Who’s your favorite towel-maker? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably struggling to think of a single towel brand. Some of the best recommended towels on Amazon have names so forgettable–Superior, Martex, Pinzon–you’d need to go back to your order history to remember what you bought. The brands stocked by Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond are just as boring. And in any case, since most towels aren’t built to be particularly durable, you’re likely to throw them out after a few months anyway.

“Most people we know don’t love their towel brand,” says Liz Eichholz, who cofounded the company with Lindsey Johnson. “In fact, most of don’t even know what brand of towel is hanging in our bathroom. That’s so strange because towels are something we use every day.”

Today Weezie launches online, selling towels made in Portugal from long-staple organic cotton that you can customize with monograms for $15 apiece. For now, the brand only sells white towels (although you can pick different piping colors for the edges, including blue, gray, and sand). A bath towel costs $58, two hand towels cost $40, and a pair of washcloths cost $20. A full starter pack, which contains four bath towels and two hand towels comes at a 15% discount, at $230. These towels are about twice as expensive as the mid-range towels you can get from Target or Amazon, and on par with luxury brands like Sferra.

Johnson and Eichholz met a decade ago through mutual friends (the brand’s name is a nod to Johnson’s grandmother Louise, or Weezie, who always had fresh towels in the guest room to welcome visitors). As they began getting married and setting up their own homes, they noticed a glaring lack of towel brands that spoke their language in terms of design and quality. They set out to create the products they wished existed, and they say they’re funding the venture themselves to retain control over the company–at least early on.

The duo seem to be hoping to replicate the success of brands like Away, which spiced up the extremely dull category of luggage with products, stores, collaborations, and imagery that appealed to twenty- and thirty-something consumers. Away managed to gain traction through it Instagram channel, which reposted many pictures from customers proudly photographing their suitcases in different parts of the world. The brand sold half a million suitcases in its first two years, then snagging a $50 Series C round earlier this year to keep growing.

They spent months visiting towel factories around the world, and discovered a family-owned factory in Portugal that has a long history in the business. Weezie’s towels use organic cotton that’s Oeko-Tex certified to be free of harmful chemicals. The long length of the cotton means its threads are less likely to break and create lint, and the company also incorporated a Japanese weaving technology that traps air within the towel, helping it dry quickly. (A feature I can attest to, since I tested an early version of the product.)

In the duo’s focus groups, they also discovered that women often ruined their towels by accidentally smudging it with makeup. To that end, they’ve created special makeup towels that come in two designs, one with emoji eyelids and the other with the words “stain me” scrawled on it. The idea? To keep the full-sized towels stain-free longer–and cut down on the number of towels that get thrown away.

Ultimately, Johnson and Eichholz want to create towels that people will use for years. They found that part of the reason that many consumers don’t seem to care about their towels is because they they think of them as short-term purchases. They assume it won’t take long for them to get stained, begin shedding lint, or get moldy because they don’t dry quickly enough. Weezie’s founders hope that if customers use their towels for years, they’ll develop the loyalty that’s evaded other brands.

“We’re thinking of towels as more than just a functional item,” says Eichholz. “We want people to feel an emotional connection to them, as they enjoy the fluffy sensation on their skin after a shower. We want them to be a beautiful bathroom accessory.”

Mechanized toymaker Anki will dip a toe into the home robotics market on October 12 with the debut of Vector–a diminutive $250 bulldozer-looking character packing the processing power and algorithms to act as a smart robo-pet. When I first saw a Vector prototype back in June, he was entertaining–able to navigate around a tabletop (and not fall off the edge), play simple games, and make excited facial expressions and twittering sounds when he recognized me approaching. But he wasn’t very useful. (Yes, Anki has dubbed Vector a “he.”)

Back then, Vector could understand questions and provide simple answers, such as weather forecasts or basic Wikipedia-style info. Though that reminded me of Amazon’s Alexa, it was nowhere near as good. Kickstarter backers felt the same way, and begged Anki to put a real digital assistant onboard.

Today the company announced that it will add support for Alexa by the end of the year. With that, Vector goes from a cute pet to a home helper–like a working dog in the barnyard instead of a lazy cat on the couch. Vector won’t be the first Alexa-enabled robot; the $800 Ubtech Lynx also has Alexa onboard.

Related: Can emotional AI make Anki’s new robot into a lovable companion?

Anki is pretty vague about what Alexa integration will do, but it could in theory include controlling a raft of smart home devices. (Fortunately, this includes home audio devices, because playing music from Vector’s tinny little speaker would be grating.)

Anki has also announced other coming upgrades, including delivering messages, recognizing music, and acting as a home-monitoring device. (He has a microphone array to recognize where sound comes from and a camera with vision algorithms to detect people and soon, flesh-and-blood pets.)

Despite outsourcing some of Vector’s brains to Alexa, Anki closely guards the bot’s personality. It’s set by Hollywood animators and software that simulates emotions–happy, sad, bored–in response to his interactions with people and the environment. Vector also has his own low-fi robotic boy voice, which he may lose in Alexa mode. While Alexa defaults to a simulated female voice, Amazon offers developers 27 voices, including (for U.S. English) such options as Justin, Matthew, Ivy, and Kendra. I asked Anki how it plans to handle voice and gender, but the company says it hasn’t worked that out yet.

You may have received training on giving a good presentation or writing a successful business proposal, but few of us spend as much time learning how to craft a good email. It’s quick and easy, but few of us give much thought to shooting off an email, so that makes it ripe for misuse.

“Email is simultaneously messy, imperfect, overwhelming, and impoverished,” says Nick Morgan, author of Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World. “Email is so easy to send that it’s become a deluge.”

As communication tools like instant messaging are added to the workplace, the purpose and strength of email has started to shift, says Morgan. “Slack or similar platforms are for quick, conversational responses,” he says. “Text is immediate and the most informal, requiring a word or two, or an emoji. Email is now the most time consuming and formal. It requires a more elaborate response and often takes the place of face-to-face communication.”

So before you send your next email, make sure you do these three things:

Wait at least 60 seconds and read it over before you hit send

Because email is a quick tool to use, it’s tempting to shoot one off on the fly, but that often leads to misunderstandings or incomplete information, requiring a few more emails to clear up.

“The issue is we feel we never have enough time because we’re buried in email,” says Morgan. “We’re in email hell, and we try to get out by erasing and deleting and responding briefly to those we have to. Ideally you should take more time.”

Write your email and then wait at least 60 seconds before hitting send, says Morgan. “Go back and reread it, edit it, and make sure it is clear,” he says. “Look particularly for emotional clarity. Remember, it is the emotions that are too often lacking in our virtual life, and they are hard to get right in an email.”

Take out fillers and qualifiers

No one likes a long, rambling email, but one that’s too short has issues, too. “You can forget to explain stuff and as a result create misunderstandings,” says Morgan. “Trying to keep it as short as possible can be a trap and make you feel overwhelmed. Brevity is not a virtue in and of itself, and writing should go as long as necessary.”

While the content may be long, there are tricks to keeping it concise. Take out fillers, qualifiers, adverbs, and adjectives, suggests Morgan. Keep the prose matter-of-fact and clear, and write conversationally, revising as needed.

“Start an email, a paragraph, and your sentences with the familiar, the old, the agreed-upon,” he says. “Then move to the unfamiliar, the new, the debatable. We only crave a little extra knowledge.”

You are conveying the right tone

The most important step of crafting a good email is being clear on your intent. “The single most important question to ask is, ‘How does what I just said make you feel?'” says Morgan. “When you talk face to face, the person gets more information from your eyes or body language. In the virtual world, all that is lost.”

We tend to overestimate both our ability to convey the tone we want to convey in an email, and our ability to judge other people’s tones, says Morgan. “We think we know exactly what other people are trying to say—but we’re wrong,” he says.

Research from New York University and the University of Chicago found that people are stuck in their own perspectives, grasping a writer’s intent only 56% of the time.

“The researchers found this solution: Read your emails out loud a few times in different tones, including offended, sarcastic, or angry, before you send it,” says Morgan. “Reading a message in a way you didn’t intend makes it easier for you to step outside your own perspective and appreciate that you might be misinterpreted. That’s the first step toward better communication.”

It’s been a long, long Monday.

You get home from work, eat dinner, clean up, flop on the couch, and doze off watching TV or mess with your phone. Then you repeat the same routine Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Before you know it, you’ve hit the weekend, and it felt like all you did all week was work.

In reality, you had an hour or two to do whatever you wanted each night. But because you didn’t consciously invest that time in meaningful or satisfying activities, every day felt like a grind.

So how do you shake up this routine and begin to invest your time in activities that truly satisfy and refresh you?

As a time management coach, I’ve seen that these five strategies can help you feel like you have more free time and feel happier with how you invest it.

Plan your downtime in advance

Making a positive choice on what to do in the evening is really difficult when you already feel drained. A better option is to think ahead about your free time. That could include scheduling a dinner out, time to cook, a visit to the gym, or an opportunity to review your retirement accounts. If you’ll need to coordinate with others, I recommend scheduling events at least a few days in advance, for example, reaching out on Wednesday or Thursday for weekend plans. You may even want to put a recurring reminder in your calendar on Wednesdays to prompt you to think about the weekend. And for solo activities, such as reading or getting something done around your home, some conscious thinking even the morning of can better your chances of a good evening. For instance, on your way to work, you may decide that tonight you’ll go on a hike or finally tackle some outstanding bills.

Prep for action

Since free time is so limited, it’s essential that you prep in advance to take full advantage of your time. That could mean packing a gym bag so you can go straight from work to the gym, writing up a list of errands to run so that you can zip out at the end of the day and get right to them, or setting out what you’ll need to work on a home project later that evening. Teeing yourself up the night before lowers the chances of inaction and also incentivizes you to leave work on time. When you have a higher level of consciousness, you are aware that extra time in the office means less time for whatever else you want to do, so you have motivation to leave.

Do what satisfies

Not all activities will equally benefit your life. Watching TV or scrolling on your phone isn’t intrinsically bad or wrong, but these activities won’t produce the mood-enhancing brain chemicals that the most effective stress-relief strategies can. The best activities include exercising or playing sports, attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going for a walk, meditating, yoga, or hobbies.

Each person has slightly different preferences, so make a list of the specific activities that make you most happy. For example, if you’re extroverted, that might include getting out and around people as much as possible, whereas an introvert might need more solo activities. Then try to get some of them in each week. Maybe your list includes playing soccer, going on walks, reading, and spending time with your significant other. Clarity on what you want to do makes it easier to make those activities a priority.

Double the benefit

A simple way to multiply the benefit of your precious free time is to layer activities. For example, go on a walk with a friend, or work on a creative hobby with your significant other—either doing the same activity or being in the same room. One thing I discovered about myself in the last few years is that I would rather meet socially for a hike than drinks or dinner. So now, when friends suggest getting together, I try to steer us toward an outdoor activity. That way I get in social time and do something that refreshes me on a deep level.

Increase your sense of time

Another little trick to give yourself the sense that you have more free time is to do more than one activity in an evening. For example, instead of just working out, also take 10-15 minutes to read, or instead of just going out for dinner, also sort the mail. I don’t recommend packing your free time too tightly. But by doing multiple activities in one evening, it makes you feel like you experienced more within the same amount of time.

Can you watch TV at night? Absolutely. I’m not suggesting that you must ban yourself from all electronic devices in the evening. But you should consider a more intentional approach to your free time. Some small tweaks to how you spend it can make a huge impact to the sense that you have free time, your overall energy levels, and your satisfaction with life in general.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the author of Divine Time Management and How to Invest Your Time Like Money, and a time management coach. Find out more at www.RealLifeE.com

One of the most common pushbacks to state and local minimum wage hikes, like those enacted in Seattle and New York state, is that requiring companies to pay people more might result in fewer jobs, or fewer shifts for people who work them. While research has been mixed, most studies find that higher minimum wages tend not to impact job availability, and generally increase quality of life for workers.

In a new paper, a pair of researchers added another dimension to the minimum wage researchers now has added another dimension to the minimum wage debate–one that’s too often left out of the discussion around employment opportunities. Economics professors Amanda Agan of Rutgers University and Michael Makowsky of Clemson University examine the effect of minimum wage increases on people who were formerly incarcerated, and found that on the whole, a minimum wage increase of $.50 an hour reduced the chance that a person would end up back in prison within a year by 2.8%.

Every year, over 600,000 people are released from prison in the U.S. The likelihood that they will return is in no small part determined by the available jobs in the market into which they re-enter, and how well they pay. “There’s a lot of literature in economics about how being released from prison into a good labor market–when there are a lot of available jobs and higher wages—reduced the probability of people returning to prison,” Agan says. In speaking with Makowsky, the duo became interested in examining the effects of local minimum wage laws on recidivism, precisely because of that common critique that a higher minimum wage may constrain the presence of available jobs.

Largely, what Agan and Makowsky found is that the benefits of a higher local minimum wage for returning prisoners outweighed any constraints in job availability that the minimum wage produced–mirroring trends in the overall positive effects of a higher minimum wage. The study mapped prison release data from the nearly 6 million men and women released from prison between 2000 and 2014 against state and federal minimum wage data. It was a source of frustration to Agan that more granular data, like into which county a formerly incarcerated person moved after being released, or where, or if, they were employed, was not available; for their study, Agan and Makowsky mainly had to work off data about prison entry and release at the state level, and track that alongside various minimum wage lifts. The lack of data, while frustrating to Agan, was not surprising. The Prison Policy Initiative released the first nationally representative estimate of employment among formerly incarcerated people this summer, but “there’s almost no data we can access on the individual level linking people’s criminal record to their employment outcomes,” Agan says.

What was pretty clear to Agan, though, was that for people returning from prison, the prospect of higher wages is especially crucial. The majority of reductions in recidivism that she and Makowsky tracked were across potentially revenue-generating crime categories like drug and property-related offenses. If a lack of adequate income is what causes someone to participate in illegal activity in the first place, it stands to reason that paying people more would alleviate some of that pressure.

That’s not to say, though, that a higher minimum wage is an automatic fix for the issue of rebuilding a life after prison. Of the 5 million formerly incarcerated people in the U.S., around 27% are unemployed, and often lack the resources or social support to receive job placement or training services. Without more coordinated re-entry programs in place, people with a history of incarceration will continue to fall through the cracks.

And there’s a role for employers to play, too. “A number of studies show that employers have no particular desire to hire people with a criminal record,” Again says. “And a higher minimum wage could serve as cause for an employer to substitute toward a different labor pool.” Often, employers will hire people recently out of prison for reduced wages, using the fact that many other employers may not hire them at all as leverage for lower pay. But if a local minimum wage mandates that employers pay their workers equitably regardless of their background, they might not offer formerly incarcerated people work.

There are various efforts to combat such employee-level discrimination against formerly incarcerated people: The “ban the box” movement encourages employers to ditch the question about criminal record from job applications, and other, more progressive movements like open hiring–pioneered by the Yonkers, New York-based social enterprise Greyston Bakery–advocate for hiring without drug tests, background checks, or questions about criminal records, all of which often prevent people from securing jobs. As more localities enact minimum wage laws, and as companies, most notably Amazon, which recently announced a $15 hourly wage floor for all workers, do the same, it should be beholden on them to ensure that higher wages don’t equate with a loss of opportunity for people who need it most, like those returning home from prison. Localities could enact laws against discrimination on the basis of incarceration history, and companies could be more rigorous about adopting open-minded hiring practices.

Ultimately, Agan and Makowsky’s research adds to the growing body of studies that show that the most effective strategy for supporting people’s livelihoods are higher and more consistent wages. The positive effect on reducing recidivism rates show that this is especially meaningful for people returning from prison–and should serve as evidence that minimum-wage and criminal-justice-reform advocates have broad common ground from which they can advocate for both.

If Beyoncé’s wearing sunglasses, there’s a good chance she’s wearing Krewe, an eyewear brand from New Orleans. The multi-million dollar brand–which was a runner-up in the 2016 Vogue Fashion Fund, one of the fashion industry’s most prestigious awards–creates eyewear with bold, statement-making flair.

“I’m evangelical on behalf of my city,” says founder and creative director Stirling Barrett, a New Orleans native. “New Orleans has a very playful sensibility to it: People come here to let loose, or as we say, be themselves. We’re inspired by these surroundings to create colorful and unique designs.”

Celebrities have certainly flocked to Krewe, with everyone from Gigi Hadid and Serena Williams to Emma Watson and Blake Lively spotted in the brand’s shades. But none as frequently as Beyonce, who appears to resonate with the brand’s New Orleans-based aesthetic. (The star recently purchased a $2.6 million church-turned-mansion in the city, and her sister Solange lives there.) In paparazzi photos, she’s been captured in a  futuristic cat-eye style wearing a blue fur coat and a checked dress; or in a titanium pair as she heads to a workout; or in bedazzled oversized sunglasses while wearing a glam silk top and matching drop earrings.

Given her intimate knowledge of the city, Beyoncé may recognize the names that Krewe bestows on each style, which refer to different landmarks in New Orleans. The St. Louis, for instance, is named for a major artery in the French Quarter, and the metal bridge across the nose is inspired by the cast-iron balconies that line the streets there. The Ward has a sleek, titanium frame, and is inspired by the jazz scene that comes out of many wards in the city. The Collins is named for and inspired by New Orleans architect Collins Diboll, who was known to be a little eccentric: The glasses have a round, bottle-cap shape that gives the wearer a quirky vintage look.

From the start, Barrett’s vision for Krewe was to translate the culture and energy of his hometown into a brand that would resonate in the fashion world. Barrett had observed how fashion labels are often inspired by other American cities, like New York or Los Angeles. Some went so far as to incorporate the cities into their names, including Donna Karan New York or Genetics Los Angeles. “I thought, Why couldn’t I do that with my own city?” Barrett recalls.

Growing up in New Orleans, Barrett was used to people stereotyping the city in various ways. Some associate it with the Mardi Gras parade and the boozy nightlife on Bourbon Street. Others love the jazz, Creole cuisine, and French architecture. And yet others think of it as the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina. “When people imagine New Orleans, their vision of the city is grounded in the past,” says Barrett. “Nobody thinks of it as a modern, design-oriented place. And I thought I could change that by building a fashion brand here.”

But launching a fashion company in New Orleans has its challenges. For one thing, Barrett has struggled to find employees with fashion experience and expertise, since the city has not historically had a thriving fashion industry. To build out his team of 50 (and growing), he says he’s had to hire people from other cities who are willing to move. He’s also invested heavily in training young New Orleanians. “I’m interested not just in building a business, but helping to create an industry here,” Barrett says. “You’ve got to start somewhere, and equip people with skills.”

Barrett also believes that choosing to keep his company in New Orleans is also a way of investing economically in the city. While Krewe doesn’t manufacture the eyewear in the city (it’s made in Asia), all the design work and marketing happens in New Orleans. He’s also been focused on building a retail presence there, with a store in the French Quarter and another on Magazine Street that has an optometrist on site. (It also has a permanent store in SoHo, New York.)

The company also has two traveling stores which the brand dubs “tiny houses.” Although they’re only 200 square feet in size, the windows and roofs let in plenty of light, and they have 14-foot ceilings. Their exteriors pull directly from New Orleans architecture: One is a replica of the shotgun houses that line various Bayous in the city. The other is made of mixed metals and woods, and is inspired by the more industrial parts of New Orleans, where ships and boats were made. Right now, the two tiny houses are parked in Houston and Austin, but the idea is for them to move continuously to different cities.

“We want to give people around the country an opportunity to explore New Orleans architecture and culture,” says Barrett. “But it’s also a good way to test the market. If people are responsive to our brand, we can look into setting up permanent stores.”

In five short years, Krewe has grown quickly. It now makes several million dollars a year in revenue, and it is growing fast, thanks to collaborations with other fast growing fashion brands, like Reformation. Ultimately Barrett hopes that the brand’s success will inspire other New Orleans-based entrepreneurs to launch brands in their city. “It’s harder to build a business here than in other places,” says Barrett. “But would we want to be anywhere else? No. If we can inspire other people to launch startups in New Orleans, I believe that would be our biggest investment to the city.”

With news that hackers can now crack pacemakers and voting machines, it’s hard not to be a little concerned about internet security. The best line of defense, of course, is a strong password, and frankly, if you still use “password” as your password at this point, you kind of deserve to be hacked.

FrontNet has put together a list of the 25 worst passwords on the internet, and if you happen to recognize a few of them, it might be time to invest in a password management app to keep your online accounts secure–and make sure you never have to *shudder* think again.

Here’s the full list of terrible passwords:

• password
• passw0rd
• qwerty
• qwertyuiop
• 12345
• 12345678
• 123456789
• 1234567890
• football
• baseball
• welcome
• abc123
• dragon
• master
• 111111
• login
• solo
• starwars

Of course, the problem with strong passwords and their bewildering combination of upper and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers is that they are really hard to remember, which is annoying when you’re trying to log into your Google+ account. Seriously, why can’t passwords just be a frustrated sigh?

At the same time, more and more sites are forcing our overtaxed brains to memorize increasingly complex password schemes, so it’s not particularly surprising that some people fall back on passwords that are easy to remember. While that’s understandable, we’re here to remind you that it’s not safe.

In the last few years, the American workforce has been whipped up into a panic over the prospect of automation. However, Fast Company has reported on various surveys that assure readers most people will not, in fact, lose their jobs to robots (but parts of their jobs may be automated). In my experience as a futurist, and while researching a new book, Humanity Works, I’ve identified the issue we should be preparing for instead: how employees can develop the skills to serve as effective members of human/machine hybrid teams, and how they can work alongside the technology that will infiltrate aspects of every job in every industry.

The rise of applied technology skills

Once upon a time, a professional didn’t need to know anything about technology unless he or she worked for an IT firm or in an IT department. Now, however, all workers must be able to use available technology to sharpen their skills in critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving. They need to draw inferences from a variety of data sources, understand overall digital infrastructure and how it can drive process efficiency and improvement, and be familiar with technology interfaces and how to effectively collaborate with machines.

My research organization, the Career Advisory Board, which was established by DeVry University in 2010, has identified these abilities as applied technology skills (ATS). In other words, these are skills that integrate people, processes, data, and devices to understand how new technologies can effectively inform business strategy and react to unanticipated shifts in direction. Data analysis is an example of a highly desirable applied tech skill that has become essential in every industry and function.

RELATED: Demand for these skills will rise dramatically by 2030

For our recent technology skills gap research, the Career Advisory Board asked hiring managers, human resource professionals, and C-suite executives to reflect on the importance of ATS as well as the challenges they face in recruiting and retaining tech-savvy talent. Sixty-nine percent of survey respondents agreed with this statement: “When I interview a prospective candidate, the presence of applied technology skills and experience is a competitive differentiator.” And, the desire for leaders to have these skills is even greater: 76% of managers who hire senior-level candidates agreed.

Although our respondents reported that some areas require ATS more than others (half said operations and administration functions are most in need of them, followed by customer relations at 39%, and sales and business development at 36%), most respondents said that employees at large need to understand how to best use and integrate software systems to maximize business value.

Identifying ATS

Unfortunately, ATS are not always easy to come by in the American workforce. For one thing, most current professionals did not receive instruction in ATS from traditional education paths unless they focused on information technology. Technology is also evolving more quickly than in the past, so skill acquisition can’t happen all at once and must be sustained over a long period of time–and that can get expensive.

Fortunately, our survey revealed that despite these obstacles, most hiring managers are continuously training and retraining on ATS through internal courses and training (78%), tuition reimbursement for reskilling (35%) and external courses and training (31%). Only 25% said their organizations are taking no action to develop the ATS skillset.

RELATED: Five ways AI will make your job easier

If you hire employees and ATS hasn’t been on your radar, there are several actions you can take related to recruitment, skill identification, and employee development.

Starting with sourcing, consult with your IT leaders and C-suite about the best way to use social, mobile, and cloud technologies to uncover hidden sources of ATS talent. Combine internal referrals and external sourcing initiatives to create synergies between your jobs, candidates, and employees using vehicles like SwoopTalent.

You can also assess a job seeker’s contributions to online communities (like GitHub, Dribble, and Stack Overflow) to validate skill proficiency, and consider using outlets like oDesk (now Upwork)  and TopCoder to recruit specific workers who have the exact skills you need for a job. Often, these individuals will come in with a combination of traditional skills and ATS and will be well positioned to help develop both in your overall workforce.

Tapping your current workforce

When it comes to identifying and developing ATS in your existing workforce, first lay out your business priorities and the required skills for each strategic position. Evaluate if the people in those positions are well equipped with the right ATS to do their jobs. Don’t assume that they do, even if they’re senior.

RELATED: Exactly how to sharpen essential job skills during your next presentation

Next, conduct a training needs analysis to measure the skills against the employee’s level of existing knowledge and how much training would be required. This might include elements such as competency profiles, interviews, focus groups, and on-the-job observation, and you can use the results to determine the skills you have, the ones you need to hire for, and the training required for various groups.

Armed with this information, you can create appropriate training plans that you can execute with help from your employees with already strong ATS. Reward these individuals by promoting them into leadership roles and seek their guidance when assessing where human employees need to develop skills to keep pace with automation and other forms of artificial intelligence. Your goal should be to build a community of human workers who are comfortable with–instead of threatened by–technology advances.

Alexandra Levit is the author of the new book Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future (Kogan Page, October 2018). A partner at People Results, she helps Fortune 500 and government organizations and their leaders prepare for the future of work through proprietary research, consulting, and program development.

Interfaces and hardware shaped the last decade of smartphone innovation, but artificial intelligence will shape the next decade. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Google’s new Pixel 3 smartphones, announced today at an event in New York. The new devices use AI to do everything from answer your phone for you to taking clear photos in the dark of night.

With all respect to the industrial design, the Pixel 3’s hardware update is fairly typical. The phone is getting faster guts, the dreaded front notch, wireless charging capabilities, a lol-worthy “not pink” millennial pink option, and 5.5-inch and 6.3-inch sizes that start at $799. Let’s be honest: It’s a Pixel stuffed with everything you’d expect a smartphone to contain in 2018.

Instead, to differentiate itself in the market, Google is leveraging its greatest asset: Industry-leading AI.

The Pixel 3 is loaded with user-friendly AI superpowers, and, crucially, it’s not running all that AI from the cloud, but locally, from right on your actual device. That means the company can pull off more advanced features in real time, with less power consumption and more security. It’s the key to what makes the phone’s software different.

The initiative to move AI to the phone itself started in a big way last year, before the announcement of the Pixel 2. Google developers were able to use machine learning to shrink its massive song-matching algorithm in a way that allowed it to “hear” any of its 70,000 songs, akin to Shazam, with a feature called Now Playing. The AI was tiny on your phone and consumed almost no power, turning a standalone app like Shazam into a clunky bit of obsolescence. Instead, you could just look down at your Pixel, and see the song you were wondering about on the lock screen.

Screen Call is a perfect example of the benefits of running AI on device versus in the cloud. Whereas existing visual voicemail allows companies like Verizon to transcribe your voicemail messages for you, this process is on a bit of a delay that you, the user, have no real control over. With the AI in your hands, though, that assistant becomes software that works on your schedule–in real time–to deal with spammers.

Similarly, features from Google Lens–Google’s cloud-based image analyzing service–will now run on the Pixel 3. That means if you photograph a business card, Lens can see that there’s a phone number, or address–which can be called, or opened in Google Maps, respectively, with buttons that appear on screen.

It’s neat to watch happen in real time, but designing exactly how the UI reacts in these moments is tricky.

“Our general philosophy is we want to make sure technology is kept out of the way of the user so it’s not something they have to think about. Mostly, we’re not in your face about it,” says Chau. “With [Lens] suggestions, we wait until a QR code or phone number is X% of the screen before we recommend it. Even if we see the business card, we don’t recommend anything until we think it’s clear that’s what you want to do.”

Indeed, most of the artificial intelligence Google is introducing is within the Pixel’s camera itself, where much of the time, a user can either ignore its smarts entirely, or benefit from the effects while being none the wiser that they exist.

Likewise, the camera features a Night Sight mode that operates in a similar manner. When you photograph something that’s dark, it will stack several photos, combining all of the brightest bits, into one image that simulates a long-exposure image.

On the Pixel 3, Google is moving these image enhancements into real-time territory. To do so, the Pixel team is borrowing and shrinking software technology from the Photos team–using a similar shrink-the-AI workflow to the way it got Now Playing running on the smartphone. The AI models behind these photo enhancements are trained in the cloud–which takes enormous processing power–but when complete, they can live on your device as software tools that are perfect for doing one job perfectly, like brightening a photo.

Where processing happens shouldn’t matter to users in theory, but practically, it makes all the difference. Most of the Pixel’s new camera tricks would be impossible if they lived in the cloud, because you couldn’t have the real-time feedback on screen that you needed. You couldn’t possibly upload photos as fast as your phone could take them, let alone wait for them to be processed, and re-download them. Google’s new Pixel AR features, for instance, will allow you to add Instagram-like stickers to your videos. But with AI, objects in the scene are identified in real time, reacting to context–a phone in the frame brings up a chat cartoon that says “call me!” Or you can bring in Marvel characters, like Iron Man, to pose for selfies with you, smiling or shrugging in concert.

“This doesn’t mean there won’t be great cloud use cases as well. But there’s always going to be latency, power, and data considerations when we’re talking about cloud services,” says Chau. “We believe there are use cases that it makes sense to run low latency, real time [AI] because it brings out a better user experience.”

Of course, there is a pretty big catch to running AI locally. It means you’re often collecting and processing tons of extra data on your phone–a device that’s inherently less secure than Google’s own servers. (That’s in theory, given the recent security breach in Google+.) Google assures me it’s not seeing data like the songs playing around you, in Now Playing. Similarly, that selfie with Iron Man will never be seen by Google, unless you back up your photos to Google’s servers. Local AI is a promising development for user privacy. But that doesn’t matter if the contents of your phone can be hacked by malware or other means–if, in theory, a hacker could hop into your phone and see everything the AI has seen.

“The more we do on the device, the more we’re going to have to protect what’s there,” says Chau. Google updated the Pixel 3 hardware in what looks to be an industry first–a security chip called Titan M that stores all of your passwords in a way that’s so protected that not even your smartphone’s CPU can see the data. This chip can also create the same two-factor login options that Google’s Titan Key password protectors use–meaning that the phone will also be able to securely unlock all sorts of websites, and potentially even Internet of Things hardware, in your life.

In a world where we’re increasingly dependent on corporations like Google keeping us secure–and those corporations are increasingly dependent on tracking our every move to be served up to advertisers–local AI is an enticing alternative. I’m not so naive as to think that this technology will allow me to use Android without being tracked, but by moving the AI closer to us, Google is putting a little more distance between our phones and its servers. Strangely, localized AI could help retain some aspects of personal privacy without us chucking our phones and moving to caves. At minimum, it should help with those Iron Man selfies.

Kanye West’s one-man Donald Trump appreciation society is hitting the road.

The rapper is headed to the White House on Thursday to have lunch with President Trump, the New York Times reports. While no one knows what will be on the menu, it seems likely that they will wear matching MAGA hats while discussing why Trump actually cares about the plight of black people in this country and venting their frustration that Saturday Night Live cut Ye’s pro-Trump speech short. (It’s a shame, too, because who wouldn’t want to see what Pete Davidson called, “one of the worst, most awkward things I’ve seen here,” including seeing “Chevy Chase speak to an intern”?)

Since he’ll be in Washington, West will also meet with son-in-law-in-chief Jared Kushner to discuss criminal justice reform and the creation of manufacturing jobs in his hometown (and maybe current base) of Chicago. Specifically, West wants to discuss “job opportunities for former convicts.”

This will be the second time that Trump and West have met (that we know of). The two got together during Trump’s transition, before he was sworn into office, although Ye didn’t perform at the Inauguration celebration.

Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, already visited the White House to work with Trump on the successful pardon of Alice Johnson, a non-violent drug offender who spent years in jail until Kardashian intervened.

Last week, a fast-causal, retro taqueria named Invicto opened in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. Its menu features items like crispy avocado tacos, steak cemitas, and grilled street corn. The spot is also the first of a small group of U.S. eateries to commit to One Feeds Two USA, a charity concept that promises to deliver a second meal to schoolchildren battling hunger in the developing world for each transaction.

The campaign is advertised with an abstract smiley-face logo that adorns all the wrappers, bags, and tray liners–and even a large wall mural. It symbolizes the positivity of the mission that also abstractly diagrams how it works: Each eye might also be seen as overhead view of two people, while the smile, which is upturned at one end, looks a lot like a curved arrow, traveling from one dot to the other.

Invicto cofounder and CEO David Sloan compares this to the buy-one, give-one concept of Toms Shoes. “When you’re going to go out to eat anyways, you might as well visit restaurants that are also providing [charity] meals or doing some type of social good through their business,” he says. “When you take a look at the entire industry, if we can do something the consumer understands and is easy for the restaurants to work into their margins, we can do a lot of good as an industry and feed a lot of people out there.”

In fact, he’s already thinking bigger. Sloan opened Invicto under the umbrella of his larger restaurant company Venture Kitchen, which will manage the U.S. branch One Feeds Two directly. One Feeds Two originally started in the United Kingdom, where since 2011, the service has provided 3.7 million meals to those in need. Venture Kitchen now offers those nonprofit services free to any other food world player who wants to make a similar step, which Sloan hopes will include eateries beyond those he owns or manages, as well as food-related consumer-package goods and meal-kit offerings. The group has developed and deployed an array of catchy slogans to encourage that, including delivering “happier meals” and “rethinking the meaning of good food.”

For now, Venture Kitchen is starting that process with its own franchises: It’s opening a total of three Invictos around Chicago within the next six months. The group also manages another concept called Blackwood BBQ that is rebranding to promote One Feeds Two at three existing Chicago locations, and will do the same at another three restaurants that should open in the area later this year.

One Feeds Two started with JP Campbell, a former corporate lawyer who quit to start a soup truck named the Elephant Juice Food Company in Edinburgh, Scotland, only to realize that a lone business donating a meal for every one sold wasn’t super impactful. At least 66 million children in the developing world go to school hungry each day, according to the charity’s research. Another 61 million don’t go at all, in part because they may be scrounging for food or needed in other ways to help their families.

Campbell then joined Virgin Unite, a Richard Branson-backed startup accelerator, and eventually added two cofounders: Mark Christophers, his mentor there, and Owen Burton, the former CEO of the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship. Along the way, they renamed the charity effort something universal so that others could adopt it. The group now works with Cook, a frozen meal company, Byron, a burger chain, and Rola Wala, an Indian street food concept. (Some locations implement the program differently, offering the bonus on special menu items.)

Sloan learned about One Feeds Two while visiting a Rola Wala spot in London last year. At the time, he’d already grown and sold a major stake in his previous fast casual empire, Mediterranean-themed Naf Naf Grill, to Roark Capital, which owns Cinnabon, Jimmy Johns, Arby’s, and Buffalo Wild Wings, and stepped back from daily management. Over several years, he and Venture Kitchen cofounder Franklin Wiener, who was Naf Naf’s former COO, had grown Naf Naf into a popular spot throughout the Midwest and Northeast. They wanted to do the same thing for concepts, but only if it was paired with something charitable, which they felt that previous rush-for-growth had lacked.

Invicto is starting in the same shopping center as Naf Naf’s original flagship. Like its U.K. affiliate, the U.S. nonprofit part of that business allows restaurants to act like philanthropic fundraisers. Rather than execute the cause work directly, it raises money for Mary’s Meals, an organization that already works with schools in many severely impoverished places. For cost and efficiency, meals are often made in large batches and kept simple–a promotional video shows lots of rice and beans. For partnering One Feeds Two retailers, that makes the actual cost of donated meals much less than what customers pay: It averages out at just 12 cents per contribution.

Rather than try to sort out how many meals are rung up per transaction (or not, in the case of someone just buying a beer or soda) Venture Kitchen’s participating spots simply donate 12 cents per tab. “Anytime you swipe in that card, no matter what it is for, we’re providing a meal.” Sloan says. “That’s the way we thought that the consumer would understand.”

He sees the low price to participate as its own selling point. “I hope every restaurant takes this up because if you can’t work with that type of expense, then maybe you should look for a different profession,” Sloan adds. “Honestly, I think every restaurant can afford to do this.”

Between the promotions at Invicto and Blackwood BBQ, Venture Kitchen expects to deliver at least 1 million meals within the next year. It hopes to see that footprint grow at least ten times larger within the next several years as VK’s chains add more locations throughout the U.S., and other participants sign on. “For most of [these kids] this is the only meal they’re getting for the day,” Sloan says. “But at least if they’re getting it at school you know maybe they’re staying there, they’re getting educated, and we can break the chains of poverty through education.”

Beto O’Rourke may not be taking any campaign donations from corporations or PACs, but that hasn’t stopped a PAC called Fire Ted Cruz from making a new anti-Cruz ad. And they enlisted Texas film legend Richard Linklater to do it.

This isn’t a Means of Production-style, appeal-to-your-sense-of-humanity, empathy, and social responsibility approach. It’s a hilariously WTF call-out of Ted Cruz’s claim he’s “tough as Texas.” Here, like so many political photo-op meet and greets, we’ve got a man in a coffee shop waxing real talk on politics. The guy is Sonny Carl, whose IMDB page includes classics like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Thelma & Louise, and The Burbs.

“If somebody called my wife a dog, and said my daddy was in on the Kennedy assassination, I wouldn’t be kissing their ass,” snarls Carl, on the all-time weird dynamic between Cruz and Donald Trump. “You stick a finger in their chest and give ’em a few choice words. Or you drag their ass out by the woodshed and kick their ass, Ted.”

Linklater eschews name calling and instead expertly uses old-fashioned unspoken disdain and Cruz’s own name as the ad’s biggest insult. “C’mon . . . Ted.” As the Washington Post pointed out, the spot is a call-back to a scene from Linklater’s 2011 movie Bernie, in which Davis played another old-timer who, in a similar outfit, gripes about liberals in a restaurant.

Anyone else think this could be a present-day Wooderson?

With maximum sustained winds of 140 mph, Hurricane Michael is bearing down on the Florida panhandle this morning, having intensified into what the National Weather Service called an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 hurricane. The hurricane is expected to make landfall today.

Florida has issued mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders in at least 22 counties on the Gulf Coast, with Governor Rick Scott urging people yesterday to get out of the way of the “monstrous storm,” CNN reported.

If you’re looking to keep track of the storm, here are a few resources for live updates:

• CNN’s Storm Tracker.
• NOAA’s dedicated Michael page.
• Esri’s interactive Michael tracker map.

Here are a few other key details about the storm:

• Position: The hurricane was about 120 miles southwest of Panama City, Florida, as of 6 a.m. ET this morning, per CNN.
• Hurricane warnings are in effect for Florida’s panhandle and Big Bend regions, along with parts of southeastern Alabama and southern Georgia, affecting about 3.7 million people, per CNN.
• Tropical storm warnings and watches are in effect all along the Southeast coast as far north as the Outer Banks, per The Weather Channel.
• Unprecedented? This could be the first time a 4 or stronger hurricane has ever made landfall in the Florida panhandle, per The Weather Channel.

For live images of the storm, we’ve rounded up a few video embeds below:

This summer, Fast Company and Inc.conducted a survey of women entrepreneurs, in which we asked nearly 300 female founders about their business goals, their politics, and if they have faced bias. More than half the women said they had encountered some form of bias or harassment as female founders. It came as little surprise that nearly 60% were on the receiving end of discriminatory behavior from investors or bankers, while more than 50% experienced the same from vendors or suppliers. In other cases, founders felt potential partners or clients showed a gender bias in their interactions.

But one finding that stuck out was that 26% of respondents claimed the discrimination had come from their own employees and subordinates. We talked to some of those women about how bias from employees can manifest in the workplace–and undermine their authority as leaders.

You may not get the same respect as male employees–even as CEO

Some female founders find they don’t get the same respect as senior-level male employees—even as CEO of the company. “I purposely create a diverse and very open atmosphere at my company, where people are really encouraged to speak up and bring up issues and have healthy debate,” says one founder and CEO, who runs a fashion startup. Her leadership is largely comprised of women, but earlier this year, she brought on a man as her president and chief operating officer. In that time, she has already found that some vendors and potential partners assume he must be the CEO. She has also found that employees treat the two of them differently.

“It’s mostly become clear to me now that I have a senior man on my team,” she says. “It’s easier for him to hold people accountable without getting a lot of pushback.” Senior male employees seem to have the authority “to speak business truths,” she says. But when, for example, she tells an employee they have fallen short of targets, it may be questioned or perceived as what she, specifically, thinks or feels—not something that is simply true.

As for whether male and female employees treat her differently, she’s not sure. “That’s the problem with bias—you can’t put your finger on it,” she says. “I think the women and the men are much more willing to just take a unqualified direction from their male boss than from me.”

Your employees may expect more from you

Bias can also take the form of employees—men and women alike—imposing higher, gendered expectations on a female boss. Women are often expected to assume the role of caretaker in the workplace. “Exhibiting nurturing characteristics is very important for a female leader,” says the fashion CEO. “It’s required. I think with men, it’s just nice to have.”

Perhaps some women demand more from female bosses because they had bad experiences in male-dominated workplaces. In an industry like fashion, employees are even more likely to have “horror stories” about previous employers. “I have some employees who specifically wanted to work for a woman and have left companies where they were being manipulated or harassed by their male boss,” the CEO says. “They purposely came to a woman-owned company because they wanted to escape that culture. I think that is where women bosses can really make a difference.”

You may face bias or discrimination during job interviews

It’s not just employees who may be biased against female founders. Some women said they felt it even in interviews with job candidates—say, when they directed answers to technical questions at the man in the room.

One tech entrepreneur, many of whose employees are based in India, said she faced frequent discrimination from the people who worked for her, in part because her husband was her cofounder. Some employees wouldn’t look her in the eye, she said, while others assumed her husband was really the one in charge and might, for example, request that he sign for a delivery. During trade shows and job interviews, people often assumed her husband was the one with a technical background. One job applicant, she says, would only address emails to her husband during the interview process, even after he explicitly asked that she be included on all emails.

Your employees may offer unsolicited performance reviews

Sometimes, employees don’t just expect more from their female employers; they also feel free to share feedback or offer recommendations for what they could do differently. Julia Rohan, who runs a pet care business in Chicago, says a former employee did exactly that when he saw her helping out with a customer’s newborn twins. “I was very sensitive to the needs of new moms because I had a terrible postpartum situation in my life, and I really got by with the support of friends and family,” Rohan says. The customer had become a good friend, so Rohan was at her house one day helping out when her employee came by.

“He came in and saw me taking care of babies,” she says. “I was not on the clock, nor did I feel he deserved an explanation. It’s my business. But after he saw that, I noticed some glares, and then later that night, I received an email from him that said he felt my place was either with my son or in the office, but not bouncing customers’ babies on my hips.” Rohan says she couldn’t have imagined him saying that to a man. “I felt put in my place by an employee,” she says. After that, she didn’t feel comfortable having one-on-one meetings with him and would usually have a manager in the room; eventually, the employee left the company of his own volition.

Christina Stembel, who runs a San Francisco-based florist startup, says she is often the recipient of unsolicited feedback. “I have male employees who regularly tell me what they think I’m doing incorrectly and where I should spend the company’s money in better ways, without any knowledge of our financial statements,” she says. “I truly do not believe that those same manufacturing-level team members would feel as free to give so much advice and feedback—again, unsolicited—to a male CEO.”

This type of bias, Stembel says, is informed by who employees have long seen as CEOs and make it harder for women to demand the same level of respect as their male counterparts. Even people who claim to want women in positions of power may be biased against female bosses. “For most of our lives, we’ve only seen men in CEO positions, so we subconsciously believe that they are more qualified to lead—even if we would say otherwise,” she says. “We’ve been marketed so many images of men in leadership positions. How can our brains not be trained to think so?”

For decades, popular wisdom held that technology was undeniably a good thing. But in the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that’s not the case: Poorly designed technology can fuel the spread of misinformation, entrench systematic racism and sexism, erode personal privacy, and aid divisivenessand extremism.

How do you address such monumental societal changes? For Mitchell Baker, the founder and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, it starts with education.

Today, Mozilla, along with Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, is launching a competition for professors and educators to effectively integrate ethics into computer science education at the undergraduate level. The context, called the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, will award up to $3.5 million over the next two years to proposals focused on how to make ethics relevant to young technologists.

“You can’t take an ethics course from 50 or even 25 years ago and drop it in the middle of a computer science program and expect it to grab people or be particularly applicable,” Baker says. “We are looking to encourage ways of teaching ethics that make sense in a computer science program, that make sense today, and that make sense in understanding questions of data.”

What might that look like? The competition is encouraging professors to propose changes to class material, like integrating a reading assignment on ethics to go with each project, or to methodology, like having computer science sections co-taught with teaching assistants from the ethics department. The first stage of the challenge will award these proposals up to $150,000 to try out their ideas firsthand, likely at the university where the educator teaches. The second stage will take the best of the pilots and grant them $200,000 to help them scale to other universities. Each idea will be judged by an independent panel of experts from academia and tech companies.

Baker hopes that the competition–and its prize money–will yield practical ideas that are both substantial and relevant. It shouldn’t be a required course that students take just to check a box before graduating, she says. Instead of being overly philosophical, the coursework should use hypotheses and logic to underpin ideas. The goal? To create a new way of talking about technology, one that incorporates more humanistic principles.

“Ideally we’d start to build a language for how you talk about ethics or how you think about the impact of technology,” she says. “Nothing as crisp as a mathematical formula, but you would have concepts that the next generation of technologists would understand and be able to talk about.”

Fundamentally, Baker believes that reinvigorating the standards for technical education can help change the set of underlying assumptions we have about technology. That’s what is currently happening with the assumption that algorithms are neutral. But in the last five years, this idea has been challenged. Now when you talk about algorithmic accountability, there’s greater understanding than there was before, even if it hasn’t penetrated very far yet. New York City even has a new law to investigate its own algorithms and hold them accountable.

Baker finds the assumption that STEM education is always good similarly dubious. “Of course tech education is good, but STEM without any understanding of humanity is going to breed a set of technologists who don’t know, even if they want to, how to build positive things for humanity,” Baker says. “The technologists, the founders, the MBA-types building businesses–do they even have the frameworks to think about a set of issues other than speed and performance?”

There’s already a burgeoning movement to integrate ethics into the computer science classroom. Harvard and MIT have launched a joint class on the ethics of AI. UT Austin has an ethics class for computer science majors that it plans to eventually make a requirement. Stanford similarly is developing an ethics class within its computer science department. But many of these are one-off initiatives, and a national challenge of this type will provide the resources and incentive for more universities to think about these questions–and theoretically help the best ideas scale across the country.

Still, Baker says she’s sometimes cynical about how much impact ethics classes will have without broader social change. “There’s a lot of power and institutional pressure and wealth” in making decisions that are good for business, but might be bad for humanity, Baker says. “The fact you had some classes in ethics isn’t going to overcome all that and make things perfect. People have many motivations.”

Even so, teaching young people how to think about tech’s implications with nuance could help to combat some of those other motivations–primarily, money. The conversation shouldn’t be as binary as code; it should acknowledge typical ways data is used and help young technologists talk and think about the difference between providing value and being invasive.

“We’re at the end of the spectrum where we don’t have the tools or the ways of thinking for those who are able and want to think about this and build it in–we just don’t have any tools,” Baker says. “And so educating the next generation of technologists about how to think about this and talk about this and how to respond to it is maybe not the first step, but it is an important foundational step.”

A rut is never a fun place to be in, but it happens to nearly all of us at some point in our careers. Perhaps you’ve been working in a job for a while, doing the same tasks, working with the same people in the same office every day. Suddenly you wake up one morning and realize you’re no longer inspired by your job. You wonder if it’s time to move on, or if you should stick with it and hope things get better.

How can you tell if you’re in a rut? Check this list of warning signs.

1.You’re bored

“Most career ruts are caused by a lack of challenge, resulting in comfort, complacency, and boredom,” says career-change coach Lisa Lewis. If your current job isn’t presenting opportunities for you to learn and grow, boredom can quickly set in.

It’s often for this reason that a career rut occurs after someone has reached a level of success. After a certain amount of time in that position you desired throughout your entire career, you feel like you’ve mastered it and aren’t finding it challenging anymore. “Learning is one of the biggest motivations for many people in the workforce,” says Lewis. Finding opportunities to learn other areas of the business or to learn a skill outside of your job can help you fight a boredom-induced rut.

2. You dread Mondays

It’s normal to feel the occasional “case of the Mondays.” While we all wish that we jumped out of bed every Monday morning feeling energized to get to the office, that’s not the case for many people. But if you’re regularly finding yourself deep in the Sunday blues, feeling angry, lethargic, and wanting to call in sick every Monday is a good sign that you’re stuck in a rut.

3. Your work is suffering

A common sign of a career rut is when your work starts to slip. You start missing deadlines and making mistakes that you never used to make. You disengage, start to lose confidence in your work, and regularly bcc or cc more people than necessary in your emails, and pass blame onto others for your mistakes.

“When you’re in a rut, you engage in self-sabotaging behaviors to protect yourself, and tend to avoid dealing with your lack of fulfillment,” says career consultant Eli Howayeck, founder and CEO of Crafted Career Concepts in Milwaukee.

4. You’re acting complacent

Do you find yourself being apathetic in work conversations where you previously would have had a strong opinion? Feeling complacent; “phoning it in” or looking for faster, easier ways to get work done without really caring too much about the end result, or without committing your attention or energy to the task, is a clear sign that you’re in a career rut.

5. Someone has asked “Are you okay?” more than once this week

As much as you may think you’re faking your engagement well, inevitably someone on your team, or a manager, will ask, “Are you okay?” “You can’t get away with acting different from the way you feel for very long,” says Howayeck. You may even find yourself avoiding your manager for fear of being “found out” that you’re miserable.

6. You feel physically exhausted

Being in a career rut can feel like you’re trudging through mud every day, just trying to get to the end of the workday. You feel that you require a greater amount of energy to get prepared for tasks that you used to accomplish easily. Being in a rut can be exhausting–perhaps even more exhausting than being super busy in a job that you love and find rewarding. “We all have an innate need to be challenged and learn. When we are in roles that no longer provide growth opportunities, it can feel as if our energy is being drained in the same way as it might if we’re completing a big project,” says Lewis. Your body begins to feel tired, and your brain can’t understand why you’re not taking on new challenges, so it gets tired too, causing you to feel lethargic and depleted.

7.You don’t look forward to things you used to

Is there an annual conference in your field that you regularly attend that you would normally sign up for as soon as registration opens but that you’ve been delaying looking at for months? Losing excitement about making future plans for things you enjoyed doing in the past is a sign that you are feeling stuck.

8. You browse the job postings

When you’re in a rut, it’s common to find yourself drawn to job postings. Surely a new job may seems like a clear path out of your rut. However, Howayeck says looking for a new job is the worst way to start to get out of a rut. “It’s like showing up to prom without a date in your workout clothes. No one is going to ask you to dance, and you won’t feel ready to ask anyone to dance, either,” he says.

Instead, Howayeck says to examine your current situation and see if there are any opportunities internally that would interest you. If there truly are none, try to create your own opportunities by looking outside your current job. Take a class in a subject you’re interested in or volunteer at a nonprofit doing something that’s outside of your current job tasks.

How to get out

When you are ready to move on, take an inventory of your strengths, weaknesses, values, and accomplishments and map out a plan to get out of your current situation. “This means cleaning up your personal and professional brand, and most importantly, your belief system around your experience and skills,” says Howayeck. Then, when you’re ready, start to network and verbalize what you’re looking for in the next phase of your career. Taking these steps will help ensure your next leap is not straight into another rut.

It’s hard to imagine a post-iPhone world, when the touch-screen phone in our pocket makes way for some other societal obsession.

But next week in Berlin, many of the world’s leading researchers in experimental interfaces are gathering for the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium. And after looking through all of the projects on my own, it’s clear that there are some radical ideas that anyone who is interested in interface design, virtual and augmented reality, or just plain old weird tech really needs to see.

Drones as a screen

Smartphones let us grab apps and drag them to any part of our screens. But what if you could drag and drop objects, unencumbered by the rules of physics, in real life? GridDrones is a matrix of tiny drone helicopters that are meant to serve as pixels in midair. Because it’s protected by a cage, you can handle each of the drones as it hovers in midair–moving these “pixels” to create different patterns on a crude “screen.” You can even program the fleet to specific animations.

GridDrones may not be inside consumer electronics anytime soon, but they represent a world in which media, and information, can be tangibly manipulated, and our objects can respond to our most unrealistic demands–like floating in midair.

Your fingers as an interface

Touch screens are swell until you want to do something as simple as right-click–there’s rarely a deeper, power-user-friendly layer of controls to unlock within iOS or Android apps. But Touch+Finger doesn’t just look at where you touch the screen. It can see how you touch the screen, analyzing your finger movements to provide more nuanced controls.

Using a pair of ring sensors, Touch+Finger lets you zoom by scraping your thumb against your index finger–you can also dismiss something by flicking your thumb, or shoot virtual bullets in a game by tapping your thumb, too. It basically makes use of your fingers in a way that a touch screen does not.

Tangible–and inflatable–interfaces

Virtual reality is remarkable, until you try to reach out and touch something. Then your body realizes that your eyes have been fooled, that the pixels in front of you are just shimmery illusions.

PuPOP is a balloon that wants to change that. When you grab objects in VR, the device inflates itself into various shapes to mimic cubes and cylinders, allowing you to ostensibly touch virtual worlds . . . even if, for now, those worlds feel like a very advanced Ziploc bag.

Tattoos as screens

Is holding an inflatable bag too much for you? Okay, then take a look at Tactoo. It’s a temporary tattoo that’s just 35μm thick–which is about the width of a human hair–and it doubles as a haptic interface, simulating the feel of branches, leaves, and other textures on your skin, which would be fantastic for VR and AR simulations.

The most remarkable point, however, is that Tactoo is so thin, you can still feel real objects through it. So wearing the device doesn’t numb your senses like a glove, but enhances them. In other words, it’s feasible that you could wear Tactoo in the real world and not miss out on it in the process.

Uber is teaming up with Girlboss, the media company started by Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso, to help put money toward women entrepreneurs. Uber will invest more than $200,000 in three founders as part of the initiative.

“We are proud to work with Uber to support the Girlboss community and beyond, contributing resources and mentorship to help change the ratio of women-owned businesses,” Amoruso said in a statement. “The only way to do that effectively is to fund businesses that wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity and provide as many entrepreneurs as possible with access to the types of resources, tools, and mentorship that have been essential on my own journey.”

Entrepreneurs can submit applications from today through October 21, and on October 30, five finalists will be chosen and invited to pitch a panel of investors and founders at the Girlboss Rally, an annual conference that convenes in both New York City and Los Angeles. (They will also receive a $5,000 stipend to account for travel costs and accommodations.)

During the first day of the NYC Girlboss Rally in November, finalists will present their pitches to the panel, which includes Away cofounder Jen Rubio, Drybar founder Alli Webb, Gingerbread Capital partner Ita Ekpoudom, and Uber’s Erika Decker. Three winners will be announced on the second day of the conference.

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"You have to see it. Your belief in what you’re going to do has to be so clear. You can see milestones, you can see hitting them. Then just knock down people’s door." – @goop's CEO @gwynethpaltrow keeping it real as hell on stage at the #girlbossrally

A post shared by Girlboss® (@girlboss) on Apr 28, 2018 at 6:14pm PDT

A number of women-run startups, from The Wing to Bumble, have recently launched programs to invest in women entrepreneurs. For Uber, this is likely also part of an ongoing rehabilitation of its image following a series of controversies related to its culture last year. Uber recently rebranded, debuting a new logo and typeface. And the company is reportedly spending about $500 million on a sweeping ad campaign that includes the TV spots you’ve likely seen, as well as investments in billboards and digital ads. Considering all that, investing in female founders sounds like a much cheaper endeavor.

Does sharing your goals help you make progress? Some research says yes, but there are also studies that say you’re way better off keeping them to yourself. Sharing your goals can reportedly be beneficial, and motivate you to create momentum. Of course, it can also be an impediment to taking action, give you a false sense of accomplishment, and make you less likely to follow through.

So what on earth do you do when science doesn’t have a clear answer? You examine the particular goal you’re trying to accomplish, think about your personality and habits, and make a decision based on the specific circumstances. Don’t know where to start? Here are some guidelines.

Make your goals public if: you need (and thrive on) external accountability

Some of us find it difficult to motivate ourselves when we don’t have anyone to answer to. As psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo previously told Fast Company, if you fall into this category, you’re probably more likely to procrastinate and push that task to the next day, the next week, or the next month if you don’t tell anyone about your endeavors. However, when you announce that intention to others, you’ll be driven to action because you don’t want to look bad–saving face becomes your motivation to act.

This strategy works for those who respond well to meeting external expectations but struggle with making progress with their own personal resolutions. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How To Make Your Life Better, calls this tendency an “obliger.” Rubin tells Fast Company, “Obligers often think they need to move out of this tendency and become inner driven, but that’s not necessary…There are hundreds of ways to build outer accountability, and that’s what obligers need.”

Keep your goals quiet if: being accountable to someone doesn’t motivate you

Of course, not everyone works this way. Some people do not like being told what to do, and when someone tries to do just that, they’re compelled to do the opposite. This type of person is a rebel, and doesn’t respond to any sort of expectations (internal or external), according to Rubin. If you identify as a rebel, you probably won’t get much benefit by making your goals public. The only exception would be if you know for sure that everyone around you will say “you could never do that”–and you’ll be motivated to prove them wrong.

Make your goals public if: it would give you a sense of community, and that motivates you

Some goals are very difficult to do in a group, but others work well toward building a community. That’s why employees who are aware of the company’s goals and how their work fits into the bigger picture tend to be more engaged, and are more driven to meet their targets.

Non-work goals can also create this kind of camaraderie. For example, three friends who are in a quest to save money can get together and brainstorm outings that are within their budget. A group of roommates who committed to eating a healthier diet can take turns cooking and eat certain meals together. According to Lombardo, sharing your goals with others who are trying to do the same thing taps into our desire and need for social connection–something that all of us have.

Keep your goals quiet if : it’s too closely tied to your identity

Some goals are deeply related to your identity, while other goals are more about progress. Examples of identity goals include being a great parent or being an inspirational leader. Progress goals, for example, might be mastering a complex piece on the piano, or solving a mathematical problem.

According to a 2009 study, sharing an identity goal can be detrimental to the goal seeker. This is because when an observer praises their goal (i.e., it’s so great that you’re trying to be a great parent!), their comments can make the goal setter feel like they’ve already achieved what they set out to do. As a result, they put less effort into doing the things that are necessary to achieve that identity goal. The researchers wrote, “Other people’s taking notice of one’s identity-relevant intentions apparently engenders a premature sense of completeness regarding the identity goal.”

Make your goals public if: there is a competitive element, and you’re driven by competition

Just as some of us crave being part of a supportive environment, others are driven by quantifying their progress and measuring it against others. In a 2016 study, participants were assigned to enter one of four different types of exercise classes: individual classes with no competition, individual classes with competition, group activities with no competition, and group activities without competition. The study found that those who took part in a competitive environment were more likely to attend to exercise than those who did not. The researchers concluded that “social comparison was more effective for increasing physical activity than social support and its effects did not depend on individual or team incentives.”

Keep your goals quiet if: you’re trying to accomplish something you’ve never done before

While competition can drive us, negative feedback can discourage us from persisting. We can all learn to be a little bit more thick-skinned, but there are circumstances where we might be more prone to succumb to those harsh criticisms, like when we set out to do something we’ve never tried before.

Take learning a new instrument or learning a coding language. Anyone who has tried to do either will tell you that they’re both very difficult endeavors for beginners. If you’re the type of person who often compares yourself with others (and feels bad when you perceive them to be better), making your goals public might not be such a great idea.

After a blistering expose in the New YorkTimes detailed how renowned architect Richard Meier allegedly sexually harassed five women, Meier is finally stepping away from day-to-day operations of the firm he founded.

Though Meier took a six month leave of absence when the news broke, his role in the future of Richard Meier & Partners is now clearer: The firm announced this week that he will “step back from day-to-day activities and support the leadership transition” of new Managing Principal Bernhard Karpf. According to Curbed, Meier will no longer handle business and administrative decisions and won’t be coming into the office every day. However, he will still be involved in supporting the firm’s leadership, including several new partners who’ve been promoted in the last few months.

When the Times broke the story in March 2018, it was architecture’s first #MeToo moment–one that sparked one person to start a “Shitty Architecture Men” list to document a wide range of allegations against particular men, both prominent and otherwise. Some architecture institutions, many of which had honored Meier, closed exhibitions featuring him and even rescinded some of his awards. Female leaders spoke out against the widespread discrimination and harassment that exists in architecture, which is a heavily male-dominated profession.

The allegations brought up broader questions about how to respond: After all, how do you boycott a building? How do you stop harassment in design overall? Most significantly, it forced an entire industry to reckon with how its power structures–and its reverence of a lone (male) genius–allow for abuse in the first place.

Meier’s semi-retirement shows that there have been some professional repercussions for his behavior, but his ability to maintain influence within his firm shows that it’s far from complete. After all, despite the success of the #MeToo movement, very few powerful men have truly been held to account.