“Congratulations, Neil!”

I was sitting across from an HR exec at Walmart a few years ago. His hand was outstretched, and on the desk in front of us was a crisp sheet of paper spelling out all the terms of my new promotion. I shook his hand and left doing mental cartwheels down the hall.

This was it! The dream job: More money, bigger team, fancier title, more interesting work.

And more total work, too. A few more meetings. A few more hours. A few more business trips. A bigger job means bigger responsibilities, which would probably mean dedicating more time and effort overall–that’s just how promotions work, I inwardly shrugged.

Promotion letter in hand, I popped my head into the office of one of my mentors at the company: “Guess what! I got the big promotion.”

“Congratulations!” he said. “Are you going to accept it?”

What did he mean, was I going to accept it?

“Well, it feels like a slam dunk,” I replied, wondering what he was getting at. “Everything improves here–salary, benefits, title. Great for future employability, too. If I get turfed I have a nice top line on my resume,” I pointed out, adding, “I feel like I should sign this right now and head straight back to the SVP’s office.”

“Go ahead and sign it,” he said with smile. “But it’s a big job! You’ll be leading a large team and on the road a lot. So before you hand it back in, make sure you take the contract home, share it with your wife, and write up another contract, too–a family contract. One between you and her. The company is changing all your terms, aren’t they? So make sure you revisit all your home terms, too.”

Related:The Insanely Simple Way To Prioritize Your Life And Work

He had a point. Many of us have contracts with our employers, but few of us have contracts with our partners.

So, strange as it sounds, I went home that night and pitched the idea to my wife, Leslie. We both agreed it was a smart move to think deliberately about how changes in either of our careers might affect work-life balance for both of us. So we sat down and spent a long time that night discussing things. At the end, we arrived at a short contract with four key bullet points whose terms are still in force today:

1. Nights Away

As a parent, it breaks my heart to miss bath time. Combing my son’s wet hair. Reading books under the covers. Goodnight kisses. Knowing there’s a finite number of these nights in our lives, Leslie weighed approximately how many nights per year I might have to be away in the new role. We came up with a number that we could both live with. The we began tracking it.

The nights-away cap we’d agreed to was easy to break down per month, so if I had a really busy month (say, a conference out of town) then I knew I’d need to cut back on travel the next month to make up for it. No, I never actually told my boss, “Sorry, I’ve hit my quota, send someone else!” In fact, just tracking things helped me stop sweating every business trip. I simply counted them toward an annual number. Plus, if I ever fumbled this bullet point, I knew I’d have to make it up on one of the subsequent three (there’s only so much control you have when you’re working for someone else). And when I left Walmart to work for myself, it simply meant planning to miss certain out-of-town opportunities.

Can this hamper your career? Absolutely. Let’s not pretend you can have everything. Come up with a number that works for your family and stick with it.

Related:Here’s How “Metric Parenting” Can Relieve Working Parent Guilt

2. Family Day

We decided it was important for us to have one family day every weekend–a full day with no cell phones, no extended family, no friends, nothing. Just me, my wife, our two little kids, and zero interruptions all day.

Before setting this down in writing, so many weekends would rush past in a blur of gymnastics, birthday parties, and extended family dinners. They were fun! But there was no deep family time for just us four. To be honest, sticking to this bullet-point has been really tough. Sometimes you feel terrible declining an invitation to an outing or get-together you know will be really special. But prioritizing one family day every weekend creates energy, and it helps you be choosier about your commitments. After all, there’s a real risk in saying “yes” to things reflexively.

3. Nights Out

The third item in our contract reads “NNO/LNO”: Neil’s Night Out/Leslie’s Night Out. This is a fun one. Once a week, we each get one night to do whatever we feel like. That can mean dinner with a friend, catching some live music by myself, spinning around in circles in empty parking lots–hey, who cares, it’s my night off! Leslie gets her own each week, too.

Again, energy is the priceless commodity here. It’s too easy to collapse on the couch in a Netflix coma once the kids are in bed: “Oh, look, we have only three Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts left!” These regular night-out appointments help us plan to prioritize ourselves and maintain our other relationships, too. I feel like a great father and husband both before and after I go away on business, because I get energy from those nights to carry me through the time I’m away.

Related:How I Knew When Saying “Yes” Was Hurting My Productivity (And Worse)

Plus, I get my own stories and experiences to bring back into the home while continuing to develop my life as an individual. The best part is there’s no guilt, since my wife and I both practice this habit in equal proportion (so in a way our two nights “pay for” each other. She can go to a yoga class, work on her pictures in a coffee shop, try my spinning-around-in-a-parking-lot thing, whatever! The two nights end up feeling like a gift to each other–even when we (admittedly) need to push one another to actually take them during a tiring week.

4. Vacation Days

I know work contracts generally have a number of vacation days spelled out. But most of us aren’t taking real vacation. We either don’t take all our days–by some recent estimates most Americans leave paid time-off that they’re entitled to on the table–or we work while we’re away. It’s also worth noting that some companies have policies where you can either buy additional vacation days or take unpaid personal days. What’s my point? Simply that it’s one thing for your employer to tell you what you get and another for you and your family to decide what you want to take.

After all, vacation time is one of the things many people don’t bother to negotiate when they’re considering a new job offer or weighing a promotion. In fact, you might even be able to swap out something smaller, like a bonus, for more vacation time if you ask for it. After finalizing our contract, I took advantage each year of a policy at Walmart that let me apply for an extra couple weeks of unpaid leave, and then took the 5% annual hit to my salary. It was a worthwhile tradeoff for the extra time with my family, and I never noticed the funds that were being skimmed off the top.

That’s it! Four bullet points–but they couldn’t be more important. Everybody will have a different set of terms that matter to them and their partner, of course. Maybe yours will involve school drop-off and pickup, or whether or not you work from home certain days of the week. In any case, you don’t have to march into work and share this work-life contract with your boss. The point is simply to help you articulate your values, then actually express them in how you live.

I’ve actually found this helps me make smarter, speedier decisions about the way I’m spending my time. For instance, if I can’t avoid traveling on a weekend and miss a family day, then I automatically know I need to book two back-to-back family days on an upcoming weekend. Good excuse for a road trip! As you think about a contract that works with you and your partner, remember that the goal is never to be perfect. It’s simply to be a little better–and more balanced–than before.

It was a long weekend for Google, and it’s likely to be an even longer week. In case you needed to get caught up on the cycle of controversy and backlash surrounding a Google engineer’s internal anti-diversity memo, here’s a recap:

• Early Saturday morning, Motherboardwrote about an internal document that had gone viral within the company and was prompting angry tweets from Google employees. The document penned by an unknown Google engineer argued that the company should embrace “ideological diversity” (i.e., stop alienating conservatives) as opposed to diversity based on race and gender. Full Article Here.

• By Saturday afternoon, Gizmodo had published entire the 3,000-word document. The memo’s author (still unknown to the public) lays out detailed arguments for why gender disparity in tech is more about biological differences between men and women than sexism. Full Article Here.

• Two senior Google executives denounced the memo internally: Danielle Brown, the company’s newly hired VP of diversity, and Aristotle Balogh, an engineering VP. In a statement to Reuters, Google said Brown’s and Balogh’s comments would stand as the company’s official statement on the matter. Full Statements Here.

• Some prominent women in tech have since weighed in on memo, including entrepreneur Elissa Shevinsky and engineer Cate Huston, both of whom wrote Medium posts.

• The Verge is out with a story this morning about how some employees within Google’s ranks secretly agree with the memo.

• We’ll post more updates here as they happen. Meanwhile, the discussion continues on social media.

According to new research by investment bank UBS, pilotless planes would save the airline industry $35 billion a year and could lead to substantial fare cuts—that is, if airlines can convince people to actually fly in them.

Per The Guardian, UBS asked people to reveal their deepest feelings about pilotless planes and 54% of respondents said they were unlikely to take a pilotless flight. Additionally, only 17% said they were likely to choose a plane with no one at the wheel.

Because airline passengers are generally keen on bargains—hence the rise of “basic economy” class on airlines—one of the most surprising revelations from the report is that half of the respondents wouldn’t take a pilotless flight even if it was cheaper. It seems passengers really prefer to believe that someone (ideally Sully Sullenberger) is actually driving the metal tube that is hurtling them through the sky at 30,000 feet. Luckily for airlines, cargo planes aren’t subject to the whims of weak-kneed passengers and UBS expects they’ll be use for air taxis and cargo flights by the 2020s.

One ray of light for airlines looking to add pilotless passenger planes to their rosters is that younger respondents were generally more willing to hop aboard a pilotless plane. “This bodes well for the technology as the population ages,” the report said per The Guardian. Until the old pilot-loving Luddites “age” away, perhaps airlines who want to roll out pilot-less planes now, should take a cue from Hollywood and set up an inflatable automatic pilot to put passengers’ minds at ease.

Robots are consistent, indefatigable workers, but they don’t improvise well. Changes on the assembly line require painstaking reprogramming by humans, making it hard to switch up what a factory produces. Now researchers at German industrial giant Siemens say they have a solution: a factory that uses AI to orchestrate the factory of the future, by both programming factory robots and handing out assignments to the humans working alongside them.

“Instead of programming [each robot], what we do is say, this is a machine that can do this [task], this is a machine that has the following capabilities,” says Florian Michahelles, who heads the Siemens Web of Things research group in Berkeley, CA. An AI program that Michahelles and his team have developed, called a “reasoner,” figures out the steps required to make a product, such as a chair; then it divides the assignments among machines based their capabilities, like how far a robotic arm can reach or how much weight it can lift.

Siemens is plugging into a larger trend in manufacturing, according to Mehdi Miremadi, a partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “For the first time, in the last few years, manufactures are seeing the real value impact of integrating the most sophisticated robotics and artificial intelligence in their production,” says Miremadi, who is unaffiliated with the Siemens project.

A McKinsey study he co-authored, “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, And Productivity,” looked at 800 occupations and found that about half of the tasks workers do could be automated. But less than 5% of careers would be completely eliminated. In most cases, computers and robots would be picking up parts of people’s jobs. “People will need to continue working alongside machines to produce the growth in per capita GDP to which countries around the world aspire,” says the report. (McKinsey provides an interactive online tool showing that automation potential for these occupations.)

Siemens’s originally gave its automated factory project the badass Teutonic moniker “UberManufacturing.” They weren’t thinking of the German word connoting “superior,” however, but rather of the on-demand car service. Part of their vision is that automated factories can generate bids for specialty, limited-run manufacturing projects and compete for customers in an online marketplace. “You could say, ‘I want to build this stool,’ and whoever has machines that can do that can hand in a quote, and that was our analogy to Uber,” says Michahelles.

Now that Uber is no longer a venerated name, Siemens has rechristened the technology Click2Make to illustrate the point-and-click vision of a self-configuring factory. Michahelles and team have proved the technology can work on a small scale with a test system that uses just a few robots to make five types of furniture (like stools and tables), with four kinds of leg configurations, six color options, and three types of floor-protector pads, for a total of 360 possible products.

Programming Man As Well As Machine

“We also can include people,” says Michahelles. Like robots, human workers also get a description of capabilities and limitations that Siemens’s reasoner AI considers when making assignments, such as drilling a piece of wood or using screws to attach the legs of a stool.

The AI would also know some personal details about human employees, like if a worker is left- or right-handed, and what language they speak best. “The idea would be that, if we can describe all the machines and describe the skills of the workers, we are very flexible in arranging production flows,” says Michahelles.

The robot might hand parts, such as chair legs, to a human, he says. Then a human, with their finer dexterity, would assemble the parts. The reasoner would also enforce safety rules. “We have modeled the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] work standards,” says Michahelles, providing an example. “If one item becomes too heavy for the worker to lift up, the robot would take over.”

“I think the human-robot interaction is the name of the game,” says Miremadi. “It will be the most important trend in the near- to mid-term…the next 5 to 15 years.”

One logistical—and safety—challenge of putting humans in the mix: Unlike robots that are bolted down, humans move around unpredictably. To deal with this, Siemens brought in a Microsoft Kinect camera system to identify workers and track their movements in three dimensions. That allows the reasoner to know who is available for work and how to position the robots so they can hand things back and forth safely, without smacking the humans around. (That’s a real danger. In 2015, for instance, a robot—not one made by Siemens—crushed and killed a technician at a Michigan auto-manufacturing facility.)

Related: Why It’s So Hard For Robots To Get A Grip

I ask Michahelles: Does this technology reduce humans to just another robot—one made of meat instead of metal?

“It should not be that way, because in that way we would just use an expensive human as an imprecise robot,” he says. The robots should serve the humans, doing the tasks that are boring, monotonous, or too physically demanding. “But when it comes to creativity and complex, intelligent tasks, this is where humans are superior,” he says. “The question is now, how can we build systems that combine strengths from both sides?”

Siemens customers won’t be starting from zero. Its factory robots (like those of its competitors) are already fitted with a program logic control device. “It’s basically a computer that’s telling the motors of the robot how to move and what to do,” says Michahelles. That provides a mechanism for the reasoner program to control the robots. And Siemens would provide profiles, called semantic descriptors, that tell the reasoner what each of its robot models is capable of. “So we [already] have technology, but we look for the problem,” says Michahelles.

That “problem” will be a company that sees an opportunity to make a lot of money by selling custom products. Michahelles gives the hypothetical example of a carmaker that can provide custom interiors as an upsell to buyers.

“It’s probably more customized and more expensive products, and also where there’s still a high part of human labor involved,” he says. But as a researcher, Michahelles has no control over how Siemens pitches new technology to customers. “The problem of disruptive innovation is, as long as they can sell the stuff they have, why would they risk something unproven?” he says.

There has been some progress toward developing pilot projects with customers Michahelles says, but “none I would be ready to publicly share.”

The Robots Are Becoming Handier

Although Click2Make integrates humans and robots, the overall trend in manufacturing will be for the number of humans to continue shrinking, according to Miremadi and his colleagues at McKinsey. They predict that up to 60% of factory tasks in the U.S. could be automated, for instance, though the transition will take decades. McKinsey’s report assumes that there will still be growth in jobs; but, as with automation in the past, the types of jobs people take will change.

One major advance in factories is the growth of biomimetic hands that closely match those of humans’. “The hands of the robots on the factory floor are becoming more sophisticated, so naturally they are doing more and more complex actions than what we are used to seeing,” Miremadi says. The closer interaction of humans and robots in factories will accelerate the process, he says, with humans training their replacements. Using a method called kinesthetic learning, people can teach certain dexterous robots, such as welding bots, complex maneuvers by manually directing a robotic arm or hand through a motion several times.

Programming robots used to be a job for engineers. Now advanced learning algorithms allow machines to pick up skills from workers on the assembly line. Robots are even gaining the ability to improvise slightly. Robots that learn to identify and pick up a particular object are increasingly able to identify and handle items with similar features, color, shape, and other attributes.

Related: A New Point And Click Revolution Brings AI To The Masses

“More and more [manufacturers] are becoming comfortable with having robots in essence running not just one specific activity but a set of activities,” says Miremadi. “And [humans] in essence play more of a quality check, monitor role—the managerial role versus doing-the-activity role.”

“There will always be tasks that a machine can’t do because it’s just impossible or too difficult or maybe just too expensive [to engineer],” says Michahelles. “We can carve out the expensive part for the human and have the other part done by the machines.” He mentions, for example, having to climb underneath a car chassis to attach components as being very difficult for a robot to do, but then adds, “this will change eventually.”

In the long run, humans will have to progress to more creative, intellectual work; they can’t count on their current advantage in dexterity lasting, says Michahelles. Otherwise, “it’s just a race against time, where the human will lose.”

On Fridays, Nick Loizides shows up for a meeting. He and 30 or so people gather to report bugs on the software they’re beta-testing, get developer updates, and check each other’s work. Most of them have never met in person and are located around the world. But in these meetings, they talk “face-to-face”, make eye contact, and watch each other’s lips move in real time.

As a 3D artist, Loizides is one of the early-invite users for Sansar, a virtual reality world by Linden Lab, the makers of massive-multiplayer social game Second Life. They hold these meetings in virtual reality, where they can travel to the worlds of the testers’ creations—beaches, outer space, elaborate rooms. It’s as close to teleportation as one can get.

Sixty-three million VR headsets shipped in 2016 (compared to 1.5 billion smartphones), with a lot of that interest around porn and gaming. Companies investing in the technology, like Linden Lab, not surprisingly, swear it’s coming to your work meetings sooner than later.

Anyone who’s ever been in a painfully slow or disjointed Skype call, yelling into the ether, “Unmute your mic!” knows that the technology—and the user experience—is sorely in need of an update. But will VR solve those frustrations, or just move them to a new, pricier, face-sweatier format?

“It gets as close as we can right now to really replicating a face-to-face type of meeting,” says Eric Boyd, a professor of marketing at James Madison University. Boyd is guest-editing an upcoming issue of the Journal of Business Research that will focus on virtual reality. “You and I, we’re having this telephone conversation, but the only information we’re really getting is what each of us is saying. We’re missing the body language.”

Video calls add a layer of intimacy with facial expressions, but reading someone’s mood from the neck up on a computer screen isn’t always enough. Are they sitting with arms and legs crossed, or are they leaning in, open and receptive? “It takes less mental effort when you don’t have to interpret and infer information,” Boyd said.

Voice and eye-tracking technology give the sense of “eye contact” and facial expressions.

In addition to adding interactivity and information—VR could especially benefit architects walking through virtual floor-plan renderings with clients—it adds an interpersonal connection that video or phone can’t: The freedom of living behind an avatar.

“In the virtual world you learn about someone from the inside out because you don’t see the person, you see their avatar, whether it’s a likeness of that person or whatever they want it to be,” Loizides said. “But they’re much more open to being open. You’re so open because you’re protected and safe behind the computer. You’re not actually with that person with your guard up. You can really be free to express anything.”

How Soon Will Your Meetings Be In VR?

Believers see VR as inevitably world-altering as the smartphone. The first response from many corporations and VR companies I asked about the long-coming VR revolution’s first words to me were, “It’s happening.” It’s what Bjorn Laurin, VP of product at Linden Lab told me: He predicts virtual-meeting ubiquity for the general public—for it to become as commonplace as owning an iPhone—within five to 10 years.

“We are still not at the point where people want to hang out in headsets for a long period of time,” says Derek Belch, founder and CEO at STRIVR. STRIVR is in the VR game, but not for meetings. They’re developing training content, for which there’s proven benefit over just watching or reading onboarding material. “A 30-minute meeting in VR? Not happening anytime soon,” Belch said, citing the hardware and comfort of headsets as reasons. Headsets currently weigh about a pound, which sounds light until you have it strapped to your face for an hour.

“If the comfort level of the headsets improves to the point where people want to wear them for an entire meeting, then I don’t think any of the other factors will be issues.”

Boyd also points to the many unknowns in long-duration VR immersion and comfort: Many people experience dizziness or motion sickness even in a tame virtual setting, and it’s still not clear what the effects of putting a screen an inch from your eyeballs for an hour at a time will do to you—ophthalmologists say it poses no threat to your eyes, but it can still cause eye fatigue and strain, in the same way staring at any screen might.

VR Meetings Depend On The Future Of Remote Work

The other factor that will determine how widespread the adoption of VR meetings will be is where the trends in remote work go. Some companies are moving away from remote work altogether, in an effort to keep the company culture alive. IBM, one of the pioneers for remote work, recently gave its scattered workforce an ultimatum: Come back to the office or quit. “If people decide they still want employees in the office, it’s going to work against VR to some extent I think,” said Boyd. “Is this five years or 50 years down the road? A lot of it has to do with business practices and what businesses feel comfortable doing, and not necessarily what technology can do for them.”

Five years is optimistic, Boyd said. “I think we’re probably looking more toward eight to 10 years before we really start to see a supply of technology that can support it and people are seeing the benefits and how it can be easily incorporated in their day-to-day life.”

On August 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible in across the U.S. for the first time in 99 years. If you haven’t already planned your NASA-approved viewing party or booked your RV to sit in a traffic jam in the Path of Totality, Airbnb and National Geographic have an offer for you: The companies are teaming up to give two eclipse enthusiasts the chance to view the eclipse from above the clouds with a world-renowned astrophysicist—and stay in a sweet geodesic dome in the Oregon desert, too.

To enter their contest, head to the Airbnb contest page and tell them about yourself. Winners will not only get to stay in a geodesic dome equipped with telescopes, but you’ll get to hang with Dr. Jedidah Isler, a National Geographic Explorer and noted badass who was the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in Astrophysics from Yale University. On the morning of the eclipse, the contest winner, Dr. Isler, and a small crew will board a small private jet, fly over the Pacific Ocean, and then start your return along the Path of Totality, becoming one of very few people to witness the first moments of the eclipse.

Before you enter, though, make sure you are prepared to fly in a small plane, stay in the hot, hot desert heat, and cope with close encounters of the wildlife kind. And don’t expect winning this contest to be your ticket to Instagram fame, because the listing warns that there are “weak phone and wifi signals.” Just go commune with nature and experience the eclipse and make us all jealous.

If you’re not from Kansas, you might think of it as a sparsely populated farming state that airplanes tend to fly over on their way between the coasts. The reality is that aviation is major business in the Sunflower State, accounting for 92,000 jobs and $20.6 billion in annual economic activity.

At the same time, Kansas is home to substantial amounts of agriculture, insurance, construction, rail, and other industries–not to mention airports supporting the 700 in-state companies in the aviation field–that either want to use drones for business, or need to make sure drones are operating safely in areas where manned aircraft are flying.

So it makes sense that Kansas would be taking a leading role when it comes to implementing new systems and technologies geared toward the safe implementation of drones, for both commercial and recreational use, into the state’s airspace.

The hope is that the technology, built by the Santa Monica, California startup Airmap–which enables anyone flying a drone to file a flight plan and anyone else wanting to use the airspace to see who else is flying in it in real time, and even in some cases to communicate with them through the tools–will make it safe for anyone to fly drones, and to alert people or businesses when flying is unsafe.

“We absolutely intend to use Airmap to do both civilian and commercial, for the purpose of building business and also protecting the environment so that their ability to share data makes all the airspace safer,” says Bob Brock, the unmanned aircraft system director in the Kansas Department of Transportation. “We really think it’s going to benefit everyone, from the hobby drone operator, who will have more data available to him, and the commercial operator, who will be able to identify airspace and others who are sharing the airspace much more readily.”

Opening A Door

Drone traffic management is on a lot of people’s minds these days, and there are efforts underway to come up with a unified system at the national level, in particular a system shepherded by NASA and a group of participating companies. But those efforts haven’t yet been completed or put in place. That’s opened a door for Airmap, which has also been cooperating in various capacities with federal officials on the creation of national standards.

Plus, a system in which pilots called airport officials to alert them to their proximity wasn’t really scalable with the rapid increase in the number of drones in the sky. Automatic, digital tools were a much better solution, they found.

“We learned that when we put tools in the hands of the right people,” McNeal explains, “they welcome drones, and they open the environment to bring drones into their community.”

Kansas, he adds, was a perfect example of that philosophy–empowering drone usage and welcoming the safe use of drones into airspace throughout the state.

And that philosophy could well lead to pressure from states on the Federal Aviation Administration to move quickly on the development and adoption of a national system. Airmap is only working with Kansas at this point, McNeal says, “but we’d be happy to work with other states if they express an interest….to show how this model of acceleration works.”

Jump-starting Business

To officials in Kansas like Brock, there’s more to the implementation of drone traffic management standards than just ensuring safety. By making it safer to use drones in any place where they can be useful, it’s going to help jump-start business.

“We need places to be able to build business well, and part of business building and economic development includes actually flight testing” drones, Brock says. “That was a gap that the industry brought to us as we really want to find a place that we can both do business well and produce return on investment at the same time we can actually fly the aircraft.”

And that’s where Airmap’s system came into play–as a tool that could be utilized throughout Kansas to allow drone pilots, airplane pilots, airport operators, and other stakeholders to mutually share the kind of data that enables everyone safe use of the airspace.

“We selected them to partner because we really believe that that is a single source of awareness and data-sharing that is unlike any other we’ve been able to find,” Brock says of Airmap’s technology. “We really think it’s going to benefit everyone, from the hobby drone operator, who will have more data available to him, to the commercial operator, who will be able to identify airspace, and others who are sharing the airspace, more readily.”

While Kansas isn’t mandating the use of Airmap’s technology, it will begin the program by making the system available to a wide range of public agencies and institutions–from the Department of Transportation and universities to search-and-rescue operations and airports.

Once that beta test is over, Brock expects municipalities and companies to get on board. And the more agencies and companies use the system, and prove its utility, the more evidence there will be for other states and eventually even the FAA to follow suit, Brock argues.

One company that is buying in is Progress Rail, a division of Caterpillar that specializes in supplying railroad and transit products throughout the rail industry.

“I think that a state [utilizing] a standardizing system for use of drones…I don’t think it’s just good, it’s something that has to happen,” says Matt Peterson, the unmanned aircraft systems flight operations manager at Progress Rail. “We have to be able to safely integrate the tools we use to get our job done.”

Peterson explains that, as an operator of commercial drones, having real-time airspace data at his fingertips–and at those of others who work with and for him–is imperative. And he thinks Airmap’s technology is a boon for business.

“A third-party application that can roll up everything from type of airspace [drones are] in to airspace restrictions to any real-time notifications,” he says, “would be phenomenal and would really empower the commercial user.”

Further, he says, it’s great that a state like Kansas is taking the lead on implementing drone traffic management systems. “They’re really going to pave the way for other states to follow,” Peterson argues.

Challenges

Now that Kansas has announced its plans to adopt Airmap’s system, the next step is going to be convincing every possible stakeholder—from state and municipal agencies to companies to recreational pilots—to use the software. Brock considers that a significant challenge to making the implementation a success, but he believes outreach is the answer.

“We will be doing a very large public relations and public service announcement routine program to make everyone that’s an operator [of drones], or even a potential operator,” he says, “to just have a clear understanding that it’s super-important that we protect this airspace safely, so they’ll be motivated just to protect their own neighbors’ industry.”

Substantial adoption is going to be important, but if people across the state buy in, Brock is confident that everyone in the state will benefit.

“I think we’re going to have so many drones in so many place that if we can give people the tools that they want to volunteer to be safe,” he says, “I think we can shepherd this industry into a really neat place if we can stay far enough ahead of the demand that the tools are there before we have issues to respond to. I really want us to be proactive and not reactive.”

Let me guess: You’re reading this because you’re at work right now and you’re bored to tears. I should know–I’m a recruiter, and I spend hours of my day on the phone with job candidates who are bored with their jobs and looking for new ones. But one thing I’ve learned by talking to them–and by reorganizing my own workday–is that on-the-job boredom sometimes isn’t so much a matter of what you do at work as much as when you do it. In other words, it’s a time-management issue.

Stop Doing All Your Boring Tasks At Once

I’ve started making a list of all my responsibilities and the time they take up. I draw a rough pie chart to display the data visually, and then I label each responsibility as a positive or a negative in terms of my interest level. If the negatives outweigh the positive, I know something has to change.

Related:How Employee Burnout Became An Epidemic And What It Takes To Fix It 

I realized that I was sometimes making the least exciting parts of my job more irritating to do because I’d put off tackling them earlier, and wound up with a big chunk of grunt work, with one boring task after another. It’s great if you can delegate some of these tasks–and breaking it into a “positive/negative” pie chart can help you get a lay of the land–but if not, you can just plan your workday so that the fun things alternate with the less-fun things. In one previous role, this trick helped me realize I could change up the time I wrote my weekly report, for instance. Whenever I had to finish up a mundane task, I made sure an exciting one would follow.

Identify Your Most Productive Hours

You need to know when you are at your best. It’s easy to feel bored by a function of your job if you’re trying to complete it when you’re not feeling at your physical or emotional peak. Not sure when that is? Here’s a quick, research-backed guide to identifying and maximizing your daily energy levels.

If you have the option, ask your boss for a more flexible schedule–even if you start small, say, with shifting your hours slightly just one day a week–so you can work at a time that suits you best. (Just make sure you frame your request in terms of when you’re most productive, not when you get bored the most.) Perhaps you can start and finish earlier or later, depending on whether you’re a morning person or a night owl. Maybe you can go home when your energy levels start to fade, and then return to work when they pick up again. In fact, one Fast Company contributor wrote recently that you might have more leeway in reshaping your working hours without your boss’s explicit go-ahead than you may think.

But even if you can’t hammer out a flexible schedule with your employer, try shifting the more tedious parts of your job to the times when your energy tends to be lowest. I personally like doing my easier tasks at night, because I found that my focus deteriorates toward the end of the day.

Look For Opportunities–Then Ask For Them

One of the unfortunate realities of the workplace is that it’s no one else’s job to make your job more interesting for you. Only you can do that. In just about every company, there’s bound to be a project or task that lets you learn and grow–and make you feel a little less bored.

Related:6 Ways The Most Successful People Conquer Boredom At Work 

So the next time you see a coworker take on a project that you wish had landed in your lap, ask them what they did to get it–and how they made the time to tackle it. Or ask your boss how you could get it next time, and which tweaks to your workflow you might be able to make in order to do that. This is a boredom-beating time-management hack rolled up in a career-advancement one: two birds, one stone.

While there are bosses who are personally invested in your career, many are too busy to realize what sorts of “stretch” assignments you might really excel at. So take the initiative and propose a few. Many managers will gladly give you the chance to try something new if you just ask. And in doing so, they’ll help shake up a tedious daily work experience in a way you might not be able to do on your own.

Still having trouble feeling engaged, but unable to leave your job at the moment? You can probably still find more fulfillment–you might just need to look for it outside your job. Whether it’s pursuing a side hustle, hobby, or goal unrelated to work, anywhere you can seek gratification outside of the office will probably make life better in the office.

Katy Spriano is a partner and director of recruiting at WinterWyman, supporting the accounting, finance, and administrative contract staffing division. 

Another day, another round of attention-grabbing headlines about SoftBank, the Japanese financial giant and the tech world’s biggest investor.

The company’s ambitious chairman, Masayoshi Son, told investors after an earnings call this morning that he’s interested in investing in either Uber or Lyft, the dueling ride-hailing companies. And he’s reportedly maneuvering to have Sprint, the telecommunications giant that SoftBank controls, attempt a takeover of cable giant Charter Communications. Last week, SoftBank reportedly invested $250 million in Kabbage, which the small-business lending startup plans to use to expand its reach in the United States. And the previous week, it was reported that SoftBank was leading a $1 billion funding round for Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo and had invested in Singaporean ride-hailing company Grab in a $2.5 billion round.

They’re just the latest examples of SoftBank’s aggressive strategy of making big bets on the technologies and business models of the future, from artificial intelligence and robotics to ride-hailing and fintech. 

This year, SoftBank has been on a tear, investing more in just the second quarter of 2017 than in all of last year combined ($8.35 billion compared to $7.94 billion), according to a PitchBook analysis prepared for Fast Company. And it’s already invested more in the first three weeks of the third quarter of 2017 (over $2 billion, not including the Ofo deal) than in all but two quarters over the last three years. Much of this new investment is due to SoftBank’s much-heralded $100 billion Vision Fund–the largest tech-focused fund in history–with high-profile backers like Apple, Qualcomm, Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund, and Foxconn, among others.

Since first disbursing its funds this spring, the Vision Fund has invested in robotics firm Brain Corp. and agtech startup Plenty, whose indoor farms promise to produce “hyper-organic food with no pesticides nor GMOs while cutting water consumption by 99%,” according to CEO and cofounder Matt Barnard. It’s the kind of visionary startup favored by SoftBank’s Son, who said Plenty will help “remake the current food system.”

Though the financial powerhouse has been extremely active in recent months, intense focus on tech has always been in its DNA, say analysts. “SoftBank has had a history of investing in pivotal technology players expanding markets for communications, which is perfectly in line with their original mission and scope of expertise,” says Tom Hackenberg, an analyst at IHS. He notes that SoftBank formed as a telecom company back in 1981, invested in computer expo pioneer Comdex in 1985, mobile giant Vodafon in 2006, and video streaming service Ustream in 2007.

“As you might notice, SoftBank has employed a successful vision of where next generation communications services are going,” adds Hackenberg. The size of the investments is welcomed by most investors, but some venture capital firms have expressed concern that they’ll be priced out of new startup funding rounds, reports Business Insider.

The variety and heft of the investments has convinced Patrick Moorhead, the president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, that SoftBank “is trying to put together literally the ecosystem of the future.” He adds, “If you go 10 years out, what is the future going to look like? And where is the heat? Where are people going to be selling things, where are they going to be making money? That what they’re focused on.”

With investments in telecom companies like Sprint, chip designers like ARM, as-a-service platforms like Ofo and Grab, and robotics firms, SoftBank has taken a holistic approach, says Moorhead. “The only piece of the pie that I don’t see is data centers, those that you need to do deep learning.”

To get a sense of the sheer size of SoftBank’s Vision Fund, consider that it’s four times bigger than the largest private equity buyout fund ever raised: Apollo’s new $24.6 billion buyout fund, says Nizar Tarhuni, analyst manager at PitchBook. The sheer size of the fund means that it won’t get into too many early-stage venture markets, “given the larger check size it needs to write for each investment to make its fund economics work.”

Tarhuni expects SoftBank to keep making big bets across entire sectors like VR, IoT, fintech, and AI, with its main focus on later-stage startups or public companies. “This strategy allows them to bet on platforms, as opposed to just select companies within sectors, which lends itself to a much more thematic and macro investment theme that could be promising over time.”

FX is trying to bring Netflix-style binge viewing to its cable channel, letting Comcast TV subscribers stream ad-free episodes for a $6 per month upcharge. The service, called FX+, launches on September 5 with full seasons of current shows such as Fargo and classics such as The Shield. Subscribers can stream those shows through the FX Now app or through Comcast’s own Xfinity cable boxes, apps, and website.

The plan is similar to AMC Premiere, which arrived in late June for $5 per month. But while AMC intends to expand its service to other TV providers, and possibly to online video bundles like Hulu with Live TV, it’s unclear whether FX will do the same. Either way, these kinds of add-ons could help prop up TV revenues among a dwindling base of cable subscribers–assuming people aren’t happy enough to just set their DVRs instead.

Despite climate change being a scientific fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is reportedly intentionally avoiding using terms like it that are considered divisive. According to emails obtained by the Guardian, managers at the government agency sent out lists of words and phrases that should not be used by employees and ways to write around them. Included on the list are “climate change”–which should, instead, be “weather extremes–and “climate change adaption”–which becomes “resilience to weather extremes,” reports the Guardian. What’s more, the USDA allegedly wants to avoid any references to its goal to reduce greenhouse gasses (because I guess that’s just far too political). Instead, the organization prefers a new euphemism: “Build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency.”

You can read the full Guardian report here.

Mike Sinyard found a way to conquer his ADHD. Then he built a multi-million dollar company around it. As the legend goes, Sinyard, the founder and chairman of Specialized Bicycle Components, used to have trouble concentrating and focusing on tasks, but found that bicycling regularly seemed to somehow diffuse those symptoms. Over the last three and a half three decades his improved attention and clarity—and of course his passion for the sport—have propelled Specialized toward an estimated $500 million in annual sales.

To continue growing, Specialized needs to draw more young riders into that sport. But within the company there’s been worry about what else happens if they don’t. Today, many kids with ADHD are being treated pharmacologically without much thought to whether physical activity might be another outlet: Nearly 11% of school-aged children are now diagnosed with ADHD, a 41% increase over the last decade. Since 2007, there’s been a 26% jump the prescription rate for treatment.

So in 2015, Specialized launched the Specialized Foundation, a nonprofit that donates bikes, helmets, and service gear to middle schools for use in P.E. classes through a program called Riding For Focus. In July, that foundation announced a major expansion: It’s moving into 20 new school to reach, by this fall, a total of 36 schools on more than a dozen states, including California, Texas, Louisiana, and New York.

As the program’s name suggests, the goal is to give Sinyard’s theory—that pedaling might have some mental payoff—a real road test. Shortly after launching, the foundation partnered with Central Michigan University to develop a protocol that schools are using to track the scholastic impact on their kids. Last year, it made $400,000 in contributions to schools and medical research.

While the foundation hasn’t published formal studies, Ted Theocheung, the foundation’s CEO, says that early results show that bicycling may improve the intellectual performance of all students, not just those with ADHD. At current Riding For Focus schools, students who rode three days a week with 20 minutes in a targeted heart rate zone for six weeks straight are seeing improvement on standardized math and English tests taken after that exercise period, compared to others doing traditional P.E. activities like running, or calisthenics. “While we started looking at the benefits for kids with ADHD academically, physically, and wellness-wise, it turns out that this actually benefits all kids, although it is most noticeable in kids with ADHD,” says Theocheung,

Company execs likely weren’t surprised. The work the eventually begot the foundation started years ago with similar promise. In 2012, Specialized partnered with RTSG Neuroscience Consultants, a research firm, to track what would happen to the mental acuity of about 50 kids at two middle schools in Natick, Massachusetts if given the chance to bike outside for 30 minutes every day before school for roughly one month.

According to a subsequent white paper, after one ride, those with ADHD performed performing more accurately than their non-participating peers on a so-called “executive function” tests of working memory, mental flexibility, and self control. (Again, it’s light on statistics.) After the program, nearly all participants reported feeling more positive, emotionally centered, and did better on a long term memory test compared to their non-cycling cohorts.

The response time for answering questions slowed down, which may be another good thing: Researchers posited it meant there was more deliberation, instead of impulsivity. And almost everyone lost weight: Kids shrunk about a half-inch around the waistline.

Riding For Focus complies with National Association and Physical Education standards, so that any school can plug into their core curriculum. Topics covered include basic bike maintenance and inspection, riding skills and signaling training, and rules for group and road riding so those who venture off campus will stay safe.

To be fair, plenty of research has shown that exercising before test taking correlates with academic performance, and that that exercising outside may boost scores even more. Yet the foundation has an early theory about why riding could work best: It requires both balance and constantly looking for potential hazards that might knock you off the bike as you move forward at a faster than usual rate of speed. “If you think of it like an engine analogy, the more cylinders firing or the more your brain is warmed up, and the more information the brain is able to retain,” says Theocheung.

Specialized wants to reach 200 schools by 2020. To do so, it’s soliciting for matching grants from community groups—the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation, for instance, just backed two Bay Area schools—and will partner with other retailers if necessary to make up any product shortfalls. It generally gives about 30 bikes per school, but when one school in Virginia recently needed 50 kids, the foundation enlisted competitor Giant bicycles to cover the difference.

The question of whether those riders may stick to it already seems answerable. “There’s no kid sitting there saying. ‘I want to do 10 more minutes of jumping jacks.’ They do want to ride longer,” adds Theocheung. “So I think that’s going to be the magical piece in our equation.”

The issue of sexism in tech is finally entering the mainstream conversation in a big way. And while it’s been scientifically proven that there are no significant differences between men and women’s brains, the notion persists as an excuse for the lack of parity in tech and other industries. In light of the assertions about so-called biological differences in the now infamous anti-diversity memo from a Google engineer, the results of employee personality tests from several major tech companies take on an interesting meaning. 

Job matching platform Good&Co used their proprietary data to analyze the personality traits of 1,029 male and female employees. They gathered the data from assessment tests that they gave at a few of tech’s largest and most influential companies: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Uber. They also compared gender differences across industries from the larger pool of Good&Co app users. 

Overall at those five companies, these key gender differences popped out:

• Male Facebook employees are 40% more likely to have an inflated sense of superiority compared to female employees.
• Female employees at Apple and Microsoft are 23% more prone to anxiety than their male counterparts.
• Men at Microsoft are 35% more ambitious and 34% more calculating than females.
• Male Uber employees are 32% more socially assertive than female employees.
• Google’s workforce displayed no major differences between male and female employees.

Apple vs. Microsoft

Across the board at both Apple and Microsoft men are on average 17% more enthusiastic than their female colleagues and the women are 23% more prone to have anxiety.

Apple’s female workers, however, are as calculating as the men working at Microsoft, and even a bit (10%) more calculating than their male coworkers at Apple. Female employees at Microsoft by contrast are the least calculating out of all the companies studied: 30% lower on average.

Women at Microsoft were 17% more sympathetic toward the feelings of others and 28% more engaged in their job compared to their male colleagues. Men at Microsoft are 35% more likely to be ambitious and 34% more calculating.

“Apple seems to attract women who are more inclined to use political tactics to promote their own agenda,” the research team writes, “and given the rumors about Apple’s sexist environment, it may be that women who survive in this culture know how to play the game,” the researchers  write.

It’s worth noting that a previous analysis by Good&Co found that Microsoft employees are more innovative than those at Apple, perhaps suggesting that the balance between ambition and empathy is helping spark creativity.

Facebook

Men and women at Facebook weren’t significantly different across the personality spectrum. This may be due to Facebook’s effort to diversify its ranks based on traditional perceptions of diversity such as gender, race, and ethnicity while also shifting toward being more inclusive of various sexual orientation, education, and experience–but still attract more like-minded personalities.

Uber

The company’s culture of discrimination against women is well-known now thanks to multiple reports of harassment. However, the psychometric team uncovered a surprising finding. “In a company where issues with gender diversity are rife the only difference between male and female workers was in assertiveness as males were 32% more socially bold than female employees.

It’s interesting to note that it’s a woman tasked with turning Uber’s culture around. Liane Hornsey was named the ride-hailing giant’s chief human resources officer in January, just before the blog post that changed everything. Prior to that, Hornsey spent nine years at Google as VP of Global People Operations before moving to sales.

Everything Is Okay, a wickedly funny head-trip meditation on How We Live Now, and it’s available to watch this very second. It’s also a brightly burning signal flare announcing that Topic.com, a just-launched visual storytelling arm of First Look Media, has arrived and they mean business.

Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel who took the reins at Topic, has spent years thinking about ways to tell stories digitally, without relying on words alone. It’s an interest borne out of frustration during her waning days at Jezebel.

“I was sort of sick of words: Sick of writing them, sick of editing them, sick of having to keep track of them as they pertained to digital media, professional or amateur,” Holmes says. “I was having more fun with visuals and photos for the site than anything else, and it was at that point that I decided maybe I should move in that direction in the future.”

Her decision has now culminated in Topic, a refreshingly unusual website where refreshingly unusual projects like Everything Is Okay feel right at home. Each month, the editors select a new theme around which to organize features. Then they hash out the possibilities of how this topic could be explored. Once there’s a foundation of ideas, the team reaches out to a wide range of storytellers, with creative briefs, to see what pitches they yield. About 90% of the content featured on the site is original.

This month’s theme is 21^st Century Women, and it’s incisively mapped out across a multitude of approaches, mediums, and collaborators. There’s a photo-heavy guide on how to freeze one’s eggs, a mixtape of short films about women–one of which features Transparent star Gaby Hoffman and another directed by Janicza Bravo of the film, Lemon–along with an animated monologue from veteran indie filmmaker Todd Solondz. And then, of course, there’s Everything Is Okay, a standout project this month.

Everything consists of five shorts all set in a modern New York City that is alternately banal and heightened to the sky. Writer and star Cirocco Dunlap’s series takes metropolitan roommate politics to an apocalyptic place, imagines task rabbiting your social life to a robot clone, and wades into a subway station that exists beyond the realm of time. Comparisons to Black Mirror, the technocentric Twilight Zone, with more twist endings than a knot-tying workshop, feel inevitable. However, the show also shares some DNA with High Maintenance or Girls, whichever New Yorkian HBO show you prefer. Everything thrives on bleakly relatable humor, the kind Dunlap also occasionally contributes to The New Yorker.

It was one of the writer’s Shouts and Murmurs contributions that paved the way for her new series. Last February, The New Yorker published her humor piece N.Y.C. to L.A. to N.Y.C. to L.A., Ad Infinitum, which sadly concluded that the two rival cities are equally unlivable. N.Y.C. to L.A. made its way around basically the entire internet, and eventually it landed with Holmes’ colleagues Lisa Leingang and Nick Borenstein.

The two development executives saw a lot of potential in the piece, and reached out to its author to see what ideas she had. Dunlap had by then already written one of the short films that became Everything Is Okay (the second episode, Subway), and had been trying to figure out how to shoot it with her director friend Adam Sacks. The writer sent along a script for the short, amongst other items, and Borenstein and Leingang commissioned a short series.

“It evolved a lot but we stayed pretty true to the original concept,” Dunlap says. “Adam and I were trying to go for a slower tone that felt honest and grounded, and we went through several drafts of each trying to make sure we didn’t have anything that didn’t feel like something we’d really been through. You know, like a fridge portal.” [Ed note: the series indeed contains a fridge portal. Just go with it.]

Those two development executives weren’t the only ones to reach out after The New Yorker piece, though. Simon Rich, a fellow veteran of Shouts and Murmurs, saw a simpatico style in Dunlap’s writing. He lured her to write for the third and final season of his comically surreal FX series, Man Seeking Woman. Rich also brought her on board for his new anthology series, Miracle Workers, which premieres on TBS this fall.

While opportunities were already opening up for Dunlap concurrent to her debut on Topic.com, the website seems poised to propel many other up-and-coming storytellers to the next level in their careers.

“Part of our mandate is to make sure we are supporting and amplifying the voices of unknowns as much as people who are more accomplished,” Holmes says. “We’re trying to create stories and support storytellers that offer narratives that feel more evergreen, more reflective than reactive, while also publishing content that we believe belongs in the digital space and is easily shared. Focusing on visual storytelling – photography, illustration, scripted and non-fiction video pieces and short films – felt like a way we could do that and do it in a new way.”

The world is full of magical and wonderful things, all of which have just been bested by Audible’s newly launched Audible for Dogs.

Every podcaster’s favorite audiobook purveyor has just announced what we all assume will be the world’s foremost audio content destination for dogs. The delightful project was developed to “foster calm, relaxed behavior in dogs,” according to a press release, because science says dogs left home alone are happier if they can listen to The Wind in the Willows read by a comforting human voice. (Not sure whether that also works for Where the Red Fern Grows, though).

The project was developed in collaboration with dog trainer and noted leader of the pack Cesar Millan, who also wrote and narrated a piece of original content called Cesar Millan’s Guide to Audiobooks for Dogs. Your dog doesn’t just have to listen to Millan bark orders, though, as Audible for Dogs will feature a rotating selection of audiobook titles curated just for dogs, including books like Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, performed by Trevor Noah, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, performed by Rosamund Pike—which have nothing to do with dogs. More thematically appropriate options include W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose performed by William Dufris, and Maria Goodavage’s Soldier Dogs: The Untold Story of America’s Canine Heroes performed by Nicole Vilencia. And with those two options, it’s surprising they don’t just throw Old Yeller into the mix.

If this news came out on April 1, we would be skeptical, but because we’re in the midst of *ahem* the dog days of summer, this is definitely 100% valid real news.

In early May, the online mattress startup Casper celebrated its third birthday in whimsical style with an event, held in its New York headquarters, modeled after a 3-year-old’s birthday party. There was face-painting, piñatas, and—in a necessary concession to adulthood—a free-flowing open bar. They even hired a balloon guy. “He really put the artist in balloon artist,” says cofounder and CTO Gabriel Flateman, whose company has transformed the mattress business with smart design, low prices, and a clever business model. “He made me this intricate jet pack I was wearing around. I mean, he made a knockoff Chanel bag! But the magician canceled at the last minute, which kind of sucked.”

When Casper launched three and a half years ago, its five founders—Flateman, CEO Philip Krim, COO Neil Parikh, chief creative officer Luke Sherwin, and chief product officer Jeff Chapin—had no clue there would soon be so much to celebrate. They knew they had a strong idea, but back then their vision was modest. Mattresses were a $7 billion industry dominated by a tiny group of highly consolidated manufacturers and retailers. Markups were sky-high, sometimes topping 100%, and the shopping process was widely perceived to be unpleasant and confusing. It seemed possible that a nimble, low-overhead online player with a veneer of cool—the Warby Parker model, essentially—could capture a small-but-profitable slice of that market, despite the conventional wisdom that no one in their right mind would buy a mattress without at least flopping down on it for a few minutes at their local retailer.

So when, on April 22, 2014, Casper flipped the switch on its new e-commerce platform—selling just one model of foam mattress in twin, full, queen, and king sizes and targeting millennial Ikea shoppers—the founders had what seemed like a reasonable goal. “Something like $1.8 million in sales in our first 18 months,” says Krim. “But then, literally on launch day, we began to totally rethink everything.”

Before the founders had shipped a single one of their blue-and-white boxes, each packed with a near-magically expanding rolled-up mattress, it was clear they had hugely underestimated just how good their idea was. Orders came flooding in so fast that the company depleted its initial inventory on the very first day. Within eight weeks Casper had surpassed its original 18-month sales goal, and within a year the young company had dramatically reshaped the industry it originally planned to nibble at from the edges.

In the short time since, the sleep business has become both more consolidated and more chaotic. In 2016, Mattress Firm, the industry’s biggest retailer, acquired its rival Sleepy’s for $780 million, shortly before Mattress Firm itself was rolled up by South African retail behemoth Steinhoff in a $3.8 billion deal. Then, earlier this year, in response to slumping sales of products made by Tempur Sealy, Mattress Firm decided to stop carrying its line. “All this basically just means that the customer is going to keep getting hosed and hosed and hosed because there is no price comparison in this market,” says Casper’s Parikh. “How can there be, when Sleepy’s, 1800Mattress, and Mattress Firm are all owned by the same people?”

Last year, Casper did more than $200 million in business. It has grown from a handful of employees at launch to more than 300 in offices in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. Its product line has expanded to include sheets, pillows, a dog bed, and more, and its wares are now also available in Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and the U.K., with further global expansion on tap. It’s a level of success that still spins the heads of the young founders. “I mean, it’s mind-blowing,” says Krim. “We just celebrated our millionth customer interaction—it’s just crazy how many people look for us, how many people sleep on our products.”

Days after the birthday bash, Casper’s founders are gathered at an upscale pizza place not far from their office in New York’s Gramercy neighborhood. Parikh orders pretty much the entire menu for the table: truffle meatballs, kale salad, a half-dozen pizzas with toppings like mascarpone and sliced potatoes. The whole crew is sipping bottles of Peroni beer. “I’m not supposed to be drinking,” says Parikh. Responds Krim, vaguely exasperated: “You say that every night!” Everybody laughs. The scene recalls the company’s early days, when they’d gather at a downtown pizza-and-wings spot to drink beer and strategize. Today, with Chapin living on the West Coast, Krim now married, and the whole team feeling the pressures of running a fast-growing enterprise, these kinds of get-togethers are increasingly rare. “It’s good,” says Chapin. “It’s like going old-school.”

If you ask the founders what accounts for their rocketlike ascent, they all say it’s the unique perspective each of them brings—that there are major advantages to having five strong points of view and five different sets of expertise rather than a single domineering vision in the Jobs or Zuckerberg mold. Krim, they all say, has a unique instinct for marketing and a calm demeanor that makes him the ideal CEO. Parikh is the most natural salesman of the bunch—Chapin describes him as “magnetic, just a person that people are drawn to.” Sherwin has a knack for brand-boosting ideas like the Casper Nap Tour, in which a fleet of bed-equipped trucks roam places like South by Southwest offering daytime snoozes. Flateman—who taught himself to code and built Casper’s original, totally bespoke web store—is obsessed with systems and full of factoids like “UPS drivers [mostly] turn right.” (Which is true; look it up!) And all four of them, along with most of their coworkers, seem quietly in awe of the somewhat older Chapin, who spent a decade as a star designer at Ideo before turning his attention to mattresses.

At the center of this looms one big question: What should Casper be? Is it a company known for making one game-changing product and delivering the best possible experience? Or is it something bigger: a platform through which to launch a variety of loosely connected items that all live under the Casper brand? And if it’s the latter, just what does Casper stand for, anyway? This debate has preoccupied the founders since the beginning, when they were scrambling to scale fast enough to just meet demand for their core mattress. On one hand, there were customers asking for ever more products; on the other was a whole host of potential bottlenecks: from a perfectionist design chief and complicated delivery logistics to implementing a seamless customer-service experience and recruiting experts from Google and Amazon to help solve these problems.

Increasingly, the platform side has been winning: Casper sees itself less as a simple mattress company and more as a lifestyle-driven enterprise that looks at sleep as a unique, optimizable category comparable to exercise or cooking or travel. “If I wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to sleep a little bit better,’ I have to go and get a mattress from a furniture store, sheets from Bed Bath & Beyond—you end up having to get things from all these different places,” says Parikh. “But if you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to become a better runner,’ you immediately think Nike. Or, ‘I want to eat healthier,’ great, go to Whole Foods. There’s nothing like that for sleep.”

If you happened to be walking past Krim’s office during a recent meeting he had with Parikh, you might have been surprised to see the two leaders yelling at each other—a disagreement that grew so heated, it seemed like they might start throwing things. The subject of the dispute isn’t important, Parikh says. What matters, he explains, is that this level of charged debate suggests how much the founders’ professional and personal bonds have deepened over the years. In the old days, they might not have felt comfortable enough to freely vent. Today, the four New Yorkers still hang out as much as possible, travel together, enjoy blowout meals at popular new restaurants—and, yes, yell at each other when situations dictate such passion. “We have less of a filter with one another about how we really feel,” the COO says cheerfully. “We don’t have to use politics anymore.”

To Taryn Laeben, Casper’s retailing chief—who joined the company last year after previously having run Kate Spade’s retail operations—that degree of openness is a major strength. “They’re so different from each other, but there’s really no ego in the founding team,” she says. “If you come to a meeting, there’s no culture of holding back because there’s a founder in the room. There isn’t some private place where debates happen. It’s an open community.”

Chapin, by virtue of working in San Francisco and joining the company mid-career, has an interesting perspective on his colleagues. “This sounds really terrible, but I don’t have that much in common with the other guys,” he says. “I don’t know if I would be friends with them if it wasn’t for Casper, other than the one guy [Parikh] that I knew before. I love spending time with them, but they’re very different from the friends I mostly spend time with.” The secret to making it work, all five agree, is trust and deference to the others’ abilities in their domains. “If I’m debating a branding thing with Luke, like, he’s going to own the branding,” Chapin says. “I can’t force my opinion down his throat. It’s about respect—not just respecting the people but their areas of expertise.”

Around the same time, Krim was coming to a similar conclusion. Then a college student at the University of Texas at Austin, he was already entrepreneurial. He had launched an early e-commerce business out of his dorm room, selling everything from blinds to futons—basically anything that could be purchased wholesale from a supplier and shipped directly from the factory to the customer. One of those products, foam mattresses, turned out to have a particularly high profit margin. “That industry was always very behind on embracing technology and anything new,” says the CEO, who has a more buttoned-down style than his colleagues.

Eventually Krim made his way to New York, where he launched a company helping local businesses advertise online, operating out of a coworking space he shared with a trio of younger guys who all went to Brown together, and who continue, Chapin says, to have a unique bond: Parikh, Flateman, and Sherwin. At the time, they were trying to get a startup of their own off the ground (which involved pairing people who had things to sell with online influencers who would promote the products and get a cut). Flateman, who studied music as an undergrad, had taught himself to code on the side. Parikh had just dropped out of medical school after his first year, much to the dismay of his physician father, and was Sherwin’s roommate. The pair even slept on an air mattress together for a while, in an apartment they shared with three other guys. “It was the classic story,” Parikh says. “Move to New York, have no money, share a room, that kind of stuff.”

Given that neither of their startups was exactly thriving, the foursome began looking into the possibility of selling mattresses direct to customers. Almost immediately, the idea felt right to the entire crew. Chapin and Parikh rented a space in Providence, Rhode Island, and started testing prototypes. The company raised $1.6 million in seed capital from a handful of investment firms in early 2014 and officially launched soon after. The timing was fortuitous. Sleep was becoming the hot new thing, with sales of sleep trackers beginning to take off and Arianna Huffington promoting a prominent campaign around the importance of eight hours of high-quality slumber. “There was a tailwind around sleep,” says Sherwin. “Entering the mattress industry was clearly a really smart proposition relative to what we were doing before.”

On the same day as the balloon-man party, Chapin’s West Coast team had its own third-anniversary celebration, and the mood was decidedly more low-key—a trip to a make-your-own-ceramics spot, a few pizzas, some beers at a dive bar. As Casper plots its next phase, some healthy tension has developed between its two coastal operations: the sales-driven mothership in New York and the design-and-engineering-focused satellite in San Francisco.

Chapin’s top priority is to nail the products—something now expected by the passionate followers of the brand that Casper has carefully built. When developing its $125-and-up dog bed, which Casper released last year to strong sales and a jolt of media buzz, Chapin’s team went through dozens of prototypes, each rigorously assessed by actual dogs. (Casper only semi-jokingly refers to the process as “canine-centered design.”) Early this summer, the company rolled out its eighth major item, a $250-plus duck-down duvet, after more than a year of iteration and testing. Chapin experimented with all kinds of synthetic insulation, before settling on down as the most breathable, comfortable, temperature-regulating solution. The shell is made of special featherweight cotton, making the entire thing more cloudlike, and it’s stitched together with baffles inspired by winter puffer coats, keeping the down from clumping.

This summer, Casper opened a new R&D facility in San Francisco, which now allows Chapin’s team to both move faster and push the company forward in several directions at once. They can experiment more with new materials and forms in-house, discovering whether production might be viable without requiring a vendor partner to participate in the research phase. There is also now a team focusing entirely on packaging design, which used to involve a protracted process of sending specs to a vendor, getting samples, and tweaking them over the course of a couple months. Today, using in-house prototyping, “our designers can design it, print it, check it,” Chapin says. “What took six or eight weeks now takes three days.” Casper is also tapping an army of 30,000 fans around the world, who have volunteered to sign NDAs and help with the testing.

Some of Chapin’s big focuses at the moment are the kinds of tech-infused products that he refers to as “connected sleep.” The Casper team has been looking more carefully at what might actually help people get better rest. They have come up with three distinct areas: How do you draw someone into bed? (By, say, making it cozy and warm in the winter.) How do you keep people asleep? (By, for instance, altering the microclimate beneath the covers.) And how do you ease people into the day? (By finding ways to make the waking phase more pleasant.)

Chapin pulls up some images on his MacBook of a sleep lab that Casper had created in a spare conference room. In one, a bed is strewn with several soft, round objects, which turn out to be connected speakers that form a 3-D sonic environment. “The team created a five-minute wake-up experience where you hear birds chirping over here and then wind chimes over there,” he says. “It was a really nice way to wake up.” Other images show heated and cooled pillows, ambient lighting effects, even a little cabinet he calls a “bedroom toaster” that can warm your pajamas in the winter. “Even though I’m obviously a fan of the products we make, these will create more delightful experiences, if we get them right,” he says. “Or we could totally fail and do a crappy job with them, and then [we] probably did brand damage. It’s all in the details of how we execute.”

Chapin has also been spending a lot of time thinking about a different question that could have even more impact: Should Casper launch a second mattress model? From the start, Chapin has been tinkering with the company’s core mattress product, working with a polymer chemist to test sandwiches of various foams and other adjustments. Quietly, he has refined the mattress as he learns (for example, the foam was refined after early iterations firmed up too much in colder climates). It’s a clever design: Layers of memory foam provide the bulk of the support, while a proprietary latex-like top layer keeps the bed cool and provides bounce for what the company’s initial marketing referred to as “indoor sports.”

All of this experimentation hasn’t just made the core product stronger: It has helped Chapin conclude that there might well be room for a second, more technologically advanced mattress to join Casper’s product line. “The testing we’re doing right now, it’s really promising,” he says. “We have to shake out what it’s going to cost us, because some of the things we’re looking at are a little spendy.” He describes a mattress unlike anything currently on the market, built around a stiff endoskeleton similar to a really good shoe insole. “How do you play with support of the mattress in different zones, like under the hips, under the shoulders?” he says. “You can’t add a lot of that support to the top of the mattress; you have to put it deeper down. And that requires some new materials and manufacturing methods that aren’t in this industry. So we’re having to create some new things and then port some stuff over [from] other industries.”

When Casper launched, one of the core assumptions was that the products would mostly appeal to tech-inclined millennials, the group most comfortable with making major purchases online. That turned out to be wrong: Casper’s demographics aren’t much different from those of the mattress industry as a whole—its customers come from every age group and every part of the country. But as much progress as Casper has made in persuading Americans to try out their concept, 90% of shoppers still buy mattresses from a physical store, Krim says.

These moves, the founders hope, will both broaden and better define the Casper brand, and will also help it stay ahead of the dozens of companies it has inspired. Competition is a major worry, with both Big Mattress and other startups angling for Casper’s customers. “The reason there are so many look-alikes out there is that it’s an industry with a very low cost of entry,” says mattress-industry analyst Jerry Epperson Jr., a managing director of the investment firm Mann, Armistead & Epperson. “But Casper raised money early and has raised the most, and now that it has Target as a big brother it has a real competitive advantage. I don’t see any other [online mattress] that’s going to come up and become a more recognizable brand.” Still, there’s quite a bit of pressure to stay ahead, which is why the New York founders are so keen to push the California product-development operation to move faster.

No matter how much they might debate with each other, all five founders do strongly agree about one thing: They aren’t going to break up the band anytime soon. Krim won’t talk specifically about the reported billion-dollar Target offer, but he says that there have been any number of parties seriously interested in acquiring the company—and that in no case have the talks gotten very far. “It’s never been of interest because we’re still very much in building mode,” he says. “We think we have much bigger, brighter days ahead of us. We view what we’re doing as building something that will be great for decades to come.”

What would a festival created just for girls look like?

 “Think Coachella for women,” says Prince Chenoa, founder of content studio and digital teen magazine Galore, “or Lilith Fair for Generation Z.”

Chenoa is describing Girl Cult, billed as a “music festival for kickass women.” The event, which he is organizing, is marketed toward progressive teens who want to “come together and create a new vision, with an undying support for equality” in “these confusing times” reads the website.

It’s being produced by mega concert promoter Goldenvoice in conjunction with Galore, which Chenoa cofounded with his business and romantic partner Jacob Dekat.

The all-day festival will be held in Los Angeles on August 20, with tickets at $29.50, less than half the price of Coachella tickets. It will feature multiple musical performances by young singers like Willow Smith and Beyoncé proteges Chloe x Halle, as well as talks by more seasoned celebrities like Kimora Lee Simmons and Tyra Banks.

There will be a discussion with transgender YouTube star Gigi Gorgeous and actress Jaime King, a sex abuse survivor and female empowerment advocate. Disney star Skai Jackson will share how to handle cyberbullying, which she experienced (the petite 4″8 actress has often been the target of social media taunts).

“It’s an eclectic mix,” explains Chenoa of the lineup, which will lean heavily on musical performances, ranging from alternative to R&B. “There’s something for everyone.”

Indeed, there is a splattering of almost everything–rappers, CEOs, models, social media influencers, and a Swedish pop star, which makes it hard to, at first glance, summarize its intent. What exactly does it mean to have a Gen Z festival—or even a coming together —”for a new vision”?

“[Girl Cult] is centered around female empowerment,” says Chenoa. and each act and speaker was picked for their social awareness or commitment to pushing women’s issues. “They stand for something.”

my heart is broken about the news i heard this morning. someone who chooses to serve this country should not be put on blast for living their truth. to my trans brothers and sisters in the armed forces my thoughts and prayers are with you. this is not a dead end but part of a bigger conversation we need to continue having about #transrights. please please please help spread the message and support anyone and everyone who is defending the country.

A post shared by GIGI GORGEOUS ???????? (@gigigorgeous) on Jul 26, 2017 at 9:23am PDT

Coachella, in comparison, has often been nicknamed “bro-chella” for its predominantly male-skewing lineup. Only 20 percent of this past year’s festival was female-fronted. And although Lady Gaga headlined, she was only the second woman to ever hold that position, following Bjork nearly a decade earlier.

“No guy will be speaking at the festival to these girls,” stresses Chenoa.

A Girl Power Fest Organized By Men

Girl Cult might only be showcasing women, but, I point out in my talk with Chenoa, the female empowerment festival is being executive produced by two men. Could that at all be considered an issue, or an insensitivity to the audience?

Chenoa pauses before answering with a long, drawn-out, “Yeaaah.” He acknowledges the irony. “I could see certain groups having something to say about that.”

The cofounder admits it might inspire some unease, but doubled down on the fact that he doesn’t think his gender should have anything to do “with one’s love and respect for women.”

He explains that as the son of a single working mother, he has nothing but admiration for women, as exemplified by his dedication to a female teen magazine. “We have no other agenda.”

Girl Cult also leans heavily on a diverse lineup of female entertainers. The talent includes African-American singer-songwriter Sevyn Streeter, Latino actress Jenna Ortega, and Canadian songstress Emmalyn, who is of Filipino descent, among a dozen others. Headliner Willow Smith, the daughter of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, has been vocal on a number on social issues, including the importance of diversity within the entertainment and media industry.

“The women of Gen Z need a festival to call their own—to see women like them on the stage… and girls who embody what generation Z aspires to,” says Chenoa. “Diversity is something we can’t strive enough for.”

Gen Z Rising

Gen Z is classified as those born after 1995. The “digital native” generation makes up roughly 25% of the U.S. population and is set to eclipse millennials in numbers in the coming decade. They are a unique group: Having been brought up on the internet, 85% relies almost exclusively on mobile for news and shopping, with an average attention span of 8 seconds, 4 seconds less than that of millennials, according to Anna Fieler, executive vice president of marketing at Popsugar. Gen Z is also probably geared to be the most tolerant and diverse of any generation, with 50% identifying as mixed race or as part of an ethnic group.

As Fast Company writer Elizabeth Segran noted,“They grew up with a black man as the leader of the free world, with women in positions of power in the workplace, and with openly gay celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper, and Neil Patrick Harris.”

So, it makes sense that female teens wouldn’t be satisfied by male-dominated acts and excessive, meaningless partying at competing festivals; they’re interested is something that feels more inclusive, important, and timely. They care. They are, as the kids say, “woke.”

????// @existentialcrisisboy // possibly dropping a song on <SoundCloud> 2nite #4thelighteaters

A post shared by ≠GWEELOS≠ (@willowsmith) on Jun 27, 2017 at 4:22pm PDT

Lexie Jiaris, production manager for Goldenvoice, sees a generation of girls who are politically engaged, with their constant phone use keeping them in the know. Why not, then, let them share their passion for social justice in real life?

“The younger girls right now on social media are very inspired by being politically correct,” says Jiaris, adding, “and coming together and hating Trump. They are very open-minded, open to people of all genders, aware of racial situations going on and openly discussing it.”

While a conference geared toward communal hatred of a president sounds awfully political, Girl Cult’s organizers are quick to point out that they don’t consider the festival a politically charged gathering.

But when I ask Chenoa, for example, what the conference means by “for girls in these confusing times,” he admits it is indeed a reference to Trump (“he is not about female empowerment in any way,” he quickly asserts).

In the same breath, Chenoa reiterates that while the festival will have political leanings–with discussions on women’s rights, climate change, HIV awareness, and the Black Lives Matter movement–“this is not a hate Trump rally.”

Fans of Galore certainly wouldn’t be surprised by the anti-Trump sentiment; they’re quite accustomed to it. A quick scan of the teen mag’s recent social media postings includes standouts like “our raging garbage fire in chief really did it this time,” about the president’s declaration on transgender military personnel. A fashion guide to the Fourth of July was headlined, “How To Wear Red, White & Blue Without Looking Trumpy,” while a First Daughter takedown was titled “Ivanka Trump Spent Last Night Liking Photos of Herself.” (The majority of articles, however, center on average teen issues, like beauty, entertainment, and dating, along with interviews of teen stars like Kendall Jenner. It’s like an edgier, more inclusive and accessible Teen Vogue.)

One Big Anti-Trump Rally?

Chenoa believes the commander-in-chief will not dominate the festival’s message, though it seems unlikely that—considering the lineup and organizer’s leanings—it won’t get political. “This is all about love and female empowerment,” he says. “We want it to be uplifting.” The first conference is based in Los Angeles since it’s a central breeding ground for liberal, progressive, and diverse teens.

I'll be there! Excited to be speaking at @girlcultfest ! Get your tix to come out and see me.

A post shared by Skai ♛ (@skaijackson) on Jul 25, 2017 at 1:53pm PDT

So far, the event is nearly sold out, with Galore adding new acts and speakers each week. Girl Cult is starting with a theater that fits 1,200 but plans on expanding in the coming year with more events at even bigger venues.

Chenoa sees the opportunity to grow Girl Cult into a movement that extends beyond the one-day festival. With readers so thoroughly connected on social media, he explains, they’re able to foster a community that can keep the festival’s spirit alive all throughout the year–until the next event. As part of that initiative, the event will be broadcast live on Facebook.

“It could grow into something that could potentially be the largest female empowerment festival in the world,” says Chenoa. “That’s what we’re going for.”

Now that girls will have their own festival, can we expect the same for the boys? Will the male counterparts of Gen Z one day have Boy Cult? Surely, they care too.

Chenoa laughs, responding with a definitive no. “There are a lot of things out there for guys,” he explains, noting that they are more than welcome to join in at Girl Cult.

But as for a LGBT Cult festival? That’s another story.

“I might entertain doing something,” says Chenoa.

According to the newsletter put out this morning by Axios’s Dan Primack, 500 Startups didn’t bother telling its limited partners or employees about the sexual harassment allegations against founder Dave McClure. They found out the way the rest of us did—through the recent New York Times article that revealed McClure had allegedly made advances toward Proday founder Sarah Kunst.

Axios obtained the recording of a call between current 500 Startups CEO Christine Tsai and the firm’s limited partners, which took place a few days after the Times story was published. Turns out the company was aware of allegations against McClure—presumably those brought forward by Kunst—as early as last year:

In late 2016, the management team was made aware of inappropriate comments that Dave had made to a potential investment team candidate, prior to her entering a formal interview process back in 2014. At the time we believed we addressed it appropriately with Dave. In April of this year we were informed of an incident involving Dave and an employee. Upon investigation we felt we needed to take significant action.

Tsai claimed that “the only person who had the legal authority to make Dave resign was Dave himself,” which is why the firm only requested that he scale back his responsibilities. When McClure did so in May, 500 Startups conveyed the news to its employees—albeit not to its partners—but didn’t reveal what had prompted it. “We did not disclose the reason for this transition to respect privacy,” Tsai said. (McClure eventually fessed to being a “creep” and resigned altogether, but only after the Times article.)

Here’s something companies should probably keep in mind going forward: Employees have a right to know if their boss is making unwanted advances toward fellow employees.

Getting the police to wear body cameras has been welcomed by both activists and law enforcement officials as a way of increasing transparency, especially in light of recent high-profile fatal shootings. But they’ve actually proven more illuminating at exposing a different type of police misconduct: Fake evidence. It isn’t a new problem in policing, but body cameras in Baltimore have given the public a high-definition glimpse into the phenomenon in recent weeks, with the emergence of videos allegedly showing officers planting drugs. City prosecutors are now re-examining hundreds of cases.

By Friday, state’s attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby had thrown out 41 cases because of “credibility” concerns arising from a video her office released last month. Shot in January, the clip appeared to show an officer planting drugs in an abandoned lot as two other officers looked on.

This week, the city’s public defender’s office discovered another set of disturbing videos. Shot in November, one of them shows an officer appearing to plant something in the front seat of a suspect’s car during a traffic stop as six other officers stood by. That the officers may have been “working together to manufacture evidence,” as Mosby’s office described the video in a statement, was what was “most concerning” about the video, she told CBS Baltimore.

“I think they put something in my car,” Shamere Collins, 35, whose car appears in the new videos, told NBC News.

In the initial video, Officer Richard Pinheiro appears not to realize that his camera is recording as he places a bag of drugs inside a coffee can in a trash-strewn lot: the department’s body cameras feature a 30-second buffer, which means the devices automatically record the 30 seconds of video just before an officer presses the record button, though without audio.

Last week, Mosby announced the dismissal of felony drug and gun charges in dozens of cases that rely on the testimony of Pinheiro, and two other officers at the scene, Hovhannes Simonyan and Jamal Brunson. This week, her office said 27 cases were proceeding on the strength of “independent corroborative evidence” while 55 more were being reviewed. Pinheiro has been suspended, and the other two were placed on administrative duty amid an investigation.

The videos that surfaced this week date to a drug arrest on November 29, 2016. Police said they witnessed a man get into his girlfriend’s car with what they believed was a bag of drugs, so they stopped and searched the car and the two individuals.

“Your passenger is under arrest because your car smells like weed,” one officer says when the woman asks why she is being asked to get out of her car, in one video. “I’m putting handcuffs on you because there’s drugs in your car,” an officer says later. “You didn’t show me any drugs,” the woman says. In the videos, officers can be seen searching around the driver’s seat of the car for several minutes but finding nothing.

Then, 30 minutes later, separate body camera videos show one officer crouching near the seat as his colleagues watch. When he steps back, other officers can be seen switching on their cameras. This is when the audio kicks in. Again, the officers appear not to realize that the previous 30 seconds had been recorded prior to the cameras’ activation.

“Now?” someone says. Then another officer approaches the seat and quickly makes a discovery. “Oh, here you go,” he says, holding a black bag that allegedly contained marijuana. “That’s the weed smell right there.”

Shamere Collins, one of the suspects in the video, told NBC News she was a recreational marijuana smoker, but said she was shocked to learn the police discovered bags of weed and heroin in her car. “My mind — I went numb like — I didn’t know what was going on. They [were] telling me I was facing time and all this … so it’s like I felt numb. I didn’t know what to do.”

Engineering Or Reenacting?

The clips, released by Collins’s lawyer on Monday, prompted prosecutors to drop her case, as well as related charges against a defendant in another drug-related case, said the city’s public defender. The state’s attorney’s office also said it was requesting postponements on all cases requiring testimony from two officers involved in the new case, but warned not to jump to conclusions.

“Before we blanketly characterize their behavior as deceptive and/or a credibility issue, we referred the matter to the Internal Affairs Division of the Baltimore Police Department,” wrote Melba Saunders, a spokeswoman for the office. The department has launched an investigation, but has not named the six officers involved. None of them has been suspended, but two were referred to the department’s internal affairs division.

Police spokespeople described the videos as disturbing but suggested that officers may sometimes reenact previous searches for evidence when they haven’t caught the original discovery on camera. “I think it’s irresponsible to jump to a conclusion that the police officers were engaged in criminal misconduct,” commissioner Kevin Davis told reporters. “That’s a heavy allegation to make.”

In a memo he sent to the force on Wednesday, he instructed officers not to reenact evidence discovery. “In the event your body worn camera is not activated during the recovery of evidence, under no circumstances shall you attempt to recreate the recovery of evidence after re-activating your body worn camera,” his memo said. “If you must deactivate your body worn camera during an incident, merely explain the reasoning on camera (e.g., to protect the identity of a witness who wishes to remain anonymous, etc.).”

According to an audit by the department published earlier this year, of 3,290 recordings saved by some 500 officers, one-third of the inspection reports show violations because officers either did not record an encounter or store video as required. A spokesman said officers have been disciplined for violations of the policy. During the program’s first six months, 47 videos were sent to internal affairs for review of possible officer misconduct, according to the police website about the program.

More and more, body cameras are capturing the life on duty of police officers—from deadly use-of-force incidents and suspicious traffic stops to lesser-seen feats of heroism. The devices—which can cost a few hundred dollars per device, plus hundreds more in storage fees—have also caught officers behaving badly in non-violent ways. In a body camera video that emerged in April, a Pueblo, Colorado, officer named Seth Jensen was captured allegedly staging a drug find in a vehicle, sounding “surprised” when he finds cash and heroin. Felony drug and weapons charges were dismissed against the suspect, but no public action was taken against him. In October a veteran Denver police officer, Julan Archuleta, was caught allegedly stealing $1,200 in cash from a suspect’s car, again thanks to a camera he was wearing.

And an untold amount of evidence manipulation can happen off camera, too. In April, Massachusetts threw out more than 20,000 drug cases after a state chemist admitted to years of falsifying drug test results.

Related: Body Cameras Will Do More Than Just Record You

“The Truth” And Its Limits

Baltimore’s police force has been under scrutiny—and federal review—since 2014, when Freddy Gray died in the back of a police van. All the officers involved had their charges dropped or were acquitted by July 2016. But the following month, a Justice Department study found that the city’s police department “engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

Since body cameras were first deployed in May 2016—there are 1,500 deployed now, and 2,500 scheduled for next year—the city has witnessed a new kind of police transparency. In one prominent clip from earlier this year, an undercover officer was captured fatally shooting a suspect after he pointed a loaded handgun at the officer during a foot chase. The department released the video about a day after the daytime incident to demonstrate that the shooting was justified, and to forestall the potential public outcry in a city where trust in the police has worn thin.

The faith in cameras to improve police-community relations, or at least get closer to “the truth,” even inspired the slogan of the company that dominates the electric weapons and body camera business, and makes the cameras worn by Baltimore’s officers: “Protect Life, Protect Truth,” is how Axon, formerly Taser International, describes its mission.

In light of the assertions about so-called biological differences in the now infamous anti-diversity memo from a Google engineer, the results of employee personality tests from several major tech companies take on an interesting meaning. A recent analysis by Good&Co reveals a startling equality in the personalities of Google’s male and female employees.

Good&Co used their proprietary data to analyze the personality traits of 1,029 male and female employees. They gathered the data from assessment tests that they gave at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Uber.

The study found that Google’s workforce demonstrated no differences between male and female personality traits. The research team writes, “Like Apple, Google is probably enticing women who are more similar to their male counterparts. Google women are as inquisitive, driven, extroverted, and confident as men employees.”