If there were any lingering doubts that President Donald Trump does not intend to be known as the champion of LGBT rights that Candidate Donald Trump was vowing himself to be this time last year, his administration put them to rest last month. In an unusual brief filed in a New York federal court last month, the Justice Department declared LGBT Americans to be unprotected by federal non-discrimination statutes that Obama officials had previously considered to cover them.

The move wasn’t so much a rewriting of law as a reversal in the interpretation of it. Despite decades of efforts, the 1964 Civil Rights Act  has never been amended to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity under Title VII, whose language bars discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Related:How Obama Left Trump An Opening To Attack LGBT Rights

Even before the Justice Department’s change in position last month, LGBT employees across the U.S. were subject to dramatically different employment protections depending on where they live, ranging from robust to virtually none at all. (Title VII’s protections, it should be noted, only cover workers at companies that employ 15 people or more.) Now that the Justice Department has clarified that it sees previous, more inclusive rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as legally meritless, states that lack LGBT non-discrimination protections are left wondering which of those two federal agencies to abide by.

Nevertheless, Trump’s tenure in the White House hasn’t dramatically changed the patchwork legal landscape that existed before he took office. Since Fast Company last surveyed LGBT workplace protections in March 2016, that map is virtually unchanged.

New York state recently added gender identity to its non-discrimination protections alongside sexual orientation (while Florida, despite experiencing a devastating mass shooting targeting a gay nightclub in Orlando last year, notably has not). Eleven states offer employment protections that cover public employees only, and five of them (Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, and Alaska) address just sexual orientation, leaving trans employees without legal recourse.

Two states whose non-discrimination provisions affect private employers, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, likewise lack language on gender identity. The states that actually bar discrimination for both sexual orientation and gender identity in both the public and private sector are still in the minority: 20 do so, plus the District of Columbia.

The Election Impact

But despite the fact that it’s still legal for companies in 28 states to fire employees for being gay or transgender–and notwithstanding Trump’s manifest hostility to LGBT rights–there are signs this year that political winds are blowing over that map in a more inclusive direction.

“We haven’t seen any states change their state nondiscrimination laws since the November election,” Naomi Goldberg, Policy and Research director at the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT advocacy group, points out–itself a significant development considering that some states have taken dramatic steps to curb reproductive rights since Trump’s win (with lawmakers in at least one instance explicitly citing his victory as their cue).

“However, a number of cities have passed nondiscrimination ordinances at the local level, including Jacksonville, Florida, and Akron, Ohio,” says Goldberg.  And even though three states–Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina–have passed laws barring the enactment or enforcement of local measures like these, similar efforts are proliferating across the country.

In addition, Goldberg continues, “several states passed other positive LGBT legislation during this recent legislative cycle, such as bans on harmful conversion therapy practices in Connecticut and Nevada and the addition of non-binary gender options on driver’s licenses in Oregon. Additionally, a number of hostile bills were defeated, including a bill in Texas that would have impacted employees by limiting restroom access for transgender people.”

Related:What It’s Like To Transition At Work

Advocates In Business

Selisse Berry, CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, sees a clear trend here, and she sees the business community as partly responsible for it. Not only are many companies adopting their own policies to protect LGBT employees, but some are actively lobbying lawmakers and courts to expand and defend LGBT rights as well. “In 1996, only 4% of Fortune 500 companies welcomed LGBT people with inclusive policies and protections,” Berry observes. “Today 96% of those companies do.”

Many of those companies have been more vocal about their support under Trump than they have in the past, says Goldberg. “When legislators in Texas pushed an anti-transgender bill into a special legislative session, for example, a coalition of businesses in the state spoke out.” That measure died with little fanfare earlier this month, reportedly in part because businesses including the NCAA and NFL came out forcefully against it.

Related: Five Ways The Trump Administration Can Help LGBT Workers (With Minimal Political Effort)

And because these highly publicized battles have now been fought before, companies are getting better at mounting a defense. Texas businesses, says Goldberg, “presented statistics that [the] anti-trans bill could cost the state $5.6 billion in lost economic investment. They relied on estimates based on the actual losses experienced by North Carolina’s economy following their anti-LGBT HB-2 bill.” Goldberg says, “After all, companies know what is best for business, and discrimination isn’t it.”

What’s more, Berry points out, “in committing to these safeguards, employers should recognize that they’re always defending more people than they actually know about.” Roughly half of U.S. employees still aren’t out at work, she explains, citing a 2014 Human Rights Campaign report, and adds that even in technology (a sector lately derided by some on the right as a bastion of liberal thought) LGBT workers are more likely to be bullied than their non-LGBT colleagues. According to a Kapor Center study released last spring, 64% of LGBT tech employees who’d been harassed at work said their experience led them to look for new jobs.

“Which is to say that U.S. employers still have a major stake in this issue,” says Berry. “When LGBT workers feel unsafe or unwelcome, they become part of a hiring and retention problem that many corporations already say is out of hand. Add that business problem to the obvious moral one,” she continues, “and you’ve got the makings of a powerful force for resisting the Trump Administration’s curtailment of LGBT rights.”

Catching Up With Public Opinion

Indeed, the current state-by-state picture of LGBT non-discrimination protections no longer reflects public opinion. Last March, a PRRI poll found that 70% of Americans back laws to protect LGBT people from discrimination in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations, compared with just 26% who don’t. The president’s claims in 2016 to support LGBT Americans put him on the right side of history and public opinion. It’s his actions in 2017, which have since proved those claims hollow, that don’t.

Two years ago, as part of a mobility initiative, the New York Police Department bought 36,000 new smartphones for its employees. Generally, these sorts of upgrade projects are good. However, this one was not–namely, because the force decided to use Windows Phones.

Now the New York Post reports that the NYPD has to scrap all of these phones because Microsoft announced it would stop supporting the operating system the phones run on. So after handing out tens of thousands of phones that have MSRPs of at least $200 (although the NYPD likely got a bulk discount), the department has been left with outdated devices. Now the officers are getting boring old iPhones.

This likely could have been avoided had the department called in a few experts to help guide the mobility program.

What: A three-minute ad from Cisco starring Peter Dinklage talking about the company’s new intuitive network.

Who: Cisco, Ogilvy & Mather

Why we care: THRONES! OK, ok, sure there’re no dragons, no White Walkers, no Starks, no Lannisters, no Targaryens. Hell, here Dinklage doesn’t even have a beard. But still, the man who brings Tyrion Lannister to life on Game of Thrones has such a compelling screen presence that he forces you to pay attention. And when he’s talking about the glorious potential and significant danger associated with our ever-connected world, he does it in a way that makes this largely corporate offering seem relevant and important to anyone and everyone.

In a blog post, Cisco CMO Karen Walker writes, “Peter Dinklage is the perfect messenger because of his global fame and ability to speak in a bold, intelligent, and captivating way. As he wanders through the streets of London, you hang on to each of his words as he describes just how simple–and monumental–the new network is.”

As Hurricane Harvey continues to batter Texas–with as many as five reported fatalities–residents are trying to receive help and updates any way they can. Snapchat, specifically, has seen a marked uptick in usage.

Snap tells Fast Company it has seen between 250,000 and 300,000 submissions to its Harvey section of Stories, which is more than double what the app saw during last year’s Louisiana floods.

Additionally, Snap says that its new Map feature has been seeing newly strategic use–for example, by giving people a more immediate way to announce where power went out.

Just insane video coming in from around Houston on the Snap map, inside homes and neighborhoods pic.twitter.com/wMNPZJ9JNU

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) August 27, 2017

These days, phone interviews are an unavoidable part of the job interview process, and for good reason: They save everyone involved time and effort. But that doesn’t mean that phoners require zero energy on the part of the candidate. Yes, you should spend more time preparing for an in-person interview, but many companies treat phone screens as the official first round of the hiring process. That means candidates are expected to go into them prepared with as much information about the company, position, and their own skills and strengths as possible.

We asked HR pros about their top phone interview pet peeves, and they had no shortage of advice to offer. Apparently, it’s quite easy to mess up your phone interview. But here’s the thing: It’s also not hard to come across well if you keep some key things in mind.

1. Never Take The Interview Somewhere Noisy

It might seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised what interviewers say they can hear in the background of their phone interviews–everything from barking dogs to screaming children. “Prepare for the interview by securing a quiet space in advance, even if it means escaping to your car parked in the garage,” advises Chere Taylor, founder of Fulcrum HR Consulting. “If you can lock your home office door, by all means do it. We’ve all been there and sometimes things just happen, but the more time spent anticipating what could go wrong, the better prepared and organized you will appear to the interviewer and the greater likelihood of success.” That doesn’t mean that if your washing machine beeps once in the background all hope is lost, but the more effort you put into being in a quiet place, the more focused you’ll be.

Related:What The Interview Process Is Like At Google, Apple, Amazon, And Other Tech Companies 

2. Don’t Talk About Your Personal Life

…Unless you’re directly asked a question about what you like to do in your off-hours. “The point of a phone interview is to focus on getting to know a candidate’s professional experience and goals,” says Mckenzie Roark, campus talent specialist at Lithko Contracting. “A recruiter is trying to qualify them to see if they are the best fit for a role, and learning about their personal life doesn’t help. For example, when asked where you see yourself in five years, we don’t want to know that you hope to be married or that you want to buy a new house. That is nice but that isn’t relative to anything professional.”

3. Resist The Urge To Multitask

It might be tempting to cross something off your to-do list while on a phone interview, but recruiters and hiring managers can easily tell if your attention is elsewhere. “My number-one pet peeve is people who decide to multitask while on the phone interview,” says Dan Krupansky, talent acquisition manager at PrimePay. “I have heard candidates washing dishes, making lunch in the microwave, going for walks, letting their dog out, and grocery shopping during the interview. I even had one person use the bathroom and flush the toilet while speaking with me.” Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect well on your level of interest in the position you’re interviewing for.

4. Skip The Money Conversation

To put it bluntly, it’s simply too early in the process for you to be the one who brings up salary expectations. “Chances are if a candidate is participating in a phone interview, this is the first time they have talked with the company, and the first call isn’t the appropriate time to talk about ‘what’s in it for you,'” says Justina Strnad, the talent acquisition manager for Shiftgig. “Trust me, if you are a great candidate and make it to the next steps, the hiring team is going to be very transparent about what’s in it for you later on!”

Related:These Are The Biggest Mistakes People Make During Interviews 

5. Never Put Your Interviewer On Hold

Phone interviews don’t take that long, and there probably isn’t anything else going on that is really truly so urgent that you need to pause your interview. “Do not put me on hold to take an important call that just beeped in,” advises Jeremy Payne, head of people operations at Remote Year. “I am your important call. If you are expecting extremely urgent news (like information about a family illness), be sure to preface that in the early minutes of the interview, so the recruiter is aware of the situation and so you can work with them to reschedule if that interruption does occur,” he says.

6. Never Skip The Q&A

“After wrapping up a phone interview, it is typical that the interviewer will ask the candidate if they have any questions. I can’t stress this enough: always ask questions,” says Roark. “If we have had a great phone interview and then we wrap up and they don’t have any questions for me, it pretty much ruins the whole interview. It tells me that the candidate is uninterested in the role, which in reality, might not be the case at all,” she notes. But surely, if you’re interested in a job, you can think of something to ask your interviewer.

7. Don’t Be Late

It seems basic, but surprisingly, a lot of people are late to phone interviews. “About a quarter of the people with whom I schedule phone interviews aren’t on time,” says Sophie Cikovsky, who handles U.S. recruiting for Infinite Global. “While this bothers me personally, it’s also indicative of someone who isn’t very detail-oriented,” she explains. “In order to identify this early in the hiring process, I started asking all candidates a few years ago to call me as opposed to calling them at an agreed-upon time. That way if I hear from them at 1:13 p.m. or 12:49 p.m. instead of our planned 1:00 p.m. interview time, I have an early indicator that they might not be a great fit.”

8. Don’t Assume Reception Is Good

“Make sure you test your headset and connection before dialing in,” recommends Payne. “There is nothing more frustrating for a recruiter who has a structured interview guide in place having to repeatedly ask the same question over and over because they could not understand your answer due to static or dropped signals.” Test call a friend beforehand or even call yourself from a landline if necessary; it will take less than a minute.

9. Never Talk Over The Interviewer

You might be eager to get your point across or talk about your experience, but interrupting the interviewer is awkward and rude when you’re speaking on the phone, even more so than in face-to-face interviews. “Interviewing can be stressful and sometimes that stress manifests itself in speaking too fast, speaking too loud, talking over the interviewer, or attempting to answer the interviewer’s question before they have actually finished asking the question,” says Taylor. “Don’t do this.” There’s a big difference between being assertive and being aggressive, and interviewers can always recognize it.

10. Skip Filler Words

It’s tough not to say things like “um,” “uh,” and “like” in everyday speech, but these verbal habits become much more pronounced when speaking on the phone, says Chris Dardis, a recruiting expert and HR professional with Versique Executive Search. “In face-to-face interviews, they’re not as noticeable because there are other things like your hair, suit, or body language to distract people,” he explains. But in a phone interview, the only thing you have to go on is what you say and how you say it. “That’s why it’s so important to eliminate these words from your speech when doing a phone interview.”

11. Don’t Go In Blind

Not knowing anything about the company or job you’re interviewing for is way more obvious than you’d think. “Many people think that a phone interview means they’re getting away with something, that they don’t have to put as much effort into researching the role or company,” says Steve Pritchard, HR consultant for giffgaff. And if you have your laptop in front of you during the interview to do a few quick searches, they won’t know the difference, right? Not exactly. “Seasoned interviewers will know whether an interviewee is researching while on the phone; they will take too long to answer the question and punctuate their answers with a lot of ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ as they type. The interviewer can often even hear the typing as they ask the question,” he adds.

12. Nix Long-Winded Answers

“The key to success during a phone interview is clear and concise answers,” says Dardis. “People’s attention spans tend to be shorter over the phone. You don’t want your future employer to lose interest in the conversation.” He recommends practicing answers to questions you know will be asked ahead of time in order to be clear on what you’re going to say. That way, you can prevent rambling before it starts.

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

It’s been a real rollercoaster ride in the theme park of Taylor Swift public opinion recently. First, she was up, riding high on the strength of a classy and empowering court victory against a groping DJ. Then came last week. It started with the reveal of her new album, Reputation, and its cover art, which was perhaps most accurately described as looking like a “straight-to-Hulu documentary about the sensational murder trial of a mysterious babysitter.”

The situation only worsened when Swift dropped that album’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” last Thursday night. It was lambasted on social media (and certain newsroom conversations) for much of Friday. People rolled their eyes at the bouncy anthem’s not-even-thinly-veiled Kanye disses, and the bratty drama of this spoken-word nugget: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone. Why? Because she’s dead.”

Swift also released some images hyping the release of a music video, which would premiere during Sunday night’s VMAs on MTV. Many pointed online out that one of these images looked suspiciously like a co-opting of Beyoncé’s “Formation” aesthetic, vaulting it to instant meme status. Between all these factors, Swift went into the weekend looking like a joke. Ultimately, however, most of the eye-rolling could have probably been avoided had she simply released the video before the single.

The video for “Look What You Made Me Do” is way more playfully self-deprecating than just the song itself might seem. Far from the “Formation” appropriation many feared, it turns out to be a send-up of previous iterations of Taylor Swift, and an acknowledgement that they are all part of the same continuum.

Directed by Joseph Kahn, who also helmed the video for “Bad Blood,”“Look” begins with a swooping view through a graveyard, specifically a tombstone that reads, “Here lies Taylor Swift’s reputation.” Suddenly, the name of her album seems more reasonable, removed from the context of its cover art, which looks like a Trump-like blistering screed against the media. Swift herself soon emerges, Carrie-style, from her grave, a desiccated corpse. Over the rest of the video, it becomes clear that with this song, Swift is owning up to things she’s been called out for over the years–aware that they were necessary for her to become who she is now.

Midway through the video, Swift appears a top a mountain of discarded previous versions of herself which viewers will recognize from various videos. She referencing the wince-inducing “I <3 TS" shirt Tom Hiddleston wore last year in a widely circulated paparazzi photo, and even her old tendency to pull a surprised face at award shows, despite almost always winning armloads of awards at every show.

The at-first-blush embarrassing “Because she’s dead” line now makes more sense, a compliment to the “I rose from the dead, I do it all the time” refrain in the chorus, with the visual accompaniment of so many Taylors past. With this video, fans and detractors alike now have a clearer idea about what the thrust of the album might entail. On top of all that, because of the genuinely creepy corpse makeup effects, this video stands a chance of being a newfangled “Thriller” to the current generation of kids who aren’t old enough to have seen horror movies. If so, that would be something Swift would never want to publicly disown at a later date.

What: An in-depth look at twist endings.

Who: YouTubers Now You See It.

Why we care: Following perhaps the least necessary spoiler alert of all time, considering the name of this video, “How to Do a Plot Twist” makes a convincing case for what makes for a satisfying ending, and what doesn’t. Apparently, the thing to avoid is a twist that relies on shock above logic. The video uses as its test cases the films Now You See Me, Primal Fear, and The Prestige. As a courtesy, I will not spoil which of these films demonstrates how to do a good twist, and which does the opposite.

NOAA’s National Weather Service said today it had to add new colors to its precipitation graphics to effectively visualize the amount of rainfall that has battered the Texas coast as a result of Hurricane Harvey. The agency tweeted before-and-after versions of the graphics, with the latter showing three additional shades of purple to account for observed precipitation levels of over 15 inches. The charts document rainfall amounts through Monday morning, Houston time. According to the NWS’s latest alert, storm totals could approach 50 inches in some locations.

#Harvey in perspective. So much rain has fallen, we’ve had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it. pic.twitter.com/Su7x2K1uuz

— NWS (@NWS) August 28, 2017

Laura and Kelly Moffat founded Kirrin Finch—a clothing company focused on tomboy and androgynous styles that are tailored for women but inspired by men’s fashion.

The days of bobbing your head back and forth to follow a tennis match may be coming to an end. With the U.S. Open happening this week, the United States Tennis Association partnered with Snap to offer Snapchat Spectacles vending machines on the grounds of New York’s USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center. So now you can watch the big tournament through Snap’s smart glasses—I mean, if you want to.

The bright-yellow vending machines (Snap calls them Snapbots) were carted in by truck, boat, and helicopter, making Spectacles available for purchase throughout the two-week tournament. The U.S. Open starts today and goes through September 10. The Spectacle activation will give tennis fans “the ability to share their tennis stories through their own viewpoints using Spectacles, HD filming sunglasses,” according to a press release.

Spectacles were released last year, but Snap indicated in its most recent earnings report that sales of the smart glasses are already slumping. Maybe this week’s tennis hookup will encourage more poeple to give them some love (sorry).

Open data may sound like a nerdy thing, but this weekend has proven it’s also a lifesaver in more ways than one.

As Hurricane Harvey pelted the southern coast of Texas, a local open-data resource helped provide accurate and up-to-date information to the state’s residents. Inside Harris County’s intricate bayou system–intended to both collect water and effectively drain it–gauges were installed to sense when water is overflowing. The sensors transmit the data to a website, which has become a vital go-to for Houston residents.

Since the storm hit, many of the bayous have completely run over, says Rafael Lemaitre, the former national director of public affairs at FEMA, who currently lives in Houston. He routinely checked the flood gauge website over the weekend, as did many residents in the Houston area. They watched intently as green marks on the page turned to red, indicating that the water was rising. “I know a lot of my neighbors rely on that during during the storms,” he says.

Houston/Harris county flood gauges yesterday vs today. Red = water over banks. #Harveypic.twitter.com/s0dKcy8bT7

— Rafael Lemaitre (@ItsRafLemaitre) August 27, 2017

This open access to flood gauges is just one of the many ways new tech-driven projects have helped improve responses to disasters over the years. “There’s no question that technology has played a much more significant role,” says Lemaitre, “since even Hurricane Sandy.”

While Sandy was noted in 2012 for its ability to connect people with Twitter hashtags and other relatively nascent social apps like Instagram, the last few years have brought a paradigm shift in terms of how emergency relief organizations integrate technology into their responses.

Social Networks Now Play An Indispensable Role

Many Texans have been taking to apps and websites to help document their troubles and need for assistance during Harvey. Snapchat, which barely existed when Hurricane Sandy struck five years ago, has emerged as a popular destination for live storm updates. Thousands of people have posted updates about their surroundings using the app; they’ve also used it to report events such as power outages.

Snap tells Fast Company that it’s seen a marked uptick of usage over the last weekend, with as many as 300,000 posts submitted to the Harvey “Our Stories” section. Similarly, the Map section, which shows area where many people are using the app, has helped present up-to-date information about areas that need emergency assistance.

Facebook has been another platform for disaster citizen engagement, particularly with the emergence of Facebook Live. Not only are people marking themselves as “safe” to inform loved ones, but many are posting video pleas to help get the word out about where action is needed.

Updated Disaster Relief For A New Era

Social media isn’t just for the residents. Local and national agencies–including FEMA–rely on this information and are using it to help create faster and more effective disaster responses. Following the disaster with Hurricane Katrina, FEMA worked over the last decade to revamp its culture and methods for reacting to these sorts of situations. “You’re seeing the federal government adapt pretty quickly,” says Lemaitre.

There are a few examples of this. For instance, FEMA now has an app to push necessary information about disaster preparedness. The agency also employs people to cull the open web for information that would help make its efforts better and more effective. These “social listeners” look at all the available Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media posts in aggregate. Crews are brought on during disasters to gather intelligence, and then report about areas that need relief efforts–getting “the right information to the right people,” says Lemaitre.

There’s also been a change in how this information is used. Often, when disasters are predicted, people send supplies to the affected areas as a way to try and help out. Yet they don’t know exactly where they should send it, and local organizations sometimes become inundated. This creates a huge logistical nightmare for relief organizations that are sitting on thousands of blankets and tarps in one place when they should be actively dispersing them across hundreds of miles.

“Before, you would just have a deluge of things dropped on top of a disaster that weren’t particularly helpful at times,” says Lemaitre. Now people are using sites like Facebook to ask where they should direct the supplies. For example, after a bad flood in Louisiana last year, a woman announced she had food and other necessities on Facebook and was able to direct the supplies to an area in need. This, says Lemaitre, is “the most effective way.”

Put together, Lemaitre has seen agencies evolve with technology to help create better systems for quicker disaster relief. This has also created a culture of learning updates and reacting in real time. Meanwhile, more data is becoming open, which is helping both people and agencies alike. (The National Weather Service, which has long trumpeted its open data for all, has become a revered stalwart for such information, and has already proven indispensable in Houston.)

Most important, the pace of technology has caused organizations to change their own procedures. Twelve years ago, during Katrina, the protocol was to wait until an assessment before deploying any assistance. Now organizations like FEMA know that just doesn’t work. “You can’t afford to lose time,” says Lemaitre. “Deploy as much as you can and be fast about it–you can always scale back.”

It’s important to note that, even with rapid technological improvements, there’s no way to compare one disaster response to another–it’s simply not apples to apples. All the same, organizations are still learning about where they should be looking and how to react, connecting people to their local communities when they need them most.

“Citizens and neighbors will always help each other out,” says Lemaitre. The uptick of various apps and open data, however, “allowed people to come together and get focused, as well as connect people the resources they need in a much faster way.”

MapLight is a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.

Four major internet service providers that support a Trump administration plan to eliminate net neutrality rules have outspent online giants such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google by a 3-to-1 margin when it comes to contributing money to members of a key House panel, according to a MapLight analysis.

The companies–Comcast Corp., AT&T, Verizon, and Charter Communications–have contributed $1.9 million to the 55 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee since 2015. More than $1.2 million has gone to Republican lawmakers, who have scheduled a Sept. 7 hearing to consider legislative options for repealing Obama-era regulations that require internet companies to treat all content equally.

The issue also continues to simmer at regulatory agencies. The Federal Communications Commission announced last week that it will give Americans more time to weigh in on a regulatory proposal that would essentially eliminate net neutrality. The comment period, originally set to expire Wednesday, was extended to Aug. 30 after drawing more than 20 million responses.

The Trump administration’s push to eliminate net neutrality rules marks the second major policy shift with the potential to significantly erode online consumer rights. President Donald Trump signed legislation in April allowing internet providers to sell customers’ private browser histories, despite a March HuffPost/YouGov poll showing that 83% of adults considered it to be a bad idea.

Support for rolling back net neutrality rules isn’t much more popular. Sixty percent of registered voters said in a Morning Consult/Politico poll that the FCC shouldn’t allow internet providers to “block, throttle, or prioritize certain content on the internet.” The FCC proposal is generally favored by large internet service providers and opposed by major content companies such as Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix. Internet content providers worry that phone and cable internet providers could discriminate against them by charging extra for their services or slowing speeds to their websites.

First-Time Testimony?

The Sept. 7 hearing is expected to draw even more attention to the net neutrality issue since it’s possible that it will mark the first time that the chief executives of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Netflix testify before Congress. Even though the four content providers have more than twice the combined market capitalization of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter, they’ve only spent about $570,000 wooing panel members since the beginning of 2015.

When it comes to campaign contributions to committee members, the four major content providers supporting net neutrality have focused on boosting local politicians. Since early 2015, Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat, has been the biggest beneficiary of contributions from Facebook and Google. Eshoo has received $19,100 from Menlo Park-based Facebook and $26,000 from Google, based in Mountain View. Amazon, headquartered in Seattle, has given $15,500 to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Spokane Republican who described the Obama-era net neutrality rules as a “heavy-handed approach.” Netflix hasn’t made any contributions to committee members since 2015, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, collected more contributions from companies whose representatives have been invited to the Sept. 7 hearing than any other panel member. Walden has received $125,300 from the eight companies, including $49,600 from Comcast Corp., which has given $586,850 to panel members since the beginning of 2015.

Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the panel, reported receiving $72,300 from the eight companies during the same period. Like Walden, the biggest chunk of contributions to Pallone by the eight companies came from Comcast, which gave $23,900 to his campaign fund. The New Jersey legislator said the rollback of net neutrality rules will “undermine the free and open internet, and hand its control over to a few powerful corporate interests.”

Starting out as a novelty product, the Apple Watch has grown increasingly relevant by adding more fitness-tracking capabilities. They are likely to expand further with its third version, expected to debut next month (including, reportedly, a cellular antenna). Fitbit, meanwhile, is coming from the opposite direction: Having once soared with the popularity of its fitness-focused bands, it posted heavy losses last year amid budget competition and slackening demand. Now Fitbit’s trying to get its groove back by crossing into smartwatch territory with the $300 Ionic, announced today and going on sale in October. (That’s in line with the lowest-priced Apple Watches, for instance.)

In growing to about the size of Apple’s device (the 38-mm version), the Ionic makes room for a relative SpO2 (blood-oxygen level sensor), onboard GPS and GLONASS nav support, and battery life up to about four days (depending what features you turn on). New features on tap include a video and audio-guided workouts, and possibly the future capability to diagnose sleep apnea and even heart ailments.

Also on tap are smartwatch features including Bluetooth, a wireless payments chip, and an app store that could bring on many more capabilities, if developers sign on. (Like Apple, the company is also thinking big about the potential of all of our fitness and health data.) Still, the Ionic is mostly a fitness device with smartwatch features, while Apple’s product is the other way around. As the war for your wrist rages on, which approach will people prefer? We’ll learn more in the coming months. Read my rundown of the new watch here.

Ed Skrein was all set to play the character Ben Daimio in a new reboot of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. This casting move spurred an outcry from the Asian American community, however, as the character in the graphic novel is Japanese American. It’s only the latest example of the off-putting trend of whitewashing adaptations, such as Scarlett Johansson starring in Ghost In the Shell, and Nat Wolff in the just-released Death Note. Something incredible happened instead, though: Skrein dropped out of the role, of his own volition, after becoming aware of the controversy surrounding his casting. (His reasons why are stated beautifully in the tweet below.) The beauty of his public exit is that it almost forces the studio behind the film to cast a Japanese American in the role now. If low box office returns for projects like Ghost In the Shell won’t make those studios put an end to whitewashing, perhaps more direct action like Skrein’s will.

pic.twitter.com/8WoSsHXDFO

— Ed Skrein (@edskrein) August 28, 2017

See Skrein’s original casting announcement below.

Excited to join the #Hellboy cast as Ben Daimio. All praise due to the creator @artofmmignola ???????? #BPRDpic.twitter.com/Ev0JDS03H5

— Ed Skrein (@edskrein) August 21, 2017

There’s a lot going on in the world. It’s easy to get bogged down by the news, the tweets, the to-do lists. Sometimes you need a way to clear away the cruft, and reignite your spark. That’s the inspiration behind our Creativity Challenge.

Fast Company asked 14 super smart creators to craft daily exercises that push you to be more imaginative and productive. One day, you’ll be drawing your own emoji, the next you’ll be making a sculpture with raw materials mined from your desk. These are simple, fun, and only take as much time as you want to devote to them.

In keeping with our eclectic style, Fast Company called on a group of people with diverse backgrounds to come up with each day’s exercise. The contributor list includes the  cofounder of Google’s Creative Lab, a visual artist from Disney, an ice cream entrepreneur, a best-selling author, and an expert on meditation and mindfulness. You can find out more about all of them, and sign up, from our Creativity Challenge home page.

You can start the free 14-day challenge any time. Be sure to also join our dedicated Creativity Challenge Facebook group, where a community is already taking shape around users’ creations!

Ready to get started? All you need is a bit of inspiration, a few extra minutes, and an email address.

The Category 4 hurricane that barreled into Texas late Friday—the first to hit the state since 1961—is “a landmark event,” said Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who predicted that his agency would have to be involved for years to deal with Harvey’s catastrophic aftermath. The flooding, tweeted the U.S. National Weather Service, “is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.”

The devastation of the relentless rain has left at least ten dead in and around Houston, overloaded 911 systems, required the opening of a 5,000-person “mega-shelter,” and required the NWS to add new colors to its weather graphics, but none of that helps the mind fathom the wreckage. Even these amateur drone videos can’t capture it, but they offer a breathtaking overhead view.

Average annual rainfall in Houston is 50 inches. In the past two days, the city has seen over 25 inches. The 9 trillion gallons of water that fell on Houston could, according to the Washington Post, fill 14 million Olympic size swimming pools, or 33,906 Empire State Buildings. If spread across the entire U.S., this would amount to .17 inches of rain for every part of every state.

The videos have been popping up on YouTube in recent days despite warnings from officials who say these drones are posing an extreme risk to rescue crews.

Already, organizations are mobilizing to help the victims and are collecting donations online. If you want to help, beware of scams and review the organizations working on the ground in Texas, via the L.A. Times, below. And check out the many campaigns that have been created on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, which it’s compiled into a central Hurricane Harvey Relief hub.

• American Red Cross: The organization has shelters open, and is shipping truckloads of supplies for distribution. Volunteers are also in place.
• Salvation Army: The Salvation Army is deploying 42 mobile kitchens–each of which can serve an average of 1,500 meals per day–to staging areas in Dallas and San Antonio. They’ll also distribute supplies of water, cleanup kits, food, and shelter supplies.
• ​​​​​​Houston Food Bank : Donations to the Houston Food Bank provide meals in emergencies and throughout the year.
• San Antonio Food Bank : The San Antonio Food Bank is collecting monetary donations, along with nonperishable goods and supplies like water, baby food, diapers, flashlights, and new batteries.
• Feeding Texas and local food banks : Feeding Texas is coordinating with partner agencies to provide donation coordination and distribution of food to the public.
• Houston SPCA and SPCA of Texas: These organizations conduct rescues of pets and farm animals, and provide equipment and shelter in emergencies.
• Humane Society of Louisiana : The Humane Society of Louisiana has so far rescued 162 animals from shelters in the hurricane’s path or at risk of flooding.

[Los Angeles Times]

The whole idea of corporate philanthropy is pretty straightforward: A large company becomes profitable enough that it sets aside a certain sum each year to funnel toward the charity or cause of its choosing. Despite the fact that this formula has come under fire for serving as a cover-up for companies whose supply chains and manufacturing practices do far more damage to society and the environment than a couple cool millions can rectify, businesses persist in following it.

Through its Center for Inclusive Growth, an independent subsidiary of the company launched in 2013 to support financial inclusion in the developing world, MasterCard is experimenting with a new type of philanthropy: data donation. MasterCard is one of the largest payments companies in the world, and Shamina Singh, president of the Center for Inclusive Growth, says that when the Center was founded, it was with a mandate from the company’s board of directors to “think about MasterCard’s assets broadly, and then think about how those assets can be applied for social good.” And with a company like MasterCard, Singh says, “you realize very quickly that data is an enormous asset.” Through its data philanthropy program, MasterCard offers governments, nonprofits, and other private companies “data grants” that allow their proprietary insights to be put toward furthering research and programs advancing social good.

The initial idea behind the Center for Inclusive Growth, Singh says, was to commit to bringing 500 million of the world’s 2 billion people living outside formal economies into the fold. Though 85% of the world’s transactions are done in cash, it comes with a societal cost–in cash-based countries like India and Nigeria, the expense of producing, distributing and safeguarding paper money can result in as much as a 2% loss to GDP. But it’s not enough, Singh and her colleagues at the Center understood, to implement a digital payments system in a country, step back, and hope that economic growth follows. “We wanted to take a longer-term view than just achieving financial inclusion, and look to how we can support long-term sustainable growth,” Singh says.

Data is at the heart of achieving economic growth, Singh says, and cashless payments systems are major collectors of information around spending patterns, revenue growth, and individual creditworthiness. As a private company, MasterCard quickly realized that it was privy to a wealth of data that could do more good publicly than it would sitting in MasterCard’s private holdings. “The real power of this data is how it can illustrate what being included in the formal economy allows you to do, versus when you were not included,” Singh says.

Take the issue of credit. Access to capital via credit is one of the main avenues by which businesses can grow, but the system of scoring creditworthiness, Singh says, is not designed to be inclusive. “There’s no FICO score in countries like Ethiopia,” she says. But what the concept of credit comes down to, she says, is a person’s ability to pay back a loan. “And when you’re a company like MasterCard, operating a technology payments network in over 200 countries, you have an ability to collect data to understand transaction behavior, and model alternative ways to assess credit,” Singh says.

MasterCard’s Center for Inclusive Growth is launching a partnership with Unilever and a network of Kenyan shop owners in the fall around this very principle. Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods suppliers, contracts with around 40,000 small shop owners in Kenya, who sell Unilever products. By equipping those shop owners with digital payment capability, which tracks what they purchase from Unilever, what they sell, and how they pay back loans, MasterCard will be able to collect the data aggregated on the platforms and analyze it in such a way that it will be able to serve as a proxy for a credit score that shop owners can show to a local bank, instead of having to rely on informal lenders.

Some of MasterCard’s other “data philanthropy” initiatives have involved donating transaction data from several countries to Harvard’s Center for International Development, which was conducting a study on how businesses develop and expand across the world, and working with Barack Obama’s Data-Driven Justice Initiative to quantifiably examine how high crime rates in Baltimore and Oakland impact local small businesses and job opportunities. “When crime hits a certain percentage, you can clearly see a drop-off of commerce in a particular neighborhood,” Singh says. “That was using transaction data at the very local level, but also using publicly available crime data.”

The Center for Inclusive Growth will soon be launching a data philanthropy leadership program, in which researchers in areas of social good and economic growth will be able to come into MasterCard’s offices and access the company’s complete data sets. One of the main difficulties of facilitating data grants is ensuring the information can be transferred and shared securely; by inviting researchers into MasterCard, it creates, Singh says, “a sandbox environment where people can dive into the data in a safe space.”

The idea of data philanthropy is still extremely new; MasterCard “is just now scratching the surface when it comes to understanding its potential,” Singh says. Though income inequality and financial inclusion are the most pressing issues facing the global economy right now, Singh maintains that information inequality, if we don’t start to tackle it proactively now, will only become more difficult to address. “We have an enormous opportunity, but also an enormous responsibility, to close the information gap, or at least make sure it doesn’t become as wide as income inequality,” Singh says.

The ride-hailing upstart selected Dara Khosrowshahi to take the helm after former CEO Travis Kalanick resigned in June. Khosrowshahi has led travel company Expedia since 2005, and will take the reigns at Uber amid a year of numerous negative headlines.

Founded in 2005, YouTube is very much a child of the era when virtually all video had a landscape orientation. But the dawn of the smartphone age gave us scads of tall, portrait-oriented video. And today, YouTube is unveiling plans for a series of updates over the next few months that will include playback of vertical (and square) video without any unslightly black bars.

Other tweaks include a new design with white space at the top rather than a red bar, a revised logo, and gestures in the mobile app that let you swipe to revisit the previous video or view the next one. The ability to slow down and speed up playback, already available in the service’s desktop incarnation, arrives in the mobile app today. At the same time, the desktop version is getting a new design of its own, including a “dark” theme meant for more cinematic video-watching.

Major crises affecting the work cultures of tech behemoths like Googleand Uber this year share at least one common root: Policies and procedures thought to be crystal clear proved much more subjective and open to interpretation than human resource execs might’ve hoped. Among other factors, those hidden gray areas have a tendency to invite conflict.

Years ago, I worked for a financial services company in the Southwest that was facing a sexual harassment scandal. The company hadn’t evolved far enough from its entrepreneurial roots in the ’70s and ’80s as a boys’ club. Since then, sexual harassment policies had been desultorily circulated by the HR team, but those policies were vague and left room for leaders who were used to getting around the rules to continue behaving badly.

Not that the company thought this was the case. Definitive-sounding phrases like “will not be tolerated,” “unwelcome conduct,” and “an offensive environment” peppered the official protocol. But those expressions are a lot, well, fuzzier than many employers typically think. Here’s how to “defuzzify” some of that language before it wrecks your company’s work culture.

Use This Script To Get Super Specific

Dr. Robert Mager, whose work on human performance informs the consultancy where I’m a partner, outlines a relatively simple process for translating this kind of undetected vagueness into clear, observable behaviors to write workplace policies around. Boiled down into a straightforward conversation between an HR exec and somebody in the Devil’s advocate seat, who you can think of as the designated “defuzzifier,” that process might go something like this:

Boss:“There will be no unwelcome conduct!”

Defuzzifier:“Well said. When you observe ‘unwelcome conduct,’ what actions are you observing?”

Boss:“Well, no one should tell jokes that the listeners consider to be inappropriate for the workplace.”

Defuzzifier:“Fair enough. What else?”

Boss:“There should be no pictures on display that people consider to be sexually oriented.”

Defuzzifier:“Got it. What else?”

The “what elses” continue until you’ve got a clear outline of specific types of observable actions or situations that constitute “unwelcome conduct.” This can feel tedious, but it’s essential. The process needs to extend to every written policy and communication dealing with a given issue. So on our sexual harassment example, that means taking this approach to clarify how the company handles each of the following:

• educating people on the subject
• reporting violations
• addressing reports of violations
• taking disciplinary actions
• protocol for reviewing and revising the existing policies

Each of these processes is composed of its own set of steps mean to achieve a fair, transparent outcome. In addition to defining each one as specifically as possible, you should probe for any gaps in the process, too.

Calling this a “simple” process doesn’t mean it’s easy. Once you’ve clarified the policies themselves, you then need to replicate this “defuzzifying” process in team meetings, too, so your whole staff knows what your policies actually are. This way they’ll have a chance to think more concretely these sensitive issues and how the company handles them in its own workplace. It takes a lot of effort and can be uncomfortable, but the process isn’t really all that complex.

The Danger Of Interpretations

Sexual harassment is an obvious example, but this applies to a wide range of cultural descriptions that may sound a lot less fraught, like “high-performance team,” “a great place to work,” or “an inclusive culture.”

The problem with each of these expressions is that it puts managers in the tenuous position of being the judge. Yes, you want bosses to have good judgment, but you don’t want unclear work processes to cause them to make subjective, inconsistent, and potentially biased decisions on what should be done, how it should be done, and how it should be evaluated. That opens each situation to potential conflict, not to mention legal liabilities.

So yes, when you sit down to reexamine your workplace policies, start with your values and what compliance with the law demands. But don’t stop there. Drill down to specifics. Think about what each of your positions on a given issue might mean in practice. How might a scenario unfold? How else might it unfold?

Keep digging deeper, and  you’ll find that at the root of most workplace conflict is disagreement over a subjective policy or process–something left open to interpretation that really shouldn’t be. After all, even a good boss will find it difficult to be effective when they’re trying to defend subjective processes and systems.

Rex Conner is the author ofWhat If Common Sense Was Common Practice in Business? and lead partner and owner of Mager Consortium, where’s spent three decades helping more than 50 companies in dozens of industries address common workplace issues.