Be slow to hire and quick to fire. You’ve probably heard this hiring advice, and perhaps you’ve even followed it. While it sounds logical, it’s almost always bad advice, says Scott Wintrip, author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant.

“People who are slow to hire operate out of fear of making a bad choice,” he says. “They have experienced the consequences of poor hiring choices, and, in attempts to avoid this mistake again, they slow down the hiring process, believing that speed and accuracy are mutually exclusive. This plodding approach to hiring leads to overanalysis and a protracted timeline.”

In 2015, the time it takes to fill a job hit a historical peak, and each year since then, it’s set a new high record, going from 28 working days to 30 working days, according to DHI Hiring Indicators reports. “Hiring delays are increasing, and that makes no sense in fast-paced world,” says Wintrip. “The world is moving faster, yet we’re hiring slower.”

Why It’s A Problem

“Slow to hire, quick to fire” grew out of fear of getting it wrong. “[Society for Human Resource Management] reports that a hiring mistake could cost a company five times the bad hire’s annual salary,” says Wintrip. “There are non-dollar costs, such as degraded morale and reputation. Performance evaluations for managers give weight to employee selection, and leaders are losing their jobs because of poor hiring choices. They’ve literally become terrified to hire.”

But an empty seat is a painful distraction, requiring a manager to do three jobs: their own work; handling or delegation of the work left by the empty seat; and finding and hiring the new employee. “Now they’re working while distracted, and that’s like driving while distracted; it’s detrimental to business,” says Wintrip.

The longer the hiring process goes on, the greater the chances of making a poor choice. “It’s a vicious cycle,” says Wintrip. “When you make fear-based decisions, you end up repeating the cycle again and again.”

Instead of acting out of fear, Wintrip recommends adopting a new mantra: “Fast to hire, quick to inspire.” Managers who operate this way mandate a hiring process that promotes rapid decision making and nurtures employee relationships. The process should be broken down into these steps:

1. Enrich The flow Of Talent

Being slow to hire means keeping a job open until right person shows up, but the opposite approach is better, says Wintrip. Cultivate top talent and wait for the right job to show up. Always be recruiting by advertising, networking, mining talent sites, keeping a presence in the market, asking for referrals, and hiring scouts.

This parallels how an on-demand economy works: “It’s about immediate access to what you earned,” he says. “You’re not putting people on shelves; you’re building a virtual pipeline of ready-to-hire talent.”

2. Harness The Flow

Once you have a talent pipeline, harness the flow by creating more effective interview methods. Experiential interviews are better than conventional methods where people sit and talk about doing work, trying to discern if they’re a fit, says Wintrip. “Talk is cheap and expensive,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you what you need to know, and it’s expensive because it leads to mistakes.”

A hands-on interview is best because you’re seeing, hearing, and experiencing a candidate doing sample work. “It’s what they do in an orchestra,” says Wintrip. “They don’t talk about how they play violin. They audition. This is the same thing.”

Better interview methods are attractive for candidates and hiring managers. “If I’m able to be a decision maker in an interview, I’m creating an irresistible experience for the candidate,” says Wintrip.

It also keeps top candidates engaged. “Candidates looking at it from the outside are looking with suspicion when there are five or six rounds of interviews,” says Wintrip. “Top talent doesn’t have time for this, and they’re thinking, ‘The leaders that are putting me through this are indecisive. Is that who I want to have leverage over my career?'”

3. Sustain The Flow

Once you find the right person and hire them, manage in a way that inspires their best by doing these three steps, says Wintrip. Set clear and reasonable expectations. Support people meeting those expectations by providing materials, training, and resources. And hold people accountable to the expectations.

Even with a better hiring process, mistakes will happen, and part of being a leader who inspires is letting people go, says Wintrip. “Firing quickly isn’t a bad idea as long as it’s act of compassion,” he says. “You can see firing as an act of compassion as long as you’ve met these three steps. You’ve done everything within your power to save their job. If I’ve done my part as a leader and they aren’t a fit, letting them go is the right thing to do for everyone.”

College these days is bonkers expensive. Take my alma mater, Williams College. For the 2017-18 school year, Williams is charging more than $53,000 for tuition. That fee is roughly in line with the median household income in the U.S.—and doesn’t include the costs of room and board.

Private colleges like Williams are quick to note that financial aid is readily available, so there’s a meaningful difference between sticker price and student outlay. Moreover, research consistently shows that higher education is worth the cost. Americans with a four-year degree have an unemployment rate that’s less than 3% and command salaries that are twice as high as their less-credentialed counterparts. But the fact remains: College imposes a crushing financial burden on many students and their families.

For an increasing number of startups, that problem presents an opportunity. Here are six that are trying to connect students with financial resources in new and interesting ways, from birth all the way to graduation and beyond.

CollegeBacker

New parents tend to get lots of (unsolicited) advice. Buy this stroller, follow that schedule—oh, and make sure you set up a 529 plan. To save enough money for college these days, American parents have to start at their kid’s birth. But only a quarter park money for college in 529s, the tax-advantaged investment vehicles that offer a clear leg up over savings accounts and other index options. 

CollegeBacker wants to increase the percentage of Americans who open 529s—and make sure that middle- and lower-income households in particular become adopters. The company sets up 529s on users’ behalf, simplifying a sometimes confusing state-level process, and enables contributions from grandparents and friends. To increase accessibility, CollegeBacker allows families to pay a monthly subscription fee of their choosing between zero and $10. “The cost of college continues to rise, and is expected to double again in the next 10 years,” says cofounder and COO Abby Chao. “Our existing solutions aren’t working.”

Raise.me

For students who aspire to be the first in their families to pursue higher education, college can feel abstract and elusive. Enter Raise.me, which rewards high school students for achievements like good grades and campus visits—with cash. “It allows them to set immediate goals,” cofounder and CEO Preston Silverman told the New York Times.

Colleges foot the bill for the scholarships (which are awarded if the student is admitted), while also paying Raise.me a service fee. Educational institutions at this level spend millions on marketing and view Raise.me as an effective means of building a relationship with motivated, high-performing students early in their high school career. Silverman and his growing team raised an additional $12 million in venture funding this past March.

Kaleidoscope

When Greg Dehn was growing up, his dad was diagnosed with ALS. Paying for treatment exhausted the family’s savings, leaving Dehn and his twin dependent on private aid to cover the cost of their education. Now, after a career in software development, he has founded Kaleidoscope, a company dedicated to matching students with private scholarship funds—a $72 billion market. It’s like the “common app for private scholarships,” Dehn says of the platform, which launched earlier this year.

At the moment, Kaleidoscope is most useful for private funders, who can use Dehn’s technology to reduce the administrative expenses associated with compliance and grant management. But over time, as the site adds more scholarship listings, it will become increasingly useful to students, too.

Frank

Students interested in applying for financial aid quickly learn the importance of the dreaded FAFSA form (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), which determines eligibility for grants, loans, and work-study programs. The online process managed by the Education Department is clunky and confusing, which deters some students from filing. Frank offers a streamlined alternative. “No one has been incentivized to fix it, which leaves a perfect ground for technology companies to come in and shake things up,” says founder and CEO Charlie Javice. 

Since launching in March, Frank has helped 75,000 families secure aid. Over time, Javice and hopes to build a sustainable business by offering premium services, such as credit counseling, that layer on top of the free FAFSA tool. “We’re acquiring customers cheaply, which is why venture is extremely excited,” she says.

Prodigy Finance

Prodigy specializes in a corner of the higher education market that is both growing and under attack: international postgrads. Graduate students from overseas have become an important source of revenue for U.S. universities, contributing over $32 billion during the 2015-16 academic year. But the Trump administration’s immigration policies have cast a shadow over many campuses, deterring applicants from Muslim-majority countries.

Prodigy, a London-based lending solution for international students, has chosen to step forward into the political fray. Last month, it raised $40 million in new equity financing and $200 million in debt. The company initially focused on students at European universities—with over 10 years of operations, it has issued $325 million in loans—but plans to expand in the U.S. this coming year.

CommonBond

After graduation, the college financing process is far from over. Students staring down a gulp-worthy debt load can look into refinancing their loans, potentially saving thousands of dollars. Refinancing used to be a paperwork-heavy process, but startups like CommonBond are changing that for the better. After successfully applying to refinance with CommonBond, graduates manage their debt through the startup’s user-friendly website, making it easier to stay on top of monthly payments.

“Traditional financial services aren’t really leveraging the technology that they could, relative to expectations of consumers,” says cofounder and CEO David Klein. Since launching in 2011, the company has funded over $1 billion in loans.

As the fight over Confederate monuments turns deadly, New Orleans-based designer Bryan C. Lee Jr. has been working to bring artists and historians together to create new symbols across the city that are inclusive of all people though his firm Colloqate Design.

Finally, after years of work, your startup has launched its first or most important product–and you want the world to know about it.

A well-timed article in a major publication could be the golden ticket many small startups need to get noticed by customers and potential funders. But convincing a journalist to write about your startup is easier said than done. Of course every reporter, editor, and publication is different, but there are some general rules that make the difference between getting your pitch deleted and getting a second look. I spoke to almost a dozen of my colleagues at Fast Company to see what they do and don’t like to see in a pitch. Here are the things most of us agreed on.

Do: Contact Journalists Through Email

If there was one universal agreement among the journalists I spoke to, it was our preferred contact method: email. Though this communication method may seem antiquated in the social media age, it’s a medium that works best since a single message (if you craft it correctly) contains everything we need to know–and it’s one we can read and reply to at our leisure.

In fact, not one journalist I spoke with had a desire to be contacted via social media. “Twitter and LinkedIn are not good ways to get in touch,” says Fast Company senior editor Kathleen Davis. “I don’t check LinkedIn frequently, so it’s not the best way to get hold of me, and if you don’t include a message with your connection request, I likely won’t accept it because I don’t know who you are.”

Do: Be Concise

Another universal agreement among those I spoke to was to get to the point quickly. “Be incredibly concise,” says Fast Company senior editor Harry McCracken. “Focus on the news or story you have, and describe it super briefly, remembering that I get a gazillion pitches a day and don’t have time to skim a lengthy pitch, let alone read it in its entirety. If I’m intrigued, I’ll ask for more.”

Fast Company staff editor Jeff Beer agrees. “Send an email, maybe ONE follow up. Get to the point very quickly: What it is, why FC readers might be interested, and why you’re pitching me specifically,” he says. This should be obvious, but it bears mentioning: Write a unique pitch for each journalist/publication and make sure it’s clearly formatted. “Don’t create a form letter pitch in some weird font that looks like a spam email newsletter. That’s almost an immediate delete.”

Do: Explain Why Your Story Is Relevant

A concise pitch is a must, but in that brief one- to two-paragraph explanation of why you are contacting us, one of the most critical things a journalist wants to know is, why, specifically, is your story relevant? “Show me how it fits in a trend or what’s going on right now,” advises Davis. “Show the scale and impact that it’s had. Ask yourself, Why now? Why would we cover it now? And why would people care? What’s in it for the reader? What value are you bringing? Keep it short and readable, and give me a useful and clear subject line on the email.”

Anisa Purbasari, an editorial assistant at Fast Company, sums it up like this: “Treat it like you would pitch a VC: What problem are you solving, why is your solution unique, what makes you the right person to solve it?” Do that convincingly and you’ve gone a long way to getting us interested.

Don’t: Bother If Someone Else Has Already Written About You

While it’s true journalists always are looking for things to write about, we’re more likely to ignore a pitch if someone has recently written about it already. As Fast Company staff writer Cale Weissman says, “Don’t talk about past recent coverage of the same thing. If Forbes already wrote about you, why would I want to?” If readers have already read the story of Startup X’s development somewhere else, why would they want to read the same story again?

Do: Take The Time To Learn About Who You Are Contacting

When you reach out to a journalist, you’re asking them to dedicate their time researching and writing about your company. So why wouldn’t you show them the same respect and get to know what they cover and the kind of stories they’re interested in? For example, if your startup just made the latest killer app, don’t waste your time (or hers) in contacting an editor who covers leadership when you should be contacting a tech editor.

“It’s pretty clear what my section covers from just a quick scan through the page and my past coverage, and it will benefit you greatly to get yourself acquainted with that before pitching,” says Eillie Anzilotti, who covers sustainability and social for Fast Company. Oh, and one more, simple, thing: “Do spell my name correctly. I know it’s a weird one, but I will respect you so much more if you do.”

Don’t: Try To Flatter Us

This isn’t a date. Flattery will get you nowhere, and it’s actually a big turnoff and a bit insulting to the journalist that you think it will help you. “I’m willing to believe some people do so sincerely,” says McCracken. “But I get so many people trying to butter me up through unsolicited praise that I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who says something nice and then tries to sell me on a story.”

Don’t: Make Us Do Your Legwork Or Tell Us How To Do Our Job

Journalists don’t work for you, they work for their readers. And like you, they are really busy with their job, so asking them to do things for you to help you get your work done is a nonstarter. “Don’t give me more work: Don’t email me just to ask me to introduce you to someone else at Fast Company. Don’t email asking me for what I’d like to be pitched or telling me that you have something great with next to no info and ask me if I want to learn more,” explains Davis.

And no one likes to be told how to do their job. “Do not try to instruct me on how to cover the thing you’re pitching, or suggest that we ‘work together to come up with an angle.’ That’s my job, not yours,” says Fast Company‘s Anzilotti.

Don’t: Stalk Us

This was another issue many journalists I spoke to brought up. While most colleagues said that a follow-up email was fine if they had not replied to your pitch, what wasn’t cool was going all-out stalker on them. Don’t hear back? Wait a few days before following up–but only follow up once, and do so via email. Don’t text, Tweet, Facebook Message, or call. Their work email should be the only method of contact unless you already have a good existing relationship with them.

“Don’t call my cell phone, that’s not a number that’s listed, so if you got it somehow that’s really going to creep me out,” says Davis.

Speaking of creepy, don’t bother buying contact info. “Don’t ever contact me at an email address not ending in @fastcompany.com, says Fast Company associate editor Rich Bellis. “If you bought my personal email address from a third party that scraped the internet for it, congratulations for being a lazy, unprofessional creep—you just got blocked.”

Don’t: Be A Lying Passive-Aggressive Jerk

You’d be surprised how deceitful some people can be in the hope that that tactic will get a journalist to write about their company. “I have had a few instances where people have told me I ‘accepted’ a piece I never did, or even go so far as to craft a fake email I never sent,” says Fast Company‘s Purbasari.

What’s almost as bad as outright lying is thinking passive aggression will get you anywhere. “Never guilt me into writing a story by saying, ‘You’ve covered my competitor before, why aren’t you covering me????’ or ‘I have been pitching you for one year, why aren’t you responding to me????’ says Fast Company staff writer Elizabeth Segran. “This undermines my editorial judgment and makes me inclined to never work with you in the future.”

Do: Build A Relationship With Us

And it’s Segran’s last point that is perhaps the most pertinent for everyone who wants to get their startup’s story told: Journalists want to work with you. They hope you have a killer pitch they just can’t wait to turn into one of the best stories they’ve ever written. But for whatever reason, your story might not be right for their audience at this moment in time.

Your startup’s story is likely only just beginning, and though you’ve followed all of the advice above and haven’t seen your company’s name in print yet, it doesn’t mean you never will. The key, above all, is to cultivate relationships with journalists. You do that by understanding what their duties are to their readers, the types of stories that interest them, and by treating them with the same respect as you would any other person you want to build a long-term relationship with.

In the St. Clair neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s South Side–a community struggling with poverty and filled with vacant lots–it can be hard to attract new residents. A development in planning now will try something new to achieve that: a housing complex will come with its own 23-acre urban farm.

Built on the site of a housing project that was demolished in 2009, the mixed income development Hilltop Farm will include an orchard, incubator farm plots for aspiring farmers, community gardens and shared plots, a youth farm, greenhouses, a farmers’ market, and fields devoted to growing produce to deliver to people living in the townhomes on the property and to others in the city.

“When you work in distressed markets that need some driver for new residents, one thing that we’ve seen is a real desire to live near well-managed green space assets,” says Aaron Sukenik, executive director of the Hilltop Alliance, a local nonprofit community advocacy group that is coordinating the plan for the farm. “That can manifest as a greenway, or public park, or a trail network, but what really hasn’t been borne out locally . . . is an urban agriculture hub.”

“In a way, this will also be a defining asset for the neighborhoods that surround this place,” Sukenik says. In time, as more people move there, other vacant lots could also be redeveloped.

The project is also designed to immediately benefit neighbors who already live nearby. Right now, much of the area could be considered a food desert, with little access to fresh produce. Nearly half of households live on less than $10,000 a year, and many lack cars. When the farm is complete, some neighbors will be able to grow food themselves, or sign up for a CSA (community-supported agriculture) subscription that delivers produce as it’s harvested. Because the area has a refugee population that is used to farming communally, some of the community plots are larger than they would be in a typical community garden. An on-site farm stand will take SNAP benefits as it sells seasonal produce.

“This is a way of having increased access to affordable and culturally appropriate food,” says Jake Seltman, executive director of Grow Pittsburgh, an urban farming organization that helped study the feasibility of the farm for Hilltop Alliance along with Penn State Extension, and which helped lead community planning for the project. “We talk about food poverty, and space where people can grow their own food and know where it comes from, regardless of whether there’s a grocery store nearby, has a huge value.”

A youth farm and orchard, along with an education center, will help introduce students from nearby schools to farming. In the farm incubator space, aspiring farmers who may not have access to land–or who want to learn more about how to run a business–can come to the farm to use a plot of land and access other resources.

“Many of the [aspiring farmers] that we connect with live in the city and don’t want to drive–they want to live in the city and also want to grow food in the city,” says Seltman. “In Pittsburgh, that’s a challenge, because the land, if there is any land, is quite expensive, and further out, where it might be more affordable, the commute is a challenge. So an incubator farm where these folks can try it out in a space that’s closer to where they live is great.”

By farming the land–and leaving some hilly parts of the property covered in trees–rather than developing all of it for housing, the project also has other benefits. The land will be able to absorb stormwater in heavy rains, helping prevent flooding. The tree cover will absorb pollution. People can walk to buy produce rather than driving. The green space is also expected to increase property values; a 2012 study in the county found that smaller community gardens contributed to 5% annual increases in the value of adjacent properties. The farm is also designed to build community.

“When people from the housing are able to go to the community garden and farm together, and there’s a farm stand, there are authentic opportunities for people to connect around food and celebrate that connection to the land and each other,” Seltman says.

Though the team began studying the feasibility of the project in 2013, the fact that multiple parties are involved has made planning complex. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development owns the site, and the Pittsburgh Housing Authority manages it, though it plans to sell it to the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority. The Redevelopment Authority will likely subdivide the property into “conservation” land, including the farm, and sell that to a land trust that will lease it for a nominal fee to Hilltop Alliance. The rest of the land will become the new housing. The Housing Authority is still going through a long list of steps required before it can dispose of the property.

In the meantime, Hilltop Alliance has access to the land and has planted its first cover crops–a process to prepare the soil for the future farm. While the housing will take longer to build, it could start growing produce for the neighborhood as early as next summer.

This week, we look at what phrases make you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about, how you can explain what you do for a living without boring anyone to death, and what it takes to introduce yourself when you find it awkward to do so.

These the top stories you loved in Leadership for the week of 09/04:

1. These Expressions Make You Sound Like You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

If you’re a manager, you might worry about sounding too controlling, but there are times when softening your language hurts your credibility. In fact, certain phrases can even make you sound less knowledgeable than you actually are. For example, saying, “I’m not sure, but” just for the sake of appearing modest isn’t doing you favors.

2. How To Answer The Question “What Do You Do?” Without Boring Anyone

Only a few jobs warrant no further detail (teacher, doctor, accountant) when someone asks you that question. Many jobs aren’t so clear cut, but people aren’t always excited by a lengthy explanation of your confusing analytics role. But there are ways to make explaining your job sound more interesting, and this week we learned a few tips.

3. I’ve Been A Googler, A Screenwriter, And A Bartender–And I’ve Ditched The Idea Of A Day Job

For those who want to make a living from doing something creative, the path usually goes like this: get a “day job,” work on your art on the side, then quit your job once you can support yourself through your own work. But for Ty Sheppard, that never happened. Instead, after accidentally falling in love with PR while working to become a writer, Sheppard came to embrace his dual career as a storyteller across multiple fields. In his own words, here’s how he made that happen.

4. Meet The Millennial Who’s Trying To Save The Labor Movement With A Facebook For Unions

Unions might be dying, but one 29 year old wants to save them–through a social media network connecting workers all over the United States. After getting frustrated with antiquated technology as a temp at Teamsters, Larry Williams Jr. decided build a platform that’s now known as UnionBase. As Rick Wartzman reports, Williams’s dream extends beyond revitalizing labor unions. “He wants not only to amplify workers’ collective voice, Wartzman writes, “but to actually facilitate collective bargaining on a grand scale.”

5. The Best Way To Introduce Yourself In Five Potentially Awkward Situations

Introductions can be awkward, especially if you’re in a situation where you need to establish credibility quickly. Leadership coach Sylvia Baldock recently shared with Fast Company‘s Michael Grothaus how to come across with authority and get the other person interested right from the get-go. One thing you probably shouldn’t do? Interrupt an existing conversation to introduce yourself.

It’s the morning after news hit that Equifax was the target of a massive security breach that impacted as many as 143 million people. For many involved, this means that personal information like social security numbers and addresses could have been accessed by a nefarious third party. The adrenaline has subsided after a restless night’s sleep, and now nearly half the United States is mulling over what options they have to protect themselves.

The answer is: not much. As of right now, Equifax has been vague about who’s been directly affected, and there’s no way to know with certainty. The website it set up, EquifaxSecurity2017.com, only tells you if your data wasn’t compromised, and that’s only after you give them more personal data.

But given the magnitude of the breach, it’s most important that Americans become aware of what’s going on. And if you haven’t already, you should probably implement some form of credit-monitoring service.

Signing A Deal With The Devil?

Along with checking to see if your data was impacted, Equifax now offers a free service on the same website that gives consumers access to robust credit monitoring for a year. The monitoring will inform customers of changes to their credit and whether or not third parties have accessed stolen data. Admittedly, this puts people in a very awkward bind: Do they use a free service offered by the very company let their information be breached?

As an alternative, you could turn to paid offerings from competitors like Experian and TransUnion (which is what USA Todayrecommends people do). But Equifax’s free service already incorporates all three bureau credit monitoring, meaning it runs reports from its competitors to make sure no credit changes go unaccounted for.

Security journalist Brian Krebs recommends people take things a step further and freeze their credit. In a post today, he said it’s best to assume that your data has already been compromised. Krebs writes, “credit monitoring services typically only look for new account fraud and do little or nothing to prevent fraud on existing consumer credit accounts.” He goes on to explain that Equifax’s free service is likely just a way to rope in future customers too:

The fact that the breached entity (Equifax) is offering to sign consumers up for its own identity protection services strikes me as pretty rich. Typically, the way these arrangements work is the credit monitoring is free for a period of time, and then consumers are pitched on purchasing additional protection when their free coverage expires. In the case of this offering, consumers are eligible for the free service for one year.

Beyond credit monitoring and freezes, it’s also important to keep a close eye on all your finances. Credit card numbers may have also been disclosed, so it’s important to make sure no unauthorized charges have been made to your existing cards.

One lesson here is to implement credit monitoring and use it before breaches occur. Stolen personal data can persist on the web for quite a long time–and, unlike credit cards, social security numbers are very difficult to change. Beyond that, it’s just wait and see if Equifax will take further steps to fix this mess. The last 17 hours for the company have been sloppy, and all of our personal data hangs in the balance.

Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, barely had time to arrange the tchotchkes on his desk before his first challenge arrived. The FBI has opened an investigation into whether the ride-hailing company used software to interfere with competitors, according to the Wall Street Journal. The probe is based on a program called “Hell,” which used Lyft rider accounts to map areas where Lyft drivers were absent. Uber would then send more drivers to areas where its rival was not. The program, which ran between 2014 and early 2016, also enticed drivers working for both platforms to drop Lyft. Hell was first unearthed by the Information in April.

Shortly after the report came out, a class-action lawsuit accused Uber of unfairly advantaging itself using “intercepted” driver communications. A judge recently dismissed the case, but the plaintiff is allowed to amend and file the complaint again by September 14.

Uber is currently cooperating with investigators, representatives for the company say.

Starting a new job can feel a lot like your first day of high school. Sure, you have those adult concerns of wanting to prove your worth and demonstrate that you’ll be able to excel in that new position.

But, more often than not, your biggest worry is this: Will everybody like you? Will you make fast friends in the office, or will you be tempted to eat your lunch alone while locked in a bathroom stall?

Fortunately, there’s something you can do to make the right impression and quickly secure your spot as the most beloved coworker on your team–and, it all starts with asking one (or all!) of these four questions during your first week on the job.

1. Can You Tell Me A Little Bit About Your Role?

In order to successfully communicate and collaborate with other employees at your company, you need to have a solid grasp on what exactly it is that they do. While job titles can give you a surface-level glimpse into the different tasks they’re responsible for, those really only tell you so much. For that reason, it’s always helpful to explicitly ask your colleagues what sorts of things they do on a daily basis.

Related:Here’s What To Wear To Your New Job

The benefits of this question are twofold. First, you’ll get a much more comprehensive understanding of specific people’s job duties–which will be a benefit as you continue to get your feet under you at that company. You’ll know who to approach with certain questions or requests, rather than wandering aimlessly.

Secondly, this sort of question demonstrates your genuine interest in your colleagues. It shows that you don’t want to work in a vacuum and operate with general assumptions about what other people are doing for eight hours a day–you really want to know them, so that you can work together that much more effectively.

2. Mind If I Sit Here?

There are plenty of workplaces out there that are warm and welcoming–meaning you’ll likely end up with seemingly endless lunch invitations during your first week. But, if that doesn’t happen? There’s no need to wait for everybody else to extend an invite. Instead, take a deep breath, put yourself out there, and ask to sit with a group of your new coworkers during lunch.

Being the one to take the first step makes you appear that much more friendly and approachable–not to mention confident.

Once you find a place to sit, follow that up with some questions about what your colleagues like to do when they’re not at the office. It’s a great opportunity to discover any common interests, while also reaffirming the fact that you want to get to know them as people–and not just team members.

Related:Why We’re Hardwired To Be Anxious At A New Job 

3. How Can My Position Best Help You?

This question is a big one. And, it’s almost guaranteed to inspire ridiculous, cartoon heart-eyes in all of your new colleagues.

You understand the core duties of your new position–the job description was able to fill you in on that much. But, now it’s smart to go a step beyond that and find out how your role can bring the most value to the other people on your team.

From your coworkers to your boss, finding out how you can be an asset to them and make their lives just a little bit easier–right from the get-go–is a surefire way to prove that you want to work in the interest of the team, and not just yourself.

Of course, you don’t want to extend too far outside of what’s expected of your position. However, if there are simple things you can be doing to better work with your team members, knowing those within your first week is helpful.

4. Can I Help You With Anything?

Your first week at a new job can feel a little strange. Most of the time, it’s filled with plenty of paperwork, the occasional meeting, and failed attempts at finding your way from the bathroom to your desk–without leaving a helpful trail of paper clips.

But, since you’re really only getting up to speed, there’s typically some downtime. You don’t have a ton of real work on your plate during that week–and, as an added bonus, almost nobody knows your email address yet.

This makes it the perfect time to ask your colleagues if there’s anything that you can help them with. Not only is it a great way to make a positive impression on your team members, but it’s also an excellent strategy to gain some hands-on experience–and a better understanding of how everything works in the process.

The first week in a new role is usually enough to bring you back to all of those first-day-of-school insecurities–particularly when you’re concerned about whether or not your colleagues will like you.

Fortunately, you can take matters into your own hands. Ask these four questions when you’re just getting started in your new position, and your coworkers won’t just like you–they’ll respect and admire you too.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More From The Muse:

• The Handy Checklist That Guarantees You’ll Start Your New Job On The Right Note 
• 4 Insane Thoughts Everyone Has From Starting A New Job (And How To Keep Your Crazy In Check) 
• 5 Situations That’ll Always Feel Awkward When You’re New At Work 

It’s no longer just the big media companies that are playing around with Snapchat’s Publisher Stories. Starting today, some college campus newspapers are being added to the mix. Snap says four college papers are going to be producing weekly stories on the platform: U.C. Berkeley’s The Daily Californian, Texas A&M’s The Battalion, Syracuse’s The Daily Orange, and U.W. Madison’s The Badger Herald. 

These newspapers’ editorial teams will be able to produce weekly content that will then be pushed to Snapchat’s publishers feed. In a sense, this is early training for budding journalists in the real-life media landscape. More media companies are turning toward visual content forms–namely video–and popular platforms like Snapchat are surely propelling this shift. On Snap’s part, this is likely a way to keep young people engaged on the app and using the publisher feed. All the same, it’s another indication that the media business is a-changing.

And who knows? Maybe front pages of future college newspapers will simply be on Snapchat.

More details are emerging about the sophisticated hackers who recently penetrated U.S. energy company systems that could be manipulated to sabotage parts of the electric grid.

“They weren’t just in administrative networks—we saw them on operational machines,” says Eric Chien, technical director of Symantec’s security technology and response unit. “We’re talking about machines that are controlling elements that are plugged into the power grid.”

The hackers, who appear linked to an earlier wave of attacks on the sector reported in 2014, ramped up their efforts this year, Symantec reports. They’ve used a mix of targeted phishing attacks—sending malware-laden emails with content targeted to the energy sector—and so-called watering hole attacks, compromising websites likely to be visited by targets in the industry and using them to invade energy company networks.

Symantec says the attack is likely the work of a group that security experts call “Dragonfly” or “Energetic Bear,” and while the company emphasized that it doesn’t have enough evidence to definitely link the group to a particular nation, other experts have previously connected them to Russia. A report released in December by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security included Dragonfly on a list of reported Russian intelligence hacking groups, and security firm CrowdStrike said in 2014 the group had a “nexus to the Russian federation.” DHS is reviewing the new report, and says there’s no sign of an immediate threat to public safety, The Hillreported Friday.

The fact that the group hasn’t sought ransom or stolen data with obvious industrial espionage value suggests a state-sponsored group, as does the apparent sophistication of the attacks, Chien says.

“This is definitely at the level of a nation state,” he says, though Symantec hasn’t pointed fingers at a particular country.

It’s also possible the group is a set of hackers for hire, writes James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, in a Friday blog post.

“If Dragonfly is a Russian state-sponsored group, then the compromises could be a show-of-force meant to indirectly respond to recent sanctions placed on the sponsor,” Scott writes. “If the group is mercenary, the campaign could be a demonstration of skill.”

Once in company systems, the group has been spotted installing additional malware granting backdoor access to systems and taking surreptitious screenshots of industrial control software. Those screenshots could allow the hackers to study how the software, which often varies from installation to installation based on the hardware that’s installed, controls electric grid operations, says Chien.

“You might see a box that represents a switch or a larger thing that represents a breaker panel,” he says. “They take screenshots of those so they can understand what they need to control.”

Symantec warned a number of companies in the energy sector in the past few months about the attack, and since then, it’s seen a decline in the number of attacks detected, possibly indicating that companies are successfully repelling the attackers. Because much of its data is collected anonymously, the company can’t say with certainly which companies have been hacked.

The company also hasn’t made definitive claims about who’s behind the hacking operation, which Symantec has dubbed Dragonfly 2.0. The company has seen evidence of attacks in Turkey and Switzerland as well as the United States, and some language in the hacking code is in French and Russian, but Symantec says that alone doesn’t divulge the nationality of the hackers. Symantec researchers were able to link these hacks with those in years past, based on unique malware used in both waves of attacks but the group now mostly uses off-the-shelf hacking tools, making it more difficult to pick out new clues to their identity, Chien says.

Given previous attacks, this new wave of hacks isn’t a great surprise, says Omer Schneider, CEO of industrial control system security company CyberX, in an email.

“Over time, the adversaries have gotten even more sophisticated and now they’ve stolen credentials that give them direct access to control systems in our energy sector,” he writes. “If I were a foreign power, this would be a great way to threaten the U.S. while I invade other countries or engage in other aggressive actions against U.S. allies.”

Chien emphasizes that there’s no single digital switch hackers could throw to instantly cause a widespread blackout but says it’s certainly conceivable they could create outages. Hackers suspected of being linked to Russia famously triggered blackouts in Ukraine on multiple occasions, and it’s possible a clever attack could cause cascading issues, like the malfunction that cut power to millions in the 2003 Northeast blackout. The Department of Energy has previously warned that the grid faces “imminent danger” of a digital attack and federal agencies have begun researching ways to quickly restore power after a hack.

Scott argues a Ukraine-style attack would be unlikely to cause widespread damage and would be an unwise move, since it would “do little other than draw the ire of the United States and its allies.”

Those power companies that are already affected by this hack should reinstall affected machines and change potentially stolen credentials, Chien says. And those who might be vulnerable should install two-factor authentication wherever possible as an additional precaution. Companies can also install monitoring tools from a variety of vendors that can catch suspicious activity, including on industrial control systems.

“Organizations in a range of industries that are concerned about DragonFly 2.0 affecting their critical operational systems should apply real-time ICS monitoring and detection that can identify the presence of DragonFly in their operations and take steps to block or remediate it,” writes Moreno Carullo, CTO of ICS security company Nozomi Networks, in an email.

And while the hacking activity has apparently decreased since Symantec put the warning out to affected companies, and electric companies have generally increased their security in recent years, it’s quite possible the attackers will regroup and try again, says Chien.

“We would expect there to be additional improvements, but it’s a constant cat-and-mouse battle,” he says.

[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

When I went to see Annabelle: Creation recently, there was a scene that filled me with more dread than any horror movie has in years. The scene wasn’t from Annabelle, though, as effectively sphincter-tightening as that demon doll movie is. It actually played before the feature, in an extended clip teasing the new adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

As a fan of the novel published in 1986 and the 1990 miniseries—which taught an entire generation to fear Tim Curry—I was familiar with the scene. It’s the final moments of pint-sized, adorably rain-slickered Georgie Denbrough’s life. The beats remained the same: A little kid follows a paper boat’s rainy-day voyage down the gutter, where Pennywise the Dancing Clown lies in wait. Everything seemed to drag on a little longer, though, and Georgie’s little boy-innocence is cranked up to 11. The exchange in which Pennywise overcomes the boy’s distrust with buffoonery is excruciating, because you know what’s coming.

Or at least you think you do. The scene in the preview ended just before Pennywise attacks, and even just that portion of it rattled me more than anything in Annabelle. Now that It’s in wide release, though, it turns out the full scene is next level–a primordially horrifying horsekick to the heart that could traumatize anyone who even just knows a child, let alone has one.

There’s an old saying among comedy writers: If you want to make an audience laugh, push a guy dressed like an old lady down some stairs; if you want to make a comedy writer laugh, push an actual old lady down those stairs. Sub out comedy writers for jaded horror junkies and laughter for the thrill of fear, and you’ve got an explanation for why kids sometimes die onscreen. Ordinarily, children are sacrosanct in horror movies. (Think of all the scenes where a child almost encounters the murderous space-goblin or whatever, only to be spared at the last second.) In every disaster flick, you can extrapolate that many, many children die, but something changes when the death is not abstract.

When a movie like The Blob (1988) or The Devil’s Candy (2017) explicitly kills off a kid, it’s a memorable transgression. That’s why It has always been kind of a landmark in horror: It’s about a clown monster that feasts on children, including one right in the opening scene. What separates the new version from its predecessor, and even those other films I just mentioned, is its audacious level of graphic violence. This movie raises the bar on child-killing horror higher than some viewers may be ready to go.

The miniseries version is rougher. Experts say that the most terrifying horror of all is what’s left to your imagination. That may be true, but before the 1990 It tosses the keys to your imagination to take over, it gives you the sound of Georgie screaming as Pennywise bares those teeth and advances toward him. Then it stops. The scene ends on those chainsaw choppers charging the camera. Then we’re on to the next thing. Perhaps the fact that this version was made for TV and featured Night Court’s Harry Anderson tipped the decision to end the scene this way. Maybe a theatrical version in 1990 would have trod carefully too.

The version now in theaters definitely does not.

Even the pre-sewer material in It is supercharged. While older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), the film’s main protagonist, crafts the ill-fated paper boat, impossibly angelic Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) rests his head on his sibling’s shoulder, just luxuriating in their blessed bond. Everything the little boy does leading up to the scene’s climax is basically that row of girl scouts on an airplane singing “We like being alive” on Family Guy.

When Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) strikes, we see what those otherworldly teeth can do. They latch onto Georgie’s arm. He screams in pain and shock. Crunch. Georgie flings himself backwards and his arm has been bitten off. It’s gory. Now the boy is on the ground, crying and screaming and trying to get away. Pennywise then sort of Mr. Fantastic’s his arm into a tentacle and pulls the boy into the sewer. We don’t know what happens after that. We just see a pool of blood sloshing in the street.

How upsetting is it to watch Georgie’s death? Everybody has their own threshold. Horror, like comedy, is subjective. But for me, it was too much. I was shaken. I’m traumatized just remembering the scene now as I sit here recapping it. As a stoic horror fan who has absorbed the entire Eli Roth canon, I was surprised by my own reaction. Perhaps it’s because my nephew is Georgie’s age and has approximately the same level of adorability. When I saw Georgie suffer onscreen, though, I saw my nephew suffer–and to a lesser extent, my cat. And it was gutting.

I understand why director Andy Muschietti filmed the scene this way. Since gruesome portrayals of children’s deaths are verboten, it was perhaps the only way to turn this most expected death into a shock. It’s an early shot across fans’ bows, an unfurling banner that reads, ‘This ain’t ya daddy’s It.’ And it isn’t, either! The rest of the film takes some fantastic creative liberties with the source material, peppers generously with humor, and emerges with a deeply unnerving experience that succeeds on its own merit.

If it took seeing a child die horribly to shock this jaded horror fan, though, I shudder to think what it will take to make us shudder in the future.

It’s been a big week for Facebook advertising. And I don’t just mean how it accounts for 77% of the digital ad industry’s overall growth last year. Or the way it shares near complete dominance of the category with Google. That stuff, as the waves of promoted posts in your feeds will tell you, is pretty typical.

No, this week the social network got hit with a trifecta of bad news on the advertising front. First was P&G CMO Marc Pritchard demanding, via an Adweek cover story, more transparency–which holds a lot of sway given he’s got a $2.4 billion annual U.S. advertising budget. Then we learned that roughly 3,000 ads from Russian sources were sold on the platform during the last election cycle, and they featured polarizing content about presidential nominees and hot-button issues. And finally, an analyst looked at census data and discovered that Facebook has been inflating its ad reach numbers in the U.S. by more than 10 million in some age ranges.

All of these have something in common: They illustrate just how little we know about how Facebook’s ad ecosystem works. Despite all the new metrics, glitzy dashboards, and custom targeting options, for many skeptics this proved that John Wanamaker’s old advertising adage still holds true. (He famously said that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”)

But is it all really that big of a deal?

That may be so, but now people like P&G’s Pritchard and Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed are publicly calling for more metric transparency, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the co-chair of the Senate committee investigating Russia’s influence on the election and possible links with the Trump campaign, wants to see Facebook at a public hearing about its role. Expect the social network to be increasingly proactive in rolling out more features and reporting numbers to help assuage them.

Facebook, for its part, is trying to stay ahead of all this. When I reached out for a comment to include in this article, they admitted that their advertising tools are for estimates and campaign planning only. “It’s not a business’s actual reach or campaign reporting, and is not billable,” they said in a statement. This helps explain the discrepancy between its audience estimates and the U.S. census. And, to its credit, Facebook did release new tools earlier this year that offer increased transparency to advertisers, particularly around where their ads would appear.

One has 2 billion users, the others have billions of dollars to spend, and the metric transparency tug of war between Facebook and its advertisers is far from over.

Here’s a doozy of a PR pitch that my colleague received earlier today:

Hi – hope all is well.

With Hurricane Irma barreling towards Florida, many are worried about their family and friends or they skipped town and are concerned about their homes and/or possessions. To help people observe the effects of the storm in real-time, South Florida-based XXX webcam company, [REDACTED], is using some of its recently launched Lifestream (live 24/7) cameras, which allow people to capture and share their lives around the clock, to stream the storm.

They have two cameras set up — one located in a third-story apartment overlooking the beach, and the other in a home that is looking out at the at backyard.  They will be streaming until the power goes out or they are knocked over.

Let’s walk through this: An XXX webcam company, based in Florida, decided to turn two of its cameras away from boobies and toward the sky. This act is somehow altruistic, because a hurricane is coming and people will want live footage of what’s happening (because there will surely be no other live coverage of the Hurricane Irma). The idea here seems to be that this cam company is doing a service to society and news outlets should write about this brave work.

I won’t write more, because I don’t want to spend more time thinking about this awful pitch. But if your PR strategy involves using a natural disaster–that could very likely kill people–as a way to rep your porn company, maybe don’t?

What: A new campaign for the transportation brand subtly highlights its

Who: Lyft, Wieden+Kennedy

Why we care: For most of its existence, Lyft’s been the bridesmaid of the transportation app market. Then, the negative stories about discrimination, regulatory bypassing, and general corporate cultural toxicity started flooding out of Uber. Here, in W+K’s first major campaign for the brand, Jeff Bridges goes back to The Oregon Trail in 1836 for some inexplicable reason, to makes a subtle values-based pitch for Lyft.

“You always have a choice. You can choose to ride with the right people doing things for the right reasons, you’ll always end up in the right place. Or, you can choose poorly and end up stranded, buzzards circling, drinking rain water out of your boot.”

In other words, forget all that sexist nonsense and give the other app a try. It would’ve been a bit more cutting six months ago, but credit to them for hitting this perceived point of differentiation. And using an Oscar winner to do it.

Todd Schulte has only one thing on his to-do list, but it’s a big one.

As the president of FWD.us, the immigrant rights advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Schulte has long been focused on a way to shield the “Dreamers,” the children of undocumented immigrants, from being deported. But this week’s turn of events clarified that mission for him. “Tuesday,” he says, “was a devastating devastating, devastating, devastating day.”

On paper that repetition may seem trite, but in conversation it was an apt way to express the heaviness of the situation. That morning President Donald Trump had Attorney General Jeff Sessions deliver the news that his administration was rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, the Obama-era executive order that shields Dreamers from deportation.

“There are no take-backs on DACA,” Schulte says, days after he and his team watched Sessions’s press conference from their Wall Street office. Still, despite a sense of defeat, FWD quickly sprung into action.

The organization spent this week mobilizing its base–it held press conferences, highlighted its past research and advocacy work, and continued to put pressure on Congress to finally pass the Dream Act–immigration reform that would provide formal ways for children brought illegally into the U.S. to receive proper, legal immigration statuses, including permanent residency.

Schulte, a veteran Democratic political strategist, has been with the organization since its early days, some five years ago. Cofounded by Mark Zuckerberg, FWD has tried to become a prominent voice for immigration reform with tens of millions of Silicon Valley dollars in its coffers. But despite the support and a sympathetic Obama administration, the organization has stumbled and struggled in its efforts to pass sweeping legislative reform.

In the Trump era the fight is harder than ever. In speeches, the candidate and newly elected president would sometimes allude to rescinding programs like DACA, which forced FWD to shift from proactive to reactive.

Rather than counter the candidate himself, FWD spent about $10 million last year trying to fight his anti-immigrant narrative with a grassroots activist approach across the U.S.: voter registration events, panel discussions, videos, celebrity-driven social media campaigns, public opinion polls and reports—essentially anything it could do to make people care. At the same time it’s been walking a delicate tightrope of presenting immigration reform as a bipartisan issue while also facing up to the realities of a hyper-partisan president who opposes the issue.

Federal lobbying reports show that the group has spent about $390,000 on lobbying Congress this year, equal to what it spent during all of last year. It spent $480,000 on lobbying in 2015, the year that President Obama signed DACA, and $720,000 in 2014.

Which is all to say that FWD–and Schulte–had a good feeling this week was coming for a while. “Since election night people like Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions have been trying to force the president to do this,” he says.

“Most Of Them Have Never Spoken Out Before”

I first met Schulte earlier this summer at a FWD-run hackathon in lower Manhattan where young people were asked to build digital tools to protect the local undocumented community. After chatting for a few minutes about politics and his organizing, he brought up DACA. Schulte described the danger rescinding it would pose, and we talked about the difficulty of explaining issues like this to an already harried, overloaded populace. How does an advocacy group communicate to citizens that they need to call their lawmakers about one specific cause when there are a slew of issues–trans rights, environmental protections, racial discrimination, police reform–that also seem to demand our immediate attention.

Trump’s decision has forced the issue to the fore: The country cares about DACA, at least for now. Schulte says FWD is seeing a burst of newfound interest. In the last three days, the number of people visiting its website and using it to make calls to Congress was triple its previous traffic record, Schulte tells me.

With more people rallying around the issue, FWD has a clear message: “Either we pass a Dream Act or our country, starting on March 6, will lose 1,400 people a day–every one of them will be subject to deportation.”

It’s a bleak directive, yet it seems to be resonating with a larger number of people, and Schulte has spent this week trying to make sure everyone hears it. The coming weeks will mean more of that, including lobbying, meetings on Capitol Hill, press conferences, and various events. That’s all old hat; this time, though, FWD has a bigger audience and more supporters.

“We have over 600 business leaders around the world speaking out on this issue,” Schulte says, including Warren Buffett, Mary Barra, and Jeff Bezos.  “Most of them have never spoken out before.”

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Zuckerberg called the decision “particularly cruel”; the following day he held a Facebook Live event with DACA recipients, some of whom worked for FWD.

And while Schulte’s job hasn’t changed since last week, FWD now faces a very stark imperative: It has six months to light a fire under America’s ass in order to get an immigration reform bill passed. “I’m going to be working around the clock with this,” he says, skipping over the fact that his fervent round-the-country travel means he’s hardly seeing his 2-year-old daughter. “If we don’t get this done, the consequences will be devastating.”

All this with a team made up of a considerable amount of DACA recipients, or Dreamers. I ask about the emotional toll the political fight is taking on those employees. “I run an organization that is made stronger because we are allowed to hire DACA recipients,” Schulte says. “I am a DACA beneficiary,” he says, referring to his team. He pauses and adds, “it’s hard.”

For the Dreamers he works with, whose job is to advocate–as immigrants–for immigration reform, there’s a clock ticking. “I want to be supportive of them,” he says. He adds that the organization is preparing for the road ahead; “We’re doing everything we can to prepare for every eventuality.”

Related: After Trump’s DACA Decision, Dreamers Start Plotting How To Fight For Their Future

Despite the bleak outlook, Schulte remains optimistic. He points to more Republican allies coming out of the woodwork to voice their support in the last few days. “A lot of our job is continuing to highlight these voices,” he says. The other part is trying to force Congress to hold a vote. In spite of all of his and FWD’s efforts, the fate of reform and the group’s big ambitions will ultimately be determined by six months of political dealmaking—or quagmire.

“Either we will come together and pass a Dream Act, or head into a dark dark place.”

What is an office, but a space containing a few tables, chairs, and computers? The founders of Boatster, a peer-to-peer yacht rental platform, have ditched their land-based office for one that floats in the Mediterranean. Six members of the company are now operating from a boat that mainly docks outside of Mallorca in Spain. The yacht has a crew of two: one captain and one attendant, “But of course, they do a lot for themselves,” says Robert Davids, a representative for the company. By which he means employees are supposed to do their own cooking and cleaning.

Of course no one is forced to be on the boat. There is still a small office in Mallorca the team can use, which they do when the yacht is being rented out on their platform. “In July, the yacht was rented out for two weeks,” says Davids. This is part of the deal the cofounders of Boatster have worked out with the yacht’s owner: they can use the boat so long as no one else wants to rent it. The company also has a larger office of 12 in Amsterdam; mostly developers and marketing people. More people would like to work from the yacht, but there is only enough room for 10, maybe 12 people, Davids tells me.

When I ask him if its weird for coworkers to also live with each other in a confined ocean-bound vestibule, he says that it hasn’t been a problem. He has only heard that it is “a lot of fun.”

The company is pitching this concept as the first-ever boat office. Not to state the obvious, but the Boatster founders are not the first to bring a laptop onto a boat to do office work. Many rich people have done this #workingfromboat.

The company views its new office as not only a perk, but also a way to sail into new markets and dock with local boat owners. The platform hosts over 10,000 boats and mainly caters to Europe, Thailand, Australia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Boatsters is currently discussing a possible move to the Caribbean with the boat’s owner as the temperature gets too cold to lounge up on deck. But they may find the climate less than hospitable this time of year.

Yesterday, Equifax finally got around to announcing that, back in July, its systems were struck by a massive cyberattack that may have impacted up to 143 million people.

The hack and delayed response to it have consumers furious, but in fact, Equifax has a very long history of being in the negative spotlight. The company was founded in 1899 under the name Retail Credit Company. Pretty quickly, it ticked off consumers by collecting massive amounts of data on them–data that it turned over to banks, insurance companies, department stores, or anyone who wanted to know whether or not to extend credit to individuals. Consumers hated it, because they couldn’t access the reports and couldn’t really fix them. Retail Credit Company was sued by customers for invasion of privacy and even libel, but it didn’t change much.

In March 1970, Alan Westin, a Columbia University professor of public law, took to the pages of the New York Times to let consumers know that their Retail Credit files may include “facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors” about basically every aspect of a person’s life, as detailed in a 1995 Wired magazine article. That included everything from people’s jobs and schooling to details about their marital troubles and sex lives. Companies, Wired notes, used that information to deny credit to those they found “morally lacking.”

That same month, Retail Credit Company was on the brink of making its files digital, so Westin went to Congress to continue the argument he made in the Times. Congressional hearings on the matter led to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970.

What’s In A Name?

In 1975, Retail Credit was so hated and distrusted that it decided to change its name to Equifax in the hopes that rebranding would shake off some of its bad reputation. It also changed the focus of its business: It no longer just sold credit reports to businesses, but to people. That shifted the burden of credit report monitoring to individuals, and if people wanted to make sure their credit report was correct, they were given one free report a year, but had to pony up for any other reports.

Just as Congress was considering even more regulation on credit bureaus, Equifax beat them to the punch. Per a 1992 Fortune article, it underwent new efforts to focus on consumer services. It also set up a public ombudsman and hired one of its fiercest critics, Alan Westin, to determine if it was adequately protecting people’s privacy.

Now the recent cyberattack is raising that question once again, particularly in light of the company’s delay in informing consumers. Equifax is also being criticized for not being forthcoming about who has been directly affected, instead setting up a website that asks consumers to surrender additional personal data.

All of this is scary because Equifax credit reports include tons of sensitive data on our financial histories, like when we report a lost or stolen credit card, our previous addresses, and probably the name of our employer, spouse, and much, much more. Equifax also manages databases for automotive, healthcare, financial, mortgages, insurance, and a whole lot more, including government databases. But now it’s clear that its databases–and the very private information held in them–aren’t quite as secure as everyone would hope.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo developed an algorithm that uses machine-learning techniques to recognize distracted driving behaviors. The result is software that uses cameras and artificial intelligence to detect hand movements that deviate from normal driving behavior. If drivers are behaving too weirdly for too long, it can then warn them to stop texting (or whatever they are doing) before they kill someone.

The tech, developed by Fakhri Karray, Arief Koesdwiady, Chaojie Ou, and Safaa Bedawi, was presented at the 14th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition in Montreal. There are no reports of the software being snatched up by a car company yet, but as distracted driving is such a pervasive and deadly problem in modern society, it seems possible. In 2015, 3,477 died and 391,000 were injured because someone behind the wheel of a car was distracted.

This isn’t the first technological solution to distracted driving. There are apps that lock your phone when you’re behind the wheel, apps that let people rat out distracted drivers they spot on the road, a “textalyzer” tool that let’s police check to see if you’ve been texting, and Apple’s iOS 11 update includes a “Do Not Disturb While Driving” mode. Apple was hit with a class-action lawsuit earlier this year for not installing patented tech that could fight distracted driving on their iPhones.

Every time the Lions throw a pass, the Seahawks run a play, or the Patriots catch a definitely-not-deflated ball, the NFL will be collecting data. The sports organization has decided to put an RFID data-collecting chip inside every football that will be thrown, punted, or bounced in a touchdown celebration during the 2017 season, according to ESPN. The chips will collect information on the speed of the football, its spin, and its spiral, but currently won’t be used to help refs make touchdown calls, marking first down, or helping those blind refs realize that the ball was clearly out of bounds. Read more here.