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Could This Solitary Confinement VR Experience Sway Lawmakers?

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Google’s senior counsel on civil and human rights, Malika Saar, explains how the technology is a powerful look into the emotional and psychological impacts of isolating an inmate. This VR experience was developed to totally immerse the viewer with powerful commentary, sound, and visuals.


Uber’s new CEO says the company might IPO in 2019

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Dara Khosrowshahi, who begins his tenure as Uber’s new CEO on September 5, was introduced to employees in a company meeting (by former CEO Travis Kalanick, no less) on Wednesday, reports Bloomberg. According to two of the people at the meeting, Khosrowshahi got a question from an employee about if and when the company might go public. Khosrowshahi reportedly replied, “It’s my opinion that the company should go public,” and suggested that Uber’s IPO would happen in the next 18 to 36 months. That puts Uber’s IPO sometime in 2019 or 2020.

The most expensive Teslas just got a little less expensive

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But hey, let’s not kid ourselves, they still aren’t the cheapest cars on the market. As TechCrunch notes, several versions of the Model S and Model X are set for price reductions in the range of $3,500 to $5,000, thanks to improvements in the production efficiency of the 100 kWh batteries they use. So crack open those piggy banks, people. The old/new pricing was/is:

  • Model S 100D: $97,500 > $94,000
  • Model S P100D: $140,000 > $135,000
  • Model X 100D: $99,500 > $96,000
  • Model X P100D: $145,000 > $140,000

The Rich Are Different From You And Me: They Evade Way More Taxes

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The income gap between the rich and poor is already huge–in the U.S., the average person in the top 1% of wealth makes $1.3 million a year now, more than three times as much as they did in the 1980s, while the income for someone in the bottom 50% has stagnated at $16,000. But the gap is likely even greater because existing inequality statistics don’t take into account a major factor: tax evasion by the rich.

In a new report that looks at Scandinavia–where tax evasion is less common than in many other parts of the world–researchers found that average households paid around 3% less in taxes than they should have. The richest 1% paid 10% less than they owed. Households in the top 0.01%, with more than $45 million in net wealth, evaded 30% of their taxes.

“It’s a bit naive to believe that you can study the wealthy just by looking at tax returns.” [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
“It’s especially important to go beyond tax data today because we live in a very globalized world with a big wealth management industry–lots of people who are paid to help rich people avoid or sometimes evade taxes,” says Gabriel Zucman, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley. “So it’s a bit naive to believe that you can study the wealthy just by looking at tax returns.”

The researchers took data from the Panama Papers, documents leaked in 2016 that showed offshore accounts of clients of a law firm in Panama, along with data from a 2015 leak of Swiss bank accounts. Then they matched that data to detailed records that Denmark, Norway, and Sweden keep of both the wealth and income of citizens, making it possible to see how much someone should have paid in taxes, and how much they actually paid. The study was the first to combine leaks and institutional data.

When governments randomly audit tax returns, they’re unlikely to catch the richest evaders, both because the sample set of the super-rich is small and because their methods of evasion are difficult to detect. “Just by looking at a tax return and the information that it has, it is almost impossible to detect the sophisticated tax evasions that take place at the top of the wealth distribution, with very wealthy taxpayers,” says Zucman. Targeted audits may have more success in catching people as they cheat, but limited enforcement budgets make that difficult.

Because tax evasion has become easier over time, estimates about the growth of inequality over the last four decades are also likely wrong. “This phenomenon of tax evasion at the top is something that has always existed, but it’s become easier and much more important since 1980s–with globalization, with progress in information technology–that makes it easier to hide assets in tax havens in particular,” he says.

The super-rich are more likely to evade taxes than the merely rich because they have the resources. The tax evasion industry, as Zucman calls it, targets the richest customers because having a small number of very profitable customers makes it less likely that they’ll get caught if they do something illegal.

“Just by looking at a tax return and the information that it has, it is almost impossible to detect the sophisticated tax evasions that take place at the top of the wealth distribution.” [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
“If you really want to reduce tax evasion, what you need to do is increase the sanctions for the financial institutions or tax havens that facilitate tax evasion,” says Zucman. “If you increase the sanctions, they will stop doing this. But if it remains very profitable, then it will continue.”

The researchers want to use the same methodology to analyze tax evasion in other countries, where it’s likely to be even greater, since Scandinavian countries have relatively little corruption and high social trust.

“We are not exaggerating the problem by looking at [Scandinavian countries,” says Zucman. “If anything, we are likely to underestimate the problem.”

An L.A. suburb is letting Elon Musk’s Boring Company build a two-mile tunnel under it

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The Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, California, has given Musk the permission for the two-mile, and up to 44-feet deep, tunnel, reports ConstructionDrive. Plans reveal the tunnel will start from underneath one of SpaceX’s parking areas, where the company currently has a 160-foot tunnel already. But the Boring Company doesn’t have all the permission it needs yet to actually start building the miles-long tunnel. It still needs to get permission from the California state labor and transportation departments, and there’s no telling how long that will take.

Wikileaks has apparently been hacked

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A notorious hackers group called OurMine reportedly hacked Wikileaks’s website early this morning, reports the Verge. They replaced the home page with a message that read:

“Hi, it’s OurMine (Security Group), don’t worry we are just testing your . . . . blablablab, oh wait, this is not a security test! Wikileaks, remember when you challenged us to hack you?”

“Anonymous, remember when you tried to dox us with fake information for attacking wikileaks [sic]?” the message continues. “There we go! One group beat you all! #WikileaksHack lets get it trending on twitter [sic]!”

At the time of this writing, Wikileaks’s website remains offline. OurMine says it’s responsible for some other big hacks over the last several years, including the Twitter account of CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Quora page. OurMine is also responsible for the hacks of websites Variety and BuzzFeed, as well as the social media accounts of HBO.

Uber’s traffic data is now available to the public

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The company’s Uber Movement website is now out of beta and available to all, reports Engadget. Uber Movement was designed to give urban planners access to Uber’s traffic data so they could use it to improve their transit systems. But now the company has opened up the data to the public as well. Right now Uber Movement only has traffic data for four cities: Boston; Washington, D.C.; Manila, the Philippines; and Sydney. It’s expected to continue to add data for more cities in the future.

Recruiters Explain What The Worst Resumes Have In Common

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Recruiters know all too well that not all resumes are created equal. But while the weaker ones land in the rejection pile for lots of different reasons, there are some common themes. Here are a few resume mistakes recruiters say they keep running into.

Mistake #1: Not Enough Numbers

“Anyone can say they are results-driven or a great leader, but we want to see metrics,” says Nicole Hubmann, a recruiter at Webdam, the asset management platform owned by Shutterstock. “It’s the lack of metrics that stands out as a red flag, whether it’s on a resume or in a phone discussion.”

Job seekers may feel pressed for space or worry that there’s no single data point they could share about their work history that’s jaw-droppingly impressive. Don’t worry about being impressive, though–focus first on just being specific. “For example,” says Joe Shao, cofounder of talent-acquisition platform PerfectLoop, “I might read a line such as, ‘consistently exceeded sales quota.’ That’s forgettable. Then I jump on the phone and learn what they meant was, exceeded sales quota 220% in 2017, becoming the top salesperson in the company.’ That is much more compelling to me and hiring managers.”

If you don’t provide enough metrics, you may never even get to that phone screener where you can explain to a recruiter why they matter.


Related:I Built A Bot To Apply To Thousands Of Jobs At Once–Here’s What I Learned


Mistake #2: Bad Formatting Or Too Long

Resumes need to look pretty–not because recruiters are interested in your aesthetic sense but because they care how you organize information. David Lewis, CEO of HR consultancy OperationsInc, runs through some of the most common offenders: “Font is too small. Font is too large. Oldest job listed first. Resume is too long.”

Hubmann explains why these misfires matter: “We are looking for candidates who want to be part of a winning culture that is results-oriented and performance-driven. A candidate who is self-aware enough to understand their impact is more likely to give concise, clear examples on their resume.”


Related:Six Quick Tips To Make Your Resume Fit On One Page


Mistake #3: Relevant Skills Are Too Hard To Find

Kari Guan, a recruiter at the apartment rental finder Zumper, says that in weak resumes candidates typically fail to “list any experience that is translatable to the role they’re applying for. This might sound fairly obvious but it happens more than you’d think, and makes me think they didn’t read the job description.” In other words, explaining your top overall job skills is one thing, but highlighting the ones that make you competitive for a specific role is another thing entirely.

Guan says this is true even for entry-level roles, where candidates may not think they have much work experience that counts as “relevant.” Even then, she says, “If they’re a recent grad, I always appreciate including a note about a personal experience they’ve had that’s applicable to the role and I might not otherwise know about.”

Lewis adds that candidates sometimes do include relevant skills but don’t give them a place of pride, especially when it comes to technical abilities. Many forget to put all the technology they know that’s crucial to the role in its own dedicated section.

Mistake #4: There’s No Clear Narrative

Says Shao, “The thing that I see all the time is that candidates miss their chance to tell their most compelling narrative. It’s especially common for a certain type person who isn’t great at self-promotion. But it is a resume,” he says–“This isn’t an Instagram selfie at some party, it’s actually an appropriate time to brag factually. If you don’t, you might lose the attention of a recruiter or hiring manager.”

Many think the time to do that is in their cover letter, but the fact is that many recruiters don’t even read those. So you need to show how your experiences have built upon one another and that you’ve grown as a result.

“For tech, we are not seeking consultants,” says Hubmann. “Instead, we look for someone who has experience working with a team on an evolving product. Often, consultants produce an app or a website and then move on to the next project, never having to deal with the impact of their product on the customer or the company. We want someone who has been through the long haul with customers and understands the importance of integrity in the product.”

So make sure your resume is a clear story about your progression, and not, as Lewis puts it, “a summary of [your] career greatest hits, with mention of what occurred at the end in a smaller section.” And whatever you do, he adds, never list your oldest job first.


Related:Three Ways To Add Personality To Your Resume (And Three Ways Not To)


Mistake #5: It’s Suspiciously Vague Or Just Boring

Sometimes resumes stand out for what they don’t say. Lewis says one hallmark of a crappy resume is that the dates of employment are either year-ranges only, like “2012–2014,” without any months, or leave off those dates altogether. That may be a sign that a candidate is trying to mask a history of job-hopping or a long stretch of unemployment.

But for Guan, vague, generic qualifications often mean passing up a candidate for another reason: “When the responsibilities they list are too general, there’s nothing that grabs me and makes me interested in learning more about the person.” Recruiters are people, too, and reviewing resumes can be dull work. If you can’t get them excited to find out more about you, they’ll find someone who can.


Karlie Kloss Programmed A Cookie-Delivering Drone And Wants Other Girls To Do The Same

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It all started on a whim. Four years ago, supermodel Karlie Kloss decided to take an intensive coding course at New York Flatiron School. She had never written a lick of code in her life, but she wanted to see what the fuss about coding was all about. Between runway shows in Paris and Milan, and magazine shoots in London and New York, she would sit down with her instructor, Avi Flombaum, and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails.

“It was sheer curiosity that led me to take that class,” the 25-year-old Kloss tells Fast Company. “But it was really eye-opening to learn about the hardware and the software that goes into the tech we use every day.”


Related: “Not Just Guys In Hoodies”: Karlie Kloss Is Reimagining What Coders Look Like


As a successful model, Kloss didn’t have any immediate reason to learn how to code, but she soon realized the activity could bring sweet rewards–literally. “One of the first things I learned how to program was a drone that could pick up a cookie on one side of the room and deliver it to the other side of the room,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do with code.”

Around 2012, coding bootcamps like the Flatiron course began popping up all over the country with the promise of equipping people with no prior training with the basics of computer science. In Kloss’s case, she was surprised to discover that coding wasn’t an impenetrable skill. “It’s a language just like any other language,” she says. “And the way our world is going, learning to code should be just as important as learning your mother tongue.”

There’s a persistent narrative in our culture that women are less inclined to pursue computer science. This was evident in the infamous Google memo, in which an employee, James Damore, claimed that women are genetically less inclined to code. This hasn’t been Kloss’s experience, though. She’s encountered many young women who are just as curious as she is about the technology that surrounds them. “They are aware of the power of these technical skills and how they are shaping the world today,” Kloss says. “These young women grew up with this technology embedded and they’re not scared to try building things. They are more forward-thinking than we sometimes give them credit for.”

[Photo: courtesy of Kode With Klossy]
The problem, she believes, is access. Many middle and high schools don’t offer coding courses, although this is slowly changing. And when they are offered, they tend to be oversubscribed by male students, creating an uncomfortable imbalance in the classroom. Then there are the popular coding bootcamps, such as the one that Kloss took, but they often come with hefty price tags: Tuition can cost upward of $1,000 a week. There have also been questions about how sustainable the coding bootcamp business model really is, since several companies, like The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp, have had to shut down recently.

A Call To Action—And Lots Of Answers

Back in 2014, Kloss put out a call on her social media channels, asking if there were like-minded young women out there who wanted to code but didn’t have access to a course. She received an avalanche of responses from young women and ultimately offered scholarships to 21 young women to attend a two-week summer camp at the Flatiron School.

Three years later, Kloss says that this initiative–called Kode With Klossy–has grown and evolved. So far, more than 400 girls age 13 to 18 have gone through the Kode With Klossy summer camps. Kloss can now track where these students have ended up, and the results have been impressive. One of the original beneficiaries just won the grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, together with three other high school girls. (The team beat out 750 engineers with a virtual reality app that can help treat and diagnose ADHD efficiently.) Another young woman from the first cohort has been accepted to top computer science college programs around the country, including NYU, Stony Brook, and Columbia.

Inspired by these successes, Kloss is expanding the Kode With Klossy program. In addition to these two-week summer camps, she has started to partner with women-led community organizations around the country to launch three-day coding workshops. She’s already collaborated with Electric Girls in New Orleans, Girls Inc. of Omaha, and CoderGals in Miami to offer “back-to-school” coding workshops to teen girls, entirely free of charge.

Sara Blakely (left) and Karlie Kloss (right). [Photo: courtesy of Kode With Klossy]
With the three-day workshops, she’s worked with educators to compress the curriculum of the two-week summer camp to distill the basics of coding. She believes that these shorter programs will allow her to impact more young women and allow them to get their feet wet in the world of computer science, with the hope that they will then continue to deepen their understanding of coding on their own, through online programs or through their school systems.

This past weekend, on Women’s Equality Day, Kloss and Spanx founder Sara Blakely spent the day in Atlanta, working alongside 25 young women from the Atlanta Girls School. Kloss partnered with Blakely to help select and work with these young women with the help of the company’s charitable wing, the Sara Blakely Foundation.

On Saturday, the first day of the three-day bootcamp, the group of young women was buzzing with excitement that Kloss had come to see them in person. The group was diverse in every possible way: They came with a wide range of skills, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and were aged between 13 and 18. (“A few 12 year-olds snuck in too,” Kloss says with a smile.) They had a wide range of interests: Some were set on becoming engineers, but others wanted careers in fashion, like Kloss and Blakely. In many ways, they acted like girls their age, blowing bubble gum and giggling. But they were also quick to dig into HTML and JavaScript, and were keen to begin building websites and programming games.

“I thought it would be inspiring for them to be learning about code while sitting in the offices of a company that is innovative, creative, and powered by technology in a lot of ways,” Kloss says. “It is a company that is led by an empowered woman that I hope the girls can relate to.”

[Photo: courtesy of Kode With Klossy]

Changing The Gender Dynamic

By offering a wider range of formats for her program, Kloss appears to be tweaking the mission of her organization. She’s focused on giving teens in-depth training in computer science through Flatiron School scholarships–supplementing the work of other organizations, like Girls Who Code or Black Girls Code, that offer long-term courses. But Kloss is equally committed to helping young women overcome the initial hurdles that might prevent them from giving coding a chance. Part of this has to do with launching more of these short bootcamps that are designed to feel accessible and less like a major commitment. Over the next few months, she will be continuing to partner with other organizations to bring these intensive courses around the country.

But Kloss is also trying to send a broader message that coding is something that all young women should be willing to learn about, even if they don’t see themselves spending their careers as web developers or tech entrepreneurs. “Just because I am a fashion model doesn’t mean that I couldn’t take a coding class,” Kloss says. “I have no plans to quit my day job, but I still think that learning these technical skills is incredibly valuable.”

For Kloss, part of changing the gender dynamic in technology has to do with giving women the chance to tinker with coding and weave it into their existing interests. “The girls in the program may have learned about Kode With Klossy in Teen Vogue because they love fashion,” Kloss says. “I’m trying to communicate that there are so many creative ways that this technical problem-solving can be applied.”

With the new Theta V, Ricoh’s 360-degree camera goes pro

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When Ricoh introduced its first Theta camera in 2013, the very idea of a pocketable, relatively affordable device that could capture 360-degree images was new. Now, thanks to the Theta (and its archrival the Samsung Gear 360), the category has some traction–and VR headsets from Oculus and others provide an immersive way to view the photos and videos you shoot.

Ricoh’s new model, the $430 Theta V, has the same tall, skinny form factor as previous versions, but it’s a more ambitious tool in multiple ways–which is possible in part because it packs a smartphone-class Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and runs Android. It’s the first Theta to support 4K video, and captures spatial audio so that soundtracks as well as visuals have a 360-degree effect. According to Ricoh, it can transfer photos and videos over USB dramatically faster than its predecessors, but it’s also the first Theta to support wireless streaming, letting you view your creations via Miracast-compatible devices (such as Amazon’s Fire Stick) without moving them off the camera first.

Along with the the Theta V, Ricoh is introducing a couple of accessories, also with a professional-caliber feel. A $270 360-degree microphone, which plugs into the bottom of the camera, has four directional mikes for higher-quality audio recording. And a $200 waterproof case (compatible with all Thetas) permits the camera to capture pictures and movies underwater as well as on land.

I’m A Hiring Manager—Here Are Five Questions I Always Ask Job Candidates

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Job interviews can be really unpleasant for interviewers and candidates alike. A 30-minute chat sandwiched between a busy hiring manager’s afternoon meetings isn’t always the best way to get to know somebody, let alone judge their fit for an open role.

But over my past few years in the hiring seat, I’ve developed a set of five go-to questions that are easy to ask within the space of a half hour and still lead to revealing answers. Together, they give me a pretty comprehensive idea of who an individual is, how well they know their craft, how quick they are on their feet, and whether I’d be happy to see them every day.

And over time, I’ve found that asking this same set of questions has helped me get a sense for how everyone is performing against the same criteria, which means I can make apples-to-apples comparisons. The people who knock their job interviews out of the park are invariably the ones we hire, and who go on to thrive. Here are the five questions I always ask:

1. What’s Your Greatest Career Hit And The Role You Played In It?

Why it works: This question allows you to get a sense of the individual’s working process, whether they can lead and contribute, and how enthusiastic they are. It also lets you know their perception of quality. They might choose to talk about a student project (if they’re just starting out), a global integrated campaign, or a startup that they founded or contributed to.

I tend to spend the most amount of time digging into a candidate’s answer to this question–usually I’ll allot 10 minutes to discussing it, whereas the subsequent four only take five minutes apiece–probing for the specifics, and pulling up the work they’re talking about on the internet.


Related:These Are The Worst Answers To The Most Common Job Interview Questions 


Answers that work: A detailed walk-through of the project that outlines their sources of data, inspiration, challenges and triumphs, along with a clear explanation of why it was successful and why they were proud of it.

Answers that suck: An inability to explain their processes, or an eagerness to say that the thing that didn’t happen was the fault of the client/the creative director/the universe–anyone else but themselves.

2. How Your Discipline Is Changing? What’s One Company That’s Adapting Well?

Why it works: The world is changing quickly, and we want people who understand and embrace new opportunities.

Answers that work: A CRM strategist once described the way Glossier is inventing a new model for digital commerce and community-building. A visual designer told me about the way GE made machines brilliant in the smaller spaces of Instagram, and a copywriter gave a blow-by-blow account of the Twitter beef between Wendy’s and Hardee’s.

Answers that suck:Has it changed?”

3. What’s The Last Thing You Read, Saw, Or Listened To That You Wanted To Tell Someone About?

Why it works: I look for curiosity. I legitimately don’t care if the answer is Game of Thrones, as long as they have an interesting take and an ability to communicate it clearly.

Answers that work: There are too many to list, but here are some great examples from our recent hires:

  • A strategist who described an article about the CEO of Scotts Miracle-Gro investing in hydroponics products that seem geared to the burgeoning cannabis industry
  • A designer who pulled out a book about interface design in science fiction
  • A creative who talked about Big Little Lies, and how Reese Witherspoon’s production career was an empowering response to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood

Answers that suck: Someone who mentions something they haven’t read properly, or only have flicked through when they were at the airport.

4. What’s A Current Cultural Phenomenon You Want Nothing To Do With?

Why it works: Because we want them to have opinions and not be afraid to express them.


Related:7 Ways To Talk About Your Athletic Experience On A Job Interview


Answers that work: Anything, just as long as they can explain why. Here are some examples we’ve seen persuasively argued: Coachella, cyber-bullying, the word “xennial,” internet outrage, transparent jeans, identity politics, Twitter, dressing children up as animals, the coopting of the term “self-care” by marketers.

Answers that suck: Saying you don’t like “politics,” for instance, without being specific about what you find disconcerting.

5. What Do You Do For Fun?

Why it works: Because we work hard, and maintaining a life outside of it is important. I want to hear how they stay grounded and what makes them happy.

Answers that work: Their own genuine answer.

Answers that suck: Not having an answer at all.


Jess Greenwood is R/GA’s SVP, Head of Strategy, North America, and co-runs strategy, social, and content over six offices. She’s always looking for ways to do more in less time.

The Startup Teaching Languages That Have Almost No Teachers

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Inky Gibbens learns languages pretty easily and speaks four–English, Russian, Mandarin, and Mongolian–but was having trouble learning Buryat. It’s a language spoken mostly in Siberia, along the Russian and Mongolian border, and the native tongue of her maternal grandparents. She tried to learn but wasn’t able to find a teacher online.

Buryat is an endangered language, still spoken by 300,000 people, but dwindling ever since Russian became the dominant language in the republic of Buryatia. If she wanted to learn, she’d have to return to the region where she had visited as a child. She was working on her PhD in sociolinguistics at the time but as she learned more about Buryat and other endangered languages, she realized she wanted to do more.

Inky Gibbens

“I wanted to do something more important with far more impact than writing a dissertation,” Gibbens says. “There were many other languages out there that awaited this fate.”

Last year, she started Tribalingual, a startup teaching online language classes. Tribalingual offers 4- and 10-week courses that cost between $170 and $520 and currently offers people a background in five languages: Ainu, an indigenous language now spoken on one island in Japan; Mongolian; Quechua, the language of the Incas; Gangte, a language spoken in a few dozen villages in northeast India; and Greko, a dialect of Greek spoken by less than 300 people in southern Italy. Tribalingual provides the coursework and a weekly Skype call.

Tribalingual received support from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Social Innovation, gaining mentorship and office space but no financial support. Not that she needed much to jump-start her idea. Using WordPress to build the site, Gibben’s expenses were the domain name and paying for G Suite.

“I just wanted something to put out that was fast and easy and see if people were going to use it,” she says.

Gibbens reached out to her network made through working in ed-tech to find teachers. Some teachers are native speakers while other are academics with a deep knowledge of the language. Gibbens herself teaches Mongolian; while not an endangered language, she’s taught it for years. The coursework is geared toward being conversational, interacting with speakers, and learning the words needed to get around.

“Conjugating verbs is important, but what are you going to do with that when you are in a marketplace in Mongolia?” Gibbens said.

Eduardo Mainero has a trip planned to Mongolia where he plans to hang out with shamans and reindeer herders. He was looking to learn as much as he could before he went, but the obvious places to learn languages like Duolingo didn’t offer Mongolian. Googling brought him to Tribalingual.

Now eight weeks into the course, Mainero finds it a challenge, but an enjoyable one. Beyond phrases and words he will need for getting around, Gibbens helps him with cultural norms. “I know I’m not going to get lost,” he says. “It’s also survival skills.”

For example, Mainero is vegan. Mongolia is a meat and dairy dependent country, especially in the countryside where he plans to spend most of his time. So he’s learned how to say “Bi tsagaan xoolton, ogt mah iddegui” or “I am a vegan, I don’t eat meat at all.”

And to endear himself after having to explain his eating habits, Gibbens taught him “Maamuu nash ir” a children’s song that’s as popular as “Mary had a little lamb” in the U.S.

“It will make him a star with everyone in the countryside,” Gibbens says.

Quechua woman looking at the landscape near Cusco, Peru. [Photo: Ruben Sanchez @lostintv/Getty Images]

What’s At Stake

Kenneth Hale, a linguist who focused on endangered languages, once described losing a language as dropping a bomb on the Louvre.

According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, there are 2,464 endangered languages with five added in July. Out of those, 18 languages have only one speaker left. The Catalogue of Endangered Languages finds that on average 3.5 languages become extinct per year, which is better than the often cited one every two weeks. Still, preservationist linguists say the situation is dire. It’s unclear how many have been lost throughout human history, but researchers have calculated the numbers of extinct languages for areas like Europe and Asia Minor, where 75 languages are thought to have been lost, and the United States, where 115 have been lost since Columbus.

The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger counts languages they consider “extinct” as when a language is “no longer the first tongue that infants learn in their homes, and that the last speaker who did learn the language in that way has passed on within the last five decades.”


Below, a preview for Tribalingual’s course in Gangte, a Sino-Tibetan language of Northeastern India. Activate subtitles in Hindi to see an English translation of the first part of the video.


UNESCO points out that it’s possible to revive extinct languages with effort and community buy-in. There have been cases where elders who learned as infants go on to teach grandchildren, skipping over a generation.

“There is a lot of hope for endangered languages,” says Anna Luisa Daigneault, the Development Officer & Latin America Projects Coordinator for Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Places like Hawaii and New Zealand are seeing a resurgence in indigenous languages. Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, many First Nation tribal languages have gotten a boost. For Daigneault, the effort is personal: Her family used to speak Quechua in Peru but stopped when they moved to Lima and then onto Canada. “It’s up to my generation to reclaim it,” she says.

Losing languages damages communities’ sense of itself. Language is tightly interwoven with culture; once the language is gone, part of that culture is gone, too. Preserving languages is also important for the world at large, as language evolved with us and contains a lot of our history and collective memory. “It’s a huge clue on how we evolved,” Daigneault says.

The Republic of Buryatia is the ancestral home of Inky Gibbens and of Buryat, a language considered “definitely endangered.” Image: Google Maps

From the tongues on Tribalingual emerge an untold number of words and phrases that tell of the culture they come from. In Ainu, “irankarapte” is used as a way to say “hello” and translates to “let me touch your spirit.” Greko has 20 different adjectives to describe goats, like “kasbopò,” or a goat that has the hair of one color and the feet of another, as if it were wearing “kasbe,” or short traditional trousers.

The internet’s relationship with endangered languages is complicated. On one hand, it can help preserve and foster growth. Living Tongues have helped build 18 Talking Dictionaries, an interactive online tool that lets users hear audio recordings of words in a language, and even add to it. Indigenous Tweets tracks sites that tracks tweets in indigenous languages and is a resource for people who want to find others who are using their language online. The University of Adelaide offers a free MOOC called “Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages.” And other preservational linguists are exploring digital technologies to assist in and spread their work.

But the internet, with its heavy English-centrism— is also putting pressure on endangered language speakers. When Daigneault is doing field work, her subjects often want to barter with her.

“They say ‘I’ll teach you my language if you teach me English,'” she says. “It’s definitely a double-edged sword.”

Still, not all of the internet is in English. Ross Perlin, assistant director of the New York-based Endangered Language Alliance, credits apps like WhatsApp and WeChat for allowing endangered language speakers to stay in better contact with family and friends using their own tongues. “They’re making it easy and free for people everywhere to stay in touch, [so that] small farflung groups (immigrants in NYC we work with, for example) are able to keep using their languages more, and in new ways,” he says.

Facebook, meanwhile, offers over 100 languages and Wikipedia has wikis in 295, and those numbers are growing. Still, this falls short of covering the nearly 7,000 languages spoken on the planet today. And a large number of those language aren’t written, another giant barrier to online communication.

That’s partly why Daigneault works with communities without a written language on writing dictionaries: it’s not just helpful for preservation in the future, but for getting those communities online and using their language now. “It’s not an easy thing to figure out when the Roman alphabet doesn’t capture all the sounds in their language,” she says.

Amid all the digital efforts, the greatest and hardest efforts at language preservation are still happening offline, face-to-face with actual speakers. But for Gibbens, the internet has proven to be vital, not just for teaching but for simply spreading the word about these languages. That’s also good for business: In its first 10 months, the school has had 60 students with zero paid advertising.

In addition to working on more courses that expand on the languages already offered, Gibbens intends to add Cherokee and Yoruba, a language spoken in West Africa, to the curriculum. Though it’s still spoken by millions, the instructor made a strong case that Yoruba is stigmatized in some places and that parents don’t want their children to speak it. “It’s not on the UNESCO list but we want to mitigate that situation,” Gibbens says.

She adds that’s still struggling to learn Buryat, the language that inspired all of this. It’s close enough to Mongolian that she can read newspapers online, where she tracks efforts to teach the endangered language in schools there. But since starting Tribalingual, she hasn’t had time to find a good enough teacher. “I still haven’t found a Buryat teacher who can teach it online,” she says. “The quest continues.”

Hate Saying No? Here’s What To Say Instead

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This piece originally appeared on Shine, a free daily motivational text, and is reprinted with permission.


You have three outstanding assignments sitting on your desk, your phone is lighting up with texts from your roommate reminding you of that party you don’t want to attend, and then your boss swings by to ask if you can stay late to help out on seven other tasks that need finishing.

Before you can stop yourself, “Uh, sure! I mean, of course,” tumbles out of your mouth. You know full well that you’re unable to handle another thing, but there’s just something about saying no that’s almost impossible to do.

Have “No” Fear?

If the above situation sounds familiar, it’s not surprising–many of us are afraid to say no. Psychology Todayoffers two main reasons why: We fear conflict and we don’t like to disappoint others. Because of this, we often say yes even if taking on something else isn’t in our best interest. We want to make others feel better–but we sacrifice our own feelings and time in return.


Related:The Ultimate Guide To Saying No To The Things You Don’t Want To Do 


For many, saying no can feel harsh. But learning to turn down a request is a crucial skill to master. It’s important to create boundaries out of respect for yourself, your time, and your energy–we truly can’t do it all.

So, how do we get better at saying no? The answer involves swapping that word for something else entirely. Let us introduce you to your new magic words: “I don’t.”

The Power Of “I Don’t”

When we’re skittish around the word no, we often try to decline requests with an “I can’t”–but “I don’t” is actually the best phrase to use. The reason is this: “I can’t” implies that you want to do something but an external factor is stopping you from doing it. It suggests you could do that task–and it leaves room for people to push back. For example: Saying “I can’t go to the party tonight” leaves lots of room for someone to respond with a “Why not?”

“I don’t,” on the other hand, reclaims your authority over your actions. When you say that you don’t do something, it’s an ironclad refusal—you as a human don’t do what’s being asked of you, and you don’t do it for your own sake. “I don’t go to parties on weeknights” is much more impactful than “I can’t go tonight.” The phrase turns a rejection into an affirmation of how you live your life, making it powerful and something you own.


Related:Five Ways To Say “No” So You Can Finally Reclaim Your Focus 


Another example: If you have a coworker asking you to step in on the office party planning committee–but you already have the responsibility of organizing the company’s retreat plus 10 outstanding work assignments–you can reply with a simple, “Although I wish I could help further, I don’t take on other projects when I’m behind on my existing assignments.” That statement is a lot harder to argue with than “I can’t do that right now,” and it’s more thoughtful than a plain “no.”

How To Use “I Don’t” To Motivate Yourself

“I don’t” is also a powerful tool you can use when working toward your goals. If you incorporate it into your self-talk, it can increase your willpower.

When researchers at Boston College and The University of Houston conducted a small study looking into the use of “I don’t” and “I can’t,” they found that participants who said “I don’t skip exercise” rather than “I can’t skip exercise” ended up working out more often than the “I can’t” group. “Using the word ‘don’t’ serves as a self-affirmation of one’s personal willpower and control … leading to a favorable influence on feelings of empowerment, as well as on actual behavior,” the researchers wrote.

Take Control Of “No”

Bottom line: “I don’t” puts the ball back in your court. It gives you authority over your no and leads to a powerful but respectful decline–or, an empowering motivational phrase.

It’s a lesson in framing, and it’s an easy way to turn dreaded “no”s into something empowering. Give it a try next time you need to say no but feel yourself about to say yes.


Shine Text is a free, daily motivational text service. To sign up, text “SHINE” to 759-85 or go to www.shinetext.com to learn more.

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Levi’s created a bot to help you find the perfect pair of jeans

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Buying jeans can be tricky and Levi’s knows it.

When you’re in the market for a new pair, you must go down a rabbit hole of decisions. Do you want them to be tight or loose in the thighs? What about the butt? And what about the leg opening: Are you more of a wide-leg or skinny-jeans kind of person? Then you need to consider the wash: Are you into dark, light, or stonewashed?

“In the past, customers have largely bought products in store, where they have the guidance of a sales expert who can walk them through the process,” says Marc Rosen, EVP of global e-commerce. “But we’ve been investing in making the online experience as seamless as shopping in a store. It’s harder than you might think.”

The Levi’s Virtual Stylist

Today, Levi’s unveils a new tool called Virtual Stylist that walks the customer through the buying experience. Zack Chang, the brand’s product manager for global e-commerce, says many brands have created bots that go through the various categories as they are laid out on the website, but that doesn’t really help the customer identify what they are looking for.

Levi’s new bot, which is available on the brand’s website and on Facebook Messenger, asks questions about how you like your jeans to fit, then provides options that are an exact match. On Facebook, it is also possible to select several pairs of jeans, then ask your friends to weigh in on which one you should buy. “Shopping is a social experience,” Chang says. “Our customers are already asking their friends and family for feedback about whether they should buy a product. We just wanted to make that experience easier for them.”

Pranksters planted Trump-branded KKK hoods and other items in Trump Tower gift shop

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Among the items available for purchase in the lower lobby merch hub at Trump Tower in New York are bobbleheads, electoral map postcards, and an assortment of sweaters. As Gothamist reports, however, for one probably very brief moment, some unlikely additional items invaded the store’s shelves. These included Trump-branded white hoods (“for fine people”), rubber sheets (“no messy clean up!”), a Russian flag, and postcards featuring Vladimir Putin (“45th president of the United States.”)

The group of pranksters responsible for planting these items have remained understandably anonymous as yet. Watch a video of them doing the deed below.


20 years after Princess Diana’s death, paparazzi culture is still out of control

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People around the world today are remembering Princess Diana of Wales, who died 20 years ago after a car crash in Paris—an event that brought worldwide attention on the vulturous paparazzi who made her life a living hell. In the decades since that event, there have been numerous attempts to rein in aggressive photographers on both sides of the Atlantic–both through industry self-regulation and government legislation. California Senator Dianne Feinstein first proposed a federal anti-paparazzi law as early as 1998, though it never got very far. On the state level, California has passed numerous laws aimed at curbing the behavior of unscrupulous shutterbugs, most recently in 2013 with a law meant to prevent paparazzi from harassing celebrities’ children—because who does that?

Alas, despite these efforts, paparazzi culture is still alive and well. Here are just a few examples from recent memory:

  • July 2017: George Clooneythreatened to sue after a French tabloid published photos of Amal Clooney’s twin babies.
  • July 2017: TMZ video shows paparazzi surrounding Justin Bieber‘s pickup truck. The singer accidentally hits one of them.
  • 2016: Paparazzi take poor-quality photos of a bikini-clad Catherine Zeta-Jones on a Mexican beach. The actress gets her revenge by posting better photos of herself on Instagram.
  • 2013: U.K. paparazzi took numerous “private moments” photos of Adele‘s then-infant son, Angelo Adkins. A lawyer sued photo agency Corbis Images U.K. on behalf of Angelo, who won a five-figure settlement.
  • 2012: Paparazzi snap photos of a topless Kate Middleton while she was vacationing in the south of France, an incident that drew comparisons to their treatment of Diana. She and Prince William sued over the incident. The case is ongoing.

Shocker: “Despacito” is Spotify’s most-streamed song of the summer

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It may come as a surprise to some literally no one, but Luis Fonsi’s hit song “Despacito” is the most-streamed song on Spotify this summer. In particular, the remix featuring Justin Bieber got people clicking the play button more than any other track on the world’s biggest music subscription service. The original Bieberless version was #22 on Spotify’s summer chart. People can’t seem to get enough of the Reaggeton-backed pop hit. In early August, the video for “Despacito” became the most-watched YouTube video of all time.

Here’s why Americans may not get to see the new season of “The Great British Bake Off”

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The Great British Bake Off—the best cooking show ever—is back on television in the U.K. with a new look, new hosts, and a new channel, but if American audiences think they’re going to see it anytime soon, they might be out of luck.

As superfans already know, in between seasons, the show went through a big shakeup. Love Productions, the company behind GBBO, moved from BBC One to Channel 4, in what Vulture described as a cash-grab-motivated move. In the shuffle, the show lost beloved judge Mary Berry, as well as charmingly and subtly hilarious hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, leaving only judge Paul Hollywood to continue his iron-fisted rule over the pastry kitchen.

To fill the gaps, Channel 4 has brought in renowned South African cookbook author Prue Leith to judge the contestants’ showstoppers and technical challenges, with comedian Sandi Toksvig and Mighty Boosh star Noel Fielding taking over as hosts. Anyone who has seen Fielding’s work as a goth swinger, future sailor, or Old Gregg knows this is a very exciting and very odd turn for the comedian and probably can’t wait to see him in this role.

For Americans, though, there is no guarantee that is going to happen anytime soon. The New York Times reports that PBS, which has aired past seasons in the U.S. and licenses it to Netflix, has not yet decided whether to air future seasons in the United States. And a PBS rep told Grub Street that the broadcaster “has not made decisions about future seasons of the show.” Unless someone else (Netflix itself, perhaps? Or good old Food Channel?) steps up to start airing the show, it looks like it might be time to build a torrent out of pastry cream, eh?

His Best Man Speech Ruined The Wedding, But This VW Ad Gave Him A Second Chance

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What: A new Volkswagen ad that gives one best man another chance to deliver his wedding speech.

Who: VW, adam&eveDDB

Why we care: Any nervous public speakers out there? If so, then you’ll recognize that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach watching the first minute or so of this ad. Car ads, as a rule, are pretty boring, standard fare. Swooping shots of the car driving in a picturesque landscape, paired with strategic looks at the interior. The better ones make us laugh or tell a story, but this might be the first one I’ve seen that uses confidence as a selling feature.

HowStuffWorks is about to make a lot more podcasts

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HowStuffWorks, which already claims the title of world’s largest for-profit podcasting company in terms of streams and downloads, is about to start putting out even more podcasts—about $15 million worth, to be precise.

HowStuffWorks just announced a Series A growth equity round led by global merchant bank the Raine Group that brought in $15 million. They plan to use that money to become a private entity, spinning off from parent company System1 to expand their growing empire that already includes 14 podcasts, including Stuff You Should Know and Stuff You Missed in History Class. They plan on adding shows on science, lifestyle, comedy, and more to their existing slate, which means a lot more shows to expand your slate of cocktail party banter.

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