Google may be Alphabet’s cash cow, but in Alphabet’s corporate structure the search and ad company is now just one of many companies operating businesses in various industries.
In a regulatory filing Friday, Alphabet described a restructuring that will put Google on equal legal and regulatory footing with its other companies. Alphabet has created a holding company called XXVI Holdings Inc. that will be the umbrella over Alphabet and all its businesses; the name refers to the 26 letters in the English alphabet. In addition, Google itself will change from a corporation to a limited liability company (LLC), which Alphabet believes better fits an affiliate company owned by a parent.
The company says the move represents the completion of a process that started when it changed its corporate structure in 2015, situating all of its businesses under the new entity Alphabet. Legally, however, businesses like the autonomous vehicle offshoot Waymo (then classified as “Other Bets”) remained subsidiaries of Google.
Until now. The restructuring could allow Google to focus on its core search and advertising business, and report results to the parent company that reflect its own results, not those of other companies beneath it. It also helps Alphabet keep potential risks in one LLC from spreading to others. While not all the legal and regulatory motivations for making today’s change are clear, it’s likely that quarterly and yearly financial reports to the SEC will still bear the Alphabet name.
But as Google drops to two levels down in the org chart, it’s unclear how much information on the company’s performance Alphabet will make public in the future. It’s already not required to report in fine detail the performance of affiliates like Google, Nest, Verily, and others to the SEC because they aren’t public companies. They’re owned by Alphabet. There’s a chance that today’s change could result in Alphabet reporting even less about its affiliates.
Alphabet says the restructuring will make its businesses more transparent than before. From today’s FCC filing:
“As a result of the corporate reorganization, Alphabet and Google will be able to operate in a more efficient, economical, and transparent manner, allowing the companies to concentrate on their revenue generating activities.”
A Google spokesperson toldBloomberg the restructuring will in no way affect shareholder control, operations, management, or personnel. Still, one has to wonder why news of Alphabet’s restructuring is hitting late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. Typically, companies pick that time to announce things they’re hoping that people won’t notice.
I recently dropped my son off at his first day of kindergarten. He met his new school with that intense combination of excitement and fear that’s unique to 5-year-olds. That morning he cried, but by mid-afternoon was telling me how great it all was, what friends he’d made already, and how nice his teachers were.
My day, however, was drastically different. I was realized there were only four months left of the year, and I still had so much to do.
For kids, back-to-school time is a season of newness and possibility. For adults, it can be a season of dread. We’d started the year with such high hopes for what we could accomplish and who we could become. And here we are, nine months in, wondering how we got here so quickly, and with so much still left undone.
This doesn’t have to be the end, though. It can be a new beginning. A friend of mine runs a gym and calls this time of year “the second New Year.” Every September, he sees a big influx of new gym memberships and personal-training clients, many of whom are parents who now have somewhat less hectic schedules with their kids back in classrooms for much of the day. In many ways, they’re telling themselves, “I promised myself I would do this back in January, and now it’s time.”
Indeed it is. Here’s how to take advantage of it, and make the end of the year your most productive stretch yet.
Time Is A Gift And A Curse–Accept Both
The good news is there’s still time. The bad news is there’s not a lot of it. One reason goals are so easy to set in January is because we have a full 12 months to look forward to all that can be accomplished in a year. A year just feels like a long time. Even if we get off track for a month or two, there’s still plenty of time to hit “reset” and still accomplish our goals. But that’s not true any longer as we race toward the final quarter of the year.
Psychologists have long understood that the act of declaring a goal is motivating all on its own. Sometimes it’s even as satisfying as actually accomplishing it, a circumstance that helps explain why New Year’s resolutions are so easy to commit to yet so hard to follow through with. But come September, we’re only left with the hard work of doing what we said we’d do; there’s no time left to procrastinate.
At times like this, it may be helpful to embrace the Stoic reminder of “memento mori,” remembering that time is limited, death comes to us all, and we must wisely do something with the life we’ve been given. Think of it less as a cause to mourn the time you’ve lost than a call to action–as a way of embracing the gift of time without being blind to its limits.
Not only is the end of the year approaching, but so is your death–some day. So let this spur you on to not waste another moment. You don’t have time to do everything, but you do have enough time to do something. Check your priorities and get on with it.
Look For Opportunities, Not Excuses
In his 2012 book Finding Ultra, endurance athlete Rich Roll tells a story about how he crashed his bike just as he was on the brink of winning his first major race.
By the time Roll had reached a stopping point where he could receive proper medical treatment, he’d already decided to quit. After all, his bike pedal had broken. Then the crew member of another team produces the pedal. They bandage his wounds. His wife says, “I think it’s gonna be okay.” “This is not over,” the captain of a competitor’s crew reassures him. And with that, Roll climbs back onto his bike and completes the remaining 135 miles of the race.
Every day, we’re presented with choices on how we choose to achieve our goals. As the clock runs down, it gets easier than ever to find an excuse to quit. Day by day, week by week, those excuses seem more and more reasonable and justified–making it harder to spot the opportunities to succeed that are still available to you. And in my experience, whatever we’re looking for, we tend to find.
Don’t Set New Goals, Set A Schedule
The time for lofty goals is over. No more goal-setting. What you need now is to create daily habits that ensure the work actually gets done. And the best way to do that is to put it in your schedule.
Today, I’m wearing a T-shirt provided by CoSchedule, my favorite social media management tool, which says “schedule everything.” It sounds like overkill, but it’s smart advice. After all, your schedule does not lie. More than what you say, it’s your calendar–all its appointments, meetings, project deadline, and social events–that tells you with cold, hard honestly what your values are, what you truly appreciate.
So take advantage of that this time of year. Use your schedule to set aside daily time to do what matters most to you. Once it’s blocked in, it’s a lot harder to ignore.
Focus On The Process, Not The Results
In general, people like events but struggle with process. Setting a goal is an event, a commitment you made at a given time and place. Accomplishing that goal takes work, and it unfolds gradually, sometimes in fits and starts. When we set a goal, we’re picturing an outcome, an end result. But what if, instead, we didn’t envision the outcome as much as we focused on the process of achieving it?
While this shift in mind-set isn’t easy to make, most things in life are actually already structured this way. You don’t lose weight, write a book, or launch a business simply by setting a goal. You do it by focusing on producing habits that ultimately allow you to reach your desired outcome. As as writer, I’m often asked about writer’s block and similar creative challenges. How do you overcome it? How do you work past that feeling of being hopelessly stuck?
My simple answer is always the same: You overcome writer’s block by writing. You do something, even if it doesn’t make any sense when you think about the end goal. The fastest way out of inertia is to just move. The more you move, the more momentum you create, and the easier the next motion becomes.
When I dropped our son off at school, it was hard that first day. The next day, it was a little easier. By the third day, he was asking when he could go back to school. That’s not to say there aren’t tough days–those happen to us all, long after we stop going to kindergarten. But the more we move, the better we get at beating our own internal resistance. And as long as we remember that time is finite, and that habits need to be scheduled in order to stick, it’s still possible to look for opportunities instead of finding excuses.
Despite sharing a name with the world’s best-selling cookie, Android 8.0 Oreo keeps a low profile.
The Oreo update, which Google started rolling out to Pixel and Nexus devices last week, isn’t much different from the previous version of Android, at least on the surface. While the update brings a handful of helpful user-facing features, such a snooze button for notifications and a redesigned set of emoji, it doesn’t offer any paradigm-shifting changes on par with, say, system-wide drag-and-drop in Apple’s iOS 11. Even Google’s Material Design language, which arrived in 2014, endures in Oreo with just a few minor aesthetic tweaks.
But after installing Android 8.0 Oreo on my two-year-old Nexus 5X phone, I noticed something more significant than any new feature: The phone just seems to work better than it used to.
Android updates stopped emphasizing new features years ago, when Google began updating apps and services through the Google Play Store as a way to sidestep Android’s fragmentation problem. In a sense, this has freed Android’s annual updates to focus on core matters of performance and stability. If my Nexus 5X is any indication, that work has paid off in Android 8.0 Oreo.
Project Better
Before Oreo, my Nexus 5X was prone to ugly performance issues. Tapping the screen sometimes produced no immediate response, and when the phone snapped into action a few moments later, it would also register any extra taps I’d entered in frustration, sending me into a navigational tailspin. The worst offender was the Camera app, whose routine launch failures led to countless missed photos and occasionally crashed the phone outright.
Post-Oreo, I haven’t experienced any of those issues. And while I can’t completely rule out a placebo effect, the update does offer plausible explanations. Google says it’s made several changes to the operating system’s core memory management, which should allow apps to run faster and prevent the system from slowing to a crawl. Android 8.0 Oreo also enforces stricter rules on letting apps run in the background, which should further reduce memory use and increase battery life.
This is hardly the first optimization Google has made over the years as it has tried to give Android the same level of polish as Apple’s iOS. But in previous updates, Google often set out specific goals with slick marketing names attached. “Project Butter” aimed to make animations and scrolling smoother in 2012. “Project Svelte” addressed the particular needs of low-end hardware in 2013. “Doze” took on a long-standing problem of standby battery drain, first in 2015, and with new refinements last year.
Although Oreo’s performance improvements don’t have a catchy moniker, maybe they don’t need one. Instead of striving for a specific goal, Oreo just generally makes Android more efficient. The difference on my Nexus 5X–a mid-tier phone at launch whose 2GB of RAM is less than half that of the latest Android handsets–is pronounced.
What About Features?
Sadly, few Android devices in existence today will get the Oreo update and see these performance improvements. Those that do will be mostly newer, high-end handsets. Even Google isn’t updating its own Nexus devices that are more than a couple of years old.
This dynamic helps explain why Android’s biggest feature changes don’t arrive through annual software upgrades anymore. Because hardware makers and wireless carriers tend to drag their feet on delivering upgrades to older devices, Google relies on a mechanism called Google Play Services to deliver new features through its own app store, where they can reach a much broader base of users. This is how Google delivered its Assistant voice tech to devices running the two-year-old Android Marshmallow earlier this year, and how new malware protections–ostensibly an Oreo feature–rolled out to a swath of devices in July.
Google has also made some features exclusive to its own Pixel phones, which debuted last year and will likely get sequels soon. The current Pixel has a its own home screen rather than the stock Android version, and a special camera app with slow-motion video support. Pixel devices also get unlimited Google Photos storage at full resolution. Even the Google Assistant was exclusive to the Pixel for several months after launch.
Of course, Google would prefer not to be in this situation, which is why it’s continually tried to improve the state of Android upgrades (albeit with little success). The latest effort, called Project Treble, is supposed to speed the upgrade process by separating chip makers’ low-level software from the broader operating-system framework. But this is tied to new devices running Android 8.0 Oreo, making it an investment in the future rather than an immediate benefit.
Because of this situation, the new features that Android 8.0 Oreo does offer feel as if they’re in suspended animation, waiting for the day when they can run on more than fraction of a percent of devices.
Picture-in-picture, for instance, only works in a handful of apps that have added support for the feature. The same goes for Notification Categories, which allows apps to offer more granular notification types through the phone’s settings menu. Notification Dots–a feature that lets you peek at an app’s alerts by long-pressing its home-screen icon–is currently exclusive to Pixel phones. And while Notification Snoozing works with every app, it won’t really hit its stride until it synchronizes with other device types, such as Chromebooks that run Android apps.
For now, it’s hard to tell how much impact those features will have on the day-to-day Android experience, which in turn just makes Oreo’s performance improvements more striking. Although they benefit hardly anyone today, they do bode well for Android’s future.
Kenya’s Supreme Court nullified last month’s electoral victory of incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta after finding that the balloting had been tainted by voting forms that were likely fraudulent—the first time that a judicial body has done so in Africa, and only the third time in modern history.
The initial outcome—a landslide for Kenyatta, who won 54% of the vote—was contested by longtime opposition leader Raila Odinga, whose supporters claimed the vote had been “hacked” by someone using the password of a central election technology official who had been found murdered a week before the vote.
Privacy advocates also raised concerns about the Kenyatta campaign’s reported decision to enlist the services of Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based data and psychographic messaging firm that worked for the Trump campaign and that is partly funded by the wealthy political donor and Breitbart News– and Trump-backer Robert Mercer.
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the political communications firm SCL Communications, signed contracts with the State Department earlier this year to carry out overseas political messaging. The company did not reply to a request for comment about its reported $6 million contract with the Kenyatta campaign. An Aristotle spokesperson declined to say what it had been paid for its services for the Odinga campaign.
The election—the most expensive in Kenya’s history, costing an estimated $1 billion in total—was also plagued by false news reports on platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. The torrent, said polling firm GeoPoll, amounted to the most “fake news” around an election ever recorded, with 90% of Kenyans saying they had encountered deliberately false political news.
In its nullification ruling, the court identified problems with the transmission and tallying of votes: It found that many of the paper forms that were required to be scanned and sent from over 40,000 polling stations were never recorded; the results were instead sent by text message and other means. It also found that a third of some 10,000 missing forms submitted days after the election lacked security features like watermarks or serial numbers, which observers said was evidence that the forms were likely false.
Immediately after preliminary election results were announced, Odinga’s supporters claimed that the tally had been manipulated by a hacker, using the password of Christopher Msando, an official who had been instrumental in setting up the country’s voting technology and whose body was found tortured and mangled outside Nairobi days before the vote.
Despite the concerns, the August 8 election was largely peaceful and was praised by international observers in the country at the time, including former Secretary of State John Kerry and the Carter Center. Kerry previously conceded “little aberrations here and there,” but he and others said the election was not rigged. Here’s Kerry at a press conference after the election:
Odinga said that international observers who determined that the election was mostly fair and free had “sanitized fraud.”
Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, did not weigh in on the outcome but urged peace after the vote in a letter he posted to Twitter.
President Trump has yet to comment on the election, but on August 10, the U.S. State Department issued a statement urging candidates to dispute results “in accordance with the constitution and rule of law and not through threats or acts of violence.” It added, “We stand with Kenyans across the political spectrum who are working together to advance democracy, build prosperity, and strengthen security in their great country.”
Fears of violence swirled after the vote was nullified. The country experienced postelection violence after presidential elections in 2013 and 2007, when as many as 1,500 died. After last month’s election, when supporters of Odinga had protested and rioted, at least 24 people were killed, most of them by security forces. Both sides were blamed for not doing enough to prepare their constituents for defeat.
An online flood of incendiary fake news ahead of the vote also raised fears that false stories would help stoke violence. Facebook even took out full-page newspaper ads and radio ads as part of its efforts to curb misinformation.
The company launched a news feed notice in Swahili and English directing users to resources on how to spot false reports “such as checking the web address, investigating the source and looking for other reports on the topic.” Ebele Okobi, Facebook Africa’s director of policy, said in a statement that the company had “a three-part strategy to stop the spread of misinformation: disrupting the economic incentives for the spammers who attempt to distribute false news, building new products and helping people better identify false news and report it.”
Along with data and polling analysis, Aristotle helped Odinga with debate prep, polling, and digital and TV advertising, a spokesperson told Fast Company; she said the company didn’t spread false news stories, and that much of its work involved figuring out ways to fight fake news. A Cambridge Analytica spokesperson told the BBC that the company was not involved in any negative advertising in Kenya, and that it “has never advocated the exploitation of ethnic divisions in any country.”
A Historic Day
A new vote, which must be held within 60 days of the ruling, means that candidates will have to start campaigning again. Supporters of Odinga shared their delight in the streets. “I am happy to be Kenyan today,” said Odinga. “It is a historic day for the people of Kenya, and by extension the people of Africa.”
Odinga, who was running for a fourth time, contended he had been robbed of victories in the previous two elections. After Kenyatta won by a tiny margin in 2013, Odinga asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the election; they refused. In early August polls, the two candidates were virtually tied, with neither drawing more than 50 percent.
On Friday, Odinga called for calm but said that his legal team would take members of the electoral commission to court, saying that they had “committed a criminal act” and belonged in jail.
President Kenyatta called on Kenyans to respond peacefully to the decision, which he said he respected even as he branded the judges “crooks.” “Millions of Kenyans queued, made their choice, and six people have decided that they will go against the will of the people,” he said.
John Aristotle Phillips, the founder and CEO of data company Aristotle, who worked for Odinga’s campaign before he was deported by government agents along with a Canadian colleague, praised the decision. “Today’s ruling is a victory for the Kenyan people and democracy worldwide,” he said in a statement. “This election was a massive fraud, and the court demonstrated great courage given the lengths to which those in government have gone to cling to power.”
Walter Mebane, a professor of statistics and political science at the University of Michigan who studies elections worldwide, ran the voting results through a computer model he and his colleagues developed to detect electoral fraud. Based solely on statistics, the New York Times reported, “and without knowledge of the intricacies of Kenyan politics, he and his team found patterns that showed widespread manipulation.”
Throughout the course of your career, there will be times when you need to ask for an introduction–even when you don’t want to. Whether you’re a new entrepreneur looking for an “in” with investors or just seeking a career change, you’ll need to tap your network for referrals, connections, and opportunities to chat.
Needless to say, making these requests can feel awkward–but it doesn’t have to. Here’s a three-step process that can make the whole experience less scary, all starting with the very first email you send, asking to be put in touch.
Step 1: Be Direct, But Leave Them An “Out”
Once you’ve identified the person who knows you and your desired connection, send an email to them that’s casual, but be up front and direct. Include a link to the desired connection’s LinkedIn profile and always give the other person an easy out in case they can’t make the connection for one reason or another. Either share the pertinent details that your acquaintance needs to make the intro right then–or let them know you’ll follow up ASAP with an email they can forward easily.
Here’s a sample email:
Jane,
Hope all is well. It was good to see you at the retail leaders’ dinner in Palo Alto in July. How was the trip to Iceland? It’s still on our bucket list.
I’m reaching out to ask for an introduction to John Smith at XYZ Company. We’ve just released a new product that is seeing some surprising traction with restaurant chains. John’s feedback on how he might think about this type of data would be very helpful.
Would you mind making an introduction? If so, I’ll send you an email that will make it easy to forward to John.
Thanks!
Brent
If the person declines to make the introduction, don’t take it personally. Be gracious, say thank you, move on. He or she might not know the person that well, or have some history that you’re simply not privy to.
Step Two: Follow Up Immediately
That day, be sure to send an email that’s easily forwarded to your target. Remember that you’re really speaking to two audiences here–your mutual connection and your desired connection.
In your note, you should provide some basic details about yourself–yes, your mutual connection knows who you are, but your new connection probably doesn’t. In addition, you should be specific about your request and who you’re trying to get to. It’s not enough to ask for a generic intro. After all, your mutual connection is putting their social capital and network on the line. Make sure you take that seriously and do your homework before you make the request.
Here’s a sample email:
Jane,
Good to catch up this week–enjoyed hearing about the trip to Iceland. As I mentioned, I’m looking for an introduction to John Smith at XYZ Company.
As you know, in my role as the CEO of Euclid, I spend a lot of time with various retail and restaurant leaders understanding how we can provide the most impact in solving some of their most pressing customer acquisition and offline attribution problems. We’ve just released a new product that is seeing some surprising traction with restaurant chains and John’s feedback on how he might think about this type of data would be very helpful.
Would you mind making an introduction? Let me know if you need anything else that might be helpful.
Thanks!
Brent
Step Three: Make Your Mutual Connection Look Good, And Then Add Your Own Value
Once your mutual connection does make their intro, don’t forget that they’re doing you a favor and putting their relationship and credibility on the line. Make them look good. Respond immediately on the same day.
Make it super easy for your target to connect with you and find a good time to talk. Remember, this person doesn’t know you so your behavior is a reflection on the mutual introduction who connected you. Don’t embarrass them.
Find a way to be helpful after the introduction is made. Comb your network for people who might be helpful to your new connection. Pass along a useful article. Send along a small gift after a good conversation, such as a book that has relevance to something you discussed, with a warm note of thanks. And while you’re at it, follow up with your mutual connection to say thanks and report back on how your conversation went. It’s always great to hear that things went positively.
Brent Franson is the CEO of Euclid, a data platform that provides offline identity and behavior for brick-and-mortar brands.
When I was a freshman in college, I wanted to try out for the football team. Given my 5 ‘7″ soft frame, this makes complete sense. You can’t keep a tiger out of the jungle. I decided to become a field-goal kicker. I bought a stand and a football at a sporting goods store. Late at night, I’d sneak into the stadium in Birmingham, Alabama, and practice my kicks. Had I ever kicked a field goal? No. So then why did I think I could walk on as a field-goal kicker for a Division-I college team that occasionally played schools like Auburn? Because I am crazy.
You’re not as foolhardy as me, but you probably tend to overreach a bit with your goals, too, especially at the beginning. That can cause all manner of mayhem and lead to disappointments–or worse. So the next time you set your eye on a big goal, try this before you take your first step toward it: Cut the goal in half.
No, I’m not telling you to do less–I’m actually helping you do more. Here’s how it works.
And to counter that, all it takes is a little thought experiment right from the get-go: Let’s say for example that you have to pay down $50,000 in credit card debt, but the thought of cutting that number in half and only paying $25,000 still makes you want to throw up a little. Defaulting on the remaining half (or all) of your debt isn’t a great option, but it’s one potential outcome. So if that ultimate $50,000 target has got to stay fixed, what’s one variable you can change? Give yourself more time.
If you doubled the amount of time you gave yourself to pay off the debt, what’s the worst thing that would happen? You’d pay a little (or perhaps significantly) more in interest, but you’d still pay off the whole debt. And chances are this would still be way better than just making minimum payments, which is exactly what your credit card company wants you to do. Remember, we’re up against quitting completely, which in this example might even mean declaring bankruptcy. The options we’re talking about right now aren’t: 1. Finish perfectly, or 2. Cut the goal in half. The options are: 1. Quit the goal because it was too big, or 2. Cut it in half and finish it. And if that means extending your timeline, then you should.
You Can Cut Goals Down To Size More Than You Think
In all likelihood, these two approaches, cutting the goal in half or doubling the timeline, can be applied to more goals than you suspect.
Of course, it’s unrealistic to think that you have the power to just cut all your goals in half. If your goal is to take medicine or something life-saving, by all means do not cut that in half. But even for some of the work-related goals you don’t have control over (because your boss sets them for you, for example), you may still have some leeway to reduce the stakes, scope, or timeline so you can perform better over the long run. The key is just making sure they’re the right size from the beginning. To do that, ask yourself this simple question: “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Let’s pretend for a minute that you cut your goal in half and instead of cleaning your entire house, you cleaned just two rooms. For years, you’ve hated how cluttered your house is, and the idea of doing only two rooms doesn’t seem like enough, so you’ve put it off completely. But by giving yourself permission to just accomplish half your goal, you’ll be able to see that you can actually clean those two rooms quickly. If a perfectionist (an “all or none at all”) mind-set prevented you from getting started on the original goal, that same type of thinking can motivate you to knock out a goal you’ve cut down by 50% (“I can definitely clean those two rooms perfectly right away.”).
Alternatively, what if you doubled the timeline instead of cutting the goal in half? If you’ve had a messy house for five whole years, why is giving yourself an extra month to clean it so terrifying? You’ve waited 60 months to do anything, and now it has to be done this month?
Perfectionism will tell you it’s now or never–that if you don’t finish it now, you never will. But by asking what’s the worst that would happen if you cut your goal in half or gave yourself more time, you’d improve your odds of success dramatically. And the world wouldn’t fall apart if you did less or it took longer.
Take a look at your long-term work projects; chances are there are plenty of opportunities to do something similar, and still achieve great results without incurring your boss’s ire. Sure, this idea may go against conventional goal-setting wisdom, but it might help you do the one thing that matters, no matter what your goal actually consists of: Finish it.
This article is adapted from Finish: Give Yourself The Gift Of Doneby Jon Acuff. It is reprinted with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
“Entrepreneurs, VCs, and so many others outside of Houston have reached out to Mercury Fund, Station Houston, TMCx, and other Houston startup development organizations asking how they can help,” the letter from Entrepreneurs of Houston reads.
“In the coming weeks and months, we will also share initiatives and programs that both directly help Houston’s entrepreneurs as well as solve the dynamic challenges that arise from this unprecedented event.”
Houston is, of course, a capital of U.S. energy. But Fast Company has written about how the city also has a thriving startup scene in areas like enterprise software and nanotechnology. As the city starts to rebuild, it will be interesting to see the industries that budding entrepreneurs will reimagine.
NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson landed back on Earth on Sunday where her capsule touched down in Kazakhstan, reports Engadget.During her time in space, Whitson spent a whopping 665 days on the International Space Station. That length allowed her to set two records: the longest time spent on the ISS for any female astronaut in history and the longest time for any American astronaut–of any gender–in history. Oh yeah, before she touched back down on Earth she had also broken another record. At 60-plus hours of space walks, she holds the record for spending the most time outside of the ISS, too.
After the 9:21pm ET landing, @AstroPeggy has a total of 665 days in space, the U.S. record and places 8th on all-time space endurance list pic.twitter.com/grVIRo3SmX
And nope, it’s not the current U.S.-North Korea spat. Musk says that the cause of WW3 will be because of competition for AI superiority at the national level. He made the claim following a tweet of a link to an article in which Russian president Vladimir Putin said the nation that leads in AI “will be the ruler of the world.”
China, Russia, soon all countries w strong computer science. Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 imo.
The network, called Verrit, is an online hub for Clinton supporters where they can get “information you can take out to social media when you’re having debates on key issues people are discussing,” Peter Daou, the site’s founder, told Recode.Verrit got a huge boost on Sunday after Clinton’s Twitter account plugged it. However, shortly after Clinton’s tweet, Verrit went offline. Daou said the cause of the downtime was the result of a “pretty significant and sophisticated” cyber attack. At the time of this writing, it’s not known who was responsible for the cyber attack, but the site is now back online.
I’m excited to sign up for @Verrit, a media platform for the 65.8 million! Will you join me and sign up too? https://t.co/bOLSMyk6bG
The iPhone maker had held the festival annually at London’s iconic Roundhouse performing arts and concert venue for the last 10 years. Originally called the iTunes Festival, Apple changed the name of the event to the Apple Music Festival in 2015. Tickets were always offered for free to U.K. residents via a lottery, and international users could watch the performances broadcast live and on-demand through Apple Music since 2015. Apple confirmed the cancellation of the festival to Music Business World, without giving a reason why. Since 2007, artists including Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Arctic Monkeys, Adele, Oasis, Mumford & Sons, Paul Simon, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga have appeared at the event.
From across a room, a tiny box beaming out low-power radar can tell how fast your heart is beating. The technology–initially developed as a concept at NASA to locate victims in a disaster–is coming to market as a monitor for elderly people living on their own, and eventually could be used by anyone as a tool to predict future health.
The startup making the technology thinks of it as an early version of a “tricorder in your home.” Like Star Trek’s fictional medical tricorder, it measures vital signs (for now, it monitors heart rate and breathing, but in the future, the team plans to develop devices that can do everything science fiction writers imagined, including diagnose disease) from a distance. The Welbi, the company’s first product, will connect to a cloud and mobile app that families can access to monitor an elderly relative’s health in real time.
“A new technology that is so disruptive to the way things are normally done starts in the consumer space, and then starts to approach the traditional medical space.” [Photo: courtesy V-Sense Medical]“There are several elderly people in my family who get calls at 7 a.m. just to make sure they woke up,” says Jeff Nosanov, CEO and cofounder of V-Sense Medical, the startup making the device. “I’m sure that’s true of many families. The problem with those situations is that people who are elderly or medically vulnerable, in many cases, don’t like being called every day–they don’t like being reminded that they are fragile or ill. They don’t want to feel like a burden. But at the same time, they do need someone, and with increasing numbers of people at home rather than in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities, there’s this gap connecting people with their families who are also their caregivers.”
“Seniors are typically an underserved market in many ways, already, because in our society we sort of have a private respect but publicly don’t want to acknowledge aging.” [Photo: courtesy V-Sense Medical]Nosanov, who previously worked at NASA, became interested in commercializing the technology after his children spent time in intensive care as newborns. The tiny monitors attached to each baby kept falling off. Nosanov saw the potential for remote monitoring. With venture capital funding, he acquired the rights to develop NASA’s technology, and founded a startup in 2015. His team spent months miniaturizing an early prototype, shrinking it from the size of a carry-on suitcase to roughly the size of a smartphone. But as he explored the market for baby monitors, he realized that it was a crowded space; a tool for elderly people made more sense as a first product (both the baby monitor and adult monitor would work the same way). Around 12 million Americans over age 65 live alone.
“The more we thought about it, we realized that at the other end of life, basically there’s a much larger market, far fewer options, and really a much more pressing need that we could address,” he says. “Seniors are typically an underserved market in many ways, already, because in our society we sort of have a private respect but publicly don’t want to acknowledge aging.”
The company believes that the technology could also be used in hospitals, where it could eliminate the need for obstrusive, uncomfortable wires and cables attached to patients that can spread germs and get in the way of medical teams. [Photo: courtesy V-Sense Medical]After the device is plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi, it doesn’t have to be maintained. Unlike a wearable like a Fitbit, users don’t have to directly interact with it or charge it. The monitor continuously scans the room with radar.
“It’s just like radar that police use to see how fast you’re going, when the signal bounces off a car and can tell you how fast it’s moving,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing, but with the surface of the body.” As the radio frequency signal shines on someone’s body, it reflects back differently depending on how the body is expanding and contracting with each breath or heartbeat. Because the body expands much more for each breath than a heartbeat, it’s easy for the system to tell the data apart.
After the device collects 30 seconds of data, an algorithm processes it to deliver back a heart rate and respiratory rate, and that information is sent to the cloud.
The company believes that the technology could also be used in hospitals, where it could eliminate the need for obstrusive, uncomfortable wires and cables attached to patients that can spread germs and get in the way of medical teams. Doctors have been receptive, though the startup says that it’s a tougher sell to administrators who think that existing monitoring devices are sufficient. “We realized we could reach a consumer space much faster . . . we’re seeing in some of our peers that this is not an uncommon story,” he says. “A new technology that is so disruptive to the way things are normally done starts in the consumer space, and then starts to approach the traditional medical space.” The device might also be used in understaffed nursing homes.
Ultimately, the company hopes to sell the device much more broadly, and begin to use it as a predictive medicine tool. If a large group of people use the monitors over a period of time, that data could be anonymously used to predict health and detect changes in vital stats before anything seems to be wrong.
“That would address a problem that is totally unmet in medical care today, which is that you really don’t start to see a doctor until you have real symptoms, and you could have had something getting worse for 10 years at that point,” Nosanov says. “We’re imagining this sort of new layer of predictive healthcare that can maybe point things out much sooner than you would have, because we’re looking at continuous data. That’s the future where we hope to see this go.”
The Finnish company accounted on Tuesday that it is planning an initial public offering to raise $36 million, Reuters reports. Rovio says it is potentially planning to use the funds raised to make acquisitions. Rovio has so far declined to say the number of shares it would offer, or their sale price, which makes it hard to know what amount the company values itself at this time. However, analysts have suggested the IPO could give the games maker a market cap of around $2 billion.
The iconic toymaker (and Europe’s largest) has announced it will cut 1,400 jobs, most before the end of 2017,reports Bloomberg. The company has seen a decline in sales and profit since its chairman Jorgen Vig Knudstorp stepped down as CEO last year. Since then, its revenues have declined for the first time in over a decade. In a statement, Knudstorp said:
“We are very sorry to make changes which may interfere with the lives of many of our colleagues. Our colleagues put so much passion into their work every day and we are deeply grateful for that. Unfortunately, it is essential for us to make these tough decisions.”
My favorite movie is Romancing the Stone. I don’t always admit that. If I’m feeling guarded, the answer is Do the Right Thing or Dead Poets Society. But to get lost in the jungle, seduce a renegade, dig up a giant emerald, fly off a waterfall and live to write the tale? That was all I ever wanted to do with my life, starting when I was nine years old.
While writing was the safest part of Joan Wilder’s adventure, it has been the riskiest of mine—and not just financially. Becoming a writer also meant confronting the fantasy of a neat and singular career arc. Like many people with artistic passions, I’d started out imagining I’d have a “day job” that could keep me going until my writing career took off, then do that full-time in its place.
That never came to pass. Instead, I found an alternative approach somewhere along the way, one that lets me balance two careers as a storyteller—one as a screenwriter and one as a communications manager at Google. Here’s how I managed to make that happen, and what I’ve learned in the process.
In my first four years after undergrad, I cycled through a few different roles. I was a magazine editor (six months), a Hollywood assistant (one year), an ad-agency temp (six months), and a tech PR guy (two years). I liked PR the least, but somehow I lasted in that stint the longest. I hated cold-calling reporters. They usually hung up on me. But I kept showing up at work the next day, even when some of my colleagues didn’t.
In 2001, when the so-called “New Economy” crashed, I was working for a small PR agency that specialized in internet startups. One by one, our clients’ domains went dark. In the aimless days following my layoff, I became strangely obsessed with Animal Planet. The creatures helped me reconnect with my basic needs. I had water, food, and shelter, but none of my post-college jobs had nourished what I saw as basic career fulfillment.
So I decided the tech bust was a great time to refresh my artistic dreams, and followed a friend to Madrid. I committed to staying long enough to write my first book-length collection of short stories. For a year, I wrote every day from midnight until 4:00 a.m. I taught English in the afternoons and survived on caffeine and street kebabs.
To complete this bohemian arc, I moved to Manhattan and took a job as a bartender, thinking I’d have time during the day to look for publishers. I was wrong. Working all night meant I had to sleep during the day. My stories got rejected everywhere. So I swung from the bartending vine back into showbiz, after scoring an impossible interview to be the writing assistant on All My Children.
I got hired as the casting assistant instead. At first, this was devastating. But as I soon recognized, life was full of hidden airbags. The bar had given me endless character templates. The casting job brought me face-to-face with talented artists, all of whom were finding their own ways to cope with rejection every day.
But I still felt like I was waiting to break through, so I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. To make money in the meantime, I returned to PR—yet another “day job”—where by now I was something of a veteran. When the academic year started, I convinced my boss to let me scale back to half time. I sold the idea by also offering to help establish the agency’s East Coast footprint, where I was returning for school. We picked up a handful of major clients as a result.
Somewhat accidentally, I was advancing professionally in a field I had always thought of as just a stopover until my writing career accelerated. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, the next two years also served as a further investment in my PR education. Every client was its own case study. For every chapter of my thesis (a novel about a gay man’s spectacular West Hollywood downward spiral), there was a launch or a crisis or an acquisition or a management change that required its own comms strategy.
When I graduated, the literary journal Puerto del Sol published one of the short stories I’d written as part of my degree program: the indulgently titled “Erotic Reparations,” about psychological warfare in an interracial love triangle. My first publication, this was a major milestone, but professionally it didn’t make things any easier. For one thing, I didn’t hate PR anymore. I was already making much bigger decisions and doing less trench work. Reporters had started taking my calls. Yet the validation of seeing my fiction in print made my ambition to become a best-selling author a bigger and hairier beast. My reflex was a fresh burst of wanderlust (for the inspiration!), so I decided to move to Berlin.
Continually underwritten by freelance PR work, my writing flourished during my 30 months at Checkpoint Charlie. I connected with a local film director looking for an English writer, and nine months later we sold our script to a local production company. (Entitled Do Not Disturb, it’s a moody film noir about love across borders, and still mired in production purgatory to this day.) By networking aggressively with the heads of other film companies, I eventually got hired as a story editor on movies in production.
Falling In Love With My “For Now” Job
By now, it was clear to me that the “day job” model no longer reflected my actual career. I’d backed into something that let me do both more or less successfully. I realized, fitfully at first, that maybe I wasn’t holding out for a big break after all. Maybe I’d broken into something else completely.
I remember the exact moment when I fell in love with PR. One of my strategies—which culminated in using the word “sex” in the headline of a press release—landed a smartphone security client in Cosmopolitan. This was gratifying in a way I’d never thought possible. Also, “content creation” was emerging as a marketing discipline. PR clients began demanding storytellers who could tweet, blog, and write Op-Eds in brand voice. My fiction training became a compelling differentiator.
Ty Sheppard [Photo: Tory Putnam]To prove (mostly to myself) that I wasn’t abandoning my first love, I set out to write my next screenplay in five-minute increments. This project finally made it clear to me that the whole “day-job/night-job” thing really wasn’t going to work; I couldn’t set aside four hours every evening, but I could always find five minutes, with the understanding that sometimes it would turn into an hour and sometimes it would only be 30 seconds.
Many multitaskers experience the reverse correlation between free time and productivity, but for me something clicked. Maybe my PR work was informing my creative work, or maybe I was just great at task-switching. Whatever it was, I spent a year writing on this schedule and another year submitting the draft and getting rejected. In those moments, I remembered my soap studs, valiantly getting turned down from one casting call to the next. But even so, I felt I’d hit my stride.
Finding My Underlying Purpose
A week after accepting an offer from the comms team at Google, I found out that one of my scripts had become a finalist in the 2016 L.A. Comedy Festival screenplay competition. This one was a TV pilot about a transgender head of state who had to save her LGBTQ nation from straight-making zombies.
But this time, while the recognition was exhilarating, it did not make me want to abandon Mountain View. Among other things, Google had hired me to handle external diversity communications. And for the first time ever, the two careers served something I felt was a deeper calling: to shape more inclusive cultural narratives and drive conversations about equality.
I haven’t written any new fiction in the 16 months since I started the job. But I know I’m doing my life’s work. Which brings me back to that movie theater: For Joan, it was flying over the edge that mattered most, not which side of the river she landed on.
Ty Sheppard is on the corporate communications team at Google. To date, he is the author of five screenplays, 20 short stories, and one novel, in varying states of production and publication.
On the assembly line in Toyota’s low-strung, sprawling Georgetown, Kentucky factory, worker ingenuity pops up in the least expected places. For instance, normally in auto plants installing a gas tank is a tedious, relatively complicated procedure. Because the tank is so heavy, a crane usually positions and holds it against the skeletal frame while employees tighten its straps and bolts from under the chassis, a strained and time-consuming maneuver that requires keeping arms up in the air for long periods of time.
To allay the obvious shortcomings in this process, a group of Toyota workers designed an ingenuous device–a multi-armed piece of industrial machinery that in a single action lifts the tank in the air, places it in its crevice and reaches underneath the vehicle’s skeletal body to permanently attach the tank to the chassis. The process is fast, seamless, and ergonomically safe.
Freed from securing the bolts, the workers (the designers of this new device) would seem to be superfluous. However, that’s not the case at all. Indeed, the same number of employees as before are still at that assembly station. But instead of turning bolts in cramped crannies, they are doing the types of less obviously essential human tasks that manufacturers tend to eliminate when automation is introduced; namely, painstaking tactile and visual inspections to check and double-check for flaws on the tank and its connections and for holes or weaknesses in the critical fuel line.
The central role that people play in this corner of the Georgetown plant is repeated in varying degrees throughout the factory and exemplifies the uniqueness of Toyota’s manufacturing philosophy, which while still cutting edge continues to curiously nod to the past. Even as the automaker unveils an updated version of its vaunted production system, called the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), the company has resisted the very modern allure of automation–a particularly contrarian stance to take in the car industry, which is estimated to be responsible for over half of commercial robot purchases in North America.
“Our automation ratio today is no higher than it was 15 years ago,” Wil James, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Kentucky, told me as we sat in his office above the 8.1-million-square-foot (170 football fields) factory. And that ratio was low to begin with: For at least the last 10 years, robots have been responsible for less than 8% of the work on Toyota’s global assembly lines. “Machines are good for repetitive things,” James continued, “but they can’t improve their own efficiency or the quality of their work. Only people can.” He added that Toyota has conducted internal studies comparing the time it took people and machines to assemble a car; over and over, human labor won.
[Photo: courtesy of Toyota]
The Robotic Mystique
Such thinking seems unorthodox but it’s not surprising given Toyota’s well-known manufacturing system, which was first popularized in The Machine That Changed the World, an unlikely best-seller in the early 1990s written by three MIT academics. Despite its dry subject, this book had a radical impact inside and outside of the business community–for the first time, unveiling the mysteries of Japanese industrial expertise and popularizing terms like lean production, continuous improvement, andon assembly lines, seven wastes or mudas and product flow. With the publication of The Machine That Changed the World, it became de rigueur for every large and small manufacturer to at least give lip service to emulating Toyota’s production strategy.
But as the decades past, you’d be forgiven if you thought that many of the balletic set of assembly line systems depicted in The Machine That Changed the World was anachronistic, especially the ones involving the contribution of human workers. Fundamentally, Toyota’s production principles were keyed to the notion that people are indispensable, the eyes, ears, and hands on the assembly line–identifying problems, recommending creative fixes, and offering new solutions for enhancing the product or process. Today, that idea seems quaint. In the industrial world now manufacturing prowess is measured more by robotic agility than human ingenuity. As an aspiration, lean is taking a back seat to lights-out–a manufacturing concept Elon Musk is championing for his Model 3 Tesla plant in which illumination will ultimately not be needed because the factory will be devoid of people . Even before we get there, auto companies like Kia–headquartered in Korea where the use of robots in manufacturing outpaces all other countries–are already claiming productivity improvements of nearly 200% from automation. Some plants have more than 1,000 robots–and less than a thousand people–on an assembly line.
Indeed, a nearly fetishistic appreciation of automation is ubiquitous these days. Dozens of articles, white papers, and books, written by respected thought leaders, executives, and consultants, depict an industrial future inevitably overrun by robots able to do the most sophisticated tasks at inhuman levels of efficiency. These are siren calls to most manufacturers whose growth plans are conditioned on cutting labor costs, which often make up as much as 25% of the value of their products. Some of the Pollyannaish views about the onslaught of robots foresee a period of unprecedented free time for individuals to cater to the whims of their imagination, turning us all into freelance artisans and entrepreneurs. Other, more sober forecasts worry about what people will do without the satisfaction of a job and the stability of a paycheck. Either way, a revolution awaits us, so goes the conventional wisdom. An oft-quoted Oxford University analysis predicts that over the next two decades, some 47% of American jobs will be lost to automation. In China and India, that figure is even higher: 77% and 69% respectively.
But Toyota has forged a different path. The automaker, now jockeying with Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan for the top spot in worldwide sales, consistently generates industry best profit margins, often 8% or more. To maintain this performance, Toyota has eschewed seeking growth primarily through cost-cutting (read automation), but rather has focused on automobile improvements offered at aggressively competitive prices. Codified as the Toyota New Global Architecture, this strategy doesn’t primarily target labor to reduce production expenses but instead is weighted toward smarter use of materials; reengineering automobiles so their component parts are lighter and more compact and their weight distribution is maxed out for performance and fuel efficiency; more economical global sharing of engine and vehicle models (trimming back more than 100 different platforms to fewer than ten); and a renewed emphasis on elusive lean concepts, such as processes that allow assembly lines to produce a different car one after another with no downtime. In TNGA’s framework, robots are not the strategic centerpiece, but merely enablers and handmaidens, helping assemblers do their jobs better, stimulating employee innovation and when possible facilitating cost gains.
Mitsuru Kawai [Photo: courtesy of Toyota]As if to punctuate how old-school this way of thinking is today, Toyota made an unusual executive appointment in 2015. Unexpectedly, the automaker named Mitsuru Kawai, a 52-year veteran of the firm (he was hired at 15), to head up global manufacturing, the highest position ever held by a former blue-collar worker. Kawai is one of the last remaining links at Toyota to Taiichi Ohno, the godfather of lean manufacturing and the Toyota production system. Ohno, who died in 1990, idealized the importance of seasoned and practiced individual workers to the success of the organization. Kawai recalled with some nostalgia how this attitude elevated employee self-regard and in turn the quality of Toyota’s assembly line. When he first started at the company, experienced factory employees were called gods because they were masters that could make anything by hand. Regrettably, he said, more recently Toyota had less appetite for “making use of human skills and wisdom.”
Kawai’s job now is to imbue TNGA with Ohno’s memory by bringing human craftsmanship back to the fore. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Kawai described the manufacturing philosophy he uses to achieve this as uncomplicated: “Humans should produce goods manually and make the process as simple as possible. Then when the process is thoroughly simplified, machines can take over. But rather than gigantic multi-function robots, we should use equipment that is adept at single simple purposes.”
A Series Of Elementary Innovation
Aspects of TNGA are being implemented in most Toyota factories around the world. But Toyota has invested in a $1.3 billion overhaul of Georgetown–its largest plant where 550,000 Camrys, Avalons, and Lexuses are produced each year–as TNGA’s pilot site before disseminating the new system globally. The imprints of Kawai and Ohno are already evident in large and small ways in the Kentucky facility. For instance, the outsized overhead conveyer belts that used to carry a steady stream of engines to the assembly line have been swapped out for moving pedestals that skate across the factory guided by electronic sensors in the floor. This new engine delivery system (which is, after all, merely a machine replacing a machine) accomplishes a series of manufacturing goals. By eliminating the complex web of conveyer belts, Toyota is able to downsize its plants considerably, essentially to one story from as many as three. That, in turn, results in substantial savings on construction, real estate, cooling, heating, and maintenance, some of the highest costs in managing a factory network.
Taiichi Ohno [Photo: courtesy of Toyota]In addition, the pedestals’ payloads are computer-directed, each engine matched directly with customer purchases. Which means that Toyota can theoretically make three SUVs for every sedan one hour and do the opposite the next, depending on market orders. Such flexible, one-by-one production is the elusive Holy Grail of the auto industry.
And equally significant, freed of the conveyer belts, the assembly line workspaces are relatively uncluttered, cleared of pulleys, tubes, and pipes. As a result, assemblers can spend their limited amount of time with the automobile–usually less than a minute–completing their tasks and checking for defects while not wasting seconds navigating inelegantly around it.
A more rudimentary innovation in Georgetown that dovetails perfectly with TNGA tenets is the floating chair ,or raku seat (raku roughly means easy in Japanese). This assembly aid glides along rails in and out of the vehicle and then front to back inside the car, giving installers unimpeded access to difficult-to-reach spots like the dashboard console without having to bend or squeeze into awkward positions. The Toyota employee that designed this device patterned it after the moving swivel chair in his bass fishing rig–and used a seat from his boat to beta test the concept.
Besides its ergonomic benefits, the raku seat prunes seconds off of the production process, which is a persistent goal of Toyota’s manufacturing systems. Repeated across the assembly line, trimming small slices of time adds to up to meaningful productivity benefits. “In our world, we see work in 55-second bursts,” said Kentucky Toyota manufacturing president James. “And we challenge our workers to chop a second or more off if they can. If we gain back 55 seconds throughout the factory, we can ultimately eliminate a job and move that worker to another slot where they can begin the innovation process over again. Humans are amazing at finding those stray seconds to remove.”
Among the more compelling experiments underway in Georgetown is a training exercise meant to infuse the TNGA idea that automation should solely grow organically out of human innovation. To this end, assemblers were given a karakuri assignment–a lean management drill that requires workers to build a Rube Goldberg-inspired contraption that operates under its own force to improve a workspace activity. One team is reengineering the flow rack, the ubiquitous stand next to each assembly station that holds the parts needed for the local task. Currently, as shelves are emptied, workers have to manually set them aside and then replace them with a full bin of parts. The “modernized” version will instead rely on a combination of springs, ropes, and weights to navigate this task after a button is pressed. When this decidedly low-tech device is perfected, Toyota plans to use the prototype as the blueprint for a robot to emulate the process.
Toyota Emerges From A Debacle
TNGA, which Toyota expects will reduce manufacturing expenditures by as much as 40%, emerged from a dark period in the early 2000s when the automaker overeagerly attempted to outpace General Motors and Volkswagen as the world’s No. 1 vehicle manufacturer. Toyota has admitted that by juicing production growth too rapidly at that time, quality, manufacturing controls and factory productivity were allowed to lag. So much so that in 2009 Toyota had its first loss in 59 years (in part due to the global financial depression) and during the next two years recalled more than 10 million vehicles after a spate of sudden acceleration accidents. In 2014, Toyota agreed to pay a record $1.2 billion penalty to end a criminal probe by the U.S. Justice Department into its alleged attempts to mislead the public and hide the true facts about the dangerous problems with its vehicles. Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda apologized publicly and abjectly for the company’s failures and said the automaker was “grasping for salvation.” An internal soul-searching followed, which in turn led to the new manufacturing system and ultimately to Kawai’s appointment to lead its implementation and a return to craftsmanship.
As part of the TNGA rollout, Kawai has demanded that factories establish manual workspaces for critical plant processes, in some cases eliminating automation where it had already been installed during the period that Toyota overtaxed its production capacity. Kawai’s goal is twofold. First, to ensure that Toyota’s workers have the expertise and skills to manufacture a car by hand even if they wouldn’t be called upon to fully do so again. Kawai believes that without this body of knowledge assemblers become myopic, focused solely on their small part of the operation and blinded to their responsibility to design improvements for the larger team effort that are required to consistently produce high-quality vehicles. Worse yet, in this narrow outlook, workers often mistakenly see robots as replacements for people rather than basic tools that can be used to enhance factory performance.
Kawai’s second aim in replacing automated factory zones with people is to revisit with a clear mind–removed from the anxiety of a surge in production volume–whether robots have actually improved efficiency in individual plant activities. Some of the results of this experiment are unexpected. For instance, in a Japanese Toyota factory where workers have taken over forging crankshafts out of metal from automated equipment, subsequent innovations have reduced material waste by 10% and shortened the crankshaft production line by 96%.
Toyota’s aversion toward automation is noteworthy for the obvious reason that the automaker is arguably one of the most creative and successful manufacturing companies in history, and has never followed the herd but rather set the course. However, beyond that, also worth examining more closely is the question raised by Toyota’s choice of direction: Do robots kill jobs or create them? Toyota, of course, would argue that while some manufacturers eagerly embrace automation and more will in the future, on a larger scale (and ironically in the more innovative and pioneering factories) robots are best used to precipitate more human plant activity rather than reduce it.
Recent analyses of employment data support this somewhat contrarian point of view. In one bit of research, James Bessen, a Boston College law professor, found that although automation has been increasingly prevalent in all types of services and manufacturing industries since 1950, in that time only one of 270 occupations categorized by the Census Bureau was eliminated by technology; namely, the elevator operator. Other jobs were partially automated and in many cases, automation led to more jobs, often higher-skilled positions at companies that used technology to design and develop new products and new ways to reach customers.
For instance, ATMs have radically altered consumer-banking habits, yet the number of branch employees has grown since money machines were first installed during the late 1990s. “Why didn’t employment fall?” writes Bessen. “Because the ATM allowed banks to operate branch offices at lower cost; this prompted them to open many more branches (their demand was elastic), offsetting the erstwhile loss in teller jobs.” And simultaneously, banks morphed into financial services companies, introducing an array of customized products that tellers were deputized to sell, giving behind-the-cage clerks the same opportunities for upward job mobility as deskbound bankers used to have.
In addition, historically there is a direct correlation between productivity growth, which robots should naturally contribute to, and job creation not explained by population gains. In theory, companies able to manufacture products more quickly and efficiently will reinvest the money from higher sales in assets and innovation and, in turn, additional workers. Or they may lower prices, which drives more consumer spending, higher GDP, and an improved employment outlook. A trenchant study on this topic by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation illustrated the relationship between productivity and employment by examining economic data of the post World War II era. ITIF found that in the 1960s, when U.S. productivity grew 3.1% per year, unemployment averaged 4.9%. [JR1] A couple of decades later, annual productivity growth had fallen to just under 2% and unemployment rates averaged 7.3%. And in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of the internet boom, annual productivity growth was nearly 3% again; in turn, the unemployment rate declined. From 2008 to 2015, productivity gains had ticked downward once more to only 1.2%; concomitantly, the rate of jobs creation has been sluggish compared to the pre-recession period.
These productivity statistics lead to a few significant conclusions about automation today. For one thing, robots thus far do not make up a significant portion of manufacturing activities–responsible for only around 10% of the work in factories, according to some estimates–and companies that have embraced automation have yet to see significant gains from it since productivity growth continues to trend downward. Moreover, the effect that automation has had on employment has been muted. Another bit of data is worth mentioning in this regard: Workers are not leaving occupations as frequently as they did in past decades–the rate of occupational change in the 2000s is 45% lower than the 1940–1980 period and 33% lower than the 1990s, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Robert Atkinson, ITIF president, believes that robots will in fact have a substantial presence in global factories before too long, although he doesn’t view automation as a threat to human jobs. He asserts that the productivity slump reflects a slowdown in innovation recently. Technology waves lasting as long 50-years have traditionally transformed society and revitalized economies but IT has stalled out, at the bottom of the S curve, Atkinson argues. “In the 1990s we went from dialup to 3 megabit broadband, that was transformative,” Atkinson says. “But going from 10 megabit to 50 megabit is not. Same thing with how much chips progressed in capabilities in the 1990s, but no more.”
As Atkinson sees it, the somewhat labored abilities of artificial intelligence are holding back robotic skills. That position is shared by John Launchbury, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, who says that AI is within reach but yet a distance away from the type of contextual adaption that true factory automation requires; in other words, AI systems still lack cognition skills to understand and manipulate underlying explanatory models and identify and analyze real-world objects. According to Launchbury, today’s second wave AI systems are capable of statistical learning; based on millions of bits of data, they can separate one voice from another or a cat from a dog, among many other more complex distinctions. A contextual adaption system, though, “could say if a specific animal it sees with little more than a cursory glance has ears, paws, or fur and how they differ from another animal in the most minute ways,” he says.
When that level of AI is available, Atkinson argues, the next technological wave–the robot era–will have arrived. And annual productivity could increase to as much as 3.5%. “Which will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people working with and around robots,” he says.
That, anyway, is what Toyota is counting on–or, better yet, cutting its own curve to make sure it happens.
There are plenty of workplace stressors you can neither avoid nor minimize–you’ve just got to deal with them. Maybe your performance review is around the corner and you’re worried you won’t meet expectations. Perhaps you’ve just been criticized by your supervisor or a colleague and are anxious to get back on your game. Or possibly it’s that the project you’re managing is destined to go over budget.
These experiences can be stressful in their own right, but sometimes people create more stress than a situation requires. Research going back some 100 years, on the so-called Yerkes-Dodson curve, finds that most people have a “sweet spot” in terms of stress, or what psychologists refer to as “arousal.” Too little, and you won’t be able to generate enough energy or motivation to work. Too much, and you’ll crumple under the pressure, unable to focus on the task at hand.
So when you’re laboring under a certain degree of unavoidable stress, you need to make sure it’s the right amount to keep you plugging away, but not so overwhelming that your performance and productivity plummet. To keep things in balance, try kicking these three common habits people fall into when coping with work stress.
Mistake #1: Trying To Go It Alone
One side effect of stress it that it can sap your focus. You tend to get stuck in a cycle of thinking, called “rumination,” about the thing that’s stressing you out. In addition, since stress is your brain’s and body’s response to something you deem potentially dangerous, you become extra sensitive to things going on in your immediate environment (due to the fact that many of the stressors our evolutionary ancestors faced involved physical threats, not conceptual ones).
To compensate for these distracting tendencies, many people try to isolate themselves from other people when they’re under pressure. “If only I can get a few hours alone this week to really focus, I’ll be able to get a better handle on this,” you may think. But this habit might only make things worse. In fact, one way to help yourself get productive work done while you’re stressed is to work together in a group.
After all, another psychologically hardwired lesson from humans’ evolutionary past was safety in numbers. When we’re feeling threatened, we gravitate toward teams. Your brain will likely be able to stay more focused in stressful situations when you’re working with others than when you try to hack away at a problem on your own–that is, just as long as you don’t spend the whole time talking about whatever’s stressing you out.
Depending on the root cause, some stressful situations unfold over long periods of time–a few days, a couple weeks, even the better part of a year. If you work for a company that’s struggling to survive, you may see no end in sight to the high-pressure environment you’re working within. In cases like these, you need to find ways to escape at least for a while. Unfortunately, many people’s first reaction is to do the reverse–cutting back on personal time in order to slog through a tough situation.
Remember, stress isn’t just a response to what’s already going on around you–it’s also your reaction to negative things that might happen but haven’t yet. So it’s important not to sacrifice the habits and routines that sustain you over the long haul. And somewhat counterintuitively, one solution is to do things that lessen work-related stress in the near-term. Yoga and mindfulness exercises are common ways to create a sense of peace and serenity. No, they won’t eliminate your dread of what might still be on the horizon, but they can dampen the arousal that’s getting the best of you right now.
The other alternative is just to find something truly enjoyable to do, whether or not it induces calm or mindfulness. Go to a movie or concert. Play a game. Do some exercise. In this case, you’re focusing your motivation on something desirable, rather than something stressful. The motivation to do pleasant things competes with the motivation to avoid negative ones. So if you can immerse yourself in positive activities, you’ll shift your motivation away from the focus on the stressors for a while. This can at lest help you keep stress that you can’t totally eliminate at manageable levels over long periods.
Mistake #3: Losing Perspective
When a big negative outcome feels like it’s right around the corner, it’s likely that your fear outstrips the potential reality. Stress causes you to magnify the imagined impact of the event you’re worrying about, which makes it hard to actually plan for it.
To regain some perspective, force yourself to think through the worst-case scenario as methodically as you can. For example, if your company does go bankrupt, what would that actually mean for you within the first week after it’s announced? The first month? How hard would it be for you to find another job? Would working somewhere else really be that bad?
When we’re under stress we can’t seem to control or mitigate, we tend to believe that bad outcomes will be much worse than they typically prove to be in reality. The researchers Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson have found that people regularly overestimate the long-term impact of negative events. Just tellingyourself that you’re worrying needlessly isn’t likely to de-stress the situation, of course–you’re going to feel what you’re going to feel.
But to help you manage those feelings, try just accepting the worst imaginable outcome rather than struggling to avoid it with everything you’ve got. This way, if it really does come to pass, you may find yourself more resilient and adaptable than you’d thought.
