5% to $1.17 billion.

Apple and Qualcomm have been fighting for a long time over the Qualcomm intellectual property used in the iPhone. No one disagrees that the iPhone uses an array Qualcomm-patented technologies. At issue is the rate Apple must pay for those technologies. Apple has complained that Qualcomm is basing its licensing rates on the total value of the iPhone, and that Qualcomm is therefore asking to be paid for innovation it had nothing to do with. It also objects to paying certain licensing fees to Qualcomm while it also buys Qualcomm modem chips for the iPhone.

Apple normally pays the Qualcomm royalties through its suppliers, like Foxconn, which it then reimburses. Apple ordered its suppliers to stop paying the royalties during the March-ending quarter of this year, saying it would not reimburse any royalties payments. That action can be seen as the direct cause of Qualcomm’s appeal to the ITC, says Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead.

“It’s unprecedented,” Moorhead said. “From a Qualcomm point of view it’s their entire business model that’s at stake.” If Apple is allowed to get away with not paying, other tech companies may try to stop paying too.

For Apple, the stakes could be equally high. Qualcomm has asked the ITC to stop the import of all iPhones that use an Intel modem chip (for operation on the T-Mobile and AT&T networks). This would include Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 7, and, possibly future iPhones.

The ITC has a history of moving quickly toward decisive judgments with binding results. It has in the past blocked the import of patent-infringing tech products into the U.S. (See the case of Cisco v. Arista.)

“The ITC doesn’t mess around,” says Moorhead, who spent 11 years working with intellectual property at a chip company. “The ITC is like the United Nations with teeth.”

What Can The ITC Do?

Patent licensing fee disputes are often settled when a federal district court sets an appropriate licensing rate, Moorhead said, but the ITC does not and will not facilitate arbitration between Qualcomm and Apple to find a licensing fee structure both companies can agree on.

(However, it’s notable that Qualcomm filed an identical complaint against Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California at the same time it filed with the ITC. The complaint seeks damages and injunctive relief.)

Intellectual property owners sometimes use an ITC appeal as a legal maneuver to apply maximum pressure on patent violators. The ITC usually takes 18 months to conclude an investigation and issue a ruling. This is seen as a quicker and more decisive legal avenue than asking for an injunction in federal district court, and then defending against appeals potentially for years. Qualcomm says it expects the ITC investigation will get going in August and be tried sometime next year.

Despite Apple’s statements in court filings that Qualcomm’s business model is “illegal” and based on “extortion,” the dispute between the two companies is long-running, complex, and involves many patents–some more important than others. “Apple has done a good job of simplifying the situation to its benefit,” says Moorhead.

The core of the dispute is over “essential patents.” That means patented technology that the phone maker (in this case Apple) must use to comply with an industry telecommunication standard, in this case a cellular communications standard overseen by the 3GPP.

Standards bodies (in this case, the 3GPP) require that companies that hold “essential” patents license them on “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.” Apple claims Qualcomm is charging licensing rates that are not fair and reasonable.

Apple says its suppliers should not pay royalties until Qualcomm has set a fair rate. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that an ITC ban on imports is not likely because no rate has been set.

The current legal war began when Apple sued Qualcomm for $1 billion in a federal district court in San Diego in January. Apple’s major suppliers–Foxconn Technology, Compal Electronics, Pegatron Corp., and Wistron Corp.–filed suit in the same court Tuesday night. The Federal Trade Commission has also sued Qualcomm, partly based on a complaint from Apple, alleging that the chipmaker’s contracts unfairly discouraged customers from using competitors’ chips.

Qualcomm says Apple is merely using its largesse and bargaining power to pay less royalty dollars. “If you peel apart all of the arguments Apple’s making, we believe firmly they’re all without merit,” says Qualcomm president Derek Aberle, who leads the company’s licensing business.

“At the end of the day, they essentially want to pay less for the technology they’re using,” Aberle says. “It’s pretty simple.”

This Ad Starkly Depicts Black Parents Having “The Talk” With Their Kids

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WHAT:“Talk About Bias,” a new 60-second spot from Proctor & Gamble.

WHO: BBDO New York.

WHY WE CARE: Proctor & Gamble has been behind some progressive ads recently, tackling subjects such as gender discrimination and equal pay in spots that don’t so much sell a product as the idea that the brand is engaged on important issues (which, given that roughly half the country is going to resent them for talking about these issues, it actually may very well be). This time out, P&G go head-first on America’s thorniest issue: race.

In “Talk About Bias,” all we see are the mothers of black children having the sort of parental conversations every black American knows are part of their reality–and that most white Americans have seldom given a moment’s thought to. The campaign addresses both groups, reflecting an experience for black viewers that has often been ignored in the mainstream, and dramatizing real and crucial moments that white folks are seldom privy to—and the result is a powerful sixty seconds that says things about race in America that are important to make clear are just part of life.

Why This Van In Fresno Is Releasing A Million Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes Every Week

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Zika-carrying mosquitoes haven’t shown up in California yet. But Aedes aegypti–an aggressive, non-native species of mosquito that is known to carry the Zika virus, along with dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and other diseases–arrived in Fresno County in 2013. Traditional methods of mosquito control, such as insecticide spraying programs, don’t work well against the species, which tends to breed in small, hard-to-reach sources of water like dishes under flowerpots. Insecticides can also kill bees and other beneficial insects.

So the city’s mosquito control agency–along with a startup called MosquitoMate, and Verily, the Alphabet subsidiary formerly known as Google Life Sciences–is now testing a new approach called Debug Fresno. Each week, until December, the team will release 1 million sterile male mosquitoes in two Fresno neighborhoods. When the mosquitoes mate with wild females, the resulting eggs won’t hatch. Females mate only once. (Male mosquitoes don’t bite, so the influx of millions of them shouldn’t annoy humans). In theory, the technique could dramatically reduce or eliminate the Aedes aegypti population before the mosquitoes become infected with a disease like Zika and start spreading it.

“By the end of the study, we hope to not be able to detect Aedes aegypti in the two neighborhoods we targeted,” says Jacob Crawford, a scientist at Verily, noting that it may be necessary to “spot treat” again at the beginning of the next mosquito season to account for eggs left at the end of  this season.

The fundamental technique is not new, though advances in technology–including Verily’s use of computer vision–may make it financially viable now. It relies on Wolbachia, a bacteria that naturally occurs in many insects, but not Aedes aegypti. If a male mosquito is infected with the bacteria and mates with an uninfected female, they can’t produce offspring (Wolbachia also reduces the chance of a female mosquito passing on diseases when it bites). There’s a catch: If both the male and female have Wolbachia, their eggs will hatch normally, so the method only works if it’s possible to ensure that the only infected mosquitoes that are released are male.

“Using this sterile insect technique, where you release a lot of these sterile males, they’ve eradicated [insects] on a continental scale.”  [Photo: courtesy Verily]
A German researcher first tested the use of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Burma in 1967, carefully breeding the mosquitoes and hand-sorting out the males before releasing them. Twelve weeks later, the local mosquito population was gone. A similar technique was used in the Americas to eradicate the screwworm fly, a fly that lays eggs in animal wounds, hatching maggots that eat through flesh and can kill livestock and even humans. “Using this sterile insect technique, where you release a lot of these sterile males, they’ve eradicated this insect on a continental scale,” says Stephen Dobson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky and founder of MosquitoMate.

Raising mosquitoes and sorting them by sex is labor-intensive, and that makes it expensive. But Dobson, who patented a way to infect mosquitoes with Wolbachia in 2005, was able to begin working with Verily, which has automated ways to mass breed and sort mosquitoes. Verily is using MosquitoMate’s strain of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in the study. The system produces more than 100,000 male mosquitoes each day. Though Verily won’t go into detail about how the full system works, Crawford will say that “our sex-sorting technology uses computer vision to detect female mosquitoes, which are then removed, leaving us with a very low risk of female contamination.”

Because Aedes aegypti isn’t native to California, eradicating it–or the Asian tiger mosquito, another invasive species–shouldn’t affect local ecosystems. “The tiger mosquito invaded the U.S. in 1985,” says Dobson. “So we’re going back to pre-1985, and the bats and the birds were doing just fine prior to that.” He notes that for species that eat mosquitoes, the insects are a very small part of their diet.

Still, some researchers are concerned that the strains of Wolbachia used in the mosquitoes could possibly jump to other insect species. “If it got transferred to a pollinator species, we can have population size reduction and associated pollination problems in many of our crops,” says Gabriel da Luz Wallau, a public health researcher in the entomology department at the Aggeu Magalhães Research Center in Brazil. Wallau says that such transfers are frequent in nature; Dobson, however, says that his team has created experiments to try to make Wolbachia transfer between species, and it has never happened. Other mosquitoes and insects also naturally have the bacteria, so if transfer is a risk, it already exists.

The method isn’t the only way to kill mosquitoes without insecticides. Others are using mosquitoes that are genetically modified to be sterile, something that could potentially work as well or better–but that is less likely to get public support.

“Our sex-sorting technology uses computer vision to detect female mosquitoes.” [Photo: courtesy Verily]
“Many people are (incorrectly, I feel) not comfortable with GMOs,” John Beckmann, a postdoctoral researcher in Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry who studies Wolbachia, says in an email. “Thus the advantage of Wolbachia is a nuanced semantic advantage in that they are not genetically modified. This means the people you can imagine–I won’t judge–are typically less concerned with this type of insect release as opposed to one that involves GMOs, which comes with all the political baggage that that charged term carries.”

Others are using Wolbachia in a different way; Eliminate Dengue, a nonprofit in Australia, releases both male and female mosquitoes infected with the bacteria. Because both are infected, they can successfully breed.  But once the infected mosquitoes are released, they pass the bacteria to future generations, permanently reducing the risk of disease transmission because of Wolbachia‘s disease-blocking power.

“The approach we’re taking, you do it once, and then once you do it you don’t need to reapply it,” says Scott O’Neill, who leads Eliminate Dengue and is the director of the Institute of Vector-Borne Disease at Monash University. “That makes it very cost effective and very cheap and very suitable for developing countries. But it makes a lousy business model because you don’t have anything to sell once you do it once. We’re a not for-profit, in the business of trying to alleviate disease in developing countries, so we’re looking for the cheapest and most effective way to do that in a sustainable way for those countries.”

Dobson says there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach; Eliminate Dengue’s approach, for example, could initially increase mosquito bites, because it releases females along with non-biting males. But it does work with one application because the bacteria can spread to successive generations, and the organization has already tested it at a large scale, having released mosquitoes across entire cities in Australia (a full randomized trial will be complete in two years, but so far, the team’s observational data suggests that the method eventually completely disrupts the transmission of disease).

“I think we should be exploring multiple alternatives because we need new tools,” Dobson says. “Existing chemical pesticides, we’re having problems with resistance, we’re having to spray more and more, and even then, the mosquitoes are just not dying. They’re resistant to some of these chemicals.”

Ultimately, MosquitoMate and Verily aim to create a system that will be affordable enough to use in developing countries, like Eliminate Dengue’s system.

“There are new pathogens that we’re learning about that are being established in the U.S. every year,” says Dobson. “But if you compare that to the challenges being faced in other countries, there are much more daunting problems overseas. That’s absolutely where we want to go with this technology: Can it be used to help those who are most in need? For that to work, it’s going to need to be an affordable solution.”

The vast majority of cases of yellow fever, for example, take place in sub-Saharan Africa. Dengue fever, which can develop into a fatal illness, is a leading cause of death for children in some less-developed countries in South America and Asia. Though Aedes aegypti doesn’t carry malaria–a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people in Africa each year–other researchers are studying how Wolbachia could be used in mosquitoes that do. Verily’s automation system could potentially be used to mass-produce and release those mosquitoes as well.

“Right now we are optimizing our program for speed so we can demonstrate that our technology can work,” says Crawford. “We are mindful of adjustments we can make to future designs to make it financially viable for different environments around the globe where diseases like dengue or Zika are endemic.”

The team will also have to show that it’s effective in reducing or eradicating disease-carrying mosquitoes–something that the current trial in Fresno could prove. It will also show how long it takes for the mosquito population to crash. “It’s not until you do these large real-world trials that you can actually see how it works in the field,” says Dobson.

This Site Hopes To Be The First Troll-Free Sex Ed Oasis On The Internet

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Think back to the last time you were in an educational setting around sex—where you learned more than just how to put a condom on a banana. And you were older than 15. Maybe you learned how to reclaim your body after trauma, how to achieve orgasm, how to find pleasure after giving birth, or how to deal with feelings of sex-related shame.

Still thinking?

According to Andrea Barrica, the world is starved for pleasure-focused, trauma-and-shame-informed sexual education. Add to that lack of education that members of the LGBTQ community and communities of color that don’t see themselves represented in nearly any type of sexual education, and it presents a huge gap in the marketplace.

Enter O.school, a site scheduled for a fall launch with Barrica, a former fintech entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist at the helm. The site will offer live streaming sex education classes focused squarely on safety with secure login and careful student vetting to help decrease access for trolls. In addition, moderators will be on-hand to quickly delete offensive and inappropriate comments.

“We are creating the safest, most trusted place on the internet to talk about sex, period,” Barrica says.

Classes will be taught by veteran sexual educators from around the country (dubbed “pleasure professionals”) on topics as wide reaching as sex after trauma, how medical professionals can practice trauma-informed care, and how to get the most out of your hookup.

The site will start with one live-streamed class per day; some classes will also focus on sexual shame for people who grew up in specific cultural and religious communities; others will be geared toward people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ population.

Bianca Palmisano [Photo: courtesy of Bianca Palmisano]
While students will be able to log on (with the option for pseudonymity) and see select live streams for free, O.school plans to offer tiered memberships in the future. Payment for its pleasure professionals will be largely tip-based early on; Barrica says the site will explore other payment models later on.  At the moment, the startup has five employees—the majority queer women of color (“we recently added a cis white straight dude and it added diversity to our team,” says Barrica) and has offices in San Francisco and Atlanta.

“Uniquely, there isn’t any nudity on O.school,” says Bianca Palmisano, a pleasure professional and owner of D.C.-based Intimate Health Consulting, which focuses on education for healthcare professionals. “We don’t want to re-trigger anyone by exposing them to imagery they aren’t expecting.”

Breaking Down Online Barriers

Barrica first became interested in this space after leaving InDinero, an accounting company she helped found, and becoming a venture partner at 500 Startups. It was there that she started investigating issues impacting women.

“I asked women where they learned about sex and how they formed their attitudes around it, and found that porn is the de facto sex ed today,” she says. “The problem? The internet hasn’t created a safe space between Planned Parenthood and PornHub.”

Andrea Barrica [Photo: courtesy of Andrea Barrica]
If you wanted to talk about sex on the internet, harassment is almost a guarantee, especially for women, say Barrica. She looked offline and found hundreds of in-person educational workshops taught by trained professionals on everything from orgasm to kink to experiencing pleasure after giving birth and more. While in-person classes were comprehensive in some locations (read: big cities; Barrica lives in the San Francisco Bay Area), they were nearly non-existent in smaller, out-of-the-way locales.

“Adult sex ed is fragmented and inconsistent,” she says. “The internet should have solved this problem. I started asking myself: why can’t you learn on platforms that already exist?”

The answer, according to Barrica, comes down to terms of service, and the people behind the technology, many of them cis white men.

“You can’t use major platforms because the broad terms of service will flag you—and that means talking about sex and paying for sexual-related education,” she says. “If you are paying for a class that involves holding a vulva puppet, it will be deemed ‘obscene.’ And there hasn’t been a place to distribute. You can’t sell sex ed classes on Facebook or Google. You’ll get denied.”

Further, if you tried talking about it, trolls would come out in full force. Informed by these barriers, Barrica set out to create a platform to solve all of these problems with the absence of harassment at its center.

“Part of what makes us unique is that we get to start this way,” she says. “Once you have millions of users like the platforms out there already, it is hard to change course.”

The New Sex Ed Market

Sites in the same realm as O.school include OMGYes.com, Make Love Not Porn and Scarleteen, all of which focus on pleasure education (Scarleteen differs from the others in that it has a teen focus with additional discussions around sexual health and issues facing minorities). And while O.school does offer some pleasure-focused classes, it’s attention on trauma, shame, minority communities, lack of nudity, and live streaming make it especially unique. Its biggest competitors, according to Barrica, are in-person workshops.

Wendy Petties [Photo: courtesy of Wendy Petties]
Wendy Petties, a pleasure professional and the New York City-based founder of Good Girls Do!, a pleasure-focused consultancy, has been working as a sexual educator for more than 25 years and has never seen anything like O.school.

“This is something new and innovative,” she says. “Sex educators come in the form of people like Dr. Ruth who are old and white, or porn stars. Women want to figure out ways to be more open and connected to their bodies, especially as many of us feel insecure and unsteady. If we can help counteract that, I think it’s wonderful.”

Palmisano agrees, saying she rarely meets a person who has had comprehensive sexual education. Instead, she meets individuals who’ve had a sex ed class in high school and are now struggling as adults.

“The lack of sex ed leaves us grossly underprepared to have relationships and be sexual beings in the world,” she says. “For so many of us, sexual information comes from family, friends, and the media, which can be toxic, misogynistic and hetero-sexist. We all deserve so much more to help us navigate our sexual lives.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misclassified the focus of the site Scarleteen

Bigger Than Booger: Curtis Armstrong On Thriving Through Four Decades In Hollywood

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Hollywood history is cluttered with Spocks and Screeches, characters that wholly overshadow the careers of the actors who portrayed them. Somehow, Curtis Armstrong has both escaped and not escaped this fate.

In 1984, Armstrong reluctantly accepted his second-ever movie role. He would play Dudley “Booger” Dawson in Revenge of the Nerds. After he initially objected to the part, the filmmakers tweaked the script just enough that Armstrong wasn’t completely repulsed by his character. Little did he know that the movie would go on to become a favorite of slobs-vs-snobs cinema (not to mention, by today’s standards, very problematic) , and that his face would be synonymous with the word, Booger. Permanently. But while that role was followed by years of typecasting, and remains his most famous turn to date, it hasn’t exactly defined him. Newer generations know him as Metatron on Supernatural or Principal Foster on The New Girl, recent roles he played for years. If the entire world only knows him as Booger, someone forgot to inform several casting agents.

Revenge of the Nerd: Or… The Singular Adventures of the Man Who Would Be “Booger”

This duality, the chameleon everyone already knows as the Geiko iguana, is one of several unlikely aspects of Armstrong’s remarkable career, which he explores in depth in his just-released memoir Revenge of the Nerd: Or, the Singular Adventures of the Man Who Would Be Booger. As you may notice from the title, or the fact that his Twitter handle is “CurtisIsBooger,” Armstrong has grown to embrace not only his essential nerdiness, but his fans’ fascination with the role he almost turned down. Over the course of the book, Armstrong charmingly recounts how he arrived at becoming Booger, and how he wriggled out from beneath that character’s long shadow. (Mostly.)

In the lead-up to the book’s release, Fast Company caught up with the actor and found out a lot we did not know, from his stint as a screenwriter, to who is considered his doppelgänger, and why he once turned down an audition with Quentin Tarantino.

The Accidental Movie Star

“I didn’t really plan on any of this,” Armstrong says. “My intention was never to do movies or television. I was just thinking of plays. But as I was doing plays that got more attention in New York, I started to get auditions for films. I went on them expecting I wouldn’t get them–and until Risky Business, I didn’t. But there wasn’t really a plan. I always look at Risky Business as the beginning of an entire career that came out of left field. I had been considering myself a stage actor all this time and then Jeff Kanew saw me in that movie and cast me in Revenge of the Nerds, and then Savage [Steve Holland] saw those two movies and cast me because he saw me as the connecting dot in two films he loved. And then ultimately Glenn Gordon Caron was a fan of Risky Business and cast me as [Bert] Viola in Moonlighting. I look at those four jobs as the pillars of my entire career from 1982 on. Those were the base of my career to this day.”

Destined to Be a Character Actor

“It’s not a decision that you make. It’s a decision that’s made for you,” Armstrong says. “I wasn’t physically cut out to be anything but a character actor. But I never regretted that because character actors–those were the parts. It’s great to be an ingénue or a leading man, but in some ways you are constricted. Someday you will reach a point where you’re regarded as a character actor in spite of yourself, and it becomes a little harder to actually get work in those circumstances. So for me the idea of being a character actor was a goal that I wanted to achieve. Basically, I wanted to be a working actor, and that’s the only kind of working actor I was cut out to be.”

Hindsight is 20/20

“I had no idea who Quentin Tarantino was, but my agent sent me the script for Reservoir Dogs,” Armstrong says. “I can’t remember what character I was reading for.” [Editor’s note: Is it possible he read for Mr. Pink?] “It was an improbable piece of casting to have someone like me in one of those roles anyway, but apart from that I couldn’t make the lines work. I worked on that audition for a while, planning to go out for it, and then I finally called my agent and said, ‘I can’t figure out how to say these words.’ To give them and him credit, everyone that did lines in that movie was brilliant, but I just felt it was out of my comfort. If I were to be approached for a Quentin Tarantino audition now–I’ve seen his movies and I know how it works. At the time I had no idea, so I turned it down.”

An Ongoing Case of Mistaken Identity

“Whenever I went to New York [in the early-80s], something strange would happen,” Armstrong says. “People kept coming up to me and saying, ‘I loved you on Saturday night.’ I know people go out to the movies on Saturday night but I wasn’t sure why they were saying that to me. And then I was finally able to piece together that people thought that I was Gilbert Gottfried, who was at the time on Saturday Night Live. And at the same time, people were going up to Gilbert and saying, ‘I loved you in Risky Business.’ We were constantly getting mistaken for each other.”


Related: The Long, Strange Journey Of “Better Off Dead” Director “Savage” Steve Holland


“One night I was having dinner and two guys came up to me and said, ‘You have to come with us now.’ They explained that they were friends of Gilbert, and he was doing a set at [New York City comedy club] Catch a Rising Star, and they needed to take me immediately up because of this thing where we had become, like, separated-at-birth twins. They took me from my dinner, put me in a cab, and we went up to Catch a Rising Star, and I got there just as Gilbert was coming off. He took one look at me and started just screaming with laughter. We were friends for many years after that.”

Better Off Dead, 1985

The Quiet Side Hustle

“Screenwriting for me was a phase and it blew over,” Armstrong says. “There was a five- or six-year period in the ’90s where a friend of mine, John Doolittle, and I were selling screenplays. We did it as a fluke, really. We were both fans of P.G. Wodehouse and we adapted one of his books into a film and it was picked up by a studio. We actually went into casting and pre-production for it–before they lost their money. Christopher Guest was going to direct. It was a big deal! Then because that came so close to being produced, we kept going. We found ourselves optioning or selling five or six screenplays over the next several years, and none of them were picked up. Then they approached us about A Goofy Movie. And to this day, that’s the only movie that we worked on that we actually got a screen credit for. We worked on The Player, the Robert Altman movie, but A Goofy Movie–that’s the one we got the screen credit for. But people are fond of that one too.”

Forever an Actor, Forever a Nerd

“One thing I’ve learned about myself is I’m not really a producer,” Armstrong. “I was in the case of King of the Nerds, because Robert and I had come up with the idea for that show, and we were the ones pitching it around and it got picked up. So we were executive producers in addition to being hosts, but it was not the next step of my career or anything. You have to have a very special skill set to be a producer, and I do not have any of those skills. I was the nerd person, and I was the one who wanted to keep the focus steadily on the nerd ideal to the degree that we could, to be inclusive, supportive, and celebratory of nerds. That was what my job was and I came out of that experience with many close friends. And that’s what I love. I love getting to play with nerds, not producing a TV show.”

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