Cosby’s sentencing hearing began yesterday in Philadelphia with his lawyer asking for house arrest in lieu of prison, citing the comedian’s age, 81, and legal blindness.
In addition to prison time, Judge Steven T. O’Neill has also ruled that Cosby should be labeled as a sexually violent predator, meaning Cosby will be on the sex-offender registry and must undergo lifetime counseling.
Since Constand came forward to authorities in 2005, more than 60 women have accused Cosby with similar stories as Constand’s, but none of those claims led to criminal charges.
You’ve probably seen evidence of #Vanlife, the burgeoning lifestyle movement, in the stream of idyllic photos on your Instagram: People in expertly outfitted vans and RVs, frolicking in beautiful natural landscapes free from 9-to-5 jobs and modern urban life.
While it’s clearly a fixture online, the van life movement is also influencing the design choices of automakers including Airstream itself, which is now selling models with extensive gadgets and connectivity tailored to younger customers. The company recently announced that it has experienced a 218% growth in sales over the last five years–and that a whopping 45% of customers are buying an Airstream for the first time.
[Photo: Airstream]The design strategy helping fuel this growth, as Skift reports, has to do with tech. It seems young customers don’t exactly want to get lost in the vast and wondrous American landscape. They want Wi-Fi. And LTE. And Bluetooth. And cool digital LEDs to illuminate their nightlife, when the coyotes are howling outside. That’s why Airstream now sells trailers that can be equipped with Wi-Fi with AT&T LTE stations that provide with unlimited data. The models also come with Bluetooth-controlled LED lighting, and wireless audio. Other companies, like Volkswagen and Nissan, are doing the same.
[Photo: Airstream]These vehicles are not cheap. The basic Airstream start at almost $37,000 without all those high-tech options. The company’s iconic large Classic RV will cost you $149,900. But as Airstream CEO Bob Wheeler told Skift, smaller Airstreams are seeing increase in the lower-end models, adding “small is the new big.”
[Photo: Airstream]Airstream has changed its strategy, Wheeler continues, abandoning the idea that people want trailers to go on the road to disconnect completely. He argues that customers want to be able to go away, yes, but they want to be connected at all times–so they can Instagram the greatest sunset ever and show off their peaceful morning coffee on Facebook.
Then there’s the other reason more customers want unlimited LTE data connections: So they can work on the road. The fact that these vans also function as offices is an aspect of #vanlife you don’t often see tagged online because, in the end, taking work with you on the road is only worth a #thissucks.
Most entrepreneurs feel strongly philanthropic, typically giving 50% more annually to charity than people not running or advising their own companies. They are also far more likely to volunteer. (They also realize that acting generously burnishes their reputation, and the reputation of their company.)
These findings are from a new report called Entrepreneurs as Philanthropists by Fidelity Charitable, which surveyed 3,000 people across a variety of professions. It classified an entrepreneur as anyone who founded or owns a business, excluding public stockholders, unless they hold a controlling share. (Silicon Valley titans weren’t included in the study because they’re a special breed with outsized influence.)
All told, entrepreneurs give about $1,200 more to charity than those working for traditional companies at the same income level. Two-thirds of them also volunteer at least two or more hours per month to cause groups. There’s also a whole lot of them—about 27 million and counting is the often cited figure. Long term, there may be an even bigger benefit for nonprofits that win entrepreneurial loyalty: 70% of those who plan to sell or shift ownership within their companies within the next five years are interested in building some form of charitable giving into the exit.
[Soruce Image: VLPA/iStock]That’s an intention that at least one organization, the Founders Pledge, has figured out how to preemptively harness. The group works with primarily tech startups to commit at least 2% of any exit to charity. On average, most companies commit more than 7%. So far, the group has secured 1,300 pledges worth a projected $550 million that it will eventually help distribute to cause groups. At least 65 founders have already given $91 million.
Large corporations, on the other hand, traditionally give proportionately less of what they make to charity than the average American does. For nonprofits seeking new supporters, though, it’s also important to consider how this set of folks want to engage: For would-be donors, organizational trust and track record play a huge role in the decision-making process, but most are also looking for ways to be personally involved in addition to just giving cash. Volunteer-wise, entrepreneurs show far more interest than the traditional employees in also donating professional services, helping with fundraising, and serving on a committee or board.
They’re also twice as likely to donate to nonprofits trying new or innovative solutions, as long as there’s the equivalent of key performance indicators—a rubric to track and demonstrate success. For Fidelity Charitable, there’s an obvious benefit to sharing this information, too. The group, which started in 1991, helps donors manage their own philanthropy portfolios largely though donor advised funds and distribute grants to different organizations. Since its inception, it has helped direct more than $30 billion in grants to 225,000 organizations.
Verizon customers were plagued by a sudden lack of connectivity across much of the South and Midwest today as the country’s largest wireless provider grappled with a widespread outage. Verizon acknowledged the issue in a tweet earlier this afternoon, saying the outage affected “some markets in the south.”
Verizon Wireless is currently experiencing an intermittent voice, text and data services interruption for customers in some markets in the south. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working diligently to resolve it.
However, reports on Twitter show many users in the Midwest and upstate New York appear to be affected too. A snapshot from the website Down Detector shows wide swaths of red in those regions as of mid-afternoon on Tuesday.
It’s unclear how widespread the issue is, if the outages are related, or when customers can expect service to resume. I’ve reached out to Verizon for more info and will update if I hear back.
To Verizon’s credit—or at least to the credit of its social media team—its customer service Twitter account seems to have spent the last hour frantically responding to angry users, assuring them that the company’s engineers are working hard to restore service. Cold comfort, perhaps, when you’re waiting for an important text, but at least it’s something.
The Power-Tweeter-in-Chief kicked off his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday by boasting of his many historic achievements. The United Nations responded with laughter. In a rare, almost-human moment, Trump admitted, “I didn’t expect that reaction,” prompting the assembly to laugh even more heartily. The President then moved on with a typically shambolic word-vomitorium, in which he alternately attacked one of the women accusing SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault and promised to always act exclusively in America’s interests rather than the world’s. You know, the usual UNGA boilerplate.
However, for many viewers, the main take away from Trump’s speech was the part where everybody laughed at him. That was the “Bodak Yellow” of this particular event.
For the 18 million followers of Fox News’ Twitter account, though, this moment may not have even happened.
Fox's Twitter account clipped what Trump said immediately before AND immediately after the laughter.
As Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake notes, Fox News shielded its Twitter followers from having to see their favorite former game show host get devastatingly owned on the world stage. Those lucky Twitter users can now remain safe in the knowledge that their Special Guy is out there kicking ass while the world trembles in fear. Build the swamp, drain the wall, lock something up, and so forth. #MOOGA
At least there isn’t a tweet from Donald Trump’s past that provides an ironic counterpoint to what happened today, because then there would be egg on his face for sure.
We need a President who isn't a laughing stock to the entire World. We need a truly great leader, a genius at strategy and winning. Respect!
News broke last night that Instagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are leaving the company. This was certainly a shock, as Instagram could easily be considered one of Facebook’s most successful acquisitions to date. Systrom and Krieger were the brains behind the app, and it’s anyone’s guess what Facebook will do in their absence. Indeed, the company’s stock fell dramatically once the news posted–although it improved as the day went on.
Some saw this departure as a potential opening for Snapchat, given that the company’s app has long been considered a major Instagram competitor; Facebook has even stolen more than a few of Snapchat’s most popular features.
Yet not everyone thinks the high-profile exit means an instant win for Snap. In an email to Fast Company, Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser writes that Snap and Instagram “aren’t direct substitutes/competitors as, let’s say, the Washington Post and New York Times are for national news.”
It’s true that both apps are competing for people’s attention, but even if Instagram’s user experience declines in the wake of Systrom and Krieger’s exit, users aren’t automatically going to defect for Snapchat. Put another way, Snap won’t get better simply because Instagram may become worse.
Indeed, things haven’t been looking great for Snap: A new eMarketer report published this morning lowered its projection for the company’s ad revenue. The firm believes the app will bring in only $662.1 million this year, compared to its earlier forecast of $1.03 billion.
And despite today’s news, Snap stock is only up by a little more than 1%.
By 2030, the private car, once a proxy for American culture itself, may be dead. Millennials are either none too thrilled at the prospect of purchasing a car, or just can’t afford one. Either way, between 2007 and 2011, the number of people between the ages of 18 and 34 who did so declined by 30%. Economists have estimated that private car ownership on the whole will decline in the U.S. by 80% in the next decade or so.
The implications for this shift are enormous. Car manufacturers will scramble to stay relevant, and perhaps, the end of America’s love affair with the car could usher in more investment in public transit and safe, walkable, low-carbon streets. But it will also give rise to another quandary: What will happen to insurance?
As it currently stands, the auto insurance industry is built around a model of private car ownership. Currently, insurance premiums attach to the car, not the driver. So if you lend your car to someone else, who crashes it, you, as the owner of the car and the holder of the insurance, would be liable to pay damages, not your friend. It’s easy to see how this model fails to translate across shifts in car usage. What if, as is becoming an increasingly popular idea, you decide to subscribe to a program like BOOK by Cadillac, which lets you rent different cars throughout the year for a flat monthly fee? Or if you swap out your car for a Car2Go or Zipcar membership, or just rely on Lyft and Uber? Or decide to use an app like Turo to rent out someone else’s car for a trip?
In giving up private cars to the sharing economy, perhaps the thing we should be keeping for ourselves is insurance. A new startup called Arity–a subsidiary of the insurance giant Allstate, tellingly—is doubling down on a model of insurance based on driver behavior, not car ownership or traditional demographic factors like gender, zip code, or vehicle model. Arity is using sensor data from smartphones and telematics connections inside cars–combined with traditional metrics like insurance claims history–to create personalized “driving scores” for customers. An algorithm processes behaviors like hard braking, speeding, running lights, and frequency of car usage to build the score, which then influences how much drivers pay for their plan. And crucially, the plan covers drivers regardless of what car they get into.
This sort of “usage-based insurance” model is not new–companies like Progressive and State Farm have used driver behavior data to influence individual insurance plans. Arity launched in 2016, in fact, out of a previous Allstate program, called Drivewise, which launched in 2010 to use sensor technology in cars to map driver behavior and adjust premiums accordingly. But Arity, according to the company, has developed more sophisticated tech to more accurately capture and analyze driver behavior. And by creating a product around this model that it can sell, it hopes to make usage-based insurance go mainstream.
The startup manufactures a software development kit that connects to the car’s diagnostic port to track everything from how fast the car is moving, how suddenly a driver brakes, how sharply they turn, and how many miles they accumulate. It also developed an app that tracks location and other data; in February, it rolled out a new version that incorporates data on distracted driving and phone use. Arity sells the software to other insurance companies like Esurance aiming to build out more driver-based plans. It’s also eyeing partnerships with mobility companies like Uber, which could use the data to create more behavior-based driver scores. As Arity president Gary Hallgren likes to say: “I would want to know that my Uber driver has a good rating because he is, in fact, a good driver, rather because his car smells good and he had a good radio station on.”
Scaling up data around driver behavior also has broader implications for cities, Hallgren says. For instance, Arity is partnering with the city of Chicago, where it’s based, to share data on where spikes in poor driver behavior occur. The partnership is helping the city identify speeding-prone stretches of road, intersections where drivers don’t stop, or corners where they turn especially sharply. This data will help Chicago advance its Vision Zero Action Plan–part of a global effort to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities through better street design and policies–by targeting infrastructure improvements and adjusting enforcement.
These are appealing applications, but Arity will still face an uphill battle in individual customer adoption. Even though usage-based insurance programs tend to reduce costs for customers–Allstate’s previous Drivewise program shaved up to 15% off a user’s premium–people still tend to balk at the invasion of privacy inherent in having their every move in a car tracked and analyzed. Only around 10% of insurance customers opt into data-based plans. But Hallgren thinks that the potential cost savings (of around $3,000 annually, according to Arity) of having safe driving rewarded with discounts could nudge people both toward usage-based insurance plans, and hopefully, better driver behavior.
Young people in lower- and middle-income countries may lack the comfort or material wealth that kids in more economically stable places have, but they’re–impressively–currently leading in a different metric: positivity that progress is possible.
Overall, 79% of people between the ages of 12 and 24 in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia say they feel optimistic about the direction of the world, compared to only about half of those in far more well-off places like Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the number is 63%.
[Image: courtesy the Gates Foundation and Ipsos]
The obvious reason is that poverty and inequity in many of these places has been reduced dramatically in recent years. The number of those suffering from extreme poverty has dropped by more than 1 billion people total, according to a recent report from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is part of the funder’s efforts to track world progress toward the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.
But economic improvement has an obvious psychological effect on the people it reaches. To show that, the Gates Foundation commissioned the Global Youth Poll, a survey of more than 40,000 respondents of all ages internationally. That effort was run by Ipsos, an independent market research company, and showed another powerful result: People in lower- and middle-income countries are now more likely than those in higher-income spots to support the idea that their generation can have more impact on the world than their parents did. It’s 63% to 39% respectively.
[Image: courtesy the Gates Foundation and Ipsos]
The question now is how can that optimism be harnessed to keep creating positive change. In lower- and middle-income countries, the top quality of life issues deal with securing better educational opportunities, continued reductions in poverty, and creating more accessible good jobs for everyone.
Part of that may happen through political involvement. In India, Kenya, and Nigeria, for instance, more than two-thirds of young folks now believe that they can help influence how their countries are governed. (In the U.S., less than half of all young people now agree with that statement.) It may also happen through a rising professional class: It’s very common for folks in improving places to report wanting to become doctors, engineers, and teachers. (For comparison, the U.S. also ranks the best job as doctor–although that’s followed closely by gamer.)
The report data shows that the governments, companies, and individual philanthropists in higher-income countries in particular should probably do more, too. Over half of both younger and older populations in Australia, Great Britain, and Australia were unaware of the sustainable development goals. And the U.S. government, at least, continues to score low in its overall commitment to sustainable development and has backed away from global commitments to counter climate change. In a way, this poll may help shift that perspective and awareness. It’s hard to push others toward continued progress if you don’t understand why it’s so important.
A report from Slate finds that “several news outlets” have said that they’ve seen their audience on Apple’s News app multiply in 2018–some by as much as 400%. For some publishers, this increasing adoption of Apple News brings the platform on par with readership numbers garnered through Facebook and Google. In other words–publishers now see some serious traffic through Apple’s News app. According to Slate:
Sources at several news outlets say they’ve seen their audience on Apple News multiply in 2018 alone. Some now say it has become one of their top traffic sources, alongside Facebook and Google. At Slate, which disclosed its data for this story, page views on Apple News have roughly tripled since September 2017, and the app recently surpassed Facebook as a driver of readership.
The bad news is, publishers aren’t seeing a correlation in profit increase with all those extra eyeballs brought in through Apple News:
The problem, publishers say, is that Apple doesn’t sell many ads within the app—not nearly as many as you’d find on most websites—and it doesn’t make it particularly easy for publishers to sell their own. Apple News doesn’t support some of the common ad formats or systems that dominate ad sales on the web, and not all media companies find it worthwhile to develop and sell custom ads just for Apple News. (Those that do can keep all the revenue or they can let Apple sell them, in which case Apple takes a 30% cut.)
And that’s disappointing news for publishers. Matter of fact, Slate‘s senior product manager ran the numbers and found that Slate makes more money from ads on a single article on its website that received just 50,000 page views than it has from the 54 million page views it garnered from all its articles on Apple News this calendar year.
However, things may be about to improve for publishers. In May Apple announced that publishers will be able to use Google’s DoubleClick to serve ads in Apple News. Apple has also begun paying some publishers for original content in the app. Will those initiatives be enough? Let’s hope so for Apple’s sake. It’s rumored the company is planning a magazine and news subscription service. But if it offers as weak ad profits as Apple News currently does, it’s difficult to see many publishers signing up for it.
Instagram isn’t just for showing off your hottest selfies or sharing snaps of your lunch that no one cares about–it’s also apparently a great place for those struggling with drug addictions to connect with drug dealers. While the platform has long been a place where some users try to hock everything from guns to sex, Instagram’s algorithms are now working overtime to make it easier for people to buy illegal drugs.
As the Washington Post reports, searching for the hashtags #oxy, #percocet, #painkillers, #painpills, #oxycontin, #adderall, and #painrelief will return a plethora of posts from Instagram users. Those users may be struggling with addiction, partying like it’s nobody’s business, or dealing the hashtagged drugs online. The problem is Instagram’s algorithms can’t distinguish the context the hashtags are used in. And if a user then follows a dealer using the hashtags, Instagram’s algorithms then suggest that user follow more drug dealers:
Following the dealer accounts, or even liking one of the dealer posts, prompted Instagram’s algorithms to work as designed–in this case, by filling up a person’s feed with posts for drugs, suggesting other sellers to follow and introducing new hashtags, such as #xansforsale. Ads from some of the country’s largest brands, including Target, Chase and Procter & Gamble, as well as Facebook’s own video streaming service, appeared next to posts illegally selling pills.
For what it’s worth, the ability to be connected with drug dealers via social media isn’t a problem unique to Instagram. The same types of posts are widespread on Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Twitter. In recent months Instagram has blocked search results for certain hashtags, such as #fentanyl, #cocaine, and #heroin, all illegal substances. But dealers simply switched to hashtagging their posts with legal drug names, or slightly tweaked the spelling of drug names–and then proceeding to sell both legal and illegal drugs to Instagram users when they connect with them outside of the platform.
Yet still, Instagram’s owner Facebook says it’s aware of the problem and is working to put a stop to the sale of illegal drugs through Instagram, though its initiatives are still in the “early stages.” As Facebook’s vice president for global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, told the Washington Post:
“We’re not yet sophisticated enough to tease apart every post to see if it’s trying to sell someone illegal drugs or they are taking Xanax [because] they are stressed out. Obviously, there is some stuff that gets through that is totally against our policy, and we’re getting better at it.”
The search giant announced the feature earlier this year at Google I/O in May. It allows users to create lists of places, say restaurants, in Google Maps and then share that list among their friends, who could vote on which place to go to. Group members could also veto certain places on the list, or add their own suggestions.
What Google is doing is making it easier for friends to decide where to go without needing to send a hundred text messages to everyone. The group planning feature also has the added benefit for Google of keeping users inside their app instead of going to non-Google messaging apps to discuss their plans.
The group planning feature will start rolling out on Android and iOS this week. To get it, just update to the latest version of the Google Maps app when prompted.
This fall, an ultra-flavorful variety of squash will begin appearing on the menus of fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen. Called Robin’s Koginut, the round, bronze-colored vegetable was created by Row 7, a seven-month-old seed company cofounded by Blue Hill chef (and farm-to-table champion) Dan Barber, Cornell University vegetable breeder Michael Mazourek, and seed producer Matthew Goldfarb. The company selectively breeds squash, beets, potatoes, and other vegetables to prioritize flavor along with yield, storability, and disease resistance–making them easier to grow organically. Row 7’s seed-to-table approach has earned it fans among high-end chefs. But the Sweetgreen partnership broadens its reach, part of Barber’s ultimate goal “to get this out of my kitchen and into the food chain,” he says. Here’s how he’s getting everyday consumers to embrace his produce.
Barber challenged Mazourek to develop a squash that combined the rich flavor of a butternut with the smooth, dry texture of Japan’s kabocha varietal. Mazourek hand-pollinated squash until he had crossbred a promising new strain.
Over the summer, Sweetgreen’s culinary team began planning a dish to showcase the squash. Barber recommended a simple preparation roasted with salt and pepper to demonstrate how good the squash tastes on its own. That’s part of the company’s mission, he says: “to write a recipe at the breeding level.”
With Row 7’s launch earlier this year, Sweetgreen saw an opportunity to embrace “the next level of transparency” in food, says cofounder and co-CEO Nicolas Jammet. The chain bought more than 100,000 seeds (with an expected yield of 280,000 pounds), and in May, worked with its farmer network to plant them on six farms across the country, offering Row 7 the first large-scale test of how the squash performs in different climates and soils.
Mazourek’s team planted and harvested the squash, and began testing it for flavor, nutrition, and other factors, including resistance to pests and shelf stability. The Koginut excelled. Barber was also drawn to its shape, which could double as a serving bowl. The pair began sharing the seeds with partner farmers.
A test kitchen at Sweetgreen’s headquarters, in Culver City, California, will begin serving the Koginut dish to customers in October, allowing the culinary team to make any last-minute tweaks to the recipe. In November, the dish will appear on the menu at all of Sweetgreen’s 89 locations nationwide.
With every smartphone launch, we hear the same thing from phone makers: This is the best phone ever. Of course, they could hardly say anything else. But the “best phone ever” is a deeply subjective title, whether by the judgment of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, or an anonymous Amazon reviewer. So we decided to ask the experts: What’s the best-designed phone of all time? See below for selections from leading designers and design thinkers, plus the Fast Company staff.
“Say what you will about BlackBerry smartphones–and the Alex P. Keaton cultural moment they engendered–but their explosive popularity in the aughts highlighted an important user insight: The best design isn’t always the prettiest or the sleekest, it’s the one that helps you get shit done. With their utilitarian interfaces and miniaturized QWERTY keyboards, the BlackBerries of yore were ideal for making calls and tapping out emails, and not much more. They were productivity tools in the strictest sense–your drab office computer rendered small. Compare that to today’s touch-screen phones, beautiful glass slabs that entice you to swipe, tap, and pinch endlessly, taking over not just your work life but also your social life (and maybe even your soul). BlackBerry’s complete lack of charm was an asset: a reminder to get off the phone and live a little, just as soon as you sent your colleague that last email.” –Suzanne LaBarre, senior editor, Fast Company
[Photo: Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum/Wiki Commons]
Enorme
“My favorite phone would probably be the Enorme, designed by Ettore Sottsass and David Kelley. I still love the weird vibe of it–exactly one-half 1980s power suit, and one-half Mondrian. The looks alone tell this story of how beauty gets adapted and updated, remixed and reused–because beauty is a tool like anything else, used to make you want something. But there’s another tension, too. Kelley of course cofounded Ideo. He’s the most famous evangelist for today’s dominant design philosophy: that design is about deference to user need. Sottsass represented a totally different idea. He epitomized the designer as artist, guided by personal vision. That Kelley and Sottsass got together to make a phone is this perfect encapsulation of design’s own competing impulses.” —Cliff Kuang, UX designer and author of the forthcoming book User Friendly
[Photo: Apple]
iPhone (original)
“My favorite phone by far, far, far is the original iPhone. It represented the largest leap forward of any phone design, maybe the largest leap forward of any product in any category I have witnessed in my lifetime. Pretty much any phone available for purchase now anywhere still takes its major design cues from that significant breakthrough.” –Stefan Sagmeister, partner, Sagmeister & Walsh
[Photo: Apple]
iPhone 3G
“The greatest iPhone was the iPhone 3G–the phone that beat out the Motorola RAZR and turned the mainstream cell phone into the smartphone. Yes, history might also remember the 3G as the first plastic iPhone that abandoned the metal back. Perhaps that means it doesn’t age as well in photos, but phones aren’t meant to be photographed, they’re meant to be held. And the 3G’s rounded posterior sat in your palm like it was made for you, with a fundamental concern to ergonomics that outweighed Apple’s soon-to-be overpowering zeal for thinness. The iPhone 4 would become a sharp razor blade in your hand, and Apple wouldn’t approach the 3G’s level of comfort again until the iPhone 7 with its curved glass screen (which, for what it’s worth, is my second favorite iPhone). The 3G was more than a testament to Apple’s industrial design, though. It was also the first iPhone that realized the smartphone’s potential for connectivity. With 3G speeds–a wonder at the time–you really could browse the web without Wi-Fi. And even more importantly, the 3G was the first iPhone on which the App Store came preinstalled, which established both the software distribution and payment model for billions of smartphones to come.” –Mark Wilson, senior writer, Fast Company
[Photo: Apple]
iPhone 4
“I owned an iPhone 4 up until 2016. It was a perfect little device that fit snugly in my hand and in the side pocket of my favorite backpack. It did not have a fingerprint reader that doesn’t work half the time, or endless notifications about how my iCloud storage is almost full. Its screen was much smaller than my phone now, but that made sense–I didn’t need to see so many apps at once, with their nagging red notification alerts. I didn’t understand why I needed a bigger screen, which I knew would make it difficult to type with one hand. I didn’t realize how effortlessly the iPhone 4 had functioned until it was suddenly dead after I left it on the side of the tub and it got splashed one too many times. I picked up my iPhone 6s the next day, which now looks simplistic in comparison to the slew of phones that Apple just released. It still has a headphone port, after all. As our phones get more complex, with more speed and better cameras and larger screens, they aim to become more and more indispensable to us, ensuring that we rely on them to mediate every interaction and guide us through the world. But sometimes I long for the simplicity of my iPhone 4, still a feat of design and engineering, that’s just a little smaller and a lot simpler.” –Katharine Schwab, associate editor, Fast Company
[Photo: Apple]
iPhone SE
“I loved the iPhone 4. When I first saw it, it looked like the most beautiful phone ever. The symmetry of that obsidian sandwich held together by a simple steel band reminded me of Dieter Rams’s wondrous Braun consumer electronic designs from the ’70s. But its aesthetic perfection was marred by its extreme fragility: ‘Glass is not a good material to make products that are constantly being moved around, under stress, and in the hands of users,’ I wrote at the time. ‘Glass breaks.’ That’s why the iPhone 5 then became Apple’s perfect design. In fact, it became the apex of phone design, period. It kept the ethos of the iPhone 4 while adopting a material–a full aluminum back–that was honest and functional, just like Dieter Rams’s principles dictate. The iPhone 4 essence was there, with a sightly larger but still manageable screen. Eventually, the iPhone 5 became the iPhone SE, which had the guts of the iPhone 6s, making it very fast and capable of recording 4K video. That’s why the iPhone SE–despite it not being quite as beautiful as the iPhone 4–became my favorite Apple phone of all time. Too bad Apple just killed it.” –Jesus Diaz, contributing writer, Fast Company
[Photo: Apple]
iPhone 7
“Good functional product design shouldn’t be polarizing or superfluous. It must continue to improve the integrity of the product and deliver a better overall experience than the last iteration. There should be no debate there. For this reason, I believe the pinnacle of mobile phone design is the iPhone 7. It was thinner, it was faster, it was stronger, and, with the introduction of the AirPods, it was liberating. It represented the most flawless execution of features thus far, with no new compromise–but let’s not forget that we’re still very much in the infancy stage of what a ‘mobile phone’ is and could be.” —Imran Chaudhri, designer and inventor
“The Motorola StarTAC Rainbow was a clamshell special-edition mobile phone manufactured by Motorola, but offered exclusively in Europe. Though the classic StarTAC has the special designation of ‘first flip phone’–the Rainbow was the eccentric multicolored variation, akin to the Volkswagen Golf Harlequin, also a similarly color-schemed variation of the standard issue. The phone measures only 98 x 57 x 23 mm, and was the lightest and most expensive phone of its era, retailing for around $1,000. The Rainbow was the even rarer and treasured release. I own one, even though it isn’t functional in the U.S. yet. The Rainbow felt like a dreamy ‘collab’ in a time before there were signature design collabs like Off-White × Nike. The cover is a strikingly colorful topography of tomato red, sky blue, racing green, and cadmium yellow. Inside, the buttons float as black ellipses on a vibrant yellow field, set against a green clamshell interior cover. Flawless.” —Forest Young, head of design and global principal, Wolff Olins
“The Motorola V220 isn’t a beautiful object. Like so many other flip phones of the early 2000s, it’s been lost in the fog of iPhone pre-history–apart from the odd YouTube hands-on video of a battered model, identified only as an ‘old Motorola flip flop mobile.’ It took me a long time to even figure out which phone my sister and I both received for Christmas in 2003 (and in the end, it might have been a different model). What I do remember is discovering the first emoji I’d ever seen on its novel color screen as we sat in the airport the next day, probably on the way to visit our grandparents over the holiday, and sending thousands of these strange little pictograms back and forth to each other, crying with laughter, regardless of the insane cost of data or our fellow fliers.
“It seems like a weird thing to find hilarious now (especially when Old Masters sticker packs exist). But it was delightful, as were other aspects of its design–from the satisfying snap of its durable plastic to the magic of its early text autocomplete. This era of phone design lacked the sheen of Cupertino, but looking back, it was the beginning of the world we live in now. RIP, flip flop mobile.” –Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, editor, Fast Company
“I remember my dad lending me his Nokia 5110 a long road trip. Being able to call ahead to figure out where we’d sleep that night felt like science fiction. It was around then I also started using SMS (or texting) to check in with friends and family. I remember thinking it was just like IRC that you can use anywhere. It was one of the first phones to come with Snake, a perfect phone game before phone games were even a thing. These two features made it feel more like the future of computers rather than the future of phones.” –Alex Schleifer, head of design, Airbnb
[Photo: Luigi Bertello/Shutterstock]
Olivetti Miram by George Sowden circa 1988
“Not the biggest fan of the Memphis Group work, but one has to admire the niceties of this telephone. Simple, bold, a modern objet d’art, a graphic wonder, all commanding traits of the Olivetti’s outstanding understanding of design and object, that can easily adorn a designer’s desk today–and is just a phone nothing more. Nice job, Mr. Sowden.” –Eddie Opara, partner, Pentagram
[Photo: Danger]
T-Mobile Sidekick
“In 2003, when I worked at PC World magazine, we named T-Mobile’s Sidekick–a smartphone created by a startup named Danger–as our product of the year. The decision was far from unanimous, but I think it holds up well: The Sidekick was the first device to put the real internet in your pocket rather than a fundamentally dumbed-down, hobbled version. With a screen that swiveled up to reveal a wide QWERTY keyboard, the Sidekick had a PC-like feel, which made perfect sense in the era before multi-touch interfaces. It offered a surprisingly usable web browser and–hey, this was important in 2003–built-in support for AOL Instant Messenger. Rather than having lasting influence, the Sidekick’s approach to the mobile internet ended up being washed away by the iPhone; even Danger cofounder Andy Rubin followed Apple’s lead when he oversaw the creation of Android. But the phone gave us the right set of features at the right time, a surprisingly tricky feat that’s always worthy of celebration.” –Harry McCracken, technology editor, Fast Company
[Photo: supertramp/iStock]
Western Electric Model 500
“The standard Bell System desk phone from 1950 through 1984 was the Western Electric Model 500. Plastic, often black, basically indestructible, tens of millions in production. It was a simple voice-driven interface to a vast global telecommunications network of goods and services, but you could turn off the ringer during dinner. I love my smartphones, but they nag and whine and update and need me to care for them every day. Try as we all might in terms of pure interface design, nothing comes close to picking up a phone and hearing that hmmmmmmmmm.” –Paul Ford, CEO, Postlight
The company has removed multiple conspiracy sites and other fake news content from Siri Suggested Websites in the Safari web browser. Siri Suggested Websites is an autofill feature suggesting content on the web based on the text a user enters in the Safari search bar. BuzzFeed looked into the types of content Siri Suggested Websites were returning and found that some of the items included low-quality information such as “debunked conspiracies, shock videos, and false information.”
Examples of such low-quality information included a link to a now-removed YouTube video touting the debunked PizzaGate conspiracy and videos alleging the QAnon conspiracy theory is real. While the Safari browser isn’t the only one to suggest content based on user input, other browsers, such as Google’s Chrome, returns suggestions debunking such conspiracy theories.
After being alerted to the questionable suggested content by BuzzFeed, Apple removed the suggestions from Siri. As an Apple spokesperson explained:
“Siri Suggested Websites come from content on the web, and we provide curation to help avoid inappropriate sites. We also remove any inappropriate suggestions whenever we become aware of them, as we have with these. We will continue to work to provide high-quality results and users can email results they feel are inappropriate to applebot@apple.com.”
We’ve all heard about the benefits of plant-based meat alternatives: reduced cholesterol, less impact on the land, animal-friendly, etc. But in terms of its reportedly environmentally friendly practices, how exactly does it measure up to traditional meat? Beyond Meat–makers of non-GMO meat-free burgers, sausages, and chicken strips–discovered it’s quite substantial.
The food company commissioned a study with the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan to conduct a “cradle-to-distribution” life cycle assessment of its best-selling burger, made with pea protein, canola oil, coconut oil, and beat juice extract. Researchers analyzed greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, water consumed, land use, and even packaging, then compared it to that of an uncooked quarter-pound beef burger delivered to retail outlets. The study then underwent a third-party review process from outside scholars, states the report.
[Image: courtesy of Beyond Meat]The team discovered that the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, and has 99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a quarter pound of U.S. beef. That means a 41-square-foot plot of land can produce just one beef burger for every 15 Beyond Burgers.
A spokesman for the brand explained that, by this assessment, Americans switching from beef to plant-based patties would be the equivalent of taking 35 million cars off the road–or saving enough electricity to power 6.8 million homes.
“From the start, Beyond Meat has been steadfast in our perspective that meat doesn’t have to come from a chicken, cow, or pig,” said Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO, Ethan Brown, in a press statement. “We believe that we can build delicious, satiating meat directly from plants. Though the sustainability of building meat from plants makes intuitive sense, we commissioned the University of Michigan study to generate peer-reviewed data and analysis regarding the positive impact consumers can have on climate and natural resources by shifting from beef to Beyond Burgers.”
The study’s release coincides with the UN Environment organization awarding Beyond Meat the 2018 Champion of the Earth honor on Wednesday. The company is being lauded as a sustainability trailblazer.
[Photo: courtesy of Beyond Meat]It’s the latest in a series of wins for the brand, which recently revealed a 26,000-square-foot facility dedicated to recreating every popular meat product on the market. The plant-based meat substitute maker, which has seen sales ramp up by 70% in the last year, has sold 13 million burgers since its 2016 debut. It admitted having trouble meeting demand after multiple Whole Foods stores ran out of inventory. Besides the market chain, Beyond Meat sells at Amazon Fresh and 20,000 other grocery retailers–as well as 10,000 restaurants, hotels, and universities.
Americans are increasingly looking for meat substitutes such as Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger. The plant-based “meat” industry saw sales top $670 million in the last year–up 24% from the year prior, reports the Plant Based Foods Association. The overall plant-based industry, meanwhile, saw $3.7 billion in sales.
For many consumers, the decision to lessen the dependence on meat is based on health and dietary concerns. But for a growing percentage, it’s shifted to environmental reasons. It takes an estimated 18,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. (Peas, in comparison, take 740 gallons.) A recent poll found that 43% of consumers are more likely to try plant-based alternatives today than just five years ago.
As Brown told Fast Company earlier this summer, “More and more consumers are beginning to understand the biggest choice they make in terms of impact on the climate is protein.”
The fifth-generation wireless network, or “5G” as it’s known, will radically transform our society. Not only will we be able to download 4K movies in seconds (on today’s 4G technology it takes hours), but 5G will enable a true “internet of things” where everything from the devices in our pockets to self-driving cars to city infrastructure like streetlights are connected by the same ultra-fast network. 5G is so important to the future of commerce and infrastructure, China and America are in a virtual arms race over becoming the leader in the field.
But now thanks to Trump’s Chinese tariffs, America could be at risk of losing that arms race. That’s because, as Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, points out on Politico, Trump’s tariffs target Chinese exports that America must import if it wants to build out its 5G infrastructure:
Last week, the U.S. Trade Representative finalized new tariffs on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports. Buried deep in the 200-page schedule of goods subject to the new tax are listings that include “machines for the reception, conversion and transmission or regeneration of voice, images or other data, including switching and routing apparatus.” You’ll also encounter entries for “apparatus for transmission or reception of voice, images, or other data, including apparatus for communication in a wired or wireless network.”
While those listings may not ring alarms, they should. That’s because 5G technology requires installing a lot of things that qualify as an “apparatus for communication.”
In other words, Trump just made it much more expensive for American companies to buy the tech they need to ensure the U.S. leads the way in 5G. And it’s not just the technology’s rollout that Trump’s tariffs will hurt. Building a world-leading U.S. 5G network is estimated to boost the American economy by half a trillion dollars and create 3 million new jobs. Or, it would have done that if it didn’t just become much more expensive to buy the needed tech from China.
For anyone trying to start a restaurant in San Francisco, the cost of renting a retail space is a barrier. That’s especially true if you happen to be female and an immigrant. By 2019, if all goes as planned, some new food entrepreneurs in the city will have another option. An abandoned post office in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood is becoming a new food hall, the first in the country aimed at new businesses owned by women of color.
“One of the things we had been realizing over the last three or four years was it was becoming increasingly difficult to find mid-level or affordable real estate options for entrepreneurs,” says Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, a nonprofit food incubator.
[Image: Perkins+Will]
The nonprofit has kitchen space in San Francisco’s Mission district that the women it works with, who are often immigrants, can use to launch new food businesses as they get mentorship from the organization. Since it started in 2005, 30 restaurants have graduated to their own brick-and-mortar shops in the Bay Area. Nyum Bai, a noodle shop in Oakland run by a Cambodian refugee who went through the program, was recently named one of the best new restaurants in the country by Bon Appetit. El Mesón De Violeta, an empanada shop, is one of five vendors that recently opened on the UC Berkeley campus. Reem Assil, a Palestinian and Syrian-American who opened a bakery in Oakland in 2017, opened a new full-service restaurant there this year.
But others have struggled to find space to run a simple mom-and-pop-style business. Some locations where its graduates have opened–like the Ferry Building, an upscale food hall–are expensive, and don’t have kitchens. “We thought, as an organization, what can we do to change that?” says Zigas. “If the marketplace isn’t offering that but there’s clearly demand for these kinds of businesses, how can we manipulate the marketplace?”
[Photo: La Cocina]
The abandoned post office is now owned by the city, which plans to eventually turn it into affordable housing. But the process of raising money for the project will take a minimum of seven years, and in the meantime, the city wanted to space–in the middle of a neighborhood that struggles with homelessness and poverty–to be active rather than blighted. La Cocina proposed the new food hall, and signed a lease for seven years of very low rent for the 7,000-square-foot space.
La Cocina is still raising some funding needed for the project, but plans to open the food hall in early 2019, using a pro bono design from the architecture firm Perkins and Will. The space will host seven graduates of the program; all are likely to be women. “We’ve had men graduate, but we prioritize women and specifically immigrant women and women of color,” Zigas says. “All of that’s really designed to address what we consider to be the inequity everywhere in the food system around business ownership.” The kitchen will also support community cooking classes, pop-ups, and other events. The food will bring higher-quality, affordable options for meals to low-income residents in a neighborhood filled with convenience stores.
It’s a model that the organization hopes is replicated elsewhere. Food halls are increasingly common–but they tend to be developer-driven projects that don’t significantly lower the cost of entry for entrepreneurs. Zigas says that older projects, like Pike Place Market in Seattle, were set up by cities. “We think that people have kind of stopped doing those projects,” he says. “We would like to show that there’s not only a good reason to do it, but there’s a good model to do it with…and you don’t need to look to people who are just going to target the highest income earners. There’s a lot of working-class residents who need more places to eat.”
Intelligent design versus evolution isn’t just a divide in people’s worldviews. It’s also been a divide in the artificial intelligence community. Until just a few years ago, AI was mainly about humans coding smart algorithms–from bank fraud detectors to autonomous video game characters. But with massive server farms, machine learning AI can run wild in the boundless fields of data that society generates–and often intuit algorithms faster and better than humans could program them. The next stage is to let algorithms loose in environments that look and act like actual fields, or houses, or highways, or anything else that can be simulated in 3D gaming environments.
DeepMind, part of Google parent company Alphabet, is going big on virtual world AI training through a deal with game-making software provider Unity Technologies (which powers games like Monument Valley and Pokémon Go). DeepMind will run the software at a giant scale to train algorithms in physics-realistic environments–part of a growing trend in AI. Game engines like Unity or Unreal provide customizable settings for advanced AI techniques such as reinforcement learning (a kind of machine learning), in which an algorithm pursues a goal through trial and error until it’s been mastered.
“Games are in many, many ways . . . much closer to nature than people think,” says Danny Lange, Unity’s VP of machine learning and AI. “You get the visual, the physics, the cognitive, and . . . the social aspect–the interaction.” These all put evolutionary pressures on algorithms, just as nature does on living things, he says.
DeepMind did not comment for this story beyond a press release. Unity wouldn’t reveal many details of the deal–such as how much money is changing hands. The tie-up follows a deal announced in June between Unity and DeepMind sibling company Google Cloud to provide services for online game developers.
Starting with no knowledge how to move, this stick figure eventually learned to run–albeit awkwardly. [Image: courtesy of Unity Technologies]
Video vérité
As a cute example of how games train AI, Lange shows me a virtual dog that learned how to fetch. All that the algorithm driving it knew was that it had to get the stick: Progress toward the goal triggers numerical rewards that encourage more of the successful behavior. In the beginning, the poor dog didn’t even know how to use its legs. But it kept trying, bound within the parameters of simulated physiology and the laws of physics, until that good boy finally got it.
None of this technology is new, per se. Researchers and companies have been using game engines for some time to train AI. Nvidia, for instance, has created a virtual robot-training system called Isaac that runs on Unity rival Unreal Engine, the system underlying the blockbuster Fortnight.
Self-driving car algorithms learn from traveling billions of miles of accurately simulated roads–to bolster what they can learn from covering far less territory in real-world driving. Lange knows this well, having built Uber’s machine learning platform before going to Unity in December 2016.
But Lange is quite expansive in his vision of what reinforcement learning and other AI can achieve in game worlds. Beyond robots, examples include using virtual people to develop more livable building designs. “You can actually test a thousand different designs on a thousand different virtual families living in that house,” he says.
Usually reinforcement learning is about pushing virtual agents to achieve a discrete task, for as long as it takes. But in this example, the amount of difficulty the characters have learning their way around could help designers evaluate how intuitive (or unintuitive) their floor plans are.
Going even grander, simulated physics could allow virtual chemistry experiments, in which software conducts far more experiments with virtual chemicals than humans can with real ones, says Lange. That could at least narrow down the candidates for real-world testing. Lange predicts that AI based on gaming engines may be able to achieve this in about five years. (Incidentally, that’s also the timeline some advocates of quantum computing reckon for it to start simulating complex chemistry.)
As players of sprawling, open-world titles know, games are about more than physics. Grand Theft Auto simulates how rubber tires grip asphalt, but it also simulates interactions between colorful characters. “It’s an emerging area,” says Lange, of modeling social dynamics. “You simulate multiple agents and they interact with each other. They invent what they say.”
That provides insights into how crowds behave, for instance. As a potentially practical–but still theoretical–example, he describes the ability to model how chatter affects stock prices. “One guy says the stock is going to go up, another guy says this stock is going to go down,” says Lange. “How do they influence the crowd?”
[Image: courtesy of Unity Technologies]
Training 1,000 dogs for 24 hours at 10,000 fps
In nature, animals must learn to crawl before they can walk, or run, or buy stocks. Reinforcement learning follows the same stepwise progression. “You would think that you just take the hard problem and throw a big computer at it, but that does not lead to a good result,” says Lange.
Instead challenges have to be broken into increasingly difficult tasks, known as curriculum learning. An algorithm masters one challenge, and uses what it’s learned to master the next one, and the next one. Having learned to fetch, Unity’s virtual dog quickly learned how to jump through a hoop, says Lange.
That’s also how games work. Players level up–squaring off against bigger and bigger “bosses” as they go. (But here, the “players” are algorithms.) Another great thing about game engines: They can generate levels on their own. The signature example is the 2016 game No Man’s Sky. Using Hello Games’s own in-house engine, the title can generate, landscape, and populate 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets.
I ask Lange if he enjoys playing video games, and he hesitates a bit. “Uh, I play a lot of AI games,” he says. “We are really super excited about this relationship [with DeepMind] because it really shows that Unity has so much more than pure gaming to it. It’s more than people playing Pokémon Go,” he says.
DeepMind, in fact, has been using its own game-engine software for some time. In a prepared quote, DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis says, “Games and simulations have been a core part of DeepMind’s research program from the very beginning and this approach has already led to significant breakthroughs in AI research.”
Perhaps his former life as a game designer made Hassabis receptive to collaborating with a maker of consumer games instead of doing everything in-house. Popular engines like Unity and Unreal are commercially driven to develop ever better simulations, and they benefit from huge developer communities.
A year ago, Unity also extended AI development to the public with its ML-Agents tool kit–open-source software linking its game engine to machine learning programs. Participants include AI researchers and some “notable game developers,” says Lange. Whatever anyone develops is available to everyone–including Unity, which wants to employ AI to evolve better “non-playable characters” that human players face in games.
The deal with DeepMind is more than just selling software licenses, according to Lange, who calls it a collaboration.
“When you build a gaming engine, it runs fast in iOS and runs fast on Android and it runs fast on your Xbox,” he says. But running Unity on thousands or even tens of thousands of servers to drive deep learning is a very different task, which requires tweaking and configuring Unity for those demands, says Lange.
And only at massive scale does deep learning offer a payoff to develop. “If I train one dog for five minutes, I’m not really going to get there,” says Lange. “If I train a thousand dogs for 24 hours at 10,000 frames per second, then all these dogs are doing all kinds of crazy things.” And eventually, from all those attempts, one dog ends up jumping through a hoop.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced its intentions to invade your home with a slew of new Alexa-powered devices designed to make your life more convenient (and Jeff Bezos a lot richer). The new products include a bevy of home appliances, ranging from microwaves to electrical outlets.
But what if the company simply built one giant Alexa device for you to live inside? Last week, we pondered whether Amazon would ever get into home building, and now the company is doing something along those lines–with an investment in home design and prefabrication company Plant Prefab.
[Photo: Plant Prefab]
On Tuesday the Rialto, California-based company announced it had raised $6.7 million is series A funding from Obvious Ventures, an investment company that funds startups with what it calls “positive social and environmental benefits,” and the Amazon Alexa Fund, Jeff Bezos’s venture capital enterprise dedicated to investing in companies that “fuel voice technology innovation.”
[Photo: Plant Prefab]
Apparently, that includes Plant Prefab.
“We will work with Amazon to integrate Alexa and other smart home technology they have into our standard home platforms,” says Steve Glenn, CEO of Plant Prefab over email. “We’ll be working with them to create better integrated Alexa and other smart home technology solutions to help improve the quality of life and utility of people who live in the homes we build.”
[Photo: Plant Prefab]
Plant Prefab has been designing prefab homes since 2016, when it was spun off of architectural and property development firm Living Homes. The company describes itself as the first American prefab factory focused on sustainability, and claims its technology can achieve a reduction of 50% in construction time and 10% to 25% in cost in major cities. It offers a series of “standard” designs developed by big design names like Ray Kappe and Yves Béhar, as well as custom builds. Over the last few months, Plant Prefab says in a press release, it has installed 26 of its units across California and Utah.
[Photo: Plant Prefab]
With so many Echo- and Alexa-enabled devices available, from clocks to subwoofers to TVs, it’s easy to joke that this is Amazon’s world and we’re just living in it. Based on its investment in Plant Prefab, that future may be Prime-delivered sooner than we think.
If you want to see someone get disproportionately irritated, tell them the dress is gold and white when they see a blue-and-black garment. Or try telling them that the voice is saying “Laurel” when they hear “Yanny.”
Viral perception arguments—at first, fascinating, then slightly annoying—may seem like silly internet disagreements. But think about this: They’re telling us that some of us truly do see, hear, and experience the world differently than others. One study published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Pain even found that people who fear pain may experience more of it after workouts or when injured.
“Yes, there are real differences between people in what we see and hear, and there can also be variation over time in how we see or hear one and the same image or sound,” says Jan Brascamp, PhD, assistant professor of psychology in the neuroscience program at Michigan State University.
How is that possible? There are a few factors. First, perception isn’t an immediate reflection of the “raw input” that our senses provide, but the mind’s interpretation of that input, Brascamp says. So, for example, when you see something, your eyes have cells that detect the light and send information about its color, or wavelength, to the brain. Meanwhile, your brain is relying on the signals your eyes are sending, but they have limitations, so your brain, informing the experiences you’ve had, fills in the blanks.
Brascamp offers an example: Let’s say you stand in front of a stained-glass window through which the sun is shining. When somebody looks at a part of your face that is covered by a red patch of light coming through the glass, the cells in that person’s eyes will signal to the brain that red light is coming off your face. But that person does not perceive you as having colored spots: He or she perceives your face as having its normal color, yet with different colors of light shining onto it. But if that same person sees a fire engine drive by, they will perceive the truck as red. A study about the white and gold dress found that factors such as age, eye health, and even the size of the community in which respondents grew up affected their answers.
Physiological and experiential differences, or “prior knowledge,” can also affect other perceptions, says Roozbeh Kiani, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neural science and psychology at New York University in New York City. “My ears may have a little more sensitivity to higher frequencies, and your ears may have more sensitivity to low frequencies that can precipitate the perceptual differences, but the main factor that would lead to different perceptions for the same physical stimulus is really differences in prior knowledge and the fact that perception is an undefined inference problem that heavily depends on prior knowledge,” he says.
“In general, the fact that the mind exploits all kinds of prior assumptions and expectations to fill in gaps in the information it receives applies to all domains of cognition, not just perception. So in that sense, it could contribute to differences in ideology and thinking in society,” Brascamp says. But he adds that illusions like the dress, spurred by differences in perceptual processes, may not play an important role in those societal variations.
Dana Dupuis, founder of Boulder, Colorado-based Echo Listening Intelligence, a consultancy that helps companies foster better listening skills among employees, says perception differences serve an important purpose. They’re a reminder that those who are communicating need to shift their styles to ensure their messages—spoken and unspoken—are understood even among people with different perceptions.
“No two brains are alike. Therefore, the way each brain takes in information is going to be slightly different,” she says.
Kiani says that it’s important to take perception differences into account in interactions between people, “and give or leave room for the possibility that, first, diversity exists not necessarily because people are not paying attention, but because they have different prior information,” he says. And both leaders and employees need to keep in mind that it’s important to provide context and explain information in ways that would potentially overcome gaps in prior knowledge and ensure the message is understood as intended.
